Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69750


Essay
When You’re Strange
Should we consider Jim Morrison, rock’s Bozo Dionysus, a real poet?
By Daniel Nester
Illustration: Jason Novak

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans. The Doors, who took their name from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”), combined jazz chord changes and Latin rhythms with flamenco, surf, raga, blues, and psychedelia, all in one ’60s rock band, often in one song: “Light My Fire,” “The End,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “People Are Strange,” just to name a few. The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor.

And why embarrassing? Because the Doors reflect a conflict many of us have with artists we think we have outgrown. For those with a youthful bent, sustained naïveté, or a poetical inclination, the combination of the Doors’ music and Jim Morrison’s lyrics can be transformative. In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir depicting her early days in New York and friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, the singer neatly encapsulates how she, and many others, “felt both kinship and contempt for [Morrison]” while watching him perform for the first time. “I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.”

But for those same people a few years on, the Morrison mythology of a rock-singer-slash-poet whose lyrics reflect influences from the Romantics, French Symbolists, and Beats feels, at best, silly, and so he becomes one of the better punch lines to any number of poetry jokes.

But the Lizard King is not dead.

Although it may not shock that Doors music is still popular, what might surprise is that Jim Morrison’s poetry still has an audience. As I write this, the remastered CD of An American Prayer, a Jim Morrison spoken-word album posthumously released in 1978, sits at number one on Amazon’s “Music > Miscellaneous > Poetry, Spoken Word & Interviews” chart, ahead of Jim Carroll and Alcoholics Anonymous and neck-and-neck with Tom Waits. Morrison’s collections of poetry continue to sell, too. Two of his three poetry titles reside semipermanently on Amazon’s poetry best-seller list—Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Volume 1 (#26) and The Lords and the New Creatures (#40)—sitting alongside Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver, and Tupac Shakur, and ahead of Eliot, Frost, Poe, and Bishop.

This is irritating to serious poetry people. But maybe there is something to Morrison’s poetry beyond the laughs. Maybe it’s time we considered him to be something beyond the “Bozo Dionysus” Lester Bangs saw him as. Maybe it’s time we accepted him as a bona fide American poet.

*

Back when I was in eighth grade, a man with an acoustic guitar came to our class at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Maple Shade, New Jersey, to sing songs about drugs. About not doing drugs, I mean. He used to do a lot of drugs, he said, and lived the whole rock-and-roll lifestyle. His was a death-style, he said, and now that he didn’t do any drugs, he loved his life and was closer to God. A couple kids raised their hands to tell stories about uncles or older siblings who did drugs and how bad drugs were. It was relatively moving.

Just when he was going to sing his last drugs-are-bad song, our visitor spotted a copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s 1980 best-selling biography of Jim Morrison, on a girl’s desk. He picked it up.

“I’ll give you five dollars not to read this book,” he said. The book glorifies drugs, he said, and would lead her down the “wrong path.” He took a bill out of his pocket and slapped it down.

“He was a poet,” our visitor sagely said. “I’ll give you that.”

I remember the girl took the money and the guy took the book. I also remember everyone thinking we had to find out who this Jim Morrison poet guy was.

I biked over to Peaches, a record store owned by Moonies, and bought a copy of An American Prayer, the Jim Morrison spoken-word album released in 1978 with other Doors adding posthumous musical flourishes. I sat in my room with headphones and put the record on.

It was, as best as I can recall, the first time I listened to a poet speak.

*

As I write this, the annual chatter about whether Bob Dylan might win the Nobel Prize for literature sends giggles through the commentariat. Although the poetry world loves hyphenates and slashes (Post-Avant! Fifth-Generation-New-York-School! Poet/Collagist! Poessay!), adding Rock Singer/Poet to the list of accepted terms is where most draw the line. While I’m not terribly interested in the interminable debate over whether rock lyrics qualify as “real” poetry, it turns out one can’t avoid it entirely when we speak of Jim Morrison, Gateway Poet, as a serious writer. It is mostly a losing proposition, I know. It is absurd. And yet I’m not willing to completely disregard what the eighth-grade me found so moving.

*

One rainy afternoon this summer, I took out my vinyl copy of An American Prayer, which I have dragged from apartment to apartment for a quarter century; put it on the turntable; and asked my 2,500-plus closest friends on Facebook if anyone was a fan, or used to be a fan, of Jim Morrison’s poetry.

There were, of course, snarky responses. One suspected I was “trying to punk them or out people for their guilty pleasure,” while another joked that I should rephrase the question as whether anyone out there “had been a 13-year-old girl.” Poet Tim Suermondt told me he’d respond “as soon as I get back from my walk on Love Street.”

Yes. Haha. But, surprisingly, most responses I got were heartfelt rather than dismissive.

“Morrison was the first human I connected to living poetry (as opposed to dead poetry),” poet and memoirist Peter Conners wrote. “When I looked at his pics, I never thought Rock Star. I thought Poet . . . and then I thought Dangerous Poet. As a teenager getting intrigued by words, that was an important leap for me.”

Todd Colby, a poet and himself a former rock singer (of Drunken Boat), quoted lines from “Ghost Song,” a track from An American Prayer: “‎Choose now, they croon / Beneath the moon / Beside an ancient lake.” Mike McCann, a friend from college I hadn’t spoken to in many years, quoted from “When the Music’s Over”: “Persian Night! See the Light! Save Us! Jesus! Save Us!”

“Wilderness was the first book of poems I ever owned,” Ginger Heather, another poet, wrote. “A friend gave it to me for my 16th birthday. Our high school was a trade school, so I’m not sure I would have been introduced to anything like contemporary poetry otherwise.”

*

“I’m hung up on the art game, you know?” Morrison said in an interview with CBC Radio. “My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I’d like to write something of great importance. That’s my ambition—to write something worthwhile.”

Just how seriously Jim Morrison can be taken as a poet depends on whom you ask, but there’s no question that he regarded himself as the real deal. Starting with No One Here Gets Out Alive and each subsequent biography, Morrison is portrayed as carrying Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry books in his pocket or quoting from Nietzsche, all by way of suggesting the singer should be taken seriously as a poet, without many other reasons why. Like many real poets, Morrison self-published his work. The Lords: Notes on Vision appeared as single vellum pages with “© James Douglas Morrison 1969 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” on the bottom of each page, housed inside a blue portfolio folder. He made 100 copies and gave them out to friends. Then came The New Creatures, a slim hardcover edition of 100 copies, privately printed in 1969. An Ode to LA while Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased, a broadside or pamphlet, was handed out at concerts after the death of the Rolling Stones guitarist, and An American Prayer was printed in an edition of 500 in 1970.

“Despite the high prices from dealers, they can’t always command them,” Ernest Hilbert, a poet who works as an antiquarian book dealer for Philadelphia’s Bauman’s Rare Books, tells me in an email. Hilbert mentioned the story of a dealer who failed to sell a copy of The New Creatures to a “very famous music mogul” for around $6,000. A copy of The Lords is on sale now for about $10,000. “They’re very rare signed because they came after his public life shut down and not long before his total life did.”

In 1970, Simon & Schuster published The Lords and The New Creatures, which combined his first two books. Other than San Francisco poet and Morrison friend Michael McClure, who urged him to self-publish his work and pursue his writing, no one from the serious poetry world seemed to pay much attention. Despite this, the book is currently in its 50th printing. But clearly sales alone can’t transform one into a serious poet. That takes academia.

*

According my college library’s databases, a 1992 article, “Wild Child: Jim Morrison’s Poetic Journeys,” was the first academic work to address the notion that Morrison’s writing should be taken seriously as poetry. Written by Tony Magistrale, now chair of the English department at the University of Vermont, the study, published in the Journal of Popular Culture, first addresses the “glaring omission” in what has been written about the Doors: namely, the failure “to analyze Morrison’s contributions as a poet,” which starts with “separat[ing] commercial myth from poetic legacy.”

Morrison, Magistrale writes, “is as much a product of the Romantic poetic vein as William Blake, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and the French Symbolists were a century before him.” Many of these writers were also obsessed with poetry as a means of vision and illumination, of “breaking through to the other side” to “discover what possible realms existed beyond the immediate and the material.” Morrison’s best works, Magistrale asserts, “defy quick dismissal.”

Two decades later, Magistrale is still enthusiastic about Jim Morrison and the Doors. “I think the real poetry is in the songs,” he tells me on the phone. “That’s when Morrison’s poetry is at its most coherent and poetic.”

People still contact Magistrale about his article, asking for comment or to reprint it, he says. Still, 40 years after the singer’s death, “We’ve got this ‘Morrison Hole,’ people who are writing crap about his poetics, that hasn’t been filled. You’ve got people out there writing about him who are not trained to read it.”

Which is a shame, he says. “This guy still has something to say to us.”

“And I would not hesitate for a minute to call lyrics like ‘Five to One’ real poetry,” he tells me. “‘Trading your hours for a handful of dimes’? That could come from ‘Prufrock’ or ‘The Waste Land.’ Or ‘I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The future’s uncertain, the end is always near.’ It might be his addiction or it might be nihilism, but what better description or encapsulation of the existential dilemma? This could be right out of Camus or Sartre. These monetary solutions are only going to take you so far, Morrison says. And no one really talks about that with his lyrics.”

“‘Moonlight Drive,’” he tells me, is a “wonderful lyrical ballad” that “really dispels the notion of Jim Morrison as a misogynist.”

“All that said,” Magistrale points out, there is “a lot of poetry that Jim Morrison wrote that is shit, pap—stuff he wrote when he was drunk, high on drugs, not capable of putting words into coherent sentences, much less rendering it poetically.”

Magistrale first sent his article to The New Yorker. Its editor, David Remnick, wrote him back personally. “He wrote, ‘I’ve been wrestling with this essay for the last week. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read about Jim Morrison, and I don’t believe a word of it.’ That’s what I got back. I should have framed that fucking rejection.”

*

“The lyrics Jim Morrison wrote for the Doors are wonderful and chilling and moving,” David Lehman writes to me. Poet, critic, and series editor of The Best American Poetry, Lehman knows about song lyrics. His most recent book, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, is a wide-ranging study of American standards. Morrison “brilliantly communicated states of extreme emotion,” he writes: “the rage of lust (‘Light My Fire’), a gentler desire (‘Touch Me’), paranoia, fear, sheer darkness.”

Lehman’s answers remind me that, although Morrison regularly name-checked his favorite writers—in one interview he rattled off “Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cendrars, Max Ernst, Céline, Burroughs,” and was still characterized by the journalist as “rambling”—his favorite singer late in life was the one and only standards master, Frank Sinatra. The thought of Francis Albert Sinatra singing James Douglas Morrison’s lyrics compels me to look up Ol’ Blue Eyes’ discography. Did he ever sing “Touch Me”? No dice, baby.

“I think ‘People Are Strange,’ for example, is an outstanding rock lyric, very haunting, with artful use of repetition and a beautiful emphasis on that major-league word, strange,” Lehman writes. “He uses ‘stranger’ more in the manner of Camus than of Orson Welles, and it connects with ‘you’ the speaker as well as ‘you’ the listener: the existential ‘you.’” Lehman likes especially how Morrison interchanges “look” and “seem” with “are,” which suggest that “‘your’ state of mind is what’s at stake.” Lehman types out the lyrics in his email to “show how rhetorically balanced the first stanza is, each line divided into two clauses conjoined by ‘when.’”

*

But maybe, suggests Robert Pattison, professor of English at Long Island University and author of The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, “acceptance” would just be a way to kill off Morrison’s sales.

“A fair number of rockers have convinced themselves that they are not in fact vulgar mutants of the 19th-century poets but their modern reincarnations,” Pattison writes in Triumph.

I couldn’t help but ask Pattison: But what about Jim, man? What would be added to Morrison’s reputation if he were hailed as a poet? Should we put a couple of his poems on the Poetry Foundation website? Wouldn’t that be cool?

“I’m not sure there’s any prestige in a rock lyricist also claiming the title of poet,” Pattison writes. “My guess is that the prestige runs the other way.”

Pattison’s credo boils down to this: excellent rock songs, boring poems. “Why are slim volumes of deep thought superior to young rants? I think Morrison would be getting a demotion to be moved to the Poetry Foundation website.

“Yes,” Pattison continues, “I think the fact the words are written for rock makes a difference. Try comparing Kurt Cobain’s lyrics with the poems he scribbled down. Millions justifiably remember the former; the latter are trite and embarrassing. There are so many good rock lyrics that I think they would swamp any poetry website. The works of Alex Chilton alone would drive out much of the competition. But the whole Internet is really a rock website, since you can summon up whole songs from fragments of lyrics or watch 15 different performances of any particular number. I’m not sure any more formal arrangement is necessary.”

*

Years after first seeing them in concert, Patti Smith spots a billboard for the Doors’ latest album, L.A. Woman, and overhears the band’s new single, “Riders on the Storm,” coming from a passing car.

“I felt remorse that I had almost forgotten what an important influence Jim Morrison had been,” Smith writes. “He had led me on the path of merging poetry into rock and roll.”

In a recent article in The New Yorker, critic Daniel Mendelsohn writes that “the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him.” The same applies for Morrison, who elicits the same types of “extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay.” Rimbaud is credited with being a student of poetry while he made his way rebelling against the world. Morrison, the American, is perennially cast as the wild man from the desert, bottle of Jack in hand. Both called for a “derangement of all the senses.” Both are examples of the poète maudit who lives outside normal conventions.

A couple nights ago I sat at a table in Dirty Frank’s, my favorite Philadelphia bar, with two old friends, one from college and one from my hometown. Over pitchers of Yuengling and a walk around the block to smoke a bowl of pot I bought off another guy in my father’s group, I told them I was writing about Jim Morrison. As usual, it felt like a confession. Both smiled and told their Doors stories. Dan, the college friend, is a rock photographer who worshiped Sonic Youth as a teenager. He’s “still all about” “When the Music’s Over.” “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection!” he sang and lifted a mug. I once saw Tom, my hometown friend, who’s now a professor, make a classic rock DJ’s head explode at a party when he told him the band XTC “transcends the Beatles.” I thought he hated the Doors, but he confessed that he loves “Twentieth Century Fox,” a light track off their first album. “It’s Morrison’s version of ‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’” I offered. Once we got our giggles out, I realized we’d all gone through Morrison periods, as part of that rite of passage for some teenagers when they first encounter someone unembarrassed to be an artist. We all read Morrison’s poetry when we were younger. Just talking about Jim Morrison, I daresay, makes us old men feel young and free again. Others qualify for this spot as well—Plath, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Kerouac, Salinger, Lady Gaga, Rimbaud, Patti Smith. What is it about these artists that compels us to make fun of them later in life? We want the world and we want it now!

“Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything,” Morrison writes in Wilderness’s prologue. “It just ticks off possibilities.” When I first set out to write this essay, I hoped it would be a brilliant exegesis of Jim Morrison, Real Poet. In the back of my mind, I envisioned a couple of his poems featured as a sidebar, maybe a sequence of prose-poem aphorisms from The Lords to drive home how relevant and "now" he could be. But I have stopped worrying whether James Douglas Morrison—The Last Holy Fool, Sex God, Black Priest of the Great Society—can join the tenuous tribe of poets. He’s been showing up for the meetings for so long now, there’s no sense in throwing him out.

Originally Published: October 19th, 2011

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/sir_walter_scott_the_life_of_an_author-1556


Sir Walter Scott: The Life of an Author
Written by: W. C. Taylor, LL.D.

The life of an author who took no active part in public affairs, but sent forth from his own fireside those marvels of imagination which have afforded delight and instruction to millions, furnishes interest of a different kind from the biographies of those whose names are associated with great events. We look more to the man than to his age; we endeavor to trace the circumstances by which his mind was moulded and his tastes formed, and we feel anxious to discover the connection between his literary and his personal history and character. There have been few authors in whose career this connection was more strongly apparent than in Sir Walter Scott; his life is, to a great extent, identified with his writings, and this appears to be the source of that feeling of truth and reality which is forced upon us while perusing his fictions. He was born at Edinburgh, August 15, 1771. His father was one of that respectable class of attorneys called, in Scotland, writers to the signet, and was the original from whom his son subsequently drew the character of Mr. Saunders Fairford, in "Redgauntlet." His mother was a lady of taste and imagination. An accidental lameness and a delicate constitution procured for Walter a more than ordinary portion of maternal care, and the influence of his mother's instructions was strongly impressed on his character. In early childhood he was sent for change of air to the country seat of his maternal grandfather, where he first developed his extraordinary powers of memory by learning the traditionary legends of border heroism and chivalry, which used to be recited at the fireside on a winter's evening. His early taste for the romantic was a little checked when he returned to Edinburgh, in his eighth year, for his father was rather a strict adherent to forms, and looked upon poetry and fiction as very questionable indulgences. The discovery of a copy of Shakespeare, and an odd volume of Percy's "Relics," enabled him to resume his favorite pursuits, though the hours he devoted to them were stolen from sleep. He was sent at an early age to the high-school of Edinburgh, but was not particularly distinguished in the regular course of study. His companions, however, soon discovered his antiquarian tastes, and his passionate love for old tales of chivalry and old chronicles scarcely less romantic; he became noted, too, for reciting stories of his own invention, in which he introduced a superabundance of the marvels of ancient superstition, with a plentiful seasoning of knight-errantry. He even pursued his favorite subject into the continental languages, and by his own exertions enabled himself to peruse the works of Ariosto and Cervantes in their original form.

After a brief residence at the university he was indented as an apprentice to his father in 1786. Though the daily routine of drudgery in an attorney's office must have been painful to a young man of ardent imagination, he did not neglect any of the tasks which his father imposed, and he thus formed habits of method, punctuality, and laborious industry, which were important elements of his future success. But in the midst of these duties he did not lose sight of the favorite objects of his study and meditation. He made frequent excursions into the lowland and highland districts in search of traditionary lore; his investigations led him to the cottage of the peasant as frequently as to the houses of the better class, and his frank manners secured him a favorable reception from all.

In 1792 he changed his profession for that of an advocate, but did not obtain much practice at the Scottish bar. His first publication was a translation from the German; Bürger's wild romantic ballads captivated his youthful imagination, and his version of them proved that he entered deeply into the spirit of the original. Soon afterward he contributed some pieces to Lewis' "Tales of Wonder," which are almost the only fragments of that work which have escaped oblivion. At last, in 1802, he gave to the world the two first volumes of his "Border Minstrelsy," printed by his old schoolfellow, Ballantyne; its literary merits were enhanced by the beauty of its typographical execution, and its appearance made an epoch in Scottish literary history. The ballads of this collection had been very carefully edited, while the notes contained a mass of antiquarian information relative to border life, conveyed in a beautiful style, and enlivened with a higher interest than poetic fiction. This work at once obtained an extensive sale, and its popularity was increased by the appearance of the third volume, containing various imitations of the old ballad by Mr. Scott, in which the feelings and character of antiquity were faithfully preserved, while the language and expression were free from the roughness of obsolete forms. The copyright of the second edition was sold to the Messrs. Longman for £500, but the great extent of the sale made the bargain profitable.

Three years elapsed before he again took the field as an author; but the poem which he then produced, at once placed him among the great original writers of his country. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" was a complete expansion of the old ballad into an epic form. "It seemed," says Prescott, "as if the author had transferred into his page the strong delineations of the Homeric pencil, the rude but generous gallantry of a primitive period, softened by the more airy and magical inventions of Italian romance, and conveyed in tones of melody such as had not been heard since the strains of Burns." Its popularity was unprecedented, and its success determined the course of his future life.

Scott's position enabled him to encounter the hazards of literary life with comparative safety. He held two offices, that of Sheriff of Selkirk, and Clerk of the Court of Sessions, which yielded him a competent income. He received some accession to his fortune on his marriage, and the tastes of his lady prevented her from indulging in any of the extravagance of fashionable life. Domestic happiness and rural retirement were favorable to literary exertion. He soon produced a second poem, "Marmion," which many critics prefer to all his other poems. It was, however, rather harshly attacked in the Edinburgh Review on its first appearance, which the author felt keenly, as he had been himself a contributor to that journal. This was the origin of the Quarterly Review, which was established mainly in consequence of his exertions. About the same time he established a newAnnual Register, and became a silent partner in the great printing establishment of the Ballantynes. This last step involved him in grievous embarrassments, but it stimulated him to exertions such as none but a man of his prodigious powers could attempt. His biographical, historical, and critical labors, united with his editorial toils, were of appalling magnitude, but in all his works he proved himself to be vigorous and effective. "Poetry," he says in one of his letters, "is a scourging crop, and ought not to be hastily repeated. Editing, therefore, may be considered as a green crop of turnips or peas, extremely useful to those whose circumstances do not admit of giving their farm a summer fallow."

The "Lady of the Lake" was his next poem; it appeared in 1811, and soon outstripped all his former productions in fame and popularity. More than fifty thousand copies of it were sold, and the profits of the author exceeded two thousand guineas. It may be noticed as a curious proof of the effect it produced on the public mind, that the post-horse duty rose to an extraordinary degree in Scotland, from the eagerness of travellers to visit the localities described in the poem. He was now at the zenith of his fame. The sale of his next poem, "Rokeby," showed that his popularity had declined, and when this was followed by the comparative failure of the "Lord of the Isles," he resolved to abandon the field of poetry, and seek for fame in another form of composition.

Ten years before this period he had commenced the novel of "Waverley," and thrown the manuscript aside; having accidentally discovered the unfinished romance amid the old lumber of a garret, he completed it for the press in 1814, and published it anonymously. Its appearance created a greater sensation and marks a more distinct epoch in literary history than that of his poetry. It was the great object of his ambition to become a land-owner and to hold a high rank, not among the literary characters, but the country gentlemen of Scotland, and this was one of the causes of his being anxious to keep the authorship of his novels a profound secret. The same ambition stimulated him to exertion. He produced in rapid succession "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Rob Roy," and the "Tales of my Landlord" in three series, and at the same time published several pieces in his own name to increase the mystification of the public. But his incognito was soon detected; long before he avowed his romances, the world generally had found out his secret; indeed, when he was created a baronet in 1820, it was universally understood that this honor was conferred on him as author of the Waverley Novels.

It is not necessary to enumerate all the fictions that emanated from the brilliant imagination of the Northern Enchanter; the list would be too long, but we must not omit to notice the energy with which he labored. Even illness, that would have broken the spirits of most men, as it prostrated the physical energies of Scott, opposed no impediment to the progress of his compositions. When he could not write he could dictate; and in this way, amid the agonies of a racking disease, he composed "The Bride of Lammermoor," "The Legend of Montrose," and a great part of the most fascinating of his works, "Ivanhoe." Never, certainly, did mind exhibit so decisive a triumph over physical suffering. "Be assured," he remarked to Mr. Gillies, "that if pain could have prevented my application to literary work, not a page of 'Ivanhoe' would have been written. Now, if I had given way to mere feelings and ceased to work, it is a question whether the disorder would not have taken deeper root and become incurable."

The crowds of visitors that flocked to his baronial mansion at Abbotsford, from all quarters, greatly added to the expenses which the hospitable owner had to meet; but the unbounded popularity of his novels appeared to him and to his publishers a never-failing source of funds; and the Messrs. Constable accepted his drafts, to the amount of many thousand pounds, in favor of works which were not only unwritten, but even unimagined. Unfortunately, Scott, in return, could not refuse to indorse the drafts of his publishers, and thus an amount of liabilities was incurred which would appear quite inexplicable, if experience had not shown that the dangerous facilities of accommodation bills lead men on to an extent that they never discover until the crash comes. In the great commercial crisis of 1825 Constables' house stopped payment; the assets proved to be very trifling in comparison with the debts, and Sir Walter Scott was found to be responsible to the startling amount of one hundred thousand pounds!

His conduct on this occasion was truly noble; he put up his house and furniture in Edinburgh to auction, delivered over his personal effects—plate, books, furniture, etc.—to be held in trust for his creditors (the estate itself had been settled on his eldest son when he married), and bound himself to discharge annually a certain amount of the liabilities of the insolvent firm. He then, with his characteristic energy, set about the performance of his herculean task. He took cheap lodgings, abridged his usual enjoyments and recreations, and labored harder than ever. The death of his beloved lady increased the gloom which the change of circumstances produced, but though he sorrowed he did not relax his exertions. One of his first tasks was the "Life of Bonaparte," which he completed in the short space of thirteen months. For this he received from the publishers the sum of £14,000, and such was its great circulation that they had no reason to repent of their bargain. In the same year that this work appeared, he took an opportunity of publicly avowing his authorship of the Waverley Novels, declaring "that their merits, if they had any, and their faults were entirely imputable to himself."

Sir Walter Scott's celebrity made everything that he produced acceptable to the public. He did not allow these favorable impressions to fade for want of exercise, and the list of the works, great and small, which he produced to satisfy his creditors, is an unexampled instance of successful labors. No one of these enterprises was so profitable as the republication of his novels in a uniform series, with his own notes and illustrations. It was not given to Sir Walter Scott to see the complete restoration of his former position; his exertions were too severe and pressed heavily on the springs of health, already deprived by age of their elasticity and vigor. In the short space of six years he had, by his sacrifices and exertions, discharged more than two-thirds of the debt for which he was responsible, and he had fair prospects of relieving himself from the entire sum. But in 1831 he was seized with a terrible attack of paralysis, to which his family had a constitutional tendency, and he was advised to try the effect of a more genial climate in Southern Europe. The British Government placed a ship at his disposal to convey him to Italy; and when he came to London, men of every class and party vied with each other in expressing sympathy for his sufferings and hopes for his recovery.

Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.

In Italy he was received with the greatest enthusiasm, and under the influence of its sunny skies he seemed, for a while, to be recovering. But his strength was gone, his heart was in his own home at Abbotsford, and, almost an imbecile, he returned there. He died September 20, 1832.

The following letter was written by him to his son Walter, in 1819, soon after the young man had entered the army. It illustrates at once his strong affections and his knowledge of the world.

"Dear Walter.

"... I shall be curious to know how you like your brother officers, and how you dispose of your time. The drills and riding-school will, of course, occupy much of your mornings for some time. I trust, however, you will keep in view drawing, languages, etc. It is astonishing how far even half an hour a day, regularly bestowed on one object, will carry a man in making himself master of it. The habit of dawdling away time is easily acquired, and so is that of putting every moment either to use or to amusement.

"You will not be hasty in forming intimacies with any of your brother officers, until you observe which of them are most generally respected and likely to prove most creditable friends. It is seldom that the people who put themselves hastily forward to please are those most worthy of being known. At the same time you will take care to return all civility which is offered, with readiness and frankness. The Italians have a proverb, which I hope you have not forgot poor Pierrotti's lessons so far as not to comprehend—'Volto sciolto e pensieri stretti.' There is no occasion to let any one see what you exactly think of him; and it is the less prudent, as you will find reason, in all probability, to change your opinion more than once.

"I shall be glad to hear of your being fitted with a good servant. Most of the Irish of that class are scapegraces—drink, steal, and lie like the devil. If you could pick up a canny Scot it would be well. Let me know about your mess. To drink hard is none of your habits, but even drinking what is called a certain quantity every day hurts the stomach, and by hereditary descent yours is delicate. I believe the poor Duke of Buccleuch laid the foundation of that disease which occasioned his premature death in the excesses of Villar's regiment, and I am sorry and ashamed to say, for your warning, that the habit of drinking wine, so much practised when I was a young man, occasioned, I am convinced, many of my cruel stomach complaints. You had better drink a bottle of wine on any particular occasion, than sit and soak and sipple at an English pint every day.

"All our bipeds are well. Hamlet had an inflammatory attack, and I began to think he was going mad, after the example of his great namesake, but Willie Laidlaw bled him, and he has recovered. Pussy is very well. Mamma, the girls, and Charlie join in love. Yours affectionately,

"W. S.

"P.S.—Always mention what letters of mine you have received, and write to me whatever comes into your head. It is the privilege of great boys when distant, that they cannot tire papas by any length of detail upon any subject."

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68823

Essay
What to Do About Poetry
The argument that keeps on giving.
By The Editors

In a recent article on the Poetry Foundation, The New Yorker lobs the latest volley in an ongoing intellectual debate. That is, who reads poetry, what does it mean to “understand” poetry, and who cares about poets? According to The New Yorker (or to the critics it quotes), the Poetry Foundation's mission to broaden the audience for poetry is a lamentable one, for with popularity comes mediocrity. Artists should worry about making art, not about who's looking at it. A position similar to The New Yorker’s was put forth by August Kleinzahler in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, when he and Dana Gioia faced off over Garrison Keillor's populist anthology, Good Poems. More recently John Barr's article calling for a "new American poetry" that speaks to a broader audience fomented debate in the academic and creative writing world. And, in Christian Wiman's editorial in the December 2006 issue of Poetry, he argues that "if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently."

Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.

Read The New Yorker article>>

Read David Orr's article "Annals of Poetry" in the The New York Times Book Review>>


Read August Kleinzahler's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read Dana Gioia's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read John Barr's essay>>

Read Christian Wiman's editorial from the December 2006 issue of Poetry>>

Read Helen Vendler's "The Closet Reader">>

Read Robert Pinksy on "Poets Who Don't Like Poetry">>

Read Bill Knott on whether institutionalized “creative writing” changed American literature>>

Read Adrienne Rich's "Poetry and Commitment">>

Read Jane Hirshfield on "Poetry Beyond the Classroom">>

Read Daniel Halpern and Langdon Hammer on William Logan's review of Hart Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters>>

Read Jorie Graham's "Introduction to the Best American Poetry">>

Read D.W. Fenza on "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?">>

Originally Published: March 10th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69289


Essay
The Hero and the Gunslinger
Did Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn lose their way in middle age?
By Aram Saroyan
Introduction
“I might have added that I myself was only nominally a New York School poet. My first allegiance had been to the Black Mountain poets, to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn, and to a number of others as well. Indeed, there was a time when these poets meant everything to me, when they embodied the possibility of the kind of life I wanted for myself.” Aram Saroyan reflects on Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn.
Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn
Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn

Almost a decade ago I was interviewed by Michael Silverblatt on his radio show Bookworm. I’d edited Ted Berrigan’s posthumous Selected Poems, and the show was an opportunity to talk about Ted and his work and to publicize the book. In the middle of the interview, Silverblatt surprised me by remarking that Ted and I and a number of other poets, including Ron Padgett and Tom Clark, represented a second generation of the New York School but that we hadn’t managed to live up to the achievement of the first generation: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler.

“Isn’t the next generation supposed to improve on its predecessors,” Silverblatt mused rhetorically.

I held back several possible responses and tried to make a case for the fact that Tom Clark, for example, was the author of a far larger oeuvre than any member of the first generation and had written in a greater variety of genres. Perhaps temporizing, Silverblatt went on to say that the difference was that we hadn’t had to measure ourselves against a masterpiece like “The Waste Land” and therefore wrote more modestly.

We had measured ourselves against Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish,” among other works, and Ted’s book-length poem The Sonnets is, in its way, an exhilarating successor. What is more true of our generation is that we didn’t play by the rules of the literary establishment. We came of age during the ’60s and paid a commensurate price in censure and revisionism for that. The first generation of “TV babies,” raised during the post–World War II economic boom, we were less grateful for our parents’ sacrifices than we might have been, while at the same time being natural denizens of a newly electrified culture.

I might have added that I myself was only nominally a New York School poet. My first allegiance had been to the Black Mountain poets, to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn, and to a number of others as well. Indeed, there was a time when these poets meant everything to me, when they embodied the possibility of the kind of life I wanted for myself.

All are gone now, and I’m struck by the shape of their various careers in long view. Charles Olson and Robert Duncan seem to me to be major American poets, great and generative figures as much today as they were during the ’60s. Denise Levertov is a personal favorite, though her range is more modest. Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn, on the other hand, wonderful poets in youth, both seem to have lost their way in midlife.

Creeley’s early work—which comprises poems, stories, and essays, and which is perhaps crowned by his novel The Island, published when he was in his mid-30s—holds the promise of a major American literary figure. Edward Dorn, also a practitioner of all these genres, seemed to many of us a figure of comparable promise with perhaps a broader vision of the American sociopolitical as well as ecological landscape. Dorn, only three years younger than Creeley, had been a student at Black Mountain College during the years when Creeley taught there.

At 20, having gotten an assignment from Henry Rago at Poetry to review The Island, I dared to write to Creeley in New Mexico from New York, and was rewarded beyond expectation with a long and interesting letter about his sources as a writer. As we exchanged several more letters, I was moving around in search of an apartment and remember writing him from a hotel in Brooklyn Heights where I stayed only a night or two. Those were heady days. For me, corresponding with Creeley was what I imagined it might have been like for a young political aspirant to correspond with then–President Kennedy.

Here is a favorite poem from Creeley’s first mainstream collection, For Love:

The End

When I know what people think of me
I am plunged into my loneliness. The grey

hat bought earlier sickens.
I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.

A feeling like being choked
enters my throat.

There is a wonderful poker-faced humor to this bleak poem, signaled in the title, and also in the clotted syntax of the fourth line. It’s so vividly an emotional thing and at the same time a made thing, a fact of words that delivers its message with the artful artlessness of a young master of what would come to be known as the Black Mountain School. Looking through the book the other night, I was struck by how often Creeley uses a title as a distancing device, while the poem itself may be entirely enveloped in the dilemma it presents.

What distinguishes these early poems is the personal detail, the signature of a more-than-literary life. Robert Bly pointed out that the energy and specificity of these poems are diluted in later volumes, by which time the poet, as so many have done to survive, had become a tenured professor. The Creeley biography by Ekbert Faas notes that during the ’60s Allen Ginsberg told Creeley that he didn’t necessarily have to write “good” poems, advice Creeley seemed to take almost literally in his next book, Pieces: a book of very short notations arranged down the pages with a kind of blithe insouciance, as if to say, I’m a poet and therefore this is poetry. This is the way Creeley would often henceforth write. Being a technical master, given a particular circumstance or assignment, he would on occasion write a fine poem or essay. But the early work is another order of achievement, full to bursting with “felt life,” Henry James’s measure for literature.

Edward Dorn once said to me that Creeley’s handicap—a missing eye since a childhood accident, over which Creeley wore no patch—added something to his mystique, something perhaps comparable in its effect to Byron’s clubfoot. In fact, Dorn himself was the best-looking white-man poet of his day, a tall, angular figure with a handsome face akin to the textbook renderings of Andrew Jackson. My first encounter with him occurred in the summer of 1964, when my friend Jim Brodey and I visited LeRoi Jones in Buffalo, where he and his family were sharing a house with Dorn and his family. Both poets were teaching in the summer session at the state university there.

Dorn, celebrated among his peers and an admired elder of Jim’s and my generation, proved to be an elusive figure, darting in and out of the living room once or twice as Jones generously played host to the two young poets. In part spurred by his unavailability, I audited one of Dorn’s classes.

I don’t think I could have told you what the class was about five minutes after it ended—although I remember that the subject included Melville—but Dorn was a marvel to see and hear. Seated at his desk at the front of the class, he didn’t engage in dialogue with students. He lectured, but at the same time was somehow casual and unassuming. He simply spoke, and the combination of his voice and his diction was spellbinding. He had a special way with vowels, evident in his poetry; and his wonderfully even pitch and intonation, coupled with word choices seemingly conjured out of the moment, made up a kind of spoken music. Here is the title poem of Dorn’s collection The Newly Fallen, which had appeared several years earlier:

If it should ever come

And we are all there together
time will wave as willows do
and adios will be truly, yes,

laughing at what is forgotten
and talking of what’s new
admiring the roses you brought.
How sad.

You didn’t know you were at the end
thought it was your bright pear
the earth, yes

another affair to have been kept
and gazed back on
when you had slept
to have been stored
as a squirrel will a nut, and half
forgotten,
there were so many, many
from the newly fallen.


The music in these words, a kind of dancing melancholy, seems to me the signature of Dorn’s greatest work. He was raised by Illinois farm people without the advantages of Harvard-trained peers like Creeley, save his gift and the effort with which he cultivated and refined it. Dorn’s early long-lined poems “Geranium” and “The Air of June Sings” deserve a place among the permanent American poems, I think, being the closest I know in our literature to the musical complexity and felicity of the Elizabethans.

What happened? Over the years, the voice gradually turned into a hipster’s cutting, sarcastic instrument, often so elliptical as to be incomprehensible. Somehow the shading and suffering in his early work was forgone. This happened gradually, and he never succumbed to the willfulness one finds in middle and later Creeley. He remained a searching and interesting poet, but he no longer moved one as he had. Like virtually everybody who experienced the ’60s firsthand, Dorn experimented with drugs, and one can imagine that so finely tuned a verbal musician might have been more affected by them than others who had never made such music.



The cover photo of Edward Dorn was taken at the The Poetry Project 20th Year Symposium.

Originally Published: April 28th, 2009

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69068



Essay
The Energies of Words
How Poetry's legendary 1931 Objectivist issue came to be, from Pound's harangues to Zukofsky's essays.
By Peter O’Leary
Introduction
"Hermeneutical mysteriousness is the single most important reason why Objectivist ideals have endured in American poetry." Peter O'Leary digs deep into the Poetry magazine archive to uncover the origins of the Objectivist movement.

The Objectivist movement didn’t yet have a name when Harriet Monroe sent a letter of recommendation on behalf of Louis Zukofsky to the Guggenheim Foundation in November 1930. The 26-year-old Zukofsky, she wrote, was “a member, perhaps the leader, of a ‘new group’ of poets who are doing very interesting, more or less experimental work in poetry and in authentic criticism. . . . I have such confidence in Mr. Z. that I am handing over to him the editorship of an entire issue of Poetry.”

The month before, Monroe had offered Zukofsky the chance “to put in whatever poets you like up to 30½ pages of verse and 20 more of prose.” Zukofsky’s reply provides an orienting credo for the Objectivist movement:

If we can get part of a Canto of Pound’s—and if I find it good which is highly probable—I don’t see why we should shun it. The energies of words are hard to find—I should want my issue to be entirely a matter of the energies of words.


Zukofsky had Ezra Pound to thank for Monroe’s invitation. Early in the magazine’s existence, she had appointed Pound her foreign correspondent. His legendary scouting reports from Europe included work by William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Rabindranath Tagore. By 1920, eight years after the magazine was founded, Pound and Monroe’s relationship had cooled. Nevertheless, Monroe kept in touch, and Pound sent her periodic advice and harangues, such as this characteristic bit from November 1926:

Dear Harriet: Have been looking through your last 18 or more numbers, find many of ’em uncut.
My impression is that you have tried ladies’ numbers, children’s numbers, in fact everything but a man’s number. And that you tend to become more and more a tea party, all mères de famille. . . . Fraid I will hav to take the bad boys off your hands and once again take up the hickory.


Writing in March 1930, Pound urges Monroe to notice Zukofsky: “I think you miss things. Criterion and H[ound] & Horn both taking on Zukofsky. If you can’t liven up the verse; you cd. at least develop the critical section [with his work].” In late September 1930, Pound wrote to again suggest that Monroe include work by Zukofsky

Dear Harriet,
Before leavin’ home yesterday I recd. 2 essays by Zukofsky. You really ought to get his Reznikof [sic]. = He is one of the very few people making any advance in criticism. = he ought to appear regularly in “Poetry.”


Twenty years had passed since Pound first became famous for agitating on behalf of literature, and he may have felt removed from any literary center and eager to dive back into the scrum. “Hang it all,” he continues, echoing the eventual opening to “Canto II,” “—you printed my ‘Don’ts’ + Ford’s essay in Poetry, in 1913. etc. + they set a date. You ought not to let the magazine drift into being a mere passive spectator of undefined + undefinable events.”

Pound’s relationship with Monroe was arguably one of the most significant collaborations in the history of American poetry. Neither would have accomplished as much as they did without the other: Monroe supported Pound’s ideas when other venues found them tedious; Pound pushed Monroe to broaden her horizons. In the same letter, Pound rails, “A prominent americ. homme de letters came to me last winter saying you had alienated every active poet in the U.S.—one ought not to be left undefended against such remarks,” adding, “Zuk has [a] definite critical gift that ought to be used.” He included Zukofsky’s address just to be sure she took his point. Later, more gently, he assures her, “You cd. get back into the ring if you wd. print a number containing [Zukofsky’s work],” adding “Must make one no. of Poet.[ry] different from another if you want to preserve life as distinct from mere continuity.” In the upper front corner of Pound’s letter, Monroe—presumably—has penciled in the notation: “Sug’d a Zukofsky number.”

In recommending Zukofsky, Pound was essentially anointing the young poet as the head of a new movement, one that he felt deserved a manifesto as galvanizing as Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts ” had been to the Imagists in 1913.

Taking Pound’s cue, Monroe asked Zukofsky to formulate the February 1931 issue of Poetry as the announcement of a new literary movement, specifying that he should write an essay summarizing the merits and intentions of its work. “I shall be disappointed,” she wrote to Zukofsky on October 13, 1930, “if you haven’t a ‘new group,’ as Ezra said.” Zukofsky did what most young poets in such an unusually fortunate position would do: he solicited work from his friends and acquaintances. Even though he knew these poets didn’t actually constitute a group, he hedged when he wrote to Monroe describing his progress:

I shall probably—in fact, most certainly,—have more of a group than I thought. The contributions I have already—McAlmon, Rakosi, T.S. Hecht, Oppen, Williams, my own—tho never talked over by us together, go together. The Rakosi I received yesterday is excellent – the man has genius (I say that rarely) and he says he stopped writing five years ago—a curious case.


Making these poets “go together” would require novel thinking as well as a memorable label. Zukofsky first introduces it in “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” one of two essays he wrote for the issue.

What is Objectivist poetry? Strictly speaking, it is a tradition emerging from the work of four of the American poets that Zukofsky featured in the issue: George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and himself. Though he included many other poets, these four are lastingly thought of as the Objectivists. Basil Bunting, a British poet whose work also appears in the issue, is sometimes considered an Objectivist, reflecting more his affiliation with Pound, whose disciple he was, than any aesthetic similarity. Lorine Niedecker, later included in this school, would strike up a lifelong friendship with Zukofsky after reading the issue. In varying ways, the work of all five of these poets advanced the poetic principles of their forebears Pound and William Carlos Williams. (A poem by Williams is also included in the issue.) The principles of Pound and Williams can be summarized by Pound’s 1913 statement that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol” in a poem.

For an issue that launched a movement, it’s not particularly memorable for its poetry, most of which was written by second-rate poets who happened to be friends of Zukofsky, or by now canonical poets who are not regarded as Objectivists, such as Williams, Bunting, or Kenneth Rexroth, a progenitor of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.

Then why is this issue of a magazine among the most influential magazine publications of the 20th century? Put somewhat crudely, it provides the diagrams and all the materials for constructing a canon, a model that has since been often repeated. In focusing the issue on four key poets, surrounding them with largely forgettable, frequently limp free-versifying, and then framing the four poets’ work with a nearly impenetrable critical vocabulary, Zukofsky created a tactical and aesthetic strategy that has influenced successive groups of poets and critics. In some cases, this strategy has involved actively modeling a movement after the Objectivists, as the Language poets did. Seminal essays by such poet/critics as Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Lyn Hejinian provided the theoretical basis and manifestos that inspired the work of other Language poets. For the Black Mountain poets, the manifesto was provided by Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse.” Exactly how the young Zukofsky more or less pulled off launching the Objectivist movement remains a remarkable story.


“Desire for what is objectively perfect” : The Theory

In his book The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins wonders whether Zukofsky’s choice of the term Objectivist was “a deeply considered description of the commonalities his poetry shared with that of George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and William Carlos Williams,” or “an ad hoc formulation, a hastily conceived banner under which he could advance the poetry and careers of himself and his friends?” As shown by the letters between Monroe and Pound, and Pound and Zukofsky, it’s safe to answer yes to both questions. Zukofsky’s designation of the term Objectivist poetry is both deeply considered and completely provisional.

Objectivist poetry is best defined by the terms with which Zukofsky characterizes it in the essays he wrote for the issue—the principles of “sincerity” and “objectification” cohering in “the energies of words.” Accordingly, sincerity is to be true to living in the world; objectification is to represent its facts.

Though the title of the first essay, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” implies that Zukofsky is defining a new school of poetic theory, he isn’t. Rather, he is offering a perplexing definition with similarly perplexing extraneous matter (for instance, bizarrely, a lengthy quotation from a Hemingway poem). In the essay’s opening paragraphs, Zukosfsky defines what “an objective” for poetry would mean:

An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.


A poem’s objective, Zukofsky seems to be saying, can be understood through the analogies of a microscope and a military target. Does Zukofsky mean that a poem functions in the same way an optical device functions—focusing on an idea or object, targeting it in a military sense, in hopes of achieving an objective perfection that is equivalent to deducing the direction of historic and contemporary trends? Who knows? Zukofsky’s ideas are easier to understand if one applies them to his personal poetic program: remaking the epic poem through a language of philosophical, historic, and musical particulars, chiefly in his poem “A,” begun in 1927 and composed over several decades. For instance, when he further explains in the essay what he means by “historic and contemporary particulars,” Zukofsky slyly refers to events that he has already written about in the early parts of “A.”

It is understood that historic and contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events: i.e., any Egyptian pulled-glass bottle in the shape of a fish or oak leaves, as well as the performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion in Leipzig, or the Russian revolution and the rise of metallurgical plants in Siberia.


The subject of the opening section of “A” is a performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion. By mentioning the Russian revolution and the prospect of steel plants in Siberia, Zukofsky, a Marxist, was not only nodding toward the past but also winking to his leftist comrades (Scroggins refers to this as one of the “red flashes” that flare throughout the issue). And perhaps he wanted those few readers of Poetry who were already familiar with his poem to think that his work was “objective,” which is to say “objectively perfect” and aimed “inextricably” toward both the past and present.

Baffling as this definition of “Objective” is, the remainder of Zukofsky’s opening essay does little to clarify what he means. It is in his essay about Reznikoff’s poetry, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” that Zukofsky more fully develops his theories.

The essay defines the two operative terms of Objectivist theory: sincerity and objectification. Sincerity occurs when writing “is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.” In other words, sincerity is describing things as they are in a musically memorable way. “Shapes suggest themselves,” Zukofsky goes on, “and the mind senses and receives awareness.” As an example of sincerity, Zukofsky cites a line of Reznikoff’s—“The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water”—noting it for “possessing remarkable energy.” He seems to be gesturing toward elements of visual and musical beauty contained in a line, what he would call in his 1948 book A Test of Poetry the “sight” and “sound” of a poem.

Objectification, on the other hand, is a nearly mystical expression of “rested totality”—a talismanic phrase and the poetic property that Zukofsky more highly valued. “This rested totality may be called objectification,” writes Zukofsky. “[T]he apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object.” Objectification is [to be] related to what Zukofsky calls “intellection” in A Test of Poetry, a variation of Pound’s logopoeia—“the dance of the intellect among the words.” Rested totality, in Zukofsky’s thinking in his 1931 essays, is the mind’s comprehension of the poem that is in Oppen’s phrase “concerned with a fact which it did not create.”

To make his case for objectification in poetry, Zukofsky offers some examples in the Reznikoff essay: five of Williams’s poems in Spring and All, Moore’s poems “An Octopus” and “Like a Bulrush,” Eliot’s “Mr. Apollinax,” and, equivocally, some of cummings’s lyrics. Zukofsky, though, reserves his real admiration for Pound. “In contemporary writing the poems of Ezra Pound alone possess objectification to a most constant degree; his objects are musical shapes.” They are, to reiterate what Zukofsky wrote to Monroe in his October 1930 letter, “a matter of the energies of words.” Zukofsky concludes his long paragraph of examples and explanations in the essay with a curt appraisal: “The degree of objectification in the work of Charles Reznikoff is small.”

What can we make of these terms, more than 75 years later? In truth, we make of them what Zukofsky’s vocabulary permits us to make. Scroggins reads objectification as form—“Not the form of the poetic handbooks . . . but form as a sense of unity, as an impression of ‘rested totality’ in the reader’s mind.” But notice here how Scroggins must rely on the vocabulary Zukofsky has provided to explain what Zukofsky means. Scroggins, like many before him, clarifies Zukofsky by perpetuating his language. Though it’s impossible to exactly paraphrase their meaning, Zukofsky’s presentation of sincerity and objectification as philosophical facts created the foundation for the Objectivist movement and its subsequent influence.

Reznikoff would later clarify Zukofsky’s Objectivist theory by relating it to factual evidence. Drawing on his long experience as a lawyer, Reznikoff wrote in “First, there is a need,” a pamphlet published in 1977 by Black Sparrow Press:

With respect to the treatment of subject matter in verse and the use of the term “objectivist” and “objectivism,” let me again refer to the rules with respect to testimony in a court of law. Evidence to be admissible in a trial cannot state conclusions of fact: it must state the facts themselves. For example, a witness in an action for negligence cannot say: the man injured was negligent crossing the street. He must limit himself to a description of how the man crossed. . . . The conclusions of fact are for the jury and let us add, in our case, for the reader.


Poet Norman Finkelstein has written that “Zukofsky’s dream of the poem as the totality of perfect rest . . . is surely one of the most hermetic texts in the annals of twentieth-century poetics, and as such, it is open to endless Talmudic interpretation and disputation.” This hermeneutical mysteriousness is the single most important reason why Objectivist ideals have endured in American poetry. “Rested totality” stands for that part of the imagination that is receptive and mainly intuitive. Perceiving such “totality of perfect rest” is, as Reznikoff understood it, a practice of providing poetic evidence, a testimony in the strictest sense of the term, from the Latin testis, for witness. The Objectivist poem is a witness to reality, both imagination’s and the world’s.


“Words will do it” : The Poetry

How does one witness reality in a poem? To propose an answer to that, we can turn to the poems Zukofsky gathered for Poetry. Pound had written to Carl Rakosi in the late 1920s and in 1930, encouraging him to get in touch with Zukofsky, who then in turn wrote enthusiastically to Monroe about his “genius.” Is it evident in the group of poems Zukofsky selected for the issue? Consider Rakosi’s “Orphean Lost,” which opened the issue:

The oakboughs of the cottagers
descend, my lover,
with the bestial evening.
The shadows of their swelled trunks
crush the frugal herb.
The heights lag
and perish in a blue vacuum.


The scene of the poem seems more Romantic than Objectivist, hinting vaguely of sexual malaise. In a strictly Zukofskyan sense, it lacks any objectification, any totality of perfect rest. It seems, instead, suggestively but mildly agitated.

Zukofsky followed Rakosi’s poems with his own contribution—the Seventh Movement of his epic poem-in-progress, “A,” a series of seven menacingly, skillfully rendered sonnets that recapitulate all the themes involved in his poem up to that point. Subtitled “There are different techniques,” the series begins with this sonnet:

Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words
Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but
They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds
Of words, from me to them no singing gut.
For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood,
For their stomachs are logs with print on them,
Blood-red, red lamps hang from necks or where could
Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M.

“Street Closed” is what print says on their stomachs;
That cuts out everybody but the diggers;
You’re cut out, and she’s cut out, and the jiggers
Are cut out, No! we can’t have such nor bucks
As won’t, tho they’re not here pass thru a hoop
Strayed on a manhole—me? Am on a stoop.


Zukofsky, in seemingly natural yet carefully rhymed lyric language, is describing a strictly urban scene: sawhorses at a work site. The “A” of his title is one sawhorse; two (now four-legged) make an M, an alphabetic objectification of the world.

The syntax of the last six lines is gymnastic, landing after all its twisting on the image of Zukofsky, sitting on a stoop, looking out toward the work site on the closed-off street. While this poem is excellent, technically speaking, is it Objectivist? Following Zukofsky’s initial definitions of “An Objective,” relying as they do on a language of focus (from optical focusing, to military targeting, to a poetic directing of historical particulars), we can say yes. The animal archetype, horse, yields “manes,” which happens to be the first word of The Iliad, meaning “rage” in Greek, invoking a mythical military campaign reflected in the situation of a street in Manhattan being closed off for repairs. All of which, through a series of ingenious rhymes, leads to Zukofsky himself, presumably as a boy, sitting on a stoop, observing the scene. It’s a pretty amazing achievement: if not rested totality, a virtuoso assaying of it to be sure.

Of the major Objectivists, the work of Charles Reznikoff appears next. The page-long selection of short poems exemplifies the type of poem that came to define Objectivist poetry: an almost purely descriptive, modestly lyrical depiction of an urban scene:

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
A girder, itself among the rubbish.


Nearly 30 years later, in 1959, George Oppen, writing to his half-sister June Oppen Degnan, would say of this poem, “Likely [Reznikoff] could mull along and tell you what he had in mind. But how other than with this image could he put into your mind so clearly the miracle of existence—the existence of things. It is only because the image hits so clear and sudden that the poem means what it means. I don’t know that he could make it any clearer by talking about it.”

Oppen is best known for the poetry he wrote after a 25-year silence that he initiated in 1934 in order to dedicate himself to the Communist Party. The two Oppen poems included in the issue appear in Discrete Series from 1934, his only book of poetry published before 1960. The poems Oppen wrote beginning in 1958 are much more expressive of Objectivist positions than the two included here. (“Of Being Numerous,” Oppen’s masterpiece from 1968, begins with an Objectivist credo: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’”) His second poem in the issue begins:

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom,
Is of—aside from reading speaking smoking—
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen,
“Approached the window as if to see what really was going on”


The appearance of Maude Blessingbourne sounds closer in tone and spirit to the characters who show up in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” than to the scenes evoked in the poetry of Rakosi, Reznikoff, or Zukofsky. The poem concludes:

And saw rain failing, in the distance more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-glass—
Of the world, weather swept, with which one shares the century.


While the last line could possibly be describing the “direction of historic and contemporary particulars,” it’s hard to find any rested totality, or even anything particularly sincere, in these lines. (The dramatic setting could possibly reflect, among other things, Oppen’s interest in Henry James.)

The work of two other poets in the issue deserves mention: Bunting’s and Williams’s. Bunting’s contribution, a single poem titled “The Word,” would subsequently be divided by the poet into two different poems in his Collected Poems. The second appears in Poetry under the subheading “Appendix: Iron,” and runs:

Molten pool, incandescent spilth of
deep cauldrons—and brighter nothing is—
cast and cold, your blazes extinct and
no turmoil nor peril left you,
rusty ingot, bleak paralyzed blob!


Are these lines Objectivist? I don’t imagine Bunting ever thought so, but they do ring with the rhetorical soundings of Pound’s early Cantos. Truth told, Bunting was a friend, a connection soldered by Pound, rather than a member of this new poetic movement. The same was true of Williams, whose appearance was emphatically meant to signal influence and ancestry for Zukofsky’s “new group.”

Zukofsky was 24 in 1928 when he struck up a friendship with Williams, who by then had been publishing poetry for 20 years, although he wasn’t especially well known. In letters he sent the younger poet in 1930, Williams worries repeatedly about making some money from his fiction and finding time to write. Responding to Zukofsky’s request for work for Poetry, Williams writes, “By some trick of the imagination I have persistently kept the Alphabet of Leaves thing for just the purpose you want it for. When you want it, yell.” Williams means “The Botticellian Trees,” a poem that would conclude the sequence titled “Della Primavera Transportata al Morale” in the various collected/selected poems of Williams published over the years. It’s arguably the finest and best-known poem in the issue, and Zukofsky was unequivocal in his praise: “Your poem is the best (I’m not kiddin’ either!) in my issue and I have some splendid material by Rakosi etc etc. Bob McAlmon, too.” The poem begins as a model of the kind of poetry Zukofsky meant to assemble:

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter


Monroe seems to have been pleased with this inclusion as well: the November 1931 issue announced that Williams had won the Guarantor’s Prize of $100 for “The Botticellian Trees” and for his service to poetry in general—“a recognition of the value and very individual quality of this poet’s work.” In writing to thank her, Williams told her that he planned to use the money (about $1,200 in today’s dollars) to help finance the publication of his next book; he had yet to find a publisher willing to print and pay for it.

The rest of the poetry in the issue, for the most part, is decidedly minor. (“Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives,” wrote Pound to Monroe in 1931.) Several of the poets were leftist intellectual friends of Zukofsky’s from New York, including Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, and, most famously, Whittaker Chambers, who as a Communist in the 1920s and early 1930s was recruited to work as a Soviet spy in Washington. When he defected from the Communist Party in 1939, he began a career of informing to the FBI on members of his circle, naming Alger Hiss as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948.

Other minor poets of note in the issue include John Wheelwright, an eccentric Boston Brahmin who would go on to exert a considerable influence on John Ashbery; and Robert McAlmon, who had been married to H.D.’s eventual companion Bryher, and who for a period ran an important press in expatriate Paris, publishing Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

Kenneth Rexroth is the most anomalous poet in the issue. Monroe was unfamiliar with elements of Rexroth's poem 'Last Page of a Manuscript,' whose manifestly Christian and mystical language set it apart from the other poems.

Light
Light
The sliver in the firmament
The stirring horde
The rocking wave
The name breaks in the sky
Why stand we
Why go we nought
They broken seek the cleaving balance
The young men gone
Lux lucis


Responding to an editorial inquiry that Monroe sent him about the line “The chalice of the flaming byss,” Rexroth replied pedantically,

The term is byss, your printer made no mistake. The term is late Neo-Platonic, and is used for the plenum, roughly, Being as contrasted with Not-Being. It emerges in western culture with John Scotus Ereugina. Pico uses it. Also Jacob Boehme, who makes much of it.


“A number I can show to my friends” : Reactions

Soon after receiving the January 1931 issue of Poetry, Pound sent a typically hectoring letter to Monroe, accusing her of squandering the value of the magazine he had helped make great. In a postcard dated February 12, 1931, however, he requests four additional copies of Zukofsky’s issue. “This is a number I can show to my friends,” he wrote. In pencil, at the top of the card, Monroe wrote, “Ezra is pleased.” On the reverse side, Pound indicated the names of magazines to which review copies should be sent.

Monroe would quote Pound’s postcard, along with its addendum, in the “Correspondence” section in the April 1931 issue: “If you can do another eleven as lively you will put the mag. on its feet.” To which Monroe replies, chidingly, “Alas, we fear that would put it on its uppers!”

Jokes aside, Monroe had little intention either of doing another issue similar to the Objectivist one or of following Pound’s advice very closely. In March 1931, citing problems that had arisen because of Zukofsky’s distance from Chicago, Monroe suggested to Basil Bunting that they hold off on the British poetry issue Pound had urged them to undertake. One month after the February issue, Pound’s annoyance toward Monroe reignited. “Yet again: say the Feb. number doesn’t ‘record a triumph’ for that group. GET some other damn group and see what it can do. . . . Tell your damn guarantors I consider ’em as holy lights amid a great flock of cattle (millionaire illiterates, dumb and speechless tribes of unconscious pawnbrokers.)”

Readers reacted to the Objectivist poems with a mixture of enthusiasm, repulsion, and sharp criticism. Monroe printed their responses in the April 1931 issue. She particularly notes a Princeton student “who congratulates us upon achieving an interesting issue at last,” and the Long Island editor who wrote an Objectivist parody begging for “my money, my god, my money!” to be sent back. She included a letter from Horace Gregory praising the issue somewhat equivocally, a strange paragraph from a Rexroth letter “too long to quote,” and a bilious but impassioned letter from a very young Stanley Burnshaw, along with Zukofsky’s defensive, dismissive reply.

Burnshaw raises questions still relevant today: “Is Objectivist poetry a programmed movement (such as the Imagists instituted), or is it a rationalization undertaken by writers of similar subjective predilections and tendencies . . . ? Is there a copy of the program of the Objectivist group available?” Zukofsky answered, speaking of himself in the third person, “The editor was not a pivot, the contributors did not rationalize about him together; out of appreciation for their sincerity of craft and occasional objectification he wrote the program of the February issue of Poetry. . . .” In reply to Burnshaw’s admitted confusion about the meaning of “objectification,” Zukofsky pointed to some of the poems in the issue—particularly Oppen’s poems, but also, more faintly, Reznikoff’s sequence—without entirely clarifying it. He concluded by trying—futilely—to clear up another of his chosen terms: “The quotes around ‘objectivist’ distinguish between its particular meaning in the Program and the philosophical etiquette associated with objectivist. ”

For a short period following the issue’s publication, Zukofsky continued to work in the Objectivist vein. In 1932 he edited An “Objectivists” Anthology, issued by TO Publishers (an acronym for The Objectivists), a small press begun by Reznikoff, Zukofsky, and Oppen and his wife, Mary, and funded by Oppen’s modest trust. The anthology was reviewed unfavorably in the pages of Poetry by Morris Schappe in the March 1933 issue, prompting an acidic letter to the editor from Zukofsky. Once again speaking in the third person, he insisted that he “proceeded in that volume very closely along the lines of revolutionary thinking, both in his presentation of the poems of others and of his own poems.”

For a few additional years, there was energy and momentum behind the incipient Objectivists. When Oppen’s money began to run out, the Oppens changed the name of TO Publishers to the Objectivist Press and managed to publish a collected edition of Williams’s poems, as well as Oppen’s Discrete Series in 1934. The press folded in 1936, by which time the Oppens had joined the Communist Party and Oppen had stopped writing poetry.

Oppen’s silence is typical of the neglect and strained personal circumstances that characterized the careers of nearly all the Objectivists until the 1960s, when groups of younger poets in America and England rediscovered, celebrated, and rejuvenated their work. While the quiet 1940s and 1950s must surely have been disappointing to most of these poets—even to Oppen, who had chosen his silence—they lend an aura of authenticity to their poetry and to their commitment as poets. Without this period of decreased visibility, I doubt that the obscure terminology by which Zukofsky had defined this group would have acquired such meaning and mystique. From the vantage of the 21st century, it’s clear that without the initial efforts of Zukofsky in 1931, none of these poets, including Zukofsky himself, would have the place in American literary history they presently occupy.


* * *


Acknowledgments

I was greatly aided in the writing of Part I of this essay by the help of two friends: poet David Pavelich, a librarian at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, who helped guide me through the extensive Poetry collection, and otherwise gave freely of his excellent company and knowledge; and poet Mark Scroggins, who supplied me with an electronic proof copy of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky that provided answers to nearly all of the questions I had, as well as much of the background detail that makes the story told in this essay coherent. Sincere gratitude to both of them. Thanks are due as well to Daniel Meyer, University Archivist and Associate Director of the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, who granted permission for the use of quotations from letters in the Poetry collection. In researching this piece, I made use of the “Objectivist Poets” entry in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_poetry, as captured on September 4, 2007.

Originally Published: June 12th, 2008

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69621


Essay
Minor Poets, Major Works
Why do obscure artists make such lasting impressions?
By Ed Park
Minor PoetsImage by Paul Killebrew


I.

“Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English,” by the California poet Garret Caples, is the first in Wave Books’ pamphlet series, and the format perfectly suits the subject. Its very appearance is minor. The cream pages, stapled twice at the spine, sit in the hand like the program for a lengthy wedding. There’s no jacket copy, no information about Caples or Wave’s new series. It doesn’t even say how much it costs! Touch the uncoated cover after reading the sports section, and the smudge is there for good. This feels like a document made to be passed on, in secret, to a fellow traveler.

Though I am no scholar of Symbolism in any language, and indeed wasn’t familiar with nearly all of the forgotten figures whom Caples resurrects, I found myself responding so strongly to the spirit of his project that I wondered if the whole thing had been executed entirely for my benefit. (Caples loosely defines Symbolism here as “a broad poetic tendency of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” consonant with work dubbed “decadent” or “fin de siècle.”) I read it in three gulps and kept peppering the margins with check marks of delight. With a supply of thumbnail biographies that read like the most improbable fiction, and a leisurely but learned style, Caples makes the minor seem major.

I’m not a poet, but like Caples I’m drawn to minor writers, particularly fiction writers, and to minor works by major authors, often over their more famous achievements. I’m attracted to minor forms as well: the book I happened to be reading alongside “Quintessence of the Minor” was Wonders in the Sky, subtitled Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. I don’t want to go overboard—I devoured Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, as major a book this year has produced in terms of quality, sales, and public recognition—but whole months of my reading life can go by in which I pick up only the out of print and out of favor. The challenge can be in the idiosyncratic language, or in the unusual structure, or in just getting a copy of the thing: a major book from, say, the mid-’70s (Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary) becomes the minor book of today.

II.

“Quintessence of the Minor” begins with a quote from W.H. Auden’s introduction to Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets (1966): “I cannot enjoy one poem by Shelley and am delighted by every line of William Barnes, but I know perfectly well that Shelley is a major poet and Barnes a minor one.” Caples goes this far only in the conclusion, where he states that he prefers the oeuvre of the short-lived Samuel Greenberg (“He can only be considered a phenomenon”) to that of Hart Crane.

Throughout, though, he is generous with his praise, even as he points out the inadequacies of many of the authors considered. Two lines in a poem by Trumbull Stickney, dead at 30 and a near contemporary of Wallace Stevens at Harvard, provoke Caples to declare them of “a simplicity, clarity, and directness that look forward to Pound’s efforts to clear American poetry of rhetorical debris.” Francis Saltus Saltus (what a name!), whom Caples calls the first American Symbolist, wrote a blood-soaked “protosurrealist” work, “Landscape of Flesh,” that displays “both a level and a type of imagination seldom met with in nineteenth century American poetry.”

Other figures are important because they put their more famous coevals in context or, in the case of the aforementioned Greenberg, complicate the reception of a major poet and make us question the minor/major distinction altogether. Lines from Greenberg appear, without attribution, in Hart Crane’s work, a theft that Caples deems inexcusable. At first glance, the lines from Greenberg quoted in “Quintessence” are tough going, and gnomic even to Caples. (“Why, of all things, is science ‘the smithy of the sea’?” he asks. “Indeed, what could ‘smithy of the sea’ itself mean?”) Punctuation can be baffling, and “spelling is highly idiosyncratic, occasionally yielding a word of uncertain meaning.” (“What Greenberg meant by ‘woob’ is anyone’s guess,” Caples writes.) But Caples considers Greenberg, who died at the absurdly young age of 23, a master of “sonorousness”: “For all the editorial fussing over his technical and grammatical imperfections, Greenberg never lays a bad line; his poems are sheer song, little musical constructions that resist outside interference.”

Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves (1922-27) has “some of the most sententious sex scenes in the history of the written word,” Caples writes, but “his literary portraiture is excellent.” It’s a talent Caples shares, and indeed “Quintessence of the Minor” is rewarding as sheer entertainment, a parade of the colorful, the brilliant, and the tragic, captured with precision and gentle irony. In a Gotham bar called Pfaff’s, Caples finds “two precursors of symbolism who furthered the Poe tradition, in the persons of two writers named Fitz: Fitz James O’Brien and Fitz Hugh Ludlow.” The first wrote Poe-like stories and succumbed, at 33, to a gunshot wound while fighting in the Civil War; the other penned a memoir called The Hasheesh Eater. (Caples suavely notes, in one of his delicious parentheticals, “I don’t think you can be physically addicted to [hashish], though you can definitely develop a psychological dependence.”)

It’s hard to resist sharing more. We learn that Ernest Dowson was almost major: he’s name-checked in the film Laura, and he coined not just “days of wine and roses” but “gone with the wind.” Caples presents the San Francisco Symbolist scene in just over a page, and the brisk execution is exciting: Ambrose Bierce served as a mentor to the highly regarded but dreary George Sterling, who in turn was mentor to both Nora May French (whose “dullness is relieved by a subdued eroticism and the occasional striking line”) and Clark Ashton Smith, one of the godfathers of science fiction, a Weird Tales contributor who published his first book of poems at 19. “Sterling’s symbolist influence is evident in Smith’s predilection for the rare word,” Caples writes, “words like, ‘rutilance,’ a variant on the already archaic ‘rutilant’ which I’ve been unable to locate in any dictionary.”

One of the few women under consideration (a troubling lack that Caples addresses) is Adelaide Crapsey, inventor of the cinquain, devout Christian, and author of the “extremely dull” Study in English Metrics and the more tantalizing collection Verse. The 22-syllable “Triad” has the “flat non-guidance of a haiku”—it reads as though all of the atmosphere from a wintry, possibly Scandinavian mystery novel has been compressed into a single pillow-book entry. As her early death (from tuberculosis) approached, she composed “To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window,” a poem “Written in a Moment of Exasperation.”

III.

Symbolism’s chief innovation, Caples maintains, “was the poet as prose writer, and when all is said and done, the prose of these poets is vastly superior to the verse.” Caples dedicates “Quintessence” to John Ashbery, a major poet whose appetite for the minor, explored in numerous essays, informs and haunts these pages. “[A]s has been so often the case,” Caples writes about his deepening interest in Greenberg, “one arrives only to find John Ashbery already there.”

In a lecture/essay on John Clare published in Other Traditions (2000), Ashbery also quotes Auden’s preference for William Barnes over Shelley, and includes Auden’s rule of thumb for distinguishing between minor and major: “One is sometimes tempted to think it nothing but a matter of academic fashion: a poet is major if, in the curriculum of the average college English department, there is a course devoted solely to the study of his work, and a minor if there is not.”

“As I look back on the writers I have learned from,” Ashbery writes, “it seems that the majority, for reasons I am not quite sure of, are what the world calls minor ones.”

Is it inherent sympathy for the underdog, which one so often feels oneself to be when one embarks on the risky business of writing? Is it desire for one-upmanship, the urge to parade one’s esoteric discoveries before others? Or is there something inherently stimulating in the poetry called ‘minor,’ something it can do for us when major poetry can merely wring its hands?

As much as what we write, what we read is an index to our artistic values and our worldviews. To seek out the obscure is to declare oneself apart from the flock—not only from those snatching up the latest best seller, but also from those whose reading diet is restricted to the classics.

To habitually champion the minor over the major can sound snobbish and irrational. But perhaps other processes are at work. The minor can do things that the major (wringing its hands) avoids, or doesn’t even dream of. Caples wonders whether “[t]o write major poetry,” as Ashbery has, “the poet perhaps must resist the major, to find fault with what, at a given time, is held to be major poetry and propose another way, in order to not simply repeat the past, in order to ‘make it new.’”

I like this line of argument, though I often wonder whether my own devotion to writers such as Harry Mathews and Charles Portis (to name but two) stems from the fact that I found a secondhand title by each, for very little money, and liked what I bought. Did the entry of these authors into my reading life come about merely because a title interrupted my sight line at a particular moment when I was slinking around a used bookstore and had a tiny amount of cash to burn?

Thought: Maybe it’s the remainder tables that secretly move the culture forward. Up-and-coming writers, strapped for cash and dismissive of the books that are being published and getting noticed, gravitate toward these steam tables of overlooked lit, these shallow arks of the minor. I used to work in an office near St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York, and would drop in at least once a week. Cheaper than the new releases, even than most of the literary journals, were the remainders on the table in the back, which is where I first discovered John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies.

The two poets began their collaborative novel in 1952, alternating sentences at first; the book wasn’t published until 1969, and this long gestation surely contributes to its subtly unreal texture. Nest’s delightful odd humor stems from its heightened mundanity (food and furniture receive lavish attention) and conversational non sequiturs. The story, such as it is, moves forward on the mad precision of its phrasing and the brazenly unanticipated scene changes that find its characters transplanted en masse from the upstate New York town of Kelton to Florida, France, and Italy.

Yet Nest’s lack of plot, continuity, and other hallmarks of the well-behaved novel is precisely its virtue. What is it? In places it works as satire, of the happily toothless variety; reading it today, I can’t help but think of it as a hilarious corrective to Mad Men, with its intense portrayal of lust and rage beneath the façade of early-’60s conformity. Though they are “sometimes bitchy,” W.H. Auden wrote in his Times review, the suburbanites here actually seem to like each other. They travel, go to movies, eat, get married, open restaurants. The most radical thing about this book written by two friends is that it’s about friendship.

But there are secret energies flowing throughout. Very late in the book, Nadia and Victor, who are opening an antiques business in Paris, pay a visit to Kelton and scope out the authentic American knickknacks of Victor’s old neighbor Marshall.

He yanked aside a cretonne curtain, revealing in a recess a scale model of Sullivan's masterpiece, the Transportation Building of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, rendered in a substance closely resembling fingernail parings.

"Oh, Marshall!" Nadia cried. "You must let us have it—it's not fair, keeping it hidden away in this—in this lumber room."

"Never," Marshall said. "Cousin Bessie gave the best years of her life to its creation. I couldn't ever figure out why, but Alice says it was the outlet for her two big frustrations: they wouldn't let her go see the Columbian Exposition or realize her ambition to be a modern architect."

“What’s it made out of?” Victor asked tentatively.

“Toothbrush handles, steamed and sliced.”

No previous mention has been made of Cousin Bessie, who first appears on page 163 of 191. A few pages later, we’re treated to another of this eccentric woman’s creations:

The young marrieds gaped at what seemed to be a large cube of cordovan leather, with strange grooves and striations. “Cousin Bessie did this one after she was a bit around the bend,” Alice explained, none too charitably. “It’s a replica of the Carson Pirie Scott Company—exact in every detail. The poor dear never saw it, though. She never got farther west than Binghamton.”

Cousin Bessie is like an outsider artist avant la lettre; her pieces are amusing and haunting, with the strangeness that comes only from products quarried out of one’s deepest personality. They have a gravity to them (one character sees the cube’s designs as “full of occult meaning”), like certain objects drawn by Ashbery’s friend Edward Gorey, himself a connoisseur of the minor. They also evoke the mind-scrambling tableaux prosecuted by the French writer Raymond Roussel, whom Ashbery virtually introduced to the English-speaking world.

A paradoxically “minor classic” (as Auden called Nest) by two major poets has lurking within it a fictional minor artist. (That the book is a work of collaborative comic fiction means it begins with two charges of “minor” against it.) Given only a few paragraphs, Cousin Bessie’s telegraphed life is as memorable as that of all the “ninnies” filling the book; her art, long a source of family puzzlement, now stands to be redeemed. To the reader, she recalls Roussel and foretells Ashbery’s interest in the outsider artist Henry Darger, janitor-muralist-novelist muse for Girls on the Run.

Ashbery, of course, is celebrated for his poetry; but as an intrepid scholar of recondite literary productions, from Giorgio de Chirico’s sole novel to E.V. Lucas and George Morrow’s catalog-drawing whimsy What a Life!, he will hopefully not mind if I call A Nest of Ninnies, that quintessence of the minor, my favorite book of his by some length.

Originally Published: November 17th, 2010

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68993

Interview
From Poetry Front Man to Award Winner
On the echo chamber of writing and reading poetry.
By Robert Hass interviewed by John Freeman (John Freeman)
Introduction
John Freeman interviews Robert Hass about Time and Materials, winner of the National Book Award, and about his experiences as a writer, reader, and teacher of poetry.

Illustration by Marianne Goldin.

ROBERT HASS has spent so much time in recent years as a tireless front man for poetry—as U.S. poet laureate, as a teacher at the University of California at Berkeley, and as a columnist about the art form—one could forget he claimed this mantle by writing it as well. That should change now that Time and Materials, his first collection in ten years, has won the National Book Award for poetry. “When I got back from New York, my students had champagne for me,” Hass said recently by phone from Berkeley, where he returned immediately after the awards to teach a class. Over the course of a half-hour phone conversation, he talked about influences, about the politics of meaning, and about the poems he learns from, year in and year out.

John Freeman: You have done quite a bit of translation over the years, especially Tomas Transtromer and Czeslaw Milosz. When you called this book Time and Materials, did you think of poetry like theirs as part of the materials?

Robert Hass: I think art is an echo chamber: you pull from experience and you pull from everything you know about the arts. Working on Milosz’s poems for 20 years, sure, I was beginning to see things I was surprised to see in my poems. I think one of the ways influence works, you are kind of working for an area of feeling or thought and then a model flickers through your mind. It’s like the writers whose work you know well help to give you a vocabulary to get what you’re after. Milosz’s technical range is enormous, and his ambition for poetry is enormous. All of that was inspiring.

I feel a tension in this book between the delicate beauty of the visible world and the ugliness of war. The poem you read at the National Book Awards, “I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri,” feels like it almost bridges that, though.

It’s a poem that did try to do that—putting this book together took a lot of thought and figuring things out, there are very accessible poems, there are somewhat private poems, there are poems where I was experimenting with surreal narrative, I was trying to understand where I’ve been and put the book together. What I could say to myself is, Isn’t everybody’s life made up of affective states and ways of coping? It makes me think of Tolstoy’s great thing about daily life. I always think of Anna Karenina’s lover: when she dies, her lover has a toothache the next day; at a moment when there should be tragedy, there’s something mundane. And so we try to wake up with the knowledge that there are several hundred thousand Iraqis dead, and you walk around with that knowledge; there are old parents to take care of, things to do.

Is using so many different forms your way of demonstrating those ways of coping?

When I am working I write a lot more that doesn’t work very well, but I am always trying to figure out something new—there are so many poems in the world, so many people writing them, and writing them very ably, that you want to kind of make something happen that is a little new. And that’s another thing—another formal driver. It’s also a time in the art when the range of possibility, from chant to prose, is just enormous.

Poetry is, in many ways, more visible than ever, and there’s more of it being published than ever. As a former poet laureate, that must make you feel pretty good.

Somebody said literacy, real literacy, as in reading literacy, is an indicator species, as a college professor can tell if a marsh is okay if there’s a certain bird found inside it. There’s a lot of access to poetry and a lot of people, and lots of people publishing them. One of the things I was trying to figure in this period is who is reading, and how many people. It’s really only a question you can look at from 1850 on, since there wasn’t public education and books were very expensive. This democratic ideal is a late 19th-century notion, but it still depends on a pretty small part of the population that reads very much. Some people only read for professional reasons, they exercise. On the other hand, I feel like I just have to keep pushing in my teaching and writing—to be an activist. In a country of 300 million people the maximum audience is maybe a million people, but that’s pushing it—certain paperback books, novels sell that many copies. And I’ve just read that the kids at some high schools, only 6 percent are reading at grade level. I think literacy is something we really need to continue to work on. When I was a kid, I got three newspapers in my house—a local suburban newspaper and two dailies.

And you think that made you a reader, a poet?

Yes, there was Bill Hogan writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, and his favorite novelist was Ernest Hemingway, and he liked John O’Hara. He wrote every day on books! From the time I was ten years old, I could begin to glance at that book world and see that it worked. Newspapers are losing readers, and they have given up on this part of their publishing.

I suppose you can make a difference teaching, though, right?

I’ve taught a lot of people over the years—but, you know, I was talking to Zadie Smith about this when she was addressing the young writers at Iowa; she said,
“My great gift is as a reader. I think I’m a pretty talented writer, but I’m a great reader.” I want to teach students to be writers, not so that they can read books, but because reading books opened and changed my life.

What poems do you teach?

Most years I teach the American poetry class, and so I probably teach “Song of Myself” every year—and I never get tired of that poem. I teach Emily Dickinson’s poems every year, the modernist poets—Eliot, Frost, Pound—these years, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and then after that I invent. Some years I’ll teach Sylvia Plath, some years Gary Snyder, some years Adrienne Rich, some years Robert Creeley. They were the ones I discovered when I started reading—I was a perfect reader, I was like a sponge. I just soaked it up, and I find that’s true of my students now. It’s a gift I get to teach them.

Do they read your poems much?

(laughs) I have a friend who did once teach a course on himself, and I was talking to a mutual friend, and he said, "I bet he starts with his baby pictures." And this guy then came to my friend and said, “You know what, I have this great idea—I started my class with my baby pictures.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that.

What does it feel like to win this prize? As a reader you must look back and see the former winners: William Carlos Williams, Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton.

At the time I thought, mostly with some rue, of my comrades in the art who were also nominated. It was a nice thing to happen to one. I thought about that, I thought about remembering to thank my wife, Brenda Hillman, whom I get to write in the company of, [and] my editor Dan Halpern.

You told a nice story about him helping you put together a collection by laying the poems out on the floor of his apartment. Did that happen with this book too?

The last couple I’ve pretty much shaped myself. He was very helpful with small things. I had a kind of definite idea—at one point I thought it would begin with a two-line poem, a three-line poem, as near as I could, but that was a little too crazy. And I also wanted to figure where to put the political pieces; I wanted to give them some space, and I didn’t want them to be the whole point. On the whole, I’d say the reviews of it have completely ignored them. It is a little book that has a prose piece with an argument against aerial bombardment, so with a piece like that, the question of where to put it becomes important. Frank Bidart said Robert Lowell once said in a class that you can say anything in a poem, you just need to know where.

Do you ever worry that, given the size of poetry’s audience, this type of poem—the political poem—really won’t make any difference?

I don’t think about this subject with any assurance, but written poetry has had a certain kind of impact when there was a very small literate class. When Wordsworth wrote poems, only 40 percent of English males could produce a signature, and of those who could, only between 10 and 15 percent were literate. And they all went to public schools. So in some sense they all knew who each other were, they came from interconnected families, and I think that was true in Latin American, Europe, China, Korea. And those who read it had power, so poetry could have an influence far out of proportion to the number of people who read it. Augustus was a patron of Ovid and Virgil, and he exiled Ovid when he thought his verse was scandalizing. Then there’s the kind of—in the Arabic world—poetry as song. The songs passing as lyrics into the world, devotional lyrics, and influencing people, beginning with modern literacy, technical societies in which many, many more people can read, most of them—the arts they enjoy are oral arts, listening to music, and watching TV; you don’t have to be able to read to experience things. So in that case, what I think about, always, is the slow power of the sensibility of poetry, avant-garde music, painting, to change over time. My shorthand goes like this—Wordsworth read a German philosopher who wrote about mountains, Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and so we got Yellowstone and Yosemite. It took 100 years—that’s the cycle of things.

Originally Published: December 19th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/poetry-slams-do-nothing-to-help-the-art-form-survive-8475599.html


Poetry slams do nothing to help the art form survive
Nathan A Thompson



Poetry is dying. Actually, it's pretty dead already for all intents and purposes and the rise of performance poetry slams is doing nothing to help matters. I know, I used to be a performance poet.

The first poetry slam competition was held in Chicago in 1984. Named after a brutal wrestling move, the slam saw poets perform original pieces for a live audience who voted for a winner. The early slam poets railed against what they pejoratively referred to as page poetry. They demanded, along with Bukowski, that poetry “have guts”. They wanted to democratise poetry and drag it from the academic ivory tower.

But there never was an ivory tower. There was no cabal of posh people who had purposely made poetry unintelligible. Poetry has always been words on a page, open to anyone. The politicisation of art and the drawing of sectarian lines continues to damage poetry to this today.

Like sipping a fine wine, reading poetry cannot be rushed. It reveals its pleasures over time, rewarding the careful reader with something new and beautiful each time. It runs bang against the grain of our quick-fix culture. It is already a lost discipline. I have taught poetry to hundreds of children aged seven to 14 and not one of them could name me a poet beyond Shakespeare.

A further nail in the coffin is the rise of poetry slams. I have performed at many slams and the audience is almost always half drunk and if you want to win you have to pitch your poem pretty low. The result is a scene rife with the poetic equivalent of nob jokes – and plenty of actual nob jokes.

The only division in poetry is between those people willing to take the time to read it and those who will not. When Emily Dickinson said only “the fairest” may enter her house of “possibility”, she wasn't being elitist –she was putting up a barrier against the lazy.

Most slam poems are not strong enough to be published in even minor poetry journals. And that's fine; maybe they don't want to be. Then why attack the poems that do? It's like there is an oedipal urge to kill the art that made it. We cannot allow slam poetry to replace the role poetry plays in our lives. The threat is there.

There is a school of thought that thinks slams are the answer. The slams I have attended have little to do with poetry and everything to do with a Darwinian death match where the audience picks the winner like some blood-crazed Circus Maximus mob. Poetry, like all art, whispers its message and we must learn to slow down and take the time to hear it.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68988

Essay
Genius Envy
How Rodin's failure inspired Rilke, and other curious routes of tribute.
By Geoff Dyer
In April, the Poetry Foundation cosponsored a panel at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Poets Mary Jo Bang, Peter Campion, and Raphael Rubinstein, as well as writer Geoff Dyer, explored the parallels between portraits in poetry and the visual arts, jumping off those on display at the Pulitzer's exhibition "Portrait/Homage/Embodiment." This article by Geoff Dyer is the second in a series by the four panelists. (Here's Raphael Rubinstein on Jacques Lipchitz and Gertrude Stein.) On Thursday (December 6), at the Pulitzer Foundation, John Yau moderates a panel on poetry and visual art, featuring Cole Swensen, Andrew Joron, and Arthur Sze.




The history of any art constitutes a form of self-commentary, what George Steiner calls “a syllabus of enacted criticism.” Within this syllabus there are especially charged moments when writers or artists deliberately and explicitly address the work of another writer or artist. The impulse is often elegiac: Auden writes his great elegy for Yeats (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”), Brodsky writes an elegy for Auden (“York: In Memoriam W. H. Auden”), and most recently, Heaney composes an elegy for Brodsky (the cleverly titled “Audenesque”).

“The words of a dead man,” writes Auden, “[a]re modified in the guts of the living.” These words—and this sentiment—are in turn modified by Brodsky: “Thus the source of love becomes the object of love.”

This chain is what I might term a linear tribute in that an artist composes a tribute to another artist who worked in the same medium. The recent exhibition “Portrait/Homage/Embodiment” at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis presents a series of more complex tributes, in which the source of love in one medium becomes the object of love in another. Thus we have sculptural essays on music (Emile Antoine Bourdelle’s Large Tragic Mask of Ludwig von Beethoven) and literature (a Jacques Lipchitz bust of Gertrude Stein). These essays highlight the shifting relation between artist and subject. The relative importance of who the artwork is by and who or what it is about is always changing.

Every art form has its particular advantages and limitations. It is not unusual for people working in one medium to envy the freedoms of another. Frank O’Hara ponders these matters briefly and frankly—before dismissing them—in his poem “Why I Am Not a Painter”:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not.

In keeping with the spirit of the exhibition, I’d like to look a little more patiently at what happens when different media come into close proximity. How do they affect, or rub off on, each other? To what extent can one art form absorb and harness the possibilities inherent in another? To do this I’ll move beyond the exhibition and look at a cluster of well-known tributes and some of the tributaries—so to speak—that flow from this cluster. The cluster is composed of a novelist, who occasions the initial convergence, and a sculptor, a poet, and a photographer who subsequently find themselves grouped around him.
Auguste Rodin, Balzac. Exhibited 1898, cast later. Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University.



In July 1891, Rodin accepted a commission to make a sculpture of Balzac. He hoped to have a sketch ready by November and to complete the sculpture in 18 months. As often happened, though, the demands Rodin made on himself—his desire to find and capture the “soul of Balzac”—came close to overwhelming him. Claiming to be working “on nothing but the Balzac,” he nevertheless missed deadline after deadline.

In May 1894 delegates from the sponsoring committee visited his studio, only to find that, instead of the expected maquette of the novelist in a monk’s robe, Rodin had modeled a naked figure with arms folded over an enormous belly. This, needless to say, was considered quite unacceptable. Rodin worked on various other versions but was constantly dissatisfied. Although frustrating for everyone concerned, the failure was itself a kind of tribute. Balzac, after all, had written a famous—almost Borgesian—account of an artist’s absolute inability to bring a work to the desired state of perfection: The Unknown Masterpiece (which, incidentally, formed the basis for the interminable Jacques Rivette film La Belle Noiseuse). Finally, with pressure and doubts mounting (there was much speculation in the press as to whether he would ever finish it), Rodin exhibited a plaster cast of his Balzac at the Salon of 1898. The controversy it engendered was as swift as its gestation had been prolonged. The sculpture had its defenders, but Bernard Berenson sounded the more typical note: he regarded it as a “stupid monstrosity. Insofar as he [Balzac] has form at all, he looks like a polar bear standing on his hind legs.”

A poet gave the best account of how Rodin worked on the statue:

For years he lived engrossed by this figure. He visited Balzac’s home, the landscape of Touraine, which constantly reappears in his books, he read his letters, studied the existing portraits of Balzac, and he lived through his works again and again . . . he lived [in Balzac’s world] as if he were himself one of Balzac’s creations, unobtrusively inserted among the multitude of existences which Balzac had created.

Rainer Maria Rilke came to Paris to write a book about Rodin in 1902. As Rodin had immersed himself in the work of Balzac, so Rilke immersed himself in the work of Rodin. As Rodin had sought to pay homage to the genius of Balzac, so Rilke sought to do justice to the genius of Rodin. As Rodin’s sculpture was an essay on genius by a genius, so Rilke’s book became not only a monograph about Rodin but also a vicarious account of his own genius. Rilke himself was conscious of this, writing to Lou Andreas-Salomé that the book “also speaks about me.” The portrait of the artist is also a self-portrait of the poet, and became more so over time as Rodin’s huge influence on Rilke’s work took shape. From Rodin, Rilke developed his work ethic (their unrelenting industriousness was one of the traits that Balzac and Rodin also shared). It was from Rodin also that Rilke became convinced that he must write about his subjects not as they appeared on the surface but as if he had inhabited them from within: “One might almost say the appearance of his things does not concern him,” he wrote of Rodin, “so much does he experience their being.” Rilke struggled to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality—his ability to create things—into the “thing-poems” [Dinggedichte] of 1907–8.

As the young Rilke had come to write about Rodin and his work, so the young Edward Steichen came to photograph Rodin and his creations. In 1902 he made a composite image of Rodin silhouetted in front of The Thinker and Monument to Victor Hugo. In 1908 he made long exposures of the Balzac monument at night. After seeing Steichen’s pictures—that is, after the photographer had passed the ultimate test of doing justice to the sculptor’s genius—Rodin became convinced not just of Steichen’s individual talent but of photography’s viability as an art form.

It would be nice to be able to square the circle: to report that Steichen later did a portrait of Rilke at Duino as the first of the Elegies swept through him, or that Rilke wrote a poem about Steichen. This did not happen. The important thing is that whatever your starting point, whether your particular interest is poetry (Rilke), photography (Steichen), sculpture (Rodin), or fiction (Balzac), you will, so to speak, be led astray. After this meeting there will be dispersal. And the dispersal will lead, in turn, to new meetings, new convergences.

The relative importance of what a given work is about and who it is by will change. Suppose, for example, that it was an interest in poetry, in Rilke, that led you to the encounter with Steichen. If you then follow his subsequent work, you will approach the famous photographs of W. B. Yeats and Carl Sandburg (Steichen’s brother-in-law) as examples of portraiture by an artist as much as you regard them as portraits of poets. Within the history of photography Steichen’s most obvious descendant is Richard Avedon, who, like Steichen, combined lucrative fashion work with highly regarded portraiture. This, in turn, means that at some point you will come across Avedon’s 1960 portrait of W. H. Auden in a snowstorm in St Mark’s Place, New York.

If you come from the other direction, to Steichen via Yeats and Sandburg, then you will end up like Joseph Brodsky contemplating a photograph of Auden: “I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.” You will, in other words, be back where we started. For every dispersal—there is something almost Rilkean about this, no? —is also a convergence.

So let’s look, briefly, at some other possible routes out of and away from that initial meeting.

After Rodin, the next important influence on Rilke was Cézanne. Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne reveals the enormous influence of the Cézanne retrospective in Paris, in the summer of 1907. He discovered there not a refutation but an intensification of what he had learned from Rodin: fruits, in Cézanne’s still lifes, “cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.” And again, as with Rodin (but more confidently and explicitly now), what he discovers is important primarily for what it enables Rilke to realize about himself and his own work: “It’s not really painting I’m studying. . . . It was the turning point which I recognised, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready, probably for a long time, for this one thing which so much depends on.”

The extent to which this breakthrough into “limitless objectivity” was achieved is revealed in “Requiem for a Friend” (1908). The poem was written in response to the death, several weeks after giving birth, of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (who had discovered Cézanne years earlier). It is, simultaneously, a lament for his friend and an essay on the art to which they were both indebted:

For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
(from Stephen Mitchell’s translation)

There are several directions one might follow from here: From Cézanne to poems by Charles Tomlinson (“Cézanne at Aix” in Seeing is Believing [1960]) and Jeremy Reed (“Cézanne” in Nineties [1990]). Or, sticking with Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, to Adrienne Rich’s important corrective, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” (Clara was Paula’s friend and Rilke’s wife), in which a poet speaks as a painter addressing a poet—thereby offering a crisp critique of Rilke:

Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day.

In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography.



Originally Published: December 5th, 2007




In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography.

One can influence people never met, with words they read. Poetry is one such vehicle and can be a gift to its readers.
While not for everybody and certainly unable to even hope to reach more than the few that cherish, love and admire it as an art..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://interestingliterature.com/2016/02/15/a-short-analysis-of-john-donnes-death-be-not-proud/

A Short Analysis of John Donne’s ‘Death, Be Not Proud’

Feb 15

Posted by interesting literature

A brief summary and analysis of one of John Donne’s classic Holy Sonnets

The sonnet ‘Death, be not proud’ is one of the most famous ‘holy sonnets’ written by John Donne (1572-1631). What follows is the poem, followed by a short introduction to it, including an analysis of its more interesting imagery and language.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Death is personified as a male braggart, like a soldier boasting of all the men he’s slain. There is also a suggestion of a Donne1male lover bragging about all of his conquests between the sheets: Donne liked the double meaning of ‘die’ as both ‘expire’ and ‘orgasm’, and the idea that ‘those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow, / Die not’ hides the suggestion that ‘you may think all those women you conquer are overcome with pleasure, but they’re faking it’. (This faint suggestion of an erotic subtext is also borne out by the line, ‘Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow’.)

‘Stroake’, too, is ambiguous: it ostensibly refers to the stroke of an axe or a sword that ends somebody’s life, but it is also alive to the other, more tender, meaning of stroking somebody in a caress, such as in lovemaking. ‘Why swell’st thou then?’ Well, quite – tumescence is uncalled for, since you’re not ‘all that’ as a lover, Death. Note the monosyllables of the last line, which hammer out in ten short words the matter-of-fact declaration that the speaker will beat death through being born again in heaven.

‘Death, be not proud’ is rightly viewed as one of Donne’s finest poems, and certainly one of his greatest sonnets. Like the best of Donne’s poetry it fuses religious and erotic imagery and ideas, bringing the physical and the metaphysical together.

Continue to explore Donne’s life and work with these interesting facts revealing his literary ancestry and our discussion of the complex imagery of his classic poem ‘The Good-Morrow’

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_genius_of_thomas_hardy-422


The Genius of Thomas Hardy
Written by: Arthur Symons

He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working, with an almost painful simplicity—just saved from being painful by a humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel, not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not, as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of private judgment. No one has created more attractive women,[Pg 208] women whom a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret loving. Jude the Obscure is perhaps the most unbiased consideration of the more complicated questions of sex which we can find in English fiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work, neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to pass beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling for nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kind of communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of every hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in a sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, and painful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth, translating the dumbness[Pg 209] of the fields into humour. His peasants have been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious wisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things.

In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous, half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny: Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In The Mother Mourns, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Nature laments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with her in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorry for Nature, who feels the[Pg 210] earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the things of the earth.

Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressive poem?
AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor;
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands.
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the people of the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as Adam, Lilith, and Eve.

Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, while all good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent in the form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of[Pg 211] the same supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric, while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants. To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read Lavengro but not Romola. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the plot extends into almost inextricable entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current, around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; stories of mere action[Pg 212] gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardy there is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out of the earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is, which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlasts their interest in the story.

It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do him justice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, always a seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He is always right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showing that 'the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.' But he requires a certain amount of emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next sentence, where he is interested[Pg 213] in expressing the impalpable emotion of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.'

No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.' But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.' And it is this power of seeing to excess, and being limited to sight[Pg 214] which is often strangely revealing, that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that a situation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure in what is perhaps his masterpiece, The Return of the Native, is in the words put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectly imagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be the culminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the words are crackle and tinsel.

What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a story-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this point no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a little sinister, and may[Pg 215] check your pleasure in his narrative if you are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is at times, as in The Return of the Native, the chief person, or the chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/a_history_of_english_romanticism_in_the_nineteenth _century-488


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A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century
Written by: Henry A. Beers
PREFACE.

The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection; and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all educated readers.

As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my definition of romanticism. But every writer has a right to make his own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use of romantic in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.

M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny that Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of romantic which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself is respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Staël was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite Mme. de Staël's, will not give such a very different idea of Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national past; in other words, mediaevalism.

A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much. Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary history of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading his books. . . . He was practically an unread man."

But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single point of view. H. A. B.
APRIL, 1901.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. WALTER SCOTT
II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY
III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL
IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY
V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE
VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.
CHAPTER I.

Walter Scott.[1]

It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment of him but of the genre. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the world which they re-create has the look of reality, the verisimile if not the verum. That Scott's genius was in extenso rather than in intenso, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and he alone popularised romance. No literature dealing with the feudal past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from 1805 to 1830.

The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour. But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history, legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany," upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt—the last I shall ever forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands, with results that have already been described.[3]

As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other "interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction—of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination."

Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies. "To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I had always added the study of history, especially as connected with military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'—a book which, as it hovered between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me."

Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to fix upon his juvenile drama "Götz von Berlichingen." Similarly he learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning." Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death. He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on

"through brake and maze
With harpers rude, of barbarous days,"

and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice.

"Nay, Erskine, nay—On the wild hill
Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . .
Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale,
Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8]

Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthur and Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "Sir Tristram." [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on "The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," "The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology." Lockhart describes two note-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containing memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame Janet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from "Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of the kind.[10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the Edinburgh Review, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul," Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer," Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' "Old Ballads," Todd's "Spenser," "The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of "The Cid," etc.

Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to his poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this, though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or even perhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination to turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted millions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands and tongues.

The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling.[12] That attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty, supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower, stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him from his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and flung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. His absorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, his conservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointed radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts—a Scottish dynasty—reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace his descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with the bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the incunabula of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life," says Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to fit up the dilapidated peel for his summer residence."

Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to become a laird and found a family; that he was more gratified when the King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14] comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal. It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the national, historic past.

The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of Edinburgh—"mine own romantic town "—from Blackford Hill;

"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent:
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle-hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?'"

and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the "Lay"—"Breathes there the man," etc.:

"O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand?"

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least once a year, he thought he would die.

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his dying ears—the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.

Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries. His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers' piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be attributed solely to its locality. . . . In some verses of that eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of

"'An old rude tale that suited well
The ruins wild and hoary.'

"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the same with myself."

Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813 Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who, in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his scene not in vacuo, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland; and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's "Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle, this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his "Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool.

Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in 1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in company to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in "Yarrow Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished host's habit of romanticising nature—that nature which Wordsworth, romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so different a fashion.

"Nor deem that localised Romance
Plays false with our affections;
Unsanctifies our tears—made sport
For fanciful dejections:
Ah no! the visions of the past
Sustain the heart in feeling
Life as she is—our changeful Life,
With friends and kindred dealing."

The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworth esteemed Scott highly and was careful to speak publicly of his work with a qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set little value upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of "Marmion": "I think your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that "his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." The minstrel was a raconteur and lived in the past, the bard was a moralist and lived in the present.

There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon common ground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate in a striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvellyn" and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the same incident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountains and perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover of dogs—loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and all dogs instinctively loved Scott.[18]

Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevolence towards the animal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantage in depth of feeling is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with perhaps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, the impression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery. But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness of instinct

". . . that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate:"—

while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Nature has given the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his favourite Gothic imagery.

"When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded,
The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall;
With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded,
And pages stand mute by the canopied pall:
Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleaming,
In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming,
Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming,
Lamenting a chief of the people should fall."

Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's most imaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn":

"When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start!"

In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it is most instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, and to imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In the prefatory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth himself pointed out the difference. "The subject being taken from feudal times has led to its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted by the principal personages in 'The White Doe' fails, so far as its object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual it succeeds."

This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North," a ballad given in the "Reliques," which recounts the insurrection of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising, carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds of Christ. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudal pomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would have laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northern Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by the insurgents in Durham Cathedral; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth; the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution of Marmaduke and Ambrose; and—by way of episode—the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346.[19] But in conformity to the principle announced in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"—that the feeling should give importance to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to the feeling—Wordsworth treats all this outward action as merely preparatory to the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of ruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the only daughter and survivor of the Norton house.

"Action is transitory—a step, a blow. . . .
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem
And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . .
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine."

With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition which he found in Whitaker's "History of the Deanery of Craven"; of a white doe which haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentle creature and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysterious and soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between the soul of man and the things of nature.[20]

Or take again the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," an incident in the Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festal hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his forefathers.

"Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls;
'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance—
Bear me to the heart of France
Is the longing of the Shield."

Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this is evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he noted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he would—witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'—'Song of the Cliffords,' I think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse; the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter—none of Scott's heroes. Nature had educated him.

"In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead.

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of "The Lady of the Lake":

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill.
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22]

Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23] Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his poem—who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"—has outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!" And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What a scene were here . . .

"For princely pomp or churchman's pride!
On this bold brow a lordly tower;
In that soft vale a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey," etc.

The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.

The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids"—begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years—was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions," says Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror."

In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott calls his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the supernatural; but the first—Scott himself draws the distinction—is a "legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad." "Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair example:

"Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart,
And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh:
But vain the lover's wily art
Beneath a sister's watchful eye."

"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside—

"At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"—

but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real names and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.[26] "The Eve" is in ballad style and verse:

"Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page,
Loud dost thou lie to me!
For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould,
All under the Eildon tree."

In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists, like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce more scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden, the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers. Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of Volkspoesie.[27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an "elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus:

"The Pope he was saying the high, high mass
All on St. Peter's day";

and then a little later fall into this kind of thing:

"There the rapt poet's step may rove,
And yield the muse the day:
There Beauty, led by timid Love,
May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29]

It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray; "The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life"; "Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering songs, narrative ballads, and the like—objective, dramatic lyrics touched always with the light of history or legend.

The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and somewhat inconsequential thread of diablerie. Byron had his laugh at it in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, as distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness; brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. Its supernatural machinery—Byron said that it had more "gramarye" than grammar—is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second.

When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "contained the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, as he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that tableau large de la vie which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo and Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character sketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William of Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a cadre most happily invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle.

The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always a little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be, and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he thoroughly enjoys.[31]

The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of Coleridge's "Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassed skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas.

With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and entered on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so universally known as to make any review of them here individually an impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and wide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet

"Such as it had
In the ages glad,
Long ago."

The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static department—in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the need-fires—those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the "Agamemnon."

In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," Scott deserted the Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions of Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales are concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of the Isles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold the Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish settlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the Civil War. The scene is laid in Yorkshire, "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had to do with the sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of these by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel" or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud.

But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, Alexis Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola," "Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In "Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and "Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris," "The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in "Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel, "The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, "something very like personal experience of a few centuries."

Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of "Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of the latter . . . we become suddenly conscious of the background. . . . It is curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers in his hero's way." [35] And it is this background which is, after all, the important thing in Scott—the leading impression; the broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with seeming ease and without any appearance of "cram." Chronicle matter does not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently buried away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he adverts to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to seek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute description of events which do not affect its progress."

Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the discussion as to the value of the genre. It may be readily admitted that Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such novels as "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a tour de force. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity—"strangeness added to beauty"—"the pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the blue distance.

Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "local colour" and "the picturesque." "Vers l'an de grâce 1827," writes Prosper Mérimée, "j'étais romantique. Nous disions aux classiques; vos Grecs ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions la couleur locale. Point de salut sans la couleur locale." [36]

As to the picturesque—a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and characteristic in its novelty—while by no means the highest of literary arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Creçy is not, at bottom, a more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that "steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature.

Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "much of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being men. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; man alone is perennial." [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendental philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in the same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works of Walter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of chivalry[40] remind us of the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive sports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying—not the inner nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance—was carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and France. . . . In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." [39]

Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the Scotch novels. "Their theme . . . is the mighty sorrow for the loss of national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer culture—a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples. For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage littéraire," asks Stendhal in 1823,[42] "qui a le plus réussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de Walter Scott. . . . On s'est moqué à Paris pendant vingt ans du roman historique; l'Académie a prouvé doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley à la main; et Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43]

Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott is primarily res.................

MUCH MORE AT LINK-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/john_donnes_life_and_poetry-1629


John Donne's Life and Poetry
Written by: William J. Long

Life. The briefest outline of Donne's life shows its intense human interest. He was born in London, the son of a rich iron merchant, at the time when the merchants of England were creating a new and higher kind of princes. On his father's side he came from an old Welsh family, and on his mother's side from the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More's family. Both families were Catholic, and in his early life persecution was brought near; for his brother died in prison for harboring a proscribed priest, and his own education could not be continued in Oxford and Cambridge because of his religion. Such an experience generally sets a man's religious standards for life; but presently Donne, as he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, was investigating the philosophic grounds of all faith. Gradually he left the church in which he was born, renounced all denominations, and called himself simply Christian. Meanwhile he wrote poetry and shared his wealth with needy Catholic relatives. He joined the expedition of Essex for Cadiz in 1596, and for the Azores in 1597, and on sea and in camp found time to write poetry. Two of his best poems, "The Storm" and "The Calm," belong to this period. Next he traveled in Europe for three years, but occupied himself with study and poetry. Returning home, he became secretary to Lord Egerton, fell in love with the latter's young niece, Anne More, and married her; for which cause Donne was cast into prison. Strangely enough his poetical work at this time is not a song of youthful romance, but "The Progress of the Soul," a study of transmigration. Years of wandering and poverty followed, until Sir George More forgave the young lovers and made an allowance to his daughter. Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any place or employment. When his wife died her allowance ceased, and Donne was left with seven children in extreme poverty. Then he became a preacher, rose rapidly by sheer intellectual force and genius, and in four years was the greatest of English preachers and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There he "carried some to heaven in holy raptures and led others to amend their lives," and as he leans over the pulpit with intense earnestness is likened by Izaak Walton to "an angel leaning from a cloud."

Here is variety enough to epitomize his age, and yet in all his life, stronger than any impression of outward weal or woe, is the sense of mystery that surrounds Donne. In all his work one finds a mystery, a hiding of some deep thing which the world would gladly know and share, and which is suggested in his haunting little poem, "The Undertaking":

I have done one braver thing
Than all the worthies did;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.

Donne's Poetry. Donne's poetry is so uneven, at times so startling and fantastic, that few critics would care to recommend it to others. Only a few will read his works, and they must be left to their own browsing, to find what pleases them, like deer which, in the midst of plenty, take a bite here and there and wander on, tasting twenty varieties of food in an hour's feeding. One who reads much will probably bewail Donne's lack of any consistent style or literary standard. For instance, Chaucer and Milton are as different as two poets could well be; yet the work of each is marked by a distinct and consistent style, and it is the style as much as the matter which makes the Tales or the Paradise Lost a work for all time. Donne threw style and all literary standards to the winds; and precisely for this reason he is forgotten, though his great intellect and his genius had marked him as one of those who should do things "worthy to be remembered." While the tendency of literature is to exalt style at the expense of thought, the world has many men and women who exalt feeling and thought above expression; and to these Donne is good reading. Browning is of the same school, and compels attention. While Donne played havoc with Elizabethan style, he nevertheless influenced our literature in the way of boldness and originality; and the present tendency is to give him a larger place, nearer to the few great poets, than he has occupied since Ben Jonson declared that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," but likely to perish "for not being understood." For to much of his poetry we must apply his own satiric verses on another's crudities:

Infinite work! which doth so far extend
That none can study it to any end.


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Methinks that Donne's critics, were either to blind to see his genius, too jealous to admit his massive talent, and/or so full of shit that their envious eyes were brown.
I identify with Donne greatly myself, in his poetic philosophy. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/92650

Essay
The Spools of Coolidge
Bill Berkson introduces his friend Clark Coolidge’s life in poetry.
By Bill Berkson
An image of Clark Coolidge, black and white. Clark Coolidge. Image courtesy of Celia Coolidge.

Editor’s note: Bill Berkson wrote the following essay in the summer of 2015 as an introduction to Clark Coolidge’s Selected Poems: 1962-1985, to be published next month by Station Hill Press. Berkson died in June, 2016.



What did Clark Coolidge say then?
—Philip Whalen, “The Task Rejected,” 1965

By some fine coincidence, Clark Coolidge and I were students together at Brown University during four semesters in 1957–58. Even though we had one or two friends and many interests in common, we were unaware of each other at the time and didn’t meet until much later, in New York. In the late 1960s, our friendship solidified over my acting as an intermediary in asking Philip Guston to make a cover drawing—it ended up being two drawings, front and back—for Clark’s book Ing (1968), which was also how Clark and Guston first met, and soon began collaborating, and how the series of poem pictures Guston made with assorted younger poets’ poems over the next 10 years began, as well.

While Clark comes from a New England intellectual and artistic family, both my parents had come to New York from modest, and modestly acculturated, circumstances in the Midwest. Fine-boned, tall, and slender, Clark resembles the upright patriarchal figures from Colonial portraiture. With his boyhood passions for rock collecting and spelunking and for fantasy writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark seems to have initiated himself early on into a private sacred world. Granted that the glittery New York of my youth was a fantasy realm in itself, I had as a child no such thing, just the usual romantic daydreams engendered by movies and popular songs. Allowing for our differences in background and temperament, the tallies of events that either of us took as important news, literary and otherwise, in those years when virtually everything was a discovery, are strikingly similar. By extension, such listings would define the changes experienced—like so many doors and windows radically opened wide—by many poets of like persuasion then starting out.

The son of the chairman of the Music Department at Brown, Clark came to writing by way of music; although an avid reader as a child, he speaks of having taken only one course in literature at Brown while majoring in geology and doubling as a jazz drummer. Having entered a year before me, in the fall of 1956, he quit his college studies altogether at the end of his second year and, inspired by reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, hitchhiked across the country to Los Angeles. Soon afterward, he lived for a time in an apartment on Horatio Street, in Greenwich Village, and wrote. Having to start somewhere, with an idiosyncratic feeling for prosody prepared by his musical training, he began by imitating, along with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Philip Whalen.

During Thanksgiving vacation that same fall, I flew to San Francisco in search of, as I rather fuzzily thought of it then, the Beat Generation. The bartender at The Place quickly confided that the writers I was hoping to find there were “all in New York, man.” A few months earlier, in Paris, I had caught a glimpse of Gregory Corso berating a man in a bar. In early 1959, I too left Brown and returned full-time to New York. The following summer, again in Paris, I met William S. Burroughs and at George Whitman’s bookstore heard a tape recording of him reading from Naked Lunch. (It had been announced that Burroughs himself would read, but instead there was only the cassette player on
a small table in the middle of the upstairs room, el hombre invisible nowhere in sight.) That fall, when I accompanied Kenneth Koch to his reading at Brown, in the same auditorium sat or stood both Clark and Ted Berrigan, fateful company unbeknownst to any of the three of us, but there we were. Looking back, it seems both Clark and I took Kerouac’s books as manuals for how to live (natural-born existentialists that we were) as well as how to write; at first the two seemed inextricable, and it took a while to learn which was which. For Clark, Doctor Sax was the book that resonated with the dark side of his New England childhood imaginings; for me, it was The Subterraneans, starting with the message on page one, a loud-and-clear corrective, which probably stood out for Clark, as well:

They are hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being
corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound
without being pretentious or talking too much about it . . .

Events in music between 1957 and ’59 that we responded to, and took as artistic models in our separate ways, included John Cage’s Inde-terminacy, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk’s stints at the Five Spot and his Riverside recordings of that period, Cecil Taylor, Robert Craft’s complete Anton Webern and Morton Feldman’s New Directions in Music 2 (liner notes by Frank O’Hara and cover drawing by Philip Guston). What was going on in the visual arts—the work of Guston, de Kooning, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Johns, and others––figured in there, too, as did the films of the burgeoning New Wave and Underground Cinema, but the analogous impact of all that was realized slightly later.

In those days it became a revelation to write poems primarily influenced by John Ashbery’s “Europe” once it appeared in Big Table (1960), with the sense––shared partly, as I learned later, by Ashbery himself––of different frequencies interrupting one another as in Cage and with spatial silences between words, phrases, or whole lines on the white page like intervals in Webern. As Clark said during an exchange with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa in the ’70s, “‘Europe’ was absolutely the poem that turned me on and mystified me.” In turn, John Ashbery once told me that Coolidge’s work as it developed early on in the ’60s was the best extension he could imagine of what he had been doing in that crucial poem.

What we shared then, and talked about only later, was a need and readiness for a mode of writing other than what Coolidge has called “frozen literature,” a feeling that words, and the sentences they came all-too-neatly wrapped in, required refreshing via intensive disruption and rearrangement. It seemed urgent for the language we had been taught and that was all around us to be short-circuited and aired out in order to give words more breathing space and physicality, away from their preauthorized, anticipated meanings, so they could exist and mean more in themselves, as their own mutable occasions––in effect, what William S. Burroughs called “breakthrough in the grey room.”

The varieties of “pulverized” or shredded syntax of Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath and Burroughs’s The Soft Machine were exemplary, but for me––and I think for Clark, too––rather than relying on collage or cut- up or any other mechanical procedure for taking language apart and reordering it, there was a readymade cut-up or scanning device accessible in one’s own mind; once you found the dial, you had only to turn it. Only in retrospect did this technicality seem to mark a change in sensibility, the previous generation’s relation to conventional syntax being fairly compliant albeit aslant with irony (every quivering word or phrase bearing quotation marks around it), whereas ours more frontally resisted the rules altogether. We had been schooled to read poems and almost everything else as cluttered terrains of dangling symbolism. The words thereby felt ruinously overdetermined and stuffed. We existed in a plethora of language, our own ironies augmented by sarcasm, with only very slippery syntax, if any. Lacking meaningful forms to proceed with, one had recourse to format, or what William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara both had called “design.” Although this was all very new at the time, the idea wasn’t to be avant-garde but to get real. If any form were possible, it would be the one Clark regularly invokes in interviews, talks, and such, coming from Beckett: “a form to accommodate the mess.”

The word book . . . What has that got to do with the real book
really? . . . It’s booooook. Like in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, he
takes the spool of tape and he says “spoooooool” and he says it
over and over again, so it’s like an incantation.

—Clark Coolidge in conversation with Philip Guston, 1972

William Carlos Williams once wrote that a poem should constitute an event––or more properly, as he put it, “a revelation”––in the language in which it’s written. In a poem of that order every word gets its “aha” mo- ment. Clark’s work of the past fifty years, of which this book represents a fair fraction of the first half, can be read as one prolonged event, with plentiful revelations. It is still partial, a clause, as the whole sentence to which it belongs remains an ongoing furtherance of grammar and ex-panded sense.

“As prolific as Clark Coolidge” is an idiom, wistful as can be, that has entered the conversation; of recent times no poet comes close in sums of page count. The rumor that Clark writes ceaselessly on a daily basis––with no outside occupation, in tidy domestic surroundings (hence the proclamation, “raging in my paradise”)––produces an image of still more black spring binders full of works as yet unreleased. In the seemingly boundless lap pool that is his commitment, he waves gingerly at completion, all the while shoving off it for the next turn. To a poet like myself, whose work comes slowly, sometimes with uncomfortable pauses between, the specter of such fluency is bound to be both a wonderment and cause for alarm––an alarm both frightening (the feeling of inevitably lagging behind) and a goad to do more (like O’Hara, Coolidge shows us there is always a poem to be written). Then, too, there is the reminder that keeping at it is not so easy as all that; once when my own work was foundering on an excess of doubt and distraction, he wrote usefully of the need to “sit down solitary and scary and work the words out.”

In seminars at the San Francisco Art Institute over the years, I repeatedly brought up what John Cage had made happen and each time realized that, although Cage was right when he said at a certain point that he’d done what he had set to do, to open people’s ears to the sounds around them, the job still had to be done again, perhaps every generation or two. Certain kinds of art lead a double life as arcane bedazzlements and primary lessons for any viable commonality. It may be that the culture beyond Coolidge’s immediate readership has already absorbed these poems without knowing it and without ever knowing how to assimilate them. Once heard, a single poem can be infectious. Imagine schoolchildren reading The Maintains to become intimate with vocabulary and what constitutes any possible sentence structure.
Bill Berkson. Image courtesy of Robert Eliason.



Clark has kept to his own orbit, all the while increasing its depth and breadth. And he has the good sense to please himself first, following from the merest drone or mutter out to where one or another terminus of mental membrane is struck and the reader’s low, rumbling chortle segues into an all-out hrumph! Commentators on his poems tend to write as if they were witnessing some kind of technological feat, a classroom science project or thought experiment. Their exegeses project an image of the poet’s brain pickled in a bell jar telekinetically aligned with standard-issue digits frantically pecking. Such descriptions suffer from overstudiousness; they leave out how playful Clark is and how funny his poems often are, how most every word shows off its risible side. It flourishes, funny and deep, as deep and dark as words can go, allowing for the oddball nature of words in the first place, that there’s nothing natural about them and yet they have been part of human consciousness for millennia. Open anywhere, you’ll find his humor at home. But turn around, and back on the same page, he’s got a case of the willies: “terrible picture of all the words waiting relentlessly outside.” “A writer of few satisfactions,” as Clark says of Kafka, whose readings of his own work were punctuated by truffles of laughter, not itself a sign of satisfaction.

I work, guided by an inner reptile. —Pierre Soulages as per
Coolidge, “The Blue Pomade: 22 European Painters & Sculptors”

The inarticulate is a closed fist, like a stone; articulation, the release of splayed fingers. The material life of thought: I recall a hallucinogenic experience of thinking to think, then experiencing, together with much grinding of teeth, the prolonged drilling of a vein of “thoughts,” all of them flying off and away like iron flakes.

Evidently, it is all improvisation: the performative winging-it, as unplanned as intense, a case of stamina and decisiveness, admitting of no bluff or cliché, but riding on sustained wonder about whatever’s at hand. Coolidge’s titles, small wonders in themselves, come last, as if by interpretative afterthought (viz. “Basil Rathbone’s Bathrobe,” “Connie’s Scared,” or “Radiational Bowling”). A continuous present is transmitted to the reader’s mind as what’s on the page, in your ear, to be “read” only by staying with it. The dynamic threatens implosion, madness—you can get lost in there, in the consciousness of a single word, that potential maelstrom. Because Coolidge will never guide you, you take upon yourself the freedom to proceed as you will in the poem—equally fearful, baffled, and amused—beside him. None of his attributes, except perhaps a rare type of surplus fixation, seems to have come naturally. As a graph of a poet’s growth, this book shows how hard he worked, as well as the refusals (“the necessary negatives”) implied, in devising his habits, and how to break them.

“Look at any word long enough . . .” Inspiring how he keeps pushing, changing, emptying, and then augmenting by writing what’s on next. A kind of manic sincerity therein: normal self-doubt unin flected by self-irony; all the major ironies saved up for what impinges from the uselessness outside. A fluency that denies stopping: “Why stop?” The chronological shift, for instance, from inventories of words like collections of things (marbles, fossils, bean jars, the ever-mounting directory of proper nouns) to what will pass as “gab.” (The writer- drummer who has “the gift of gab,” but only by figuring it, solilo-quizing at his fingertips.) Then another shift, from short, fine-tuned line lengths to poem and extended-prose masses where caesuras are brushed by in the heat of pressing onward. “Just a bunch of words” is not far off. In the early poems, they seem at first to scintillate in space like pieces of a mobile construction, or else you hear the truncated syllables clattering, or else words or parts of words tumbling like numbers out of a bingo cage, brandishing cadenzas en route.

I recall Clark’s telling me in the early 1970s that he didn’t really like Schoenberg’s music, but he appreciated that large parts of it go along without any development. Likewise, around the same time, he mentioned a particular solo of John Coltrane’s as proceeding at “exact speed.” In the writing, I hear him hearing ahead, in front of and behind the word as it reveals itself, the poem’s surface compounding thereby. He himself stands revealed as some kind of visionary, in the sense of turning open a world simultaneously apprehended and there for the making. The passion for and of the activity of writing is the overriding sentiment, within which there are, for Coolidge, endless curiosities to be satisfied or anyway dealt with. As Bernadette Mayer once said, a concordance to his work would be fascinating.

The poems in Clark’s Selected Poems, forthcoming from Station Hill, were written over 23 years in such places as Providence (1962–66); New York (1966); Providence/Cambridge, Mass. (1966–67); San Francisco (1967–70); Hancock, Mass. (1970–85); and Rome (1984–85). The fact that in many of these towns and cities Clark lived on the top or side of a hill suggests a quality of remove and gazing on things from above. From the heights each poem appears to take its own peculiar plunge. The insistent musings, dis- criminations, glees, puzzlements, irritability, those sardonic drive-by puns, and philosophic remarks that register almost as stage whispers without claiming any prior authority, all signify a powerful affection for the world as encompassed, and ultimately, Clark’s will to articulate that fabled specific infinity he has had his eye on, the “quest to know anything, write everything,” the Chapel Perilous of these poems.

From Clark Coolidge’s Selected Poems: 1962-1985, edited by Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin, with an introduction by Bill Berkson, published by Station Hill Press. Reprinted with permission from Station Hill Press and the estate of Bill Berkson.

Originally Published: March 7th, 2017

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Yes, I read stuff like this. And always find hidden jewels within. Sometimes its a high quality and intense colored diamond, others times its just a low luster pearl..
Most important is its about a real human, not some imaginary character from a novel or movie.
A real person that wrote -real words- to be read by the real world!
ONE CAN WRITE POETRY BASED UPON IMAGINATION AND DREAMS, THAT REPRESENT ---REAL--- HOPES, GREAT DREAMS, LOVES AND LIFE'S JOURNEY.
Or one can participate by reading such when found..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69134




Essay
The Rebirth of a Suicidal Genius
Thomas James died obscure at 27 in 1974, then became a cult hero. Now Graywolf republishes his lost, legendary Letters to a Stranger.
By Lucie Brock-Broido

Introduction
Thomas James, a Roethke Prizewinning devotee of Sylvia Plath, died obscure in 1974. Now Graywolf republishes his lost, legendary Letters to a Stranger, and Lucie Brock-Broido explains her 30-year search for his poetry.

Book of the dead: Thomas James as a mysterious, haunted author resurrecting Plath's Lady Lazarus as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy.


I

It is September 1977 and this autumn is a gorgeous one, just like the one I am writing to you from three decades later. I am thinking of you now. Richard Howard sails into our first workshop in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and asks his twelve new graduate poetry students (I am the thirteenth, permitted by luck and circumstance to sit in) to recite the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The best minds of my generation, collectively, come up with about six of them. Richard is not amused. He then requires a recitation of the names of the Nine Muses. We get all but two. A slight scowl is provoked. All the while I am thinking of you. Richard takes from his bookbag this text: Daniel Halpern’s American Poetry Anthology, a new collection of poets, some published for the first time, all under forty, including Frank Bidart, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, Robert Hass, Gregory Orr, and Charles Wright. Of the seventy-six poets included, only one has two dates after his name in the index: Thomas James (1946–1974).

Letters to a Stranger
By Thomas James
Graywolf Press, 88 pp., $15.00
Richard Howard applies his monocle to his right eye and reads aloud one poem, Thomas James’s “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh.” I will last forever. I am not impatient— The poem is a soliloquy in the voice of a young girl from Thebes in the year 1051 BC as she is being mummified according to The Egyptian Book of the Dead. For all the physical violences of the process, her descriptions are luminous, romantic, graphically and magically sensual. I was so important!, she writes, I wanted to sit up.

So taken is she, Lady J., with the lyrical process of having her body made to last forever, she writes: Before I learned to love myself too much, / My body wound itself in spools of linens.

Even as I write to you, it is just past the cusp of thirty years ago when I first heard those words. My world was changed, as would my work change, indelibly—the whole Music of what would Happen. A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts / Replaced the tinny music of my heart.

So began this journey. The first thing that happened was that I wrote a poem back to Thomas James. It was called “Pornography,” and it was eighty pages long. So bizarre and unintelligible was it that I composed a prose companion to it, which I calligraphed, and then I illustrated that. No one will ever read this poem.

I went in search of this young man, Thomas James. If I had come into this world a bit earlier, if I had been a boy, if I had been gay and raised Lutheran, if I had been born in Joliet, Illinois, Letters to a Stranger—Thomas’s first book, last book, only book—would have been my book, my “First World,” the one first book I would have written in some other life.

II

Thomas Edward Bojeski was born on June 2, 1946. Soon after New Year’s Day, on January 7, 1974, he shot himself in the head with a .45 caliber handgun. He meant to go. In 1972, he lost both his parents within ten days of one another. He was twenty-seven years old and had just published his first book, Letters to a Stranger, which would receive only one review—a withering one—calling Thomas James a “pale Plath.” A day before his death, he had phoned Lynn, his sister (and only remaining member of his immediate family), to say goodbye. The last time Lynn saw him had been the day after Christmas 1973. They were at Union train station in Joliet, and she remembered only his turning back and waving to her before he left for godknowswhere. At his death two weeks later in early January, he left a note, but no one remembers where it is or what it said.

But he had left a book, and this book is a long embellishing of suicide itself. There is a Thou throughout this text, singular and other, religious and erotic—these “letters” are addressed, of course, to “a stranger.” And it is you; it is I; it is the beloved, the Master; it is God; he is strange, and stranger too. So much of the book is modeled after Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Thomas was drunk with Plath. His high romance with Ariel puts her genetic dispositions all over these poems. And he was under the spell of Georg Trakl, a suicide too, also at the age of twenty-seven. And Frank Stanford, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at twenty-nine. And Roethke. And Thomas’s teacher, Lucien Stryk. But it is mostly Plath, her drama and her excellence, her extremity and gift, her apparitions and her fate. Her inevitability.

In the three decades that I’ve hankered backward for this book, toward whence it came, almost everything and everybody that has had a connection to Thomas or to his work has disappeared or died along the way. So peculiar have these vanishings been, I admit that I am slightly spooked to be the vessel to bring this extraordinary text back into the world. In 1994, seventeen years after hearing “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh,” I found Thomas’s sister, Lynn, in Joliet, and went to stay with her, but now I’ve lost her too. After a sustaining and sweet connection, I’ve not heard from her for thirteen years. She’s left no clue save a strange message that she was “moving west.” I cannot find even a trace of her anymore.

In 1980, I met a young fiction writer at Columbia named Allen Barnett, and one night at the Abbey Pub on the Upper West Side, I told him about this journey I was on. Astonishing: Allen had known Thomas in Joliet; they had been in a theater troupe together. I had my first clue then. Allen told me that Thomas James’s real name was Bojeski—Thomas had thought his own name too “unpoetic,” and so used as his surname, instead, his mother’s maiden name. Allen told me that Tom was born in Joliet, that his whole family was gone, all of them, save a sister who survived, perhaps still in Joliet, but went by (yet) another (married) name.

The last time I saw Allen was through a revolving door—into the old New Yorker offices; he was leaving, and I was going in. His first story was to come out in the magazine; I was on my way to visit my soon-to-be editor. Allen’s first book, The Body and Its Dangers (both the book’s title as well as the final story are taken from “Reasons,” the last poem in Letters to a Stranger) would begin also with this epigraph from Thomas James: If I could reach you now, in any way / At all, I would say this to you. . . . This was the last time I ever saw Allen Barnett. On August 14, 1991, he died of complications from AIDS. I am present for the news of an enormous death.

III

It is the autumn of 1981, and I am languishing in my old hometown of Pittsburgh, in a dark year, one haunted by many of my own ghosts. Since Richard Howard had read us James’s work, I had been looking all over America for one copy of his book. I found that copy in the Carnegie Library on Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh. It had been checked out only once: July 28, 1977. I put the book in the back of my jeans, between the blousy white shirt I’d worn and the waistband of my pants. I walked out of the library with that book. It was pre-security for Great Literature. Letters to a Stranger is the only book I’ve ever stolen. Until now, you could not lay hold of a copy of that book, but it has existed in hundreds and hundreds of xeroxed copies across the country, a small underground railroad of reading for young poets. Letters to a Stranger was, and is still, the most ravishing (and ravished) first book of poetry I’ve read. Thomas James’s cadences, his transformations, are in my head every single time I write. I have been rereading your letters.

By the mid-1980s, I had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thought to call the poet whom I’d recently met at a reading, Peter Davison, who was the poetry editor at Houghton Mifflin, the house which had published Letters a decade earlier. Peter told me he would investigate, try to comb through some old records at the press. It turned out that a man named Arthur Gould at the Gould Literary Agency in Evanston, Illinois, had originally brought the book to Houghton Mifflin. Peter could find no editor on record who had worked with Thomas or with the book itself. And Peter will not have lived to see this book come back into print. How did this odd—unlikely—and intoxicating first book make its way into the world?

I have taught the book, year after year, first at Harvard, then Columbia, always in fierce violation of copyright. I’ve given talks at Iowa, at Washington University, at the Bennington Writing Seminars, in Gainesville, in Houston, Missoula, Los Angeles; wherever I’ve read, I’ve taken the manuscript with me. Students are enthralled by the poems. In fact, to this day, it is still the book which most influences and captivates young writers, beyond and above all other first books. My genius is intact.

IV

How is it, exactly, that I can explain the peculiar spell cast between poets and this text? How is it that, when I teach this book, invariably, young poets seem to want to go home (as soon as possible) to write back to Thomas James, to begin their own dialogue with him? I doubt that it is simply that Thomas’s particular darknesses are (in particular) more remarkable than others’, in fact, but somehow the bounty of his metaphors seem more edgy, strangely more inviting, bewitching even, than most. Thomas James’s protégés want to reach him, see him, raise him (in all senses of that term), risk for risk.

Perhaps it is the looming presence of Federico García Lorca’s duende in these pages—that force, writes Lorca, which “loves ledges and wounds.” I do not know a text more capable of circumnavigating these ledges, nor tampering with these wounds, troubling them, stitching and unstitching their embroidered and lacerated edges than Letters.

In his 1930 essay, “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement,” Lorca wrote: “All that has black sounds has duende. . . . These black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art.” Lorca goes on to describe the three forces—the Angel, the Muse, and the Duende—that “everyone senses and no philosopher explains.”

According to Lorca, when the Angel sees death on the way, he flies in slow circles and “weaves tears of narcissus and ice.” When the Muse sees death, she closes the door. But the Duende “will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death.” Lorca writes: “Everywhere else, death is an end.” Death’s possibility—the necessity of its proximity—is that which makes art human and alive.

This omnipresent loom of death—the body and its dangers, the heart and its constancy of harm—is what makes the poetry of Thomas James so powerful. So ubiquitous is this power of “black sounds” that—according to a student who, in earnest, made a list of Thomas’s touchstones, his word-hoard, his lexicon (such easy prey—moon, stone, bone, wound)—over a dozen instances of the word “dark” appear in this one book. But Lorca wrote, after all, that poems are works of art that have been “baptized in dark water.”

V

Thomas James’s gifts are extravagant. How did a man in his early twenties write with such wizardry and rigor, with such guile? The work is alight with the electric gestures of Robert Bly’s “Leaping Poetry” (which, in all likelihood, Thomas had not read; the first edition of Bly’s book had been published only a year or so before Thomas’s death). Bly explains this process of leaping, put simply, as the ability to associate “wildly.” Here are some particularly transcendent metaphors in Letters, feats of wild association. In the title poem, Thomas writes (italics here and following are mine):

Alexander died this morning,
Leaving his worldly possessions
To the strongest.
I watched an empire fade across his lips.
They propped him in the sun a while,
And then three women came to scour his body
Like a continent.


How does one compose a simile this far-fetched, this sparked with imagination, this curiously precise? Later, in this same poem, he writes of the snow “dismantling the weeds / Like the breakable furniture of a boudoir.”

In a poem called “Dissecting a Pig,” he writes: “I have kept you in a laboratory jar / Comfortable as the château of your mother.”

Or, in “Dragging the Lake,” a persona poem in the voice of an odd Ophelia (a poem which has a curious kinship with both James Wright’s “To the Muse,” as well as Richard Hugo’s “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir”), Thomas speaks of “a sky involved with a stillborn moon.” A plethora of moons exist in contemporary American poetry, many more than our fair share, in fact, and perhaps more than a handful have been “stillborn,” after all. But no one has ever thought, heretofore, to tell us that the sky could be involved with such a moon.

In “Two Aunts,” one of the most remarkable pieces in the book, Thomas tells us of his two Great Aunts, two farmer’s daughters, “maiden ladies” who lived out their lives in a small town in North Dakota where the Bojeski family had first settled. He addresses them:

My ladies,
My dusky girls, I see you
With your bustles puffed up like life preservers. . . .


He tells us they were both heroin addicts who sprinkled opium on their oatmeal, who embroidered doilies with the drug. He identifies with them:


       I know what you meant.
There was always the hunger,
The death of small things
Somewhere in your body,
The children that would never
Take place in either of you. . . .
I see you ride the black hills of my mind,
Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,
Galloping
In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware
Of something I inherited,
The doubt,
The fear,
The needle point of speech,
The hunger you passed down that I
Possess.


Much later, I would learn from Thomas’s sister that, in the nineteenth century, Aunt Rose “perished in a cyclone.” And that Aunt Angie, one afternoon, “put her hand over her eyes and passed away in a chair.” I remember how I died. It was so simple! / One morning the garden faded. My face blacked out.

Other effulgent examples abound, for instance, in “Luncheon with the Hangman”:


After the minor fractures of April,

Slow convalescence, a montage of sky.
The village clock, punctual as a cricket,
Tapped the penetrable gray

I mistook for sheep, a wooly light.


We have never heard of a cricket’s “punctuality” before, though it will have its own true accuracy from now on.

Every way points to harm in Thomas James, so much is composed of omen, but over and again, he delivers these portents toward a kind of visionary salvation. In a poem called “Jason”: “Fistfuls of brightness” bloom where he dreams “of the innumerable antlers of winter.” He has his own breed of near-Gothic sensibilities: “Lobster-colored clouds merge and pass / On the arbor’s dilapidated bones.”

He writes: “I learn the lion color of these hills” and “I come in dryshod, in my mushroom-colored coat.” I cannot think of another writer as adept at confecting these odd marriages, except perhaps Flannery O’Connor, whose metaphors can be as singular and indelible as these. For example, in O’Connor’s “Revelation,” a girl in a doctor’s office waiting room has a face that is “blue with acne”—a statement far-fetched, risky, and grotesquely precise at once. Or, in another O’Connor story, with menace and her gift for odd exactitude, she writes of a cloud that is “the exact color of the boy’s hat and is shaped like a turnip.”

VI

At least five of the poems in Letters are in direct dialogue with Plath’s Ariel. “Waking Up,” the invocating poem, is a near call-and-response to Plath’s opening poem “Morning Song.” Likewise, “Carnations” is a response to Plath’s “Tulips,” as, in its own eccentric way, “Luncheon with the Hangman” corresponds to Plath’s “The Hanging Man.” And Thomas’s “Longing for Death” (in addition to its alliance with another poem, written by Anne Sexton, called “Wanting to Die”) is homage to Plath’s “Death & Co.” Further, “Laceration” has its alliance with Plath’s “Cut.” And finally, though the lexicon and sorcery and tonal urges are quite dissimilar, Thomas James’s “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh” must surely correspond—in some wild associative manner—to Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” both rising, as they do, each from their own forms of dying—each as an art.

But Thomas James is not a “pale Plath” in any sense. He is simply engaged in an intense (and very intricate) conversation with Ariel. Both Plath and James were writing out of their own psychic heat, their urgency—emergency, in fact. For both poets, the “Thou,” it is made clear, has betrayed, transgressed. Plath speaks with the sharp keen of rage; James is less angular. And Plath’s “Thou” is dangerously present, immanent, in too-close proximity to her speaker. But for James, the “Thou” is far more distant; the ache is more mysterious and more abstract. In the crescendo of poems that closes James’s book (his first, his last) is a poem called “Letter to a Mute.” This Thou will not, cannot speak back. For Plath and James, the genius is intact—concrete, palpable, each with their own compulsion toward immortality. Like Ariel, this book will go on.

VII

Years pass (twenty in fact, thus far), and I am still trying to find Lynn Bojeski, now named—I have no idea. In 1993, Mark Wunderlich is one of my first new students at Columbia. During a seminar on first books, when just about everyone in the class falls in love with Letters, Mark stays late into the night with me—the search has been stalled for a long time now. Mark comes up with the idea that we should try to find one “Gil Ross,” the name of the man who took the author’s photograph on the book jacket. We do research. We find him outside of Chicago. I phone him. He is cautious and says he knows nothing, only that Thomas James is dead, that perhaps I should try to find one “Kathryn Smith,” who may now teach at the Francis Parker School in Chicago.

A week or so later, I find Kathryn at school. She is, at first, bewildered by my voice on the phone, then almost hostile. She bursts into tears. She says she cannot talk, not now, but perhaps in a while. She gives me a specific date and time to call her back. The date and time she gives me could not be worse—a Monday night in October, which happens to be right in the middle of my seminar. Weeks later, I let the seminar know we’ll be taking a long break, and I tell them why. I phone Kathryn at the appointed time, and she relents; she has decided, with great trepidation, to speak to me. Too many people, incidents surrounding Thomas and his work were painful, sometimes violent, she says. I do not mean, I tell her, to dredge up old ghosts. I’ll lie here till the world swims back again.

Months later, Kathryn winds up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, for medical treatment; she has been diagnosed with cancer and has decided to seek only alternative medicine. She stays with me in Cambridge and gives me the name and address of one of Thomas’s oldest friends, Ron Thelo, who lives still in Illinois. We phone him that night, but get only his answering machine. I hear back from his lover, Gene Wojcik, who tells me, instead, to write to Ron—who is mortally ill, though I do not know it at the time. As for Kathryn, I lose hold of her too, and am shaken by the idea of trying to see if she is still alive and in this world.

VIII

On April 14, 1994, I write to Ron Thelo: It’s quite astonishing to realize that this one slim volume, now twenty-one years old, has had such a lasting and painfully lovely impact. Little by little, I have found pockets of poets across the country who know it, honor it, love it. . . . For me, oddly enough, I feel more akin to Thomas’s book than to any other, save perhaps Emily Dickinson. I feel that intimate with Thomas’s work. And so I am to be the one to help it back into the world. . . . In the letter, I ask him if he can help me find Thomas’s sister’s married name. I do not hear back from him.

Exactly four months later, I phone Ron but speak, again, to Gene. He has news. First, Ron has died. (Ron, he tells me, had been pleased to have heard from me, but was far too ill to respond.) And secondly, he has indeed found Lynn Bojeski’s married name. She is Lynn Fisher now.

On August 14, I write to Gene: It is well past midnight—hours since I phoned you. I am so deeply sorry to hear the news of Ron’s death. . . . And I am troubled deep into the night, and wishing you well.

What legacies abound. I am, after all, writing my own Letter to a Stranger, but somehow I feel oddly connected, not strange, though I’ve never even met any of your world out there. I have been immersed in Thomas’s work, reading it aloud. I have his poems, now, almost to heart. But I’ve lost yet another link in this chain of gifts and losses. And how strange that the book just keeps going on with its going on. And it will go on, I’ll see to it. By the time this reaches you, I hope I’ll have finally been in touch with Lynn Fisher. I’ll try not to startle her. So much of this story passes on; I’m saddened and bewildered. . . . And all the more hell-bent on seeing this book back into the world.

Gene writes back to me with a photograph of Ron Thelo, with this note: Dear Lucie, Thanks for your letter. I’ve pondered these connections a lot in the last four months. Ron sent me this just after we met twenty-two years ago. It is by Edna St. Vincent Millay:


It may well be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be, I do not think I would.



IX

By early September 1994, I found Lynn Fisher. On the telephone, she was, as I had expected, wildly suspicious of my intentions, all and any of them. She bristled and mistrusted at first, but gradually warmed to me. She spoke to me for a long time, and by the time we hung up, I had made plans to come see her. Within days, she posted me a Modigliani-esque ink sketch by Tom that she said he had drawn years ago. She had many paintings of his, line drawings, an unfinished novel, a play. She told me that he always signed his work “TOMB.” Tomb, or Tom B., Thomas Bojeski. She wrote that she was certain that the enclosed sketch of the long-haired girl was me. She signed her letter, Thank heavens you found me.

I have now, in my office in New York, an oil painting of Tom’s, a primitive—a slender girl standing at a meadow’s edge, her hair in a thin ponytail, an imagined breed of tree in the distance with one single leaf falling from it, a hopelessly autumnal sky. I have a soft, lined-paper page—as if torn from an elementary school composition book—with his scrolls and doodles on it, little figurines, and some thirty practices of his signature, in an almost Victorian hand: Thomas James, Thomas James, Thomas James all over the page. I have a handful of poems he never published, now included here. And a list of poems he would have written had he stayed alive, all in the character he called Tom O’ Bedlam. “Tom O’ Bedlam Dances,” “Tom O’ Bedlam Enters the Asylum,” “Tom O’ Bedlam Walks in the Rain,” “Tom O’ Bedlam among the Fireflies.”

On October 15, 1994, finally in Joliet, I write in my Tom B. journal: I am with Lynn, Thomas’s dining room. I am in Dickens country, new world—this is an old world. There are streets with names like Pickwick Court, Little Dorritt, Copperfield. This is rough country, a city of small gangs, a floating casino on an old docked riverboat, a town of old railways, penitentiaries (now shut down), and dirty dark canals. It’s a city mourning the post-war 1950s, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. This was a big union town, with a huge steel factory where Tom’s father used to work as a guard. Tom himself worked as a night watchman at American Steel and Wire in the late 1960s.

Riding in their large, low-slung car with Lynn and her husband Bob and her son Mike, I am cold. I take flickering notes in my journal: I am writing in long leather gloves, chill. Then someone says, and I record: Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples,

Poet in his youth: Thomas Bojeski in the process of reinventing himself as Thomas James.
the Latin Kings. The town is home to two of the most notorious prisons in the country, Joliet Correctional Center, where Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life in 1924, and Statesville, where Richard Speck lived and died. Even this late in the year, the corn in the fields outside of town still goes unharvested, withering. We drive to Thomas’s grave, which is, as he wrote of a statue of Saint Francis behind a church, “upholstered in oak leaves.” Likewise, Thomas’s grave, bronze and level to the ground, is similarly upholstered by so many leaves. The earth has taken on terrible proportions.

Lynn’s home is the house that she and Tom grew up in. It has been in the family for generations, built in 1893. It is tight and gray and plain and ramshackle. Seventeen cats live here now with Lynn. In the 1950s, seven members of the Bojeski family—Grandmother, Uncle Ray, Aunt Opal, Lynn, Tom, and his parents—lived there. It is a tiny place. Tom lived in a little room downstairs and slept on a hide-a-bed couch. She shows me Thomas’s desk, a two-foot wide avocado pine secretary where he wrote his poems. Lynn works now in the city for the Bureau of Identification division of the State Police; she’s a bookkeeper. Billy Graham, Lynn tells me, is her Master. She is married to Bob; her son Mike is an autodidact, a curious and rambling savant. These are some of the things I wrote down that this young man told me in the car:

Tom was chasing apparitions, ghosts; he made the wrong choice. He should have been able to reinvent himself, a Greek necessity. . . . The soul is in a state of flux. Poets. . . instead of going forward, they use their writing to go back; they cloak themselves. Of Tom, his uncle, he tells me, he is . . . not pissed. But T. was pathetic . . . There’s a reason that people are given a madness. . . . He speaks of Socrates’ “geist,” of Thomas Edison’s 35,000 attempts at inventing the light bulb, of Salvador Dali lecturing in London in a deep-sea diver’s suit, in fur-lined capes. Socrates drank hemlock, Mike says. You cannot recant an absolute truth.

X

No one in the family believes that Thomas killed himself. His brother-in-law, Bob, had gone to the morgue to identify him. He graphically describes the scene, Thomas’s wound, the concrete slab, the tag affixed to his foot. Tom was right-handed; his wound was on the left side of his head. How a right-handed guy could reach is bullshit. He was shot on his bed. There was someone else involved. . . . At the funeral, the casket was open and Aunt Opal shook it, shook the coffin back and forth. We pass a street named “Bliss.” This is true.

You were baptized in formaldehyde / Before I brought you to this strange autopsy.

I want to tell them to read his book again, that it is an homage to the autumnal, the inevitable, the going and the going on, the afterlife and all its jeweled states; that, in Letters to a Stranger, each gallery of weather leads to fall and dying off. In the title poem, Thomas writes:


The leaves have all gone yellow
Overnight, wrinkling like hands
In the updraught.
I drove my car by the creek
Because I had nowhere else to go.
The milkweed’s delicate closet had been fractured,
Filling the air with rumors.
Despite all I could do, the sumac
Had taken on the color of a mouth.


In the poem called “Longing for Death,” he writes: I wanted to marry an absence. I want to tell them: Thomas married his absence, wittingly, willingly, willfully.

The pageantry of the whole text itself is an intricate embalming—the body’s mereness on its unstoppable journey toward corporeal oblivion, toward an ethereal infinitude. I believe Thomas James dreamed this book would last, somehow, that it would go on. He taught me the word “ichors,” the fluid that runs through the veins of the gods, unlike a mortal’s mere blood. The book is full of such embellished images of “mere” life, of “bruised” eyes traded in for precious stones. There are lacerations, intravenous needles, crutches (Thomas kept a collection of canes, for no particular reason I know of, except the odd elegance of their imagery), wounds both physical and otherwise: I ride on my own diminishing. . . . He speaks of “a terrible vertigo,” of “small effulgences.” He writes of being mute, of being strange. He is uninterested in Sin. The saints have been turning to stone for a long, long time—


Nuns lie under these plain stone markers.
Asleep in their long rows, whitely established
In the center of a hunger that was never theirs,
They do no blossoming.



“Room 101” is a rehearsal for “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh,” as are so many of his poems. “Room 101” is spoken in the voice of a young man, already dead, being prepared for a world less damaging than this one is:


I come to trade my flesh for stone.

. . . On Saturday I watched them take
My heart. Old relic, now you tick

All night beneath my tablelamp.

          . . . Light hurts
My eyes. I trade them both for quartz
On Wednesday morning. I am made
To last forever, girded bone.
A hornet tests my sculptured skin.



Thomas James’s lyric hallucinatory intensities seem to provoke his gift for ventriloquism—nine of the poems in Letters to a Stranger are personae. And no matter how far-fetched each voice may be, Thomas carries his own elegiac and immutable isolation to each of his “mutations”—incarnations, each, of his own embellishments and his truths, painfully alive.

I want to be a shepherd to this book, and not one of its lambs, grazing and inevitable, eventual, along the way of so many vanishings. Thomas writes: The lambs are not aware of me. I do not want to lose myself along the way of losing everyone and everything that surrounds this book, except the text itself. In “Lambs,” he writes:


I walk into the field, I am not afraid of them—
They scatter like the last edges of a sickness.
The sun has begun to enlarge its tawny fleeces
At the expense of no one in particular.


In a letter, Emily Dickinson wrote: Could we see all we hope, or hear the whole we fear told tranquil, like another tale, there would be madness near.

Lady Jemutesonekh says, from her world 3,000 years ago, in the seventh, final septet of her soliloquy:


When I come home the garden will be budding,
White petals breaking open, clusters of night flowers,
The far-off music of a tambourine.
A boy will pace among the passionflowers,
His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces.
I’ll know the mouth of my young groom, I’ll touch
His hands. Why do people lie to one another?

In the title poem, Thomas says, quite simply: I am afraid of what the world will do.

“Introduction” by Lucie Brock-Broido copyright 2008 by Lucie Brock-Broido. Reprinted from Letters to a Stranger with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Originally Published: September 24th, 2008



In the title poem, Thomas says, quite simply: I am afraid of what the world will do.

Poet Thy Fear, Should Have Thee Cast Onto Page


Poet thy fear, should have thee cast onto page
Sank ink deep into paper for posterity
Others have endured despair and insane rage
Failure to act denotes not weak temerity

Now thee has deprived this world of thy heart
Acted in misery with greatest of errors
Tragedy of death allows no restart
Slay thy soul, ends not thy future terrors

As we grieve deeply, for both our great sins
That of indifference and its pain inflicted
O' that we poets have been true as best friends
Yielding not to our emotions conflicted

Now thee has deprived this world of thy heart
Tragedy of death allows no restart

Robert J. Lindley, 3-12-2017

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/great_american_poet_henry_wadsworth_longfellow_-1564

Great American Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Written by: Hezekiah Butterworth

That was a memorable scene in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, when the veil was lifted from the bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first American upon whom England had conferred such distinguished honor. James Russell Lowell was there, and made the eulogy, and left in all minds the impression of these simple words; "The most beautiful character that I have ever known." Mr. Lowell knew men, and among the great spirits of the age with whom he had been associated, he perhaps had known no literary man more intimately than Longfellow. The original families of Lowell and Longfellow in America had grown side by side on the banks of the Merrimac. The younger poet had succeeded the elder in the professorship of literature at Harvard College; the two had lived side by side in historic houses in the old Cambridge neighborhood on the Charles, and there had shared the amenities of suburban life and had studied the world together. It was said that Longfellow came to live in a house "on the way to Mt. Auburn;" Lowell lived in a house on the same road, and the two poets sleep together there now in the loving shadows of Boston's "Field of God."

Since the days of Horace, friendship has found no more sympathetic and beautiful expression in verse than in the lines inscribed by Lowell to Longfellow and in the poems written by Longfellow in reference to Lowell.

Says Lowell in his lines to H. W. L——:

"Long days be his, and each as lusty-sweet
As gracious natures find his song to be;
May age steal on with softly-cadenced feet
Falling in music, as for him were meet
Whose choicest verse is harsher-toned than he!"

Says Longfellow of Lowell in the "Herons of Elmwood:"

"Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate,
Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting,
Some one hath lingered to meditate,
And send him unseen this friendly greeting;

"That many another hath done the same,
Though not by a sound was the silence broken;
The surest pledge of a deathless name
Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."

The matchless lines in "The Two Angels," a poem that commemorates the events of the birth of a child to Longfellow and the death of the beautiful wife of Lowell on the same night, in which the poet sees an angel with amaranths go to the door of his neighbor, while an angel with asphodels comes to his own door, strikes the tenderest chords of life.

Longfellow was the poet of friendship, and he carried his heart friends wherever he went. The river Charles in his fancy made the letter C in its windings in the Brighton meadows before his door, and ever recalled three friends who had borne that name. One of the masterpieces of the work of his fading years is "Three Friends of Mine," in which he pictures Felton and Agassiz and the midnight parting with Charles Sumner at his door, and represents himself as one left to cover up the embers.

Henry W. Longfellow, the poet of "Hope, Home, and History," was a descendant of the family of William Longfellow, who came from England to Newbury, Mass., in 1675, and a son of Stephen Longfellow, an eminent lawyer and public man. He was born in Portland, Me., February 27, 1807. The family consisted of eight children, of which he was the second, and of which two were poets, the other being the Unitarian hymn writer, Rev. Samuel Longfellow.

He grew up a pure, loving boy in the schools of Portland, Me., fond of the woods, the hills, and the sea. "My Lost Youth" furnishes a delightful picture of this period of his life. It is said that his childhood fancy first found expression in the following rhymes:

"Mr. Finney had a turnip
That grew behind the barn,
And it grew and it grew,
But never did any harm."

A member of the Longfellow family has denied that these luminous but not very promising lines were the first offering of his muse. If the anecdote be apocryphal, the boyLongfellow yet began to love poetry and to write it, and he became a newspaper poet, one of those common soldiers of literature, while a student. He read Irving at twelve, and was charmed with the matter and style of "Rip Van Winkle." He felt the charm of Horace a little later, and probably learned his first lesson in eloquent literature from the "Poetic Art" of the Augustine age of Rome in her glory. Says Horace: "He who writes what is useful with what is agreeable wins every vote: his book crosses the sea; it will enrich the booksellers, and win for him imperishable fame."

Longfellow learned to make what is useful, agreeable, and this principle was one of the great secrets of his success in literary life. His early poems that did useful and agreeable service in the poet's corner of the newspapers of the time were, so far as we know, never collected. A few of them, however, survive, among them "The Spirit of Poetry," "Sunrise on the Hills," and "The Hymn of the Moravian Nuns."

At the age of fourteen he was prepared for Bowdoin College, which he entered a year later as a sophomore, and became a member of one of the most distinguished classes in American history. Among his fellow-students were Nathaniel Hawthorne, his personal friend, John S. C. Abbott, George B. Cheever, William Pitt Fessenden, John P. Hale, Calvin E. Stone, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. He was graduated the fourth in his class.

The ambition for authorship came to him among the shades of Bowdoin. He said while there, thus anticipating in prose the "Psalm of Life:" "Whatever I study I ought to engage in with all my soul, for I will be eminent in something."

His poems published in the newspapers, principally in the Boston Literary Gazette, during his college life made for him a name, and he was offered the professorship of modern languages in Bowdoin College, soon after his graduation. To better prepare himself for the chair he went abroad, in 1826, in his twentieth year. He studied in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. He made himself master of the French, Spanish, German, and Italian languages and literature, and returned to America in the late summer of 1829, and entered upon the duties of his professorship at Bowdoin in the autumn. He married Miss Mary Potter, of Portland, Me., and went to live in an old house, which was shaded by a single great elm, the site of which is still shown, on a salary of $1,000 per year. He published "Outre Mer," and taught and wrote with such distinguished success that, on the resignation of George Ticknor, he was offered the chair of modern languages at Harvard. For the larger preparation which he found necessary for his work, he went to Europe again in 1835. In his first visit to Europe he had met Washington Irving in Spain; he now made the acquaintance of Carlyle and Browning. His wife died in Germany.

He became a professor in Harvard in the fall of 1836, making his residence at the Cragie House, an old colonial mansion, shaded by trees, which Washington had used for his headquarters in 1775-1776. He married a most beautiful and accomplished lady, a daughter of Hon. Nathan Appleton, of Boston, whom he had met abroad, and who is supposed to be described in his romance "Hyperion." Here, happy in his domestic life, surrounded by the most scholarly men of America, his literary life ripened, his fame as a poet grew, and his sympathy with life as expressed in his works won all hearts. His "Voices of the Night" made him the poet of the home; "Evangeline," which is the American book of Ruth, made him the singer of the fidelity of holy affections, and "Hiawatha," the voice of the dying traditions of the Indian race.

He was a lover of his family, and a great affliction came to him in the summer of 1861. One July day his wife was playing with some sealing-wax with her children, when her dress caught fire, and she was enveloped in the flames, and burned to death. The poet is said to have suddenly changed from a young man to an old man under his weight of grief; he appeared in the streets of Cambridge again, in a few weeks, but unlike his former self. His affection for his dead wife in his widowerhood is expressed in the "Cross of Snow," written many years after her death:

"In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face—the face of one long dead—
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died."

He would take a dear friend into the room where her portrait hung, point to it, and say "my dear wife," and turn away to weep. His loving dream of his first wife is pictured in "The Footsteps of Angels:"

"And with them the Being Beauteous,
Who unto my youth was given,
More than all things else to love me,
And is now a saint in heaven.

"With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle hand in mine.

"And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes.
Like the stars, so still and saint-like.
Looking downward from the skies.

"Uttered not, yet comprehended,
Is the spirit's voiceless prayer.
Soft rebukes, in blessings ended.
Breathing from her lips of air.

"Oh, though oft depressed and lonely
All my fears are laid aside,
If I but remember only
Such as these have lived and died."

In 1868 he went to England with his family. His fame in England was as great now as that of any English poet. He was received in London with the greatest love and hospitality; he met the queen, and received a doctor's degree from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His reception by the literary classes was not more warm than the appreciative interest which was shown by the people. He had become the poet of the English homes, and was as greatly read as the Laureate.

I met the poet under most pleasant circumstances, in the beginning of his beautiful old age. I was a young editor; I was called to make an address before a church literary society on the historic places of Boston, and I wrote to Professor Longfellow in regard to the history of the poem "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight." I received a note from him in his well-known hand, saying that if I would visit him some evening at his home, it would give him pleasure not only to give me the history of the writing of this poem, but of any of his poems in which I might take an interest. I accepted the invitation, and one misty February night found me at his door, feeling as poor Phillis Wheatly must have felt when she stood at the same door after the invitation from Washington.

I well recall the night. The slow opening of the door by the quiet servant, the dim hall that seemed haunted by the shadows of the past, the great reception-room walled with books and pictures!

The poet was alone—he was a lonely man in his old age. He rose from his table, and came to meet me, a kindly light in his face, his flowing hair as white as snow. He saw that I was awed by his presence, and his gracious dignity changed at once into a friendly sympathy. "I have here some things that may interest you," he said; "here is Coleridge's inkstand; there is Tom Moore's waste-paper basket; and there," he added, in a reverent tone, "is a piece of Dante's coffin." The last relic was enclosed in a solid glass, and he proceeded to tell the story of how he had received it.

"You express a kindly interest in the origin of my poems," he added, in substance. "I will tell you something about the writing of some of them. You see the screen yonder; it is Japanese; there is written upon it the 'Psalm of Life.' The poem was written at Cambridge when the orchards were bright with buds and blossoms, and the days were in the full tide of the year. I did not write it for publication but for myself. I felt an inspiration to express in words my one purpose in life. I carried it about with me for a long time, when I was asked for a poem for the Knickerbocker Magazine, then a popular periodical, and I sent it to the editor without any expectation of its success with the people. It has been translated into nearly all languages that have a literature.

"In London I received an invitation to visit the queen. On returning from the palace, the coach was stopped by the crowd of vehicles in the street. There stepped before the door of the carriage an English workman. 'Are you Mr. Longfellow?' he asked. 'I am,' I answered. 'Did you write the "Psalm of Life"?' 'I wrote that poem, my friend.' 'Pardon me, but would you be willing to take the hand of a workingman?' 'Certainly, my friend; it would give me pleasure.' He put his hand through the carriage window, and I shook hands with him. That," said Mr. Longfellow, with emphasis and feeling, "was the best compliment that I ever received in my life."

Longfellow's Study.

The last declaration, in which we think that we have quoted the poet's exact words, shows the heart and character of the man. It is a photograph of his soul.

He said that the poem "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight" was written in the lonely hours of his widowerhood, when he used to visit Boston evenings and return over the bridge of the Charles. The bridge grew still as the night wore on, and the procession of the day became thin. There was a furnace at Brighton at that time, and the reflection of the red fire fell across the dark river. The bridge over the Charles is nearly the same now as then; it has been somewhat reconstructed, but the wooden piers are there; the drifting seaweed, the odor of the brine, and the processions of "care-encumbered men" vanishing into the night. An English nobleman who is a literary critic has pronounced this poem the most sympathetic in the language. Its popularity probably is due to the night scene and the spirit of self-renunciation. It is one of the most beautiful songs of the age as set to music by two English composers. We never tire of the message of sympathy.

"Excelsior," which has been greatly parodied, expresses in a simple way what Browning has more artistically illustrated in "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It was written one evening after the poet had received a letter from his beloved friend, Charles Sumner, full of lofty sentiments, expressed in the classic rhetoric of the time. As he dropped the letter the word "Excelsior" caught his eye, and the inspiration and the vision of the poem came. He wrote it on the back of the letter which contained the magic word.

It is said that the words "Cumnor Hall," in Meckle's ballad, so haunted the mind of Sir Walter Scott as to compel him to write "Kenilworth." "I was led, I think," said Longfellow, "to write the 'Wreck of the Hesperus' by the words 'Norman's Woe' I had been reading one dreary night of the disasters that had befallen the Gloucester fishing fleet, and my eye met the words 'Norman's Woe.' I went to bed, but the story haunted me. I arose and began to write, and the poem came to me in whole stanzas."

"The Old Clock on the Stairs" was suggested by an old farmhouse timepiece at the country house of Mr. Appleton, his father-in-law. While the house described was in the country, the description answers well to the poet's own residence, which also contained an eight-day clock which reached from floor to ceiling. Many people never so much as doubted that the Cragie House and its clock were meant in the poem. The clock in the Cambridge house was so old and antique that most visitors fancied that they saw in it the real "old clock on the stairs." The refrain was suggested by the French words "Toujours jamais, jamais toujours" in an elegant French quotation.

"Hiawatha" was pictured to the poet by the story which Abraham le Fort, an Onondaga chief, gave to Schoolcraft. The musical vocabulary in which the Indian words suggest their own meaning may be found in Schoolcraft. It is the one poem which commemorates the legends of the Indian races; it will doubtless outlive those races, and be their tradition in future ages. The Indian words, as in the instance of "Norman's Woe," must have suggested in many cases the scenes and incidents of the poet's creative fancy.

"The March of Miles Standish," which followed, repeats the old apocryphal Puritan story, which no one but a critic would care to question. We think, however, that the ancient fable of Europa is likely to have suggested the ride to Duxbury on the back of the bull, for at that time there were few cattle in the colonies.

"'The Tales of a Wayside Inn,'" said Mr. Longfellow, "received that name merely to give them locality. I had never been in the Wayside Inn, but once." (We think that he stopped there on his first return from Europe when travelling from Albany to Boston, on which road there were the White Horse, Red Horse (Wayside), and Black Horse Inns.) "I had written the stories in verse, and I wished to connect them with a sympathetic place and a company of story-tellers. My friends were accustomed to dine occasionally at the Wayside Inn, and it seemed a pleasing fancy to place my story-tellers there." The Poet of the company was Mr. Parsons, the Dante scholar; the Theologian, Mr. Wales; the Sicilian, Luigi Monte, an exile from Sicily, whom President Lincoln sent back in an official capacity, under the influence of Charles Sumner, when Sicily became free during the Italian revolution; the Jew was Edrika, an accomplished Boston merchant.

"Paul Revere's Ride" is perhaps the most popular, and the "Vision Beautiful" the most philosophical, of these many tales. The story of "Lady Wentworth" is a most charming story of old New England folk-lore, and wears the quaint and sympathetic colorings of colonial times.

"I have given up the theory," said Mr. Longfellow, "that the old stone tower at Newport is to be connected with the Norsemen. I feel certain now that it is merely a windmill. I have a model of just such a mill, which was a common sight on the coasts of the North Sea." His residence in Scandinavia as a student gave him a love of the literature of the North, and hence his tales from the Sagas.

The melodious and sympathetic qualities of Longfellow's verse meet well the wants of the composer. The songs of the poet are more and more being wedded to music. "The Bridge," "The Rainy Day," "The Day is Done," "The Legend of the Crossbill," "The Silent Land," "Allah," "The Sea Hath its Pearls" (translation), and many other poems have found expression in musical art as inspired and beautiful as themselves, and thus winged will long go singing through the world. The English composers have thus far been the best interpreters of his songs.

His view of literature at that time, when he had made his fame and stood in the ripeness of the harvest, was expressed in the words of Fitz Greene Halleck, which he quoted: "A little well written is immortality." He had always acted on Horace's advice as given in the "Poetic Art," and had chosen subjects that waited a voice, and made what was useful, agreeable. Every poem, even though an inspiration, had been carefully revised, until the best and most sympathetic, picturesque, and worthy expression was found. His poems grew in art with years. One of his earliest volumes was "Outre Mer," which was followed by "Hyperion" after some years; both prose works were filled with the spirit of poetry. In 1839 he published his first popular volume of verse under the title of "Voices of the Night;" in 1841, "Ballads and other Poems;" in 1842, "Poems on Slavery;" in 1843, "The Spanish Student;" in 1846, "The Belfry of Bruges;" and in 1847, "Evangeline," which established his fame. His other works were published after intervals of two or three years, with a long silence after the death of his wife in 1861. The last of his great poems was "Morituri Salutamus," read by him at the fiftieth reunion of his class at Bowdoin College. One of his most perfect poems, and perhaps the most elegant of its kind in any language, was produced at this period of the beginning of life's winter, "Three Friends of Mine."

One March day in 1882, a lad from one of the Boston schools came to me, and said that some pupils from the school wished to call on the poet, and asked me if I supposed that he would receive them and give them his autograph. I recalled that Longfellow had said to me that he always answered applications for autographs, adding, "Would it not be discourteous in me to refuse my name to one who took such an interest in anything which I had written as to write me for such a favor?" I replied that I had no doubt but that the poet would receive them kindly; that he loved young people, and advised them to make the call.

He received the lads with his usual kindness, showed them the historic associations of the old house, and then in their company looked over on the Brighton meadows and the Charles River with its now icy C, for the last time. The day was declining, the last March day that he would ever see in health. Illness came soon after this visit from the school-boys, and soon he who had lived on the way to Mt. Auburn, was borne to the calm city of the dead. His grave is near Spurzheim's, not far from the gate, on a beautiful knoll, and is marked by a simple stone with a plain inscription.

Longfellow was the poet of humanity and eternal hope, and his poetic scriptures are always sought and always will be by spirits seeking sympathy. He doubtless will live as the poet of the heart long after greater rhetoricians and more philosophical poets have lost their influence. It is the poet that is most human that has the greatest influence and the most enduring fame.

As the poet of eternal hope, his horizons ever lift. He could not have written Browning's "Lost Leader." His characters are all happy in the end; his ships of song all come to blue harbors and happy ports. Poems like Lowell's "Rhœcus," where opportunity is lost forever, find no expression in his muse, but rather the rainbow always that shines in the "Legend Beautiful." His Sordellos do not fail; they attain; the people of his fancy overcome even their sins and mount on them like ladders to heaven. Even old age in his view is full of opportunity, and all experiences have their kindly helps and opportunities. Though a translator of Dante, his own muse had no "Inferno," hut only a "Purgatorio."

He is the most loved poet of our own or of any age; the American Horace, whose pictures of all that is best in our early history will ever remain. To study him is to grow. He never gave to the world a soiled thought, or planted a seed in any mind whose flower and fruit were not good. "The most beautiful character I ever knew," said Lowell amid the shadows of the royal tombs of the Abbey, as his white bust was placed among the ghosts; and so felt those who laid him down to rest in the kindly earth of Mt. Auburn's fields and flowers, on the banks of the calm, rippling Charles; and so feel those who visit that simple spot, and rest in thought there amid the vines and roses under the trees.

He touched all life to make it better, and humanity will ever be grateful to the Heavens that he lived and sang.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/poetry_and_criticism-1450


Poetry and Criticism
Written by: J. Middleton Murry

Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come out of it. Having thus passed the stage at which the theory that poetry is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard should be once more created and applied.

What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a glimpse through magic casements, profound wisdom? All these things—all different, yet not all contradictory—have been required of poetry. What shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete universality.

Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.

Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the condition of poetry, such as Plato's Republic or Milton'sAreopagitica, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchehov's Cherry Orchard has as good a claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess of the D'Urbervillesas The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phèdre? Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will prove to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.

The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's New Study of English Poetry is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage, sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest spiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a matter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books of literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten years—if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has like Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know, but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.

Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to the same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is—and it is an age of many interesting characteristics—it is not an age of poetry. It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you have the evidence of that act, the sovereign æsthetic process, there you have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare'sArabia or Mr Davies's Lovely Dames or Miss Katherine Mansfield's Prelude or Mr Eliot's Portrait of a Lady, in each of which the vital act of intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.

That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of criticism which is analysis of poetic method, an investigation and appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where there are real poets—and only a bigot will deny that there are real poets among us now: we have just named four—there will always be true criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does, assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with criticism of method—and there is no reason why they should not coexist in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind—so much the better; but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need at this moment.

A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude.

Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held up to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement in opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr ——'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction they will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the acid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the appropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts of consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry, no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.

We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is a good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and apply them vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of the supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his essay on Chaucer is an honourable example—A New Study of English Poetry deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_advance_of_english_poetry_in_the_twentieth_cen tury-560

The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century
Written by: William Lyon Phelps
Meaning of the word "advance"—the present widespread interest in poetry—the spiritual warfare—Henley and Thompson—Thomas Hardy a prophet in literature—The Dynasts—his atheism—his lyrical power—Kipling the Victorian—his future possibilities—Robert Bridges—Robert W. Service.

Although English poetry of the twentieth century seems inferior to the poetry of the Victorian epoch, for in England there is no one equal to Tennyson or Browning, and in America no one equal to Poe, Emerson, or Whitman, still it may fairly be said that we can discern an advance in English poetry not wholly to be measured either by the calendar and the clock, or by sheer beauty of expression. I should not like to say that Joseph Conrad is a greater writer than Walter Scott; and yet in The Nigger of the Narcissus there is an intellectual sincerity, a profound psychological analysis, a resolute intention to discover and to reveal the final truth concerning the children of the sea, that one would hardly expect to find in the works of the wonderful Wizard. Shakespeare was surely a greater poet than Wordsworth; but the man of the Lakes, with the rich inheritance of two centuries, had a capital of thought unpossessed by the great dramatist, which, invested by his own genius, enabled him to draw returns from nature undreamed of by his mighty predecessor. Wordsworth was not great enough to have written King Lear; and Shakespeare was not late enough to have written Tintern Abbey. Every poet lives in his own time, has a share in its scientific and philosophical advance, and his individuality is coloured by his experience. Even if he take a Greek myth for a subject, he will regard it and treat it in the light of the day when he sits down at his desk, and addresses himself to the task of composition. It is absurd to call the Victorians old-fashioned or out of date; they were as intensely modern as we, only their modernity is naturally not ours.

A great work of art is never old-fashioned; because it expresses in final form some truth about human nature, and human nature never changes—in comparison with its primal elements, the mountains are ephemeral. A drama dealing with the impalpable human soul is more likely to stay true than a treatise on geology. This is the notable advantage that works of art have over works of science, the advantage of being and remaining true. No matter how important the contribution of scientific books, they are alloyed with inevitable error, and after the death of their authors must be constantly revised by lesser men, improved by smaller minds; whereas the masterpieces of poetry, drama and fiction cannot be revised, because they are always true. The latest edition of a work of science is the most valuable; of literature, the earliest.

Apart from the natural and inevitable advance in poetry that every year witnesses, we are living in an age characterized both in England and in America by a remarkable advance in poetry as a vital influence. Earth's oldest inhabitants probably cannot remember a time when there were so many poets in activity, when so many books of poems were not only read, but bought and sold, when poets were held in such high esteem, when so much was written and published about poetry, when the mere forms of verse were the theme of such hot debate. There are thousands of minor poets, but poetry has ceased to be a minor subject. Any one mentally alive cannot escape it. Poetry is in the air, and everybody is catching it. Some American magazines are exclusively devoted to the printing of contemporary poems; anthologies are multiplying, not "Keepsakes" and "Books of Gems," but thick volumes representing the bumper crop of the year. Many poets are reciting their poems to big, eager, enthusiastic audiences, and the atmosphere is charged with the melodies of ubiquitous minstrelsy.

The time is ripe for the appearance of a great poet. A vast audience is gazing expectantly at a stage crowded with subordinate actors, waiting or the Master to appear. The Greek dramatists were sure of their public; so were the Russian novelists; so were the German musicians. The "conditions" for poetry are intensified by reason of the Great War. We have got everything except the Genius. And the paradox is that although the Genius may arise out of right conditions, he may not; he may come like a thief in the night. The contrast between public interest in poetry in 1918 and in 1830, for an illustration, is unescapable. At that time the critics and the magazine writers assured the world that "poetry is dead." Ambitious young authors were gravely advised not to attempt anything in verse—as though youth ever listened to advice! Many critics went so far as to insist that the temper of the age was not "adapted" to poetry, that not only was there no interest in it, but that even if the Man should appear, he would find it impossible to sing in such a time and to such a coldly indifferent audience. And yet at that precise moment, Tennyson launched his "chiefly lyrical" volume, and Browning was speedily to follow.

Man is ever made humble by the facts of life; and even literary critics cannot altogether ignore them. Let us not then make the mistake of being too sure of the immediate future; nor the mistake of overestimating our contemporary poets; nor the mistake of despising the giant Victorians. Let us devoutly thank God that poetry has come into its own; that the modern poet, in public estimation, is a Hero; that no one has to apologize either for reading or for writing verse. An age that loves poetry with the passion characteristic of the twentieth century is not a flat or materialistic age. We are not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.

In the world of thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age. The old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose from the dead, and the followers of Pan say their god never died at all. It is significant that at the beginning of the twentieth century two English poets wrote side by side, each of whom unconsciously waged an irreconcilable conflict with the other, and each of whom speaks from the grave today to a concourse of followers. These two poets did not "flourish" in the twentieth century, because the disciple of the bodily Pan was a cripple, and the disciple of the spiritual Christ was a gutter-snipe; but they both lived, lived abundantly, and wrote real poetry. I refer to William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903, and to Francis Thompson, who died in 1907.

Both Henley and Thompson loved the crowded streets of London, but they saw different visions there. Henley felt in the dust and din of the city the irresistible urge of spring, the invasion of the smell of distant meadows; the hurly-burly bearing witness to the annual conquest of Pan.

Here in this radiant and immortal street
Lavishly and omnipotently as ever
In the open hills, the undissembling dales,
The laughing-places of the juvenile earth.
For lo! the wills of man and woman meet,
Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared
As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befel,
To share his shameless, elemental mirth
In one great act of faith, while deep and strong,
Incomparably nerved and cheered,
The enormous heart of London joys to beat
To the measures of his rough, majestic song:
The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell
That keeps the rolling universe ensphered
And life and all for which life lives to long
Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

The London Voluntaries of Henley, from which the above is a fair example, may have suggested something to Vachel Lindsay both in their irregular singing quality and in the direction, borrowed from notation, which accompanies each one, Andante con moto, Scherzando, Largo e mesto, Allegro maestoso. Henley's Pagan resistance to Puritan morality and convention, constantly exhibited positively in his verse, and negatively in his defiant Introduction to the Works of Burns and in the famous paper on R. L. S., is the main characteristic of his mind and temperament. He was by nature a rebel—a rebel against the Anglican God and against English social conventions. He loved all fighting rebels, and one of his most spirited poems deals affectionately with our Southern Confederate soldiers, in the last days of their hopeless struggle. His most famous lyric is an assertion of the indomitable human will in the presence of adverse destiny. This trumpet blast has awakened sympathetic echoes from all sorts and conditions of men, although that creedless Christian, James Whitcomb Riley, regarded it with genial contempt, thinking that the philosophy it represented was not only futile, but dangerous, in that it ignored the deepest facts of human life. He once asked to have the poem read aloud to him, as he had forgotten its exact words, and when the reader finished impressively

I am the Master of my fate:
I am the Captain of my soul—

"The hell you are," said Riley with a laugh.

Henley is, of course, interesting not merely because of his paganism, and robust worldliness; he had the poet's imagination and gift of expression. He loved to take a familiar idea fixed in a familiar phrase, and write a lovely musical variation on the theme. I do not think he ever wrote anything more beautiful than his setting of the phrase "Over the hills and far away," which appealed to his memory much as the three words "Far-far-away" affected Tennyson. No one can read this little masterpiece without that wonderful sense of melody lingering in the mind after the voice of the singer is silent.

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade
On desolate sea and lonely sand,
Out of the silence and the shade
What is the voice of strange command
Calling you still, as friend calls friend
With love that cannot brook delay,
To rise and follow the ways that wend
Over the hills and far away?

Hark in the city, street on street
A roaring reach of death and life,
Of vortices that clash and fleet
And ruin in appointed strife,
Hark to it calling, calling clear,
Calling until you cannot stay
From dearer things than your own most dear
Over the hills and far away.

Out of the sound of ebb and flow,
Out of the sight of lamp and star,
It calls you where the good winds blow,
And the unchanging meadows are:
From faded hopes and hopes agleam,
It calls you, calls you night and day
Beyond the dark into the dream
Over the hills and far away.

In temperament Henley was an Elizabethan. Ben Jonson might have irritated him, but he would have got along very well with Kit Marlowe. He was an Elizabethan in the spaciousness of his mind, in his robust salt-water breeziness, in his hearty, spontaneous singing, and in his deification of the human will. The English novelist, Miss Willcocks, a child of the twentieth century, has remarked, "It is by their will that we recognize the Elizabethans, by the will that drove them over the seas of passion, as well as over the seas that ebb and flow with the salt tides…. For, from a sensitive correspondence with environment our race has passed into another stage; it is marked now by a passionate desire for the mastery of life—a desire, spiritualized in the highest lives, materialized in the lowest, so to mould environment that the lives to come may be shaped to our will. It is this which accounts for the curious likeness in our today with that of the Elizabethans."

As Henley was an Elizabethan, so his brilliant contemporary, Francis Thompson, was a "metaphysical," a man of the seventeenth century. Like Emerson, he is closer in both form and spirit to the mystical poets that followed the age of Shakespeare than he is to any other group or school. One has only to read Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan to recognize the kinship. Like these three men of genius, Thompson was not only profoundly spiritual—he was aflame with religious passion. He was exalted in a mystical ecstasy, all a wonder and a wild desire. He was an inspired poet, careless of method, careless of form, careless of thought-sequences. The zeal for God's house had eaten him up. His poetry is like the burning bush, revealing God in the fire. His strange figures of speech, the molten metal of his language, the sincerity of his faith, have given to his poems a persuasive influence which is beginning to be felt far and wide, and which, I believe, will never die. One critic complains that the young men of Oxford and Cambridge have forsaken Tennyson, and now read only Francis Thompson. He need not be alarmed; these young men will all come back to Tennyson, for sooner or later, everybody comes back to Tennyson. It is rather a matter of joy that Thompson's religious poetry can make the hearts of young men burn within them. Young men are right in hating conventional, empty phrases, words that have lost all hitting power, hollow forms and bloodless ceremonies. Thompson's lips were touched with a live coal from the altar.

Francis Thompson walked with God. Instead of seeking God, as so many high-minded folk have done in vain, Thompson had the real and overpowering sensation that God was seeking him. The Hound of Heaven was everlastingly after him, pursuing him with the certainty of capture. In trying to escape, he found torment; in surrender, the peace that passes all understanding. That extraordinary poem, which thrillingly describes the eager, searching love of God, like a father looking for a lost child and determined to find him, might be taken as a modern version of the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm, perhaps the most marvellous of all religious masterpieces.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with
all my ways.
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy
presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell,
behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts
of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

The highest spiritual poetry is not that which portrays soul-hunger, the bitterness of the weary search for God; it is that which reveals an intense consciousness of the all-enveloping Divine Presence. Children do not seek the love of their parents; they can not escape its searching, eager, protecting power. We know how Dr. Johnson was affected by the lines

Quaerens me sedisti lassus
Redemisti crucem passus
Tantus labor non sit passus.

Francis Thompson's long walks by day and by night had magnificent company. In the country, in the streets of London, he was attended by seraphim and cherubim. The heavenly visions were more real to him than London Bridge. Just as when we travel far from those we love, we are brightly aware of their presence, and know that their affection is a greater reality than the scenery from the train window, so Thompson would have it that the angels were all about us. They do not live in some distant Paradise, the only gate to which is death—they are here now, and their element is the familiar atmosphere of earth.

Shortly after he died, there was found among

His papers a bit of manuscript verse, called "In No Strange Land." Whether it was a first draft which he meant to revise, or whether he intended it for publication, we cannot tell; but despite the roughnesses of rhythm—which take us back to some of Donne's shaggy and splendid verse—the thought is complete. It is one of the great poems of the twentieth century, and expresses the essence of Thompson's religion.
"IN NO STRANGE LAND"

O world invisible, we view thee:
O world intangible, we touch thee:
O world unknowable, we know thee:
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air,
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars:
The drift of pinions, would we harken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry; and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, clinging heaven by the hems:
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Thompson planned a series of Ecclesiastical Ballads, of which he completed only two—Lilium Regis and The Veteran of Heaven. These were found among his papers, and were published in the January-April 1910 number of the Dublin Review. Both are great poems; but Lilium Regis is made doubly impressive by the present war. With the clairvoyance of approaching death, Thompson foresaw the world-struggle, the temporary eclipse of the Christian Church, and its ultimate triumph. The Lily of the King is Christ's Holy Church. I do not see how any one can read this poem without a thrill.
LILIUM REGIS

O Lily of the King! low lies thy silver wing,
And long has been the hour of thine unqueening;
And thy scent of Paradise on the night-wind spills its sighs,
Nor any take the secrets of its meaning.
O Lily of the King! I speak a heavy thing,
O patience, most sorrowful of daughters!
Lo, the hour is at hand for the troubling of the land,
And red shall be the breaking of the waters.

Sit fast upon thy stalk, when the blast shall with thee talk,
With the mercies of the king for thine awning;
And the just understand that thine hour is at hand,
Thine hour at hand with power in the dawning.
When the nations lie in blood, and their kings a broken brood,
Look up, O most sorrowful of daughters!
Lift up thy head and hark what sounds are in the dark,
For His feet are coming to thee on the waters!

O Lily of the King! I shall not see, that sing,
I shall not see the hour of thy queening!
But my song shall see, and wake, like a flower that dawn-winds shake,
And sigh with joy the odours of its meaning.
O Lily of the King, remember then the thing
That this dead mouth sang; and thy daughters,
As they dance before His way, sing there on the Day,
What I sang when the Night was on the waters!

There is a man of genius living in England today who has been writing verse for sixty years, but who received no public recognition as a poet until the twentieth century. This man is Thomas Hardy. He has the double distinction of being one of the great Victorian novelists, and one of the most notable poets of the twentieth century. At nearly eighty years of age, he is in full intellectual vigour, enjoys a creative power in verse that we more often associate with youth, and writes poetry that in matter and manner belongs distinctly to our time. He could not possibly be omitted from any survey of contemporary production.

As is so commonly the case with distinguished novelists, Thomas Hardy practised verse before prose. From 1860 to 1870 he wrote many poems, some of which appear among the Love Lyrics in Time's Laughingstocks, 1909. Then he began a career in prose fiction which has left him today without a living rival in the world. In 1898, with the volume called Wessex Poems, embellished with illustrations from his own hand, he challenged criticism as a professional poet. The moderate but definite success of this collection emboldened him to produce in 1901, Poems of the Past and Present. In 1904, 1906, 1908, were issued successively the three parts of The Dynasts, a thoroughly original and greatly-planned epical drama of the Napoleonic wars. This was followed by three books of verse, Time's Laughingstocks in 1909, Satires of Circumstance, 1914, and Moments of Vision, 1917; and he is a familiar and welcome guest in contemporary magazines.

Is it possible that when, at the close of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy formally abandoned prose for verse, he was either consciously or subconsciously aware of the coming renaissance of poetry? Certainly his change in expression had more significance than an individual caprice. It is a notable fact that the present poetic revival, wherein are enlisted so many enthusiastic youthful volunteers, should have had as one of its prophets and leaders a veteran of such power and fame. Perhaps Mr. Hardy would regard his own personal choice as no factor; the Immanent and Unconscious Will had been busy in his mind, for reasons unknown to him, unknown to man, least of all known to Itself. Leslie Stephen once remarked, "The deepest thinker is not really—though we often use the phrase—in advance of his day so much as in the line along which advance takes place."

Looking backward from the year 1918, we may see some new meaning in the spectacle of two modern leaders in fiction, Hardy and Meredith, each preferring as a means of expression poetry to prose, each thinking his own verse better than his novels, and each writing verse that in substance and manner belongs more to the twentieth than to the nineteenth century. Meredith always said that fiction was his kitchen wench; poetry was his Muse.

The publication of poems written when he was about twenty-five is interesting to students of Mr. Hardy's temperament, for they show that he was then as complete, though perhaps not so philosophical a pessimist, as he is now. The present world-war may seem to him a vindication of his despair, and therefore proof of the blind folly of those who pray to Our Father in Heaven. He is, though I think not avowedly so, an adherent of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. The primal force, from which all things proceed, is the Immanent Will. The Will is unconscious and omnipotent. It is superhuman only in power, lacking intelligence, foresight, and any sense of ethical values. In The Dynasts, Mr. Hardy has written an epic illustration of the doctrines of pessimism.

Supernatural machinery and celestial inspiration have always been more or less conventional in the Epic. Ancient writers invoked the Muse. When Milton began his great task, he wished to produce something classic in form and Christian in spirit. He found an admirable solution of his problem in a double invocation—first of the Heavenly Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the composition of In Memoriam, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the Muse would give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he therefore, in the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of God. Now it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek Deities, or of Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his mind all three equally belonged to the lumber-room of discredited and discarded myth. He believes that any conception of the Primal Force as a Personality is not only obsolete among thinking men and women, but that it is unworthy of modern thought. It is perhaps easy to mistake our own world of thought for the thought of the world.

In his Preface, written with assurance and dignity, Mr. Hardy says: "The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the Masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical consequence of the long abandonment by thinkers of the anthropomorphic conception of the same." Accordingly he arranged a group of Phantom Intelligences that supply adequately a Chorus and a philosophical basis for his world-drama.

Like Browning in the original preface to Paracelsus, our author expressly disclaims any intention of writing a play for the stage. It is "intended simply for mental performance," and "Whether mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a kindred question not without interest." The question has been since answered in another way than that implied, not merely by the success of community drama, but by the actual production of The Dynasts on the London stage under the direction of the brilliant and audacious Granville Barker. I would give much to have witnessed this experiment, which Mr. Barker insists was successful.

"Whether The Dynasts will finally take a place among the world's masterpieces of literature or not, must of course be left to future generations to decide. Two things are clear. The publication of the second and third parts distinctly raised public opinion of the work as a whole, and now that it is ten years old, we know that no man on earth except Mr. Hardy could have written it." To produce this particular epic required a poet, a prose master, a dramatist, a philosopher, and an architect. Mr. Hardy is each and all of the five, and by no means least an architect. The plan of the whole thing, in one hundred and thirty scenes, which seemed at first confused, now appears in retrospect orderly; and the projection of the various geographical scenes is thoroughly architectonic.

If the work fails to survive, it will be because of its low elevation on the purely literary side. In spite of occasional powerful phrases, as

What corpse is curious on the longitude
And situation of his cemetery!

the verse as a whole wants beauty of tone and felicity of diction. It is more like a map than a painting. One has only to recall the extraordinary charm of the Elizabethans to understand why so many pages in The Dynasts arouse only an intellectual interest. But no one can read the whole drama without an immense respect for the range and the grasp of the author's mind. Furthermore, every one of its former admirers ought to reread it in 1918. The present world-war gives to this Napoleonic epic an acute and prophetic interest nothing short of astounding.

A considerable number of Mr. Hardy's poems are concerned with the idea of God, apparently never far from the author's mind. I suppose he thinks of God every day. Yet his faith is the opposite of that expressed in the Hound of Heaven—in few words, it seems to be, "Resist the Lord, and He will flee from you." Mr. Hardy is not content with banishing God from the realm of modern thought; he is not content merely with killing Him; he means to give Him a decent burial, with fitting obsequies. And there is a long procession of mourners, some of whom are both worthy and distinguished. In the interesting poem, God's Funeral, written in 1908-1910, which begins

I saw a slowly stepping train—
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore

the development of the conception of God through human history is presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce, yet long-suffering and full of mercy.

And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we dream,
And what we had imagined we believed.

Till, in Time's stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

Among the mourners is no less a person than the poet himself, for in former years—perhaps as a boy—he, too, had worshipped, and therefore he has no touch of contempt for those who still believe.

I could not prop their faith: and yet
Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
And though struck speechless, I did not forget
That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

In the next stanza, the poet's oft-expressed belief in the wholesome, antiseptic power of pessimism is reiterated, together with a hint, that when we have once and for all put God in His grave, some better way of bearing life's burden will be found, because the new way will be based upon hard fact.

Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

Whereof, to lift the general night,
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
"See you upon the horizon that small light—
Swelling somewhat?" Each mourner shook his head.

And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many nigh the best….
Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.

This pale gleam takes on a more vivid hue in a poem written shortly after God's Funeral, called A Plaint to Man, where God remonstrates with man for having created Him at all, since His life was to be so short and so futile:

And tomorrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told, and the fact he faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart's resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.

Other poems that express what is and what ought to be the attitude of man toward God are New Year's Eve, To Sincerity, and the beautiful lyric, Let Me Enjoy, where Mr. Hardy has been more than usually successful in fashioning both language and rhythm into a garment worthy of the thought. No one can read The Impercipient without recognizing that Mr. Hardy's atheism is as honest and as sincere as the religious faith of others, and that no one regrets the blankness of his universe more than he. He would believe if he could.

Pessimism is the basis of all his verse, as it is of his prose. It is expressed not merely philosophically in poems of ideas, but over and over again concretely in poems of incident. He is a pessimist both in fancy and in fact, and after reading some of our sugary "glad" books, I find his bitter taste rather refreshing. The titles of his recent collections, Time's Laughingstocks and Satires of Circumstance, sufficiently indicate the ill fortune awaiting his personages. At his best, his lyrics written in the minor key have a noble, solemn adagio movement. At his worst—for like all poets, he is sometimes at his worst—the truth of life seems rather obstinately warped. Why should legitimate love necessarily bring misery, and illegitimate passion produce permanent happiness? And in the piece, "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" pessimism approaches a reductio ad absurdum.

Dramatic power, which is one of its author's greatest gifts, is frequently finely revealed. After reading A Tramp-woman's Tragedy, one unhesitatingly accords Mr. Hardy a place among the English writers of ballads. For this is a genuine ballad, in story, in diction, and in vigour.

Yet as a whole, and in spite of Mr. Hardy's love of the dance and of dance music, his poetry lacks grace and movement. His war poem, Men Who March Away, is singularly halting and awkward. His complete poetical works are interesting because they proceed from an interesting mind. His range of thought, both in reminiscence and in speculation, is immensely wide; his power of concentration recalls that of Browning.

I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard.
I have stood before, gone round a serious thing,
Tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close,
As I stretch forth my arm to touch this bar.
God and man, and what duty I owe both,—
I dare to say I have confronted these
In thought: but no such faculty helped here.

No such faculty alone could help Mr. Hardy to the highest peaks of poetry, any more than it served Caponsacchi in his spiritual crisis. He thinks interesting thoughts, because he has an original mind. It is possible to be a great poet without possessing much intellectual wealth; just as it is possible to be a great singer, and yet be both shallow and dull. The divine gift of poetry seems sometimes as accidental as the formation of the throat. I do not believe that Tennyson was either shallow or dull; but I do not think he had so rich a mind as Thomas Hardy's, a mind so quaint, so humorous, so sharp. Yet Tennyson was incomparably a greater poet.

The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention—I find even the drawings in Wessex Poems so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books—I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm.

The title of Mr. Hardy's latest volume of poems, Moments of Vision, leads one to expect rifts in the clouds—and one is not disappointed. It is perhaps characteristic of the independence of our author, that steadily preaching pessimism when the world was peaceful, he should now not be perhaps quite so sure of his creed when a larger proportion of the world's inhabitants are in pain than ever before. One of the fallacies of pessimism consists in the fact that its advocates often call a witness to the stand whose testimony counts against them. Nobody really loves life, loves this world, like your pessimist; nobody is more reluctant to leave it. He therefore, to support his argument that life is evil, calls up evidence which proves that it is brief and transitory. But if life is evil, one of its few redeeming features should be its brevity; the pessimist should look forward to death as a man in prison looks toward the day of his release. Yet this attitude toward death is almost never taken by the atheists or the pessimists, while it is the burden of many of the triumphant hymns of the Christian Church. Now, as our spokesman for pessimism approaches the end—which I fervently hope may be afar off—life seems sweet.
"FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CARED GREATLY"

For Life I had never eared greatly,
As worth a man's while;
Peradventures unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
Unwon by its style.

In earliest years—why I know not—
I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that slowly leaked out,
May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
Much zest for its dance.

With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, till living aloofly loomed duller
Than life among men.

Anew I found nought to set eyes on,
When, lifting its hand,
It uncloaked a star,
Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar,
And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon
As bright as a brand.

And so, the rough highway forgetting,
I pace hill and dale,
Regarding the sky,
Regarding the vision on high,
And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting
My pilgrimage fail.

No one of course can judge of another's happiness; but it is difficult to imagine any man on earth who has had a happier life than Mr. Hardy. He has had his own genius for company all his days; he has been successful in literary art beyond the wildest dreams of his youth; his acute perception has made the beauty of nature a million times more beautiful to him than to most of the children of men; his eye is not dim, nor his natural force abated. He has that which should accompany old age—honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.

The last poem in Moments of Vision blesses rather than curses life.
AFTERWARDS

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
Will they say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to
no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the
door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but he used to notice such things"?

Should Mr. Hardy ever resort to prayer—which I suppose is unlikely—his prayers ought to be the best in the world. According to Coleridge, he prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast; a beautiful characteristic of our great writer is his tenderness for every living thing. He will be missed by men, women, children, and by the humblest animals; and if trees have any self-consciousness, they will miss him too.

Rudyard Kipling is a Victorian poet, as Thomas Hardy is a Victorian novelist. When Tennyson died in 1892, the world, with approximate unanimity, chose the young man from the East as his successor, and for twenty-five years he has been the Laureate of the British Empire in everything but the title. In the eighteenth century, when Gray regarded the offer of the Laureateship as an insult, Mr. Alfred Austin might properly have been appointed; but after the fame of Southey, and the mighty genius of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, it was cruel to put Alfred the Little in the chair of Alfred the Great. It was not an insult to Austin, but an insult to Poetry. With the elevation of the learned and amiable Dr. Bridges in 1913, the public ceased to care who holds the office. This eminently respectable appointment silenced both opposition and applause. We can only echo the language of Gray's letter to Mason, 19 December, 1757: "I interest myself a little in the history of it, and rather wish somebody may accept it that will retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had any credit…. The office itself has always humbled the professor hitherto (even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there are poets little enough to envy even a poet-laureat." Mason was willing.

Rudyard Kipling had the double qualification of poetic genius and of convinced Imperialism. He had received a formal accolade from the aged Tennyson, and could have carried on the tradition of British verse and British arms. Nor has any Laureate, in the history of the office, risen more magnificently to an occasion than did Mr. Kipling at the sixtieth anniversary of the reign of the Queen. Each poet made his little speech in verse, and then at the close of the ceremony, came the thrilling Recessional, which received as instant applause from the world as if it had been spoken to an audience. In its scriptural phraseology, in its combination of haughty pride and deep contrition, in its "holy hope and high humility," it expressed with austere majesty the genius of the English race. The soul of a great poet entered immediately into the hearts of men, there to abide for ever.

It is interesting to reflect that not the author of the Recessional, but the author of Regina Cara was duly chosen for the Laureateship. This poem by Robert Bridges appeared on the same occasion as that immortalized by Kipling, and was subsequently included in the volume of the writer's poetical works, published in 1912. It shows irreproachable reverence for Queen Victoria. Apparently its poetical quality was satisfactory to those who appoint Laureates.
REGINA CARA

Jubilee-Song, for music, 1897

Hark! the world is full of thy praise,
England's Queen of many days;
Who, knowing how to rule the free,
Hast given a crown to monarchy.

Honour, Truth, and growing Peace
Follow Britannia's wide increase,
And Nature yield her strength unknown
To the wisdom born beneath thy throne!

In wisdom and love firm is thy fame:
Enemies bow to revere thy name:
The world shall never tire to tell
Praise of the queen that reignèd well.

O Felix anima, Domina pracclara,
Amore semper coronabere
Regina Cara

Rudyard Kipling's poetry is as familiar to us as the air we breathe. He is the spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon breed. His gospel of orderly energy is the inspiration of thousands of business offices; his sententious maxims are parts of current speech: the victrola has carried his singing lyrics even farther than the banjo penetrates, of which latter democratic instrument his wonderful poem is the apotheosis. And we have the word of a distinguished British major-general to prove that Mr. Kipling has wrought a miracle of transformation with Tommy Atkins. General Sir George Younghusband, in a recent book, A Soldier's Memories, says, "I had never heard the words or expressions that Rudyard Kipling's soldiers used. Many a time did I ask my brother officers whether they had ever heard them. No, never. But, sure enough, a few years after the soldiers thought, and talked, and expressed themselves exactly as Rudyard Kipling had taught them in his stories. Rudyard Kipling made the modern soldier. Other writers have gone on with the good work, and they have between them manufactured the cheery, devil-may-care, lovable person enshrined in our hearts as Thomas Atkins. Before he had learned from reading stories about himself that he, as an individual, also possessed the above attributes, he was mostly ignorant of the fact. My early recollections of the British soldier are of a bluff, rather surly person, never the least jocose or light-hearted except perhaps when he had too much beer."

This is extraordinary testimony to the power of literature—from a first-class fighting man. It is as though John Sargent should paint an inaccurate but idealized portrait, and the original should make it accurate by imitation. The soldiers were transformed by the renewing of their minds. Beholding with open face as in a glass a certain image, they were changed into the same image, by the spirit of the poet. This is certainly a greater achievement than correct reporting. It is quite possible, too, that the officers' attitude toward Tommy Atkins had been altered by the Barrack-Room Ballads, and this new attitude produced results in character.

I give General Younghusband's testimony for what it is worth. It is important if true. But it is only fair to add that it has been contradicted by another military officer, who affirms that Kipling reported the soldier as he was. Readers may take their choice. At all events the transformation of character by discipline, cleanliness, hard work, and danger is the ever-present moral in Mr. Kipling's verse. He loves to take the raw recruit or the boyish, self-conscious, awkward subaltern, and show how he may become an efficient man, happy in the happiness that accompanies success. It is a Philistine goal, but one that has the advantage of being attainable. The reach of this particular poet seldom exceeds his grasp. And although thus far in his career—he is only fifty-two, and we may hope as well as remember—his best poetry belongs to the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth, so universally popular a homily as If indicates that he has by no means lost the power of preaching in verse. With the exception of some sad lapses, his latter poems have come nearer the earlier level of production than his stories. For that matter, from the beginning I have thought that the genius of Rudyard Kipling had more authentic expression in poetry than in prose. I therefore hope that after the war he will become one of the leaders in the advance of English poetry in the twentieth century, as he will remain one of the imperishable monuments of Victorian literature. The verse published in his latest volume of stories, A Diversity of Creatures, 1917, has the stamp of his original mind, and Macdonough's Song is impressive. And in a poem which does not appear in this collection, but which was written at the outbreak of hostilities, Mr. Kipling was, I believe, the first to use the name Hun—an appellation of considerable adhesive power. Do roses stick like burrs?

His influence on other poets has of course been powerful. As Eden Phillpotts is to Thomas Hardy, so is Robert Service to Rudyard Kipling. Like Bret Harte in California, Mr. Service found gold in the Klondike. But it is not merely in his interpretation of the life of a distant country that the new poet reminds one of his prototype; both in matter and in manner he may justly be called the Kipling of the North. His verse has an extraordinary popularity among American college undergraduates, the reasons for which are evident. They read, discuss him, and quote him with joy, and he might well be proud of the adoration of so many of our eager, adventurous, high-hearted youth. Yet, while Mr. Service is undoubtedly a real poet, his work as a whole seems a clear echo, rather than a new song. It is good, but it is reminiscent of his reading, not merely of Mr. Kipling, but of poetry in general. In The Land God Forgot, a fine poem, beginning

The lonely sunsets flare forlorn
Down valleys dreadly desolate;
The lordly mountains soar in scorn
As still as death, as stern as fate,

the opening line infallibly brings to mind Henley's

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade.

The poetry of Mr. Service has the merits and the faults of the "red blood" school in fiction, illustrated by the late Jack London and the lively Rex Beach. It is not the highest form of art. It insists on being heard, but it smells of mortality. You cannot give permanence to a book by printing it in italic type.

It is indeed difficult to express in pure artistic form great primitive experiences, even with long years of intimate first-hand knowledge. No one doubts Mr. Service's accuracy or sincerity. But many men have had abundance of material, rich and new, only to find it unmanageable. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling succeeded where thousands have failed. Think of the possibilities of Australia! And from that vast region only one great artist has spoken—Percy Grainger.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_works_of_lord_byron_studies_in_literature_and_ history-390

The Works of Lord Byron: Studies in Literature and History
Written by: Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
'When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first names will be Wordsworth and Byron.' Thus wrote Matthew Arnold in 1881, and now that the century's last autumn is passing away, a new edition of Byron's works appears in the fullness of time to quicken our memories and rekindle our curiosity, by placing before us a complete record of the life, letters, and poetry of one whom Macaulay declared in 1830 to be the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century, and who seventy years later may still be counted among its most striking and illustrious figures.

As the new edition is issued by installments, and several volumes are still to come, to compare its contents, arrangement, and the editorial accessories with those of preceding editions might be thought premature. We may say, however, that a large number of Byron's letters, not before printed, have now been added; and that the text of this new material has been prepared from originals, whereas it is now impossible so to collate the text of the greater number of the letters heretofore published. Moore is supposed to have destroyed many of those entrusted to him; and moreover he handled the originals very freely, making large omissions, and transposing passages[Pg 178] from one letter to another, though we presume that he did not re-write and amplify passages after the fashion in which certain French editors have dealt with recent memoirs. The letters now for the first time published by Mr. Murray were for the most part inaccessible to Moore. But for all these details we may refer our readers to the concise and valuable prefaces appended to the three volumes of Letters and Journals.

We have now, therefore, a substantial acquisition of fresh and quite authentic material, though it would be rash to assume that all important documents are included, for the family archives are still held in reserve. It is admitted by the editor that the literary value of the letters now printed for the first time is not high, but he explains that in publishing, with a few exceptions, the whole available correspondence, he has acted on the principle that they form an aggregate collection of great biographical interest, and may thus serve as the best substitute for the lost memoirs. We may agree that any scrap of a great man's writing, or even any words spoken, may throw some light upon his character, whether the subject be trivial or tremendous, a business letter to his solicitor or a defiance of society; for even though careless readers chance to miss some pearl strung at random on a string of commonplaces, to the higher criticism nothing is quite valueless. In this instance, at any rate, no pains have been spared to place the real Lord Byron, as described more or less unconsciously by himself, before his fellow-countrymen; and the result is to confirm his reputation as a first-class letter-writer. The private and confidential correspondence of eminent literary men would be usually more decorous than interesting; but Byron, though he is not always respectable, is never dull. The correspondence and journals, taken all together,[Pg 179] constitute the most interesting and characteristic collection of its kind in English literature.

In regard to the effect upon his personal reputation, we have long known what manner of man was Byron; nor is it likely that, after passing in review the complete array of evidence collected in these volumes, the general verdict of posterity will be sensibly modified. Those who judge him should bear in mind that perhaps no famous life has ever been so thoroughly laid bare, or scrutinised with greater severity. The tendency of biographers is to soften down errors and praise where they can; and in an autobiography the writer can tell his own story. But the assiduous searching out and publication of every letter and diary that can be gathered or gleaned is a different ordeal, which might try the reputation of most of us; while in the case of an impulsive, wayward, high-spirited man, exposed to strong temptations, with all a poet's traditional irritability, whose rank and genius concentrated public attention on his writings from his early youth, this test must be extremely severe. Many of the letters are of a sort that do not ordinarily appear in a biography. Byron's letters to his wife at the time of their separation, which are moderate and even dignified, are supplemented by his wife's letters to him and to her friends, full of mysterious imputations; and there are letters to and from the lady with whom his liaison was notorious. His own reckless letters from Venice to Moore, and those from Shelley and others describing his dissipated habits, were clearly never intended for general reading after his death. Of course most of these are not now produced for the first time, nor do we argue that they ought never to have appeared, for the biographical interest is undeniable. Our point is that the publication of such private and damaging correspondence is so very unusual in biographies that it[Pg 180] places Byron at a special disadvantage, and that when we pass our judgment upon him we are bound to take into account the unsparing use that has been made of papers connected with the most intimate transactions of a lifetime which was no more than a short and stormy passage from youth to manhood; for he was cut off before the age at which men abandon the wild ways of their springtide, and are usually disposed to obliterate the record of them. At least one recent biography might be mentioned which would have read differently if it had been compiled with similar candour.

The annotations subjoined to almost every page of the text are so ample and particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading. The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Staël—her birth, books, and political opinions—very useful to those who had no previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are treated with similar liberality. There is a full account, taken from the Examiner, of the procession with which Louis XVIII. made his entry into London in 1814. The notes—of about four pages each—upon Hobhouse and Lord Carlisle may be justified by their close connection with Byron's affairs; though some of us might have been content with less. Allusions to such notorious evildoers as Tarquin are explained, and stock quotations from Shakespeare have been carefully verified. The result is that a reader might go through this edition of Byron with the very slightest previous knowledge of general literature or of contemporary history, and might[Pg 181] give himself a very fair middle-class education in the process, although the consequence might be to imbue him with what Coleridge has called 'a passion for the disconnected.' Nevertheless we readily acknowledge the thorough execution of this part of the editorial work, and the very meritorious labour that has been spent upon bringing together every kind of document and reference that can inform or enlighten us upon the main subjects of Byron's life and writings. In the poems the practice of giving in notes the rough drafts and rejected versions of passages and lines, so as to show the poet at work, seems to us not altogether fair to him, and is occasionally distracting to those readers who enjoy a fine picture without asking how the colours were mixed, or are not anxious about the secrets of a good dinner. Yet to students of method, to the fellow-craftsman, and to the literary virtuoso, these variant readings, of which there are sometimes four to a single line, may often be of substantial interest, as throwing light on the tendencies and predilections of taste which are the formative influences upon style in prose or poetry.

Probably the most favourable circumstance for a poet is that he should only be known, like the Divinity of Nature, from his works; or at least that, like Wordsworth, he should keep the noiseless tenor of his way down some secluded vale of life, whereby his poems stand out in clear relief like fine paintings on a plain wall. Is there any modern English poet of the first class, except Byron, whose entire prose writings and biography are bound up in standard editions with his poetry? The question is at any rate worth asking, because certainly there is no case in which the record of a poet's private life and personal fortunes has so greatly affected, for good or for ill, his poetic reputation. Those who detested his character [Pg 182]and condemned his way of living found it difficult to praise his verses; they detected the serpent under every stone. For those who were fascinated by the picture of a reckless prodigal, always in love and in debt, with fierce passions and a haughty contempt for the world, who defied public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things—such a personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative literature of England.

It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose poetry, he[Pg 183] admitted, had influenced his own later verse—one of those who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of these two eminent artists in poetry, since Arnold placed Wordsworth and Byron by anticipation on the same level at this century's end, whereas Wordsworth stands now far higher. And the bitter disdain which Sir. Swinburne has poured upon Byron's verse and character, though tempered by acknowledgment of his strength and cleverness, and by approbation of his political views, excites some indignation and a sympathetic reaction in his favour. One can imagine the ghost of Byron rebuking his critic with the words of the Miltonic Satan, 'Ye knew me once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar'; for in his masculine defiant attitude and daring flights the elder poet overtops and looks down upon the fine musical artist of our own day.

Some of the causes which have combined to lower Byron's popularity are not far to seek. The change of times, circumstance, and taste has been adverse to him. The political school which he so ardently represented has done its work; the Tory statesmen of the Metternich and Castlereagh type, who laid heavy hands upon nations striving for light and liberty, have gone down to their own place; the period of stifling repression has long ended in Europe.[Pg 184] Italy and Greece are free, the lofty appeals to classic heroism are out of date, and such fiery high-swelling trumpet notes as
'Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind,'

fall upon cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and weariness which passed over sensitive minds at the beginning of this century, a period of political disillusion, has long been swept away by the prosperity and sanguine activities of the Victorian era; and the literary style has changed with the times. Melancholy moods, attitudes of scornful despair, tales of fierce love and bloody revenge are strange and improbable to readers who delight in situations and emotions with which they are familiar, who demand exactitude in detail and correct versification; while sweet harmonies, perfection of metre, middle-class pastorals, and a blameless moral tone came in with Tennyson. In short, many of the qualities which enchanted Byron's own generation have disenchanted our own, both in his works and his life; for when Macaulay wrote in 1830 that the time would come when his 'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated, or of biographies of The Real Lord Byron; whereby it has come to pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more[Pg 185] severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly, there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read, operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it. His contemporaries—Coleridge, Keats, Shelley—lived so much apart from the great world of their day that important changes in manners and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry, moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the man himself; and his empeiria (as Goethe calls it), his too exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories, with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's sympathetic relations with universal Nature.

A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme' of that epoch as no more[Pg 186] than a great waking up of the poetic spirit, says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it spread into literature. In criticising Byron's poetry we have to bear in mind that he came in on the first wave of this flood, which overflowed the exhausted and arid field of poetry at the end of the last century, fertilising it with colour and emotion. The comparison between Byron in England and Chateaubriand in France must have been often drawn. The similarity in their style, their moody, melancholy outlook upon common humanity, their aristocratic temper, their self-consciousness, their influence upon the literature of the two countries, the enthusiasm that they excited among the ardent spirits of the generation that reached manhood immediately after them, and the vain attempts of the elder critics to resist their popularity and deny their genius—form a remarkable parallel in literary history. As Jeffrey failed at first to discern the promise of Byron, so Morellet could only perceive the obviously weak points of Chateaubriand, laying stress on his affectations, his inflated language, his sentimental exaggeration, upon all the faults which were common to these two men of genius, the defects of their qualities, the energetic rebound from the classic level of orderly taste and measured style. It was the ancient régime contending against a revolutionary uprising, and in poetry, as in politics, the leaders of revolution are sure to be excessive, to force their notes, to frighten their elders, and to scandalise the conservative mind. Yet just as Chateaubriand, after passing through his period of depression, is now rising again to his proper place in French literature, so we may hope that an impartial survey of Byron's verse will help to determine the rank that he is likely to hold permanently, although the high tide of Romance in poetry has at this moment fallen to a low ebb, and the spell which[Pg 187] it laid upon our forefathers may have lost its power in an altered world.

It must be counted to the credit of these Romantic writers that at any rate they widened and varied the sphere and the resources of their art, by introducing the Oriental element, so to speak, into the imaginative literature of modern Europe. They brought the lands of ancient civilisation again within the sphere of poetry, reviving into fresh animation the classic glories of Hellas, reopening the gates of the mysterious East, and showing us the Greek races still striving, as they were twenty-two centuries earlier, for freedom against the barbarous strength of an Asiatic empire. Byron was the first of the poets who headed this literary crusade for the succour of Christianity against Islam in the unending contest between East and West on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in this cause he eventually died. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo were also travellers in Asia, and had drawn inspiration from that source; they all instinctively obeyed, like Bonaparte, the impulse which sends adventurous and imaginative spirits toward that region of strong passions and primitive manners, where human life is of little matter, and where the tragic situations of drama and fiction may at any time be witnessed in their simple reality. The effect was to introduce fresh blood into the veins of old romance; and Byron led the van of an illustrious line of poets who turned their impressions de voyage into glowing verse, for the others only trod in his footsteps and wrote on his model, while Lamartine openly imitated him in his Dernier Chant de Childe Harold. For the first time the Eastern tale was now told by a poet who had actually seen Eastern lands and races, their scenery and their cities, who drew his figures and landscape with his eye on the objects, and had not mixed his local colours by the process of skimming[Pg 188] books of travel for myths, legends, costume, or customs, with such result as may be seen in Moore's Lalla Rookh and in Southey's Thalaba, or even in Scott's Talisman. The preface to this novel shows that Scott fully appreciated the risk of competing with Byron, albeit in prose, in the field of Asiatic romance, yet all his skill avails little to diminish the sense of conventional figure-drawing and of uncertainty in important details when they are not gathered in the field, but only transplanted from the library.

Byron has noticed in one of his letters the errors of this kind into which a great poet must fall whose accurate observation has been confined mainly to his own country. 'There is much natural talent,' he writes, 'spilt over the Excursion, yet Wordsworth says of Greece that it is a land of
'Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores Under a cope of variegated sky.

The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, the shores still and tideless, the sky is anything but variegated, being for months and months beautifully blue.'

This may be thought trivial criticism, yet it is evidence of the attention given by Byron to precise description. His accuracy in Oriental costume was also a novelty at that time, when so little was known of Oriental lore that even Mr. Murray 'doubted the propriety of putting the name of Cain into the mouth of a Mohammedan.' With regard to his characters, we may readily admit that in the Giaour or the Bride of Abydos the heroes and heroines behave and speak after the fashion of high-flying Western romance, and that their lofty sentiments in love or death have nothing specifically Oriental about them. But this was merely the romantic style used by all[Pg 189] Byron's contemporaries, and generally accepted by the taste of that day as essential to the metrical rendering of a passionate love-story. It may be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent, familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory notices and erudite references to authorities that are appended to the text. This fashion of garnishing with far-fetched outlandish words, in order to give the requisite flavour of time or place, was peculiar to the new romantic school of his era; it was the poetical dialect of the time, and Byron employed it too copiously. Yet, with all his faults, he remains a splendid colourist, who broke through a limited mannerism in poetry, and led forth his readers into an unexplored region of cloudless sky and purple sea, where the serene aspect of nature could be powerfully contrasted with the shadow of death and desolation cast over it by the violence of man.

Undoubtedly this contrast, between fair scenery and foul barbarism, had been presented more than once in poetry; yet no one before Byron had brought it out with the sure hand of an eye-witness, or with such ardent sympathy for a nation which had been for centuries trodden under the feet of aliens in race and religion, yet still clung to its ancient traditions of freedom. Throughout his descriptive poems, from Childe Harold to Don Juan, it is the true and forcible impression, taken from sight of the thing itself, that gives vigour and animation to his pictures, and that has stamped on the memory the splendid opening of the Giaour, the meditations in Venice and Rome,[Pg 190] the glorious scenery of the Greek islands, and even such single lines as
'By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone.'

In the art of painting what may be called historical landscape, where retrospective associations give intellectual colour to the picture, Byron has very few rivals. His descriptions of the Lake of Geneva, of Clarens, of the Trojan plain—
'High barrows, without marble or a name, A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain, And Ida in the distance'—

have the quality of faithful drawing illumined by imaginative power. They have certainly touched the emotions and enhanced the pleasure of all travellers in the last three generations whose minds are accessible to poetic suggestion; and if at the present day their style be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer without them. The stanzas in Childe Harold on Waterloo are full of the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents of war—the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing adequately with heroic action in contemporary verse, of writing a poem on a campaign that has just been reported in the newspapers, is exemplified by the fact that Walter Scott's two compositions on Waterloo are failures; nor has any poet since Byron yet succeeded in giving us a good modern battlepiece.

Nevertheless there is much in Byron's longer poems (excepting always Don Juan) that seems tedious to[Pg 191] the modern reader; there are descriptions and declamations too long drawn-out to sustain the interest; and there are many lines that are superfluous, untidy, and sometimes ungrammatical. One can only plead, in extenuation of these defects, that the fashion of his day was for long metrical romance, in which it is difficult to maintain the high standard of careful composition exacted by the latest criticism. It is almost impossible to tell a long story in verse that shall be throughout poetical. And one main reason why this fashion has nearly passed away may be surmised to be that the versified narrative cannot adapt itself in this respect to the present taste, which is impatient of fluent lengthy heroics, refusing to accept them for the sake of some finely executed passages. Southey's epics are now quite unreadable, and many of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek patriots, he had actually seen the men and heard of their deeds. The fact that he also portrayed more unreal characters in dismal drapery—Lara, Conrad, and Manfred, as the mouthpieces of splenetic misanthropy—has led to some unjust depreciation of his capacity for veritable delineation. Macaulay, for example, in his essay on Byron, observes that 'Johnson, the man whom Don Juan met in the slave-market, is a striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman in such a situation!' and Mr. Swinburne echoes this criticism. But it is unfair[Pg 192] to compare a minor character, slightly sketched into a poem for the purposes of the plot, with the full-length portrait that might have been made of him by a first-class artist in prose. The proper comparison would be between the figures in the metrical romances of the two poets, whereby it might be shown that Scott could take as little trouble as Byron did about an unimportant subsidiary actor. In regard to the leading heroes and heroines, Scott's poetic creations are hardly more interesting or dramatic than Byron's; and whenever he makes, even in prose, an excursion into Asia, his figure-drawing becomes conventional. But he was usually at the disadvantage, from which Byron was certainly free, of being hampered by an inartistic propensity to make virtuous heroes triumph in the long run.

Yet it must be admitted that no poet of the same calibre has turned out so much loose uneven work as Byron. His lapses into lines that are lame or dull are the more vexatious to the correct modern ear when, as sometimes happens, they spoil a fine passage, and in the midst of a superb flight his muse comes down with a broken wing. In the subjoined stanza, for example, from the Waterloo episode in Childe Harold, the first five lines are clear, strenuous, and concise, while the next three are confused and clumsy; so that though he recovers himself in the final line, the general effect is much damaged:
'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, The morn the marshalling in arms—the day Battle's magnificently stern array. The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent, The earth is covered thick with other clay, Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent, Rider and horse—friend, foe—in one red burial blent.'

[Pg 193]

These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them. His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we are all—Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I—upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;[Pg 194] and here, again, he is a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit, dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany; Werther, Obermann, and René are all moulded on the same type with Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of type does not mean imitation—it means that the writers were all in the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages, and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw, in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in the same year (1818), and from the same[Pg 195] place (Venice), he produced the fourth canto of Childe Harold, full of deep longing for unbroken solitude:
'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'

and also Beppo, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, if they had been preserved, would have been very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.

It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression, and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest poems, the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Siege of Corinth. On this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary; yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action. The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the Giaour—
'Clime of the unforgotten brave! Whose land from plain to mountain cave Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'—

has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and[Pg 196] almost illegible hand—an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and melodramatic figuring—
'Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl'—

are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are, perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek fe??a????, and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirât's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors, he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably [Pg 197]added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.

Byron has told us why he adopted for the Corsair, and afterwards for Lara, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':

'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart; Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]

We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos—as in the following sample from the Corsair:
'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives One female form—remember—we have wives.'

And the consequence has been that Lara and the[Pg 198] Corsair are now, we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.

Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them. His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about Sardanapalus, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of history and mythology.'

'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to common language.'

And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which have no metrical construction at all:

'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]

'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]

Many others of the same quality might be given,[Pg 199] in which the disjecti membra poetæ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a rough unpractised hand.

There are some vigorous passages scattered through the plays, and we have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading Sardanapalus. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained, 'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse, for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had[Pg 200] lost the guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of Cain: a Mystery, one must speak reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in Manfred, the discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth. There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory passages; and we may quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:
'Pipes in the liberal air Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd,'

which is to be found in Manfred and might have been taken from the Excursion.

When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead, as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or overcharged:
'The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine; The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep; Nor need I to repine That all those charms have passed away, I might have watched through long decay.'

[Pg 201]

There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.

In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his strength freely:
'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free Thou shalt not taste of death! The generous blood that flowed from thee Disdained to sink beneath; Within our veins its currents be, Thy spirit on our breath.
'Thy name, our charging hosts along, Shall be their battle word! Thy fall, the theme of choral song From virgin voices poured! To weep would do thy glory wrong; Thou shalt not be deplored.'

And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in the Isles of Greece, where the two lines,
'Ah, no! the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'

drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and that in our time we have had a good many attempts—almost all failures; whereas the Isles of Greece will long continue to stir the masculine imagination of Englishmen.

[Pg 202]

On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much too occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation over the misfortunes which he had brought upon himself, as in the Poems of the Separation. Yet when he shook off his personal grief and took to politics, no other poet could more vividly express his intense living interest in the great events of his time, or strike the proper note of some great catastrophe. It may be affirmed that the Ode to Napoleon is better than anything else that has been written in English upon the most astonishing career in modern history:
'The triumph and the vanity, The rapture of the strife— The earthquake-voice of Victory, To thee the breath of life; The sword, the sceptre, and that sway Which man seemed made but to obey, Wherewith renown was rife— All quelled; Dark Spirit, what must be The madness of thy memory!
'The Desolator desolate! The Victor overthrown! The Arbiter of others' fate A suppliant for his own! Is it some yet imperial hope That with such change can calmly cope? Or dread of death alone? To die a prince—or live a slave— Thy choice is most ignobly brave.'

[Pg 203]In the first of these two stanzas the seventh line is weak and breaks the rapid rush of the verse; but the high pressure and impetus of the poem are sustained throughout twenty stanzas, producing the effect of an improvisatore who stops rather from want of breath than from any other lack of inspiration. In this respect the ode is a rare poetical exploit; for all poems composed under the spur of the moment, upon some memorable incident that has just startled the world, must be more or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded some unlucky laureate.

There is one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of lyrics. In his latest and longest production, Don Juan, he tells us that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the yellow leaf':
'And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.'

It was in Beppo: a Venetian Story that he dropped, for the first time, the weapon of trenchant sarcasm and invective, with no very fine edge upon it, which he flourished in his youth, and took up the tone of light humorous satire upon society. He soon acquired mastery over the metre (which was suggested, as is[Pg 204] well known, by Hookham Frere's Whistlecraft); and in Don Juan he produced a long, rambling poem of a kind never before attempted, and still far beyond any subsequent imitations, in the English language. Of a certainty there is much that it is by no means desirable to imitate, for the English literature does not assimilate the element of cynical libertinism, which indeed becomes coarse on an English tongue. Yet it is remarkable that the Whistlecraft metre, although Byron could manage it with point and spirit, has never produced more than insipid pastiche in later hands. But while Beppo may be classed as pure burlesque, Don Juan strikes various keys, ironical and voluptuous, grave and gay, rising sometimes to the level of strenuous realistic narrative in the episodes of the shipwreck and the siege, falling often into something like grotesque buffoonery, with much picturesque description, many animated lines, and occasional touches of effective pathos. As a story it has the picaresque flavour of Gil Blas, presenting a variety of scenes and adventures strung together without any definite plot; as a poem its reputation rests upon some passages of indisputable beauty; while Byron's own experiences, grievances, and animosities, personal or political, run through the whole performance like an accompaniment, and break out occasionally into humorous sarcasm or violent denunciations. That the overheated fervour of a stormy youth should cool down into disdainful irony, under the chill of disappointment and exhaustion, was natural enough; and this unfinished poem may be regarded as typical of Byron's erratic life, full of loose intrigue and adventure, with its sudden and premature ending.

It is in Don Juan that Byron stands forth as the founder and precursor of modern realism in poetry. He has now finally exorcised the hyperbolic fiend[Pg 205] that vexed his youth, he has cast off the illusions of romance, he knows the ground he treads upon, and his pictures are drawn from life; he is the foremost of those who have ventured boldly upon the sombre actualities of war and bloodshed:—
'But let me put an end unto my theme, There was an end of Ismail, hapless town, Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream, And redly ran his blushing waters down. The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown; Of forty thousand that had manned the wall Some hundreds breathed, the rest were silent all.'

'A versified paraphrase,' it may be said, 'of sober history,' yet withal very different from the most animated prose, which must be kept at a lower temperature of intense expression. If we turn to quieter scenes—which are called picturesque because the artist, like a painter, has selected the right subject and point of view, and has grouped his details with exquisite skill—we may take the stanzas describing the return of the pirate Lambro to his Greek island—
'He saw his white walls shining in the sun, His garden trees all shadowy and green'—

as a fine example of pure objective writing, which lays out the whole scene truthfully, with the direct vision of one who has seen it. One does not find here the suggestive intimations, the wide imaginative horizon of higher poetry; there are no musical blendings of sound and sense, as in such lines as Tennyson's
'By the long wash of Australasian seas.'

Yet in these passages Byron has after his own fashion served Nature faithfully, and he has preserved to us some masterly sketches of life and manners that have long since disappeared. The Greek islands have[Pg 206] since fallen under the dominion of European uniformity; the costume of the people, the form of their government, are shabby imitations of Western models. But the cloudless sky, the sun slowly sinking behind Morea's hills, the sea on whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and the marbled steep of Sunium, are still unchanged; and the peaceful tourist in these waters will see at once that Byron was a true workman in line and colour, and will feel the intellectual pleasure that comes from accurate yet artistic interpretation of natural beauties.

The poem of Don Juan is, therefore, a miscellany, connected on the picturesque side with Childe Harold, and by its mocking spirit with Beppo and the Vision of Judgment, the two pieces that may be classed as pure burlesque. The irreverent persiflage of the Vision belongs to the now obsolete school of Voltaire, and in biting wit and daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master in diablerie. Nor can it be asserted that this lashing sarcasm was undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George III., browbeating the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron. There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have invariably failed. Southey's Vision, and Robert Montgomery's libel upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.

[Pg 207]

Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of first-class genius and striking originality. And from his death almost up to the century's close there has been no time when some considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters, and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also been great political and social changes, and all these things have severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely associated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging spirits whom Shelley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think, not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable poets; the Victorian celebrities have one by one passed away; and we can only hope that the first quarter of the twentieth century may bring again some such bountiful harvest as was vouchsafed to our grandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the meantime the reading of Byron may operate as a wholesome tonic upon the literary nerves of the rising generation; for, as Mr. Swinburne has generously acknowledged, with the emphatic concurrence of Matthew Arnold, his poems[Pg 208] have 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' Now one tendency of latter-day verse has been toward that over-delicacy of fibre which has been termed decadence, toward the preference of correct metrical harmonies over distinct and incisive expression, toward vague indications of meaning. In this form the melody prevails over the matter; the style inclines to become precious and garnished with verbal artifice. Some recent French poets, indeed, in their anxiety to correct the troublesome lucidity of their mother-tongue, have set up the school of symbolism, which deals in half-veiled metaphor and sufficiently obscure allusion, relying upon subtly suggestive phrases for evoking associations. For ephemeral infirmities of this kind the straightforward virility of Byron's best work may serve as an antidote. On the other hand, we have the well-knit strenuous verse of extreme realism, wrought out by a poet in his shirt-sleeves, with rhymes clear-sounding like the tap of hammer on anvil, who sings of rough folk by sea and land, and can touch national emotion in regard to the incidents or politics of the moment. He paints without varnish, in hard outline, avoiding metaphor and ornamental diction generally; taking his language so freely out of the mouths of men in actual life that he makes occasional slips into vulgarity. He is at the opposite pole from the symbolist; but true poetry demands much more distinction of style and nobility of thought. And here again Byron's high lyrical notes may help to maintain elevation of tone and to preserve the romantic tradition. His poetry, like his character, is full of glaring imperfections; yet he wrote as one of the great world in which he made for a time such a noise; and after all that has been said about his moral delinquencies, it is certain that we could have better spared a better man.

In one of Tennyson's earlier letters is the following[Pg 209] passage, with reference to something written at the time in Philip van Artevelde:

'He does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease the wheels of the old world.'

This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets, which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.
FOOTNOTES:

[24] The Works of Lord Byron: a New, Revised, and Enlarged Edition.—'Letters and Journals.' Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M. A. 'Poetry.' Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M. A. London, John Murray, 1898.—Edinburgh Review, October 1900.

[25] Preface to the Corsair.

[26] The Deformed Transformed (part I. scene i.).

[27] Sardanapalus (act V. scene i.).

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/algernon_charles_swinburne__a_poet_writing_for_poe ts-420

Algernon Charles Swinburne - A Poet Writing for Poets
Written by: Arthur Symons

It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,' Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed 'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets, or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses. Think of how[Pg 154] extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson. There was a time when the first series of Poems and Ballads was read for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.

A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest, and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that, among his plays, Swinburne prefers Mary Stuart, and, among his lyrical poems, the ode on Athens and the[Pg 155] ode on the Armada. 'By the test of these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'

In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work; in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his. Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he[Pg 156] discriminate, in his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which, though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has set Atalanta in Calydon higher in general favour than Erechtheus, and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for setting Erechtheus above Atalanta in Calydon, the fact remains that there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a growth of the profoundest poetical genius.

[Pg 157]

Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the 'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne, 'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as Les Djinns.' In metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability. His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of[Pg 158] intricate harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.

In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication of the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of Poems and Ballads, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an artist whose medium or material has more in[Pg 159] common with a musician's than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on Poems and Ballads, in which the question as to whether these poems were or were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the[Pg 160] newspapers; it can hardly be of much greater importance.

A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying, a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and Shakespeare, Æschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is great, noble, and heroic. The old name of Laudi, which has lately been revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not more troublesome to a sleeper.

[Pg 161]

Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars. 'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing impetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion and into his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the last word of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of his poetry.

He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world without an emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud of rapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record of things seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into little separate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed,[Pg 162] the child's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty in every sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because, to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, and with books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual inner communing.

In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake, the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas, and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism, and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist, the poet of strenuous laughter.
But love and wine were moon and sun
For many a fame long since undone,
And sorrow and joy have lost and won
By stormy turns
As many a singer's soul, if none
More bright than Burns.
[Pg 163]
And sweeter far in grief and mirth
Have songs as glad and sad of birth
Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth
In joy of life:
But never song took fire from earth
More strong for strife.
* * * * *
Above the storms of praise and blame
That blur with mist his lustrous name,
His thunderous laughter went and came,
And lives and flies;
The war that follows on the flame
When lightning dies.

Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice. There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations, as there are on so many pages of the Songs before Sunrise and the Songs of Two Nations, in which the effect is far less convincing, as it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the [Pg 164]lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was a finely ferocious energy in the Dirae ending with The Descent into Hell of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing vigour in The Commonweal of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt political verse, like so much of the political verse of the Songs before Sunrise, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight, though song only needs wings.
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,

said Swinburne in the Songs before Sunrise, when he was the trumpeter of Mazzini.

And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years old. There is, in the Songs before Sunrise, an arraignment of Christianity as deliberate[Pg 165] as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as Nietzsche's; in the Poems and Ballads, a learned sensuality without parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we are told that Before a Crucifix is a poem fundamentally reverent towards Christianity, and that Anactoria is an ascetic experiment in scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have taken the new book and the old book together, because there is surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old poems and the new. The contents of A Channel Passage are[Pg 166] unusually varied in subject, and the longest poem, The Altar of Righteousness, a marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if, indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for instance, the line:
The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell.

The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us before we have[Pg 167] properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:
The tyranny
Kindled in darkness fell,

how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes to make this song.

And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt, when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated, he misses the naïve quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word[Pg 168] for his rhyme scheme, is not a word that Villon could have used, and that
Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur,

though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in
Two we were and the heart was one,

is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by
Twain we were, and our hearts one song,
One heart.

Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or direction of the brain?

Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, A Channel Passage, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the recollection of
Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy,
Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy.

It may be that Swinburne has praised the[Pg 169] sea more eloquently, or sung of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with the very soul of the sea in storm. The Lake of Gaube is remarkable for an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems of flowers in A Rosary; the most passionate and memorable of the political poems in Russia: an Ode; the Elizabethan prologues. These poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.

The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley contains three books, each published at an interval of ten years: the Midsummer Holiday of 1884, the Astrophel of 1894, and the Channel Passage of 1904. Choice among them is as difficult[Pg 170] as it is unnecessary. They are alike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and great men, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finest poems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the sea from at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from the heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades in long lines which bears the name of A Midsummer Holiday stands out as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it may almost be said, a new lyric form. After A Midsummer Holiday no one can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an acrostic would cease to be artificial.

In this last volume the technique which[Pg 171] is seen apparently perfected in the Poems and Ballads of 1866 has reached a point from which that relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost, no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of Dolores or even of The Triumph of Time with the metrical qualities of On the Verge is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical development is significant of every change through which the poet has passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces of every kind of beauty.
II

'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for antiquity: nor need you be assured that[Pg 172] when I write plays it is with a view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close as this:
We are so more than poor,
The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you
Less than mere losing; so most more than weak
It were but shame for one to smite us, who
Could but weep louder.

A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:
All other women's praise
Makes part of my blame, and things of least account
In them are all my praises.

And there is a jester who talks in a metre[Pg 173] that might have come straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:
I am considering of that apple still;
It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too
Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,
Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.

Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and go there, as in these lines:
What are you made God's friend for but to have
His hand over your head to keep it well
And warm the rainy weather through, when snow
Spoils half the world's work?

And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:
Naked as brown feet of unburied men?

An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in Fair Rosamond, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two years earlier, in Sir Peter Harpdon's End.

So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. [Pg 174]Fair Rosamond, though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical sensation which was to be so evident in the Poems and Ballads, is altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way, than the longer and more regular drama of The Queen-Mother. Swinburne speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive' which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic, reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly possible to make[Pg 175] the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such lines as these?
I should be mad,
I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,
Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,
And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,
I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,
Make witness of it even this night that is
The last for many cradles, and the grave
Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,
This edge of season, this keen joint of time,
Finish and spare not.

The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less[Pg 176] fluid, less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in reference to the verse of Atalanta in Calydon). He is ready to be harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when he has said the essential thing.

In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first intercourse with print. In The Queen-Mother and Rosamond Swinburne is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence already of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poet with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no ears to attention, would be[Pg 177] more surprising if one did not remember that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse, Modern Love, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and was wise.

The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires. There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that he does not transform, who can, as in Mary Stuart, fill scores of pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A[Pg 178] similar satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties, leads him to say of the modern play, The Sisters, that it is the only modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of Locrine, none of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form, has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition, one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the further question: can work professedly dramatic which is not consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted[Pg 179] as wholly satisfactory from any other point of view?

The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and most ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part, Chastelard, was published in 1865; the last, Mary Stuart, in 1881. And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play, Bothwell, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of Bothwell, the longest of the three plays—indeed, the longest play in existence, Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to take his work in the chronicle play as a model is[Pg 180] hardly more reasonable than to take Venus and Adonis as a model for narrative poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we conceive of Bothwell even on the stage which has seen Les Burgraves? The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely just such parts as are finest in the printed play.

There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital dramatic quality, and in Bothwell there is one scene, the scene leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the lovely and luxurious song of Chastelard or in the severe and strenuous study of Mary Stuart. There are moments, in all, where speech is as simple,[Pg 181] as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:
Well, all is one to me: and for my part
I thank God I shall die without regret
Of anything that I have done alive.

These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways as tortuous as this:
Indeed I have done all this if aught I have,
And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye
Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw
That face which taught it faith and made it first
Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see
How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes
That give love's light to others.

But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire or calmness the necessary feeling of the moment, it is nearly always mere speech, a talking about action or emotion, not itself action or emotion. And every scene, even the finest, is thought of as a scene of talk, not as visible action; the writer hears his people speak, but does not see their faces or where or how they stand or move. It is this power of [Pg 182]visualisation that is the first requirement of the dramatist; by itself it can go no further than the ordering of dumb show; but all drama must begin with the ordering of dumb show, and should be playable without words.

It was once said by William Morris that Swinburne's poems did not make pictures. The criticism was just, but mattered little; because they make harmonies. No English poet has ever shown so great and various a mastery over harmony in speech, and it is this lyrical quality which has given him a place among the great lyrical poets of England. In drama the lyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but to the dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute. Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything. It is for this reason that a play like Locrine, which is confessedly, by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to being satisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive' plays. Marino Faliero, though an episode of history, comes into somewhat the same[Pg 183] category, and repeats with nobler energy the song-like character of Chastelard. The action is brief and concentrated, tragic and heroic. Its 'magnificent monotony,' its 'fervent and inexhaustible declamation,' have a height and heat in them which turn the whole play into a poem rather than a play, but a poem comparable with the 'succession of dramatic scenes or pictures' which makes the vast lyric of Tristram of Lyonesse. To think of Byron's play on the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can be paralleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, in poetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for what is heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in human speech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and in the opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewish rhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre.

The form of Locrine has something in common with the form of Atalanta in Calydon, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recurs only once, and[Pg 184] less lyrically, in Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards. It is written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines, without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by Shakespeare in the Rape of Lucrece, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner of terza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanza of two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead of forward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who ever lived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is not less true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beating of time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout at white heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and a child's prattle, in nine-line stanzas[Pg 185] of two rhymes apiece, goes as merrily as this:
That song is hardly even as wise as I—
Nay, very foolishness it is. To die
In March before its life were well on wing,
Before its time and kindly season—why
Should spring be sad—before the swallows fly—
Enough to dream of such a wintry thing?
Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring
Than snow for summer when his heart is high:
And why should words be foolish when they sing?

Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can be done with blank verse that he cannot do with it. Listen to these lines from Mary Stuart:
She shall be a world's wonder to all time,
A deadly glory watched of marvelling men
Not without praise, not without noble tears,
And if without what she would never have
Who had it never, pity—yet from none
Quite without reverence and some kind of love
For that which was so royal.

There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of the cadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading Locrine, and with Atalanta and Erechtheus in memory, it is difficult not to wish that Swinburne had[Pg 186] written all his plays in rhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories. Locrine has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme would sound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent and well-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translated Euripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to be insuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks, or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key.

The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in his dramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel—a story of the year 573—acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, with surprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a small one, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too; every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a single merely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there the lines become lyric, as in
[Pg 187]
Thou rose,
Why did God give thee more than all thy kin,
Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this?
Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds
Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not
How heavy sounds her note now?

But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business.' And for the most part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeed written with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:
Almachildes.
God must be
Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else
Live.
Rosamund.
That concerns not thee nor me. Be thou
Sure that my will and power to serve it live.
Lift now thine eyes to look upon thy lord.

Compare these lines with the lines which end the fourth act:
Almachildes.
I cannot slay him
Thus.
Rosamund.
Canst thou slay thy bride by fire? He dies,
Or she dies, bound against the stake. His death
Were the easier. Follow him: save her: strike but once.
[Pg 188]
Almachildes.
I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.
[Exit.
Rosamund.
And I will see it. And, father, thou shalt see.
[Exit.

In both these instances one sees the quality which is most conspicuous in this play—a naked strength, which is the same kind of strength that has always been present in Swinburne's plays, but hitherto draped elaborately, and often more than half concealed in the draperies. The outline of every play has been hard, sharp, firmly drawn; the characters always forthright and unwavering; there has always been a real precision in the main drift of the speeches; but this is the first time in which the outlines have been left to show themselves in all their sharpness. Development or experiment, whichever it may be, this resolute simplicity brings a new quality into Swinburne's work, and a quality full of dramatic possibilities. All the luxuriousness of his verse has gone, and the lines ring like sword clashing against sword. These savage and simple people of the sixth century do not turn over their thoughts before[Pg 189] concentrating them into words, and they do not speak except to tell their thoughts. Imagine what even Murray, in Chastelard, a somewhat curt speaker, would have said in place of Almachildes's one line, a whole conflict of love, hate, honour, and shame in eight words:
I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.

Dramatic realism can go no further than such lines. The question remains whether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, and whether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by such self-restraint.

The poetic drama is in itself a compromise. That people should speak in verse is itself a violation of probability; and so strongly is this felt by most actors that they endeavour, in acting a play in verse, to make the verse sound as much like prose as possible. But, as it seems to me, the aim of the poetic drama is to create a new world in a new atmosphere, where the laws of human existence are no longer recognised. The aim of the poetic drama is beauty, not truth; and Shakespeare, to take the supreme example, is great, not because he[Pg 190] makes Othello probable as a jealous husband, or gives him exactly the words that a jealous husband might have used, but because he creates in him an image of more than human energy, and puts into his mouth words of a more splendid poetry than any one but Shakespeare himself could have found to say. Fetter the poetic drama to an imitation of actual speech, and you rob it of the convention which is its chief glory and best opportunity. A new colour may certainly be given to that convention, by which a certain directness, rather of Dante than of Shakespeare, may be employed for its novel kind of beauty, convention being still recognised as convention. No doubt that is really Swinburne's aim, and to have succeeded in it is to show that he can master every form, and do as he pleases with language. And there are passages in the play, like this one, which have a fervid colour of their own, fully characteristic of the writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse than any other English poet:
This sun—no sun like ours—burns out my soul.
I would, when June takes hold on us like fire,
The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here
[Pg 191]
The splendour and the sweetness of the world
Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth
Is here too hard on heaven—the Italian air
Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin,
Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be,
Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome—
Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end
That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall.

The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heat seems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action. Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled in their power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalised vision—it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no English poet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtle intensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the point of agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotion tortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare his heart, confessing:
The devil and God are crying in either ear
One murderous word for ever, night and day,
Dark day and deadly night and deadly day,
Can she love thee who slewest her father? I
Love her.

[Pg 192]

Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:
I am yet alive to question if I live
And wonder what may ever bid me die.
. . . . There is nought
Left in the range and record of the world
For me that is not poisoned: even my heart
Is all envenomed in me.

And she recognises that
No healing and no help for life on earth
Hath God or man found out save death and sleep.

The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame, can but question and answer one another thus:
Hildegard.
Hast thou forgiven me?
Almachildes.
I have not forgiven
God.

And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror, sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:
Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.

[Pg 193]

As in the time of the great first volume of Poems and Ballads, Swinburne is still drawn to
see
What fools God's anger makes of men.

He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired the equivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlook upon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too much poetry for a poet—as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to be mingled with alloy.

There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of the world, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, than the story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another Cenci, in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit the one as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with some form of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley said?

[Pg 194]

There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself.

A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much to teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent, coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of Holies. Alexander, Cæsar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated, thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings. Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has[Pg 195] shown it: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancing before the cushioned idol and her two worshippers.

Swinburne in The Duke of Gandia has not dealt with the whole matter of the story—only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart or essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition, fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in the far less effectual Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards; the style, speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen fierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passing without consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she is hidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like her historians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learned men wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father and son live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back and consume the cloud.[Pg 196] It is Cæsar Borgia who is the flame, and Alexander the Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds. The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; he has no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live about him for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now one steps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, a cardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step of the Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment of action, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open and then shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible and magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley—a scene itself only surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death of Marlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who can endure to read it, 'moves pity and terror,' as to Lamb, 'beyond any scene ancient or modern.' And only in Bothwell, in the whole of Swinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full of fear and suspense. Take, for instance, the [Pg 197]opening of the great final scene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber, and after seven days he appears calmly before his father.
Alex. Thou hast done this deed.
Cæsar. Thou hast said it.
Alex. Dost thou think
To live, and look upon me?
Cæsar. Some while yet.
Alex. I would there were a God—that he might hear.
Cæsar. 'Tis pity there should be—for thy sake—none.
Alex. Wilt thou slay me?
Cæsar. Why?
Alex. Am I not thy sire?
Cæsar. And Christendom's to boot.
Alex. I pray thee, man,
Slay me.
Cæsar. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I
Sane.
Alex. Art thou very flesh and blood?
Cæsar. They say,
Thine.
Alex. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,
There is no God indeed.
Cæsar. Nor thou nor I
Know.
Alex. I could pray to God that God might be,
Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:
I do not pray.

[Pg 198]

There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak face to face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even these lines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that only one of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and that one Shelley, has understood the complete art of the playwright, and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote plays for the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only made even a temporary success, and Becket is likely to have gone out with Irving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for the stage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with an unexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, are our poets so insistent on using the only form for which a special faculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?

A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special[Pg 199] genius for dramatic music, wrote Die Zauberflöte to a bad libretto with as great a perfection as the music to Don Giovanni, which had a good one. The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and (this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling, brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays—an act, an episode—he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And now,' cries Cæsar, fresh from murder,
Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,
Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away
This grief from off thy godhead.

[Pg 200]

And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:
Thou art subtle and strong.
I would thou hadst spared him—couldst have spared him.

And the son replies:
Sire,
I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,
I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate,
Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.

But Cæsar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole representation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave the responsibility of things:
And God, who made me and my sire and thee,
May take the charge upon him.

1899-1908.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/epic_poetry__the_most_dignified_and_elaborate_form _of_narrative_poetry-867


Epic Poetry: The Most Dignified and Elaborate Form of Narrative Poetry
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

EPIC POETRY, or Epos (from the Gr. ?πος, a story, and ?πικ?ς, pertaining to a story), the names given to the most dignified and elaborate forms of narrative poetry. The word epopee is also, but more rarely, employed to designate the same thing, ?ποποι?ς in Greek being a maker of epic poetry, and ?ποποι?α what he makes.

It is to Greece, where the earliest literary monuments which we possess are of an epical character, that we turn for a definition of these vast heroic compositions, and we gather that their subject-matter was not confined, as Voltaire and the critics of the 18th century supposed, to “narratives in verse of warlike adventures.” When we first discover the epos, hexameter verse has already been selected for its vehicle. In this form epic poems were composed not merely dealing with war and personal romance, but carrying out a didactic purpose, or celebrating the mysteries of religion. These three divisions, to which are severally attached the more or less mythical names of Homer, Hesiod and Orpheus seem to have marked the earliest literary movement of the Greeks. But, even here, we must be warned that what we possess is not primitive; there had been unwritten epics, probably in hexameters, long before the composition of any now-surviving fragment. The saga of the Greek nation, the catalogue of its arts and possessions, the rites and beliefs of its priesthood, must have been circulated, by word of mouth, long before any historical poet was born. We look upon Homer and Hesiod as records of primitive thought, but Professor Gilbert Murray reminds us that “our Iliad, Odyssey, Erga and Theogony are not the first, nor the second, nor the twelfth of such embodiments.” The early epic poets, Lesches, Linus, Orpheus, Arctinus, Eugammon are the veriest shadows, whose names often betray their symbolic and fabulous character. It is now believed that there was a class of minstrels, the Rhapsodists or Homeridae, whose business it was to recite poetry at feasts and other solemn occasions. “The real bards of early Greece were all nameless and impersonal.” When our tradition begins to be preserved, we find everything of a saga-character attributed to Homer, a blind man and an inhabitant of Chios. This gradually crystallized until we find Aristotle definitely treating Homer as a person, and attributing to him the composition of three great poems, the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Margites, now lost (see Homer). The first two of these have been preserved and form for us the type of the ancient epic; when we speak of epic poetry, we unconsciously measure it by the example of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is quite certain, however, that these poems had not merely been preceded by a vast number of revisions of the mythical history of the country, but were accompanied by innumerable poems of a similar character, now entirely lost. That antiquity did not regard these other epics as equal in beauty to the Iliad seems to be certain; but such poems as Cypria, Iliou Persis (Sack of Ilion) and Aethiopis can hardly but have exhibited other sides of the epic tradition. Did we possess them, it is almost certain that we could speak with more assurance as to the scope of epic poetry in the days of oral tradition, and could understand more clearly what sort of ballads in hexameter it was which rhapsodes took round from court to court. In the 4th century b.c. it seems that people began to write down what was not yet forgotten of all this oral poetry. Unfortunately, the earliest critic who describes this process is Proclus, a Byzantine neo-Platonist, who did not write until some 800 years later, when the whole tradition had become hopelessly corrupted. When we pass from Homer and Hesiod, about whose actual existence critics will be eternally divided, we reach in the 7th century a poet, Peisander of Rhodes, who wrote an epic poem, the Heracleia, of which fragments remain. Other epic writers, who appear to be undoubtedly historic, are Antimachus of Colophon, who wrote a Thebais; Panyasis, who, like Peisander, celebrated the feats of Heracles; Choerilus of Samos; and Anyte, of whom we only know that she was an epic poetess, and was called “The female Homer.” In the 6th and 5th centuries b.c. there was a distinct school of philosophical epic, and we distinguish the names of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles as the leaders of it.

From the dawn of Latin literature epic poetry seems to have been cultivated in Italy. A Greek exile, named Livius Andronicus, translated theOdyssey into Latin during the first Punic War, but the earliest original epic of Rome was the lost Bellum Punicum of Naevius, a work to which Virgil was indebted. A little later, Ennius composed, about 172 b.c., in 18 books, an historical epic of the Annales, dealing with the whole chronicle of Rome. This was the foremost Latin poem, until the appearance of the Aeneid; it was not imitated, remaining, for a hundred years, as Mr Mackail has said, “not only the unique, but the satisfying achievement in this kind of poetry.” Virgil began the most famous of Roman epics in the year 30 b.c., and when he died, nine years later, he desired that the MS. of the Aeneid should be burned, as it required three years’ work to complete it. Nevertheless, it seems to us, and seemed to the ancient world, almost perfect, and a priceless monument of art; it is written, like the great Greek poems on which it is patently modelled, in hexameters. In the next generation, the Pharsalia of Lucan, of which Cato, as the type of the republican spirit, is the hero, was the principal example of Latin epic. Statius, under the Flavian emperors, wrote several epic poems, of which the Thebaidsurvives. In the 1st century a.d. Valerius Flaccus wrote the Argonautica in 8 books, and Silius Italicus the Punic War, in 17 books; these authors show a great decline in taste and merit, even in comparison with Statius, and Silius Italicus, in particular, is as purely imitative as the worst of the epic writers of modern Europe. At the close of the 4th century the style revived with Claudian, who produced five or six elaborate historical and mythological epics of which the Rape of Proserpine was probably the most remarkable; in his interesting poetry we have a valuable link between the Silver Age in Rome and the Italian Renaissance. With Claudian the history of epic poetry among the ancients closes.

In medieval times there existed a large body of narrative 682poetry to which the general title of Epic has usually been given. Three principal schools are recognized, the French, the Teutonic and the Icelandic. Teutonic epic poetry deals, as a rule, with legends founded on the history of Germany in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, and in particular with such heroes as Ermanaric, Attila and Theodoric. But there is also an important group in it which deals with English themes, and among these Beowulf, Waldere, The Lay of Maldon and Finnesburh are pre-eminent. To this group is allied the purely German poem of Hildebrand, attributed to c. 800. Among these Beowulf is the only one which exists in anything like complete form, and it is of all examples of Teutonic epic the most important. With all its trivialities and incongruities, which belong to a barbarous age, Beowulf is yet a solid and comprehensive example of native epic poetry. It is written, like all old Teutonic work of the kind, in alliterative unrhymed rhythm. In Iceland, a new heroic literature was invented in the middle ages, and to this we owe the Sagas, which are, in fact, a reduction to prose of the epics of the warlike history of the North. These Sagas took the place of a group of archaic Icelandic epics, the series of which seems to have closed with the noble poem of Atlamál, the principal surviving specimen of epic poetry as it was cultivated in the primitive literature of Iceland. The surviving epical fragments of Icelandic composition are found thrown together in the Codex Regius, under the title of The Elder Edda, a most precious MS. discovered in the 17th century. The Icelandic epics seem to have been shorter and more episodical in character than the lost Teutonic specimens; both kinds were written in alliterative verse. It is not probable that either possessed the organic unity and vitality of spirit which make the Sagas so delightful. The French medieval epics (see Chansons de Geste) are late in comparison with those of England, Germany and Iceland. They form a curious transitional link between primitive and modern poetry; the literature of civilized Europe may be said to begin with them. There is a great increase of simplicity, a great broadening of the scene of action. The Teutonic epics were obscure and intense, the French chansons de geste are lucid and easy. The existing masterpiece of this kind, the magnificent Roland, is doubtless the most interesting and pleasing of all the epics of medieval Europe. Professor Ker’s analysis of its merits may be taken as typical of all that is best in the vast body of epic which comes between the antique models, which were unknown to the medieval poets, and the artificial epics of a later time which were founded on vast ideal themes, in imitation of the ancients. “There is something lyrical in Roland, but the poem is not governed by lyrical principles; it requires the deliberation and the freedom of epic; it must have room to move in before it can come up to the height of its argument. The abruptness of its periods is not really an interruption of its even flight; it is an abruptness of detail, like a broken sea with a larger wave moving under it; it does not impair or disguise the grandeur of the movement as a whole.” Of the progress and decline of the chansons de geste (q.v.) from the ideals of Roland a fuller account is given elsewhere. To theNibelungenlied (q.v.) also, detailed attention is given in a separate article.

What may be called the artificial or secondary epics of modern Europe, founded upon an imitation of the Iliad and the Aeneid, are more numerous than the ordinary reader supposes, although but few of them have preserved much vitality. In Italy the Chanson de Roland inspired romantic epics by Luigi Pulci (1432-1487), whose Morgante Maggiore appeared in 1481, and is a masterpiece of burlesque; by M.M. Boiardo (1434-1494), whoseOrlando Innamorato was finished in 1486; by Francesco Bello (1440?-1495), whose Mambriano was published in 1497; by Lodovico Ariosto (q.v.), whose Orlando Furioso, by far the greatest of its class, was published in 1516, and by Luigi Dolce (1508-1568), as well as by a great number of less illustrious poets. G.G. Trissino (1478-1549) wrote a Deliverance of Italy from the Goths in 1547, and Bernardo Tasso (1493-1569) an Amadigi in 1559; Berni remodelled the epic of Boiardo in 1541, and Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544), ridiculed the whole school in an Orlandino of 1526. An extraordinary feat of mock-heroic epic was The Bucket (1622) of Alessandro Tassoni (1565-1638). The most splendid of all the epics of Italy, however, was, and remains, the Jerusalem Delivered of Torquato Tasso (q.v.), published originally in 1580, and afterwards rewritten as The Conquest of Jerusalem, 1593. The fantastic Adone (1623) of G.B. Marini (1569-1625) and the long poems of Chiabrera, close the list of Italian epics. Early Portuguese literature is rich in epic poetry. Luis Pereira Brandão wrote an Elegiada in 18 books, published in 1588; Jeronymo Corte-Real (d. 1588) a Shipwreck of Sepulveda and two other epics; V.M. Quevedo, in 1601, an Alphonso of Africa, in 12 books; Sá de Menezes (d. 1664) aConquest of Malacca, 1634; but all these, and many more, are obscured by the glory of Camoens (q.v.), whose magnificent Lusiads had been printed in 1572, and forms the summit of Portuguese literature. In Spanish poetry, the Poem of the Cid takes the first place, as the great national epic of the middle ages; it is supposed to have been written between 1135 and 1175. It was followed by the Rodrigo, and the medieval school closes with theAlphonso XI. of Rodrigo Yañez, probably written at the close of the 12th century. The success of the Italian imitative epics of the 15th century led to some imitation of their form in Spain. Juan de la Cueva (1550?-1606) published a Conquest of Bética in 1603; Cristóbal de Virues (1550-1610) aMonserrate, in 1588; Luis Barahona de Soto continued Ariosto in a Tears of Angélica; Gutiérrez wrote an Austriada in 1584; but perhaps the finest modern epic in Spanish verse is the Araucana (1569-1590) of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1595), “the first literary work of merit,” as Mr Fitzmaurice-Kelly remarks, “composed in either American continent.” In France, the epic never flourished in modern times, and no real success attended the Franciade of Ronsard, the Alaric of Scudéry, the Pucelle of Chapelain, the Divine Épopée of Soumet, or even the Henriade of Voltaire. In English literature The Faery Queen of Spenser has the same claim as the Italian poems mentioned above to bear the name of epic, and Milton, who stands entirely apart, may be said, by his isolated Paradise Lost, to take rank with Homer and Virgil, as one of the three types of the mastery of epical composition.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_a_Grecian_Urn#Structure

Ode on a Grecian Urn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A fine-line drawing of an urn. It is tall, with high scrolled handles. Around the middle is a frieze of figures, of which four can be seen. From left to right, a naked man with a helmet and sword, a dancing woman in a flowing garment, a robed woman carrying a spear and a naked man with a cloak hanging from his shoulder. The drawing is inscribed "By John Keats".
Tracing of an engraving of the Sosibios vase by Keats

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820, Number 15, issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts (see 1820 in poetry).

The poem is one of several "Great Odes of 1819", which includes "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem after reading two articles by English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Keats was aware of other works on classical Greek art, and had first-hand exposure to the Elgin Marbles, all of which reinforced his belief that classical Greek art was idealistic and captured Greek virtues, which forms the basis of the poem.

Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. The poem focuses on two scenes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfilment, and another of villagers about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", and literary critics have debated whether they increase or diminish the overall beauty of the poem. Critics have focused on other aspects of the poem, including the role of the narrator, the inspirational qualities of real-world objects, and the paradoxical relationship between the poem's world and reality.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was not well received by contemporary critics. It was only by the mid-19th century that it began to be praised, although it is now considered to be one of the greatest odes in the English language.[1] A long debate over the poem's final statement divided 20th-century critics, but most agreed on the beauty of the work, despite various perceived inadequacies.

Contents

1 Background
2 Structure
3 Poem
4 Themes
5 Critical response
5.1 Beauty is truth debate
5.2 Later responses
6 Notes
7 References
8 Bibliography
9 External links

Background
Miniature of Keats in his twenties, a pale sensitive young man with large blue eyes looking up from a book on the table in front of him, with his chin on his left hand with his elbow. He has tousled golden-brown hair parted in the middle, and wears a grey jacket and waistcoat over a shirt with a soft collar and white cravate tied in a loose bow.
John Keats in 1819, painted by his friend Joseph Severn

By the spring of 1819, Keats had left his job as dresser, or assistant house surgeon, at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, London, to devote himself entirely to the composition of poetry. Living with his friend Charles Brown, the 23-year-old was burdened with money problems and despaired when his brother George sought his financial assistance. These real-world difficulties may have given Keats pause for thought about a career in poetry, yet he did manage to complete five odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to Psyche", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode on Indolence", and "Ode on a Grecian Urn".[2] The poems were transcribed by Brown, who later provided copies to the publisher Richard Woodhouse. Their exact date of composition is unknown; Keats simply dated "Ode on a Grecian Urn" May 1819, as he did its companion odes. While the five poems display a unity in stanza forms and themes, the unity fails to provide clear evidence of the order in which they were composed.[3]

In the odes of 1819 Keats explores his contemplations about relationships between the soul, eternity, nature, and art. His idea of using classical Greek art as a metaphor originated in his reading of Haydon's Examiner articles of 2 May and 9 May 1819. In the first article, Haydon described Greek sacrifice and worship, and in the second article, he contrasted the artistic styles of Raphael and Michelangelo in conjunction with a discussion of medieval sculptures. Keats also had access to prints of Greek urns at Haydon's office,[4] and he traced an engraving of the "Sosibios Vase", a Neo-Attic marble volute krater, signed by Sosibios, in The Louvre,[5] which he found in Henry Moses's A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Paterae.[6][7]

Keats's inspiration for the topic was not limited to Haydon, but embraced many contemporary sources.[8] He may have recalled his experience with the Elgin Marbles[9] and their influence on his sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles".[10] Keats was also exposed to the Townley, Borghese, and Holland House vases and to the classical treatment of subjects in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Many contemporary essays and articles on these works shared Keats's view that classical Greek art was both idealistic and captured Greek virtues. Although he was influenced by examples of existing Greek vases, in the poem he attempted to describe an ideal artistic type, rather than a specific original vase.[11]

Although "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was completed in May 1819, its first printing came in January 1820 when it was published with "Ode to a Nightingale" in the Annals of Fine Art, an art magazine that promoted views on art similar to those Keats held.[12] Following the initial publication, the Examiner published Keats's ode together with Haydon's two previously published articles.[13] Keats also included the poem in his 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.[14]
Structure

In 1819, Keats had attempted to write sonnets, but found that the form did not satisfy his purpose because the pattern of rhyme worked against the tone that he wished to achieve. When he turned to the ode form, he found that the standard Pindaric form used by poets such as John Dryden was inadequate for properly discussing philosophy.[15] Keats developed his own type of ode in "Ode to Psyche", which preceded "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and other odes he wrote in 1819. Keats's creation established a new poetic tone that accorded with his aesthetic ideas about poetry. He further altered this new form in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by adding a secondary voice within the ode, creating a dialogue between two subjects.[16] The technique of the poem is ekphrasis, the poetic representation of a painting or sculpture in words. Keats broke from the traditional use of ekphrasis found in Theocritus's Idyll, a classical poem that describes a design on the sides of a cup. While Theocritus describes both motion found in a stationary artwork and underlying motives of characters, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" replaces actions with a series of questions and focuses only on external attributes of the characters.[17]

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is organized into ten-line stanzas, beginning with an ABAB rhyme scheme and ending with a Miltonic sestet (1st and 5th stanzas CDEDCE, 2nd stanza CDECED, and 3rd and 4th stanzas CDECDE). The same overall pattern is used in "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to a Nightingale" (though their sestet rhyme schemes vary), which makes the poems unified in structure as well as theme.[3] The word "ode" itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung". While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it represented a manner rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. Keats's odes seek to find a "classical balance" between two extremes, and in the structure of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", these extremes are the symmetrical structure of classical literature and the asymmetry of Romantic poetry. The use of the ABAB structure in the beginning lines of each stanza represents a clear example of structure found in classical literature, and the remaining six lines appear to break free of the traditional poetic styles of Greek and Roman odes.[18]

Keats's metre reflects a conscious development in his poetic style. The poem contains only a single instance of medial inversion (the reversal of an iamb in the middle of a line), which was common in his earlier works. However, Keats incorporates spondees in 37 of the 250 metrical feet. Caesurae are never placed before the fourth syllable in a line. The word choice represents a shift from Keats's early reliance on Latinate polysyllabic words to shorter, Germanic words. In the second stanza, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which emphasizes words containing the letters "p", "b", and "v", uses syzygy, the repetition of a consonantal sound. The poem incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, which is found in very few English poems. Within "Ode on a Grecian Urn", an example of this pattern can be found in line 13 ("Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd") where the "e" of "sensual" connects with the "e" of "endear'd" and the "ea" of "ear" connects with the "ea" of "endear'd". A more complex form is found in line 11 ("Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard") with the "ea" of "Heard" connecting to the "ea" of "unheard", the "o" of "melodies" connecting to the "o" of "those" and the "u" of "but" connecting to the "u" of "unheard".[19]
Poem
Manuscript in Keats's hand titled "Ode on a Grecian Urn 1819." It is a fair copy in pen and ink of the first two verses of the poem. The writing is highly legible, tall and elegant, with well-formed letters and a marked slope to the right. The capital letters are distinctive and artistically formed. Even-numbered lines are indented with lines 7 and 10 are further indented. A scallopy line is drawn beneath the heading and between the verses.
First known copy of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", transcribed by George Keats in 1820

The poem begins with the narrator's silencing the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions.[20] The narrator addresses the urn by saying:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1–2)

The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it was created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who did not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and ageing is such a slow process that it can be seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells its story through its beauty:[21]

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 3–10)

The questions presented in these lines are too ambiguous to allow the reader to understand what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed: there is a pursuit with a strong sexual component.[22] The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[23]

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11–14)

There is a hint of a paradox in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that music without a sound is desired by the soul. There is a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[23]

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17–20)

In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not "bid the Spring adieu". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be:[23]

For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (lines 27–30)

Renaissance painting depicting the sacrifice at Lystra. In an ancient Greek townscape, a cow is brought before a small altar, and held by a kneeling man with her head down while another raises an axe to kill her. A group of people look with worshipful gestures towards two men who stand on the steps behind the altar. One of the men turns aside and rends his clothes, while the other speaks to the people. A crutch lies abandoned in the foreground and a statue of Hermes is at the end of the square.
Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lystra

A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.[24] To overcome this paradox of merged life and death, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective.[24] The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, Claude Lorrain's Sacrifice to Apollo, and Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lystra[25][A 1]

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. (lines 31–40)

All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real. The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:[26]

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41–45)

The audience is limited in its ability to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak to them. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind. The poem concludes with the urn's message:[27]

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 46–50)

Themes
A Romantic painting of Keats sitting near a wood on elevated land. It is evening and the full moon appears above the wood while fading daylight illuminates a distant landscape. Keats appears to turn suddenly from the book he has been reading, towards the trees where a nightingale is silhouetted against the moon.
Keats, Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn

Like many of Keats's odes, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" discusses art and art's audience. He relied on depictions of natural music in earlier poems, and works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" appeal to auditory sensations while ignoring the visual. Keats reverses this when describing an urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to focus on representational art. He previously used the image of an urn in "Ode on Indolence", depicting one with three figures representing Love, Ambition and Poesy. Of these three, Love and Poesy are integrated into "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with an emphasis on how the urn, as a human artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth". The images of the urn described within the poem are intended as obvious depictions of common activities: an attempt at courtship, the making of music, and a religious rite. The figures are supposed to be beautiful, and the urn itself is supposed to be realistic.[28] Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the narrator, the description of the urn within the poem implies a human observer that draws out these images.[29] The narrator interacts with the urn in a manner similar to how a critic would respond to the poem, which creates ambiguity in the poem's final lines: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The lack of a definite voice of the urn causes the reader to question who is really speaking these words, to whom they are speaking, and what is meant by the words, which encourages the reader to interact with the poem in an interrogative manner like the narrator.[30]

As a symbol, an urn cannot completely represent poetry, but it does serve as one component in describing the relationship between art and humanity.[31] The nightingale of "Ode to a Nightingale" is separated from humanity and does not have human concerns. The urn, as a piece of art, requires an audience and is in an incomplete state on its own. This allows the urn to interact with humanity, to put forth a narrative, and allows for the imagination to operate. The images on the urn provoke the narrator to ask questions, and the silence of the urn reinforces the imagination's ability to operate. This interaction and use of the imagination is part of a greater tradition called ut pictura poesis – the contemplation of art by a poet – which serves as a meditation upon art itself.[32] In this meditation, the narrator dwells on the aesthetic and mimetic features of art. The beginning of the poem posits that the role of art is to describe a specific story about those with whom the audience is unfamiliar, and the narrator wishes to know the identity of the figures in a manner similar to "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode to Psyche". The figures on the urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" lack identities, but the first section ends with the narrator believing that if he knew the story, he would know their names. The second section of the poem, describing the piper and the lovers, meditates on the possibility that the role of art is not to describe specifics but universal characters, which falls under the term "Truth". The three figures would represent how Love, Beauty, and Art are unified together in an idealised world where art represents the feelings of the audience. The audience is not supposed to question the events but instead to rejoice in the happy aspects of the scene in a manner that reverses the claims about art in "Ode to a Nightingale". Similarly, the response of the narrator to the sacrifice is not compatible with the response of the narrator to the lovers.[33]

The two contradictory responses found in the first and second scenes of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are inadequate for completely describing art, because Keats believed that art should not provide history or ideals. Instead, both are replaced with a philosophical tone that dominates the meditation on art. The sensual aspects are replaced with an emphasis on the spiritual aspects, and the last scene describes a world contained unto itself. The relationship between the audience with the world is for benefiting or educating, but merely to emphatically connect to the scene. In the scene, the narrator contemplates where the boundaries of art lie and how much an artist can represent on an urn. The questions the narrator asks reveal a yearning to understand the scene, but the urn is too limited to allow such answers. Furthermore, the narrator is able to visualise more than what actually exists on the urn. This conclusion on art is both satisfying, in that it allows the audience to actually connect with the art, and alienating, as it does not provide the audience the benefit of instruction or narcissistic fulfilment.[34] Besides the contradictions between the various desires within the poem, there are other paradoxes that emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the figures on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a "bride of quietness", which serves to contrast the urn with the structure of the ode, a type of poem originally intended to be sung. Another paradox arises when the narrator describes immortals on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.[35]

In terms of the actual figures upon the urn, the image of the lovers depicts the relationship of passion and beauty with art. In "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on Melancholy", Keats describes how beauty is temporary. However, the figures of the urn are able to always enjoy their beauty and passion because of their artistic permanence.[36] The urn's description as a bride invokes a possibility of consummation, which is symbolic of the urn's need for an audience. Charles Patterson, in a 1954 essay, explains that "It is erroneous to assume that here Keats is merely disparaging the bride of flesh wed to man and glorifying the bride of marble wed to quietness. He could have achieved that simple effect more deftly with some other image than the richly ambivalent unravished bride, which conveys ... a hint of disparagement: It is natural for brides to be possessed physically ... it is unnatural for them not to be."[37] John Jones, in his 1969 analysis, emphasises this sexual dimension within the poem by comparing the relationship between "the Eve Adam dreamed of and who was there when he woke up" and the "bridal urn" of "Ode on a Grecian Urn".[38] Helen Vendler expands on the idea, in her 1983 analysis of Keats's odes, when she claimed "the complex mind writing the Urn connects stillness and quietness to ravishment and a bride".[39] In the second stanza, Keats "voices the generating motive of the poem – the necessary self-exhaustion and self-perpetuation of sexual appetite."[40] To Vendler, desire and longing could be the source of artistic creativity, but the urn contains two contradicting expressions of sexuality: a lover chasing after a beloved and a lover with his beloved. This contradiction reveals Keats's belief that such love in general was unattainable and that "The true opponent to the urn-experience of love is not satisfaction but extinction."[41]
Critical response

The first response to the poem came in an anonymous review in the July 1820 Monthly Review, which claimed, "Mr Keats displays no great nicety in his selection of images. According to the tenets of that school of poetry to which he belongs, he thinks that any thing or object in nature is a fit material on which the poet may work ... Can there be a more pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn?"[42] Another anonymous review followed in the 29 July 1820 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review that quoted the poem with a note that said that "Among the minor poems, many of which possess considerable merit, the following appears to be the best".[43] Josiah Conder, in a September 1820 Eclectic Review, argues that:

Mr Keats, seemingly, can think or write of scarcely any thing else than the 'happy pieties' of Paganism. A Grecian Urn throws him into an ecstasy: its 'silent form,' he says, 'doth tease us out of thought as doth Eternity,'—a very happy description of the bewildering effect which such subjects have at least had upon his own mind; and his fancy having thus got the better of his reason, we are the less surprised at the oracle which the Urn is made to utter:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

That is, all that Mr Keats knows or cares to know.—But till he knows much more than this, he will never write verses fit to live.[44]

George Gilfillan, in an 1845 essay on Keats, placed the poem among "The finest of Keats' smaller pieces" and suggested that "In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed. His works 'rise like an exhalation.' His language has been formed on a false system; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious clear, and select. He seems to have been averse to all speculative thought, and his only creed, we fear, was expressed in the words— Beauty is truth,—truth beauty".[45] The 1857 Encyclopædia Britannica contained an article on Keats by Alexander Smith, which stated: "Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the 'Ode to the Grecian Urn'; it breathes the very spirit of antiquity,—eternal beauty and eternal repose."[46] During the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold claimed that the passage describing the little town "is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added."[47]
Beauty is truth debate

The 20th century marked the beginning of a critical dispute over the final lines of the poem and their relationship to the beauty of the whole work. Poet laureate Robert Bridges sparked the debate when he argued:

The thought as enounced in the first stanza is the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfect; and this is true and beautiful; but its amplification in the poem is unprogressive, monotonous, and scattered ... which gives an effect of poverty in spite of the beauty. The last stanza enters stumbling upon a pun, but its concluding lines are very fine, and make a sort of recovery with their forcible directness.[48]

Bridges believed that the final lines redeemed an otherwise bad poem. Arthur Quiller-Couch responded with a contrary view and claimed that the lines were "a vague observation – to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent."[48] The debate expanded when I. A. Richards, an English literary critic who analysed Keats's poems in 1929, relied on the final lines of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to discuss "pseudo-statements" in poetry:

On the one hand there are very many people who, if they read any poetry at all, try to take all its statements seriously – and find them silly ... This may seem an absurd mistake but, alas! it is none the less common. On the other hand there are those who succeed too well, who swallow 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty ...,' as the quintessence of an aesthetic philosophy, not as the expression of a certain blend of feelings, and proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle-mindedness as a result of their linguistic naivety.[49]

Poet and critic T. S. Eliot, in his 1929 "Dante" essay, responded to Richards:

I am at first inclined to agree ... But on re-reading the whole Ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would have repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement ... The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me.[50]

In 1930, John Middleton Murry gave a history of these responses "to show the astonishing variety of opinion which exists at this day concerning the culmination of a poem whose beauty has been acknowledged for many years. Whether such another cause, and such another example, of critical diversity exists, I cannot say; if it does, it is unknown to me. My own opinion concerning the value of those two lines in the context of the poem itself is not very different from Mr. Eliot's."[51]

Cleanth Brooks defended the lines from critics in 1947 and argued:

We shall not feel that the generalization, unqualified and to be taken literally, is meant to march out of its context to compete with the scientific and philosophical generalizations which dominate our world. 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' has precisely the same status, and the same justification as Shakespeare's 'Ripeness is all.' It is a speech 'in character' and supported by a dramatic context. To conclude thus may seem to weight the principle of dramatic propriety with more than it can bear. This would not be fair to the complexity of the problem of truth in art nor fair to Keats's little parable. Granted; and yet the principle of dramatic propriety may take us further than would first appear. Respect for it may at least insure our dealing with the problem of truth at the level on which it is really relevant to literature.[52]

M. H. Abrams responded to Brooks's view in 1957:

I entirely agree, then, with Professor Brooks in his explication of the Ode, that 'Beauty is truth' ... is to be considered as a speech 'in character' and 'dramatically appropriate' to the Urn. I am uneasy, however, about his final reference to 'the world-view ...' For the poem as a whole is equally an utterance by a dramatically presented speaker, and none of its statements is proffered for our endorsement as a philosophical generalization of unlimited scope. They are all, therefore, to be apprehended as histrionic elements which are 'in character' and 'dramatically appropriate,' for their inherent interest as stages in the evolution of an artistically ordered ... experience of a credible human being.[53]

Earl Wasserman, in 1953, continued the discussion over the final lines and claimed, "the more we tug at the final lines of the ode, the more the noose of their meaning strangles our comprehension of the poem ... The aphorism is all the more beguiling because it appears near the end of the poem, for its apparently climactic position has generally led to the assumption that it is the abstract summation of the poem ... But the ode is not an abstract statement or an excursion into philosophy. It is a poem about things".[54]

Walter Evert, discussing the debate in 1965, justified the final lines of the poem to declare "The poem, then, accepts the urn for the immediate meditative imaginative pleasure that it can give, but it firmly defines the limits of artistic truth. In this it is wholly consistent with all the great poetry of Keats's last creative period."[55] Hugh Kenner, in 1971, explained that Keats "interrogates an urn, and answers for it, and its last answer, about Beauty and Truth, may seem almost intolerably enigmatic".[56] To Kenner, the problem with Keats's Beauty and Truth statement arises out of the reader's inability to distinguish between the poet, his reflections on the urn, and any possible statement made by the urn. He concluded that Keats fails to provide his narrator with enough characterization to be able to speak for the urn.[56] Charles Rzepka, in 1986, offered his view on the matter: "The truth-beauty equation at the end of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' offers solace but is finally no more convincing than the experience it describes is durable."[57] Rick Rylance picked up the debate again in 1990 and explained that the true meaning of the final lines cannot be discerned merely by studying the language. This posed a problem for the New Critics, who were prone to closely reading a poem's text.[58]
Later responses

Not every 20th-century critic opined primarily on the quality of the final lines when discussing the success or failure of the poem; Sidney Colvin, in 1920, explained that "while imagery drawn from the sculptures on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn."[59] In his 1926 analysis, H. W. Garrod felt that the end of the poem did not match with the rest of the poem: "Perhaps the fourth stanza is more beautiful than any of the others—and more true. The trouble is that it is a little too true. Truth to his main theme has taken Keats rather farther than he meant to go ... This pure cold art makes, in fact, a less appeal to Keats than the Ode as a whole would pretend; and when, in the lines that follow these lines, he indulges the jarring apostrophe 'Cold Pastoral' [...] he has said more than he meant—or wished to mean."[60] In 1933, M. R. Ridley described the poem as a "tense ethereal beauty" with a "touch of didacticism that weakens the urgency" of the statements.[61] Douglas Bush, following in 1937, emphasized the Greek aspects of the poem and stated, "as in the Ode to Maia, the concrete details are suffused with a rich nostalgia. The hard edges of classical Greek writing are softened by the enveloping emotion and suggestion. In his classical moments Keats is a sculptor whose marble becomes flesh."[62]

In 1954, Charles Patterson defended the poem and claimed, "The meaningfulness and range of the poem, along with its controlled execution and powerfully suggestive imagery, entitle it to a high place among Keats's great odes. It lacks the even finish and extreme perfection of To Autumn but is much superior in these qualities to the Ode to a Nightingale despite the magic passages in the latter and the similarities of over-all structure. In fact, the Ode on a Grecian Urn may deserve to rank first in the group if viewed in something approaching its true complexity and human wisdom."[63] Walter Jackson Bate argued in 1962 that "the Grecian Urn possesses a quiet and constrained composure hardly equaled by the other odes of this month and perhaps even unsurpassed by the ode To Autumn of the following September ... there is a severe repose about the Ode on a Grecian Urn; it is both 'interwoven' and 'complete'; and within its tensely braced stanzas is a potential energy momentarily stilled and imprisoned."[64] In 1964, literary critic David Perkins claimed in his essay "The Ode on a Nightingale" that the symbol of the urn "may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry ... but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions".[31]

F. W. Bateson emphasized in 1966 the poem's ability to capture truth: "The Ode to a Nightingale had ended with the explicit admission that the 'fancy' is a 'cheat,' and the Grecian Urn concludes with a similar repudiation. But this time it is a positive instead of a negative conclusion. There is no escape from the 'woe' that 'shall this generation waste,' but the action of time can be confronted and seen in its proper proportions. To enable its readers to do this is the special function of poetry."[65] Ronald Sharp followed in 1979 with a claim that the theme of "the relationship between life and art ... receives its most famous, and its most enigmatic and controversial, treatment" within the poem.[66] In 1983, Vendler praised many of the passages within the poem but argued that the poem was unable to fully represent what Keats wanted: "The simple movement of entrance and exit, even in its triple repetition in the Urn, is simply not structurally complex enough to be adequate, as a representational form, to what we know of aesthetic experience – or indeed to human experience generally."[67] Later in 1989, Daniel Watkins claimed the poem as "one of [Keats's] most beautiful and problematic works."[68]

Andrew Bennett, in 1994, discussed the poem's effectiveness: "What is important and compelling in this poem is not so much what happens on the urn or in the poem, but the way that a response to an artwork both figures and prefigures its own critical response".[69] In 1999, Andrew Motion claimed that the poem "tells a story that cannot be developed. Celebrating the transcendent powers of art, it creates a sense of imminence, but also registers a feeling of frustration."[6] Ayumi Mizukoshi, in 2001, argued that early audiences did not support "Ode to Psyche" because it "turned out to be too reflexive and internalised to be enjoyed as a mythological picture. For the same reason, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' drew neither attention nor admiration. Although the poet is gazing round the surface of the urn in each stanza, the poem cannot readily be consumed as a series of 'idylls'."[70]
Notes

The Raphael is one of the Raphael Cartoons then at Hampton Court Palace. The Claude is now usually called Landscape with the Father of Psyche sacrificing to Apollo, and is now at Anglesey Abbey. It was one of the pair of "Altieri Claudes", among the most famous and expensive paintings of the day. See Reitlinger, Gerald; The Economics of Taste, Vol I: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960, Barrie and Rockliffe, London, 1961, and Art and Money Archived July 7, 2011, at the Wayback Machine., by Robert Hughes. Image of the Raphael, and image of the Claude .................................................. ....

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/_explication_of_one_flesh_by_elizabeth_jennings-1719

Explication of “One Flesh” by Elizabeth Jennings
Written by: Ross Vassilev

“One Flesh” is probably the best-known poem by the late British poetess Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001). Published as part of her poetry collection The Mind Has Mountains (1966), the poem is an ode ostensibly devoted to her aging parents who—upon entering the chilly late autumn of their long married life—have drifted apart both physically and emotionally. Its ironic title is an allusion to a biblical phrase in Genesis, “one flesh,” which is an allegorical symbol of marriage: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:21).

But rather than criticize her elderly parents for their estrangement from each other, the ode is conveying her feelings of sadness, sympathy, regret, and daughterly concern. Of course, one should never mistake a poem's persona for its author, especially since Jennings was not known to “write explicitly autobiographical poetry” (PoemHunter.com). This explication of “One Flesh” explores the deeper (symbolic) meaning as well as the structure of the lyric poem, underlying its lasting popularity with many readers on both sides of the Atlantic. By focusing on the connotations and relationships of words, imagery, figures of speech, and other poetic components that comprise “One Flesh,” this essay connects the poem’s theme, plot, characters, and conflicts to its structural elements, such as form, content, rhyme, voice, mood, diction, tone, rhythm, etc. It is due to its masterful and sensitive treatment of eternal but delicate themes like love, marriage, disillusionment, loneliness, suffering, as well as death, that Jennings' ode appeals to a broad array of readers—both young and old, men and women.

The analysis begins by examining the ode's symbolic meaning(s) and beautiful poetic language, including the use of figurative speech, which account for the reader's reactions of aesthetic pleasure and emotional enjoyment. The first stanza opens with a melancholy depiction of an old couple in their bedroom, both “Lying apart now, each in a separate bed, / He with a book, keeping the light on late, / She like a girl dreaming of childhood” (lines 1-3). The separate beds are both a metaphor and a symbol of the physical distance and emotional separation of the two spouses. The husband is pretending to read a book in bed with his nightstand lamp on, while “she is like a girl” (a simile) who is daydreaming in bed about her long-lost childhood (2-3). But he seems to have no interest in his “unread” book (a case of situational irony), brooding instead over how “all” men seem to be waiting for something “new” in their lives: “All men elsewhere—it is as if they wait / Some new event: || the book he holds unread, / Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead” (4-6). The use of a caesura—a pause (||) within a poetic line —in conjunction with an enjambment (a run-on line) in line 5 hints at the husband's awareness or implicit acknowledgement of his mortality. The wife, on the other hand, is just staring at the lamp's shadows on the ceiling (a metaphor for her childhood memories), clearly trying to escape the depressing reality of having grown old. It is likely that the phrase “the shadows overhead” is an allusion to the famous solipsistic metaphor of a cave fire's shadows on the cave wall in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, symbolizing life's uncertainties, deceptiveness, and unreality. Ultimately, what the old couple is silently waiting for is death (a recurring theme never explicitly mentioned in the text), which is not that far off in their future.

The second stanza makes use of a simile (“like flotsam”) and a quasi-onomatopoeia (“Tossed”)—“Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion, / How cool they lie. || They hardly ever touch” (7-8)—to describe how the old couple is like wreckage jettisoned by the shipwreck of their long-faded romantic passion, as both lie emotionless and cold to each other in their separate beds, avoiding any interaction. And when they do show some feelings for one another, it is an embarrassing admission—”like a confession” (a simile)—of feeling guilty for their indifference or even hostility to each other: “Or if they do, || it is like a confession / Of having little feeling || —or too much” (9-10). Using caesuras before the line breaks in lines 8, 9, and 10 contributes to the ode's natural rhythm. One can even feel the old couple's deliberate silences in the poem's steady rhythm. A loveless future without any intimacy and passion lies ahead of them—indeed, a sexless life of “chastity” (a religious metaphor)—for which they have been preparing mentally all their lives: “Chastity faces them, a destination / For which their whole lives were a preparation” (11-12), because they have always felt intuitively that this is how their marriage is destined to end up in old age.

The third stanza starts with a juxtaposition, which changes somewhat the poem's somber atmosphere by contrasting the aged couple being “apart” with it being also “close together.” It employs a simile (“like a thread”) to portray them as physically apart and yet spiritually still bonded. Their silence (as they have nothing to say to each other any more) tenuously keeps them together like a fine “thread”—as if they are holding on a life-saving line but not pulling it in: “Strangely apart, yet strangely close together, / Silence between them like a thread to hold / And not wind in...” (13-15). Lines 13 and 14 make use of the stylistic device of sibilance—a form of alliteration, in which the “s” consonant is repeated in quick succession at the beginning of more than two words: “Strangely apart, yet strangely close together, / Silence...” in order to emphasize the silence of their mutual estrangement. Much like their long silences, “time” (presumably, their long life together) keeps them connected, even though time is at the same time compared to a flighty “feather” (a metaphor for the fickleness of life), which quietly and imperceptibly ages both of them: “...And time itself's a feather / Touching them gently...” (15-16). The stanza closes with a gloomy rhetorical question which, for the first time, puts the poem in a more personal, almost autobiographical context, by revealing the persona's (the poet's?) relationship to the elderly couple: “Do they know they're old, / These two who are my father and my mother / Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?” (16-18). Using a second juxtaposition and another effective metaphor (“fire”), the poetess regretfully contrasts her parents' long-extinguished “fire” of youthful romance, love, and passion with their “cold” detachment and physical disconnection in old age.

In terms of structure and sound patterns, “One Flesh” consists of three stanzas with six lines each (so-called sestets or sextets), measuring usually ten syllables per line (that is, a metrical line of five feet or iambic pentameter). The poem's rhyme scheme is abcbaa (a rare variant of the English sestet, using an off-rhyme or slant rhyme at the line break in line 3) in the first stanza and dedeff (conventional English sestet) in the second stanza, but it changes to ghghgh (Sicilian sestet) in the last stanza, where the persona's identity and relationship to the elderly couple are finally uncovered. The whole poem is presented from the point of view of the persona (the poetess), revealing in the first-person voice what's on her mind, but never what's going on in the minds of her aged parents. In addition to using the non-traditional form of six-line stanzas, each ending in a heroic couplet—“two lines of iambic pentameter, consecutively rhymed” (Burroway 371)—the poem's metered verse is rendered all the more remarkable for its simple but memorable word choice (diction), melancholy tone, poignant mood, monotonously repetitive rhythm, and a pessimistic state of mind which casts doubts on the very possibility that marital love can last forever—or even for very long. Those two who once used to be physically and mentally “one flesh” are now co-habiting strangers who are deeply alienated from each other. This is not an unexpected sentiment for someone like Miss Jennings, who—although well-educated, intellectually refined, and quite pretty in her younger days—never married. Because of its masterful and sensitive treatment of eternal but delicate themes like love, flawed marriage, disillusionment, loneliness, suffering, and death, her elegiac poem “One Flesh” appeals to a surprisingly wide array of readers—both young and old, men and women.



Works Cited

Burroway, Janet. Ed. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. 4th edition. Boston: Longman Publishing Group, 2014. Print.

Jennings, Elizabeth. “One Flesh.” Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. Ed. Janet Burroway. 4th edition. Boston: Longman Publishing Group, 2014. 129. Print.

New American Standard Bible. Genesis. Lockman Foundation: La Habra, California, 1995. 2:21. Web. 3 Feb. 2015. <http://biblehub.com/nasb/genesis/2.htm>.

“Biography of Elizabeth Jennings.” PoemHunter.com. Web. 2 Feb. 2015. <http://www.poemhunter.com/elizabeth-jennings/biography/>

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/a_poet_of_the_poor_mary_pyper-1111

A Poet of the Poor: Mary Pyper
Written by: William Andrews

SCOTLAND is a land of song. It has been the birthplace of many poets who have added glory to our literary annals. Its list of authors includes the names of a large number of men and women in the humbler walks of life, who took up literature under difficulties, and won honourable places in the world of letters. Burns at the plough, Hogg tending his sheep on the hillside, Hugh Miller in the quarry, Allan Cunningham with chisel in hand, William Thom and Robert Tannahill at the shuttle, and Janet Hamilton in her humble home are familiar figures to every reader of Scottish biography.

Amongst the lesser known names is that of Mary Pyper, who, under severe trials, read a great deal and produced poems of considerable merit for a self-taught writer. She was born at Greenock, on the 27th of May, 1795. Her father was a clockmaker, named Alexander Pyper, who had married a worthy woman, Isabella Andrews, both of whom were natives of Edinburgh. Failing[Pg 168] to obtain regular employment in their native city, the parents of our heroine moved westwards in search of work. Mary Pyper, in an autobiographical letter, addressed to the Rev. Charles Rogers, ll.d., states that “her father enlisted in the 42nd Highlanders on account of failing to find employment.” Says Mr. D. H. Edwards, in his Modern Scottish Poets, “it was a time of war when recruits were often made in an unscrupulous manner, and one day Alexander Pyper found a shilling in his pocket, and was told to his astonishment that he had enlisted in His Majesty’s service.” His regiment, shortly after he joined it, received orders to march from Perth across the Sheriffmuir, a distance of sixteen miles. Poor Mrs. Pyper walked, carrying her infant in her arms, the rain coming down in torrents. After a weary tramp the poor mother sat down nearly broken-hearted, fearing that her baby had perished. On the arrival of the baggage carts, warm clothing and other necessaries were procured, and happily the child began to revive.

The regiment subsequently proceeded to Ireland. Pyper, on leaving Dublin for England, stumbled and fractured his leg. The accident rendered him unfit for active service, and he was discharged.[Pg 169] He did not long survive, and at the age of six months, Mary Pyper was left fatherless.

Her mother then returned to her native city. Here she had to struggle for bread, gaining a scanty living as a boot-binder. She devoted much time to the education of her child, who proved an apt scholar. Mother and daughter delighted in the study of history, but Mary’s chief pleasure was derived from the works of the poets. She was familiar with the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Cowper, and other celebrated authors. As a child she was puny; she was always little, and might be called a dwarf. In her early years she suffered much from ill-health. She was troubled with jaundice, and on three occasions had severe attacks of fever, each lasting from six to eight weeks. Her mother, too, was often sick, and when other children of her age were enjoying childish games Mary Pyper was busy with her needle helping to add to the slender income of her mother.

After being confined to her bed for six years, Mrs. Pyper died on the 27th of March, 1827. It was during the attendance on her mother that Mary first thought of composing verses. The poor woman had been obliged to run into debt to[Pg 170] the extent of £9. This amount was paid by her daughter out of her wages of six shillings per week, obtained from a shop-keeper who employed her to make buttons and fringes. Hoping to earn more, she left her situation, and obtained a small basket containing fancy goods, which she hawked for sale, but this did not prove a satisfactory means of making a living. It was uncertain, and the walking fatiguing. In later years she had a continual struggle, and met with numerous misfortunes. Writing to Dr. Rogers, in 1860, she said: “As I was working in our church-school, I fell and broke my arm, some ten years since. Eight months after this, I was painting my house and, over-reaching myself, ricked my back, and the year before I fell on the frost and severely hurt my head.” Kind friends helped to lighten her troubles, which she bore with Christian fortitude.

A small volume of her poems was published in 1860, mainly through the assistance of Mr. T. Constable. The work met with a favourable reception, and a couple of the hymns were reproduced in the pages of Lyra Britannica. Mr. Henry Wright, the compiler of the work entitled Lays of Pious Minstrels, includes in it examples[Pg 171] of Mary Pyper’s poetry. In the preface to his volume he wrote: “The attention of my readers is especially directed to the pieces ‘Let me go,’ ‘Servant of God,’ and ‘We shall see Him as He is,’ the composition of Miss Mary Pyper, a resident in one of the closes or alleys in the Old Town of Edinburgh, who is in extreme old age, quite alone in the world, totally blind, and in deep poverty. Since the notice of Miss Pyper appeared in the last edition of this work, many benevolent persons have sent me donations for her in postage stamps, and otherwise. I shall be glad to be the medium of alleviating in any degree the very painful circumstances in which she is placed.” It will be seen from the foregoing that in addition to other afflictions she lost her eyesight in her old age.

We give a few specimens of her verses, which are chiefly of a religious and devotional character. The first poem is entitled “The Christian’s View of Death”:

“Let me go! the Day is breaking
Morning bursts upon mine eye,
Death this mortal frame is shaking,
But the soul can never die!

Let me go! the Day-Star, beaming,
[Pg 172]Gilds the radiant realms above;
Its full glory on me streaming,
Lights me to the Land of Love.”

The last stanzas of her “Servant of God” are as follow:—

“There Flowers immortal bloom
To charm the ravished sight;
And palms and harps await for those
Who walk with Him in white.

For they shall sing the song
Of Moses, long foretold,
When they have passed those pearly gates
And streets of burnished gold.

The glories of the Lamb
Their rapturous strains shall raise—
Eternal ages shall record
His love, His power, His praise.”

The following are the concluding lines of “We shall see Him as He is”:—

“When we pass o’er death’s dark river
We shall see Him as He is—
Resting in His love and favour
Owning all the glory His;
There to cast our crowns before Him—
Oh! what bliss the thought affords!
There for ever to adore Him—
King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

One of her best hymns is entitled “What has Jesus done?” The little gem we next reproduce is perhaps her best known production. It has been widely quoted and much admired:—

[Pg 173]Epitaph: A Life.

“I came at morn—’twas Spring, I smiled,
The fields with green were clad;
I walked abroad at noon, and lo!
’Twas summer—I was glad.
I sate me down—’twas autumn eve,
And I with sadness wept;
I laid me down at night—and then
’Twas winter—and I slept.”

The following poem is a fair specimen of her poetic power:—

On seeing two little girls present
a flower to a dying person.

“Come, sit beside my couch of death,
With that fair summer flower,
That I may taste its balmy breath
Before my final hour.
The lily’s virgin purity,
The rose’s rich perfume,
Speak with a thrilling voice to me,
Preparing for the tomb.

“Each calls to mind sweet Sharon’s rose,
The lily of the vale—
The white and stainless robes of those
Who conquer and prevail.
For as it droops its modest head,
Methinks it seems to say:
‘All flesh, like me, must quickly fade,
Must wither and decay!’

“And yet it tells of fairer skies,
[Pg 174]And happier lands than this,
Where beauteous flowers immortal vie,
And plants of Paradise:
A land where blooms eternal spring—
Where every storm is past;
Fain would my weary spirit wing
Its way—and be at rest.—

“But hark, I hear a choral strain—
It comes from worlds above,
It speaks of my release from pain,
Of rest—in Jesus’ love!
Jesus, my hope, my help, my stay,
My all in earth or heaven,
Let thy blest mandate only say,
‘Thy sins are all forgiven!’

“Then will I plume my joyful wing
To those blest realms of peace,
Where saints and angels ever sing,
And sorrows ever cease.
Dear mother, dry thy tearful eye,
And weep no more for me,
The orphan’s God that reigns on high
The widow’s God shall be.

“Pull me a sprig of that white flower,
And place it on my breast,
The last effect of friendship’s power
Shall charm my heart to rest.
Then, Lord, let me depart from pain
To realms where glories dwell,
Where I may meet those friends again,
And say no more ‘farewell!’”

Her first book did not yield much pecuniary profit. In 1865 a larger volume of her poetry was[Pg 175] published by Mr. Andrew Elliot, of Edinburgh. Her valued friend, Miss Moncrieff, prefaced it with a biographical sketch, and Dean Ramsay wrote an introduction. He described her poems as being of “no common excellence, both in diction and sentiment.” The book also contains a portrait of the author. Through the kindly interest of the publisher the work proved extremely successful, and the proceeds of the sale became her chief support in her old age, when unable to work through feeble health and blindness. She enjoyed many comforts, thanks to the help of Miss M. A. Scott Moncrieff, Mr. Andrew Elliot, and other warm-hearted friends.

She died in 1870, having reached more than the allotted three score years and ten, and was interred in the historic burial ground of Greyfriars’ Church, Edinburgh. Her last resting-place was for some years without any monumental stone, but mainly through the exertions of Dr. Rogers, in May, 1885, a handsome cross was erected over her remains, simply bearing her name, “Mary Pyper.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/minor_poets_of_the_south-824

Minor Poets of the South

Written by: F.V.N. Painter

The first poetic writer of this country had his home at Jamestown. He was GEORGE SANDYS who came to Virginia in 1621, and succeeded his brother as treasurer of the newly established colony. Amid the hardships of pioneer colonial life, in which he proved himself a leading spirit, he had the literary zeal to complete his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which he had begun in England. After the toilsome day, spent in introducing iron works or in encouraging shipbuilding, he sat down at night, within the shadow of surrounding forests, to construct his careful, rhymed pentameters. The conditions under which he wrote were very far removed from the Golden Age which he described,—

"Which uncompelled
And without rule, in faith and truth, excelled."

The promise of this bright, heroic beginning in poetry was not realized; and scarcely another voice was heard in verse in the South before the Revolution. The type of civilization developed in the South prior to the Civil War, admirable as it was in many other particulars, was hardly favorable to literature. The energies of the most intelligent portion of the population were directed to agriculture or to politics; and many of the foremost statesmen of our country—men like Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Calhoun, Benton—were from the Southern states. The system of slavery, while building up baronial homes of wealth, culture, and boundless hospitality, checked manufacture, retarded the growth of cities, and turned the tide of immigration westward. Without a vigorous public school system, a considerable part of the non-slaveholding class remained without literary taste or culture.

The South has been chiefly an agricultural region, and has adhered to conservative habits of thought. While various movements in theology, philosophy, and literature were stirring New England, the South pursued the even tenor of its way. Of all parts of our country, it has been most tenacious of old customs and beliefs. Before the Civil War the cultivated classes of the Southern states found their intellectual nourishment in the older English classics, and Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare formed a part of every gentleman's library. There were no great publishing houses to stimulate literary production; and to this day Southern writers are dependent chiefly on Northern publishers to give their works to the public. Literature was hardly taken seriously; it was rather regarded, to use the words of Paul Hamilton Hayne, "as the choice recreation of gentlemen, as something fair and good, to be courted in a dainty, amateur fashion, and illustrated by aproposquotations from Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace." Thus it happened that before the Civil War literature in the South, whether prose or poetry, had a less vigorous development than in the Middle States and New England.

Yet it has been common to undervalue the literary work of the South. While literature was not generally encouraged there before the Civil War,—a fact lamented by gifted, representative writers,—there were at least two literary centers that exerted a notable influence. The first was Richmond, the home of Poe during his earlier years, and of the Southern Literary Messenger, in its day the most influential magazine south of the Potomac. It was founded, as set forth in its first issue, in 1834, to encourage literature in Virginia and the other states of the South; and during its career of twenty-eight years it stimulated literary activity in a remarkable degree. Among its contributors we find Poe, Simms, Hayne, Timrod, John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and others—a galaxy of the best-known names in Southern literature.

The other principal literary center of the South was Charleston. "Legaré's wit and scholarship," to adopt the words of Mrs. Margaret J. Preston, "brightened its social circle; Calhoun's deep shadow loomed over it from his plantation at Fort Hill; Gilmore Simms's genial culture broadened its sympathies. The latter was the Maecenas to a band of brilliant youths who used to meet for literary suppers at his beautiful home." Among these brilliant youths were Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, two of the best poets the South has produced. The Southern Literary Gazette, founded by Simms, and Russell's Magazine, edited by Hayne, were published at Charleston. Louisville and New Orleans were likewise literary centers of more or less influence.

Yet it is a notable fact that none of these literary centers gave rise to a distinctive group or school of writers. The influence of these centers did not consist in one great dominating principle, but in a general stimulus to literary effort. In this respect it may be fairly claimed that the South was more cosmopolitan than the North. In New England, theology and transcendentalism in turn dominated literature; and not a few of the group of writers who contributed to the Atlantic Monthly were profoundly influenced by the anti-slavery agitation. They struggled up Parnassus, to use the words of Lowell,—

"With a whole bale of isms tied together with rime."

But the leading writers of the South, as will be seen later, have been exempt, in large measure, from the narrowing influence of one-sided theological or philosophical tenets. They have not aspired to the rôle of social reformers; and in their loyalty to art, they have abstained from fanatical energy and extravagance.

The major poets of the South stand out in strong, isolated individuality. They were not bound together by any sympathy other than that of a common interest in art and in their Southern home. Their genius was nourished on the choicest literary productions of England and of classic antiquity; and looking, with this Old World culture, upon Southern landscape and Southern character, they pictured or interpreted them in the language of poetry.

The three leading poets of the Civil War period—Hayne, Timrod, and Ryan —keenly felt the issues involved in that great struggle. All three of them were connected, for a time at least, with the Confederate army. In the earlier stages of the conflict, the intensity of their Southern feeling flamed out in thrilling lyrics. Timrod's martial songs throb with the energy of deep emotion. But all three poets lived to accept the results of the war, and to sing a new loyalty to our great Republic.

The South has not been as unfruitful in literature as is often supposed. While there have been very few to make literature a vocation, a surprisingly large number have made it an avocation. Law and literature, as we shall have occasion to note, have frequently gone hand in hand. A recent work on Southern literature enumerates more than twelve hundred writers, most of whom have published one or more volumes. There are more than two hundred poets who have been thought worthy of mention. More than fifty poets have been credited to Virginia alone; and an examination of their works reveals, among a good deal that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that ought to be preserved. Apart from the five major poets of the South—Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan—who are reserved for special study, we shall now consider a few of the minor poets who have produced verse of excellent quality. [Footnote *: Manly'sSouthern Literature.]

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780-1843) is known throughout the land as the author of The Star-spangled Banner, the noblest, perhaps, of our patriotic hymns. He was born in Frederick County, Maryland, and was educated at St. John's College, Annapolis. He studied law, and after practicing with success in Frederick City, he removed to Washington, where he became district attorney.

During the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, he was detained on board a British vessel, whither he had gone to secure the release of a friend. All night long he watched the bombardment with the keenest anxiety. In the morning, when the dawn disclosed the star- spangled banner still proudly waving over the fort, he conceived the stirring song, which at once became popular and was sung all over the country. Though a volume of his poems, with a sketch by Chief-Justice Taney, was published in 1857, it is to The Star-spangled Banner that he owes his literary fame.

"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Few poems written in the South have been more popular than My Life is like the Summer Rose. It has the distinction of having been praised by Byron. Its author, RICHARD HENRY WILDE (1789-1847), was born in Dublin, Ireland, but brought up and educated in Augusta, Georgia. He studied law, became attorney general of his adopted state, and later entered Congress, where he served for several terms. He was a man of scholarly tastes and poetic gifts. He spent five years abroad, chiefly in Italy, where his studies in Italian literature afterwards led to a work on Torquato Tasso. It was on the occasion of this trip abroad that he wrote A Farewell to America, which breathes a noble spirit of patriotism:—

"Farewell, my more than fatherland!
Home of my heart and friends, adieu!
Lingering beside some foreign strand,
How oft shall I remember you!
How often, o'er the waters blue,
Send back a sigh to those I leave,
The loving and beloved few,
Who grieve for me,—for whom I grieve!"

On his return to America, he settled in New Orleans, where he became a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy lyric, My Life is like the Summer Rose, that, more than all the rest, has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote a stanza of a poem so well known?

"My life is like the summer rose,
That opens to the morning sky,
But, ere the shades of evening close,
Is scattered on the ground—to die!
Yet on the rose's humble bed
The sweetest dews of night are shed,
As if she wept the waste to see—
But none shall weep a tear for me!"

GEORGE D. PRENTICE (1802-1870) was a native of Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University, and studied law; but he soon gave up his profession for the more congenial pursuit of literature. In 1828 he established at Hartford the New England Weekly Review, in which a number of his poems, serious and sentimental, appeared. Two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he turned over his paper to Whittier and removed to Louisville, where he became editor of the Journal.

He was a man of brilliant intellect, and soon made his paper a power in education, society, and politics. Apart from his own vigorous contributions, he made his paper useful to Southern letters by encouraging literary activity in others. It was chiefly through his influence that Louisville became one of the literary centers of the South. He was a stout opponent of secession; and when the Civil War came his paper, like his adopted state, suffered severely.

Among his writings is a Life of Henry Clay. A collection of his witty and pungent paragraphs has also been published under the title of Prenticeana. His poems, by which he will be longest remembered, were collected after his death. His best-known poem is The Closing Year. Though its vividness and eloquence are quite remarkable, its style is, perhaps, too declamatory for the taste of the present generation. The following lines, which express the poet's bright hopes for the political future of the world, are taken from The Flight of Years:—

"Weep not, that Time
Is passing on—it will ere long reveal
A brighter era to the nations. Hark!
Along the vales and mountains of the earth
There is a deep, portentous murmuring
Like the swift rush of subterranean streams,
Or like the mingled sounds of earth and air,
When the fierce Tempest, with sonorous wing,
Heaves his deep folds upon the rushing winds,
And hurries onward with his night of clouds
Against the eternal mountains. 'Tis the voice
Of infant Freedom—and her stirring call
Is heard and answered in a thousand tones
From every hilltop of her western home——
And lo—it breaks across old Ocean's flood——
And Freedom, Freedom! is the answering shout
Of nations starting from the spell of years.
The dayspring!—see—'tis brightening in the heavens!
The watchmen of the night have caught the sign——
From tower to tower the signal fires flash free——
And the deep watchword, like the rush of seas
That heralds the volcano's bursting flame,
Is sounding o'er the earth. Bright years of hope
And life are on the wing.—Yon glorious bow
Of Freedom, bended by the hand of God,
Is spanning Time's dark surges. Its high arch,
A type of love and mercy on the cloud,
Tells that the many storms of human life
Will pass in silence, and the sinking waves,
Gathering the forms of glory and of peace,
Reflect the undimmed brightness of the Heaven."

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806-1870), a native of Charleston, was a man of remarkable versatility. He made up for his lack of collegiate training by private study and wide experience. He early gave up law for literature, and during his long and tireless literary career was editor, poet, dramatist, historian, and novelist. He had something of the wideness of range of Sir Walter Scott; and one can not but think that, had he lived north of Mason and Dixon's line, he might occupy a more prominent place in the literary annals of our country. He has been styled the "Cooper of the South"; but it is hardly too much to say that in versatility, culture, and literary productiveness he surpassed his great Northern contemporary.

Simms was a poet before he became a novelist. The poetic impulse manifested itself early; and before he was twenty-five he had published three or more volumes of verse. In 1832 his imaginative poem, Atalantis, a Story of the Sea, was brought out by the Harpers; and it introduced him at once to the favorable notice of what Poe called the "Literati" of New York. His subsequent volumes of poetry were devoted chiefly to a description of Southern scenes and incidents.

As will be seen in our studies of Hayne and Timrod, Simms was an important figure in the literary circles of Charleston. His large, vigorous nature seemed incapable of jealousy, and he took delight in lending encouragement to young men of literary taste and aspiration. He was a laborious and prolific writer, the number of his various works— poetry, drama, history, fiction—reaching nearly a hundred. Had he written less rapidly, his work might have gained, perhaps, in artistic quality.

Among the best of Simms's novels is a series devoted to the Revolution. The characters and incidents of that conflict in South Carolina are graphically portrayed. The Partisan, the first of this historic series, was published in 1835. The Yemassee is an Indian story, in which the character of the red man is less idealized than in Cooper's Leather- stocking Tales. In The Damsel of Darien, the hero is Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific.

The verse of Simms is characterized by facile vigor rather than by fine poetic quality. The following lines, which represent his style at its best, bear a lesson for the American people to-day:—

"This the true sign of ruin to a race—
It undertakes no march, and day by day
Drowses in camp, or, with the laggard's pace,
Walks sentry o'er possessions that decay;
Destined, with sensible waste, to fleet away;—
For the first secret of continued power
Is the continued conquest;—all our sway
Hath surety in the uses of the hour;
If that we waste, in vain walled town and lofty tower!"

EDWARD COATE PINKNEY (1802-1828) died before his poetic gifts had reached their full maturity. He was the son of the eminent lawyer and diplomatist, William Pinkney, and was born in London, while his father was American minister at the court of St. James. At the age of nine he was brought home to America, and educated at Baltimore. He spent eight years in the United States navy, during which period he visited the classic shores of the Mediterranean. He was impressed particularly with the beauty of Italy, and in one of his poems he says:—

"It looks a dimple on the face of earth,
The seal of beauty, and the shrine of mirth;
Nature is delicate and graceful there,
The place's genius feminine and fair:
The winds are awed, nor dare to breathe aloud;
The air seems never to have borne a cloud,
Save where volcanoes send to heaven their curled
And solemn smokes, like altars of the world."

In 1824 he resigned his place in the navy to take up the practice of law in Baltimore. His health was not good; and he seems to have occupied a part of his abundant leisure (for he was not successful in his profession) in writing poetry. A thin volume of poems was published in 1825, in which he displays, especially in his shorter pieces, an excellent lyrical gift. The following stanzas are from A Health:—

"I fill this cup to one made up
Of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex
The seeming paragon;
To whom the better elements
And kindly stars have given
A form so fair, that, like the air,
'Tis less of earth than heaven.

"Her every tone is music's own,
Like those of morning birds,
And something more than melody
Dwells ever in her words;
The coinage of her heart are they,
And from her lips each flows
As one may see the burdened bee
Forth issue from the rose."

PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE (1816-1850), like most Southern writers before the Civil War, mingled literature with the practice of law. He was born at Martinsburg, Virginia, and educated at Princeton. He early manifested a literary bent, and wrote for the Knickerbocker Magazine, the oldest of our literary monthlies, before he was out of his teens. He was noted for his love of outdoor life, and became a thorough sportsman. In 1847 he published a volume entitled Froissart Ballads and Other Poems. The origin of the ballad portion of the volume, as explained in the preface, is found in the lines of an old Roman poet:—

"A certain freak has got into my head,
Which I can't conquer for the life of me,
Of taking up some history, little read,
Or known, and writing it in poetry."

The best known of his lyrics is Florence Vane which has the sincerity and pathos of a real experience:—

"I loved thee long and dearly,
Florence Vane;
My life's bright dream, and early,
Hath come again;
I renew, in my fond vision,
My heart's dear pain,
My hope, and thy derision,
Florence Vane.

"The ruin lone and hoary,
The ruin old,
Where thou didst hark my story,
At even told,—
That spot—the hues Elysian
Of sky and plain—
I treasure in my vision,
Florence Vane.

"Thou wast lovelier than the roses
In their prime;
Thy voice excelled the closes
Of sweetest rhyme;
Thy heart was as a river
Without a main.
Would I had loved thee never,
Florence Vane!"

THEODORE O'HARA (1820-1867) is chiefly remembered for a single poem that has touched the national heart. He was born in Danville, Kentucky. After taking a course in law, he accepted a clerkship in the Treasury Department at Washington. On the outbreak of the Mexican War he enlisted as a private soldier, and by his gallant service rose to the rank of captain and major. After the close of the war he returned to Washington and engaged for a time in the practice of his profession. Later he became editor of the Mobile Register, and Frankfort Yeoman in Kentucky. In the Civil War he served as colonel in the Confederate army.

The poem on which his fame largely rests is The Bivouac of the Dead. It was written to commemorate the Kentuckians who fell in the battle of Buena Vista. Its well-known lines have furnished an apt inscription for several military cemeteries:—

"The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on Life's parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.

"On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead."

O'Hara died in Alabama in 1867. The legislature of Kentucky paid him a fitting tribute in having his body removed to Frankfort and placed by the side of the heroes whom he so worthily commemorated in his famous poem.

FRANCIS ORRERY TICKNOR (1822-1874) was a physician living near Columbus, Georgia. He led a busy, useful, humble life, and his merits as a poet have not been fully recognized. In the opinion of Paul Hamilton Hayne, who edited a volume of Ticknor's poems, he was "one of the truest and sweetest lyric poets this country has yet produced." The Virginians of the Valley was written after the soldiers of the Old Dominion, many of whom bore the names of the knights of the "Golden Horseshoe," had obtained a temporary advantage over the invading forces of the North:—

"We thought they slept!—the sons who kept
The names of noble sires,
And slumbered while the darkness crept
Around their vigil fires;
But aye the 'Golden Horseshoe' knights
Their Old Dominion keep,
Whose foes have found enchanted ground,
But not a knight asleep."

But a martial lyric of greater force is Little Giffen, written in honor of a blue-eyed lad of East Tennessee. He was terribly wounded in some engagement, and after being taken to the hospital at Columbus, Georgia, was finally nursed back to life in the home of Dr. Ticknor. Beneath the thin, insignificant exterior of the lad, the poet discerned the incarnate courage of the hero:—

"Out of the focal and foremost fire,
Out of the hospital walls as dire;
Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene,
(Eighteenth battle and he sixteen!)
Specter! such as you seldom see,
Little Giffen of Tennessee!

* * * * *

"Word of gloom from the war, one day;
Johnson pressed at the front, they say.
Little Giffen was up and away;
A tear—his first—as he bade good-by,
Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
'I'll write, if spared!' There was news of the fight;
But none of Giffen.—He did not write."

But Ticknor did not confine himself to war themes. He was a lover of Nature; and its forms, and colors, and sounds—as seen in April Morning, Twilight, The Hills, Among the Birds—appealed to his sensitive nature. Shut out from literary centers and literary companionship, he sang, like Burns, from the strong impulse awakened by the presence of the heroic and the beautiful.

JOHN R. THOMPSON (1823-1873) has deserved well of the South both as editor and author. He was born in Richmond, and educated at the University of Virginia, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1845. Two years later he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger; and during the twelve years of his editorial management, he not only maintained a high degree of literary excellence, but took pains to lend encouragement to Southern letters. It is a misfortune to our literature that his writings, particularly his poetry, have never been collected.

The incidents of the Civil War called forth many a stirring lyric, the best of which is his well-known Music in Camp:—

"Two armies covered hill and plain,
Where Rappahannock's waters
Ran deeply crimsoned with the stain
Of battle's recent slaughters."

The band had played "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," which in turn had been greeted with shouts by "Rebels" and "Yanks."

"And yet once more the bugles sang
Above the stormy riot;
No shout upon the evening rang—
There reigned a holy quiet.

"The sad, slow stream its noiseless flood
Poured o'er the glistening pebbles;
All silent now the Yankees stood,
And silent stood the Rebels.

"No unresponsive soul had heard
That plaintive note's appealing,
So deeply 'Home, Sweet Home' had stirred
The hidden founts of feeling.

"Or Blue or Gray, the soldier sees,
As by the wand of fairy,
The cottage 'neath the live-oak trees,
The cabin by the prairie."

On account of failing health, Thompson made a visit to Europe, where he spent several years, contributing from time to time to Blackwood's Magazine and other English periodicals. On his return to America, he was engaged on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post, with which he was connected till his death, in 1873. He is buried in Hollywood cemetery at Richmond.

"The city's hum drifts o'er his grave,
And green above the hollies wave
Their jagged leaves, as when a boy,
On blissful summer afternoons,
He came to sing the birds his runes,
And tell the river of his joy."

The verse of Mrs. MARGARET J. PRESTON (1820-1897) rises above the commonplace both in sentiment and craftsmanship. She belongs, as some critic has said, to the school of Mrs. Browning; and in range of subject and purity of sentiment she is scarcely inferior to her great English contemporary. She was the daughter of the Rev. George Junkin, D.D., the founder of Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and for many years president of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia. In 1857 she married Colonel J. T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute.

For many years she was a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, in which her earlier poems first made their appearance. Though a native of Philadelphia, she was loyal to the South during the Civil War, and found inspiration in its deeds of heroism. Beechenbrook is a rhyme of the war; and though well-nigh forgotten now, it was read, on its publication in 1865, from the Potomac to the Gulf. Among her other writings are Old Songs and New and Cartoons. Her poetry is pervaded by a deeply religious spirit, and she repeatedly urges the lesson of supreme resignation and trust, as in the following lines:—

"What will it matter by-and-by
Whether my path below was bright,
Whether it wound through dark or light,
Under a gray or golden sky,
When I look back on it, by-and-by?

"What will it matter by-and-by
Whether, unhelped, I toiled alone,
Dashing my foot against a stone,
Missing the charge of the angel nigh,
Bidding me think of the by-and-by?

* * * * *

"What will it matter? Naught, if I
Only am sure the way I've trod,
Gloomy or gladdened, leads to God,
Questioning not of the how, the why,
If I but reach Him by-and-by.

"What will I care for the unshared sigh,
If in my fear of lapse or fall,
Close I have clung to Christ through all,
Mindless how rough the road might lie,
Sure He will smoothen it by-and-by.

"What will it matter by-and-by?
Nothing but this: that Joy or Pain
Lifted me skyward,—helped me to gain,
Whether through rack, or smile, or sigh,
Heaven, home, all in all, by-and-by."

In this rapid sketch of the minor singers of the South, it has been necessary to omit many names worthy of mention. It is beyond our scope to speak of the newer race of poets. Here and there delicate notes are heard, but there is no evidence that a great singer is present among us. Yet there is no ground for discouragement; the changed conditions and the new spirit that has come upon our people may reasonably be expected to lead to higher poetic achievement.

In some respects the South affords a more promising field for literature than any other part of our country. There is evident decadence in New England. But the climate and scenery, the history and traditions, and the chivalrous spirit and unexhausted intellectual energies of the South contain the promise of an Augustan age in literature. In no insignificant degree its rich-ored veins have been worked in prose. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS has successfully wrought in the mine of negro folk-lore; GEORGE W. CABLE has portrayed the Creole life of Louisiana; CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK has pictured the types of character found among the Tennessee mountains; THOMAS NELSON PAGE has shown us the trials and triumphs of Reconstruction days; and Miss MARY JOHNSTON has revived the picturesque scenes of colonial times. There has been an obvious literary awakening in the South; and sooner or later it will find utterance, let us hope, in some strong-voiced, great-souled singer.

It is true that there are obstacles to be overcome. There are no literary magazines in the South to encourage and develop our native talent as in the days of the Southern Literary Messenger. Southern writers are still dependent upon Northern periodicals, in which they can hardly be said to find a cordial welcome. It seems that the South in a measure suffers the obloquy that rested of old upon Nazareth, from which the Pharisees of the metropolis maintained that no good thing could come.

But the most serious drawback of all is the disfavor into which poetry has fallen, or rather which it has brought upon itself. In the remoteness of its themes and sentiments, in its over-anxiety for a faultless or striking technique, it has erected a barrier between itself and the sanity of a practical, truth-loving people. Let us hope that this aberration is not permanent. When poetry returns to simplicity, sincerity, and truth; when it shall voice, as in the great English singers, Tennyson and Browning, the deepest thought and aspirations of our race; when once more, as in the prophetic days of old, it shall resume its lofty, seer-like office,—then will it be restored to its place of honor by a delighted and grateful people.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_history_of_criticism_in_literature_and_poetry-1605

The History of Criticism in Literature and Poetry
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

CRITICISM (from the Gr. κρ?της, a judge, κρ?νειν, to decide, to give an authoritative opinion), the art of judging the qualities and values of an aesthetic object, whether in literature or the fine arts.1 It involves, in the first instance, the formation and expression of a judgment on the qualities of anything, and Matthew Arnold defined it in this general sense as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” It has come, however, to possess a secondary and specialized meaning as a published analysis of the qualities and characteristics of a work in literature or fine art, itself taking the form of independent literature. The sense in which criticism is taken as implying censure, the “picking holes” in any statement or production, is frequent, but it is entirely unjustifiable. There is nothing in the proper scope of criticism which presupposes blame. On the contrary, a work of perfect beauty and fitness, in which no fault could possibly be found with justice, is as proper a subject for criticism to deal with as a work of the greatest imperfection. It may be perfectly just to state that a book or a picture is “beneath criticism,” i.e. is so wanting in all qualities of originality and technical excellence that time would merely be wasted in analysing it. But it can never be properly said that a work is “above criticism,” although it may be “above censure,” for the very complexity of its merits and the fulness of its beauties tempt the skill of the analyser and reward it.

It is necessary at the threshold of an examination of the history of criticism to expose this laxity of speech, since nothing is more confusing to a clear conception of this art than to suppose that it consists in an effort to detect what is blameworthy. Candid criticism should be neither benevolent nor adverse; its function is to give a just judgment, without partiality or bias. A critic (κριτικ?ς) is one who exercises the art of criticism, who sets himself up, or is set up, as a judge of literary and artistic merit. The irritability of mankind, which easily forgets and neglects praise, but cannot forgive the rankling poison of blame, has set upon the word critic a seal which is even more unamiable than that of criticism. It takes its most savage form in Benjamin Disraeli’s celebrated and deplorable dictum, “the critics are the men who have failed in literature and art.” It is plain that such names as those of Aristotle, Dante, Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold are not to be thus swept by a reckless fulmination. There have been many critics who brought from failure in imaginative composition a cavilling, jealous and ignoble temper, who have mainly exercised their function in indulging the evil passion of envy. But, so far as they have done this, they have proved themselves bad critics, and neither minute care, nor a basis of learning, nor wide experience of literature, salutary as all these must be, can avail to make that criticism valuable which is founded on the desire to exaggerate fault-finding and to emphasize censure unfairly. The examination of what has been produced by other ages of human thought is much less liable to this dangerous error than the attempt to estimate contemporary works of art and literature. There are few indeed whom personal passion can blind to the merits of a picture of the 15th or a poem of the 17th century. In the higher branches of historical criticism, prejudice of this ignoble sort is hardly possible, and therefore, in considering criticism in its ideal forms, it is best to leave out of consideration that invidious and fugitive species which bears the general name of “reviewing.” This pedestrian criticism, indeed, is useful and even indispensable, but it is, by its very nature, ephemeral, and it is liable to a multitude of drawbacks. Even when the reviewer is, or desires to be, strictly just, it is almost impossible for him to stand far enough back from the object under review to see it in its proper perspective. He is dazzled, or scandalized, by its novelty; he has formed a preconceived notion of the degree to which its author should be encouraged or depressed; he is himself, in all cases, an element in the mental condition which he attempts to judge, and if not positively a defendant is at least a juryman in the court over which he ought to preside with remote impartiality.

It may be laid down as the definition of criticism in its pure sense, that it should consist in the application, in the most competent form, of the principles of literary composition. Those principles are the general aesthetics upon which taste is founded; they take the character of rules of writing. From the days of Aristotle the existence of such rules has not been doubted, but different orders of mind in various ages have given them diverse application, and upon this diversity the fluctuations of taste are founded. It is now generally admitted that in past ages critics have too often succumbed to the temptation to regulate taste rigidly, and to lay down rules that shall match every case with a formula. Over-legislation has been the bane of official criticism, and originality, especially in works of creative imagination, has been condemned because it did not conform to existing rules. Such instances of want of contemporary appreciation as the reception given to William Blake or Keats, or even Milton, are quoted to prove the futility of criticism. As a matter of fact they do nothing of the kind. They merely prove the immutable principles which underlie all judgment of artistic products to have been misunderstood or imperfectly obeyed during the life-times of those illustrious men. False critics have built domes of glass, as Voltaire put it, between the heavens and themselves, domes which genius has to shatter in pieces before it can make itself comprehended. In critical application formulas are often useful, but they should be held lightly; when the formula becomes the tyrant where it should be the servant of thought, fatal error is imminent. What is required above all else by a critic is knowledge, tempered with good sense, and combined with an exquisite delicacy of taste. He who possesses these qualities may go wrong in certain instances, but his error cannot become radical, and he is always open to correction. It is not his business crudely to pronounce a composition “good” or “bad”; he must be able to show why it is “good” and wherein it is “bad”; he must admire with independence and blame with careful candour. He must above all be assiduous to escape from pompous generalizations, which conceal lack of thought under a flow of words. The finest criticism should take every circumstance of the case into consideration, and hold it necessary, if possible, to know the author as well as the book. A large part of the reason why the criticism of productions of the past is so much more fruitful than mere contemporary reviewing, is that by remoteness from the scene of action the critic is able to make himself familiar with all the elements of age, place and medium which affected the writer at the moment of his composition. In short, knowledge and even taste are not sufficient for perfect criticism without the infusion of a still rarer quality, breadth of sympathy.

Criticism has been one of the latest branches of literature to reach maturity, but from very early times the instinct which induces mankind to review what it has produced led to the composition of imperfect but often extremely valuable bodies of opinion. What makes these early criticisms tantalizing is that the moral or political aspects of literature had not disengaged themselves from the purely intellectual or aesthetic.

To pass to an historical examination of the subject, we find that in antiquity Aristotle was regarded as the father and almost as the founder of literary criticism. Yet before his day, three Greek writers of eminence had examined, in more or less fulness, the principles of composition; these were Plato, Isocrates and Aristophanes. The comedy of The Frogs, by the latter, is the earliest specimen we possess of hostile literary criticism, being devoted to ridicule of the plays of Euripides. In the cases of Plato and Isocrates, criticism takes the form mainly of an examination of the rules of rhetoric. We reach, however, much firmer ground when we arrive at Aristotle, whose Poetics and Rhetoric are among the most valuable treatises which antiquity has handed down to us. Of what existed in the literature of his age, extremely rich in some branches, entirely empty in others, Aristotle speaks with extraordinary authority; but Mr G. Saintsbury has justly remarked that as his criticism of poetry was injuriously affected by the non-existence of the novelist, so his criticism of prose was injuriously affected by the omnipresence of the orator. This continues true of all ancient criticism. A work by Aristotle on the problems raised by a study of Homer is lost, and there may have been others of a similar nature; in the two famous treatises which remain we have nothing less important than the foundation on which all subsequent European criticism has been raised. It does not appear that any of the numerous disciples of Aristotle understood his attitude to literature, nor do the later philosophical schools offer much of interest. The Neoplatonists, however, were occupied with analysis of the Beautiful, on which both Proclus and Plotinus expatiated; still more purely literary were some of the treatises of Porphyry. There seems to be no doubt that Alexandria possessed, in the third century, a vivid school of critic-grammarians; the names of Zenodotus, of Crates and of Aristarchus were eminent in this connexion, but of their writings nothing substantial has survived. They were followed by the scholiasts, and they by the mere rhetoricians of the last Greek schools, such as Hermogenes and Aphthonius. In the 2nd century of our era, Dio Chrysostom, Aristides of Smyrna, and Maximus of Tyre were the main representatives of criticism, and they were succeeded by Philostratus and Libanius. The most modern of post-Christian Greek critics, however, is unquestionably Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who leads up to Lucian and Cassius Longinus. The last-mentioned name calls for special notice; in “the lovely and magnificent personality of Longinus” we find the most intelligent judge of literature who wrote between Aristotle and the moderns. His book On the Sublime (Περ? ?ψους), probably written about A.D. 260, and first printed in 1554, is of extreme importance, while his intuitions and the splendour of his style combine to lift Longinus to the highest rank among the critics of the world.

In Roman literature criticism never took a very prominent position. In early days the rhetorical works of Cicero and the famous Art of Poetry of Horace exhaust the category. During the later Augustan period the only literary critic of importance was the elder Seneca. Passing over the valuable allusions to the art of writing in the poets, especially in Juvenal and Martial, we reach, in the Silver Age, Quintilian, the most accomplished of all the Roman critics. His Institutes of Oratory has been described as the fullest and most intelligent application of criticism to literature which the Latin world produced, and one which places the name of Quintilian not far below those of Aristotle and Longinus. He was followed by Aulus Gellius, by Macrobius (whose reputation was great in the middle ages), by Servius (the great commentator on Virgil), and, after a long interval, by Martianus Capella. Latin criticism sank into mere pedantry about rhetoric and grammar. This continued throughout the Dark Ages, until the 13th century, when rhythmical treatises, of which the Labyrinthus of Eberhard (1212?) and the Ars rhythmica of John of Garlandia (John Garland) are the most famous, came into fashion. These writings testified to a growing revival of a taste for poetry.

It is, however, in the masterly technical treatise De vulgari eloquio, generally attributed to Dante, the first printed (in Italian) in 1529, that modern poetical criticism takes its first step. The example of this admirable book was not adequately followed; throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, criticism is mainly indirect and accidental. Boccaccio, indeed, is the only figure worthy of mention, between Dante and Erasmus. With the Renaissance came a blossoming of Humanist criticism in Italy, producing such excellent specimens as the Sylvae of Poliziano, the Poetics (1527) of Vida, and the Poetica of Trissino, the best of a whole crop of critical works produced, often by famous names, between 1525 and 1560. These were followed by sounder scholars and acuter theorists: by Scaliger with his epoch-making Poetices (1561); by L. Castelvetro, whose Poetica (1570) started the modern cultivation of the Unities and asserted the value of the Epic; by Tasso with his Discorsi (1587); and by Francesco Patrizzi in hisPoetica (1586).

In France, the earliest and for a long time the most important specimen of literary criticism was the Défense et illustration de la langue française, published in 1549 by Joachim du Bellay. Ronsard, also, wrote frequently and ably on the art of poetry. The theories of the Pléiade were summed up in the Art poétique of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, which belongs to 1574 (though not printed until 1605).

In England, the earliest literary critic of importance was Thomas Wilson, whose Art of Rhetoric was printed in 1553, and the earliest student of poetry, George Gascoigne, whose Instruction appeared in 1575. Gascoigne is the first writer who deals intelligently with the subject of English prosody. He was followed by Thomas Drant, Harvey, Gosson, Lodge and Sidney, whose controversial pamphlets belong to the period between 1575 and 1580. Among Elizabethan “arts” or “defences” of English poetry are to be mentioned those of William Webbe (1586), George Puttenham (1589), Thomas Campion (1602), and Samuel Daniel (1603). With the tractates of Ben Jonson, several of them lost, the criticism of the Renaissance may be said to close.

A new era began throughout Europe when Malherbe started, about 1600, a taste for the neo-classic or anti-romantic school of poetry, taking up the line which had been foreshadowed by Castelvetro. Enfin Malherbe vint, and he was supported in his revolution by Regnier, Vaugelas, Balzac, and finally by Corneille himself, in his famous prefatory discourses. It was Boileau, however, who more than any other man stood out at the close of the 17th century as the law-giver of Parnassus. The rules of the neo-classics were drawn together and arranged in a system by René Rapin, whose authoritative treatises mainly appeared between 1668 and 1674. It is in writings of this man, and of the Jesuits, Le Bossu and Bouhours, that the preposterous rigidity of the formal classic criticism is most plainly seen. The influence of these three critics was, however, very great throughout Europe, and we trace it in the writings of Dryden, Addison and Rymer. In the course of the 18th century, when the neoclassic creed was universally accepted, Pope, Blair, Kames, Harris, Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson were its most distinguished exponents in England, while Voltaire, Buffon (to whom we owe the phrase “the style is the man”), Marmontel, La Harpe and Suard were the types of academic opinion in France.

Modern, or more properly Romantic, criticism came in when the neo-classic tradition became bankrupt throughout Europe at the very close of the 18th century. It has been heralded in Germany by the writings of Lessing, and in France by those of Diderot. Of the reconstruction of critical opinion in the 19th century it is impossible to speak here with any fulness, it is contained in the record of the recent literature of each European language. It is noticeable, in England, that the predominant place in it was occupied, in violent contrast with Disraeli’s dictum, by those who had obviously notfailed in imaginative composition, by Wordsworth, by Shelley, by Keats, by Landor, and pre-eminently by S. T. Coleridge, who was one of the most penetrative, original and imaginative critics who have ever lived. In France, the importance of Sainte-Beuve is not to be ignored or even qualified; after manifold changes of taste, he remains as much a master as he was a precursor. He was followed by Théophile Gautier, Saint-Marc, Girardin, Paul de Saint Victor, and a crowd of others, down to Taine and the latest school of individualistic critics, comparable with Matthew Arnold, Pater, and their followers in England.

See G. Saintsbury, A History of Criticism (3 vols., 1902-1904); J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (2nd ed. 1908); Théry, Histoire des opinions littéraires (1849); J. A. Symonds, The Revival of Learning (1877); Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, i. (1865), ii. (1868); Bourgoin, Les Maîtres de la critique au XVIIe siècle (1889); Paul Hamelius, Die Kritik in der englischen Literatur (1897); S. H. Butcher,The Poetics of Aristotle (1898); H. L. Havell and Andrew Lang, Longinus on the Sublime (1890). See also the writings of Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold, F. Brunetière, Anatole France, Walter Pater, passim.

(E. G.)

1It is in this general sense that the subject is considered in this article. The term is, however, used in more restricted senses, generally with some word of qualification, e.g. “textual criticism” or “higher criticism”; see the article Textual Criticism and the article Bible for an outstanding example of both “textual” and “higher.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/my_freedom_my_words_myself-503

My Freedom. My Words. Myself.
Written by: olive eloisa guillermo
It is my freedom.

Common adage as pen is mightier than the sword is often heard and told by many. Throughout history so much exemplified in my own country: the Philippines. Our national hero: Jose P. Rizal most notable writings: Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo are his main stimulators arousing the sleeping bravery of the Filipinos in his time.

I am a silent shy type person who when angry or been shouted at sometimes just remain silent. It's not to be defenseless nor to be weak rather this is to avoid small things to get big. It is also my way to let things cool down. Avoiding words that might worsen any situation.

Thus, one of my outlets is writing. I started in my high school years. I tried to join our school paper but so focused on my studies until college that i have gaps on my writing. Nevertheless, being away from home; unexpected expressions, various experiences and lots of personalities that came by in my life brought out so much in me that i again began to compose.

I thought i have forgotten this long ago nor do i expect that it will be liked. All i want is to express myself silently and sharing it with some persons. Some, i have posted in facebook and send it to my friends. Too many to count, not to brag though, i am nearly completing my second 80 paged notebook.

As before, i compose in a paper but when i am here in Saudi as i have lots of freetime. Sometimes, i just scribble via my phone as when thoughts pop around my mind. Most of my poems before are of free verse type but because of my likeness to rhymes, I'm so encourage and it challenges me to make my poems on rhyming form. i hope though that every word i chose doesn't effect yet it will add more interest, vibrancy in my composition.

Some have appreciated my writings: my poems, my reflections, my essays and some short stories i created. Some have vocally told me their admiration; their dislike; their criticism and some feedbacks of which i truly appreciate. May it be good or bad, i care. i like them all. However, those who criticized destructively as sometimes when i write without rechecking i post instantly. what can i say? i truly don't care even.

As all that i'm writing is all about i am.

I do not aspire popularity nor do i expect to earn from this, all i want is to express and maybe someday my children will read them too.

I love writing. It makes me so free of which freedom to where i am at the moment is so limited and so precious. it goes also, as being far from home thought me to talk less and trust cautiously. If writing these makes me appear as so deep and sensitive person let it be. I am just hoping and wishing that maybe by sharing these, my reader will enjoy, be encouraged, be inspired and simply, will feel "me". i have fun writing them: some made me really smile, pout, laugh, shake and even cry as i do not speak aloud but i write what i want to say silently.


Written by my friend, a truly great poetess, beautiful and kind filipina lady, that I am honored and blessed to be friends with.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/tapping_into_creativity,_for_logical_types-795

Tapping Into Creativity, For Logical Types
Written by: Donovan Willis

I starting writing about four years ago. I was studying a chemistry and mathematics course at university, a very much non-literate oriented field of study. Ruled by logic, I set out to write. It was difficult as the writing came out primitive and it was difficult to read and understand it myself. Very much enthusiastic about the matter, I continued in my hyper-graphic state to produce what I considered “art”. The first year was the hardest but I told myself everyday, to write a little everyday: a thought, a poem, a quote or anything. The first step was to open the channel for the creative process to take place and as my good friend has told me ‘consistency is fashion’. I never thought about syntax or what was considered good form, but rather the act of writing was most important. I shared my writing with nobody, until this day, I still haven’t shared those early works. My next objective after opening the channel for creativity, was to build confidence. I made writing into an enjoyable activity by trying to express my thoughts in a structured yet artistic way. I never fretted about English devices but used a strength so inherent in my personality type: abstraction. Like connecting the dots in mathematics, one could do the same in literature. Leaving bread crumbs for the reader to enjoy the big picture, I used my scientific rigor to analyze my poems. For even art has rules. Some can be broken while others can be bent to your will.

Thirdly, I didn’t try change myself. I knew that like a good data model, a poem needs to get the message across in a relatable format. I decided to write as simply as possible. As people need to relate to your message. So I stuck with these three principles:

Write Often : A little everyday, is a lot over the long run.

Build Confidence : Share a little, learn a lot.

Keep It Simple : Sometimes complexity diminishes power

This I found allowed me to tap into my creative side. I began building better poems by allowing the reader to interpret depth. Today, I am truly happy to write. It's not complicated, just pick up that pen and go for it! It is with great joy for me to share my work and I can definitely say that I am creative! I hope this helps you like it has helped me!

Definitely on the right track and I agree-in that with most poems simpler is better(as it reaches a wider audience).
Yet some poems are meant to be more complex and much, much deeper.
These are to be written without regard to the lesser minds that simply will not fathom them..
To each his own spoon and milk....- ;)-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/101643


Edward Thomas 101
A once unsung poet rises to prominence 100 years after his death
By The Editors

The British writer Edward Thomas turned to poetry only three years before his death, but in that short time, he created a body of work that shaped the sensibility of modern poetry. After studying at Oxford University, Thomas became a prolific writer of essays, criticism, biographies, travelogues, fiction, and anything else he might be paid for writing. At age 36, he began writing poetry. This was in 1914, just before World War I; Thomas was killed during the Battle of Arras in April 1917. His output from that short period came to be viewed as some of the most well-regarded and influential English poetry of the 20th century.

A Bridge Between Eras
Considered an important link in the shift from Georgianism to Modernism, Thomas’s poetry features elements of both styles, occasionally within the same poem. The landscape of rural England, a frequent topic of his prose, is also a feature of many poems. “Aspens” and “The Brook,” both rhyming meditations on nature, are more typical of much of the poetry being written at the time, which included elements of formalism as well as idyllic depictions of the countryside. In his most famous poem, “Adlestrop,” Thomas takes in the scenery during the most trivial of moments. On a journey by rail, the train makes a brief, unexplained, unscheduled stop during which nothing happens: “Someone cleared his throat. / No one left and no one came / On the bare platform.” Yet in that moment, the poet uses his vantage point aboard the train to observe the “meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, / No whit less still and lonely fair / Than the high cloudlets in the sky.”

Lurking behind these tranquil, bucolic scenes was an unavoidable darkness. Thomas began writing poetry shortly before the outbreak of World War I, and the impending war loomed large. “The Cherry Trees,” just four lines long, laments a flowery scene worthy of a wedding, wasted because “all that passed are dead.” In “Rain,” the poet finds himself with “nothing but the wild rain / On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me / Remembering again that I shall die.” A scene “In Memoriam (Easter 1915),” another of Thomas’s more well-known poems, shows “the flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood” and brings to mind the men who left for war and that otherwise would have picked the flowers for their sweethearts but now “will do never again.”

Increasingly, Thomas felt a pull toward military service. “The Sun Used to Shine” describes a walk with a friend interrupted by thoughts of the war, acknowledging they were far enough removed that “our eyes / / Could as well imagine the Crusades / Or Caesar’s battles.” Thomas’s guilt at enjoying the countryside while others fought to protect it grew stronger. Feeling compelled to defend his country while recognizing the futility of war, he struggled to decide whether to enlist. A similar struggle is found in “The Sign-Post,” in which a fork in the road is met with “I read the sign. Which way shall I go? / A voice says: You would not have doubted so / At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn / Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born.”

A Literary Friendship
In a chance encounter, Thomas befriended a then-unknown American poet and forged one of the most significant literary friendships of the era. Thomas met Robert Frost shortly before he began writing poetry—a move Frost supported and encouraged. The two were known to take frequent long walks in the English countryside, discussing life, poetry, and the looming war. When the war broke out, Frost returned to the United States, and Thomas remained to plot his course. Sometime later, Frost sent a copy of “The Road Not Taken,” intended as playful teasing of Thomas’s indecisive tendencies during their walks together. Thomas, at the height of his personal conflict, did not see the humor in the poem.

War Time
Thomas joined the Artist Rifles, a volunteer light infantry unit, in July 1915. Although he wrote only a few overt war poems, many of his poems deal with the psychological effects of war and the death it caused. The one true war poem, “This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong,” is a personal justification for a world war: “I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.” Another poem, “The Trumpet,” is more of a straightforward call to arms, and “No one cares less than I [Bugle Call]” is a darker take, with the author signing to the daily bugle call “No one cares less than I / Nobody knows but God, / Whether I am destined to lie / Under a foreign clod.” With death surrounding him, Thomas wrote several poems meditating on his own demise. Among the best are “I Never Saw that Land Before” (“I should use, as the trees and birds did, / A language not to be betrayed”) and “Lights Out”: “There is not any book / Or face of dearest look / That I would not turn from now / To go into the unknown / I must enter, and leave, alone, / I know not how.” His poem “The Owl,” which describes “the bird’s voice / Speaking for all who lay under the stars, / Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice,” is considered one of his greatest, most read poems.

Thomas advanced to become a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He transferred to France for the Battle of Arras, a five-week engagement that ended with a stalemate and resulted in nearly 300,000 casualties. He was killed on the first day of the battle, April 9, 1917, while the first edition of his Poems (1917) was being prepared for press.

Thomas’s Poetry Today
In recent decades, Thomas has taken a more central place in early-20th-century British poetry. Matthew Hollis examines Thomas’s important friendship with Robert Frost in Now All Roads Lead to France (2011), and their letters are collected in Matthew Spencer’s critical edition, Elected Friends (2004). A flurry of recent collected volumes of Thomas’s poetry and prose, a biography by scholar Jean Moorcroft Wilson, and a play based on his life, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky (2012), have helped bring Thomas out of Frost’s shadow, and Thomas’s poems are taught increasingly today.

Originally Published: March 31st, 2017

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/_explication_of_one_flesh_by_elizabeth_jennings-1719

Explication of “One Flesh” by Elizabeth Jennings
Written by: Ross Vassilev

“One Flesh” is probably the best-known poem by the late British poetess Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001). Published as part of her poetry collection The Mind Has Mountains (1966), the poem is an ode ostensibly devoted to her aging parents who—upon entering the chilly late autumn of their long married life—have drifted apart both physically and emotionally. Its ironic title is an allusion to a biblical phrase in Genesis, “one flesh,” which is an allegorical symbol of marriage: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:21).

But rather than criticize her elderly parents for their estrangement from each other, the ode is conveying her feelings of sadness, sympathy, regret, and daughterly concern. Of course, one should never mistake a poem's persona for its author, especially since Jennings was not known to “write explicitly autobiographical poetry” (PoemHunter.com). This explication of “One Flesh” explores the deeper (symbolic) meaning as well as the structure of the lyric poem, underlying its lasting popularity with many readers on both sides of the Atlantic. By focusing on the connotations and relationships of words, imagery, figures of speech, and other poetic components that comprise “One Flesh,” this essay connects the poem’s theme, plot, characters, and conflicts to its structural elements, such as form, content, rhyme, voice, mood, diction, tone, rhythm, etc. It is due to its masterful and sensitive treatment of eternal but delicate themes like love, marriage, disillusionment, loneliness, suffering, as well as death, that Jennings' ode appeals to a broad array of readers—both young and old, men and women.

The analysis begins by examining the ode's symbolic meaning(s) and beautiful poetic language, including the use of figurative speech, which account for the reader's reactions of aesthetic pleasure and emotional enjoyment. The first stanza opens with a melancholy depiction of an old couple in their bedroom, both “Lying apart now, each in a separate bed, / He with a book, keeping the light on late, / She like a girl dreaming of childhood” (lines 1-3). The separate beds are both a metaphor and a symbol of the physical distance and emotional separation of the two spouses. The husband is pretending to read a book in bed with his nightstand lamp on, while “she is like a girl” (a simile) who is daydreaming in bed about her long-lost childhood (2-3). But he seems to have no interest in his “unread” book (a case of situational irony), brooding instead over how “all” men seem to be waiting for something “new” in their lives: “All men elsewhere—it is as if they wait / Some new event: || the book he holds unread, / Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead” (4-6). The use of a caesura—a pause (||) within a poetic line —in conjunction with an enjambment (a run-on line) in line 5 hints at the husband's awareness or implicit acknowledgement of his mortality. The wife, on the other hand, is just staring at the lamp's shadows on the ceiling (a metaphor for her childhood memories), clearly trying to escape the depressing reality of having grown old. It is likely that the phrase “the shadows overhead” is an allusion to the famous solipsistic metaphor of a cave fire's shadows on the cave wall in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, symbolizing life's uncertainties, deceptiveness, and unreality. Ultimately, what the old couple is silently waiting for is death (a recurring theme never explicitly mentioned in the text), which is not that far off in their future.

The second stanza makes use of a simile (“like flotsam”) and a quasi-onomatopoeia (“Tossed”)—“Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion, / How cool they lie. || They hardly ever touch” (7-8)—to describe how the old couple is like wreckage jettisoned by the shipwreck of their long-faded romantic passion, as both lie emotionless and cold to each other in their separate beds, avoiding any interaction. And when they do show some feelings for one another, it is an embarrassing admission—”like a confession” (a simile)—of feeling guilty for their indifference or even hostility to each other: “Or if they do, || it is like a confession / Of having little feeling || —or too much” (9-10). Using caesuras before the line breaks in lines 8, 9, and 10 contributes to the ode's natural rhythm. One can even feel the old couple's deliberate silences in the poem's steady rhythm. A loveless future without any intimacy and passion lies ahead of them—indeed, a sexless life of “chastity” (a religious metaphor)—for which they have been preparing mentally all their lives: “Chastity faces them, a destination / For which their whole lives were a preparation” (11-12), because they have always felt intuitively that this is how their marriage is destined to end up in old age.

The third stanza starts with a juxtaposition, which changes somewhat the poem's somber atmosphere by contrasting the aged couple being “apart” with it being also “close together.” It employs a simile (“like a thread”) to portray them as physically apart and yet spiritually still bonded. Their silence (as they have nothing to say to each other any more) tenuously keeps them together like a fine “thread”—as if they are holding on a life-saving line but not pulling it in: “Strangely apart, yet strangely close together, / Silence between them like a thread to hold / And not wind in...” (13-15). Lines 13 and 14 make use of the stylistic device of sibilance—a form of alliteration, in which the “s” consonant is repeated in quick succession at the beginning of more than two words: “Strangely apart, yet strangely close together, / Silence...” in order to emphasize the silence of their mutual estrangement. Much like their long silences, “time” (presumably, their long life together) keeps them connected, even though time is at the same time compared to a flighty “feather” (a metaphor for the fickleness of life), which quietly and imperceptibly ages both of them: “...And time itself's a feather / Touching them gently...” (15-16). The stanza closes with a gloomy rhetorical question which, for the first time, puts the poem in a more personal, almost autobiographical context, by revealing the persona's (the poet's?) relationship to the elderly couple: “Do they know they're old, / These two who are my father and my mother / Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?” (16-18). Using a second juxtaposition and another effective metaphor (“fire”), the poetess regretfully contrasts her parents' long-extinguished “fire” of youthful romance, love, and passion with their “cold” detachment and physical disconnection in old age.

In terms of structure and sound patterns, “One Flesh” consists of three stanzas with six lines each (so-called sestets or sextets), measuring usually ten syllables per line (that is, a metrical line of five feet or iambic pentameter). The poem's rhyme scheme is abcbaa (a rare variant of the English sestet, using an off-rhyme or slant rhyme at the line break in line 3) in the first stanza and dedeff (conventional English sestet) in the second stanza, but it changes to ghghgh (Sicilian sestet) in the last stanza, where the persona's identity and relationship to the elderly couple are finally uncovered. The whole poem is presented from the point of view of the persona (the poetess), revealing in the first-person voice what's on her mind, but never what's going on in the minds of her aged parents. In addition to using the non-traditional form of six-line stanzas, each ending in a heroic couplet—“two lines of iambic pentameter, consecutively rhymed” (Burroway 371)—the poem's metered verse is rendered all the more remarkable for its simple but memorable word choice (diction), melancholy tone, poignant mood, monotonously repetitive rhythm, and a pessimistic state of mind which casts doubts on the very possibility that marital love can last forever—or even for very long. Those two who once used to be physically and mentally “one flesh” are now co-habiting strangers who are deeply alienated from each other. This is not an unexpected sentiment for someone like Miss Jennings, who—although well-educated, intellectually refined, and quite pretty in her younger days—never married. Because of its masterful and sensitive treatment of eternal but delicate themes like love, flawed marriage, disillusionment, loneliness, suffering, and death, her elegiac poem “One Flesh” appeals to a surprisingly wide array of readers—both young and old, men and women.



Works Cited

Burroway, Janet. Ed. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. 4th edition. Boston: Longman Publishing Group, 2014. Print.

Jennings, Elizabeth. “One Flesh.” Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. Ed. Janet Burroway. 4th edition. Boston: Longman Publishing Group, 2014. 129. Print.

New American Standard Bible. Genesis. Lockman Foundation: La Habra, California, 1995. 2:21. Web. 3 Feb. 2015. <http://biblehub.com/nasb/genesis/2.htm>.

“Biography of Elizabeth Jennings.” PoemHunter.com. Web. 2 Feb. 2015. <http://www.poemhunter.com/elizabeth-jennings/biography/>.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/epitaphs_and_poetry-1646

Epitaphs and Poetry
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

EPITAPH (Gr. ?πιτ?φιος, sc. λ?γος, from ?π?, upon, and τ?φος, a tomb), strictly, an inscription upon a tomb, though by a natural extension of usage the name is applied to anything written ostensibly for that purpose whether actually inscribed upon a tomb or not. When the word was introduced into English in the 14th century it took the form epitaphy, as well as epitaphe, which latter word is used both by Gower and Lydgate. Many of the best-known epitaphs, both ancient and modern, are merely literary memorials, and find no place on sepulchral monuments. Sometimes the intention of the writer to have his production placed upon the grave of the person he has commemorated may have been frustrated, sometimes it may never have existed; what he has written is still entitled to be called an epitaph if it be suitable for the purpose, whether the purpose has been carried out or not. The most obvious external condition that suitability for mural inscription imposes is one of rigid limitation as to length. An epitaph cannot in the nature of things extend to the proportions that may be required in an elegy.

The desire to perpetuate the memory of the dead being natural to man, the practice of placing epitaphs upon their graves has been common among all nations and in all ages. And the similarity, amounting sometimes almost to identity, of thought and expression that often exists between epitaphs written more than two thousand years ago and epitaphs written only yesterday is as striking an evidence as literature affords of the close kinship of human nature under the most varying conditions where the same primary elemental feelings are stirred. The grief and hope of the Roman mother as expressed in the touching lines—

“Lagge fili bene quiescas;

Mater tua rogat te,

Ut me ad te recipias:

Vale!”

find their echo in similar inscriptions in many a modern cemetery.

Probably the earliest epitaphial inscriptions that have come down to us are those of the ancient Egyptians, written, as their mode of sepulture necessitated, upon the sarcophagi and coffins. Those that have been deciphered are all very much in the same form, commencing with a prayer to a deity, generally Osiris or Anubis, on behalf of the deceased, whose name, descent and office are usually specified. There is, however, no attempt to delineate individual character, and the feelings of the survivors are not expressed otherwise than in the fact of a prayer being offered. Ancient Greek epitaphs, unlike the Egyptian, are of great literary interest, deep and often tender in feeling, rich and varied in expression, and generally epigrammatic in form. They are written usually in elegiac verse, though many of the later epitaphs are in prose. Among the gems of the Greek anthology familiar to English readers through translations are the epitaphs upon those who had fallen in battle. There are several ascribed to Simonides on the heroes of Thermopylae, of which the most celebrated is the epigram—

“Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

A hymn of Simonides on the same subject contains some lines of great beauty in praise of those who were buried at Thermopylae, and these may be regarded as forming a literary epitaph. In Sparta epitaphs were inscribed only upon the graves of those who had been especially distinguished in war; in Athens they were applied more indiscriminately. They generally contained the name, the descent, the demise, and some account of the life of the person commemorated. It must be remembered, however, that many of the so-called Greek epitaphs are merely literary memorials not intended for monumental inscription, and that in these freer scope is naturally given to general reflections, while less attention is paid to biographical details. Many of them, even some of the monumental, do not contain any personal name, as in the one ascribed to Plato—

“I am a shipwrecked sailor’s tomb; a peasant’s there doth stand:

Thus the same world of Hades lies beneath both sea and land.”

Others again are so entirely of the nature of general reflections upon death that they contain no indication of the particular case that called them forth. It may be questioned, indeed, whether several of this character quoted in ordinary collections are epitaphs at all, in the sense of being intended for a particular occasion.

Roman epitaphs, in contrast to those of the Greeks, contained, as a rule, nothing beyond a record of facts. The inscriptions on the urns, of which numerous specimens are to be found in the British Museum, present but little variation. The letters D.M. or D.M.S. (Diis Manibus or Diis Manibus Sacrum) are followed by the name of the person whose ashes are enclosed, his age at death, and sometimes one or two other particulars. The inscription closes with the name of the person who caused the urn to be made, and his relationship to the deceased. It is a curious illustration of the survival of traces of an old faith after it has been formally discarded to find that the letters D.M. are not uncommon on the Christian inscriptions in the catacombs. It has been suggested that in this case they mean Deo Maximo and not Diis Manibus, but the explanation would be quite untenable, even if there were not many other undeniable instances of the survival of pagan superstitions in the thought and life of the early Christians. In these very catacomb inscriptions there are many illustrations to be found, apart from the use of the letters D.M., of the union of heathen with Christian sentiment, (see Maitland’s Church in the Catacombs). The private burial-places for the ashes of the dead were usually by the side of the various roads leading into Rome, the Via Appia, the Via Flaminia, &c. The traveller to or from the city thus passed for miles an almost uninterrupted succession of tombstones, whose inscriptions usually began with the appropriate words Siste Viator or Aspice Viator, the origin doubtless of the “Stop Passenger,” which still meets the eye in many parish churchyards of Britain. Another phrase of very common occurrence on ancient Roman tombstones, Sit tibi terra levis (“Light lie the earth upon thee”), has continued in frequent use, as conveying an appropriate sentiment, down to modern times. A remarkable feature of many of the Roman epitaphs was the terrible denunciation they often pronounced upon those who violated the sepulchre. Such denunciations were not uncommon in later times. A well-known instance is furnished in the lines on Shakespeare’s tomb at Stratford-on-Avon, said to have been written by the poet himself—

“Good frend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare

To digg the dust enclosed heare;

Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones.

And curst be he yt moves my bones.”

The earliest existing British epitaphs belonged to the Roman period, and are written in Latin after the Roman form. Specimens are to be seen in various antiquarian museums throughout 704the country; some of the inscriptions are given in Bruce’s Roman Wall, and the seventh volume of theCorpus Inscriptionum Latinarum edited by Hübner, containing the British inscriptions, is a valuable repertory for the earlier Roman epitaphs in Britain. The earliest, of course, are commemorative of soldiers, belonging to the legions of occupation, but the Roman form was afterwards adopted for native Britons. Long after the Roman form was discarded, the Latin language continued to be used, especially for inscriptions of a more public character, as being from its supposed permanence the most suitable medium of communication to distant ages. It is only, in fact, within recent years that Latin has become unusual, and the more natural practice has been adopted of writing the epitaphs of distinguished men in the language of the country in which they lived. While Latin was the chief if not the sole literary language, it was, as a matter of course, almost exclusively used for epitaphial inscriptions. The comparatively few English epitaphs that remain of the 11th and 12th centuries are all in Latin. They are generally confined to a mere statement of the name and rank of the deceased following the words “Hic jacet.” Two noteworthy exceptions to this general brevity are, however, to be found in most of the collections. One is the epitaph to Gundrada, daughter of the Conqueror (d. 1085), which still exists at Lewes, though in an imperfect state, two of the lines having been lost; another is that to William de Warren, earl of Surrey (d. 1089), believed to have been inscribed in the abbey of St Pancras, near Lewes, founded by him. Both are encomiastic, and describe the character and work of the deceased with considerable fulness and beauty of expression. They are written in leonine verse. In the 13th century French began to be used in writing epitaphs, and most of the inscriptions to celebrated historical personages between 1200 and 1400 are in that language. Mention may be made of those to Robert, the 3rd earl of Oxford (d. 1221), as given in Weever, to Henry III. (d. 1272) at Westminster Abbey, and to Edward the Black Prince (d. 1376) at Canterbury. In most of the inscriptions of this period the deceased addresses the reader in the first person, describes his rank and position while alive, and, as in the case of the Black Prince, contrasts it with his wasted and loathsome state in the grave, and warns the reader to prepare for the same inevitable change. The epitaph almost invariably closes with a request, sometimes very urgently worded, for the prayers of the reader that the soul of the deceased may pass to glory, and an invocation of blessing, general or specific, upon all who comply. Epitaphs preserved much of the same character after English began to be used towards the close of the 14th century. The following, to a member of the Savile family at Thornhill, is probably even earlier, though its precise date cannot be fixed:—

“Bonys emongg stonys lys ful

steyl gwylste the sawle wan-

deris were that God wylethe”—

that is, Bones among stones lie full still, whilst the soul wanders whither God willeth. It may be noted here that the majority of the inscriptions, Latin and English, from 1300 to the period of the Reformation, that have been preserved, are upon brasses (see Brasses, Monumental). The very curious epitaph on St Bernard, probably written by a monk of Clairvaux, has the peculiarity of being a dialogue in Latin verse.

It was in the reign of Elizabeth that epitaphs in English began to assume a distinct literary character and value, entitling them to rank with those that had hitherto been composed in Latin. We learn from Nash that at the close of the 16th century it had become a trade to supply epitaphs in English verse. There is one on the dowager countess of Pembroke (d. 1621), remarkable for its successful use of a somewhat daring hyperbole. It was written by William Browne, author of Britannia’s Pastorals:—

“Underneath this sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse;

Sydney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;

Death, ere thou hast slain another

Fair and learn’d and good as she,

Time will throw his dart at thee.

Marble piles let no man raise

To her name for after days;

Some kind woman, born as she,

Reading this, like Niobe,

Shall turn marble, and become

Both her mourner and her tomb.”

If there be something of the exaggeration of a conceit in the second stanza, it needs scarcely to be pointed out that epitaphs, like every other form of composition, necessarily reflect the literary characteristics of the age in which they were written. The deprecation of marble as unnecessary suggests one of the finest literary epitaphs in the English language, that by Milton upon Shakespeare.

The epitaphs of Pope are still considered to possess very great literary merit, though they were rated higher by Johnson and critics of his period than they are now.

Dr Johnson, who thought so highly of Pope’s epitaphs, was himself a great authority on both the theory and practice of this species of composition. His essay on epitaphs is one of the few existing monographs on the subject, and his opinion as to the use of Latin had great influence. The manner in which he met the delicately insinuated request of a number of eminent men that English should be employed in the case of Oliver Goldsmith was characteristic, and showed the strength of his conviction on the subject. His arguments in favour of Latin were chiefly drawn from its inherent fitness for epitaphial inscriptions and its classical stability. The first of these has a very considerable force, it being admitted on all hands that few languages are in themselves so suitable for the purpose; the second is outweighed by considerations that had considerable force in Dr Johnson’s time, and have acquired more since. Even to the learned Latin is no longer the language of daily thought and life as it was at the period of the Reformation, and the great body of those who may fairly claim to be called the well-educated classes can only read it with difficulty, if at all. It seems, therefore, little less than absurd, for the sake of a stability which is itself in great part delusive, to write epitaphs in a language unintelligible to the vast majority of those for whose information presumably they are intended. Though a stickler for Latin, Dr Johnson wrote some very beautiful English epitaphs, as, for example, the following on Philips, a musician:—

“Philips, whose touch harmonious could remove

The pangs of guilty power or hapless love;

Rest here, distressed by poverty no more,

Here find that calm thou gav’st so oft before;

Sleep undisturbed within this peaceful shrine

Till angels wake thee with a note like thine!”

In classifying epitaphs various principles of division may be adopted. Arranged according to nationality they indicate distinctions of race less clearly perhaps than any other form of literature does,—and this obviously because when under the influence of the deepest feeling men think and speak very much in the same way whatever be their country. At the same time the influence of nationality may to some extent be traced in epitaphs. The characteristics of the French style, its grace, clearness, wit and epigrammatic point, are all recognizable in French epitaphs. In the 16th century those of Étienne Pasquier were universally admired. Instances such as “La première au rendez-vous,” inscribed on the grave of a mother, Piron’s epitaph, written for himself after his rejection by the French Academy—

“Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien,

Pas même académicien”—

and one by a relieved husband, to be seen at Père la Chaise—

“Ci-gît ma femme. Ah! qu’elle est bien

Pour son repos et pour le mien”—

might be multiplied indefinitely. One can hardly look through a collection of English epitaphs without being struck with the fact that these represent a greater variety of intellectual and emotional states than those of any other nation, ranging through every style of thought from the sublime to the commonplace, every mood of feeling from the most delicate and touching to the coarse and even brutal. Few subordinate illustrations of the complex nature of the English nationality are more striking.

Epitaphs are sometimes classified according to their authorship and sometimes according to their subject, but neither division 705is so interesting as that which arranges them according to their characteristic features. What has just been said of English epitaphs is, of course, more true of epitaphs generally. They exemplify every variety of sentiment and taste, from lofty pathos and dignified eulogy to coarse buffoonery and the vilest scurrility. The extent to which the humorous and even the low comic element prevails among them is a noteworthy circumstance. It is curious that the most solemn of all subjects should have been frequently treated, intentionally or unintentionally, in a style so ludicrous that a collection of epitaphs is generally one of the most amusing books that can be picked up. In this as in other cases, too, it is to be observed that the unintended humour is generally of a much more entertaining kind than that which has been deliberately perpetrated.

See Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631, 1661, Tooke’s edit., 1767); Philippe Labbe, Thesaurus epitaphiorum (Paris, 1666); Theatrum funebre extructum a Dodone Richea seu Ottone Aicher (1675); Hackett, Select and Remarkable Epitaphs (1757); de Laplace, Épitaphes sérieuses, badines, satiriques et burlesques (3 vols., Paris, 1782); Pulleyn, Churchyard Gleanings (c. 1830); L. Lewysohn, Sechzig Epitaphien von Grabsteinen d. israelit. Friedhofes zu Worms (1855); Pettigrew, Chronicles of the Tombs (1857); S. Tissington, Epitaphs (1857); Robinson,Epitaphs from Cemeteries in London, Edinburgh, &c. (1859); le Blant, Inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule antérieures au VIIIe siècle (1856, 1865); Blommaert, Galliard, &c, Inscriptions funéraires et monumentales de la prov. de Flandre Orient (Ghent, 1857, 1860); Inscriptions fun. et mon. de la prov. d’Anvers (Antwerp, 1857-1860); Chwolson, Achtzehn hebräische Grabschriften aus der Krim (1859); J. Brown, Epitaphs, &c, in Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh (1867); H.J. Loaring, Quaint, Curious, and Elegant Epitaphs (1872); J.K. Kippax, Churchyard Literature, a Choice Collection of American Epitaphs (Chicago, 1876); also the poet William Wordsworth’s Essay on Epitaphs.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/141830


Essay
Notes from Auden Land
Why Auden is as essential to our times as Orwell.
By Austin Allen


Whether poetry is “relevant” has always struck me as a beginning-of-semester question—also a distinctly American one. There’s a cheerful presumptuousness to it. Poetry spans thousands of years and emerges naturally across times and cultures. What are the odds that such a vast creative output has nothing to teach us?

Still, poets often proclaim their own marginality, even while defending their art. William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” W.H. Auden: “poetry makes nothing happen.” Even the swaggering Percy Bysshe Shelley saw poetic influence as essentially thankless: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In each case the writer concedes poetry’s distance from the main cultural arena. Auden went so far as to quip that Shelley’s phrase describes the secret police, not poets. It’s a great line, but Auden’s own career powerfully refutes it.

Of course, poems don’t move stock markets or armies. But they have a way of surfacing, calmly, whenever the “acknowledged” legislators scramble. Usually all sorts of pragmatic disciplines—economics, political science, statistical analysis—seem to hold the globe in hand; then, one day, the markets plummet, treaties crumble, pollsters wake to shock, and suddenly poetry looks old and solid enough to cling to. Verses of mourning or anger or consolation make the social-media rounds. Impassioned members of Congress start quoting the poem enshrined at the Statue of Liberty, forgetting that it’s nowhere enshrined in law; it’s “only” a sonnet, the brainchild of a single 19th-century citizen and an afterthought to the statue’s original conception.

During the upheavals of recent years, many readers have looked to Auden, too, as monument and beacon. Most famously, his World War II poem “September 1, 1939” circulated widely after 9/11. It caught the mood of the moment, but the moment was a prologue. We are really in Auden Land now. In 2015, as the U.S. presidential campaign turned ugly, actor Jeffrey Tambor quoted from the same poem: “Love one another or die.” When the election went to the billionaire realtor, angry bigot, and alleged sexual predator, the poem looked more clairvoyant than ever: “The lie of Authority / Whose buildings grope the sky.” Friends and pundits, some of whom had never shown much interest in poetry, quoted it on social media for weeks afterward. The day after the inauguration, at the Women’s March on Washington, Madonna did her part to sanctify what’s long since become a mantra: “We must love one another or die.”

But Auden, of course, is more than the one classic, which in later life he came to resent. He was one of his century’s most uncanny prophets in any genre; whatever seedy atmosphere our politics lurches into, his lyrics seem to be audible in the background. This is especially true of those poems collected in the landmark 1940 volume Another Time. Reading about corporate data mining or NSA surveillance, I hear the sardonic close of “The Unknown Citizen”:

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

As the new administration bars refugees and hounds “illegal aliens,” I hear the opening of “Refugee Blues”:

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

And when the new president brags online about meeting some “really great Air Force GENERALS and Navy ADMIRALS,” how can an Auden fan help but hear the “Epitaph on a Tyrant”?

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets. …

Meanwhile the deeper trend of entropy, often associated with Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (“Things fall apart”), conjures too the mocking, apocalyptic lilt of Auden’s “The Fall of Rome”:

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Auden isn’t politically irreproachable, but in dozens of poems, essays, interviews—in the deepest texture and meaning of his work—he has become indispensable. You could navigate a dysfunctional country without him, just as you could without knowing your Orwell, but why would you? His witty, accurate, dark, dissenting music has soundtracked the world history of the past 80 years. Listening closely now may lend some small advantage.

•

Take just ten of Auden’s best poems—“September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “The Fall of Rome,” “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” “Refugee Blues,” “The Unknown Citizen,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “August 1968,” and “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”—plus selections from the longer sequences and essays, and you’ve got a pocket anthology of modern political reality. Think of it as a literary supply kit for whatever the coming years bring. Just as instructive for writers, though, is the broader sweep of Auden’s career: his triumphs and disenchantments as the great political poet of his age.

Auden’s mature style bloomed amid the nightmare of 1930s Europe, which brought depression, then war, then cataclysmic war. A model of the engagé artist throughout the decade—in one characteristic gesture, he traveled to observe the Spanish Civil War, then donated proceeds from his poem-pamphlet Spain to a relief organization—he angered many of his compatriots by resettling in America in 1939. Some viewed it as a desertion; as late as his centenary in 2007, the Guardian reported “muted celebrations for poet who shunned Britain.” But the move only helped the poetry, the gathering brilliance of which blazed out into the annus mirabilis of 1939–1940.

Everything is political in some sense, but politics in the ordinary sense so suffused Auden’s imagination that it stamped even his love poems. “Funeral Blues” (1936), famous as a lover’s poem of grief, bears traces of its original conception as a satirical elegy for a dictator:

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

In “Lullaby” (1937), one of Auden’s purest love songs, the speaker hears “fashionable madmen raise / Their pedantic boring cry”—likely the sound of fascists overtaking Europe. (Notice the parallel imagery in “September 1, 1939”: dictators talking “elderly rubbish” to “an apathetic grave,” and so on.) That contemporary threat, along with the universal hazards of “faithless” love and “the mortal world,” provides the dramatic occasion for the poem. The lovers may be resting on Venus’s “enchanted slope,” but the world around them is careering downhill.

Auden excelled not only at humanizing politics but also at politicizing humans, at mapping the individual as a microcosm of the civic. In a 1941 essay, Randall Jarrell highlighted “a certain kind of spatial metaphor Auden uses for people,” in which, for example, “The provinces of Yeats’s body revolted,” “Matthew Arnold is a dark disordered city,” and Edward Lear “became a land.” It can’t be an accident that the people in Jarrell’s examples are also writers. As the most celebrated English poet of his generation, Auden felt early the artist’s burden of “representing” his culture—not entirely different from the politician’s mode of “representation.” Both figures are spokespersons; both must be accountable but not completely beholden to their public. (Auden’s elder model Yeats had straddled both roles, serving a stint in the Irish Senate.)

As Jarrell surveys Auden’s work—his subject was only 34 at the time, yet Jarrell divided it into “early” and “late” periods—it’s astonishing how much ground it covers, how large a mandate Auden claimed for himself. He offers not just stylistic novelty, or clever sound play, or quiet epiphanies but also a far-ranging moral and intellectual vision. He was a master of thinking in verse, obliquely but always cogently, such that we can muck around in the landscape of his ideas (about everything from Freud to democracy to space travel) as we could the most capacious essayist’s. Recall that he imagined poetry itself as a realm apart:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in. …


To absorb this landscape in all its autonomy and breadth is to realize how much territory most poets cede up front. (Or is it only their critics?) Auden can downplay his ambitions all he wants, but when Jarrell reaches for Marxism, evolutionary biology, Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, the Hegelian dialectic, Edmund Burke, Thomas Malthus, and popular song—all in one paragraph—to make sense of Auden’s achievement, poetry looks anything but parochial. Elsewhere Jarrell writes, almost offhandedly, that Auden “took the world for his province without much hesitation.” It’s meant as a sideswipe, but a young poet today is likely to find it thrilling.

•

“Poetry makes nothing happen.” How many poets’ hearts have felt the dagger of that line? It comes from Auden’s elegy for Yeats, a poet who never won over his beloved or saved his troubled country. Readers who resist the line usually point to the end of that stanza, which clarifies that poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth.” Or they look to section III, which instructs the poet to do what she can for her people: sing, heal, teach.

All fair enough. But to me the best counterstatement comes from “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” which begins:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.

What use would a tyrant have for something that makes nothing happen?

Where the elegy for Yeats imagines poetry as a private country that scares off “executives,” these lines warn us that executives have their poetry, too, and it’s always threatening to invade ours. It’s the stuff of crude slogans: sentimentality, bombast, cliché. It contains no genuine feeling, but its folly can grip entire nations:

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

At worst it’s pure gibberish, as in Auden’s “August 1968,” another vision of the ruler as monster:

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Why read poetry? One answer: if you don’t learn to recognize the real stuff, you’ll be a sucker for the tyrant’s kind.

But is the real stuff effective only by contrast with the fake? Auden seemed to adopt that stance toward the end of his career. Here he is in a 1974 Paris Review interview:

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. By all means, let a poet, if he wants to, write what is now called an “engagé” poem, so long as he realizes that it is mainly himself who will benefit from it. It will enhance his literary reputation among those who feel the same as he does.

For any young poet with a savior complex, this is another dagger. (But not an ambition killer: when asked “which living writer [would you] say has served as the prime protector of the integrity of our English tongue,” Auden replied, “Why, me, of course!”) It’s hard to argue with the master, except by noting that language has no “correct” state; the idea that it does belongs more to tyrants than writers. Poetic language is less concerned with preserving definitions than inventing fresh usages. And with invention comes the possibility of subversion.

The odd, sometimes ominous kinship between poet and politician became a recurrent theme for Auden. The second of his “Sonnets from China” (1938) defines both poets and lawmakers by their failures of language; both are exiles from an Eden where word and thing were united (“…the way back by angels was defended / Against the poet and the legislator”). If tyrants are poets of a sort, Auden saw also that poets could be tyrants, reigning willfully and harshly over their imaginative domains. In the seventh sonnet of the same sequence, a bard starts his career as the people’s “servant,” then is worshipped as “a God that sings”—until the people cast him down again. In a later essay on Byron’s Don Juan, Auden quotes a shrewd remark by Lady Byron: her husband, she said, “is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them as Bonaparte did lives, for conquest without regard to their intrinsic value.” Auden adds:

What had been Byron’s defect as a serious poet, his lack of reverence for words, was a virtue for the comic poet. Serious poetry requires that the poet treat words as if they were persons, but comic poetry demands that he treat them as things and few, if any, English poets have rivaled Byron’s ability to put words through the hoops.

Auden, a gentler monarch, was never fully comfortable treating words “as things.” His work in the pure comic mode, such as “Letter to Lord Byron” and “Under Which Lyre,” earns a few wry smiles but has stiffened with age. At the same time, his “serious” verse is full of wit; “treat[ing] words as if they were persons” meant honoring the full range of their capacities, from wickedness to sorrow. And his political verse contains some of his best tragicomic inventions, from the “little birds with scarlet legs” awaiting our doom in “The Fall of Rome” to the lesson on disguising love poems as propaganda in “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.” Though superficially about painting and not politics, “Musée des Beaux Arts” glitters with the ironies of atrocity and witness: “the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

•

Auden himself became a more detached witness as the years went by. The activism of his early years lapsed into a kind of quietism; he claimed to worry about “adding to the general confusion and panic” of public crises. (His politics may, however, have cost him the Nobel Prize; he’s thought to have offended the Swedish Academy by criticizing their countryman, Dag Hammarskjöld.) As his style evolved, he began second-guessing some of his earlier works—none more so than “September 1, 1939.” After the war, he cut the final stanza, then agonized over the line “We must love one another or die,” which he revised to “We must love one another and die” (emphasis mine). In 1964 he declared the whole poem “infected with an incurable dishonesty” and renounced it altogether.

Certainly, the poem has its flaws. It’s true that no amount of love can save us from dying (though there are forms of death besides the literal). It’s possible to read “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return” as too forgiving of Nazi Germany (though the surrounding rhetoric stands fiercely against Nazism). The title is literally dated, and all the capitalized abstractions—“Authority,” “the Just”—are tough to take at first. Jarrell jeers them mercilessly. I remember scoffing at them as a twentysomething. I could see why Auden had been embarrassed.

I see a different poem now. Beyond its virtues and flaws, I see a striking resilience, a stubborn relevance. In the title, I sense a hint that it’s always September 1, 1939; modern life teeters permanently on the brink. In the abstractions, I sense the poet writing against the clock, scrapping the “show, don’t tell” style in his drive to tell it all before chaos takes over. Rather than summon up justice or despair through image and narrative, he lays them bare:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

It may be that he later found this approach maudlin, like a soldier who laughs at his own terror once the battle’s done. If so, he misjudged: he was reacting to a cultural trauma whose shadow has not left us. I find it deeply moving that, on the eve of the worst catastrophe in human history, at least one human managed to respond so adequately to the occasion. How steady his nerves must have been to raise that affirming torch. In our own time, we’ll be lucky to hold a candle to him.

Originally Published: April 26th, 2017




Whether poetry is “relevant” has always struck me as a beginning-of-semester question—also a distinctly American one. There’s a cheerful presumptuousness to it. Poetry spans thousands of years and emerges naturally across times and cultures. What are the odds that such a vast creative output has nothing to teach us?

Still, poets often proclaim their own marginality, even while defending their art. William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” W.H. Auden: “poetry makes nothing happen.” Even the swaggering Percy Bysshe Shelley saw poetic influence as essentially thankless: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In each case the writer concedes poetry’s distance from the main cultural arena. Auden went so far as to quip that Shelley’s phrase describes the secret police, not poets. It’s a great line, but Auden’s own career powerfully refutes it.

DOES IT MATTER THAT THIS LEVEL OF DISCOURSE, THINKING, QUESTIONING AND TEACHING ONLY EXISTS(EVEN LESS SO NOW) AT COLLEGE LEVEL;
WHEN ONCE PRIOR TO WW2 it was taught, discussed and introduced at 12th grade level in public schools?
And not just on the subject of writing but on many other topics... --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91017

Essay
Forever Words
A new book collects the unpublished poems of Johnny Cash.
By Paul Muldoon
Joel Baldwin

The great artist has a finger on the pulse of his time; he also quickens that pulse. In the case of Johnny Cash, his music seems to well up directly from the poverty and deprivation of country life in the Great Depression, through the uncertainty of World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam, to the victories of adulation and the vicissitudes of addiction. We might guess, even if we didn’t know, that Cash’s classic “Five Feet High and Rising” is an account of the flooding with which he was all too familiar from his 1930s achildhood in the cotton fields of Arkansas:

How high’s the water, mama?
Five feet high and risin’

How high’s the water, papa?
Five feet high and risin’

His song “Man in Black” is a deft and dexterous comment on Vietnam, a subject on which so many others were heavy-handed:

And I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believin’ that we all were on their side

The relationship between the amphitheater and amphetamines, meanwhile, is rather neatly delineated in a piece collected here called “Going, Going, Gone”:

Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
The payoff is the same in the end
Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
Convenient ways to get the poison in

So ingrained in our collective unconscious is the voice of Johnny Cash that we can all but hear the boom-chicka boom-chicka of his guitar accompaniment, at once reassuring and disquieting in its very familiarity.

The defining characteristic of an effective lyric—even the greatest of them—is that it doesn’t quite hold up to the scrutiny we might bring to bear on a poem, that only something along the lines of that missing boom-chicka will allow it to be completely what it most may be. In the case of work that is previously unpublished, or hitherto overlooked, this intrinsic lack is thrown into even greater relief. Is it possible that Cash himself chose not to round out, never mind record, some or all of these pieces? Are we doing him and his memory a disservice in allowing them out of the attic and into the wider world? Writers of the stature of Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin are among those whose reputations have suffered at least a dent from the indiscriminate publication of their second- or third-rate efforts. And the fact is that even great artists not only nod, like Homer, but also produce nonstarters and no-nos.

Such considerations weighed heavily on the team—John Carter Cash and Steve Berkowitz—most immediately involved in the collection and collation of the copious raw material from which I was able to make the selection for Forever Words. It was with an initial sense of relief, then an increasingly rapturous glee, that I realized there is so much here that will indeed broaden and deepen our perception of Johnny Cash and his legacy.



•

Before thinking about Johnny Cash’s legacy, though, I’d like to appeal to a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which I continue to find particularly instructive in this matter:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.

The veracity of Eliot’s last profound observation may be seen in a piece like “The Dogs Are in the Woods”:

The dogs are in the woods
And the huntin’s lookin’ good
And the raccoons on the hill
I can hear them trailing still

These dogs are calling out to some of their not-too-distant relatives, the hunting hounds poisoned by Lord Randall’s dissed girlfriend, as reported by Lord Randall to his mother in the traditional Scotch-Irish folksong “Lord Randall”:

“What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randall my son?
What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?”
“O they swelled and they died: mother, make my bed soon,
for I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

We’ve already seen the dialogue format of the “Lord Randall” ballad repurposed in “Five Feet High and Rising.” The “Muscadine Wine” we find in this collection is an offshoot of the same vine that gave us the blood-red wine in the Scottish standard “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”:

The King sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blood-red wine;
“O where shall I get a skeely skipper
To sail this ship or mine?”

Then up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the King’s right knee:
“Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sailed the sea.”

The King has written a broad letter,
And sealed it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the strand.

It’s no accident that the tradition of the Scots ballad, along with its transmogrified versions in North America, is one in which Johnny Cash should be so at ease, given that the first recorded instance of the name Cash—that of Roger Cass—is found in, of all things, the Registrum de Dunfermelyn. The entry is dated 1130, during the reign of King David I of Scotland (r. 1124–1153). “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” is set in Dunfermline a mere hundred sixty years later, in 1290.

We may also see the influence of the Scotch-Irish tradition in the use of the tag phrase at the end of each verse (a device we’ve come to associate with the work of Bob Dylan), in a piece like “Slumgullion”:

Every day’s a brand-new mountain
Don’t drink long at any fountain
You’ll be turned into slumgullion

“Slumgullion” is a word that means several things, including a watery stew, the watery waste left after the rendering of whale blubber, and the slurry associated with a mine. It is generally believed to be derived from “slum,” an old word for “slime,” and “gullion,” an English dialect term for “mud” or “cesspool.” “Gullion” may actually be a corruption of the Gaelic word góilín, “pit” or “pool.” The earliest recorded usage of “slumgullion,” in Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), refers to a drink:

Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “Slum gullion,” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.

The Scotch-Irish song tradition has a strong humorous component that may be detected in “Jellico Coal Man,” a song about life in a Tennessee mining town that could easily have been called Slumgullion had it not already been named after the wild angelica (Angelica sylvestris) that grows there in abundance:

It will warm your baby in the winter time
It comes direct from the Jellico mine
When the sun comes up that’s the time I start
You will see me comin’ with my two-wheel cart

There’s a not too-far-from-the-surface eroticism about this coal-mining man that straddles not only the ballad tradition but also the bawdiness of certain old blues songs. We recognize it in “Hey, Baby, Wake Up,” with its assertion that “I need my biscuit buttered, Babe.” We have detected it in “Who’s Gonna Grease My Skillet?” when he says “Who’s gonna squeeze my juice if you should go,” with a nod and wink in the direction of Robert Johnson’s “Squeeze my lemon.”

In addition to conjuring up the naughty nickname attached to, say, Jelly Roll Morton, “Jellico Coal Man” brings to mind the city of Jericho, the walls of which succumbed to the power of music when the Israelite priests sounded their ram’s-horn trumpets. (In one of those fascinating coincidences that many of us enjoy, Jellico was the childhood home of Homer Rodeheaver, the famous evangelist and trombonist.) The iconography of the Bible is a constant in Johnny Cash’s work, rarely so powerful as in a piece like “Job,” with its recalibration of Job as cattle baron:

Job was a wealthy man
He had a lot of kids and a lot of land
He had cattle on a thousand hills
He lived every day to do God’s will

On a technical note, there exist a number of versions of the “Job” text in Cash’s hand. As with several other pieces included here, I drew on these multiple manuscript sources to make a plausible “finished” version. An attentive reader may therefore remark on discrepancies and disconnects, variations and vagaries, between the printed texts and the facsimile material with which they’re so artfully interspersed. That reader may also notice the rationalization of stanza breaks and the generally normative tendencies of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Cash’s occasional misspellings need be perpetuated no more than Yeats’s, and that includes the humorous humdinger “Caddilac.”

There’s another humorous strand running through a number of these lyrics that draws on the cowboy tradition, be it the Lone Ranger mounted on Silver, referred to in “Spirit Rider” (“I will mount my Hi-Yo and I will ride off, ma’am”), or the singing cowboy Roy Rogers in “Hey, Baby, Wake Up”:

Hey, Baby, wake up
Did you hear the latest news
The man said Roy and Dale split up
And Dale got Trigger, too
Yeah, I hear your sweet feet on the f loor
I knew that’d get through to you

That humor extends to the litany of exhortations in “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” that reflect Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering:

Don't let 'em drag old Hickory Lake
For my telephones and bottles and roller skates . . .
Out a hundred yards from my lakeside house
Weighted down with a rock is a skirt and blouse
A dozen pair of boots that made a dozen corns
Trombones, trumpets, harmonicas and horns
And the tapes that I threw from the lakeside door
Silverstein, and Kristofferson from years before

This was the selfsame Shel Silverstein who won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song of 1969 for “A Boy Named Sue.” He was friendly with David Allan Coe, also mentioned in “Don’t Make a Movie About Me,” who had the distinction of embarking on his music career in Nashville while living in a hearse parked outside Ryman Auditorium, a macabre touch that would surely have ap- pealed to Cash. The song continues:

If they’re hot on a book called Man in Black Tell
’em I’ve got the rights and won’t give back If
you don’t know my tune you can’t get it right I
don’t talk about me in Man in White

As it turns out, Man in White is the title of Cash’s historical novel about the life of Saint Paul before and after his conversion. We’re reminded, of course, that Johnny Cash as the “Man in Black” is less gunslinger than psalm-singing preacher, the unapologetic nature of his Christian faith shining through in “He Bore It All for Me,” a piece that takes as its text Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” A faith in the sense that there is a world beyond this one must at least partly inform the sentiments of “Forever”:

But the trees that I planted
Still are young
The songs I sang
Will still be sung

•

In addition to the sense that it functions within time, the great work of art brings with it a profound sense of timelessness. There’s a sense of immortality and inevitability that suggests (1) that it has always existed and (2) that it was always meant to exist in this form and this form only. Johnny Cash’s quiet insistence that his songs “will still be sung” might easily be read as self-regarding but is more accurately perceived as a manifestation of the humility that is an absolute prerequisite in art-making: it has less to do with his name and fame being bruited about in Dubai or Decatur or Dunfermline itself than with his achieving a kind of beautiful anonymity. It’s a claim to deathlessness that may be made only by someone who has taken into account that, like “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,” Johnny Cash’s brilliant “California Poem” was written by everyone and no one:

The lights are on past midnite
The curtains closed all day
There’s trouble on the mountain
The valley people say


From FOREVER WORDS: The Unknown Poems by Johnny Cash, published by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Foreword copyright © 2016 by John Carter Cash.

Originally Published: October 12th, 2016

No other country star, living or dead surpasses Johnny Cash.
As Cash, from birth to death, was the true essence of country and its profoundest meanings, IMHO..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/118548

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Words That Sing, Dance, Kiss
On Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo
By Helen Vendler

Four Reincarnations, by Max Ritvo.

Milkweed Editions. $22.00.

I first heard Max Ritvo’s voice in “Poem to My Litter,” published last year in The New Yorker. The distinguishing quality of a Max Ritvo poem is a leap from the literal to the fanciful, from the pedestrian to the performative. The leap ratifies itself in the success of the poem. Yes, a mortally ill young poet may know that lab animals are killed in the clinical trials that may save him, but how many poets would think of those animals as “my litter”? And how many, after the comic beginning, would crash into a shocking simile of family trauma and torture?

I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children.
I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2,

but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites.
They don’t know they’re named, of course.

They’re like children you’ve traumatized
and tortured so they won’t let you visit.

The sharp deflection into the human, as the guilt of bloody experiments on mice veers into the guilt of torturing children, is typical of Ritvo’s ingenuity of reflection. Just as he frames the mice whimsically as his “litter,” but then gives dreadful details of their suffering at the hands of doctors (“Before the tumors can spread // they bust open the legs of the mice”), so he frames the traumatized mice with traumatized children. Ritvo juggles the symbolic and the real so rapidly that the distinction between mice and children blurs in the intimacy of identity: “I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me.” The poems in Four Reincarnations are a litter of Maxes for posterity: Max himself died last year at twenty-five of Ewing’s sarcoma. (Additional poems have seen publication in journals since his death.)

Ritvo often opens his poems with startling language: the very first 
line in Four Reincarnations is “The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?” A different sort of dramatization follows the mind’s slide from self-dramatization to a borrowed cliché: “I am raving at you / with extremely good eye contact.” Ritvo’s imaginative manner often combines unlikely objects: to his bride he says, “I see behind the documents: / the gauze swelling with gold /  blood into a halo.” Yes: the marriage contract. Yes, his bloodied bandages. And yes, as two become one in marriage, her golden halo intersects with his blood-stained swelling gauze. But it takes a minute to see how the 
documents, the bandages, and the halo combine; the consequent 
excitement on the page is like strobe lighting, flash after flash.

Ritvo’s electric style finds its complement in his allusive simplicity: 
to his wife, as they make love, the ground is not the grave, and winter is not deathly:

We are becoming a bulb
in the ground of  the living,
in the winter of  being alive.

The bulb will stand, as it always does, for future possibility. The elusive four reincarnations of Ritvo’s title find one embodiment here. Behind his bulb lies George Herbert’s:

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
— From The Flower

The hard weather is Ritvo’s winter; the underground mother-root is Ritvo’s bulb. Whether or not Ritvo — enormously well-read — was remembering Herbert, the bulb is a perennial image. Many of  Ritvo’s allusions have a long history in poetic tradition, and not solely from Western sources. From the Mahabharata, the prince Shon, killed by Arjuna, speaks to Ritvo in a dream:

Me: What is my future?
Shon: Flowers. You are marrying flowers.
— From Second Dream

From the bulb, human posies/poesies (a pun Herbert liked) will 
issue: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). Jesus’s prophecy of progeny is fulfilled in the virtual world of art as in the material world of propagation.

One of  Ritvo’s great charms is that his early childhood, down to his 
lisp in baby-language, is extraordinarily alive within his twenty-five-year-old self. Childhood surges up unexpectedly and with pathos in “Plush Bunny,” where — in a characteristically blurred sequence of future, past, future, and future-future — his life-stages, as they are telescoped, pull in and out of focus, culminating in a metaphor at once homemade and tragic, the stitched eyes of the “special bunny,” his transitional object:

My poor little future,
you could practically fit in a shoebox
like the one I kept ’pecial bunny in
when I decided I was too old to sleep with her.
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
She had eyes, I could see them.
They were two stitches. My future has eyes,
for a while. Then my future has stitches,
like ’pecial’s.

Like all credible poets, Ritvo has a fidelity to iron as well as to bunnies and flowers. He consciously “spoils” the sweetness of the bunny-past with an acerbic gesture to the future’s end: “You start to reek. / That’s you moving on.” The reek is as abrupt as the grinning skull Dickinson saw:

a Face of Steel — 
That suddenly looks into ours
With a metallic grin — 
The Cordiality of Death — 
Who drills his Welcome in — 
— From That after Horror — that ’twas us

The normal response of a youthful poet is to take “in all beauty with an easy span” (Keats, “The Human Seasons”). But the writer, no matter how young, once awakened to imminent mortality must acknowledge the coming winter: “He has his winter too of pale 
misfeature / Or else he would forgo his mortal nature.” Ritvo’s admission, like Keats’s own, is both unwilling and compelled: both were honest poets. Both strained to find the adequate diction for the moment of horror: “pale misfeature” and “reek” are registered by the senses (sight, smell), but the conceptualizing mind demands its hour as well. When Ritvo, speaking as his child-self in “The Big Loser,” awakens from a hideous nightmare of the grave — “It’s burning hot, the heat coming / from bugs and worms / raping and devouring one another” — he must embark on the painful transformative work required to turn the human terrors preceding Four Reincarnations into the living word of the imagination:

He starts the hard work
of the imagination,
learning to minister to the new dream.

To me, this is Ritvo’s most moving sentence. As he defines “the hard work / of the imagination” he draws — with the single word “minister” — on the desperate scene in Macbeth, in which Macbeth, seeing his wife go mad, pleads with the summoned doctor “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,”

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

The doctor replies:

Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

To minister to the unfortunate is an act of tenderness; the poet must somehow conceive a way to understand the psychic wound dealt by the hideous dream of the grave, “ministering” to it by inventing for it a symbolic form, a “sweet oblivious antidote” that will denature its poison. As so often, the tradition — here in Shakespeare’s sense of the lonely act of “ministering” — glimmers underneath Ritvo’s re-voicing. Ritvo greets with instant recognition Shakespeare’s words naming what a dying person knows: a mind diseased, a rooted sorrow, troubles of the brain, a killing heartache.

Ritvo had lived for almost a decade in the shadow of a potentially lethal disease. Keats, under the same shadow, facing death at twenty-five, revealed in “To Autumn” how his own self-ministering dealt with the shock of certain death. As his life accelerated to a premature end, he wrote a fable acknowledging that in order to gain the necessary sustenance of food and drink, human beings had to destroy the beautiful panoramas of the autumn harvest: the gathered grain must be flailed to become bread, the beautiful apples must be crushed to become cider. He did not end his “hard work of the imagination” with his earlier bitter view of “pale misfeature,” but rather with an autumn both consoling and consoled, as the earlier visual luxury fades into a last austere plenitude, an aural twilight of life-sounds: cricket-
song, lamb-bleats, robin-whistles, and swallow-twitters. Ritvo, 
himself accelerating through all the human seasons, replicates — in a poem published in Poetry, “The Soundscape of Life Is Charred by Tiny Bonfires” — Keats’s own autumnal “soundscape” in his own: “Everywhere life-sounds / swarm this, our shared pond, like mating turtles.” The life-sounds at first seem modern — the whooshing of cars, the humming of schmoozers (two incessant pollutants). But some things never change: the poet finds that in the alternating coupling and sobbing of marriage, the poisonous snake hides as it did in Eden:

Cars whoosh, schmoozers hum,
snakes spit poison, Martin and Martina say yes

and sob and hold.

The question is when to give up: but instead of St. Paul’s solemn 
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race” (2 Timothy 4:7) Ritvo ends his mortal race with a wry and ironic modern aphorism on suicide:

You’re almost at the finish line.
But first, you have to pick a finish line.

Ritvo often integrates his complicated intuitions by moving — 
apparently effortlessly — from the surreal to the real. The conjunctions 
are convincing: he sees “eyes like blisters / leaking fondness.” His devastating self-portrait, surreal though it is, subsides into the awful exhaustion of an emaciated body unable not to utter language (even if only in the form of Keatsian bird-cheeping):

Skinny, hairy-chested,
made of pellets of rice,
cheeping in a way that’s
endearing and inappropriate,
confused, surprised at the confusion,
surprised at the surprise,
and so on, very tiringly, so on.
— From The Curves

Ritvo’s successive adjectives and nouns, culminating in the always unexpected (but cruelly repeated) surprise of each new symptom, of each hazarded treatment, track the emotional consequences of the disease: “confused,” “surprised,” “confusion,” “surprised,” “surprise.” 
Eventually he realizes that poetic narrative and his obligation to it cannot cease: “and so on, very tiringly, so on.” Normally, poets have declared the exhilaration of creation. It takes a moment (after Ritvo’s cartoon portrait of his body) to see the force of that understated “tiringly,” to recognize the loss of hope in “and so on,” to participate in the convincing rhythmic entropy of “and so on, very tiringly, so on.”

Ritvo’s anecdotes are no less transfixing as they mix realms and speech-registers. In “Poem Set in the Day and in the Night,” a man’s shadow of fatality suddenly becomes a shadow spider that induces the suicide of his inner cricket:

The man becomes a web
and his shadow becomes a spider.

It’s not that his life passes to the shadow — 
but a tipping happens, as in an hourglass,

and suddenly there’s a new order
to the life he never knew was shared.

That night a cricket kills himself in the man.

Behind Ritvo’s lines we again hear the susurrus of tradition; Tennyson’s cricket-Tithonus; Dickinson’s “spectral canticle” of crickets in the grass; Keats’s reassuring cricket on the hearth in his sonnet “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”; and especially Keats’s undaunted assertion in “To Autumn” of the central unmodified verb: “Hedge-crickets sing.” In those reverberations, the crickets are still the life-principle, their song the poet’s. Ritvo’s cricket, against all these, has gone silent in eerie self-destruction. Ritvo’s spider has ancestors in Job, Jonathan Edwards, Donne, and Dickinson, but Ritvo’s man — who is a web harboring a death-dealing spider and a living cricket — is new. It’s as if, reading Ritvo, one is reading several poems at once, as the receding planes of past verses are rescued by the present lines. Just when we cannot guess where the next analogy will be found, suddenly, for instance, we hear grating tectonic plates: “The new day is slid underneath / the old days.” The modern surreal can too often become senseless or coy; Ritvo’s surreal is as real as his real. He packs the surreal into the real so unobtrusively (as the single word “slid” visualizes the tectonic plates) that we — expecting some longer elaboration of a metaphor — can miss Ritvo’s single-word subtleties altogether until our second reading. Then (as Hopkins said) the meaning explodes.

Ritvo’s conceptual effort is athletic, even when a poem becomes uncertain. And his ripples of musicality survive. In one of his frightening fore-glimpses of the end, the familiar techniques of poetry — alliteration, assonance, syntactic parallelism, graphic placement — flicker within two chilly similes: the first one of market-haggling and the second one, its gruesome partner, one of automata playing with human heads in a macabre game of pool:

In the distance, behind several voices
haggling, I hear a sound like heads
clicking together. Like a game of pool
played with people by machines.
— From Afternoon

Ritvo’s alliteration — even when it shows off (as in “pool / played with people”) — does not sound like Hopkins’s or Dylan Thomas’s. He has decoupled their pulsing rhythms from his own faltering succession 
of sounds: his heartbeat is diminished, irregular, failing. As he says, “I give my breath / to a small, bird-shaped pipe.” The legato pipe of classical pastoral, miniaturized, is about to be etherealized into a Keatsian twitter.

It is impossible not to bring up Keats in the context of Ritvo, but Ritvo knew from adolescence the shattering fear that Keats acquired only at his first lung hemorrhage. Keats managed that knowledge by a gallant alternation of pathos and stoicism, while Ritvo manages it by an irresistible comedy nesting itself within bleakness. When Ritvo is introducing his poems to an audience (see YouTube), his festive clowning caroms off the candidly-related barriers of disease. Trying to split his mind from his body, he fails, and thereby defines his art:

I split wrong. Only my mind split — 
into an array of sirens with
show tunes played in between them.
— From Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture

Foreboding sirens crossed with jazzy show tunes create the sonorities of many of  Ritvo’s narratives, as though every incident has to be told twice over, once in classical form, once in the modern vulgate. The old Greek and Christian symbol of resurrection — a caterpillar that becomes a soul-butterfly — is reincarnated in a new myth, “Dawn of Man”:

After the cocoon I was in a human body
instead of a butterfly’s. All along my back

there was great pain — I groped to my feet
where I felt wings behind me, trying

to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so.

Haunted by the ghosts of his aspiring wings, the poet blots out his memory of them:

My thoughts remained those of a caterpillar — 

I took pleasure in climbing trees. I snuck food
into all my pains.

“Could you have said the bluejay suddenly / Would swoop to earth?” asked Stevens in his poem about joy, “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man.” Could you have said that there would be a contest 
between the caterpillar and his wings? For me, the signal reward in reading Ritvo is coming upon his unforeseen volley of sparks — some tragic, some comic — as when the mental caterpillar, refusing the wings of rebirth, climbs trees and sneaks food into the hunger of his repudiated yearning. The modern transforming of Paradise — into a gold mosaic, the Emperor’s palace, “some splintered garland for the seer” — has seemed a duty to many twentieth-century poets (Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Crane). In age, some have forgone, if only temporarily, the nostalgic Edenic myth (Yeats in “The Black Tower,” Stevens in “The Plain Sense of Things”). Judging by Four Reincarnations, Ritvo abandoned the idea of supernatural consolation altogether, turning away from it with a pang, but also with gaiety, mockery, and self-mockery. His liveliness makes his rejection seem the better choice.

Ritvo choreographs the language of poetry as Whitman conceives it in An American Primer:

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal    ...    or do any thing that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

Ritvo’s words give birth when he loves his lab rats, each of them named after himself. Singing occurs on his pages; so does dancing; so does making love. To these the weeping and the bleeding and the rage provide the continuo. The modern inventor in Ritvo loves, too, the new analgesic words studding the dictionary:

have too many wounds to zip up,
brain becoming a suit of  zippers,
soberly shutting.
— Zyprexa, the Snow Pills

The bullfighter wears a brilliant “suit of lights”; the invalid, bearing his wounds, wears “a suit of zippers,” slowly being closed not in wild mourning but in the sobriety of the lessening of pain.

Ritvo had the luck to study at Yale with Louise Glück and at Columbia with Lucie Brock-Broido, and to attract, before his death, many admirers of his ecstatic originality. Although he is inimitable, his example is there for young poets wanting to forsake simple transcriptive dailiness for the wilder country of the afflicted but dancing body and the devastated but joking mind.

Originally Published: May 1st, 2017


While not quite my cup of tea, this is still an interesting article on an interesting poet/writer.
Excerpt quoted below I found to be particularly interesting and thought provoking.-Tyr



Ritvo choreographs the language of poetry as Whitman conceives it in An American Primer:

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal    ...    or do any thing that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

Ritvo’s words give birth when he loves his lab rats, each of them named after himself. Singing occurs on his pages; so does dancing; so does making love. To these the weeping and the bleeding and the rage provide the continuo. The modern inventor in Ritvo loves, too, the new analgesic words studding the dictionary:

have too many wounds to zip up,
brain becoming a suit of  zippers,
soberly shutting.
— Zyprexa, the Snow Pills

The bullfighter wears a brilliant “suit of lights”; the invalid, bearing his wounds, wears “a suit of zippers,” slowly being closed not in wild mourning but in the sobriety of the lessening of pain

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/92768



Essay
The Students of Marianne Moore
Reading the ugly history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where the poet taught.
By Siobhan Phillips


Late last fall, after the evenings of phone-banking and before the day of patriotic devotion, after the election returns and before the Women’s March, after one sort of horror receded and before a different, more permanent sort set in, I stood in a Native American graveyard and thought about Marianne Moore.

The graveyard lies on the outskirts of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I live and where Moore lived from the age of nine until she was near 30. It’s also where the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated from 1879 to 1918. Moore remembered seeing the founder, General Richard Henry Pratt, on the streets of her small town. She found him “so monumental,” as she told an interviewer in 1960, that “no one could dare approach him to tell him one approved of the work he was doing.” That work was cultural genocide. Pratt fought for the Union in the Civil War and for the United States in the Indian wars before deciding that his true vocation was educating Native American youth in the ways of white America. He convinced the federal government to repurpose some outdated army barracks in central Pennsylvania for this elevating, assimilating, decimating purpose. “The last great Indian war,” David Wallace Adams writes in Education for Extinction, “[was] waged against children.”

Moore enlisted in 1911. She taught in the business department. When she biked to classes and study halls and supervisory duties from her house on Hanover Street, she was, to use her own word from a later interview, “soldiering.” She mostly hated the job. She liked her students, though. Among them was Jim Thorpe, later declared the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century. Thorpe and Moore might be the two most famous figures associated with the school. But Moore’s fame came later, after her department was dissolved and she left teaching. It can be hard to find traces of the Carlisle school in her poems.

Or it can be hard if you’re not looking in the right places. I hadn’t been. I started thinking about Moore’s Carlisle experience, after the election. But I’d been thinking about it in the context of journalism that describes “a growing rural-urban split.” For more than five decades, Moore lived in New York City, where she edited the Dial and wrote “An Octopus” and talked over Bryher’s nude photographs and argued with Ezra Pound; the city seems to be where Modernism happened. But Carlisle, in fact, was where Moore the Modernist grew up. Her first acceptance from Poetry came to her Carlisle address. Jeff Wood, a Moore scholar who runs the excellent local bookstore, helped me see the town then, in all its Moore-ish detail: how many millinery establishments Moore would have passed en route to church every week, for example. Carlisle at that time had two opera houses, two daily newspapers, and a railroad station. Moore’s minister held “the largest private library in the Cumberland Valley,” Wood explained. When Moore’s mother fell in love with the minister’s daughter, a Bryn Mawr graduate and suffragist, the young woman became part of the poet’s family for nearly a decade. Much of what makes Moore’s work so distinctive and modern, much of what makes Moore’s life in New York so distinctive and modern—a combination of queer families and friendships and moral rectitude, for example, a love of hats and books and scrapbooked facts, an investment in patriotism and feminism—came from her time in a borough of 10,000 people.

“It could not be dangerous to be living / in a town like this,” Moore writes in “The Steeple-Jack.” I used to chant the line on my way to work. It’s infused with something of Carlisle, I think, though its true source, as Linda Leavell’s biography explains, is a combination of Monhegan and Brooklyn. But the very impulse to put together coastal Maine and metropolitan New York—that seems Carlisle-nurtured. Also political and not just for readers like me, mired in 21st-century US electoral news. “The Steeple-Jack” opens Moore’s 1932 triptych, “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play,” which ushers in the decade of Moore’s most political and to my mind most interesting writing. “The Steeple-Jack” remembers how “presidents” treat “sin-driven // senators. ...” The last poem of the three, “The Hero,” ends with a “Negro” pointing out George and Martha Washington’s tombs.

But I had missed so much—forgotten so much—I began to realize on my late-November visit to the Native American cemetery. So much in many areas. And in my reading of Moore, too. I had forgotten the “Indian- / named Virginian / streams, in counties named for English lords” from “Virginia Britannia” (1935). I had forgotten Moore’s contrast of the “Indian buffalo” and the “white / Christian heathen” in “The Buffalo” (1934). I had neglected “Rigorists” (1940), a poem that describes how reindeer prevented the “extinction / of the Esquimaux.” Above all, I had missed, among the “Part Of …” assemblage, the way Moore’s experience in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School might infuse the perpetually overlooked middle poem, “The Student.” Reading Moore in and after 2016 means questioning the urban-rural divide, perhaps. But it also means thinking about another imaginary American line—the frontier.

The frontier: on one side, “civilization”; on the other, “wilderness.” It’s a way of imagining the division between European and Native American cultures and a way of justifying violence against Native American nations as well as appropriation of land and resources they once held. Moore’s poems know the frontier. “New York,” the one explicitly focused on her great Modernist city, does not combine metropolis and un-dangerous small town but rather metropolis and wilderness. It begins with “the savage’s romance.” The rest describes New York as “the center of the wholesale fur trade,” “plunder” that comes from as far away as “the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny.” These are Native American names for rivers in Pennsylvania. Moore turns the city westward, backward, toward an ongoing history of settlement and exploitation.

Carlisle is a good place to think through that ongoing history. The “frontier” made Carlisle a sensible spot for a settlement back in the 18th century, when the borough was founded. The Carlisle Barracks were established because Carlisle was a good place from which to venture out in the French and Indian War, later a good place to train 19th-century cavalry who would kill Native Americans and take their land. When Pratt thought Carlisle a fine setting for his Indian school, the frontier—supposedly closed—moved east again, back to the town, part of a mission to perpetuate and deny its existence.

Frontier as scar. Frontier as double consciousness. “Kill the Indian,” Pratt wrote, “and save the man.” Over the 39 years of the school, more than 10,000 children were transported to Carlisle over vast distances, from Alaska and Puerto Rico, the Dakotas, and the Southwest. Students from different nations were deliberately housed together to enforce English speaking and accelerate assimilation. They were dressed in uniforms and drilled to band music. Classes taught academic subjects and trades such as painting, carpentry, sewing, cooking, preparation for the jobs Native Americans were meant to take up after graduation. For some, school did lead to employment. For many, school years enforced a traumatized liminality that afterward prevented happiness in either predominantly white or predominantly Native American cultures.

Others—the cemetery, those rows of stones—others had no afterward at all. Jacqueline Fear-Segal, a professor of American history and culture, reports that Pratt tried to send seriously ill students home to avoid scrutiny of the school’s high mortality rate. Fear-Segal’s varied scholarship on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School contributes to efforts at knowing and reclaiming the names and histories involved, often in conjunction with scholarship by descendants of students. A Dickinson College initiative digitizes archives for further access and study. A 2012 conference produced an invaluable volume edited by Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose. (I am indebted to all this work.)

Even at the time Moore taught there, the school’s obvious wrongs were noticed and decried. Moore knew of “cruel neglect and abuse,” as her mother put it in a letter included in Leavell’s biography. Moore did not protest. In 1914, federal investigators examined conditions at CIIS and dismissed the superintendent (Pratt had already left, in 1904). Congress found financial corruption and mismanagement as well as incidents of wrongful expulsion and physical harm. A student in Moore’s department organized the petition requesting the investigation, which 276 students signed. Moore was accused of supporting insurrection, but she sidestepped the charge, as she reports in a letter to her brother: “I crush out disrespect and rancor whenever I see it, and I give the students as thorough a training in political honor as I can.” When inspectors came to Carlisle, she dodged them. Her brother advised her not to say anything definitive or particular. She took his advice.

It’s hard to know how much of her silence was self-protection or family protection; in her unpublished autobiography, the poet implies that she took the job for money, and her $2,000 a year seems to have been essential to the Moores’ finances. Moore leaves only when her department is shut down and her job canceled, at which point she assures her brother that she will still bring in income. She plans to write for a gardening periodical, an article about botanical camouflage. Camouflage is a good Moore theme. In an essay, Lesley Wheeler and Chris Gavaler make the interesting argument that Moore’s poetic self-concealment and changeability, especially in her animal poems, reflect her Indian Industrial School tenure.

Experience is also a good Moore theme. It also might reflect her tenure at the Carlisle institution. In “New York,” she contrasts the record of plunder with “accessibility to experience.” And then there’s “The Student.” “Experience” is there too. If we are to look for the poetic results of Moore’s only teaching job, it makes sense to look to her most explicit discussion of education. “The Student” deserves more attention than it has gotten, especially in the original, 1932 publication that Poetry preserves. That version includes a key citation of “experience,” later excised: “The football huddle in the / vacant lot // is impersonating calculus and physics and military / books; and is gathering the data for genetics,” Moore writes. “If

scholarship would profit by it, sixteen
foot men should be grown; it’s for the football men to
say. We must lean



on their experience. There is vitality in the world of sport.
If it is not the tree of knowledge, it’s the tree of life.

In Moore’s educational Eden, football signals the kind of experience from which we can learn. Might we see in this athletic scholasticism, out on an overlooked “vacant lot,” the presence of those student-athletes Moore would have known in Carlisle?

Moore’s interest in sports, of course, is well-known and overdetermined. Late in life, she wrote liner notes for Muhammad Ali, a poem about a polo pony, and a song for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The latter prompted Sports Illustrated to discover, in 1960, that Moore also had a “background” in athletics by virtue of her long-ago teaching job. For most US readers then—and maybe even now—the Carlisle School was known, if at all, not as the template of a destructive educational experiment but as the source of some wildly successful football teams. How wonderful to learn that a “neat and gentle” senior-citizen poet with a “delightful personality” knew those “almost mythological” sportsmen at the time of their “epic striving.” “The Poet, the Bums and the Legendary Red Men” was the headline for Robert Cantwell’s article.
Jim Thorpe, 1912 Summer Olympics



In the interview, Moore obligingly remembered “James” Thorpe carrying her umbrella on an outing. A Sac and Fox student, Thorpe was part of Moore’s department when he won a pair of gold medals in track and field at the 1912 Olympics—for a country that had not granted him citizenship. As the star of the football team, Thorpe helped Carlisle defeat colleges such as Georgetown, Harvard, and Brown; Carlisle even beat Army, and at West Point. “Pop” Warner, a coach famous for experimenting with tactics just shy of cheating (the “hidden-ball” play) whose practices with ticket revenues were not always scrupulous (he was also dismissed in the federal investigation), knew how to design a schedule and promote his team. Fans and journalists were not shy in pointing out the symbolism in Indians’ defeating white men and cadets. Football, more violent at the turn of the century than it is now, was busy consolidating its status as a symbolic crucible of US militarism and masculinity. Carlisle’s team helped. The line of scrimmage? Another frontier. The excitement of violent territorial advance turned into wholesome exercise and entertainment, an honorable part of education, even—something citizens could watch and cheer for on a weekend afternoon.

The subtle or not-so-subtle racism involved colored accounts of Thorpe: he was a “natural” athlete, supposedly. He was lazy, but he did not need to practice. He trained little if at all for his Olympic events. When the “Indian Service medical inspector” came to measure him at Carlisle, as Kate Buford describes in her biography (I am indebted to it for many details), Thorpe was touted as “half-way … between the sinuous aborigine … and the modern product of civilization.” He was proof of refinement, and he was a primitive rejoinder to it. So was the entire Carlisle squad—for white spectators, at once an expiation of guilt and a reinforcement of prejudice. Decades after, Moore’s Sports Illustrated interview demonstrates much of the same. Cantwell’s first question about the Indian School is whether the poet was “afraid” of “her charges.” Moore responds that this never occurred to her.

She has the chance for more interesting responses to the conjoined US myths of football, Indians, and education in her earlier poem. “The Student” uses sporting experience to empower its largest claims for educational democracy. At first, Moore’s lines seem to center on elite universities such as Harvard and Yale—she includes their mottoes (“Christo et ecclesiae,” “lux et veritas”). But she in fact scrutinizes elitism. Is college only for the few? Can educational enfranchisement coexist with genuine superiority? Moore answers no and yes. Education should be “for everyone.” Yet education must not comprise only college study. Look at how that unassuming huddle performs its interdisciplinary research. Look—and then the poem takes off, “changed from that which creeps to that which is / angelic,” comparing genuine learning to dancing or swimming or the turning of a windsock in the breeze, an attunement of one’s physical being and circumstances that allows all the multiplying, highly Moore-an distinctions on the penultimate page: “the difference between cow / and zebu,” the attributes of the “golden eagle.”

Is the city (New York, perhaps) “accessible” to this experience? Is the country (the United States, perhaps) so open? “We’re not / hypocrites,” Moore says in lines of “The Student” just before she invokes the football team. “We’re rustics.” Rustic means “countrified.” In Britain, rusticated also means “expelled from school.” Moore punningly reclaims that exclusion as a point of political distinction. Education as experience, knowledge as life, exceeds the academy and its timetables; “‘science is never finished.’” British dons might not think so, nor snobbish Frenchmen, since “the French … don’t / say everyone must go to college.” But out in the wilderness, Americans have the chance to get it right. If football is to be a repository of the country’s values, Moore implies, let it not be in remaking as spectacle the racist, violent frontier. Let it be through its “vitality,” its embodied wisdom. So says the ideal “student,” in Moore’s poem, who is like “the poet,” who has a “heroic mind,” who “concentrates and does not like to fight,” and who “is reclusive, and reserved.” In an interview with George Plimpton, Moore remembers watching the Carlisle team practice: Thorpe “crouched in the lineup for football … was the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve.”

Moore changed “The Student” later. She edited out references to rustics and hypocrites and specifically American thinkers (Emerson, Audubon). She also edited out the football. (“She never wrote anything about the Indian School,” Cantwell claims in the 1960 Sports Illustrated interview, “because it never really became a part of her life.”) The result is less interesting, less personal—also less emphatic. Only in the Poetry version does Moore venture a statement as plain as this one: “Education augments our natural forces and / prompts us to extend the machinery of advantage / to those who are without it.”

It could be the motto—the justification—of an Indian School teacher. Certainly, Moore continued to want to justify the work of men like Pratt. “Rigorists,” her reindeer poem, wants to extol another educator, also bent on suppressing Native American languages and culture in the name of a “civilizing” goal, because of his efforts to import reindeer that Native Alaskans could use. Moore’s revisions to this work make it less interesting, again, emphasizing the benevolence of the missionary, Sheldon Jackson, rather than the mysterious sympathies and symbioses between animal and human. That mystery, in the original version, retains some challenge. The sentence about “education” and “natural forces” in “The Student” is also a challenge. One pleasure of reading Moore is discovering how her detailed particulars—and their sources—add to the nuance of any definitive claim. What are “natural forces” in the context of an educational history imbued with racist arguments about “the data for genetics” as well as racist uses for “calculus and physics and military / books?” What sort of augmentation do those natural forces require?

In 1913, when Carlisle students were petitioning against the machinery of disadvantage and Moore was trying to avoid inspectors, she received a Christmas card from Thorpe and his first wife, Iva. Thorpe was just beginning a troubled post-Carlisle career. He was stripped of his Olympic medals when the Committee discovered he had played professional summer baseball—common practice, though others kept deniability by using fake names. In later years of professional sports, Thorpe never found lasting financial security or happiness. He worked as a Hollywood extra, a security guard, and a barkeep. At one point in 1941, he was hired to dress up in “Indian” costume and parade a New York gridiron. He had just split from the second of his three wives. When he died in 1953, he was buried in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, a place formed when two municipalities changed their names in order to receive his body and, they hoped, spark tourism and business—Pennsylvania coal was failing and jobs were dwindling. Those hopes fizzled, of course. Thorpe’s grave did not revitalize a small-town economy. His descendants tried to remove his body to Oklahoma, near his birthplace and childhood home but were unsuccessful.

The card to Moore is postmarked Nagasaki, Japan, where Thorpe was on a world tour with the New York Giants. Inside is a mere line of greeting. When I saw the card in the Moore archive back in December, its significance seemed rather to inhere in the envelope’s simple delivery address: “Miss Moore, Carlisle, Pa., U.S.A.” Miss Moore in Carlisle. Miss Moore in Carlisle, USA. To think about the poet here means thinking about small-town values and national political geography. “As a nation, perhaps,” Moore writes in “The Student,” “we are undergraduates not students.” That is, we are trapped in institutions that do not help us study what we need to know? Or we are deluded enough to think we might graduate from the need? We cannot. Reading Moore’s work now means reading the history of the places in which she taught, lessons to keep learning and relearning.

Originally Published: March 14th, 2017

I am of Native American blood myself, from my mother's side.
I know that my Native American grandfather was mistreated and regarded as unworthy by whites..Truth is he was a totally honest and hard working man that faced a very harsh society and world.
I being a lot like him in character, admire him and will never forget how he was treated by arrogant bastards.
Men not worthy enough to even shine his shoes, IMHO
HIS LIFE AND WHAT WAS DONE TO HIM IS ONE OF THE MANY REASONS THAT I CARRY ( OR ONCE CARRIED) SUCH EXPLOSIVE ANGER IN ME..
A "hidden monster" that I now struggle to keep leashed at all times...--TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68823


Essay
What to Do About Poetry
The argument that keeps on giving.
By The Editors

In a recent article on the Poetry Foundation, The New Yorker lobs the latest volley in an ongoing intellectual debate. That is, who reads poetry, what does it mean to “understand” poetry, and who cares about poets? According to The New Yorker (or to the critics it quotes), the Poetry Foundation's mission to broaden the audience for poetry is a lamentable one, for with popularity comes mediocrity. Artists should worry about making art, not about who's looking at it. A position similar to The New Yorker’s was put forth by August Kleinzahler in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, when he and Dana Gioia faced off over Garrison Keillor's populist anthology, Good Poems. More recently John Barr's article calling for a "new American poetry" that speaks to a broader audience fomented debate in the academic and creative writing world. And, in Christian Wiman's editorial in the December 2006 issue of Poetry, he argues that "if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently."

Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.

Read The New Yorker article>>

Read David Orr's article "Annals of Poetry" in the The New York Times Book Review>>


Read August Kleinzahler's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read Dana Gioia's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read John Barr's essay>>

Read Christian Wiman's editorial from the December 2006 issue of Poetry>>

Read Helen Vendler's "The Closet Reader">>

Read Robert Pinksy on "Poets Who Don't Like Poetry">>

Read Bill Knott on whether institutionalized “creative writing” changed American literature>>

Read Adrienne Rich's "Poetry and Commitment">>

Read Jane Hirshfield on "Poetry Beyond the Classroom">>

Read Daniel Halpern and Langdon Hammer on William Logan's review of Hart Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters>>

Read Jorie Graham's "Introduction to the Best American Poetry">>

Read D.W. Fenza on "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?">>

Originally Published: March 10th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68888


Essay
Learning to Bear[/SIZE]
Composed just before a long period of poetic silence, “Zone” stands as one of Louise Bogan’s last great poems.
[SIZE=4]By Mary Kinzie
Introduction
Written in 1940, just before a long period of poetic silence, “Zone” is one of Louise Bogan’s last great poems. Poet Mary Kinzie takes a closer look at Bogan’s influences, and at Bogan’s moment of artistic—and personal—crisis.

The Irish-American writer Louise Bogan was, for nearly four decades beginning in 1930, one of the best-known and most powerful poets in this country. Her acuity, energy, balanced learning, and courage as a critic for The New Yorker were widely known, contributing further authority to a reputation founded on the exacting passion and eerie translucency of her poems. She established her name as an artist with two volumes of poetry in the 1920s, Body of This Death in 1923 and Dark Summer in 1929; her third volume, The Sleeping Fury, did not appear until 1937.

Much like Emily Dickinson, Bogan brought an intensity of her own to the lyric poem. But she diverged from her more prolific New England forebear in the variety of her poetic forms and voices. In her own time, when the lyric was already waning, Bogan invigorated the brief form by insisting on linguistic exactness, depth of dramatic embodiment, and a forthright and unflinching probing of the torments of jealousy and betrayal in love. In addition, she was at home in many modes of poetry, from meditation, description, and satire to imagism and song. Although her oeuvre was small, her reach was long.

A major influence was undoubtedly Yeats. Never as hieratic as he, Bogan nevertheless owed much to his model of the poet as the bulwark between the modern soul and the insidious materialism of the age. Yet Bogan was also uneasy with ideological politics, and so it is ironic that her model of a heroic poet was Yeats whose political engagement, to no small degree, defined him. In Bogan’s view, though, he stood above his own battles and his fallible allegiances: He had won out over them.

Her disdain for revolutionary regimes and the politics of parties stemmed from her uneasiness at their patent suspicion of artists: “the condescension of the political party toward the artist is always clear, however well disguised,” she wrote in 1939 in The Partisan Review, in a veritable fury that any revolutionary group would presume to grant or withhold liberation from imaginative artists. “The artist will be ‘given’ his freedom,” she mocked, “as though it were not the artist who ‘gives’ freedom to the world, and not only ‘gives’ it, but is the only person capable of enduring it, or of understanding what it costs.”

Freedom and the artist’s ability to endure freedom, to pay its cost, and to give freedom to the world—I bring up these apparently sociological themes because they come near the suffering projected in poems such as “Zone.” However odd it may seem to speak of the poem’s worldly backgrounds, the ordeal portrayed here is borne by a sensibility for whom the private had a public reverberation.

Bogan’s temperament drove her to accept deprivations on both fronts; even the diction of bearing a burden moved both ways, from the psychological to the ethical. Metaphors of worldly hardship and struggle-against helped to channel the creative act. In a draft of the poem that became “To an Artist, to Take Heart,” she wrote that, however placid the deaths of Shakespeare and Milton, in life neither was “absolved from either the courage or the cowardice / With which they bore what they had to bear.” In the same vein, the speaker ends “Zone” bearing the rude touch of the wind, along with the other treacheries, disappointments, and importunities she and her companion “have learned how to bear”:

Zone

We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef.
The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words,
And these are of fear or grief.

Like a ship, we have struck expected latitudes
Of the universe, in March.
Through one short segment’s arch
Of the zodiac’s round
We pass,
Thinking: Now we hear
What we heard last year,
And bear the wind’s rude touch
And its ugly sound
Equally with so much
We have learned how to bear.

Marianne Moore thought that Louise Bogan’s poem “Zone” owed some of its compactness to the plain-style imagism of William Carlos Williams. But Bogan’s experiments in dramatic compression seldom truly moved in his direction; in fact, she was beguiled by all the linguistic possibilities that Williams deliberately resisted—


the etymologies of words embedded in language (e.g., zone, or narrow belt, and strike, nautical term for taking soundings);
the metaphors linking pointedly diverging realms of experience and image (the nearness of the wind to words; the “ugly sound” that accompanies psychic shipwreck);
the novel yet sophisticated sound of the choice terms in the not-quite-colloquial order the poet chose for them (the adverbial phrase interrupting the sentence order in line 3, creating suspense; the nicely qualifying phrase “Equally with so much” in the penultimate line);
and, most important, the energy provided to language by the amplitudes and logic of syntax (so that even the brief declaration “We pass”—in its place—becomes a sustained and monumental act seen down a colonnade of precisely differentiated genitives: “Through one shore segment’s arch / Of the zodiac’s round”).


Consider, by contrast, a whole field of Queen Anne’s lace, “white desire, empty, a single stem, / a cluster, flower by flower, / a pious wish to whiteness gone over— / or nothing.” The impression made by the verse of Williams is of keenness moving aloft on the air passed through the words that he has liberated, even disowned. By contrast, the impression of a Bogan poem remains on the razor’s edge of feeling as, with an eye sharpened by a kind of delicacy, a damaged will looks on:

The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words. . . .

In “Zone,” the will has been damaged by inexorability and by mindless repetition. The couple are violently bound toward wrack, regardless of which one of them plays the role of jagged reef and which that of the doomed vessel that steers toward it. The zone of the poem’s central metaphor is also a place of violence, an area of danger into which the two people have been driven by forces they cannot control, at a latitude where seas are particularly violent, in March, in the time of the vernal equinox.

Not only are the winds of March proverbial, they are widely believed to produce what are called “equinoctial gales” at sea along the path of the zodiac (whose narrow zone, or sash, encircles the earth along the apparent annual path of the sun). Although the persons in Louise Bogan’s poem have entered a region of seasonal disturbance that is recurrent, the poem points beyond nature to emotional revisitings that are yet more indelibly severe. Weight of feeling gathers and presses down with a familiar, almost physical relentlessness . . . familiar, but perhaps a little irksome too, as if irritability were the other face of despair. (1) Both features emerge in Bogan’s 1962 comment that it was “in a transitional period” in the late 1930s, “both of my outer circumstances and my central beliefs,” that she composed “Zone,”

a poem which derives directly from emotional crisis, as, I feel, a lyric must. And I think that the poem’s imagery manages to express in concrete terms (the concrete terms which poetry demands), some reflection of the relentless universal laws under which we live—which we must not only accept but in some manner forgive—as well as the fact of the human courage and faith necessary to that acceptance.


Odd that Bogan should speak of the need not only to accept the burden of “relentless universal laws” but even to forgive them. If these were like other “laws”—axioms in science or a set of rules in a republic—the attitude of forgiveness would be most peculiar. But in “Zone” (as in a somewhat earlier poem, “At a Party”), Bogan is summoning the imagery of the planets and the zodiac to represent the laws that propel us toward interpersonal mismatches:

Over our heads, if we but knew,
Over our senses, as they reel,
The planets tread, great seven, great two
Venus, Uranus, in a wheel.
(“At a Party,” The Sleeping Fury, 1937)



Astrology would have it that these “great two” planets—Uranus, visible mid-month to the upper right side of the much smaller Venus, whose light is far brighter because closer to the earth—combine with effects of savage appetite, willfulness, and destruction. Whereas alone Uranus projects a strong individuality, and Venus effects of harmony (“Brief planet,” Bogan had called her in the 1935 poem “Evening-Star,” “shining without burning”), together these planets entice one toward explosive frictions, a manic social round, sudden attractions, and illicit broken love affairs. (2)

“Zone” emerges at the end of a period in Bogan’s life defined by loss and isolation. Since late 1933 she had been separated from her second husband, Raymond Holden (their divorce became final in 1937). Her mother, against whom Bogan had mightily struggled (until the daughter’s struggle carried over into other confrontations that similarly resulted in renunciation), died in 1936, impoverished, with Louise “unable to [afford to] provide her mother with private care” (as her biographer Elizabeth Frank points out).

Then, yet more crushing, it seemed that Bogan’s poetic gift was being withdrawn. In the period from 1936 to 1940, during which she spent great efforts on her literary journalism, she wrote fewer and fewer poems, completing “Zone” in March 1940, making it one of the last poems she wrote before she was overtaken by a dry period that lasted from 1941 to 1948. Even after that silence was broken, Bogan produced, during the final 20 years of her life, no more than a handful of poems—and none with the same mixture of tranquil eloquence, resignation, and distress.

* * *


(1) As Bogan suggests in a short poem whose speaker chafes against the task of speaking to those who are not thoughtful, and who bear little hardship; the “It” is the daemon that lashes her to begin again:

Must I speak to the lot
Who little bore?
It said Why not?
It said, Once more.
(“The Daemon,” Poems and New Poems, 1941)




(2) In her greatest sonnet, also from 1935, the time of her affair with Theodore Roethke, Bogan commands herself to “Take up the burden” (as in a theme or refrain traditional for this kind of song), a word punningly allied to the theme of crushing weight (the Latin pondus): “No stone, slate, metal under or above / Earth is so ponderous, so dull, so cold.” Then comes the third quatrain, with its paradox of erotic force applied without movement, and the diction of bearing this weight to the breaking point:

Too long as ocean bed bears up the ocean,
As earth’s core bears the earth, have I borne this;
Too long have lovers, bending for their kiss,
Felt bitter force cohering without motion.
(“Single Sonnet,” The Sleeping Fury, 1937)

Originally Published: June 18th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68629


Essay
How Words Fail
Does language reflect the world? Or is it a distorting mirror that never gets reality straight?
By Cathy Park Hong
Introduction

In a response to Adrian Blevins’ article “In Praise of the Sentence,” Cathy Park Hong debates Blevins’ notion that syntax reflects the psyche of the writer. “The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression,” writes Hong, “It can prove to be a difficult transaction.”

I always felt an anxiety about language, an anxiety that grew more pronounced when I began writing poetry. I rationalized this anxiety by rolling out the immigrant truisms. Growing up, I had to negotiate the yawning gap between speaking Korean at home and battling it out in the schoolyard with my faltering English (for a while, my flimsy arsenal was “You shut up!” for every imaginative invective hurled at me). I thought the English language was a tricky, trap-filled activity I had to somehow master like squash or table tennis. Nabokov once called English “an artificial, stiffish thing” and wrote, “If Russian was his music, English was his murder”; yet he wrote some of the most exquisite prose in the English language. I am no persecuted exile, however, but a pampered second-generation American whose childhood difficulties with English nonetheless left their indelible mark.

When professors first introduced the craft of poetry to me, I felt like Leonard Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon-man, who appropriated the behavior of whomever was around him. “Write about your family experience! Write about what is true to you,” one dramatic poetry professor told me in his office, and then gave me poems by Asian American poets who sounded exactly like Sharon Olds. I tried to compose clear, confessional gems but thought of them as interesting exercises in imitation. When the professor looked at them, he told me I was beginning to find a voice. “Whose voice?” I asked. “Yours!” he announced, and the meeting was over.

“Finding your voice” is a familiar workshop trope, one that assumes poetry is an expression of an authentic self. I was asked to write in natural, plainspoken speech (none of which felt natural or plain to me), and this teacher mistook the result as me. He embraced the principle that a poem represents a person who is a unified whole, and that the syntax of the poem is a window to the person’s, or writer’s, mind. The professor’s assumptions proved only that I was a damn good mimic.

My teacher’s concept of “the voice” is shared by many poets, including Adrian Blevins, who wrote an essay about the music of sentences for PoetryFoundation.org. She opines that the sentence structure of a poem gives us a clear diagnosis of the poet’s mind. In her reading of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” she writes, “The ungrammatical . . . excerpt produces the emotional effects of an anxious or scattered psyche.” She sees a direct correlation between Berryman’s progressively unraveling mind and his unraveling syntax, concluding, “It’s interesting to note that Berryman began playing with syntax as a young man, when he was still, as far as anyone can determine, happy enough. As his life becomes more and more pressured . . . he becomes more and more serious and seems to lose, as a result, the sense of daring syntactical play. . . . It is therefore possible to speculate that Berryman’s suicide was at least partly the result of a loss of his syntactical distinctiveness.”

Blevins believes in a causal relationship between the author’s psychological state and the author’s syntactical choices, asserting that Berryman’s “loss of syntactical distinctiveness” helped lead to his own suicide. If we are to follow this logic, how to explain Hart Crane, who offed himself yet wrote poetry that is syntactically distinct? Or Sylvia Plath, who was at the top of her syntactic game when she shoved her head in the oven? Or that many poets today are happy on antidepressants yet write syntactically dull poetry? Blevins also observes that the sentences of Gertrude Stein and certain “post-post-post-postmodernists” are “stark raving mad,” implying that the poets must obviously be bonkers.

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.

The repetition in “Psalm” creates a propulsive cadence. The poem begins with a negation of Genesis. The recurrence of “No one,” a reference to God (or his absence), creates a tonally hammering antiprayer as it denies Creation. “Blessed art thou” is negated by the thudding absence of “No one.” “No one” becomes “Nothing” and then returns as “No-One’s Rose.” The song, driven by absence, ends somewhat redemptively, as the flowering song or the word sings “over” the imagery of suffering, Christ’s thorn. Yet the singing is also fractured—the invocatory “O” in the line “Over, O over” is a hesitant break in cadence. Driven by spiritual necessity, the music of Celan’s poetry is both brutal and brutalized.

Like Celan, the poet John Taggart entwines the music of his linguistic experiments with a deep spiritual sensibility. Son of a Methodist clergyman, Taggart was born in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1942 and spent most of his childhood within the church culture. He equates “poem as gospel service,” positing that poetry should have a spiritual power that can be wrought from its own music. But Taggart is no traditional lyricist. His “voice” is not a stand-in for the self. His ultimate goal is to turn the poem into what he calls a “sound object,” where words cease to be metaphor and become part and parcel a compositional score.

Deeply influenced by the experimental music composer and writer John Cage and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, Taggart incants through the “silence of the gaps” that surround the unadorned word. His words are mortarless, often unbound by clauses or punctuation. Rather than isolated poems, Taggart composes poetic variations that are circular, repetitive, and serial. In fact, his largest collection of poems, Loop,is aptly titled since his poetry obsessively returns to a set of nouns in different arrangements, as if each poem is a remix of the previous one. “Nativity,” for instance, scrolls down as if it were enacting a feverish sermon:

If you kneel
sender will teach
will teach you
here’s a sender
no bright harness
still a sender
if you kneel
will teach you
teach the shout.

But Taggart does not completely abandon content. Like Celan’s work, Taggart’s poetry can be read within a cultural-political context. Here is an excerpt from “Twenty-one Times,” Taggart’s most explicit poem about Vietnam and his own version of Wallace Stevens’s“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

4
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
The word breaks through partitions and outer-walls
Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.

5
Napalm: the heart rubbed and smeared with soap
The young heart is soiled with fire
Soap cannot cleanse the soiling of the fire.

6
Napalm: why the child caught on fire
The itching as of creatures for possession of words
Glitter for self and nation.

The repeated incantation “napalm” is an attempt at exorcism, as if to cleanse the horrors associated with napalm. But despite the attempt to “wash” it out, the word grows cancerously: “Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.” As in many of Taggart’s other poems, the nouns in “Twenty-one Times” are reshuffled, and each time a noun is reintroduced, its associations become progressively menacing: “the young heart is soiled with fire” leads to “why the child caught on fire.” As the poem’s inexorable momentum builds to a frightening pitch, “napalm” as a word metastasizes inside the mouth, until poem’s end: “Napalm: speak and the word glows and plays / speak and suffer torment for love / because of you no one will have to write the word down.”

Celan and Taggart have created a distinctly haunting and astonishing music through solecisms and hesitations, through the broken sentence. For them, the disassociation of voice from language is not just a philosophical choice. It is also political. The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression. It can prove to be a difficult transaction, a construction of fragments, as much conflicted demurral as actual communication, as much about what is unspeakable as about what is speakable.

Originally Published: July 31st, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/poet.html

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series [1844]

The Poet

Web Study Text by Ellen Moore, 1999
and Ann Woodlief, 2002, Virginia Commonwealth University

A moody child Note and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;Note
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.Note

Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience.Note But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous factNote: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty,Note to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time.

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative.Note He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.Note

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter;Note but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect.Note Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children,Note born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit. and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.Note He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.

For poetry was all written before time was,Note and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.Note

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and utterer of the necessary and casual. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet.Note I took part in a conversation the other day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose, whether he was not only a Iyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.Note The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that all was changed,--man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome,--what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have arrived so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal even in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration!Note And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount about these clouds and opaque airs in which I live,--opaque, though they seem transparent,--and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday; then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost some faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.Note

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language.Note Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpenter' s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:--

"So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight
For, of the soul, the body form doth take.
For soul is form, and doth the body make."'

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the externization of the soul.Note Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus,"exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with the un- apparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol.Note Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities.Note When you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites.

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs.Note In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the huge wooden ball rolled by successive ardent crowds from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship.' Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!Note

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use.Note We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,--and re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,-- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts.Note Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these. for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs,--and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named,--yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems, but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the thought's independence of the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform- that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy,--sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth--are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker,Note naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.Note The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind.Note Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, -- a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms.Note I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated.Note As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, -- him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.Note

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.Note The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.Note

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration.Note All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up,Note and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.Note That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common influences should delight him.Note His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men.Note We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained; -- or, when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; or, figure to be a bound of solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman, following him, writes,

--
"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;"


when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse,' compares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; -- we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say, "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die."

The poets are thus liberating gods.Note The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, -- you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.Note

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, -- All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, -- universal signs, instead of these village symbols, -- and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see.

There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer, an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children, who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires, whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation, he doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it.

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.Note We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials,Note and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English poets.Definition These are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.Note The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, "By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say, 'That is yours, this is mine;' but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist.Note Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only.Note Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty,Note plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

I found this article to be very, very interesting.. A lot of truth in this but one must separate the wheat from the chaff.
For as always the hand of the dark lord taints all that is in his power to do so.. Casting shadows into LIGHT.

A true poet writes to give, if for any other cause, then he or she, has not the TRUE heart of a poet, IMHO.
A true poet writes only truth from a light within his/her heart.
Writes about the good and the bad... For each serves a purpose...-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69475


Essay on Poetic Theory
Invisible Architecture (2000)
By Barbara Guest
Introduction

Barbara Guest was a central figure in the New York School of poets. Her early career as an art critic prefaced her structural awareness of language throughout her career as a poet. While some critics classify her work as abstract lyric, Guest told Mark Hillringhouse in an interview for the American Poetry Review, “My poems tend more to language than ideas.” Indeed, her poetry often simultaneously inhabits both a musical and a visual field.

A restless explorer of borders and margins, Guest, in her short poetics statement “Invisible Architecture,” engages the productive tension between the “desire of the poet to control” and that “something within poetry that desires the invisible.” In form, Guest’s piece shifts over its course from poetry to prose, which has the effect of both illustrating and enacting the poet’s work. She initially uses gaps and syntactical breaks to show the uncertain process of beginning a composition, and to trace the fragile starts of new work. She begins, “There is an invisible architecture often supporting / the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem,” and she locates this architecture “in the period before the poem finds an exact form and vocabulary.”

According to Guest, the poem breaks free of this architecture as it grows surer, as one might from a scaffold or a mold. At this point in her piece, Guest shifts from poetry to prose, allowing the uninterrupted breath of her sentences to illustrate the calming and building of thought. She traces the balance sought between a poem’s surface and its unconscious, and between its stability and fluidity, though she notes that there are necessarily undefined elements of the poem’s progress. In conclusion, Guest wonders, “By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed.”

“Invisible Architecture” was published in Guest’s prose collection Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (2002). She died in 2006.

There is an invisible architecture often supporting
the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem. It reaches
into the poem
in search for an identity with the poem,

its object is to possess the poem for a brief time, even as an apparition appears. An invisible architecture upholds the poem while allowing a moment of relaxation for the unconscious. A period of emotional suggestion,
of lapse,
of reliance on the conscious substitute words pushed toward the bridge of the architecture. An architecture in the period before the poem finds an exact form and vocabulary—,

before the visible appearance of the poem on the page and the invisible approach to its composition. Reaching out to develop the poem there are interruptions, some apparently for no reason—something else is happening the poet has no control—the poem begins to quiver, to hesitate, to become insubstantial the desire of poetry to elevate itself, to become stronger. The poem is fragile. It needs to reach through the armed vehicle of the poem,

to loosen the armed hand.

Losing the arrogance of dominion over the poem to an invisible hand, the poet campaigns for a passage over which the poet has control. Yet the unstableness of the poem is important.
Also the frequent lapses of control of the poem.
The writer only slowly retains power over the poem, physical power, when the poem breaks away from the authority of the invisible architecture.

This invisible authority may be the unconscious that dwells on the lower level, in a substratum beneath the surface of the poem and possesses its own reference. A fluidity only enters the poem when it becomes more openly aware of itself.

By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed. The Surrealists taught us to wander freely on the page, releasing mechanical birds, if we so desire, to nest in the invisible handwriting of composition. There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible.

The desire of the poet to control. This control was earlier destructive to the interior of the poem, to its infrastructure. There is something deliberate about this practice of control by the conscious. It includes the question that is undefined, the behavior of the poem. By whom or by what agency is this decided, by what invisible architecture is the poem developed?

Originally Published: February 15th, 2010


Biography

Barbara Guest rose to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of an informal group of writers known as the New York school of poets whose membership included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler. Their innovative approach to poetry was influenced by modern art, especially surrealism and abstract..




The desire of the poet to control. This control was earlier destructive to the interior of the poem, to its infrastructure. There is something deliberate about this practice of control by the conscious. It includes the question that is undefined, the behavior of the poem. By whom or by what agency is this decided, by what invisible architecture is the poem developed?

I am not sure if control is the prime in this analysis. Certainly true poets want to control their message delivered in their poetry...
Yet each must yield to their heart first(!), if sincere, and enslaved in their addiction..
For a true poet, even if loathe to admit it, is a slave to that addiction be it good or bad...
At times I dearly hate it, but far more often find it a great, great treasure...----Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://hammeringshield.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/hesse-on-living-a-life-of-heightened-awareness/


Hammering Shield
The Collected Essays



Hesse On Living A Life Of Heightened Awareness
February 12, 2014 ~ Hammering Shield


Once a turtle sticks his head out from the comfy confines of his shell, he has, most fundamentally, two choices… To stay out… or to duck back in. It’s more frightening and truly more dangerous outside the shell, but it’s also more exciting, and– if our turtle is a philosophical one– he may desire to know the more fully filled-in Truths he can gather from a vantage point outside his shell.

Similar to the turtle, once the human child (of whatever age) begins to come out from under the illusions in which society has wrapped him, he has two choices– remain in the relative comfort of the second-hand illusions or keep moving forward toward a greater, more painful, and yet also more delightful enlightenment.

Hermann Hesse, poet-novelist, encourages the more full-sighted approach. It saddens him to see that, as the youthful Hesse says in his essay On Little Joys (1905), “great masses of people these days live out their lives ina dull and loveless stupor.” They shuffle through their gray days to their gray jobs with their black and white values and their red little appetites.

Hesse wants us to break outside the coloring-book lines of the simplified and distorted worldview we are handed during childhood. He wants us to open our eyes wide and took a good look– absorb the world, plunge in all the way up to our elbows. This is the poetic frame of mind, and as with so many artistic things in life, it seems that the first step in the creation of the new is the destruction of the old. We have to UNSEE the world as it has been painted for us, only then do we have a chance at seeing what is really going on. Hesse writes in Variations On A Theme By Wilhelm Schafer of the poet possessing “this mood, this willingness of the soul NOT to recognize the familiar world.”

Hesse speaks openly about the dangers of seeking a heightened awareness of reality. It may not even be a healthy thing to do. The creature of heightened awareness, says Hesse in his essay on the BrothersKaramazov, is “an invalid of the sort who has lost the healthy, sound, beneficent instinct of self-preservation which is the essence of all middle class.” The person of heightened awareness (and like others before and after him, Hesse uses interchangeably terms such as “Prophet” and “Artist” and “Seer” and “Poet”)– this person serves as what Hesse calls an “antenna” for the dull and stupified masses. Such a person is “especially sensitive, noble, vulnerable” with “a prophetic sense of touch.” Hesse believes that, for the majority of people, the faculty which enables the life of heightened awareness “has remained vestigial”— and with good evolutionary reason… most people are happier and healthier without it.

Re-activating the vestigial faculty of heightened awareness takes, like any conditioning exercises, steady application and a commitment of time. Then, states Hesse in On Little Joys (1905)…

“Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights, to contemplate nature and city streets, to appreciate the inexhaustable fun of daily life. From their to the fully trained artistic eye is the smaller half of the journey. The principle thing is the beginning, the opening of the eyes.”

Hesse goes on to speak of “the ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life,” going so far as to say that it leads to “the conception of life as a happy thing, as a festival.”

This does NOT mean we should go off a Rimbaudian tear of deranging all the senses and exploding in a short, firework-burst of narcissistic, nihilistic debauchery. In fact, quite the opposite. After a person has developed a high level of awareness– less is more. A flower does not need to do a song and dance to be enjoyed by a person who can completely Be Here Now. For the man fully “in the moment,” a side-walk cafe can be as stimulating as the Grand Canyon. When it comes to the fully awake individual, says Hesse, “moderate enjoyment is double enjoyment.” I think included in what Hesse means by this is the fact that after moderate enjoyments, there are no hang-overs, no regrets, no painful consequences– all the negative after-effects of pleasure so routinely suffered by the undisciplined, unenlightened, semi-sighted over-indulgers of the world. No truly wise man has ever been a binge-er.

Hesse suggests, as a run-through of this new approach to life– we should stop playin’ the bloody tourist (I paraphrase). He uses the example of the museum visit. The typical bourgeois would run through the entire exhibition, attempting to see as much as possible during the time scheduled to “do” the museum. Relax, counsels Hesse. Try instead to spend “an hour or more in front of a single masterpiece.” In Concerning The Soul (1917), Hesse remarks that “contemplation is not scrutiny or criticism, it is nothing but love”-– and an “undemanding love” at that.

Hesse disparages the “aggressive haste” that undervalues every moment precisely by overvaluing it. “The idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living,” says Hesse, “is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” For some people the job of having fun is “hardly less irritating and nerve-racking than the pressure of our work.”

The irony of it all for Hesse is that– in a world of increasing leisure time and ever more technologies dedicated to pleasure and diversion– “there is more and more entertainment and less and less joy.”

I’d like to end today’s post with an example of Hesse’s prose, wherein I think he exhibits that sort of calm, poet’s contemplation of the world. The following is from the essay At Year’s End, written in 1904 when Hesse was still a young man, but sounding very much like an old sage…

“A brief hour ago I was out on the hills looking at the clouds. Each one drifted past, or strode or swam or danced by like a miracle, like a word or a song or a jest or a solace from the lips of God, and pressed on eagerly into the distance, cradled in the cool pale blue, and it was beautiful and sang more enchantingly than any songs printed in books.”

More Posts from Hammering Shield On Hermann Hesse:

Hesse On the Decline Of The West

Hesse On Clear Contemplation And The Cloudy Mirror Of Desire

Hesse On Critics: The Good, The Bad, And The Actually Helpful

Hesse On Facing The Abyss Within

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70071


Essay
A Little Society
From the Brontës to Dorothy and William Wordsworth, literary siblings challenge assumptions of lonely genius.
By Casey N. Cep
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti

For years, a tiny pub on the road between the English villages of Haworth and Keighley has been home to a peculiar rumor. The Cross Roads Inn was one of Branwell Brontë’s favorite haunts. It was at the Cross Roads that two of Branwell’s friends claim he read from a manuscript that featured the characters who would later appear in the novel Wuthering Heights.

Despite Charlotte Brontë’s insistence that her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, the rumor that their brother Branwell penned the novel has persisted. In their various biographies, Juliet Barker, Daphne du Maurier, Lucasta Miller, and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford all considered the possibility that Branwell was the true author of Wuthering Heights. Barker claimed to have identified a story of Branwell’s that influenced the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; du Maurier pointed to poems written by Emily and Branwell as evidence of an early collaboration between the two that could have blossomed into Wuthering Heights.

The persistence of the rumor reflects the curious, cloistered upbringing of the Brontës, but also the more universal experience of siblings. Collaboration and competition between brothers and sisters exists no matter their vocations, but literary siblings challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks. Patrick Brontë, father to the four artists, who raised them himself after their mother died, wrote: “As they had few opportunities of being in learned and polished society, in their retired country situation, they formed a little society amongst themselves—with which they seem’d content and happy.”

“A little society” is the perfect description of siblings. Brothers and sisters have long encouraged one another’s literary careers: letters and drafts change hands; carefully chosen words of praise and criticism pass between lips; scraps of paper, coveted notebooks, and particular pens move between writing desks.

The Brontës—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—were all prolific writers as children. When Charlotte was ten and Branwell was nine, they began to write plays set in the fictional world of Glass Town. When Emily and Anne were old enough to contribute, Glass Town grew into the separate kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Together, the four children filled miniature books and tiny magazines with poetry and stories.

Their juvenilia reveal young artists finding their voices, but also their audience. Writing first for one another, they learned how to write for others. When the sisters finally published a book in 1846, it was a collection of poems. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold poorly, and the sisters redirected their efforts to fiction. Emily and Anne continued writing poetry privately, but Charlotte would write poems again only to mark the deaths of her siblings.

“On the Death of Anne Brontë” is one of Charlotte’s most sorrowful poems. “There’s little joy in life for me,” it begins. From the first stanza (“I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save”) to the last (“And now, benighted, tempest-tossed, / Must bear alone the weary strife”), she laments her sister’s death and her fresh solitude. She outlived all of her siblings: Branwell and Emily died in 1848; Anne followed them to the grave less than a year later. Charlotte would be their literary executor after their deaths just as she had been their literary champion in life.

That same closeness characterized the relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Although they lived apart during much of their childhood, the siblings were reunited as adults and eventually cohabited for many years in the Lake District. In an essay on Dorothy, Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry.”

Dorothy would copy verses for her brother and assist him with correspondence, but she was also a talented writer. While she wrote little for publication, her journals, travelogues, and poetry are all now in print. It is clear that her writing influenced her brother’s or, as Woolf noted, that “one could not act without the other.”

It was Dorothy who made notes in her journal about a fateful walk the siblings took on April 15, 1802, when they “saw a few daffodils close to the water side … a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.” Dorothy recorded that she “never saw daffodils so beautiful [—] they grew among the mossy stones and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced.”

Only a few years later, William would return to that entry and craft from it one of the most iconic poems in the English language. Written in iambic tetrameter, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” captures “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” While the poem celebrates “the bliss of solitude,” the poet himself rambled through the Lake District with his sister. In one of her own poems, “Floating Island,” Dorothy wrote that “the lost fragments shall remain, / To fertilize some other ground.” She might very well have been thinking of the way her own writing nurtured her brothers.

The collaboration between siblings is not always so indirect. Charles and Mary Lamb co-authored several collections of poetry and prose for children. Long before he had established his reputation as an essayist and a critic, Charles collaborated with Mary on Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), and Poetry for Children (1809).

Mary, who suffered from mental illness, wrote poetry and stories almost constantly when fueled by her mania; Charles, not without his own struggles, suffered from depression and alcoholism, both of which led to severe writer’s block. Brother and sister were linked not only in illness but in tragedy. Mary came to live with Charles after murdering their mother in a psychotic episode. Although Mary was 31 and Charles was only 21, he became her legal guardian and refused to have her committed. They lived together for 40 years, until Charles died.

Well known in literary circles, Charles and Mary were forever linked to one another. It was Thomas Carlyle who called the siblings “a very sorry pair of phenomena,” but everyone from Keats to Coleridge to Wordsworth enjoyed their company. While they hosted many of London’s literati, their deepest friendship, their strongest relationship, was with one another. It was brother and sister who saw one another through madness and depression, frustration and addiction. “You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both,” Mary wrote in 1805, “to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces, & saying how do you do? & how do you do? & then we fall a crying & say we will be better on the morrow.”

Unlike the Lambs and the Wordsworths, pairs of siblings in which the brother’s reputation far exceeded the sister’s, one Victorian family produced a daughter whose fame has outlasted that of her brother. Christina Rossetti is considered one of the greatest Victorian poets, while her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti is remembered more for his status as sibling than painter or poet.

Born to an accomplished poet and Dante scholar, Christina and her brother were the “two storms” in a family of four children whose other dyad was known as the “two calms.” All four of the Rossetti children had accomplished careers as writers and critics, encouraged by a childhood filled with arts and letters. As teenagers, they played rounds of bouts-rimés, racing against one another to write sonnets with specified forms and rhymes; Christina was the youngest, but is said to have excelled most at the game.

While Dante Gabriel founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to surround himself with other artists, Christina found support from the Portfolio Society, a group of female poets. Despite their esteemed position in literary society, they remained each other’s best critics. Exchanging letters almost daily for years, they critiqued one another’s work, suggested new topics and themes, and helped to organize poems into volumes for publication.

Private disagreements, including Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that certain topics are unsuitable for female writers and Christina’s increasing unwillingness to accept her brother’s revisions, did not keep them from championing one another’s work in public. And while Christina’s most remarkable poem, Goblin Market, testifies to the love between sisters (“For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather”), it was her brother Dante Gabriel whose illustrations accompanied its publication. And like Branwell Brontë, who painted a famous portrait of his sisters, Dante Gabriel produced iconic images of Christina.

Tellingly, Branwell’s painting of his sisters, the only surviving group portrait, originally included his likeness: the blurred pillar between Emily and Charlotte was once Branwell. As the oil paint fades, the canvas is slowly revealing Branwell’s figure. Brothers and sisters are not always at peace, and posterity plays favorites. Branwell is as spectral a figure in the portrait as he is in the pages of literary history. The competition for prizes, publication, and readers in life often continues posthumously, and not all siblings are peaceable partners in literary creation.

Where there is ink, there is envy. Literary siblings are certainly not exempt from the rivalries that animate other families. One sibling’s success fuels another sibling’s writing with jealousy and ambition or thwarts the other sibling’s efforts entirely; the connections of one sibling to the literary establishment facilitate another sibling’s career or, less ceremoniously, earn the lesser sibling a footnote in literary history as simply that, a biological relation.

Literary siblings are not only a thing of the past. Contemporary poetry is home to at least two of these little societies: Matthew and Michael Dickman are twin brothers who edit one another’s poetry and share a publisher; Fanny and Susan Howe are sisters whose poetic careers span decades. While many artists long to be orphans, free of family and obligation, some poets find strength in their siblings. The complicated dynamics of these little societies are fascinating and fraught. Collaborating on juvenilia, editing one another’s drafts, supporting one another through depression and doubt, championing each other’s work: these little societies sustain one another in ways only siblings could.

Originally Published: October 22nd, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_life_and_works_of_john_donne-1640


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The Life and Works of John Donne
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

DONNE, JOHN (1573-1631), English poet and divine of the reign of James I., was born in 1573 in the parish of St Nicholas Olave, in the city of London. His father was a wealthy merchant, who next year became warden of the Company of Ironmongers, but died early in 1576. Donne’s parents were Catholics, and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was directly descended from the sister of the great Sir Thomas More; she was the daughter of John Heywood the epigrammatist. As a child, Donne’s precocity was such that it was said of him that “this age hath brought forth another Pico della Mirandola.” He entered Hart Hall, Oxford, in October 1584, and left it in 1587, proceeding for a time to Cambridge, where he took his degree. At Oxford he began his friendship with Henry Wotton, and at Cambridge, probably, with Christopher Brooke. Donne was “removed to London” about 1590, and in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s Inn with the intention of studying the law.

When he came of age, he found himself in possession of a considerable fortune, and about the same time rejected the Catholic doctrine in favour of the Anglican communion. He began to produce Satires, which were not printed, but eagerly passed from hand to hand; the first three are known to belong to 1593, the fourth to 1594, while the other three are probably some years later. In 1596 Donne engaged himself for foreign service under the earl of Essex, and “waited upon his lordship” on board the “Repulse,” in the magnificent victory of the 11th of June. We possess several poems written by Donne during this expedition, and during the Islands Voyage of 1597, in which he accompanied Essex to the Azores. According to Walton, Donne spent some time in Italy and Spain, and intended to proceed to Palestine, “but at his being in the farthest parts of Italy, the disappointment of company, or of a safe convoy, or the uncertainty of returns of money into those remote parts, denied him that happiness.” There is some reason to suppose that he was on the continent at intervals between 1595 and the winter of 1597. His lyrical poetry was mainly the product of his exile, if we are to believe Ben Jonson, who told Drummond of Hawthornden that Donne “wrote all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old.” At his return to England he became private secretary in London to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper (afterwards Lord Brackley), in whose family he remained four years. In 1600 he found himself in love with his master’s niece, Anne More, whom he married secretly in December 1601. As soon as this act was discovered, Donne was dismissed, and then thrown into the Fleet prison (February 1602), from which he was soon released. His circumstances, however, were now very much straitened. His own fortune had all been spent and “troubles did still multiply upon him.” Mrs Donne’s cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, offered the young couple an asylum at his country house of Pyrford, where they resided until the end of 1604.

During the latter part of his residence in Sir Thomas Egerton’s house, Donne had composed the longest of his existing poems, The Progress of the Soul, not published until 1633. In the spring of 1605 we find the Donnes living at Camberwell, and a little later in a small house at Mitcham. He had by this time “acquired such a perfection” in civil and common law that he was able to take up professional work, and he now acted as a helper to Thomas Morton in his controversies with the Catholics. Donne is believed to have had a considerable share in writing the pamphlets against the papists which Morton issued between 1604 and 1607. In the latter year, Morton offered the poet certain preferment in the Church, if he would only consent to take holy orders. Donne, however, although he was at this time become deeply serious on religious matters, did not think himself fitted for the clerical life. In 1607 he started a correspondence with Mrs Magdalen Herbert of Montgomery Castle, the mother of George Herbert. Some of these pious epistles were printed by Izaak Walton. These exercises were not of a nature to add to his income, which was extremely small. His uncomfortable little house he speaks of as his “hospital” and his “prison;” his wife’s health was broken and he was bowed down by the number of his children, who often lacked even clothes and food. In the autumn of 1608, however, his father-in-law, Sir George More, became reconciled with them, and agreed to make them a generous allowance. Donne soon after formed part of the brilliant assemblage which Lucy, countess of Bradford, gathered around her at Twickenham; we possess several of the verse epistles he addressed to this lady. In 1609 Donne was engaged in composing his great controversial prose treatise, the Pseudo-Martyr, printed in 1610; this was an attempt to convince Roman Catholics in England that they might, without any inconsistency, take the oath of allegiance to James I. In 1611 Donne wrote a curious and bitter prose squib against the Jesuits, entitledIgnatius his Conclave. To the same period, but possibly somewhat earlier, belongs the apology for the principle of suicide, which was not published until 1644, long after Donne’s death. This work, the Biathanatos, is an attempt to show that “the scandalous disease 418of headlong dying,” to which Donne himself in his unhappy moods had “often such a sickly inclination,” was not necessarily and essentially sinful.

In 1610 Donne formed the acquaintance of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, who offered him and his wife an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane. Drury lost his only daughter, and in 1611 Donne published an extravagant elegy on her, entitled An Anatomy of the World, to which he added in 1612 a Progress of the Soul on the same subject; he threatened to celebrate the “blessèd Maid,” Elizabeth Drury, in a fresh elegy on each anniversary of her death, but he happily refrained from the third occasion onwards. At the close of 1611 Sir Robert Drury determined to visit Paris (but not, as Walton supposed, on an embassy of any kind), and he took Donne with him. When he left London, his wife was expecting an eighth child. It seems almost certain that her fear to have him absent led him to compose one of his loveliest poems:

“Sweetest Love, I do not go

For weariness of thee.”

He is said to have had a vision, while he was at Amiens, of his wife, with her hair over her shoulders, bearing a dead child in her arms, on the very night that Mrs Donne, in London (or more probably in the Isle of Wight), was delivered of a still-born infant. He suffered, accordingly, a great anxiety, which was not removed until he reached Paris, where he received reassuring accounts of his wife’s health. The Drurys and Donne left Paris for Spa in May 1612, and travelled in the Low Countries and Germany until September, when they returned to London. In 1613 Donne contributed to the Lachrymae lachrymarum an obscure and frigid elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and wrote his famous Marriage Song for St Valentine’s Day to celebrate the nuptials of the elector palatine with the princess Elizabeth. About this time Donne became intimate with Robert Ker, then Viscount Rochester and afterwards the infamous earl of Somerset, from whom he had hopes of preferment at court. Donne was now in weak health, and in a highly neurotic condition. He suggested to Rochester that if he should enter the church, a place there might be found for him. But he was more useful to the courtier in his legal capacity, and Rochester dissuaded him from the ministry. At the close of 1614, however, the king sent for Donne to Theobald’s, and “descended to a persuasion, almost to a solicitation of him, to enter into sacred orders,” but Donne asked for a few days to consider. Finally, early in 1614, King, bishop of London, “proceeded with all convenient speed to ordain him, first deacon, then priest.” He was, perhaps, a curate first at Paddington, and presently was appointed royal chaplain.

His earliest sermon before the king at Whitehall carried his audience “to heaven, in holy raptures.” In April, not without much bad grace, the university of Cambridge consented to make the new divine a D.D. In the spring of 1616, Donne was presented to the living of Keyston, in Hunts., and a little later he became rector of Sevenoaks; the latter preferment he held until his death. In October he was appointed reader in divinity to the benchers of Lincoln’s Inn. His anxieties about money now ceased, but in August 1617 his wife died, leaving seven young children in his charge. Perhaps in consequence of his bereavement, Donne seems to have passed through a spiritual crisis, which inspired him with a peculiar fervour of devotion. In 1618 he wrote two cycles of religious sonnets, La Corona and the Holy Sonnets, the latter not printed in complete form until by Mr Gosse in 1899. Of the very numerous sermons preached by Donne at Lincoln’s Inn, fourteen have come down to us. His health suffered from the austerity of his life, and it was probably in connexion with this fact that he allowed himself to be persuaded in May 1619 to accompany Lord Doncaster as his chaplain on an embassy to Germany. Having visited Heidelberg, Frankfort and other German cities, the embassy returned to England at the opening of 1620.

In November 1621, James I., knowing that London was “a dish” which Donne “loved well,” “carved” for him the deanery of St Paul’s. He resigned Keyston, and his preachership in Lincoln’s Inn (Feb., 1622). In October 1623 he suffered from a dangerous attack of illness, and during a long convalescence wrote his Devotions, a volume published in 1624. He was now appointed to the vicarage of St Dunstan’s in the West. In April 1625 Donne preached before the new king, Charles I., a sermon which was immediately printed, and he now published his Four Sermons upon Special Occasions, the earliest collection of his discourses. When the plague broke out he retired with his children to the house of Sir John Danvers in Chiswick, and for a time he disappeared so completely that a rumour arose that he was dead. Sir John had married Donne’s old friend, Mrs Magdalen Herbert, for whom Donne wrote two of the most ingenious of his lyrics, “The Primrose” and “The Autumnal.” The popularity of Donne as a preacher rose to its zenith when he returned to his pulpit, and it continued there until his death. Walton, who seems to have known him first in 1624, now became an intimate and adoring friend. In 1630 Donne’s health, always feeble, broke down completely, so that, although in August of that year he was to have been made a bishop, the entire breakdown of his health made it worse than useless to promote him. The greater part of that winter he spent at Abury Hatch, in Epping Forest, with his widowed daughter, Constance Alleyn, and was too ill to preach before the king at Christmas. It is believed that his disease was a malarial form of recurrent quinsy acting upon an extremely neurotic system. He came back to London, and was able to preach at Whitehall on the 12th of February 1631. This, his latest sermon, was published, soon after his demise, as Death’s Duel. He now stood for his statue to the sculptor, Nicholas Stone, standing before a fire in his study at the Deanery, with his winding-sheet wrapped and tied round him, his eyes shut, and his feet resting on a funeral urn. This lugubrious work of art was set up in white marble after his death in St Paul’s cathedral, where it may still be seen. Donne died on the 31st of March 1631, after he had lain “fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change.” His aged mother, who had lived in the Deanery, survived him, dying in 1632.

Donne’s poems were first collected in 1633, and afterwards in 1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654 and 1669. Of his prose works, the Juvenilia appeared in 1633; the LXXX Sermons in 1640; Biathanatos in 1644; Fifty Sermons in 1649; Essays in Divinity, 1651; his Letters to Several Persons of Honour, 1651; Paradoxes, Problems and Essays, 1652; and Six and Twenty Sermons, 1661. Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne, an admirably written but not entirely correct biography, preceded the Sermons of 1640. The principal editor of his posthumous writings was his son, John Donne the younger (1604-1662), a man of eccentric and scandalous character, but of considerable talent.

The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep, although almost wholly malign. His originality and the fervour of his imaginative passion made him extremely attractive to the younger generation of poets, who saw that he had broken through the old tradition, and were ready to follow him implicitly into new fields. In the 18th century his reputation almost disappeared, to return, with many vicissitudes in the course of the 19th. It is, indeed, singularly difficult to pronounce a judicious opinion on the writings of Donne. They were excessively admired by his own and the next generation, praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then entirely neglected for a whole century. The first impression of an unbiased reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavorable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them. Some of his lyrics and one or two of his elegies excepted, the Satires are his most important contribution to literature. They are probably the earliest poems of their kind in the language, and they are full of force and picturesqueness. Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar 419brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

Izaak Walton’s Life, first published in 1640, and entirely recast in 1659, has been constantly reprinted. The best edition of Donne’s Poems was edited by E. K. Chambers in 1896. His prose works have not been collected. In 1899 Edmund Gosse published in two volumes The Life and Letters of John Donne, for the first time revised and collected.





In the 18th century his reputation almost disappeared, to return, with many vicissitudes in the course of the 19th. It is, indeed, singularly difficult to pronounce a judicious opinion on the writings of Donne. They were excessively admired by his own and the next generation, praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then entirely neglected for a whole century. The first impression of an unbiased reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavorable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them. Some of his lyrics and one or two of his elegies excepted, the Satires are his most important contribution to literature. They are probably the earliest poems of their kind in the language, and they are full of force and picturesqueness. Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.


Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.


I FOUND DONNE TO BE A POETIC GENIUS THE FIRST TIME I STUDIED HIS POETRY.
His immense depth of thought and brilliance was evident to me from the onset. Perhaps because I read so many other classic poets before finding Donne. That foundation gave me insight and better understanding. I took what I could , given my own poetry education and lesser talent and found common ground in the -- often (for me), ""odd terminology""...
Writing in a mixture of Fran Stanton simplicity , but embracing depth of thought by way of -- ""odd terminology""..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68988

Essay
Genius Envy
How Rodin's failure inspired Rilke, and other curious routes of tribute.
By Geoff Dyer

In April, the Poetry Foundation cosponsored a panel at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Poets Mary Jo Bang, Peter Campion, and Raphael Rubinstein, as well as writer Geoff Dyer, explored the parallels between portraits in poetry and the visual arts, jumping off those on display at the Pulitzer's exhibition "Portrait/Homage/Embodiment." This article by Geoff Dyer is the second in a series by the four panelists. (Here's Raphael Rubinstein on Jacques Lipchitz and Gertrude Stein.) On Thursday (December 6), at the Pulitzer Foundation, John Yau moderates a panel on poetry and visual art, featuring Cole Swensen, Andrew Joron, and Arthur Sze.


The history of any art constitutes a form of self-commentary, what George Steiner calls “a syllabus of enacted criticism.” Within this syllabus there are especially charged moments when writers or artists deliberately and explicitly address the work of another writer or artist. The impulse is often elegiac: Auden writes his great elegy for Yeats (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”), Brodsky writes an elegy for Auden (“York: In Memoriam W. H. Auden”), and most recently, Heaney composes an elegy for Brodsky (the cleverly titled “Audenesque”).

“The words of a dead man,” writes Auden, “[a]re modified in the guts of the living.” These words—and this sentiment—are in turn modified by Brodsky: “Thus the source of love becomes the object of love.”

This chain is what I might term a linear tribute in that an artist composes a tribute to another artist who worked in the same medium. The recent exhibition “Portrait/Homage/Embodiment” at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis presents a series of more complex tributes, in which the source of love in one medium becomes the object of love in another. Thus we have sculptural essays on music (Emile Antoine Bourdelle’s Large Tragic Mask of Ludwig von Beethoven) and literature (a Jacques Lipchitz bust of Gertrude Stein). These essays highlight the shifting relation between artist and subject. The relative importance of who the artwork is by and who or what it is about is always changing.

Every art form has its particular advantages and limitations. It is not unusual for people working in one medium to envy the freedoms of another. Frank O’Hara ponders these matters briefly and frankly—before dismissing them—in his poem “Why I Am Not a Painter”:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not.

In keeping with the spirit of the exhibition, I’d like to look a little more patiently at what happens when different media come into close proximity. How do they affect, or rub off on, each other? To what extent can one art form absorb and harness the possibilities inherent in another? To do this I’ll move beyond the exhibition and look at a cluster of well-known tributes and some of the tributaries—so to speak—that flow from this cluster. The cluster is composed of a novelist, who occasions the initial convergence, and a sculptor, a poet, and a photographer who subsequently find themselves grouped around him.
Auguste Rodin, Balzac. Exhibited 1898, cast later. Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University.



In July 1891, Rodin accepted a commission to make a sculpture of Balzac. He hoped to have a sketch ready by November and to complete the sculpture in 18 months. As often happened, though, the demands Rodin made on himself—his desire to find and capture the “soul of Balzac”—came close to overwhelming him. Claiming to be working “on nothing but the Balzac,” he nevertheless missed deadline after deadline.

In May 1894 delegates from the sponsoring committee visited his studio, only to find that, instead of the expected maquette of the novelist in a monk’s robe, Rodin had modeled a naked figure with arms folded over an enormous belly. This, needless to say, was considered quite unacceptable. Rodin worked on various other versions but was constantly dissatisfied. Although frustrating for everyone concerned, the failure was itself a kind of tribute. Balzac, after all, had written a famous—almost Borgesian—account of an artist’s absolute inability to bring a work to the desired state of perfection: The Unknown Masterpiece (which, incidentally, formed the basis for the interminable Jacques Rivette film La Belle Noiseuse). Finally, with pressure and doubts mounting (there was much speculation in the press as to whether he would ever finish it), Rodin exhibited a plaster cast of his Balzac at the Salon of 1898. The controversy it engendered was as swift as its gestation had been prolonged. The sculpture had its defenders, but Bernard Berenson sounded the more typical note: he regarded it as a “stupid monstrosity. Insofar as he [Balzac] has form at all, he looks like a polar bear standing on his hind legs.”

A poet gave the best account of how Rodin worked on the statue:

For years he lived engrossed by this figure. He visited Balzac’s home, the landscape of Touraine, which constantly reappears in his books, he read his letters, studied the existing portraits of Balzac, and he lived through his works again and again . . . he lived [in Balzac’s world] as if he were himself one of Balzac’s creations, unobtrusively inserted among the multitude of existences which Balzac had created.

Rainer Maria Rilke came to Paris to write a book about Rodin in 1902. As Rodin had immersed himself in the work of Balzac, so Rilke immersed himself in the work of Rodin. As Rodin had sought to pay homage to the genius of Balzac, so Rilke sought to do justice to the genius of Rodin. As Rodin’s sculpture was an essay on genius by a genius, so Rilke’s book became not only a monograph about Rodin but also a vicarious account of his own genius. Rilke himself was conscious of this, writing to Lou Andreas-Salomé that the book “also speaks about me.” The portrait of the artist is also a self-portrait of the poet, and became more so over time as Rodin’s huge influence on Rilke’s work took shape. From Rodin, Rilke developed his work ethic (their unrelenting industriousness was one of the traits that Balzac and Rodin also shared). It was from Rodin also that Rilke became convinced that he must write about his subjects not as they appeared on the surface but as if he had inhabited them from within: “One might almost say the appearance of his things does not concern him,” he wrote of Rodin, “so much does he experience their being.” Rilke struggled to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality—his ability to create things—into the “thing-poems” [Dinggedichte] of 1907–8.

As the young Rilke had come to write about Rodin and his work, so the young Edward Steichen came to photograph Rodin and his creations. In 1902 he made a composite image of Rodin silhouetted in front of The Thinker and Monument to Victor Hugo. In 1908 he made long exposures of the Balzac monument at night. After seeing Steichen’s pictures—that is, after the photographer had passed the ultimate test of doing justice to the sculptor’s genius—Rodin became convinced not just of Steichen’s individual talent but of photography’s viability as an art form.

It would be nice to be able to square the circle: to report that Steichen later did a portrait of Rilke at Duino as the first of the Elegies swept through him, or that Rilke wrote a poem about Steichen. This did not happen. The important thing is that whatever your starting point, whether your particular interest is poetry (Rilke), photography (Steichen), sculpture (Rodin), or fiction (Balzac), you will, so to speak, be led astray. After this meeting there will be dispersal. And the dispersal will lead, in turn, to new meetings, new convergences.

The relative importance of what a given work is about and who it is by will change. Suppose, for example, that it was an interest in poetry, in Rilke, that led you to the encounter with Steichen. If you then follow his subsequent work, you will approach the famous photographs of W. B. Yeats and Carl Sandburg (Steichen’s brother-in-law) as examples of portraiture by an artist as much as you regard them as portraits of poets. Within the history of photography Steichen’s most obvious descendant is Richard Avedon, who, like Steichen, combined lucrative fashion work with highly regarded portraiture. This, in turn, means that at some point you will come across Avedon’s 1960 portrait of W. H. Auden in a snowstorm in St Mark’s Place, New York.

If you come from the other direction, to Steichen via Yeats and Sandburg, then you will end up like Joseph Brodsky contemplating a photograph of Auden: “I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.” You will, in other words, be back where we started. For every dispersal—there is something almost Rilkean about this, no? —is also a convergence.

So let’s look, briefly, at some other possible routes out of and away from that initial meeting.

After Rodin, the next important influence on Rilke was Cézanne. Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne reveals the enormous influence of the Cézanne retrospective in Paris, in the summer of 1907. He discovered there not a refutation but an intensification of what he had learned from Rodin: fruits, in Cézanne’s still lifes, “cease to be edible altogether, that’s how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness.” And again, as with Rodin (but more confidently and explicitly now), what he discovers is important primarily for what it enables Rilke to realize about himself and his own work: “It’s not really painting I’m studying. . . . It was the turning point which I recognised, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready, probably for a long time, for this one thing which so much depends on.”

The extent to which this breakthrough into “limitless objectivity” was achieved is revealed in “Requiem for a Friend” (1908). The poem was written in response to the death, several weeks after giving birth, of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (who had discovered Cézanne years earlier). It is, simultaneously, a lament for his friend and an essay on the art to which they were both indebted:

For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
(from Stephen Mitchell’s translation)

There are several directions one might follow from here: From Cézanne to poems by Charles Tomlinson (“Cézanne at Aix” in Seeing is Believing [1960]) and Jeremy Reed (“Cézanne” in Nineties [1990]). Or, sticking with Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, to Adrienne Rich’s important corrective, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” (Clara was Paula’s friend and Rilke’s wife), in which a poet speaks as a painter addressing a poet—thereby offering a crisp critique of Rilke:

Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day.

In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography.

Originally Published: December 5th, 2007

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69430


Essay
The Poetry of Autumn
Forget spring. Fall is the season for poetry.
By Annie Finch
A selection of fall poems. Illustration by Mark McGinnisIllustration: Mark McGinnis

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” wrote John Keats, and yet that quintessential poet of autumn, his own life fading as the colors of his glory blazed and flew, was exquisitely alive to the season’s dying. His sleeping Autumn, cheeks flushed and hair awry, personifies the sensual richness of the early part of the season as iconically as the yellow leaves of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII embody the forlorn grandeur of the late. And yet both of these poems contain the tinge of their opposites, more exquisite for being so subtle: the unspoken sexual passion in the sonnet and the hint of the ominous in the ode (the wailing of the bugs, the swallows gathering) are so delicate they are barely there.

Through just this kind of sensitivity to duality, the poetry of autumn tends to ambiguity—and to greatness. What poet or lover of poetry could resist, now, when death and beauty are afoot? Together? The stereotypical poet writes of spring; the odds are that any parody of poetry will involve twittering and budding. But Millay answers, from the end of “The Death of Autumn”: “Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky! / Oh, Autumn! Autumn—What is the Spring to me?”

The evidence for the greatness of autumn poetry, at least in the Romantic tradition in English, is everywhere: Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Keats’s “To Autumn,” Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole,” H.D.’s “Orchard,” Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” Brooks’s “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” Dickinson seemed to take the connection between poetry and autumn for granted, writing “Besides the Autumn poets sing / a few prosaic days” as if it were as standard a subject for poetry in her mind as spring is in ours. It seems likely that her own “Wild nights - Wild nights!,” not to mention its ancient ancestor, “O Western Wind,” was inspired by late autumn, by the kind of mood when Rilke wrote, “Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter; / who lives alone will live indefinitely so.”

Rilke’s poem partakes of the tradition of relentless autumn poems, those sad or bitter mournings of the season, the “withered” world on which Alice Cary so utterly turns her back. This is the aspect of autumn that drives Walter de la Mare, in “Autumn,” to spell-like obsession:

There is a wind where the rose was;
Cold rain where sweet grass was . . .
Sad winds where your voice was;
Tears, tears where my heart was . . .

It drives Paul Verlaine to hear such long long sobs, and most brutally of all perhaps, Adam Zagajewski to political despair at the power of autumn “merciless in her blaze / and her breath.”

On the other end of the spectrum are the few stalwart, happy autumn poems. These seem, interestingly enough, more common among American than among English poets. Could it be the sheer beauty of a more heavily wooded landscape that tips the balance? Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Merry Autumn,” one of the most successful happy autumn poems, consciously calls up the “solemn” tradition it rejects:

It's all a farce,—these tales they tell
About the breezes sighing,
And moans astir o'er field and dell,
Because the year is dying.

Emily Dickinson’s “The morns are meeker than they were,” uncharacteristic of her as it may be, is utterly memorable, and Whitman basks in autumn with benign acceptance, feeling its rivulets flowing towards an eternal ocean. Longfellow, not at his best in his ruthlessly cheerful poem “Autumn,” more than makes up for it at the gorgeous beginning of Book 2 of his now-underappreciated, but still highly readable, epic Evangeline:

Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and
longer,
And the retreating sun the sign of the Scorpion enters.
Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the
ice-bound
Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropical islands.
Harvests were gathered in; and wild with the winds of September
Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel.

But poems of lament or celebration are the exceptions; the real tradition of the poetry of autumn is the paradoxical tradition. Where does paradox find its proper home but in poetry, and in autumn? From Shakespeare’s sonnet to Keats’s ode and far beyond, much of the most memorable autumn poetry embraces what Stevens called “the blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick,” that balance between fecundity and decay which Frost addresses with such excruciating specificity in “After Apple-Picking”:

Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear. . . .
I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

This paradox, I think, is the pith of autumn, the part that some of us just can’t get enough of, the reason autumn is so many people’s favorite season. This is the ineffable puzzle that inspires Stevens’s “gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” and leads Archibald MacLeish to call autumn “the human season.” This is the time when, perhaps, we are all looking to feel more accurately what Mary Kinzie, in her commentary on Rilke’s “Day in Autumn,” described as “the flowering of loss, . . . the ripening of diminishment into husk and hull.” And in this, autumn is again like poetry: though it may help us to notice more deeply how we are alone, it can also help us to feel the excitement of sharing that solitude with each other. In the words of Basho,

It is deep autumn
My neighbor
How does he live, I wonder.

Originally Published: October 28th, 2009

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69068

Essay
The Energies of Words
How Poetry's legendary 1931 Objectivist issue came to be, from Pound's harangues to Zukofsky's essays.
By Peter O’Leary
Introduction
"Hermeneutical mysteriousness is the single most important reason why Objectivist ideals have endured in American poetry." Peter O'Leary digs deep into the Poetry magazine archive to uncover the origins of the Objectivist movement.

The Objectivist movement didn’t yet have a name when Harriet Monroe sent a letter of recommendation on behalf of Louis Zukofsky to the Guggenheim Foundation in November 1930. The 26-year-old Zukofsky, she wrote, was “a member, perhaps the leader, of a ‘new group’ of poets who are doing very interesting, more or less experimental work in poetry and in authentic criticism. . . . I have such confidence in Mr. Z. that I am handing over to him the editorship of an entire issue of Poetry.”

The month before, Monroe had offered Zukofsky the chance “to put in whatever poets you like up to 30½ pages of verse and 20 more of prose.” Zukofsky’s reply provides an orienting credo for the Objectivist movement:

If we can get part of a Canto of Pound’s—and if I find it good which is highly probable—I don’t see why we should shun it. The energies of words are hard to find—I should want my issue to be entirely a matter of the energies of words.


Zukofsky had Ezra Pound to thank for Monroe’s invitation. Early in the magazine’s existence, she had appointed Pound her foreign correspondent. His legendary scouting reports from Europe included work by William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Rabindranath Tagore. By 1920, eight years after the magazine was founded, Pound and Monroe’s relationship had cooled. Nevertheless, Monroe kept in touch, and Pound sent her periodic advice and harangues, such as this characteristic bit from November 1926:

Dear Harriet: Have been looking through your last 18 or more numbers, find many of ’em uncut.
My impression is that you have tried ladies’ numbers, children’s numbers, in fact everything but a man’s number. And that you tend to become more and more a tea party, all mères de famille. . . . Fraid I will hav to take the bad boys off your hands and once again take up the hickory.


Writing in March 1930, Pound urges Monroe to notice Zukofsky: “I think you miss things. Criterion and H[ound] & Horn both taking on Zukofsky. If you can’t liven up the verse; you cd. at least develop the critical section [with his work].” In late September 1930, Pound wrote to again suggest that Monroe include work by Zukofsky

Dear Harriet,
Before leavin’ home yesterday I recd. 2 essays by Zukofsky. You really ought to get his Reznikof [sic]. = He is one of the very few people making any advance in criticism. = he ought to appear regularly in “Poetry.”


Twenty years had passed since Pound first became famous for agitating on behalf of literature, and he may have felt removed from any literary center and eager to dive back into the scrum. “Hang it all,” he continues, echoing the eventual opening to “Canto II,” “—you printed my ‘Don’ts’ + Ford’s essay in Poetry, in 1913. etc. + they set a date. You ought not to let the magazine drift into being a mere passive spectator of undefined + undefinable events.”

Pound’s relationship with Monroe was arguably one of the most significant collaborations in the history of American poetry. Neither would have accomplished as much as they did without the other: Monroe supported Pound’s ideas when other venues found them tedious; Pound pushed Monroe to broaden her horizons. In the same letter, Pound rails, “A prominent americ. homme de letters came to me last winter saying you had alienated every active poet in the U.S.—one ought not to be left undefended against such remarks,” adding, “Zuk has [a] definite critical gift that ought to be used.” He included Zukofsky’s address just to be sure she took his point. Later, more gently, he assures her, “You cd. get back into the ring if you wd. print a number containing [Zukofsky’s work],” adding “Must make one no. of Poet.[ry] different from another if you want to preserve life as distinct from mere continuity.” In the upper front corner of Pound’s letter, Monroe—presumably—has penciled in the notation: “Sug’d a Zukofsky number.”

In recommending Zukofsky, Pound was essentially anointing the young poet as the head of a new movement, one that he felt deserved a manifesto as galvanizing as Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts ” had been to the Imagists in 1913.

Taking Pound’s cue, Monroe asked Zukofsky to formulate the February 1931 issue of Poetry as the announcement of a new literary movement, specifying that he should write an essay summarizing the merits and intentions of its work. “I shall be disappointed,” she wrote to Zukofsky on October 13, 1930, “if you haven’t a ‘new group,’ as Ezra said.” Zukofsky did what most young poets in such an unusually fortunate position would do: he solicited work from his friends and acquaintances. Even though he knew these poets didn’t actually constitute a group, he hedged when he wrote to Monroe describing his progress:

I shall probably—in fact, most certainly,—have more of a group than I thought. The contributions I have already—McAlmon, Rakosi, T.S. Hecht, Oppen, Williams, my own—tho never talked over by us together, go together. The Rakosi I received yesterday is excellent – the man has genius (I say that rarely) and he says he stopped writing five years ago—a curious case.


Making these poets “go together” would require novel thinking as well as a memorable label. Zukofsky first introduces it in “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” one of two essays he wrote for the issue.

What is Objectivist poetry? Strictly speaking, it is a tradition emerging from the work of four of the American poets that Zukofsky featured in the issue: George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and himself. Though he included many other poets, these four are lastingly thought of as the Objectivists. Basil Bunting, a British poet whose work also appears in the issue, is sometimes considered an Objectivist, reflecting more his affiliation with Pound, whose disciple he was, than any aesthetic similarity. Lorine Niedecker, later included in this school, would strike up a lifelong friendship with Zukofsky after reading the issue. In varying ways, the work of all five of these poets advanced the poetic principles of their forebears Pound and William Carlos Williams. (A poem by Williams is also included in the issue.) The principles of Pound and Williams can be summarized by Pound’s 1913 statement that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol” in a poem.

For an issue that launched a movement, it’s not particularly memorable for its poetry, most of which was written by second-rate poets who happened to be friends of Zukofsky, or by now canonical poets who are not regarded as Objectivists, such as Williams, Bunting, or Kenneth Rexroth, a progenitor of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.

Then why is this issue of a magazine among the most influential magazine publications of the 20th century? Put somewhat crudely, it provides the diagrams and all the materials for constructing a canon, a model that has since been often repeated. In focusing the issue on four key poets, surrounding them with largely forgettable, frequently limp free-versifying, and then framing the four poets’ work with a nearly impenetrable critical vocabulary, Zukofsky created a tactical and aesthetic strategy that has influenced successive groups of poets and critics. In some cases, this strategy has involved actively modeling a movement after the Objectivists, as the Language poets did. Seminal essays by such poet/critics as Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Lyn Hejinian provided the theoretical basis and manifestos that inspired the work of other Language poets. For the Black Mountain poets, the manifesto was provided by Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse.” Exactly how the young Zukofsky more or less pulled off launching the Objectivist movement remains a remarkable story.


“Desire for what is objectively perfect” : The Theory

In his book The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins wonders whether Zukofsky’s choice of the term Objectivist was “a deeply considered description of the commonalities his poetry shared with that of George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and William Carlos Williams,” or “an ad hoc formulation, a hastily conceived banner under which he could advance the poetry and careers of himself and his friends?” As shown by the letters between Monroe and Pound, and Pound and Zukofsky, it’s safe to answer yes to both questions. Zukofsky’s designation of the term Objectivist poetry is both deeply considered and completely provisional.

Objectivist poetry is best defined by the terms with which Zukofsky characterizes it in the essays he wrote for the issue—the principles of “sincerity” and “objectification” cohering in “the energies of words.” Accordingly, sincerity is to be true to living in the world; objectification is to represent its facts.

Though the title of the first essay, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” implies that Zukofsky is defining a new school of poetic theory, he isn’t. Rather, he is offering a perplexing definition with similarly perplexing extraneous matter (for instance, bizarrely, a lengthy quotation from a Hemingway poem). In the essay’s opening paragraphs, Zukosfsky defines what “an objective” for poetry would mean:

An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.


A poem’s objective, Zukofsky seems to be saying, can be understood through the analogies of a microscope and a military target. Does Zukofsky mean that a poem functions in the same way an optical device functions—focusing on an idea or object, targeting it in a military sense, in hopes of achieving an objective perfection that is equivalent to deducing the direction of historic and contemporary trends? Who knows? Zukofsky’s ideas are easier to understand if one applies them to his personal poetic program: remaking the epic poem through a language of philosophical, historic, and musical particulars, chiefly in his poem “A,” begun in 1927 and composed over several decades. For instance, when he further explains in the essay what he means by “historic and contemporary particulars,” Zukofsky slyly refers to events that he has already written about in the early parts of “A.”

It is understood that historic and contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events: i.e., any Egyptian pulled-glass bottle in the shape of a fish or oak leaves, as well as the performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion in Leipzig, or the Russian revolution and the rise of metallurgical plants in Siberia.


The subject of the opening section of “A” is a performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion. By mentioning the Russian revolution and the prospect of steel plants in Siberia, Zukofsky, a Marxist, was not only nodding toward the past but also winking to his leftist comrades (Scroggins refers to this as one of the “red flashes” that flare throughout the issue). And perhaps he wanted those few readers of Poetry who were already familiar with his poem to think that his work was “objective,” which is to say “objectively perfect” and aimed “inextricably” toward both the past and present.

Baffling as this definition of “Objective” is, the remainder of Zukofsky’s opening essay does little to clarify what he means. It is in his essay about Reznikoff’s poetry, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” that Zukofsky more fully develops his theories.

The essay defines the two operative terms of Objectivist theory: sincerity and objectification. Sincerity occurs when writing “is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.” In other words, sincerity is describing things as they are in a musically memorable way. “Shapes suggest themselves,” Zukofsky goes on, “and the mind senses and receives awareness.” As an example of sincerity, Zukofsky cites a line of Reznikoff’s—“The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water”—noting it for “possessing remarkable energy.” He seems to be gesturing toward elements of visual and musical beauty contained in a line, what he would call in his 1948 book A Test of Poetry the “sight” and “sound” of a poem.

Objectification, on the other hand, is a nearly mystical expression of “rested totality”—a talismanic phrase and the poetic property that Zukofsky more highly valued. “This rested totality may be called objectification,” writes Zukofsky. “[T]he apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object.” Objectification is [to be] related to what Zukofsky calls “intellection” in A Test of Poetry, a variation of Pound’s logopoeia—“the dance of the intellect among the words.” Rested totality, in Zukofsky’s thinking in his 1931 essays, is the mind’s comprehension of the poem that is in Oppen’s phrase “concerned with a fact which it did not create.”

To make his case for objectification in poetry, Zukofsky offers some examples in the Reznikoff essay: five of Williams’s poems in Spring and All, Moore’s poems “An Octopus” and “Like a Bulrush,” Eliot’s “Mr. Apollinax,” and, equivocally, some of cummings’s lyrics. Zukofsky, though, reserves his real admiration for Pound. “In contemporary writing the poems of Ezra Pound alone possess objectification to a most constant degree; his objects are musical shapes.” They are, to reiterate what Zukofsky wrote to Monroe in his October 1930 letter, “a matter of the energies of words.” Zukofsky concludes his long paragraph of examples and explanations in the essay with a curt appraisal: “The degree of objectification in the work of Charles Reznikoff is small.”

What can we make of these terms, more than 75 years later? In truth, we make of them what Zukofsky’s vocabulary permits us to make. Scroggins reads objectification as form—“Not the form of the poetic handbooks . . . but form as a sense of unity, as an impression of ‘rested totality’ in the reader’s mind.” But notice here how Scroggins must rely on the vocabulary Zukofsky has provided to explain what Zukofsky means. Scroggins, like many before him, clarifies Zukofsky by perpetuating his language. Though it’s impossible to exactly paraphrase their meaning, Zukofsky’s presentation of sincerity and objectification as philosophical facts created the foundation for the Objectivist movement and its subsequent influence.

Reznikoff would later clarify Zukofsky’s Objectivist theory by relating it to factual evidence. Drawing on his long experience as a lawyer, Reznikoff wrote in “First, there is a need,” a pamphlet published in 1977 by Black Sparrow Press:

With respect to the treatment of subject matter in verse and the use of the term “objectivist” and “objectivism,” let me again refer to the rules with respect to testimony in a court of law. Evidence to be admissible in a trial cannot state conclusions of fact: it must state the facts themselves. For example, a witness in an action for negligence cannot say: the man injured was negligent crossing the street. He must limit himself to a description of how the man crossed. . . . The conclusions of fact are for the jury and let us add, in our case, for the reader.


Poet Norman Finkelstein has written that “Zukofsky’s dream of the poem as the totality of perfect rest . . . is surely one of the most hermetic texts in the annals of twentieth-century poetics, and as such, it is open to endless Talmudic interpretation and disputation.” This hermeneutical mysteriousness is the single most important reason why Objectivist ideals have endured in American poetry. “Rested totality” stands for that part of the imagination that is receptive and mainly intuitive. Perceiving such “totality of perfect rest” is, as Reznikoff understood it, a practice of providing poetic evidence, a testimony in the strictest sense of the term, from the Latin testis, for witness. The Objectivist poem is a witness to reality, both imagination’s and the world’s.


“Words will do it” : The Poetry

How does one witness reality in a poem? To propose an answer to that, we can turn to the poems Zukofsky gathered for Poetry. Pound had written to Carl Rakosi in the late 1920s and in 1930, encouraging him to get in touch with Zukofsky, who then in turn wrote enthusiastically to Monroe about his “genius.” Is it evident in the group of poems Zukofsky selected for the issue? Consider Rakosi’s “Orphean Lost,” which opened the issue:

The oakboughs of the cottagers
descend, my lover,
with the bestial evening.
The shadows of their swelled trunks
crush the frugal herb.
The heights lag
and perish in a blue vacuum.


The scene of the poem seems more Romantic than Objectivist, hinting vaguely of sexual malaise. In a strictly Zukofskyan sense, it lacks any objectification, any totality of perfect rest. It seems, instead, suggestively but mildly agitated.

Zukofsky followed Rakosi’s poems with his own contribution—the Seventh Movement of his epic poem-in-progress, “A,” a series of seven menacingly, skillfully rendered sonnets that recapitulate all the themes involved in his poem up to that point. Subtitled “There are different techniques,” the series begins with this sonnet:

Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words
Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but
They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds
Of words, from me to them no singing gut.
For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood,
For their stomachs are logs with print on them,
Blood-red, red lamps hang from necks or where could
Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M.

“Street Closed” is what print says on their stomachs;
That cuts out everybody but the diggers;
You’re cut out, and she’s cut out, and the jiggers
Are cut out, No! we can’t have such nor bucks
As won’t, tho they’re not here pass thru a hoop
Strayed on a manhole—me? Am on a stoop.


Zukofsky, in seemingly natural yet carefully rhymed lyric language, is describing a strictly urban scene: sawhorses at a work site. The “A” of his title is one sawhorse; two (now four-legged) make an M, an alphabetic objectification of the world.

The syntax of the last six lines is gymnastic, landing after all its twisting on the image of Zukofsky, sitting on a stoop, looking out toward the work site on the closed-off street. While this poem is excellent, technically speaking, is it Objectivist? Following Zukofsky’s initial definitions of “An Objective,” relying as they do on a language of focus (from optical focusing, to military targeting, to a poetic directing of historical particulars), we can say yes. The animal archetype, horse, yields “manes,” which happens to be the first word of The Iliad, meaning “rage” in Greek, invoking a mythical military campaign reflected in the situation of a street in Manhattan being closed off for repairs. All of which, through a series of ingenious rhymes, leads to Zukofsky himself, presumably as a boy, sitting on a stoop, observing the scene. It’s a pretty amazing achievement: if not rested totality, a virtuoso assaying of it to be sure.

Of the major Objectivists, the work of Charles Reznikoff appears next. The page-long selection of short poems exemplifies the type of poem that came to define Objectivist poetry: an almost purely descriptive, modestly lyrical depiction of an urban scene:

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
A girder, itself among the rubbish.


Nearly 30 years later, in 1959, George Oppen, writing to his half-sister June Oppen Degnan, would say of this poem, “Likely [Reznikoff] could mull along and tell you what he had in mind. But how other than with this image could he put into your mind so clearly the miracle of existence—the existence of things. It is only because the image hits so clear and sudden that the poem means what it means. I don’t know that he could make it any clearer by talking about it.”

Oppen is best known for the poetry he wrote after a 25-year silence that he initiated in 1934 in order to dedicate himself to the Communist Party. The two Oppen poems included in the issue appear in Discrete Series from 1934, his only book of poetry published before 1960. The poems Oppen wrote beginning in 1958 are much more expressive of Objectivist positions than the two included here. (“Of Being Numerous,” Oppen’s masterpiece from 1968, begins with an Objectivist credo: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’”) His second poem in the issue begins:

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom,
Is of—aside from reading speaking smoking—
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen,
“Approached the window as if to see what really was going on”


The appearance of Maude Blessingbourne sounds closer in tone and spirit to the characters who show up in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” than to the scenes evoked in the poetry of Rakosi, Reznikoff, or Zukofsky. The poem concludes:

And saw rain failing, in the distance more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-glass—
Of the world, weather swept, with which one shares the century.


While the last line could possibly be describing the “direction of historic and contemporary particulars,” it’s hard to find any rested totality, or even anything particularly sincere, in these lines. (The dramatic setting could possibly reflect, among other things, Oppen’s interest in Henry James.)

The work of two other poets in the issue deserves mention: Bunting’s and Williams’s. Bunting’s contribution, a single poem titled “The Word,” would subsequently be divided by the poet into two different poems in his Collected Poems. The second appears in Poetry under the subheading “Appendix: Iron,” and runs:

Molten pool, incandescent spilth of
deep cauldrons—and brighter nothing is—
cast and cold, your blazes extinct and
no turmoil nor peril left you,
rusty ingot, bleak paralyzed blob!


Are these lines Objectivist? I don’t imagine Bunting ever thought so, but they do ring with the rhetorical soundings of Pound’s early Cantos. Truth told, Bunting was a friend, a connection soldered by Pound, rather than a member of this new poetic movement. The same was true of Williams, whose appearance was emphatically meant to signal influence and ancestry for Zukofsky’s “new group.”

Zukofsky was 24 in 1928 when he struck up a friendship with Williams, who by then had been publishing poetry for 20 years, although he wasn’t especially well known. In letters he sent the younger poet in 1930, Williams worries repeatedly about making some money from his fiction and finding time to write. Responding to Zukofsky’s request for work for Poetry, Williams writes, “By some trick of the imagination I have persistently kept the Alphabet of Leaves thing for just the purpose you want it for. When you want it, yell.” Williams means “The Botticellian Trees,” a poem that would conclude the sequence titled “Della Primavera Transportata al Morale” in the various collected/selected poems of Williams published over the years. It’s arguably the finest and best-known poem in the issue, and Zukofsky was unequivocal in his praise: “Your poem is the best (I’m not kiddin’ either!) in my issue and I have some splendid material by Rakosi etc etc. Bob McAlmon, too.” The poem begins as a model of the kind of poetry Zukofsky meant to assemble:

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter


Monroe seems to have been pleased with this inclusion as well: the November 1931 issue announced that Williams had won the Guarantor’s Prize of $100 for “The Botticellian Trees” and for his service to poetry in general—“a recognition of the value and very individual quality of this poet’s work.” In writing to thank her, Williams told her that he planned to use the money (about $1,200 in today’s dollars) to help finance the publication of his next book; he had yet to find a publisher willing to print and pay for it.

The rest of the poetry in the issue, for the most part, is decidedly minor. (“Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives,” wrote Pound to Monroe in 1931.) Several of the poets were leftist intellectual friends of Zukofsky’s from New York, including Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, and, most famously, Whittaker Chambers, who as a Communist in the 1920s and early 1930s was recruited to work as a Soviet spy in Washington. When he defected from the Communist Party in 1939, he began a career of informing to the FBI on members of his circle, naming Alger Hiss as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948.

Other minor poets of note in the issue include John Wheelwright, an eccentric Boston Brahmin who would go on to exert a considerable influence on John Ashbery; and Robert McAlmon, who had been married to H.D.’s eventual companion Bryher, and who for a period ran an important press in expatriate Paris, publishing Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

Kenneth Rexroth is the most anomalous poet in the issue. Monroe was unfamiliar with elements of Rexroth's poem 'Last Page of a Manuscript,' whose manifestly Christian and mystical language set it apart from the other poems.

Light
Light
The sliver in the firmament
The stirring horde
The rocking wave
The name breaks in the sky
Why stand we
Why go we nought
They broken seek the cleaving balance
The young men gone
Lux lucis


Responding to an editorial inquiry that Monroe sent him about the line “The chalice of the flaming byss,” Rexroth replied pedantically,

The term is byss, your printer made no mistake. The term is late Neo-Platonic, and is used for the plenum, roughly, Being as contrasted with Not-Being. It emerges in western culture with John Scotus Ereugina. Pico uses it. Also Jacob Boehme, who makes much of it.


“A number I can show to my friends” : Reactions

Soon after receiving the January 1931 issue of Poetry, Pound sent a typically hectoring letter to Monroe, accusing her of squandering the value of the magazine he had helped make great. In a postcard dated February 12, 1931, however, he requests four additional copies of Zukofsky’s issue. “This is a number I can show to my friends,” he wrote. In pencil, at the top of the card, Monroe wrote, “Ezra is pleased.” On the reverse side, Pound indicated the names of magazines to which review copies should be sent.

Monroe would quote Pound’s postcard, along with its addendum, in the “Correspondence” section in the April 1931 issue: “If you can do another eleven as lively you will put the mag. on its feet.” To which Monroe replies, chidingly, “Alas, we fear that would put it on its uppers!”

Jokes aside, Monroe had little intention either of doing another issue similar to the Objectivist one or of following Pound’s advice very closely. In March 1931, citing problems that had arisen because of Zukofsky’s distance from Chicago, Monroe suggested to Basil Bunting that they hold off on the British poetry issue Pound had urged them to undertake. One month after the February issue, Pound’s annoyance toward Monroe reignited. “Yet again: say the Feb. number doesn’t ‘record a triumph’ for that group. GET some other damn group and see what it can do. . . . Tell your damn guarantors I consider ’em as holy lights amid a great flock of cattle (millionaire illiterates, dumb and speechless tribes of unconscious pawnbrokers.)”

Readers reacted to the Objectivist poems with a mixture of enthusiasm, repulsion, and sharp criticism. Monroe printed their responses in the April 1931 issue. She particularly notes a Princeton student “who congratulates us upon achieving an interesting issue at last,” and the Long Island editor who wrote an Objectivist parody begging for “my money, my god, my money!” to be sent back. She included a letter from Horace Gregory praising the issue somewhat equivocally, a strange paragraph from a Rexroth letter “too long to quote,” and a bilious but impassioned letter from a very young Stanley Burnshaw, along with Zukofsky’s defensive, dismissive reply.

Burnshaw raises questions still relevant today: “Is Objectivist poetry a programmed movement (such as the Imagists instituted), or is it a rationalization undertaken by writers of similar subjective predilections and tendencies . . . ? Is there a copy of the program of the Objectivist group available?” Zukofsky answered, speaking of himself in the third person, “The editor was not a pivot, the contributors did not rationalize about him together; out of appreciation for their sincerity of craft and occasional objectification he wrote the program of the February issue of Poetry. . . .” In reply to Burnshaw’s admitted confusion about the meaning of “objectification,” Zukofsky pointed to some of the poems in the issue—particularly Oppen’s poems, but also, more faintly, Reznikoff’s sequence—without entirely clarifying it. He concluded by trying—futilely—to clear up another of his chosen terms: “The quotes around ‘objectivist’ distinguish between its particular meaning in the Program and the philosophical etiquette associated with objectivist. ”

For a short period following the issue’s publication, Zukofsky continued to work in the Objectivist vein. In 1932 he edited An “Objectivists” Anthology, issued by TO Publishers (an acronym for The Objectivists), a small press begun by Reznikoff, Zukofsky, and Oppen and his wife, Mary, and funded by Oppen’s modest trust. The anthology was reviewed unfavorably in the pages of Poetry by Morris Schappe in the March 1933 issue, prompting an acidic letter to the editor from Zukofsky. Once again speaking in the third person, he insisted that he “proceeded in that volume very closely along the lines of revolutionary thinking, both in his presentation of the poems of others and of his own poems.”

For a few additional years, there was energy and momentum behind the incipient Objectivists. When Oppen’s money began to run out, the Oppens changed the name of TO Publishers to the Objectivist Press and managed to publish a collected edition of Williams’s poems, as well as Oppen’s Discrete Series in 1934. The press folded in 1936, by which time the Oppens had joined the Communist Party and Oppen had stopped writing poetry.

Oppen’s silence is typical of the neglect and strained personal circumstances that characterized the careers of nearly all the Objectivists until the 1960s, when groups of younger poets in America and England rediscovered, celebrated, and rejuvenated their work. While the quiet 1940s and 1950s must surely have been disappointing to most of these poets—even to Oppen, who had chosen his silence—they lend an aura of authenticity to their poetry and to their commitment as poets. Without this period of decreased visibility, I doubt that the obscure terminology by which Zukofsky had defined this group would have acquired such meaning and mystique. From the vantage of the 21st century, it’s clear that without the initial efforts of Zukofsky in 1931, none of these poets, including Zukofsky himself, would have the place in American literary history they presently occupy.


* * *


Acknowledgments

I was greatly aided in the writing of Part I of this essay by the help of two friends: poet David Pavelich, a librarian at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, who helped guide me through the extensive Poetry collection, and otherwise gave freely of his excellent company and knowledge; and poet Mark Scroggins, who supplied me with an electronic proof copy of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky that provided answers to nearly all of the questions I had, as well as much of the background detail that makes the story told in this essay coherent. Sincere gratitude to both of them. Thanks are due as well to Daniel Meyer, University Archivist and Associate Director of the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, who granted permission for the use of quotations from letters in the Poetry collection. In researching this piece, I made use of the “Objectivist Poets” entry in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_poetry, as captured on September 4, 2007.

Originally Published: June 12th, 2008

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/john_donnes_life_and_poetry-1629


Article
John Donne's Life and Poetry
Written by: William J. Long

Life. The briefest outline of Donne's life shows its intense human interest. He was born in London, the son of a rich iron merchant, at the time when the merchants of England were creating a new and higher kind of princes. On his father's side he came from an old Welsh family, and on his mother's side from the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More's family. Both families were Catholic, and in his early life persecution was brought near; for his brother died in prison for harboring a proscribed priest, and his own education could not be continued in Oxford and Cambridge because of his religion. Such an experience generally sets a man's religious standards for life; but presently Donne, as he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, was investigating the philosophic grounds of all faith. Gradually he left the church in which he was born, renounced all denominations, and called himself simply Christian. Meanwhile he wrote poetry and shared his wealth with needy Catholic relatives. He joined the expedition of Essex for Cadiz in 1596, and for the Azores in 1597, and on sea and in camp found time to write poetry. Two of his best poems, "The Storm" and "The Calm," belong to this period. Next he traveled in Europe for three years, but occupied himself with study and poetry. Returning home, he became secretary to Lord Egerton, fell in love with the latter's young niece, Anne More, and married her; for which cause Donne was cast into prison. Strangely enough his poetical work at this time is not a song of youthful romance, but "The Progress of the Soul," a study of transmigration. Years of wandering and poverty followed, until Sir George More forgave the young lovers and made an allowance to his daughter. Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any place or employment. When his wife died her allowance ceased, and Donne was left with seven children in extreme poverty. Then he became a preacher, rose rapidly by sheer intellectual force and genius, and in four years was the greatest of English preachers and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There he "carried some to heaven in holy raptures and led others to amend their lives," and as he leans over the pulpit with intense earnestness is likened by Izaak Walton to "an angel leaning from a cloud."

Here is variety enough to epitomize his age, and yet in all his life, stronger than any impression of outward weal or woe, is the sense of mystery that surrounds Donne. In all his work one finds a mystery, a hiding of some deep thing which the world would gladly know and share, and which is suggested in his haunting little poem, "The Undertaking":

I have done one braver thing
Than all the worthies did;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.

Donne's Poetry. Donne's poetry is so uneven, at times so startling and fantastic, that few critics would care to recommend it to others. Only a few will read his works, and they must be left to their own browsing, to find what pleases them, like deer which, in the midst of plenty, take a bite here and there and wander on, tasting twenty varieties of food in an hour's feeding. One who reads much will probably bewail Donne's lack of any consistent style or literary standard. For instance, Chaucer and Milton are as different as two poets could well be; yet the work of each is marked by a distinct and consistent style, and it is the style as much as the matter which makes the Tales or the Paradise Lost a work for all time. Donne threw style and all literary standards to the winds; and precisely for this reason he is forgotten, though his great intellect and his genius had marked him as one of those who should do things "worthy to be remembered." While the tendency of literature is to exalt style at the expense of thought, the world has many men and women who exalt feeling and thought above expression; and to these Donne is good reading. Browning is of the same school, and compels attention. While Donne played havoc with Elizabethan style, he nevertheless influenced our literature in the way of boldness and originality; and the present tendency is to give him a larger place, nearer to the few great poets, than he has occupied since Ben Jonson declared that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," but likely to perish "for not being understood." For to much of his poetry we must apply his own satiric verses on another's crudities:

Infinite work! which doth so far extend
That none can study it to any end.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/critique_the_poem_not_the_poet-1


Critique the Poem not the Poet
Written by: Rose DesRochers

The act of writing poetry is something that is very personal to us poets and sharing it for the first time can be a very frightening experience. The first experience of having your work criticized can boggle our mind and set us back a step in our writing. However critique is essential in any writer’s career.

Accepting criticism is something that we all must face even if we don't like it. When I received my first harsh critique it was on a ezboard workshop and right then I wanted to give up writing. They were arrogant and my opinion very mean. It was the most painful experience.

Running an online writing community for the last two years I have met a few arrogant and mean people just like the one on Ezboard. I think that some of these poets have gone to workshops and have been critique in this matter, so now they think this is how one critiques. Wrong!

How to give a critique :

Short reviews like good poem, I like this, and awesome are not useful to any poet. When giving a critique remember that poets are looking for in depth critique. As writers we strive on feedback and we grow as writers by getting both positive and negative comments on our work. At all times keep them respectful. You don't have to take a critical lengthy review approach when commenting on others poetry. You might just want to comment on the way the poem struck you, what you liked about a poem, or what threw you off about a poem. Maybe you can quote part of the poem and why you liked that verse. You don't have to write a book; just a few comments can really help someone know what works and what doesn't. Remember to be tactful and never disrespect the writer. Poets are sensitive souls and they take their poetry to heart. There is a wrong way and right way to say everything. You can offer constructive criticism where the poet is going to learn from it without being disrespectful and never mock your fellow poet.

Here is an example: You just read a poem and all you can find are reasons why the poem that you just read sucks. Maybe they had a number of spelling, grammar mistakes and run on sentences. Instead of commenting on only the bad parts of the poem start out by pointing out a good point. For instance you could say I think you've done a really fine job at expressing your emotions. I do believe that your poem could use some work on the structure to make it complete. I noticed a few spelling and grammar mistakes. I really think this is a good attempt and if you are looking for a more in depth critique I would be happy to work with you to tighten up the poem.

How to not give a critique:

Never critique the author, critique the poem. Never change the poem and put it in your own words. When you do this it no longer becomes the poet’s thoughts. Never think that you are an expert in your field. All poets have room for improvement. Never look at another poet as a failure, keep in mind just as movies not every poem will appeal to you. Don't point out every line in the poem that needs work. You should save that for a more in depth critique if the poet desires it. Don't come off as an arrogant critic that is not the way to help people or win friends in the writing business.

Critique is important to all poets. However if you feel that you are a poet expert with no room for improvement yourself than maybe you should stay away from critique groups and just look at your own writing because your really not helping anyone.

About The Author

Rose DesRochers is the founder of Today's Woman Writing Community http://www.todays-woman.net, a supportive online writing community for men and women over 18. Rose is also the founder of Blogger Talk Blog Community http://www.bloggertalk.net, a friendly fast growing blogging portal, offering bloggers support, advice, tools, tips and information about blogs and blogging.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/american_poet_and_essayist,_ralph_waldo_emerson-1650


American Poet and Essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803-1882), American poet and essayist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of May 1803. Seven of his ancestors were ministers of New England churches. Among them were some of those men of mark who made the backbone of the American character: the sturdy Puritan, Peter Bulkeley, sometime rector of Odell in Bedfordshire, and afterward pastor of the church in the wilderness at Concord, New Hampshire; the zealous evangelist, Father Samuel Moody of Agamenticus in Maine, who pursued graceless sinners even 333into the alehouse; Joseph Emerson of Malden, “a heroic scholar,” who prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; and William Emerson of Concord, Mass., the patriot preacher, who died while serving in the army of the Revolution. Sprung from such stock, Emerson inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue, sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his ideals was modified by the metamorphic glow of Transcendentalism which passed through the region of Boston in the second quarter of the 19th century. But the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced them and lived them out, was the Puritan spirit, elevated, enlarged and beautified by the poetic temperament.

His father was the Rev. William Emerson, minister of the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston. Ralph Waldo was the fourth child in a family of eight, of whom at least three gave evidence of extraordinary mental powers. He was brought up in an atmosphere of hard work, of moral discipline, and (after his father’s death in 1811) of that wholesome self-sacrifice which is a condition of life for those who are poor in money and rich in spirit. His aunt, Miss Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant old maid, an eccentric saint, was a potent factor in his education. Loving him, believing in his powers, passionately desiring for him a successful career, but clinging with both hands to the old forms of faith from which he floated away, this solitary, intense woman did as much as any one to form, by action and reaction, the mind and character of the young Emerson. In 1817 he entered Harvard College, and graduated in 1821. In scholarship he ranked about the middle of his class. In literature and oratory he was more distinguished, receiving a Boylston prize for declamation, and two Bowdoin prizes for dissertations, the first essay being on “The Character of Socrates” and the second on “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy”—both rather dull, formal, didactic productions. He was fond of reading and of writing verse, and was chosen as the poet for class-day. His cheerful serenity of manner, his tranquil mirthfulness, and the steady charm of his personality made him a favourite with his fellows, in spite of a certain reserve. His literary taste was conventional, including the standard British writers, with a preference for Shakespeare among the poets, Berkeley among the philosophers, and Montaigne (in Cotton’s translation) among the essayists. His particular admiration among the college professors was the stately rhetorician, Edward Everett; and this predilection had much to do with his early ambition to be a professor of rhetoric and elocution.

Immediately after graduation he became an assistant in his brother William’s school for young ladies in Boston, and continued teaching, with much inward reluctance and discomfort, for three years. The routine was distasteful; he despised the superficial details which claimed so much of his time. The bonds of conventionalism were silently dissolving in the rising glow of his poetic nature. Independence, sincerity, reality, grew more and more necessary to him. His aunt urged him to seek retirement, self-reliance, friendship with nature; to be no longer “the nursling of surrounding circumstances,” but to prepare a celestial abode for the muse. The passion for spiritual leadership stirred within him. The ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the divinity school at Cambridge, to prepare himself for the Unitarian pulpit. His course was much interrupted by ill-health. His studies were irregular, and far more philosophical and literary than theological.

In October 1826 he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. The same year a threatened consumption compelled him to take a long journey in the south. Returning in 1827, he continued his studies, preached as a candidate in various churches, and improved in health. In 1829 he married a beautiful but delicate young woman, Miss Ellen Tucker of Concord, and was installed as associate minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. The retirement of his senior colleague soon left him the sole pastor. Emerson’s early sermons were simple, direct, unconventional. He dealt freely with the things of the spirit. There was a homely elevation in his discourses, a natural freshness in his piety, a quiet enthusiasm in his manner, that charmed thoughtful hearers. Early in 1832 he lost his wife, a sorrow that deeply depressed him in health and spirits. Following his passion for independence and sincerity, he arrived at the conviction that the Lord’s Supper was not intended by Christ to be a permanent sacrament. To him, at least, it had become an outgrown form. He was willing to continue the service only if the use of the elements should be dropped and the rite made simply an act of spiritual remembrance. Setting forth these views, candidly and calmly, in a sermon, he found his congregation, not unnaturally, reluctant to agree with him, and therefore retired, not without some disappointment, from the pastoral office. He never again took charge of a parish; but he continued to preach, as opportunity offered, until 1847. In fact, he was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His supreme task was to befriend and guide the inner life of man.

The strongest influences in his development about this time were the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical visions of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, and the stimulating essays of Carlyle. On Christmas Day 1832 he took passage in a sailing vessel for the Mediterranean. He travelled through Italy, visited Paris, spent two months in Scotland and England, and saw the four men whom he most desired to see—Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth. “The comfort of meeting such men of genius as these,” he wrote, “is that they talk sincerely.” But he adds that he found all four of them, in different degrees, deficient in insight into religious truth. His visit to Carlyle, in the lonely farm-house at Craigenputtock, was the memorable beginning of a lifelong friendship. Emerson published Carlyle’s first books in America. Carlyle introduced Emerson’s Essays into England. The two men were bound together by a mutual respect deeper than a sympathy of tastes, and a community of spirit stronger than a similarity of opinions. Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds. The things that each most admired in the other were self-reliance, directness, moral courage. A passage in Emerson’s Diary, written on his homeward voyage, strikes the keynote of his remaining life. “A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself.... All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without, the principles of them all may be penetrated into within him.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint man with himself.... The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” Here is the essence of that intuitional philosophy, commonly called Transcendentalism. Emerson disclaimed allegiance to that philosophy. He called it “the saturnalia, or excess of faith.” His practical common sense recoiled from the amazing conclusions which were drawn from it by many of its more eccentric advocates. His independence revolted against being bound to any scheme or system of doctrine, however nebulous. He said: “I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” But this very wish commits him to the doctrine of the inner light. All through his life he navigated the Transcendental sea, piloted by a clear moral sense, warned off the rocks by the saving grace of humour, and kept from capsizing by a good ballast of New England prudence.

After his return from England in 1833 he went to live with his mother at the old manse in Concord, Mass., and began his career as a lecturer in Boston. His first discourses were delivered before the Society of Natural History and the Mechanics’ Institute. They were chiefly on scientific subjects, approached in a poetic spirit. In the autumn of 1835 he married Miss Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, having previously purchased a spacious old house and garden at Concord. There he spent the remainder of his life, a devoted husband, a wise and tender father, a careful house-holder, a virtuous villager, a friendly neighbour, and, spite of all his disclaimers, the central and luminous figure among the 334Transcendentalists. The doctrine which in others seemed to produce all sorts of extravagances—communistic experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands, weird schemes of political reform, long hair on men and short hair on women—in his sane, well-balanced nature served only to lend an ideal charm to the familiar outline of a plain, orderly New England life. Some mild departures from established routine he tranquilly tested and as tranquilly abandoned. He tried vegetarianism for a while, but gave it up when he found that it did him no particular good. An attempt to illustrate household equality by having the servants sit at table with the rest of the family was frustrated by the dislike of his two sensible domestics for such an inconvenient arrangement. His theory that manual labour should form part of the scholar’s life was checked by the personal discovery that hard labour in the fields meant poor work in the study. “The writer shall not dig,” was his practical conclusion. Intellectual independence was what he chiefly desired; and this, he found, could be attained in a manner of living not outwardly different from that of the average college professor or country minister. And yet it was to this property-holding, debt-paying, law-abiding, well-dressed, courteous-mannered citizen of Concord that the ardent and enthusiastic turned as the prophet of the new idealism. The influence of other Transcendental teachers, Dr Hedge, Dr Ripley, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Jones Very, was narrow and parochial compared with that of Emerson. Something in his imperturbable, kindly presence, his angelic look, his musical voice, his commanding style of thought and speech, announced him as the possessor of the great secret which many were seeking—the secret of a freer, deeper, more harmonious life. More and more, as his fame spread, those who “would live in the spirit” came to listen to the voice, and to sit at the feet, of the Sage of Concord.

It was on the lecture-platform that he found his power and won his fame. The courses of lectures that he delivered at the Masonic Temple in Boston, during the winters of 1835 and 1836, on “Great Men,” “English Literature,” and “The Philosophy of History,” were well attended and admired. They were followed by two discourses which commanded for him immediate recognition, part friendly and part hostile, as a new and potent personality. His Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College in August 1837, on “The American Scholar,” was an eloquent appeal for independence, sincerity, realism, in the intellectual life of America. His address before the graduating class of the divinity school at Cambridge, in 1838, was an impassioned protest against what he called “the defects of historical Christianity” (its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus, and its failure to explore the moral nature of man as the fountain of established teaching), and a daring plea for absolute self-reliance and a new inspiration of religion. “In the soul,” he said, “let redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. Go alone. Refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” In this address Emerson laid his hand on the sensitive point of Unitarianism, which rejected the divinity of Jesus, but held fast to his supreme authority. A blaze of controversy sprang up at once. Conservatives attacked him; Radicals defended him. Emerson made no reply. But amid this somewhat fierce illumination he went forward steadily as a public lecturer. It was not his negations that made him popular; it was the eloquence with which he presented the positive side of his doctrine. Whatever the titles of his discourses, “Literary Ethics,” “Man the Reformer,” “The Present Age,” “The Method of Nature,” “Representative Men,” “The Conduct of Life,” their theme was always the same, namely, “the infinitude of the private man.” Those who thought him astray on the subject of religion listened to him with delight when he poetized the commonplaces of art, politics, literature or the household. His utterance was Delphic, inspirational. There was magic in his elocution. The simplicity and symmetry of his sentences, the modulations of his thrilling voice, the radiance of his fine face, even his slight hesitations and pauses over his manuscript, lent a strange charm to his speech. For more than a generation he went about the country lecturing in cities, towns and villages, before learned societies, rustic lyceums and colleges; and there was no man on the platform in America who excelled him in distinction, in authority, or in stimulating eloquence.

In 1847 Emerson visited Great Britain for the second time, was welcomed by Carlyle, lectured to appreciative audiences in Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and London, made many new friends among the best English people, paid a brief visit to Paris, and returned home in July 1848. “I leave England,” he wrote, “with increased respect for the Englishman. His stuff or substance seems to be the best in the world. I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration.” The impressions of this journey were embodied in a book called English Traits, published in 1856. It might be called “English Traits and American Confessions,” for nowhere does Emerson’s Americanism come out more strongly. But the America that he loved and admired was the ideal, the potential America. For the actual conditions of social and political life in his own time he had a fine scorn. He was an intellectual Brahmin. His principles were democratic, his tastes aristocratic. He did not like crowds, streets, hotels—“the people who fill them oppress me with their excessive civility.” Humanity was his hero. He loved man, but be was not fond of men. He had grave doubts about universal suffrage. He took a sincere interest in social and political reform, but towards specific “reforms” his attitude was somewhat remote and visionary. On the subject of temperance he held aloof from the intemperate methods of the violent prohibitionists. He was a believer in woman’s rights, but he was lukewarm towards conventions in favour of woman suffrage. Even in regard to slavery he had serious hesitations about the ways of the abolitionists, and for a long time refused to be identified with them. But as the irrepressible conflict drew to a head Emerson’s hesitation vanished. He said in 1856, “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” With the outbreak of the Civil War he became an ardent and powerful advocate of the cause of the Union. James Russell Lowell said, “To him more than to all other causes did the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives.”

Emerson the essayist was a condensation of Emerson the lecturer. His prose works, with the exception of the slender volume entitled Nature(1836), were collected and arranged from the manuscripts of his lectures. His method of writing was characteristic. He planted a subject in his mind, and waited for thoughts and illustrations to come to it, as birds or insects to a plant or flower. When an idea appeared, he followed it, “as a boy might hunt a butterfly”; when it was captured he pinned it in his “Thought-book”. The writings of other men he used more for stimulus than for guidance. He said that books were for the scholar’s idle times. “I value them,” he said, “to make my top spin.” His favourite reading was poetry and mystical philosophy: Shakespeare, Dante, George Herbert, Goethe, Berkeley, Coleridge, Swedenborg, Jakob Boehme, Plato, the new Platonists, and the religious books of the East (in translation). Next to these he valued books of biography and anecdote: Plutarch, Grimm, St Simon, Varnhagen von Ense. He had some odd dislikes, and could find nothing in Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shelley, Scott, Miss Austen, Dickens. Novels he seldom read. He was a follower of none, an original borrower from all. His illustrations were drawn from near and far. The zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into toys; the naked Derar, horsed on an idea, charging a troop of Roman cavalry; the long, austere Pythagorean lustrum of silence; Napoleon on the deck of the “Bellerophon,” observing the drill of the English soldiers; the Egyptian doctrine that every man has two pairs of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the horizontal stratification of the 335earth; a soft mushroom pushing its way through the hard ground,—all these allusions and a thousand more are found in the same volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, the Sphinx, St Paul’s, Etna and Vesuvius, you will find the White Mountains, Monadnock, Agiocochook, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in bloom, the wild geese honking through the sky, the chick-a-dee braving the snow, Wall Street and State Street, cotton-mills, railroads and Quincy granite. For an abstract thinker he was strangely in love with the concrete facts of life. Idealism in him assumed the form of a vivid illumination of the real. From the pages of his teeming note-books he took the material for his lectures, arranging and rearranging it under such titles as Nature, School, Home, Genius, Beauty and Manners, Self-Possession, Duty, The Superlative, Truth, The Anglo-Saxon, The Young American. When the lectures had served their purpose he rearranged the material in essays and published them. Thus appeared in succession the following volumes: Essays (First Series) (1841); Essays (Second Series) (1844); Representative Men (1850); English Traits (1856); The Conduct of Life (1860); Society and Solitude (1870); Letters and Social Aims (1876). Besides these, many other lectures were printed in separate form and in various combinations.

Emerson’s style is brilliant, epigrammatic, gem-like; clear in sentences, obscure in paragraphs. He was a sporadic observer. He saw by flashes. He said, “I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought.” The coherence of his writing lies in his personality. His work is fused by a steady glow of optimism. Yet he states this optimism moderately. “The genius which preserves and guides the human race indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favourable to the side of reason.”

His verse, though in form inferior to his prose, was perhaps a truer expression of his genius. He said, “I am born a poet”; and again, writing to Carlyle, he called himself “half a bard.” He had “the vision,” but not “the faculty divine” which translates the vision into music. In his two volumes of verse (Poems, 1846; May Day and other Pieces, 1867) there are many passages of beautiful insight and profound feeling, some lines of surprising splendour, and a few poems, like “The Rhodora,” “The Snowstorm,” “Ode to Beauty,” “Terminus,” “The Concord Ode,” and the marvellous “Threnody” on the death of his first-born boy, of beauty unmarred and penetrating truth. But the total value of his poetical work is discounted by the imperfection of metrical form, the presence of incongruous images, the predominance of the intellectual over the emotional element, and the lack of flow. It is the material of poetry not thoroughly worked out. But the genius from which it came—the swift faculty of perception, the lofty imagination, the idealizing spirit enamoured of reality—was the secret source of all Emerson’s greatness as a speaker and as a writer. Whatever verdict time may pass upon the bulk of his poetry, Emerson himself must be recognized as an original and true poet of a high order.

His latter years were passed in peaceful honour at Concord. In 1866 Harvard College conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., and in 1867 he was elected an overseer. In 1870 he delivered a course of lectures before the university on “The Natural History of the Intellect.” In 1872 his house was burned down, and was rebuilt by popular subscription. In the same year he went on his third foreign journey, going as far as Egypt. About this time began a failure in his powers, especially in his memory. But his character remained serene and unshaken in dignity. Steadily, tranquilly, cheerfully, he finished the voyage of life.

“I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near.

And every wave is charmed.’”

Emerson died on the 27th of April 1882, and his body was laid to rest in the peaceful cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, in a grove on the edge of the village of Concord.

Authorities.—Emerson’s Complete Works, Riverside edition, edited by J.E. Cabot (11 vols., Boston, 1883-1884); another edition (London, 5 vols., 1906), by G. Sampson, in Bohn’s “Libraries”; The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1883); George Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings and Philosophy (Boston, 1881); Alexander Ireland, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius and Writings (London, 1882); A. Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher and Seer (Boston, 1882); Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston, 1882); Joel Benton, Emerson as a Poet (New York, 1883); F.B. Sanborn (editor),The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (Boston, 1885); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (“American Men of Letters” series) (Boston, 1885); James Elliott Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols. (the authorized biography) (Boston, 1887); Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston, 1889); Richard Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (London, 1888); G.E. Woodberry, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1907). Critical estimates are also to be found in Matthew Arnold’s Discourses in America, John Morley’s Critical Miscellanies, Henry James’s Partial Portraits, Lowell’s My Study Windows, Birrell’s Obiter Dicta (2nd series), Stedman’s Poets of America, Whipple’s American Literature, &c. There is a Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by G.W. Cooke (Boston, 1908).

(H. van D.)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://bactra.org/Poetry/Tagore/modern-poetry.html

Modern Poetry
Rabindranath Tagore
Writing about modern English poets is by no means an easy task, for who defines the limit of the modern age in terms of the almanac? It is not so much a question of time as of spirit.

After flowing straight for a while, most rivers take a sudden turn. Likewise, literature does not always follow the straight path; when it takes a turn, that turn must be called modern. We call it adhunik in Bengali. This modernity depends not upon time but upon temperament.

The poetry to which I was introduced in my boyhood might have been classed as modern in those days. Poetry had taken a new turn, beginning from Robert Burns, and the same movement brought forth many other great poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.

The manners and customs of a society are shown in social usage. In countries where these social customs suppress all freedom and individual taste, man becomes a puppet, and his conduct conforms meticulously to social etiquette. Society appreciates this traditional and habitual way of life. Sometimes literature remains in this groove for long periods of time, and whosoever wears the sacred marks of perfect literary style is looked upon as a saintly person. During the age of English poetry that followed Burns, the barriers of style were broken down, and temperament made its debut. ``The lake adorned with lotus and the lily'' became a lake seen through the special view of official blinkers fashioned in the classic workshop. When a daring writer removes those blinkers and catch phrases, and looks upon the lake with open eyes, he also opens up a view through which the lake assumes different aspects and various fancies. But classic judgement cries ``fie for shame'' on him.

When we began to read English poetry, this unconventionally individualistic mood had already been acknowledge in literature, and the clamor raised by the Edinburgh Review had died down. Even so, that period of our life was a new era in modernism.

In those days, the sign of modernism in poetry was an individual's measure of delight. Wordsworth expressed in his own style the spirit of delight that he realized in nature. Shelley's was a Platonic contemplation, accompanied by a spirit of revolt against every kind of obstacle, political, religious or otherwise. Keat's poetry was wrought out of the meditation and creation of beauty. In that age, the stream of poetry took a turn from outwardness to inwardness.

A poet's deepest feelings strive for immortality by assuming a form in language. Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. There was a time when humanity in its moments of leisure sought to beautify that portion of the universe with which it came into contact, and this outer adornment was the expression of its inner love, and with this love, there could be no indifference. In those days, in the exuberance of his sense of beauty man began to decorate the common articles of daily use; his inspiration lent creative power to his fingers. In every land and village, household utensils and the adornment of the home and person bound man, in color and form, to these outward insignia of life. Many ceremonies were evolved for adding zest to social life, many new melodies, arts and crafts in wood and metal, clay and stone, silk, wool and cotton. In those days, the husband called his wife: ``beloved disciple in the fine arts.'' The bank balance did not constitute the principal asset of the married couple in the work of setting up house; the arts were a more necessary item. Flower garlands were woven, the art of dancing was taught, accompanied by lessons in the vina, the flute and singing, and young women knew how to paint the ends of their saris of China silk. Then, there was beauty in human relationships.

The English poets with whom we came into contact in my early youth saw the universe with their own eyes; it had become their personal property. Not only did their own imaginations, opinions and tastes humanize and intellectualize the universe, but they molded it according to their individual desires. The universe of Wordsworth was specially ``Wordsworthian,'' of Shelley, ``Shelleyan,'' of Byron, ``Byronic.'' By creative magic it also became the reader's universe. The joy that we felt in a poet's world was the joy of enjoying the delight of a particular world aroma. The flower sent its invitation to the bee through a distinctive smell and color, and the note of invitation was sweet. The poet's invitation possessed a spontaneous charm. In the days when the chief bond between man and universe was individuality, the personal touch in the invitation had to be fostered with care, a sort of competition had to be set up in dress and ornament and manners, in order to show oneself off to the best advantage.

Thus, we find that in the beginning of the nineteenth century the tradition which held priority in the English poetry of the previous age had given place to self-expression. This was called modernism.

But now that modernism is dubbed mid-Victorian senility and made to recline on an easy chair in the next room. Now is the day of the modernism of lopped skirts and lopped hair. Powder is applied to the cheeks and rouge to the lips, and it is proclaimed that the days of illusion are over. But there is always illusion at every step of the creation, and it is only the variety of that illusions which plays so many tunes in so many forms. Science has throughly examined every pulse beat, and declares that at the root of things there is no illusion; there is carbon and nitrogen, there is physiology and psychology. We old-fashioned poets thought the illusion was the main thing and carbon and physiology the by-products. Therefore, we must confess that we had striven to compete with the Creator in spreading the snare of illusion through rhyme and rhythm, language and style. In our metaphors and nuances there was some hide-and-seek; we were unable to lift aside that veil of modesty which adorns but does not contradict truth. In the colored light that filtered through the haze, the dawns and evenings appeared in a beauty as tender as a new bride. The modern, Duhshashsan, engaged in publicly disrobing Draupadi is a sight we are not accustomed to. Is it merely habit that makes us uncomfortable; is there no truth in this sense of shame; does not Beauty become bankrupt when divested of the veil which reveals rather than conceals?

But the modern age is in a hurry, and livelihood is more important. Man races through his work and rushes through his pleasure in a crowd of accelerating machines. The human being who used to create his own intimate world at leisure now delegates his duties to factory and rigs up some sort of provisional affair to suit his needs according to some official standard. Feasts are out of fashion; only meals remain. There is no desire to consider whether life is in harmony with the intellect, for the mind of man is also engaged in pulling the rope of the huge car of livelihood. Instead of music, we hear hoarse shouts of ``Push, boys, push!'' He has to spend most of his time with the crowed, not in the company of his friends; his mentality is the mentality of the hustler. In the midst of all this bustle he has no will power to bypass unadorned ugliness.

Which path must poetry now follow, then, and what is her destination? It is not possible these days to follow one's own taste, to select, to arrange. Science does not select, it accepts whatever is; it does not appraise by the standard of personal taste nor embellish with the eagerness of personal involvement. The chief delight of the scientific mind consists in curiosity, not in forming ties of relationship. It does not regard what ``I'' want as the main consideration, but rather what the thing in itself exactly is, leaving ``me'' out of the question; and without ``me,'' the preparation of illusion is unnecessary.

Therefore, in the process of economizing that is being carried out in the poetry of this scientific age, it is adornment that has suffered the biggest loss. A fastidious selectivity in the matter of rhyme, rhythm and words has become almost obsolete. The change is not taking place smoothly, but in order to break the spell of the past, it has become the fashion to repudiate it aggressively, like trying to arrange bits of broken glass in an ugly manner, lest the selective faculty should enter the house by jumping over the garden wall. A poet writes, ``I am the greatest laugher of all, greater than the sun, than the oak tree, than the frog and Apollo.'' ``Than the frog and Apollo'' is where the bits of broken glass come in, out of fear that someone will think that the poet is arranging his words sweetly and prettily. If the word ``sea'' were used instead of ``frog,'' the modernists might object to it as regular poetizing. That may be so, but mentioning the frog is a more regular poetizing of the opposite kind. That is to say, it is not introduced naturally, but is like intentionally walking on your toes; that would be modern.

But the fact of the matter is, the days are gone for the frog to be admitted into poetry with the same respect as other creatures. In the category of reality, the frog now belongs to a higher class than Apollo. I do not wish to regard the frog with contempt; rather, in an appropriate context, the croaking laugh of the frog might be juxtaposed with the laugh of the poet's beloved, even if she objected. But even according to the most ultra-scientific theory of equality, the laugh of the sun, of the oak tree, of Apollo, is not that of the frog. It has been dragged in by force in order to destroy the illusion.

Today. this veil of illusion must be removed and the thing must be seen exactly as it is. The illusion which colored the nineteenth century has now faded, and the mere suggestion of sweetness is not enough to satisfy one's hunger - something tangible is required. When we say that smelling is half the eating, we exaggerate by nearly three quarters. Let me quote a few lines from a poem addressed to a beauty of bygone days.

You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.

This kind of modern coinage is cheaper but stronger, and very definite; it clearly sounds the modern note. Old-fashioned charm had an intoxicating effect, but this poem has insolence; and there is nothing misty about it.

The subject matter of modern poetry odes not seek to attract the mind by its charm. Its strength consists in firm self-reliance, that which is called ``character'' in English. It calls out: Ho there! behold me, here am I. The same poetess, whose name is Amy Lowell, has written a poem on a shop of red slippers. The theme is that in the evening the snowflakes are whirling outside in the wind; inside, behind polished glass windows, rows of red slippers hang like garlands, ``like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the street, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas. The row of white, sparkling shop-fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers.'' The whole poem deals with slippers.

This is called impersonal. There is no ground for being particularly attached to these garlands of slippers, either as a buyer or a seller, but one has to stop and look; as soon as the character of the picture as a whole becomes apparent, it no longer remains trifling. Those concerned with meaning will ask, ``What does it all mean, sir? Why so much bother about slippers, even if they are red?'' To which one replies - ``Just look at them yourself.'' But the questioner asks, ``What's the good of looking?'' To which there is no reply.

Let us take another example. There is a poem by Ezra Pound called ``A Study in Aesthetics,'' in which a girl walks along the street, and a boy in patched clothes cries out in uncontrollable excitement, ``Oh! look, look, how beautiful!'' Three years later, the poet meets the boy again during a great haul of sardines. The father and uncles box the fish in order to send them to the market at Breschia. The boy jumps about, handling the fish, and his elders scold him to be quiet. The boy strokes the neatly-arranged fish, and mutters to himself in a tone of satisfaction ``How beautiful!'' On hearing this the poet says, ``I was mildly abashed.''

The pretty girl and the sardines elicit the same comment, "How beautiful!" This observation is impersonal, pure and simple; even the slipper-shop is not outside its purview.

In the nineteenth century poetry was subjective in character; in the twentieth it is objective. Hence, emphasis is now laid on the realism of the subject-matter, not on its adornment; for adornment expresses individual taste, whereas the power of reality consists in expressing the subject itself.

Before making its appearance in literature, this modernism exposed itself in painting. By creating disturbances, it sought to contradict the idea that painting was one of the fine arts. The function of art is not to charm but to conquer the mind, it argued; its sign is not beauty but truth. It did not acknowledge the illusion of form but rather the advertisement of the whole. This form has no other introduction to offer; it only wants to proclaim the fact that it is worth observing. This strong case for being observed is not made by appeals of gesture and posture, nor by copying nature, but by its own inherent truth, which is neither religious, moral, nor ideal - it is natural. That is to say, it must be acknowledged simply because it exists, just as we acknowledge the peacock and the vulture, just as we cannot deny the existence of the the pig or the deer.

Some are beautiful, others are ugly; some are useful, others harmful; but there is no possible pretext for discarding any from the sphere of creation. It is the same with literature and art. If any beauty has been created, it needs no apology; but if it possesses no innate strength of being, only sweetness, then it must be rejected.

Hence, present day literature that has accepted the creed of modernity, scorns to keep caste by carefully adjusting itself to bygone standards of aristocracy; it does not pick and choose. Eliot's poetry is modern in this sense, but not Bridges'. Eliot writes:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways,
Six o'clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of whithered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots.
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

Then comes a description of a muddy morning filled with the smell of stale beer. On such a morning, the following words are addressed to a girl:

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;

And this is the account given of the man:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

In the midst of this smoky, this muddy, this altogether dingy morning and evening, full of many stale odors, and waste papers, the opposite picture is evoked in the poet's mind. He says:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Here the link between Apollo and the frog is broken. Here the croaking of the frog in the well hurts the laughter of Apollo. It is clearly evident that the poet is not absolutely and scientifically impersonal. His loathing for this tawdry world is expressed through the very description he gives of it. Hence the bitter words with which he ends the poem:

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The poet's distaste for this gathering world is evident. The difference from the past consists in there being no desire to delude oneself with an imaginary world of rosy dreams. The poet makes his poetry trudge through this mire regardless of his laundered clothes; not because he is fond of mud, but because in this muddy world one must look at mud with open eyes, and accept it. If Apollo's laugh reaches one's ears in the mud, well and good; if not, then one need not despise the loud, leaping laughter of the frog. One can look at it for a moment in the context of the universe; there is something to be said for this. The frog will seem out of place in the cultured language of the drawing-room; but then most of the world lies outside the drawing-room....

But if modernism has any philosophy, and if that philosophy is to be called impersonal, then one must admit that this attitude of aggressive disbelief and calumny toward the universe, is also a personal mental aberration owing to the sudden revolution. This also is an illusion, in which there is no serious attempt to accept reality naturally in a calm and dispassionate frame of mind. Many people think that this aggressiveness, this wantonly destructive challenging is what is called modernity.

I myself don't think so. Even though thousands of people are attacked by influenza today, I shall not say that influenza is the natural condition of the body in modern times. The natural bodily state exists behind influenza.

Pure modernism, then, consists in looking upon the universe, not in a personal and self-regarding manner, but in an impersonal and matter-of-fact manner. This point of view is bright and pure, and there is real delight in this unclouded vision. In the same dispassionate way that modern science analyzes reality, modern poetry looks upon the universe as a whole; this is what is eternally modern.

But, actually, it is nonsense to call this modern. The joy of a natural and detached way of looking at things belongs to no particular age; it belongs to everyone whose eyes know how to wander over the naked earth. It is over a thousand years since the Chinese poet Li Po wrote his verses, but he was a modern; he looked upon the universe with freshly-opened eyes. In a verse of four lines he writes simply:

Why do I live among the mountains?
I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man,
The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on....

Another picture:

Blue water ... a clear moon ...
In the moonlight the white herons are flying.
Listen! Do you hear the girls who gather water-chestnuts?
They are going home in the night, singing.

Another:

Naked I lie in the green forest of summer...
Too lazy to wave my white-feathered fan.
I hang my cap on a crag,
And bare my head to the wind that comes
Blowing through the pine trees.

A river merchant's wife writes:

I would play, plucking flowers by the gate;
My hair scarcely covered my forehead, then.
You would come, riding on your bamboo horse,
And loiter about the bench with green plums for toys.
So we both dwelt in Chang-kan town,
We were two children, suspecting nothing.

At fourteen I became your wife,
And so bashful I could never bare my face,
But hung my head, and turned to the dark wall;
You would call me a thousand times,
But I could not look back even once.

At fifteen I was able to compose my eyebrows,
And beg you to love me till we were dust and ashes.

I was sixteen when you went on a long journey.
Traveling beyond the Ken-Tang gorge,
Where the giant rocks heap up the swift river,
And the rapids are not passable in May.
Did you hear the monkeys wailing
Up on the skyey height of the crags?

Do you know your footmarks by our gate are old,
And each and every one is filled up with green moss?
The mosses are too deep for me to sweep away;
And already in the autumn wind the leaves are falling.

The yellow butterflies of October
Flutter in pairs over the grass of the west garden
My heart aches at seeing them ...
I sit sorrowing alone, and alas!
The vermillion of my face is fading.

Some day when you return down the river,
If you will write me a letter beforehand,
I will come to meet you - the way is not long -
I will come as far as the Long Wind Bench instantly.

In this poem the sentiment is neither maudlin nor ridiculous. The subject is familiar, and there is feeling. If the tone were sarcastic and there was ridicule, then the poem would be modern, because the moderns scorn to acknowledge in poetry that which everybody acknowledges naturally. Most probably a modern poet would have added at the end of this poem that the husband went his way after wiping his eyes and looking back repeatedly, and the girl at once set about frying dried prawn fish-balls. For whom? In reply there are a line-and-a-half of asterisks. The old-fashioned reader would ask, ``What does this mean?'' The modern poet would answer ``Things happen like this.'' The reader would say, ``But they also happen otherwise.'' And the modern would answer, ``Yes, they do, but that is too respectable. Unless it sheds its refinement, it does not become modern....''

Edwin Arlington Robinson has described an aristocrat thus:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home a put a bullet through his head.

There is no modern sarcasm or loud laughter in this poem; on the contrary, there is pathos, which consists in the fact that there may be some fatal disease lurking inside the apparently healthy and beautiful.

He whom we consider rich has a hidden personality. The anchorites spoke in the same way. They remind the living that one day they would go to the burning-ground slung on bamboo poles. European monks have described how the decomposed body beneath the soil is eaten by worms. In dissertations on morality we have seen attempts to destroy our illusion by reminding us that the body which seems beautiful is a repulsive compound of bones and flesh and blood and fluids. The best way of cultivating detachment is repeatedly to instil into our minds a contempt for the reality which we perceive. But the poet is not a disciple of detachment, he has come to cultivate attachment. Is the modern age so very degenerate that even the poet is infected with the atmosphere of cremation, that he begins to take pleasure in saying that which we consider great is decayed, that which we admire as beautiful is untouchable at the core? ...

The mid-Victorian age felt a respect for reality and wished to accord it a place of honor; the modern age thinks it part of its program to insult reality and tear aside all the veils of decency.

If you call a reverence for universal things sentimentalism, then you must also call your rebellion against them by the same name. If the mind becomes bitter, for whatever reason, the vision can never be natural. Hence, if the mid-Victorian age is to be ridiculed as being the leader of ultra-respectability, then the Edwardian age must also be ridiculed with the opposite adjectives. The thing is not natural and therefore not perennial. As for science, so for art, the detached mind is the best vehicle. Europe has gained that mind in science, but not in literature.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://archive.org/details/essayslettersfro01shelrich


Essays, letters from abroad, translation and fragments
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851

Published 1840
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v.1. A defense of poetry. Essay on the literature, arts, and manners of the Athenians. Preface to the Banquet of Plato. The banquet--translated from Plato. On love. The coliseum. The assasins. On the publishment of death. On life. On a future state. Speculations on metaphysics. Speculations on morals. Ion; or, Of the Iliad--translated from Plato. Menexenus,--or, The funeral oration. Fragments from the Republic of Plato. On a passage in Crito.--v. 2. Journal of a six week's tour. Letters from Geneva. Journal at Geneva: ghost stories. Journal: return to England. Letters from Italy


Volume 1
Publisher London : Edward Moxon
Pages 362
Possible copyright status NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language English
Call number ucb_banc:GLAD-67128747
Digitizing sponsor MSN
Book contributor University of California Libraries
Collection cdl; americana

Full catalog record MARCXML

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Excerpt
‘Mutability’ Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Insignificance of Humanity

‘ Mutability ’ employs traditional conventions of the Lyric poem as it is “brief and discontinuous, emphasising sound and pictorial imagery rather than narrative”, in order to present the concept of life as ephemeral.1 Shelley is a poet shaped by the sense “that there are narrow limits to what human beings can know with certainty.”2 ‘ Mutability ’ reflects this notion as Shelley undermines human importance within a world in which nothing is constant. In his ‘ A Defence of Poetry ’ he argues that for man to be “greatly good… the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” and therefore this essay shall consider the way Shelley uses ‘ Mutability ’ in order to educate readers on humanities fleeting and irrelevant nature.3

By definition ‘Mutable’ is the “disposition of change, variableness and inconsistency”.4

Shelley explores this notion of ‘change’ as the only constant that individuals can rely upon, with the overarching message of the poem being: “Nought may endure but Mutability”.5 By capitalising ‘Mutability’ Shelley modifies the noun to become a proper noun thus causing it to become a focal point in the sentence. This final proclamation heightens the permanence of impermanence. Ironically, both structurally and visually Shelley presents a poem which is consistent. The interlocking rhyme, ABAB, is continual throughout producing a regular rhythm. The nature of the chain rhyme, in addition to the iambic pentameter of the poem it provides a steady progression with no indication of finalisation. The lack of a definitive ending creates a sense of movement that will seemingly continue through the end of the poem and therefore the consistency of the form contradicts the content. Shelley targets the concept of change, professing “Mans yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow” as the universe is fundamentally mutable and yet the form denotes constancy. This dichotomy between change and consistency represents Shelley’s thesis that mutability is the only thing that remains the same. Through this observation the reader can draw the conclusion that humanity is not an omnipotent or timeless species, rather it becomes a fleeting concept that falls subject to the ever changing universe. This is further identifiable in the visual aspect of the poem as whilst each stanza is 4 lines long and undeviating, lines 2 and 4 are indented causing a change in structure which is continued throughout the poem; change has become consistent.

For Shelley, educating readers was crucial to poetry. He believed that verse had the ability to “lif[t] the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and mak[e] familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”6 Arguably, ‘ Mutability ’ lifts the veil off human importance by demonstrating individual insignificance. Shelley initialises this thesis through his slight manipulation of the Lyric Poem. Traditionally the Lyric Poem focused on the “thoughts and attitudes… immediate to the dramatic speaker” yet ‘ Mutability ’ directly implicates the reader.7 The poem begins with the inclusive subject pronoun “we”, causing both the reader and Shelley to become the subject of the sentence.8 This adaptation of the traditional Lyric poem draws specific attention to Shelley’s desire to educate, or speak directly to his readers rather than an indulgent insight into the narrative voice. The line “Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away” embodies this as the embedded command within the line presents the reader with an alternative way to view humanity.9

Shelley depicts human insignificance through his use of imagery. In the first Stanza, humanity is metaphorically compared to a ‘cloud’: “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon”.10 Shelley places humanity within the realm of nature implying that both phenomenon’s co-exit. However, the metaphor develops as humanity is likened to “forgotten lyres” in the second stanza.11 The enjambment between the two stanzas creates a correlation between the two objects, suggesting humanity exists in both the natural and the materialistic world. Furthermore, humanity has been grouped together and standardised, diminishing human individuality as Shelley (using the simile of a lyre) suggests we “give various response[s] to each varying blast”, or in other words, humanity reacts to one another in an indistinguishable manner.12 To be the same is to be ultimately unidentifiable and thus insignificant, furthered by the fact the comparisons in which Shelley adopts to represent humanity fade into nothing. For example, the clouds are “lost for ever”, whilst the Lyre is “forgotten”.13

Humans do not have control over their own fate in ‘ Mutability ’ . A cloud is a product of mother-nature and as the poem indicates it only serves to “veil” the moon, it does not protect it.14

Similarly the lyre must be played in order to make music and fulfil its purpose; it is further weakened as a result of its “frail frame”.15 These comparisons serve to quell human importance as they demonstrate humanities interdependence on one another and nature. Shelley, heightens human dependency by augmenting the power of the mind. Within ‘ Mutability ’ “A dream has power” rather than the individual who is dreaming.16 Equivalently, “One wandering thought pollutes the day”, implying emotions have control over the individual.17 Shelley therefore gives agency to the mind over the physical body. This is reflected in the structure of the lines in stanza three:

“We rest. - A dream has power to poison sleep We rise. - One wandering thought pollutes the day”18

The abrupt full stop emphasises the physical act of the individual, causing the bodily action to become short and factual. The emotional consequence of these actions which implicate the mind, such as ‘thoughts’ and ‘dreams’ literally take up more space in the line, forcing the reader to indulge in the unconscious. Essentially, Shelley removes humanities control by placing power in the mind and in nature.

[...]

1 Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and its stories: Narratives Universals and Human emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge university of press, 2003), p.152.

2 Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Ninth Edition: The romantic Period, volume D (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), p 750.

3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature Ninth Edition: The Romantic Period, Volume D, ed. By Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), pp.856 - 869 (p.862).

4 “Mutability, n.”, OED Online (Oxford University press, September 2014) <http://www.oed.com> [Accessed 18th November 2014].

5 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mutability’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature Ninth Edition: The Romantic Period, Volume D, ed. By Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), pp.751 - 752 (p.752).

6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Defence of Poetry’, p.862.

7 W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley, ‘The intentional Fallacy’, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54 (1946), pp. 468-488 (p. 470).

8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mutability’, p. 751.

9 Ibid., p.752.

10 Ibid., p.751.

11 Ibid., p. 751.

12 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mutability’, p. 751.

13 Ibid., p. 751.

14 Ibid., p.751.

15 Ibid., p.751.

16 Ibid., p. 751.

17 Ibid., p. 751.

18 Ibid., p.751.
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[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/shakespeare_%E2%80%94_the_sonnets_and_their_litera ry_history-337


Shakespeare — The Sonnets and Their Literary History
Written by: Sidney Lee
VII—THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY
The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.
It was doubtless to Shakespeare’s personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France, the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney’s collection of sonnets entitled ‘Astrophel and Stella’ was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney’s volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron’s ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height.
Shakespeare’s first experiments.
Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which bears traces of very early composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ which prefaced in 1591 Florio’s ‘Second Frutes,’ a series of Italian-English dialogues for students.
Majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets composed in 1594.
p. 85But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman’s patronage for his earliest publication, ‘Venus and Adonis,’ that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the sonnets to his growing age was a conventional device—traceable to Petrarch—of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of p. 86no literal interpretation. In matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggest that they came from the pen of a man not much more than thirty. Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts occasionally p. 87and at irregular intervals during the nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in 1603. But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594 be allotted with confidence. Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is made to Queen Elizabeth’s death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and a final act of homage on Shakespeare’s part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height.
Their literary value.
In literary value Shakespeare’s sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare’s sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early dramatic efforts as ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in ‘Venus and Adonis’ or in ‘Lucrece,’ although p. 88occasional utterances of Shakespeare’s Roman heroine show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them. The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language.
Circulation in manuscript.
In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets; he circulated them in manuscript. But their reputation grew, and public interest was aroused in them in spite of his p. 89unreadiness to give them publicity. A line from one of them:

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14),

was quoted in the play of ‘Edward III,’ which was probably written before 1595. Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare’s ‘sugred sonnets among his private friends,’ and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems. William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in his ‘Passionate Pilgrim.’
Their piratical publication in 1609. ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’
At length, in 1609, the sonnets were surreptitiously sent to press. Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a camp-follower of the regular publishing army. He was professionally engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been widely disseminated in written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors’ control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without p. 90reference to the author’s wishes. Thorpe’s career as a procurer of neglected ‘copy’ had begun well. He made, in 1600, his earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe’s translation of the ‘First Book of Lucan.’ On May 20, 1609, he obtained a license for the publication of ‘Shakespeares Sonnets,’ and this tradesman-like form of title figured not only on the ‘Stationers’ Company’s Registers,’ but on the title-page. Thorpe employed George Eld to print the manuscript, and two booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright, to distribute it to the public. On half the edition Aspley’s name figured as that of the seller, and on the other half that of Wright. The book was issued in June, and the owner of the ‘copy’ left the public under no misapprehension as to his share in the production by printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his own pen. The appearance in a book of a dedication from the publisher’s (instead of from the author’s) pen was, unless the substitution was specifically accounted for on other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no hand in the publication. Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright. He p. 91cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe’s collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas (the metre of ‘Lucrece’) entitled ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ in which a girl laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth. The poem, in a gentle Spenserian vein, has no connection with the ‘Sonnets.’ If, as is possible, it be by Shakespeare, it must have been written in very early days.
Thomas Thorpe and ‘Mr. W. H.’
A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe’s preface and his part in the publication has led many critics into a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s poems. Thorpe’s dedication was couched in the bombastic language which was habitual to him. He advertised Shakespeare as ‘our ever-living poet.’ As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,’ and in resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture p. 92a partner in the speculation, ‘Mr. W. H.’ In the conventional dedicatory formula of the day he wished ‘Mr. W. H.’ ‘all happiness’ and ‘eternity,’ such eternity as Shakespeare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse. When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe’s ‘First Book of Lucan’ in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. ‘W. H.’ was doubtless in a like position. He is best identified with a stationer’s assistant, William Hall, who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring ‘copy.’ In 1606 ‘W. H.’ won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year ‘W. H.’ announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem—‘A Foure-fould Meditation’—by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed ‘W. H.’) vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove. When Thorpe dubbed ‘Mr. W. H.,’ with characteristic magniloquence, ‘the onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,’ he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the pirate-publisher fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare’s sonnets and recommend its surreptitious issue. In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave Hall’s initials only, because he was an intimate associate who was known by those initials to their common circle of friends. Hall was not a man of sufficiently wide public reputation to render it probable that the p. 93printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers.

The common assumption that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials ‘Mr. W. H.,’ a young nobleman, to whom the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe’s efforts were confined. There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe’s methods of business. His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated solely by his mercantile interests. He was under no inducement and in no position to take into consideration the affairs of Shakespeare’s private life. Shakespeare, through all but the earliest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassable barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued p. 94his calling. It was wholly outside Thorpe’s aims in life to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with any cryptic significance.
No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials ‘Mr. W. H.’ Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often been recklessly assumed) with William, third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth. But were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’ The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his life by the symbols ‘Mr. W. H.’ In 1609 Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe’s address to ‘Mr. W. H.’ belongs to the p. 95biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the scope of Shakespeare’s biography.
The form of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects their master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more. The collection of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in Thorpe’s edition opens the volume.
Want of continuity. The two ‘groups.’
It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were p. 97addressed to a woman. This division cannot be literally justified. In the first group some eighty of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the masculine pronoun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining forty there is no clear indication of the kind. Many of these forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi. cxix. cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or ‘benefit of ill’ (cxix.) The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first ‘group,’ does little more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy. And there is no valid objection to the assumption that the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi. xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second ‘group’ (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in p. 98octosyllabics, like Lyly’s song of ‘Cupid and Campaspe,’ and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly’s songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv. soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid’s fire.
Main topics of the first ‘group.’
The choice and succession of topics in each ‘group’ give to neither genuine cohesion. In the first ‘group’ the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the poet’s appeal to a young man to marry so that his youth and beauty may survive in children. There is almost a contradiction in terms between the poet’s handling of that topic and his emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend’s youth and accomplishments. The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. ci. cvii.) These alternate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet’s affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.) There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.) At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the poet’s mistress in the poet’s absence, but the poet is forgiving (xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.) In Sonnet lxx. the young man whom p. 99the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience:

And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast pass’d by the ambush of young days,
Either not assail’d, or victor being charg’d!

At times melancholy overwhelms the writer: he despairs of the corruptions of the age (lxvi.), reproaches himself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his profession of acting (cxi. cxii.), and foretells his approaching death (lxxi.-lxxiv.) Throughout are dispersed obsequious addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet’s verse (cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.) But in one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for bestowing his patronage on rival poets (lxxviii.-lxxxvi.) In three sonnets near the close of the first group in the original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf. cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.)
Main topics of the second ‘group.’
In two sonnets of the second ‘group’ (cxxvi.-clii.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve sonnets he hotly denounces his ‘dark’ mistress for her proud disdain of his affection, and for her manifold infidelities with other men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first ‘group,’ the poet rebukes the woman, whom he addresses, for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.) Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.) p. 100or lightly quibbles on his name of ‘Will’ (cxxx.-vi.) In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first ‘group’ lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow.
It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe’s arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640—thirty-one years after their first appearance—they were presented in a completely different order. The short descriptive titles which were then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein.
Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets. Their dependence on French and Italian models.
In whatever order Shakespeare’s sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can only be accepted with many qualifications. Elizabethan sonnets were commonly the artificial products of the poet’s fancy. A strain of personal emotion is occasionally discernible in a detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions were very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The typical collection p. 101of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative studies. Echoes of the French or of the Italian sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant notes. The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves. Daniel’s fine sonnet (xlix.) on ‘Care-charmer, sleep,’ although directly inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre de Brach apostrophising ‘le sommeil chasse-soin’ (in the collection entitled ‘Les Amours d’Aymée’), or the sonnet of Philippe Desportes invoking ‘Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire’ (in the collection entitled ‘Amours d’Hippolyte’). But, throughout Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to Italian and French effort is unmistakable. Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of ‘an English Petrarch’—the highest praise that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer. Thomas Watson in 1582, in his p. 102collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled ‘????????T??, or A Passionate Century of Love,’ prefaced each poem, which he termed a ‘passion,’ with a prose note of its origin and intention. Watson frankly informed his readers that one ‘passion’ was ‘wholly translated out of Petrarch;’ that in another passion ‘he did very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard;’ while ‘the sense or matter of “a third” was taken out of Serafino in his “Strambotti.”’ In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his p. 103foreign original, and frequently appended a quotation. Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets entitled ‘Idea,’ declared that it was ‘a fault too common in this latter time’ ‘to filch from Desportes or from Petrarch’s pen.’ Lodge did not acknowledge his borrowings more specifically than his colleagues, but he made a plain profession of indebtedness to Desportes when he wrote: ‘Few men are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody’s hand.’ Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called ‘Licia’ (1593) simulated the varying p. 104moods of a lover under the sway of a great passion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were all written in ‘imitation of the best Latin poets and others.’ Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by William Drummond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources in the Italian sonnets not merely of Petrarch, but of the sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro. The Elizabethans usually gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice Sève in christening his collection ‘Delia;’ Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection ‘Diana;’ while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term ‘amours,’ but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux, although it was employed by other French contemporaries.
Sonnetteers’ admission of insincerity.
With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘no inward touch’ was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes as

‘[Men] that do dictionary’s method bring
Into their rhymes running in rattling rows;
[Men] that poor Petrarch’s long deceasèd woes
With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.’

Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments. But ‘even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey in ‘Pierces Supererogation’ in 1593, ‘are but dainties of a pleasurable wit.’ Drayton’s sonnets more nearly approached Shakespeare’s in quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton told the readers of his collection entitled ‘Idea’ (after the French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go elsewhere. ‘In all humours sportively he ranged,’ he declared. Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets entitled ‘Licia, or Poems of Love,’ with the warning, ‘Now in that I have written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of p. 106husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.’
Contemporary censure of sonnetteers’ false sentiment. ‘Gulling Sonnets.’
The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical treatment of ‘the pangs of despised love’ or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the most respected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet-sequence in his ‘Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid.’ Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets entitled ‘A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,’ appealed to his literary comrades to abandon ‘the painted cabinet’ of the love-sonnet for a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend, Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton’s ‘Idea’), he inveighed against the ‘bastard sonnets’ which ‘base rhymers’ ‘daily’ begot ‘to their own shames and poetry’s disgrace.’ In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he wrote and circulated in manuscript a specimen series of nine ‘gulling sonnets’ p. 107or parodies of the conventional efforts. Even Shakespeare does not seem to have escaped Davies’s condemnation. Sir John is especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled conceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth ‘gulling sonnet,’ in which he ridicules the application of law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by Shakespeare’s legal phraseology in his Sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxiv.; while Davies’s Sonnet ix., beginning:

‘To love, my lord, I do knight’s service owe’
must have parodied Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxvi., beginning:
‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,’ etc.
Shakespeare’s scornful allusion to sonnets in his plays.
Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays. ‘Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,’ exclaims Biron in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (IV. iii. 158). In the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke:

You must lay lime to tangle her desires
By wailful sonnets whose composèd rime
p. 108Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .
Say that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.

Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.’ In later plays Shakespeare’s disdain of the sonnet is still more pronounced. In ‘Henry V’ (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, ‘I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus: “Wonder of nature!”’ The Duke of Orleans retorts: ‘I have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress.’ The Dauphin replies: ‘Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.’ In ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ (V. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero’s waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to ‘write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.’ Benedick jestingly promises one so ‘in high a style that no man living shall come over it.’ Subsequently (V. iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ‘a halting sonnet of his own pure brain’ in praise of Beatrice.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/words_an_endangered_species-643

words: An endangered species

written by: Emily schaffer

words are beautiful. It is a simple fact. Long before poems and songs were written down on paper or computers, the beauty of poetry was shared orally. Mankind put so much time and effort into recording and finding ways to record words. Our society could not function without them. Too many take simple words for granted as if they were oxygen, always available to them. As new generations appear and the old fade away so do traditions, writings, and even language. Could all our words really be forgotten?
Slowly, one by one, our words are being replaced. Definitions are changing. In some cases, whole words that have vanished from the memory of mankind. William shakespeare wrote in the late 16th century and the early 17th century. He wrote for the uneducated, those some might describe as simple minded, yet literary minds today struggle to understand his work. Books as common as the king james bible use words few americans would recognize. Words such as shod and wiles are no longer taught or used. "progress" is what it is named, but is not advancement typically involved in progression?
Words, just as endangered species, need to be remembered and protected. Throughout the world, there are over 7 thousand known languages, and it is believed by the end of this century only close to 10% will remain. When did words, even languages become trivial? Why does the removal, misuse, and ruination of words not embroil the literary world? Will the restructuring of the world, the integration of nations cause the extinction of not only languages but entire cultures? With the digression of the world's education comes the loss of habitat for words.

I agree with much of this article but I do doubt that 90% will be lost in the coming 83 years.
Even if that massive number were ever reached, it would take far more time, perhaps two centuries methinks.-tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/ebenezer_elliott,_english_poet-1649

Ebenezer Elliott, English Poet
Written by: PoetrySoup

Ebenezer Elliott, English poet, known as the 'Corn-law Rhymer', was born in 1781 near Rotherham, Yorkshire, and died in 1849. At the age of seventeen he published his first poem, The Vernal Walk, which was soon followed by others. In 1829 The Village Patriarch, the best of Elliott's longer pieces, was published.

From 1831 to 1837 he carried on business as an iron merchant in Sheffield. His Corn-law Rhymes, periodically contributed to a local paper devoted to the repeal of these laws, attracted attention, and were afterwards collected and published with a longer poem entitled The Ranter. Commercial losses compelled him in 1837 to contract his business, and in 1841 he retired from it altogether. In 1850 two posthumous volumes appeared, entitled More Prose and Verse by the Corn-law Rhymer.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/main.htm


the hypertexts

at a reading of poems of a poet's agonies
by x. J. Kennedy

we sit and listen, writhing in our chairs,
pierced by a pain far worse than what he shares.

First published in trinacria #5 (spring 2011)

pain, product, and poetry
by joseph s. Salemi

i went to my first opera when i was six years old. My mother took me to the world premiere of gian carlo menotti’s the saint of bleecker street, on the condition that i be a good boy and behave. It was some time in december of 1954, and my aunt (the soprano elizabeth carron) was singing. I was much more interested in seeing my aunt lee—that’s what we called her—on stage than anything else. My mother hoped that the evening would be the start of some musical interest in me. Alas, that never happened. Despite sitting through dozens of operas over the next decade, my enthusiasms were doggedly literary and not musical.

Opening night at the opera always brought out celebrities back then. My mother pointed out to me the film actor franchot tone, and the singer william warfield. She also said "see that man on crutches? That’s the famous cole porter." i remember a cadaverous figure whose face was a mask of pain, with eyes blackened by his suffering, hobbling along slowly on spindly wooden crutches. I didn’t understand how he could possibly be interested in hearing an opera.

Following the performance we went back stage to see aunt lee. I was bursting with childish enthusiasm after sitting for three hours, but my mom warned me to be silent. She said to me "do you see that thin woman over there?" i looked and saw a striking lady in brown taffeta. My mother intoned "that’s the great marlene dietrich. Don’t you dare make noise!" i was suitably cowed.

Marlene, however, did make some noise. It happened to be a mild december in new york that year, and i recall miss dietrich saying, in her low husky voice, "it’s like spring outside! Spring!" in any case, i liked my mother’s evening dress of black taffeta with tiny rosebuds much better than dietrich’s ensemble.

But most of all i remember cole porter, and that terrible burden of pain etched into his visage. He had been in a horrendous riding accident in 1937, and the doctors had advised a double amputation of his hopelessly smashed legs. He refused, and instead endured over thirty futile operations over the following fifteen years, with most of that time spent in chronic agony.

Nevertheless, in the twenty years between the accident and his final retirement, porter produced some of his most memorable work, such as the immortal songs from dubarry was a lady, mexican hayride, kiss me kate, and can-can. How strange to think of all those lighthearted and breezily perfect lyrics coming from the pen of a man whose limbs were racked with pain.

Is suffering a prerequisite for the making of great art? No, of course not. There are many perfectly content persons who have produced masterworks of creativity. What suffering might well do, however, is add urgency to one’s labors. Because suffering is merely the anteroom to death, its presence focuses our awareness on the third of what the church calls the four last things: Heaven, hell, death, and final judgment. Suffering cuts through the silly hubris of imagining that one has unlimited time.

Suffering can’t make you an artist. Your artistic skill comes from study, training, development, practice, and innate gifts. If it were otherwise, we could simply torture budding poets and musicians until they did good work. But no one can escape trouble and tribulation totally, and the best of us use it as a spur to our labors.

I recall the retirement several years ago of one of the heads of our state poetry societies (you know them—the organizations run by what dana gioia calls "the trinominate blue-haired ladies"). At her somewhat syrupy retirement speech, the lady said that poetry had only three valid subjects: Love, suffering, and death.

Can you imagine the utter limitation of such an aesthetic? A poetry with no comedy, no satire, no argument, no rodomontade, no wit, no intellectuality, no myth, no politics? But that is what happens to poetry when you think that only intense emotion is allowable in it. It becomes walled in, like fortunato, behind the bricks of three boring commonplaces. Love, suffering, and death the only subjects? Great—let’s all talk about our most recent amour, our arthritic limbs, and how we are dreading the grave. That kind of constricting stupidity is what makes a lot of contemporary poetry unreadable drivel.

What lies behind this nonsense is the unspoken puritan assumption that a poem ought to be a reflection of what you are actually feeling and experiencing, and if it isn’t the poem is somehow "dishonest" or "inauthentic" or—to use one of the most idiotic terms in contemporary literary criticism—"unearned." yes, there are some dorks in english departments who call the effects of some poems "unearned," as if they were discussing income from bonds. If there is no genuine feeling behind a poem, they say, then any literary effect it may have on readers is illegal or at least unfair.

Imagine if cole porter wrote about his "feelings" during the time when he was in great pain. Imagine if all he could commit to paper was how he "dealt with suffering." suppose he had turned—god help us—to one of those fatuous "self-help and self-awareness" texts that pollute the shelves of our bookstores. Suppose he could only bloviate pompously on the serious aspects of love, suffering, and death. Would a single lyric of his be remembered?

But he didn’t do that, thank god. He didn’t focus on himself and his perceptions, the way too many of the arrested adolescents writing poetry today do. He knew that the important thing was not himself, nor his pain, nor the process by which he managed to create, but only the product that he would wrench out of nothingness and leave behind. Poetry is product—nothing else.

This is a truth that it takes many poets years to assimilate, and the longer it takes the more time they have wasted. No one cares about your pain. All they care about is what you make of it, poetically.

If you read poetry because you want to hear about the trials, tribulations, joys, sorrows, and emotional vicissitudes of a particular poet, then you are not a serious reader of poetry. You should become a counselor or a social worker, and listen as losers tell you their hard-luck stories. Poetry isn’t about that at all. Poetry is about what a human mind can make out of the whole cloth of language, plus whatever input a poet might require from his personal knowledge or experiences. Remember cole porter on those crutches.

First published in the pennsylvania review (february 2009), and in trinacria #5 (spring 2011)
all rights reserved

the hypertexts





can you imagine the utter limitation of such an aesthetic? A poetry with no comedy, no satire, no argument, no rodomontade, no wit, no intellectuality, no myth, no politics? But that is what happens to poetry when you think that only intense emotion is allowable in it. It becomes walled in, like fortunato, behind the bricks of three boring commonplaces. Love, suffering, and death the only subjects? Great—let’s all talk about our most recent amour, our arthritic limbs, and how we are dreading the grave. that kind of constricting stupidity is what makes a lot of contemporary poetry unreadable drivel..

^^^^^ My feelings exactly.. IF SUCH IS PRESENTED WITHOUT A MESSAGE, A MORAILITY AND A DESIRE TO EDUCATE OTHERS.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens

The New Yorker

May 2, 2016 Issue
Insurance Man
The life and art of Wallace Stevens.

By Peter Schjeldahl

Stevens, in 1954: the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century.
Illustration by John Gall; Source: Bettmann Archive / Getty (Photograph)

Paul Mariani’s excellent new book, “The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” (Simon & Schuster), is a thrilling story of a mind, which emerges from a dispiriting story of a man. It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism. Mariani persuasively numbers Stevens among the twentieth-century poets who are both most powerful and most refined in their eloquence, along with Rilke, Yeats, and Neruda. He is certainly the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century, a doubting idealist who invested slight subjects (the weather, often) with oracular gravitas, and grand ones (death, frequently) with capering humor.

Stevens’s first book, the ravishing “Harmonium,” which contains “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” and most of the rest of his poems that people still read—if they read any of them—came out in 1923, when he was forty-four. His next book, “Ideas of Order,” published thirteen years later, features what may be the finest American modern poem: “The Idea of Order at Key West.” (It gets my vote, with perfectly paced beauty that routinely squeezes tears from me.) His subsequent work, which abounded until his death, in 1955, is less familiar, because most of it is gruellingly difficult; the great mind finally spiralled in on itself, like a ruminative Narcissus. It takes heroic stamina to get through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and other of the late long poems, which American literary culture coped with at the time by loading Stevens with every possible prize, honor, and encomium. Since then, his reputation has stood as a windswept monument, tended by professors.

Mariani, an accomplished New England poet himself, with an unstressed Catholic bent, has written well-received biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He has a prehensile feel for the roots and branches of literary modernism, exemplary taste in what he chooses to quote, and a real gift for exegesis, unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows.

Something like a flame comes off the page (page 71, to be exact) of “The Whole Harmonium” when Mariani quotes lines from Stevens’s first published mature poetry, a waltz-timed passage that begins, “An odor from a star.” It appeared in 1914, when Stevens was thirty-four. Up to that point in the story, we have attended the growth of a restless child into a skittish adult. Thereafter, the book switches back and forth between Stevens’s seraphic art and his plodding life. But they merge as sides of a coin: philosophical, in his continual grappling with implications of the death of God—a loss that he tried to remedy by making poetry stand in for religion—and psychological, in his constant compulsion to cheer himself up.

The key sentence in the biography, for me, tells that Stevens, who was prone to being depressed, “hated depression—hated it.” So do a lot of people, but few fight it as tenaciously as Stevens did. He relied, for stability, on the routine demands of his office job. (Whenever free of them, he commonly drank to excess.) He projected his struggles as abstract patterns of human—and, beyond human, of natural and metaphysical—existence. One late poem hints at a nagging anguish that poetry relieved for him: “It is a child that sings itself to sleep, / The mind.”

Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second of five children. His father, from humble beginnings, was a successful lawyer, his mother a former schoolteacher. Each night, she read a chapter of the Bible to the children, who attended schools attached to both Presbyterian and Lutheran churches, where the music left an indelible impression on Stevens. Both sides of the family were Pennsylvania Dutch, an identity that meant little to him when he was young but a great deal later on, perhaps to shore up a precarious sense of identity. (He became obsessed with tracing his family genealogies, poring over thousands of documents, and was “deeply disappointed,” Mariani writes, at being denied membership in the Holland Society of New York when, in the poet’s words, “some bastard from Danzig” popped up to spoil the requisite ancestral purity.) His father, a stern man, urged upon him a regimen of “work and study, study and work,” toward a professional career. Stevens was often ill, to the extent that he had to repeat a year of high school, and a bout of malaria—as improbable as that sounds, in Pennsylvania—permanently impaired his hearing. But he played football, consorted with the town’s bad boys, and cultivated a blustery front.

He also had a hunger for erudition, expressed in precocious poems, essays, and orations. In 1897, he enrolled at Harvard, where he studied closely with the humanist philosopher George Santayana, debating matters of belief (Stevens was afire with skepticism, against Santayana’s more nuanced views) and even exchanging sonnets on the subject. He became the editor of the Harvard Advocate, read widely and deeply, and mastered French on the way to commanding a fabulous vocabulary, choreographing such tangos of words regular and rare as “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” in “The Connoisseur of Chaos.” On graduation, in 1900, he moved to New York and wrote for newspapers. For one, he covered the second Presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan, whom he hopped home to Reading to vote for. In his third book, “Owl’s Clover,” issued by a leftist publisher, in 1936, Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time. He was no better than most white men of his class in point of casual racism and anti-Semitism, though fewer such toxins leak into his poetry than into that of Eliot or Pound. In verse, Stevens transcended anything mean or petty in himself, but for art’s sake; he wasn’t much given to moral scruple.

For the New York Tribune, in 1900, Stevens covered the funeral of Stephen Crane, whom he admired but whose mourners he found “wretched, rag, tag, and bobtail.” He thrilled to a performance, in French, by Sarah Bernhardt, as Hamlet, for what he later recalled as her “intricate metamorphosis of thoughts”—quite the keynote of his own developing sensibility. He was bemused by the “quick, unaccountable” life of the city, and took to sitting for spells of restorative peace in St. Patrick’s Cathedral—unbelieving, but savoring the aura of sanctity. Tiring of journalism and seeing no path to a life in literature, he succumbed to pressure from his father and enrolled in the New York Law School. He passed the bar in 1904 and worked at various law and insurance firms.

Also in that year, Stevens fell wildly in love with Elsie Kachel, a Reading girl from a family who lived on “the wrong side of the tracks,” Mariani writes—a cliché now that was at the time a grinding social fate in railway-divided American towns. When his father vehemently opposed the match, Stevens stormed out of the house and never spoke to him again. (He generally avoided all his relatives except, by way of genealogical research, those who were dead.) Elsie was beautiful. In 1916, her profile, sculpted by an artist who was a chance acquaintance, is said to have become the face of the dime, reigning there until she was replaced by F.D.R., in 1946. (Mariani believes the oft-told story, though the artist’s son denied it.) She was also prim, humorless, and, having left school in the ninth grade, intellectually defensive and incurious—traits overlooked by the smitten Stevens through the years of their courtship, while he accrued enough income, by his conventional lights, to justify marriage. The couple wed in 1909 and moved into an apartment on West Twenty-first Street.

The next few years, spent on a small but seething scene of budding modernists, were golden for Stevens’s formation as a poet. At the salon of Walter Arensberg, a wealthy doyen of the new, Stevens met Marcel Duchamp—one of their conversations, in French, suggested to Stevens “sparrows around a pool of water”—and the New Jersey pediatrician and brilliantly innovative poet William Carlos Williams, his peer and cordial rival, who once called him “a troubled man who sings well, somewhat covertly, somewhat overfussily at times, a little stiffly but well.” Williams’s vernacular free verse and Stevens’s sumptuous blank verse long remained magnetic poles of American poetic form. They more or less merged in the work of Marianne Moore, whom both men esteemed.

Mariani’s chapters on these years sparkle with personalities, anecdotes, and ideas. There’s Carl Van Vechten, calling Stevens “a dainty rogue in porcelain” who was “big, blond, and burly”—he stood six feet two—but possessed of “a tiny reserved spirituality.” Arensberg promptly revised the description to “that rogue elephant in porcelain,” in view of Stevens’s social ineptitude. (The patron’s stated formula for a successful poets’ salon was to convene “five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.”) One gathering was so much fun that Stevens sent a telegram to Elsie, not daring to phone, to say that he would be home late. He admitted to his companions that he dreaded what awaited him at home.

Mariani gives a fascinating account of a poet, previously unknown to me, who strongly influenced Stevens in those days: Donald Evans, a free spirit with a bejewelled, determinedly decadent poetic style, who most probably committed suicide, in 1921. “With their silk-swathed ankles softly kissing,” a typical line reads. Something of Evans—French elegance crossed with American vigor—informs Stevens’s early “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which weaves theories of music and beauty into a comic version of the story, in the Apocrypha, of Susanna’s harassment by lusting elders: “She turned— / A cymbal crashed, / And roaring horns.” And: “Beauty is momentary in the mind— / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal.”
“It was the cheapest way for us to cover the potholes.”

Some of Stevens’s breakthrough works amount to literary equivalents of the formally audacious still-lifes and interiors of advanced French painting. The masterpiece “Sunday Morning,” from 1915, is an argument for spirituality without God, interlaced with a woman’s parlor daydream. It begins with “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”; ranges “Over the seas, to silent Palestine”; decides that “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires”; and concludes with a breathtaking image of “casual flocks of pigeons” that, at evening, “make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” It was the first poem to appear under Stevens’s name in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which had recently started publication in Chicago. (He had shyly used a pseudonym, Peter Parasol, when submitting earlier poems, two of which were accepted.)

The editor, Harriet Monroe, cut some stanzas and rearranged others, and Stevens agreed to it, though he restored the original in “Harmonium.” A certain reciprocal high-handedness among poets and editors—as if the modern in aesthetics required a team effort—marked the time. (Think of Pound’s retooling of “The Waste Land.”) Williams advised Stevens to delete, from a poem, two lines that struck him as sentimental. “For Christ’s sake yield to me and become great and famous,” he hectored. Stevens obeyed.

Then, in 1916, perhaps, in part, to secure a suitable life with Elsie, who disliked New York, Stevens took a position with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he worked for the rest of his life. After the move to Connecticut, he retreated from collegial enterprise—“a frightened man drawing back,” in Williams’s view—and conducted his art as a sideline to his humdrum life. It took him seven years to complete and perfect “Harmonium,” leaving out as many poems as he included. Except for Marianne Moore, who called the poems “sharp, solemn, rhapsodic,” reviewers of the book were bewildered. One condemned Stevens for having created a “fictitious reality,” which might seem a positive achievement. Another praised him as America’s first true dandy, thereby missing the sincerity of his ambition.

For several years after the birth of his only child, Holly, in 1924, Stevens wrote little. (In a letter to Monroe, he called parenthood a “terrible blow to poor literature.”) When he resumed, it was in less sprightly veins, as his idealist’s temperament groped, through thickets of qualification, toward a never quite attained ideal. But flares of comedy recurred. The painting-like “So and So Reclining on Her Couch” begins, “On her side, reclining on her elbow, / This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” It ends, “Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.”

Stevens took to composing poems on slips of paper in the morning while walking to his office, where his secretary typed them up. The results made him a regular and imposing presence in literary journals, starting in the nineteen-thirties, and his poems from “Harmonium,” especially, which were frequently anthologized, fascinated a growing popular audience. After work, at home, he closed himself off, with a sense, he told a friend in a letter, of “shutting out something crude and lacking in all feeling and delicacy.” His marriage had foundered—Elsie had banished him from her bed after Holly’s birth—although he seems never to have considered ending it. When they moved to a new house, in 1932, Stevens occupied the master bedroom and Elsie a former servant’s quarters. A full-time housekeeper tended to Holly. There’s no hint in the book of any other romantic attachment, except for a chaste crush on a young teacher whom he met in the summer after his first year in law school—memories of which haunted him with visions of a flawless woman, forever lost.

His public manner became aloof and stony, but the bravado of his boyhood resurfaced when he drank too much, as he did with zestful abandon on annual, usually solo vacations to the Florida Keys. Mariani tells us that at a party in Key West, in 1935—the year after Stevens became his firm’s vice-president in charge of surety and fidelity claims—he drunkenly insulted Robert Frost, disparaging his poetry. He wrote Frost a not quite penitent but mollifying letter, to which Frost replied gracefully, “If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from
Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Bede's%20Death%20Song%20Modern%20English%20Transla tion.htm


The HyperTexts

Bede's Death Song: a Modern English Translation, Summary and Analysis of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Poem

Bede's "Death Song" is one of the best early poems of the fledgling English language now known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon English. Written circa 735 AD, the poem may have been composed by Bede on his death-bed. It is the most-copied Old English poem, with 45 extant versions.

Was the celebrated scholar known and revered as the Venerable Bede also one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon poets? The answer appears to be "yes," since Bede was doctus in nostris carminibus ("learned in our song") according to his most famous disciple, Saint Cuthbert. Cuthbert's letter on Bede's death, the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae, is commonly taken by modern scholars to indicate that Bede composed the five-line vernacular Anglo-Saxon poem known as "Bede’s Death Song" (my modern English translation appears below). However, there is no way to be absolutely certain that Bede was the poem's original author.

Bede's Death Song

a modern English translation by Michael R. Burch

Facing Death, that inescapable journey,
who can be wiser than he
who reflects, while breath yet remains,
on whether his life brought others happiness, or pains,
since his soul may yet win delight's or night's way
after his death-day.

The original Anglo-Saxon (Old English) text:

Fore ðæm nedfere nænig wiorðe
ðonc snottora ðon him ðearf siæ
to ymbhycgenne ær his hinionge
hwæt his gastæ godes oððe yfles
æfter deað dæge doemed wiorðe.

Bede (673–735) is known today as Saint Bede, Good Bede and Venerable Bede (Latin: Beda Venerabilis). One may thus conclude that he was held in extremely high regard by his peers. The name Bede may be related to the Anglo-Saxon word for prayer, bēd. Bede was a English Benedictine monk of the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth and of its companion monastery Saint Paul's in Wearmouth-Jarrow. Both monasteries were at the time part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. Bede, a distinguished scholar, had access to a library which included works by Eusebius and Orosius, among others. His most famous work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), has resulted in Bede being called "the Father of English History." Bede has also been called the "Father of the footnote" because he was "the first author in any language to rigorously trace his sources, and as a result he set a precedent of scholarly accuracy for writers across the range of disciplines." He was also a skilled linguist and translator whose Latin and Greek writings contributed significantly to early English Christianity.

Bede is now revered as a saint in certain circles:

"Because, saith he,
thou art a saint, Good Bede,
pray for me ..."

Bede was declared Venerable in 836 and was canonized (declared a saint) in 1899. He was named a "Doctor of the Church" by Pope Leo XIII because of his work and piety. Bede is considered to be the patron saint of scholars and historians.

Bede died on Thursday, 26 May 735 (Ascension Day) and was buried at Jarrow. Cuthbert described Bede's death as follows: "Being well-versed in our native songs, he described to us the dread departure of the soul from the body by a verse in our own tongue, which translated means: 'Before setting forth on that inevitable journey, none is wiser than the man who considers—before his soul departs hence—what good or evil he has done, and what judgement his soul will receive after its passing.'" (A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Shirley-Price, Penguin Books, 1955)

Bede also helped establish the foundations of medieval astronomy and chronology; he is primarily responsible for popularizing the western BC/AD dating system. George Sarton called the eighth century "The Age of Bede" because Bede was such an important scientific figure. He wrote major scientific works such as On the Nature of Things, On Time (which provided an introduction to the principles of calendars) and On the Reckoning of Time (which "became the cornerstone of clerical scientific education during the ninth century"). He also wrote a treatise on grammar and figures of speech.

"Caedmon's Hymn," the oldest complete poem in the English language, was recorded by Bede in a Latin translation. You can read the original poem, its history and a modern English translation by clicking here: Caedmon's Hymn.

If you want to learn more about the origins of English poetry, please feel free to investigate English Poetic Roots: A Brief History of Rhyme.

The following are links to other translations by Michael R. Burch. "Wulf and Eadwacer" may be the oldest extant poem in the English language written by a female poet. "Sweet Rose of Virtue" is a modern translation of a truly great poem by the early Scottish master William Dunbar. "How Long the Night" is one of the very best Anglo Saxon lyric poems.

Wulf and Eadwacer
Sweet Rose of Virtue
How Long the Night
Caedmon's Hymn
Bede's Death Song
The Wife's Lament
Deor's Lament
Lament for the Makaris
Ancient Greek Epigrams and Epitaphs
Basho
Oriental Masters/Haiku
Sappho
Miklós Radnóti
Rainer Maria Rilke
Renée Vivien
Ono no Komachi
Allama Iqbal
Bertolt Brecht
Ber Horvitz
Paul Celan
Primo Levi
Tegner's Drapa
Robert Burns
Ahmad Faraz
Sandor Marai
Wladyslaw Szlengel

The HyperTexts

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Note- Although this touches on being political, I post it primarily to note another example of the power of poetry in our culture...
If desiring to comment, then please do so in regards to aspects of the poem, its virtues and the author's body of work and great poetic talents.
All comments regarding politics , will be deleted.
Thank you.. -Tyr





https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/08/emma-lazaruss-the-new-colossus-causes-rift-between-white-house-aide-cnn-anchor

Poetry News
Emma Lazarus's 'The New Colossus' Causes Rift Between White House Aide & CNN Anchor
By Harriet Staff

Emma Lazarus

Headlines making waves: On Wednesday, CNN reporter Jim Acosta quoted the most famous couplet from Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem "The New Colossus" in a public disagreement with White House senior aide Stephen Miller. Newsweek reports on the story:

Acosta questioned whether the new green card system being proposed was in keeping with U.S. history and invoked Lazarus’s poem to make his point.

“What you’re proposing, or what the President is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer," Acosta said.

“Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them you have to speak English?” he asked.

The new immigration bill in question, endorsed by Donald Trump, seeks to cut immigration in half. "The legislation would [also] award points based on education, ability to speak English, high-paying job offers, age, record of achievement and entrepreneurial initiative," as reported in the New York Times. As for the controversy over the poem:

Miller in his rebuttal questioned whether [the] poem was really representative of U.S. values on the basis it had been added to the statue after it was conceived as a symbol of American liberty. “The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty,” he said.

In a later back and forth, Miller referred to the “Statue of Liberty law of the land” asking the CNN journalist in what decade and which number of people entering the country each year he approved of U.S. immigration policy.

According to the National Park’s service, the Statue of Liberty’s official name is Liberty Enlightening the world. Lazarus's famous sonnet depicts the Statue as the "Mother of Exiles:" a symbol of immigration and opportunity - symbols associated with the Statue of Liberty today. One of Lazarus’s friends began a campaign promoting her work after her death in 1887 and in 1903 the words of the poem were inscribed on a plaque and placed on the inner wall of the pedestal of the statue.

Find the whole story at Newsweek.
Originally Published: August 3rd, 2017

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/minor_poets_of_the_south-824


Minor Poets of the South

Written by: F.V.N. Painter

The first poetic writer of this country had his home at Jamestown. He was GEORGE SANDYS who came to Virginia in 1621, and succeeded his brother as treasurer of the newly established colony. Amid the hardships of pioneer colonial life, in which he proved himself a leading spirit, he had the literary zeal to complete his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which he had begun in England. After the toilsome day, spent in introducing iron works or in encouraging shipbuilding, he sat down at night, within the shadow of surrounding forests, to construct his careful, rhymed pentameters. The conditions under which he wrote were very far removed from the Golden Age which he described,—

"Which uncompelled
And without rule, in faith and truth, excelled."

The promise of this bright, heroic beginning in poetry was not realized; and scarcely another voice was heard in verse in the South before the Revolution. The type of civilization developed in the South prior to the Civil War, admirable as it was in many other particulars, was hardly favorable to literature. The energies of the most intelligent portion of the population were directed to agriculture or to politics; and many of the foremost statesmen of our country—men like Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Calhoun, Benton—were from the Southern states. The system of slavery, while building up baronial homes of wealth, culture, and boundless hospitality, checked manufacture, retarded the growth of cities, and turned the tide of immigration westward. Without a vigorous public school system, a considerable part of the non-slaveholding class remained without literary taste or culture.

The South has been chiefly an agricultural region, and has adhered to conservative habits of thought. While various movements in theology, philosophy, and literature were stirring New England, the South pursued the even tenor of its way. Of all parts of our country, it has been most tenacious of old customs and beliefs. Before the Civil War the cultivated classes of the Southern states found their intellectual nourishment in the older English classics, and Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare formed a part of every gentleman's library. There were no great publishing houses to stimulate literary production; and to this day Southern writers are dependent chiefly on Northern publishers to give their works to the public. Literature was hardly taken seriously; it was rather regarded, to use the words of Paul Hamilton Hayne, "as the choice recreation of gentlemen, as something fair and good, to be courted in a dainty, amateur fashion, and illustrated by aproposquotations from Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace." Thus it happened that before the Civil War literature in the South, whether prose or poetry, had a less vigorous development than in the Middle States and New England.

Yet it has been common to undervalue the literary work of the South. While literature was not generally encouraged there before the Civil War,—a fact lamented by gifted, representative writers,—there were at least two literary centers that exerted a notable influence. The first was Richmond, the home of Poe during his earlier years, and of the Southern Literary Messenger, in its day the most influential magazine south of the Potomac. It was founded, as set forth in its first issue, in 1834, to encourage literature in Virginia and the other states of the South; and during its career of twenty-eight years it stimulated literary activity in a remarkable degree. Among its contributors we find Poe, Simms, Hayne, Timrod, John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and others—a galaxy of the best-known names in Southern literature.

The other principal literary center of the South was Charleston. "Legaré's wit and scholarship," to adopt the words of Mrs. Margaret J. Preston, "brightened its social circle; Calhoun's deep shadow loomed over it from his plantation at Fort Hill; Gilmore Simms's genial culture broadened its sympathies. The latter was the Maecenas to a band of brilliant youths who used to meet for literary suppers at his beautiful home." Among these brilliant youths were Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, two of the best poets the South has produced. The Southern Literary Gazette, founded by Simms, and Russell's Magazine, edited by Hayne, were published at Charleston. Louisville and New Orleans were likewise literary centers of more or less influence.

Yet it is a notable fact that none of these literary centers gave rise to a distinctive group or school of writers. The influence of these centers did not consist in one great dominating principle, but in a general stimulus to literary effort. In this respect it may be fairly claimed that the South was more cosmopolitan than the North. In New England, theology and transcendentalism in turn dominated literature; and not a few of the group of writers who contributed to the Atlantic Monthly were profoundly influenced by the anti-slavery agitation. They struggled up Parnassus, to use the words of Lowell,—

"With a whole bale of isms tied together with rime."

But the leading writers of the South, as will be seen later, have been exempt, in large measure, from the narrowing influence of one-sided theological or philosophical tenets. They have not aspired to the rôle of social reformers; and in their loyalty to art, they have abstained from fanatical energy and extravagance.

The major poets of the South stand out in strong, isolated individuality. They were not bound together by any sympathy other than that of a common interest in art and in their Southern home. Their genius was nourished on the choicest literary productions of England and of classic antiquity; and looking, with this Old World culture, upon Southern landscape and Southern character, they pictured or interpreted them in the language of poetry.

The three leading poets of the Civil War period—Hayne, Timrod, and Ryan —keenly felt the issues involved in that great struggle. All three of them were connected, for a time at least, with the Confederate army. In the earlier stages of the conflict, the intensity of their Southern feeling flamed out in thrilling lyrics. Timrod's martial songs throb with the energy of deep emotion. But all three poets lived to accept the results of the war, and to sing a new loyalty to our great Republic.

The South has not been as unfruitful in literature as is often supposed. While there have been very few to make literature a vocation, a surprisingly large number have made it an avocation. Law and literature, as we shall have occasion to note, have frequently gone hand in hand. A recent work on Southern literature enumerates more than twelve hundred writers, most of whom have published one or more volumes. There are more than two hundred poets who have been thought worthy of mention. More than fifty poets have been credited to Virginia alone; and an examination of their works reveals, among a good deal that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that ought to be preserved. Apart from the five major poets of the South—Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan—who are reserved for special study, we shall now consider a few of the minor poets who have produced verse of excellent quality. [Footnote *: Manly'sSouthern Literature.]

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780-1843) is known throughout the land as the author of The Star-spangled Banner, the noblest, perhaps, of our patriotic hymns. He was born in Frederick County, Maryland, and was educated at St. John's College, Annapolis. He studied law, and after practicing with success in Frederick City, he removed to Washington, where he became district attorney.

During the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, he was detained on board a British vessel, whither he had gone to secure the release of a friend. All night long he watched the bombardment with the keenest anxiety. In the morning, when the dawn disclosed the star- spangled banner still proudly waving over the fort, he conceived the stirring song, which at once became popular and was sung all over the country. Though a volume of his poems, with a sketch by Chief-Justice Taney, was published in 1857, it is to The Star-spangled Banner that he owes his literary fame.

"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Few poems written in the South have been more popular than My Life is like the Summer Rose. It has the distinction of having been praised by Byron. Its author, RICHARD HENRY WILDE (1789-1847), was born in Dublin, Ireland, but brought up and educated in Augusta, Georgia. He studied law, became attorney general of his adopted state, and later entered Congress, where he served for several terms. He was a man of scholarly tastes and poetic gifts. He spent five years abroad, chiefly in Italy, where his studies in Italian literature afterwards led to a work on Torquato Tasso. It was on the occasion of this trip abroad that he wrote A Farewell to America, which breathes a noble spirit of patriotism:—

"Farewell, my more than fatherland!
Home of my heart and friends, adieu!
Lingering beside some foreign strand,
How oft shall I remember you!
How often, o'er the waters blue,
Send back a sigh to those I leave,
The loving and beloved few,
Who grieve for me,—for whom I grieve!"

On his return to America, he settled in New Orleans, where he became a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy lyric, My Life is like the Summer Rose, that, more than all the rest, has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote a stanza of a poem so well known?

"My life is like the summer rose,
That opens to the morning sky,
But, ere the shades of evening close,
Is scattered on the ground—to die!
Yet on the rose's humble bed
The sweetest dews of night are shed,
As if she wept the waste to see—
But none shall weep a tear for me!"

GEORGE D. PRENTICE (1802-1870) was a native of Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University, and studied law; but he soon gave up his profession for the more congenial pursuit of literature. In 1828 he established at Hartford the New England Weekly Review, in which a number of his poems, serious and sentimental, appeared. Two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he turned over his paper to Whittier and removed to Louisville, where he became editor of the Journal.

He was a man of brilliant intellect, and soon made his paper a power in education, society, and politics. Apart from his own vigorous contributions, he made his paper useful to Southern letters by encouraging literary activity in others. It was chiefly through his influence that Louisville became one of the literary centers of the South. He was a stout opponent of secession; and when the Civil War came his paper, like his adopted state, suffered severely.

Among his writings is a Life of Henry Clay. A collection of his witty and pungent paragraphs has also been published under the title of Prenticeana. His poems, by which he will be longest remembered, were collected after his death. His best-known poem is The Closing Year. Though its vividness and eloquence are quite remarkable, its style is, perhaps, too declamatory for the taste of the present generation. The following lines, which express the poet's bright hopes for the political future of the world, are taken from The Flight of Years:—

"Weep not, that Time
Is passing on—it will ere long reveal
A brighter era to the nations. Hark!
Along the vales and mountains of the earth
There is a deep, portentous murmuring
Like the swift rush of subterranean streams,
Or like the mingled sounds of earth and air,
When the fierce Tempest, with sonorous wing,
Heaves his deep folds upon the rushing winds,
And hurries onward with his night of clouds
Against the eternal mountains. 'Tis the voice
Of infant Freedom—and her stirring call
Is heard and answered in a thousand tones
From every hilltop of her western home——
And lo—it breaks across old Ocean's flood——
And Freedom, Freedom! is the answering shout
Of nations starting from the spell of years.
The dayspring!—see—'tis brightening in the heavens!
The watchmen of the night have caught the sign——
From tower to tower the signal fires flash free——
And the deep watchword, like the rush of seas
That heralds the volcano's bursting flame,
Is sounding o'er the earth. Bright years of hope
And life are on the wing.—Yon glorious bow
Of Freedom, bended by the hand of God,
Is spanning Time's dark surges. Its high arch,
A type of love and mercy on the cloud,
Tells that the many storms of human life
Will pass in silence, and the sinking waves,
Gathering the forms of glory and of peace,
Reflect the undimmed brightness of the Heaven."

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806-1870), a native of Charleston, was a man of remarkable versatility. He made up for his lack of collegiate training by private study and wide experience. He early gave up law for literature, and during his long and tireless literary career was editor, poet, dramatist, historian, and novelist. He had something of the wideness of range of Sir Walter Scott; and one can not but think that, had he lived north of Mason and Dixon's line, he might occupy a more prominent place in the literary annals of our country. He has been styled the "Cooper of the South"; but it is hardly too much to say that in versatility, culture, and literary productiveness he surpassed his great Northern contemporary.

Simms was a poet before he became a novelist. The poetic impulse manifested itself early; and before he was twenty-five he had published three or more volumes of verse. In 1832 his imaginative poem, Atalantis, a Story of the Sea, was brought out by the Harpers; and it introduced him at once to the favorable notice of what Poe called the "Literati" of New York. His subsequent volumes of poetry were devoted chiefly to a description of Southern scenes and incidents.

As will be seen in our studies of Hayne and Timrod, Simms was an important figure in the literary circles of Charleston. His large, vigorous nature seemed incapable of jealousy, and he took delight in lending encouragement to young men of literary taste and aspiration. He was a laborious and prolific writer, the number of his various works— poetry, drama, history, fiction—reaching nearly a hundred. Had he written less rapidly, his work might have gained, perhaps, in artistic quality.

Among the best of Simms's novels is a series devoted to the Revolution. The characters and incidents of that conflict in South Carolina are graphically portrayed. The Partisan, the first of this historic series, was published in 1835. The Yemassee is an Indian story, in which the character of the red man is less idealized than in Cooper's Leather- stocking Tales. In The Damsel of Darien, the hero is Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific.

The verse of Simms is characterized by facile vigor rather than by fine poetic quality. The following lines, which represent his style at its best, bear a lesson for the American people to-day:—

"This the true sign of ruin to a race—
It undertakes no march, and day by day
Drowses in camp, or, with the laggard's pace,
Walks sentry o'er possessions that decay;
Destined, with sensible waste, to fleet away;—
For the first secret of continued power
Is the continued conquest;—all our sway
Hath surety in the uses of the hour;
If that we waste, in vain walled town and lofty tower!"

EDWARD COATE PINKNEY (1802-1828) died before his poetic gifts had reached their full maturity. He was the son of the eminent lawyer and diplomatist, William Pinkney, and was born in London, while his father was American minister at the court of St. James. At the age of nine he was brought home to America, and educated at Baltimore. He spent eight years in the United States navy, during which period he visited the classic shores of the Mediterranean. He was impressed particularly with the beauty of Italy, and in one of his poems he says:—

"It looks a dimple on the face of earth,
The seal of beauty, and the shrine of mirth;
Nature is delicate and graceful there,
The place's genius feminine and fair:
The winds are awed, nor dare to breathe aloud;
The air seems never to have borne a cloud,
Save where volcanoes send to heaven their curled
And solemn smokes, like altars of the world."

In 1824 he resigned his place in the navy to take up the practice of law in Baltimore. His health was not good; and he seems to have occupied a part of his abundant leisure (for he was not successful in his profession) in writing poetry. A thin volume of poems was published in 1825, in which he displays, especially in his shorter pieces, an excellent lyrical gift. The following stanzas are from A Health:—

"I fill this cup to one made up
Of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex
The seeming paragon;
To whom the better elements
And kindly stars have given
A form so fair, that, like the air,
'Tis less of earth than heaven.

"Her every tone is music's own,
Like those of morning birds,
And something more than melody
Dwells ever in her words;
The coinage of her heart are they,
And from her lips each flows
As one may see the burdened bee
Forth issue from the rose."

PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE (1816-1850), like most Southern writers before the Civil War, mingled literature with the practice of law. He was born at Martinsburg, Virginia, and educated at Princeton. He early manifested a literary bent, and wrote for the Knickerbocker Magazine, the oldest of our literary monthlies, before he was out of his teens. He was noted for his love of outdoor life, and became a thorough sportsman. In 1847 he published a volume entitled Froissart Ballads and Other Poems. The origin of the ballad portion of the volume, as explained in the preface, is found in the lines of an old Roman poet:—

"A certain freak has got into my head,
Which I can't conquer for the life of me,
Of taking up some history, little read,
Or known, and writing it in poetry."

The best known of his lyrics is Florence Vane which has the sincerity and pathos of a real experience:—

"I loved thee long and dearly,
Florence Vane;
My life's bright dream, and early,
Hath come again;
I renew, in my fond vision,
My heart's dear pain,
My hope, and thy derision,
Florence Vane.

"The ruin lone and hoary,
The ruin old,
Where thou didst hark my story,
At even told,—
That spot—the hues Elysian
Of sky and plain—
I treasure in my vision,
Florence Vane.

"Thou wast lovelier than the roses
In their prime;
Thy voice excelled the closes
Of sweetest rhyme;
Thy heart was as a river
Without a main.
Would I had loved thee never,
Florence Vane!"

THEODORE O'HARA (1820-1867) is chiefly remembered for a single poem that has touched the national heart. He was born in Danville, Kentucky. After taking a course in law, he accepted a clerkship in the Treasury Department at Washington. On the outbreak of the Mexican War he enlisted as a private soldier, and by his gallant service rose to the rank of captain and major. After the close of the war he returned to Washington and engaged for a time in the practice of his profession. Later he became editor of the Mobile Register, and Frankfort Yeoman in Kentucky. In the Civil War he served as colonel in the Confederate army.

The poem on which his fame largely rests is The Bivouac of the Dead. It was written to commemorate the Kentuckians who fell in the battle of Buena Vista. Its well-known lines have furnished an apt inscription for several military cemeteries:—

"The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on Life's parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.

"On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead."

O'Hara died in Alabama in 1867. The legislature of Kentucky paid him a fitting tribute in having his body removed to Frankfort and placed by the side of the heroes whom he so worthily commemorated in his famous poem.

FRANCIS ORRERY TICKNOR (1822-1874) was a physician living near Columbus, Georgia. He led a busy, useful, humble life, and his merits as a poet have not been fully recognized. In the opinion of Paul Hamilton Hayne, who edited a volume of Ticknor's poems, he was "one of the truest and sweetest lyric poets this country has yet produced." The Virginians of the Valley was written after the soldiers of the Old Dominion, many of whom bore the names of the knights of the "Golden Horseshoe," had obtained a temporary advantage over the invading forces of the North:—

"We thought they slept!—the sons who kept
The names of noble sires,
And slumbered while the darkness crept
Around their vigil fires;
But aye the 'Golden Horseshoe' knights
Their Old Dominion keep,
Whose foes have found enchanted ground,
But not a knight asleep."

But a martial lyric of greater force is Little Giffen, written in honor of a blue-eyed lad of East Tennessee. He was terribly wounded in some engagement, and after being taken to the hospital at Columbus, Georgia, was finally nursed back to life in the home of Dr. Ticknor. Beneath the thin, insignificant exterior of the lad, the poet discerned the incarnate courage of the hero:—

"Out of the focal and foremost fire,
Out of the hospital walls as dire;
Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene,
(Eighteenth battle and he sixteen!)
Specter! such as you seldom see,
Little Giffen of Tennessee!

* * * * *

"Word of gloom from the war, one day;
Johnson pressed at the front, they say.
Little Giffen was up and away;
A tear—his first—as he bade good-by,
Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
'I'll write, if spared!' There was news of the fight;
But none of Giffen.—He did not write."

But Ticknor did not confine himself to war themes. He was a lover of Nature; and its forms, and colors, and sounds—as seen in April Morning, Twilight, The Hills, Among the Birds—appealed to his sensitive nature. Shut out from literary centers and literary companionship, he sang, like Burns, from the strong impulse awakened by the presence of the heroic and the beautiful.

JOHN R. THOMPSON (1823-1873) has deserved well of the South both as editor and author. He was born in Richmond, and educated at the University of Virginia, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1845. Two years later he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger; and during the twelve years of his editorial management, he not only maintained a high degree of literary excellence, but took pains to lend encouragement to Southern letters. It is a misfortune to our literature that his writings, particularly his poetry, have never been collected.

The incidents of the Civil War called forth many a stirring lyric, the best of which is his well-known Music in Camp:—

"Two armies covered hill and plain,
Where Rappahannock's waters
Ran deeply crimsoned with the stain
Of battle's recent slaughters."

The band had played "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," which in turn had been greeted with shouts by "Rebels" and "Yanks."

"And yet once more the bugles sang
Above the stormy riot;
No shout upon the evening rang—
There reigned a holy quiet.

"The sad, slow stream its noiseless flood
Poured o'er the glistening pebbles;
All silent now the Yankees stood,
And silent stood the Rebels.

"No unresponsive soul had heard
That plaintive note's appealing,
So deeply 'Home, Sweet Home' had stirred
The hidden founts of feeling.

"Or Blue or Gray, the soldier sees,
As by the wand of fairy,
The cottage 'neath the live-oak trees,
The cabin by the prairie."

On account of failing health, Thompson made a visit to Europe, where he spent several years, contributing from time to time to Blackwood's Magazine and other English periodicals. On his return to America, he was engaged on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post, with which he was connected till his death, in 1873. He is buried in Hollywood cemetery at Richmond.

"The city's hum drifts o'er his grave,
And green above the hollies wave
Their jagged leaves, as when a boy,
On blissful summer afternoons,
He came to sing the birds his runes,
And tell the river of his joy."

The verse of Mrs. MARGARET J. PRESTON (1820-1897) rises above the commonplace both in sentiment and craftsmanship. She belongs, as some critic has said, to the school of Mrs. Browning; and in range of subject and purity of sentiment she is scarcely inferior to her great English contemporary. She was the daughter of the Rev. George Junkin, D.D., the founder of Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and for many years president of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia. In 1857 she married Colonel J. T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute.

For many years she was a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, in which her earlier poems first made their appearance. Though a native of Philadelphia, she was loyal to the South during the Civil War, and found inspiration in its deeds of heroism. Beechenbrook is a rhyme of the war; and though well-nigh forgotten now, it was read, on its publication in 1865, from the Potomac to the Gulf. Among her other writings are Old Songs and New and Cartoons. Her poetry is pervaded by a deeply religious spirit, and she repeatedly urges the lesson of supreme resignation and trust, as in the following lines:—

"What will it matter by-and-by
Whether my path below was bright,
Whether it wound through dark or light,
Under a gray or golden sky,
When I look back on it, by-and-by?

"What will it matter by-and-by
Whether, unhelped, I toiled alone,
Dashing my foot against a stone,
Missing the charge of the angel nigh,
Bidding me think of the by-and-by?

* * * * *

"What will it matter? Naught, if I
Only am sure the way I've trod,
Gloomy or gladdened, leads to God,
Questioning not of the how, the why,
If I but reach Him by-and-by.

"What will I care for the unshared sigh,
If in my fear of lapse or fall,
Close I have clung to Christ through all,
Mindless how rough the road might lie,
Sure He will smoothen it by-and-by.

"What will it matter by-and-by?
Nothing but this: that Joy or Pain
Lifted me skyward,—helped me to gain,
Whether through rack, or smile, or sigh,
Heaven, home, all in all, by-and-by."

In this rapid sketch of the minor singers of the South, it has been necessary to omit many names worthy of mention. It is beyond our scope to speak of the newer race of poets. Here and there delicate notes are heard, but there is no evidence that a great singer is present among us. Yet there is no ground for discouragement; the changed conditions and the new spirit that has come upon our people may reasonably be expected to lead to higher poetic achievement.

In some respects the South affords a more promising field for literature than any other part of our country. There is evident decadence in New England. But the climate and scenery, the history and traditions, and the chivalrous spirit and unexhausted intellectual energies of the South contain the promise of an Augustan age in literature. In no insignificant degree its rich-ored veins have been worked in prose. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS has successfully wrought in the mine of negro folk-lore; GEORGE W. CABLE has portrayed the Creole life of Louisiana; CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK has pictured the types of character found among the Tennessee mountains; THOMAS NELSON PAGE has shown us the trials and triumphs of Reconstruction days; and Miss MARY JOHNSTON has revived the picturesque scenes of colonial times. There has been an obvious literary awakening in the South; and sooner or later it will find utterance, let us hope, in some strong-voiced, great-souled singer.

It is true that there are obstacles to be overcome. There are no literary magazines in the South to encourage and develop our native talent as in the days of the Southern Literary Messenger. Southern writers are still dependent upon Northern periodicals, in which they can hardly be said to find a cordial welcome. It seems that the South in a measure suffers the obloquy that rested of old upon Nazareth, from which the Pharisees of the metropolis maintained that no good thing could come.

But the most serious drawback of all is the disfavor into which poetry has fallen, or rather which it has brought upon itself. In the remoteness of its themes and sentiments, in its over-anxiety for a faultless or striking technique, it has erected a barrier between itself and the sanity of a practical, truth-loving people. Let us hope that this aberration is not permanent. When poetry returns to simplicity, sincerity, and truth; when it shall voice, as in the great English singers, Tennyson and Browning, the deepest thought and aspirations of our race; when once more, as in the prophetic days of old, it shall resume its lofty, seer-like office,—then will it be restored to its place of honor by a delighted and grateful people.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/ten_treasures_i_found_in_poetry-1820

Ten Treasures I Found in Poetry

Written by: Micheal Ace

Note: Some deliberate patterns are employed independently by the writer for the purpose of easy comprehension. I was just this frustrated kid who wanted to echo the giggles of life made mockingly over him, I began music and raps; I wanted to make a difference but my desires could not climb the gates of success right when it was locked. Then, I began writing. In no time, poetry started; a dream come true. “The sky’s won’t be the limit when there are footprints on the moon”, so I became zealous and consistent but guess what.
Over time, I have found ten treasures in poetry. -Poetry is a talking drum: Being an African-born writer has opportuned me to know more about how drums are used to relay messages with effect of sounds. But the significant similarity it shares with poetry is; Only the wise and the patient understands. Unlike prose, poetry provides us means to write in codes with use of several poetics. -Every poet is a servant: One thousand poets can scribble on the same theme with different imageries, dictions, depths and rhythms and which does not make any of them better than the others. We write according to the ‘much’ we are given as servant to words. No poet owns it all, there is chance for everybody to become a poetic elephant, we are all servants to word.
- Poetry is a living organism: I have done dining with elders and they often tell me; Micheal Ace, don’t ever let poetry outgrow you. The only characteristic poetry doesn’t have as a living thing is ‘Death’, There will always be themes unwritten and poetics unused, remember even the likes of Shakespeare did not write it all, they couldn’t and we will not either. No, no one can end poetry. -Sovereignty. Otherwise called ‘Poetic license’, most poets understand this concept except for the misusers. However, poets are free to utilize any imaginable character in relaying their thoughts. -Cowards don’t write poetry: It takes courage and determination to pick a pen and write even when you are not sure someone will read them. I have seen poets battle with the question; ‘Who cares to read my poems’. But when ‘Wole Soyinka’ began poetry, I know he never knew people like me will read him. The writer being dead or alive, his poems live immortally. -Poetry is a father of three; Proverb, Parable and Idiom: Proverbs for the elders, parables for God, Idioms for the sages. Poetry encompass them all. In fact, even God is a poet. -Every poet is a prophet: As a poet, I see the predictions of the end from every beginning, not with my eyes but my instincts. Poets see silver linings on the cloud and dark spots of the sun.
-No poet is ugly: I have seen thousands of pengicians, all with beautiful faces, handsome grins, gorgeous looks. Poets are flawless beings. -Writing poetry is lifetime service to humanity: Whenever I see poets quit, I feel the pest inside of me. I wish they know they don’t write for themselves, they write for an audience whom they might not even know. No poet has the right to quit.
Lastly, -Poets are the treasure of poetry: What else would poetry ever wish for than the magical pen of you and I? Poets are treasures of poetry for every poetics exist in the narrow path of their veins, poets are gods and I’m proud being one. Conclusively, 'Marie beynon Ray' said and I quote that; "Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late" The tickles of time say in their everyday murmur "Do it", try something, be creative. You have your stories to tell, someone somewhere wants to hear. Remember, we are treasures of poetry!

Written by Micheal Ace

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/gwendolyn-over-everything-specificity-humanity-and-class-beverly-hills-chicago


Gwendolyn Over Everything: Specificity, Humanity, and Class in ‘Beverly Hills, Chicago’

I like my poetry 
like I like my politics, 
local. For all the grandeur of the poem 
that attempts to speak in the broadest, most universal strokes, I prefer my verse at street level. Perhaps no other poet in the American tradition does this like Gwendolyn Brooks.

Brooks was born in 1917 and moved to Chicago soon after. She would become a lifelong Chicagoan and one of the city’s most revered writers. In 2017, her centennial is being celebrated nationwide and particularly in Chicago through an outpouring of public events, dedications, and recent publications inspired by her life and work.

In 1950, Brooks famously became the first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Annie Allen (Harper & Brothers, 1949). Throughout her long, illustrious career, her poetic voice developed and shifted tremendously, but her poetry mostly focused on illustrating the textures and complexities of black life in Chicago. She always remained interested in articulating the lives of the people in her community.

The first poem I encountered by Brooks that made me feel the full weight of this was “Beverly 

Hills, Chicago” from Annie Allen. I grew up in 
West Pullman, a neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago, just southeast of the more affluent neighborhood of “the Beverly,” also called Beverly Hills, which Brooks documents in the poem. Many of my friends from the magnet school I attended lived in Beverly Hills. I passed through it every day on the bus to elementary school. Until I read “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” I had never seen a poem—or any piece of art—mention a place that was a part of my daily world.

In Brooks’s poem, the speaker drives through Beverly Hills, describing the neighborhood and imagining what its residents do with their day (go to tea, as one line suggests) and the ease with which their lives unfurl. This poem showcases the way Brooks handles class in her work. Rather than paint a picture of singular communities that feels monolithic, she takes on a wide-lens view, depicting a blackness that includes both the college-bound girl and the unwed mother (“Sadie and Maud”), the civil rights martyr (“Medgar Evers”) and the notorious street gang (“The Blackstone Rangers”).

The speaker in “Beverly Hills, Chicago” addresses the relative nature of class and social competition with a line like “But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough,” the “we” speaking for those who do not have access to the privileges living in Beverly Hills affords. The sense of longing, perhaps a kind of collective jealousy of the well-off, moves throughout this poem and propels it forward. Brooks masterfully articulates the shame of not-having, something I’ve felt countless times riding through Longwood Drive in Beverly Hills. It’s a feeling that people from my neighborhood feel instinctively, knowing that just west from us, across the tracks, there is so much we can’t touch. Brooks writes in a way that makes the gulf between these two worlds palpable.

The poem, though, has no clear hero. Part of the genius of Brooks’s work is her commitment to a certain democracy of morality. In her world, the poor have no monopoly on criminality just as the rich have no monopoly on virtue. She does the difficult work of considering each player in her poems as fully human and capable of all that being human entails. In this poem (and others) she resists the temptation to stereotype the wealthy (or any other group). The speaker in the poem continually sees and expresses the ways in which the people in Beverly Hills may be the same as the people in the car. By drawing those similarities we are able to feel the disparity in wealth in an even stronger way. Even the most universal moments of our lives, like death, can be altered by money: “They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers....”

I will never forget the jolt I felt the first time I read “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” This poem told the story not of that iconic, glamorous Beverly Hills but, instead, of Chicago’s Beverly Hills, the neighborhood I knew, of St. Patrick’s Day parades and wide lawns. For all of Brooks’s awareness and deft depictions of class, her ability to use small details to paint a full picture of a community is her most powerful skill. Her vision allows us to feel like we are along for an intimate ride with both the comfortable folks in the big houses and the plainer folks passing through in their car. Never does Brooks demonize or laud people because of what they have or don’t. She asks us, on her own streets and on her own terms, to consider what inequity might feel like. Like a rapper using neighborhood slang, she doesn’t translate her feelings into a place or a scenario that might be more palatable. She just writes what is, and we are able to experience it.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/ten_treasures_i_found_in_poetry-1820

Ten Treasures I Found in Poetry
Written by: Micheal Ace

Note: Some deliberate patterns are employed independently by the writer for the purpose of easy comprehension. I was just this frustrated kid who wanted to echo the giggles of life made mockingly over him, I began music and raps; I wanted to make a difference but my desires could not climb the gates of success right when it was locked. Then, I began writing. In no time, poetry started; a dream come true. “The sky’s won’t be the limit when there are footprints on the moon”, so I became zealous and consistent but guess what. Over time, I have found ten treasures in poetry. -Poetry is a talking drum: Being an African-born writer has opportuned me to know more about how drums are used to relay messages with effect of sounds. But the significant similarity it shares with poetry is; Only the wise and the patient understands.

Unlike prose, poetry provides us means to write in codes with use of several poetics. -Every poet is a servant: One thousand poets can scribble on the same theme with different imageries, dictions, depths and rhythms and which does not make any of them better than the others. We write according to the ‘much’ we are given as servant to words. No poet owns it all, there is chance for everybody to become a poetic elephant, we are all servants to word. - Poetry is a living organism: I have done dining with elders and they often tell me; Micheal Ace, don’t ever let poetry outgrow you. The only characteristic poetry doesn’t have as a living thing is ‘Death’, There will always be themes unwritten and poetics unused, remember even the likes of Shakespeare did not write it all, they couldn’t and we will not either. No, no one can end poetry. -Sovereignty. Otherwise called ‘Poetic license’, most poets understand this concept except for the misusers. However, poets are free to utilize any imaginable character in relaying their thoughts. -Cowards don’t write poetry: It takes courage and determination to pick a pen and write even when you are not sure someone will read them. I have seen poets battle with the question; ‘Who cares to read my poems’. But when ‘Wole Soyinka’ began poetry, I know he never knew people like me will read him. The writer being dead or alive, his poems live immortally.

-Poetry is a father of three; Proverb, Parable and Idiom: Proverbs for the elders, parables for God, Idioms for the sages. Poetry encompass them all. In fact, even God is a poet. -Every poet is a prophet: As a poet, I see the predictions of the end from every beginning, not with my eyes but my instincts. Poets see silver linings on the cloud and dark spots of the sun. -No poet is ugly: I have seen thousands of pengicians, all with beautiful faces, handsome grins, gorgeous looks. Poets are flawless beings.

-Writing poetry is lifetime service to humanity: Whenever I see poets quit, I feel the pest inside of me. I wish they know they don’t write for themselves, they write for an audience whom they might not even know. No poet has the right to quit. Lastly, -Poets are the treasure of poetry: What else would poetry ever wish for than the magical pen of you and I? Poets are treasures of poetry for every poetics exist in the narrow path of their veins, poets are gods and I’m proud being one. Conclusively, 'Marie beynon Ray' said and I quote that; "Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late" The tickles of time say in their everyday murmur "Do it", try something, be creative. You have your stories to tell, someone somewhere wants to hear. Remember, we are treasures of poetry!
_Micheal Ace Written by Micheal Ace

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christina-rossetti


Christina Rossetti
1830–1894


Of all Victorian women poets, posterity has been kindest to Christina Rossetti. Her poetry has never disappeared from view, and her reputation, though it suffered a decline in the first half of the twentieth century, has always been preserved to some degree. Critical interest in Rossetti’s poetry swelled in the final decades of the twentieth century, a resurgence largely impelled by the emergence of feminist criticism; much of this commentary focuses on gender issues in her poetry and on Rossetti as a woman poet. In Rossetti’s lifetime opinion was divided over whether she or Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the greatest female poet of the era; in any case, after Browning’s death in 1861 readers and critics saw Rossetti as the older poet’s rightful successor. The two poets achieved different kinds of excellence, as is evident in Dante Gabriel Rossetti‘s comment on his sister, quoted by William Sharp in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1895): “She is the finest woman-poet since Mrs. Browning, by a long way; and in artless art, if not in intellectual impulse, is greatly Mrs. Browning’s superior.” Readers have generally considered Rossetti’s poetry less intellectual, less political, and less varied than Browning’s; conversely, they have acknowledged Rossetti as having the greater lyric gift, with her poetry displaying a perfection of diction, tone, and form under the guise of utter simplicity.

Rossetti was the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca in 1827, Gabriel Charles Dante (famous under the name Dante Gabriel but always called Gabriel by family members) in 1828, William Michael in 1829, and Christina Georgina on 5 December 1830. In 1831 Gabriele Rossetti was appointed to the chair of Italian at the newly opened King’s College. The children received their earliest education, and Maria and Christina all of theirs, from their mother, who had been trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family. Certainly this ambition was satisfied: in addition to Christina’s becoming one of the Victorian age’s finest poets, Maria was the author of a respected study of Dante, as well as books on religious instruction and Italian grammar and translation; Dante Gabriel distinguished himself as one of the foremost poets and painters of his era; and William was a prolific art and literary critic, editor, and memoirist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Rossetti’s childhood was exceptionally happy, characterized by affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings. In temperament she was most like her brother Dante Gabriel: their father called the pair the “two storms” of the family in comparison to the “two calms,” Maria and William. Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper. Years later, counseling a niece subject to similar outbursts, the mature Christina looked back on the fire now stifled: “You must not imagine, my dear girl, that your Aunt was always the calm and sedate person you now behold. I, too, had a very passionate temper; but I learnt to control it. On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath. I have learnt since to control my feelings—and no doubt you will!” Self-control was, indeed, achieved—perhaps too much so. In his posthumous memoir of his sister that prefaces The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904) William laments the thwarting of her high spirits: “In innate character she was vivacious, and open to pleasurable impressions; and, during her girlhood, one might readily have supposed that she would develop into a woman of expansive heart, fond of society and diversions, and taking a part in them of more than average brilliancy. What came to pass was of course quite the contrary.” As an adult Christina Rossetti was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.

Frances Rossetti read to her children, favoring religious texts such as the Bible, John Bunyan‘s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and the writings of St. Augustine, or moralistic tales such as those by Maria Edgeworth. When the children began reading for themselves, however, they generally shunned their mother’s edifying selections in favor of the imaginative delights of The Arabian Nights or Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828); later favorites included Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis. Until 1836, when the boys began attending day school, the four children were offered similar instruction by their mother; thereafter, only Dante Gabriel and William were formally instructed in classics, mathematics, and sciences. Asked to describe her poetic influences, Rossetti speculated in a 26 March 1884 letter to Edmund Gosse: “If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather’s cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London.” At Gaetano Polidori’s cottage at Holmer Green she fostered the attention to the minute in nature that marks her poetry; there she also observed the corruptibility and mortality that became keynotes in her work. Her reminiscences in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) include reflections on childhood adventures at the cottage: her patient attendance on a strawberry, only to find it blighted before it has fully ripened, and her burial of a dead mouse and later observation of its decay. The visits to Holmer Green ended in 1839 when her grandfather sold the house and moved to London. A great lover of nature, Rossetti nevertheless spent most of her life in the city.

In his memoir William notes that Christina composed her first verse, “Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator,” before she was old enough to write. Her next attempt was an aborted tale, modeled on The Arabian Nights, about a dervish named Hassan; and she wrote her first poem, “To my Mother on her Birthday,” when she was eleven. The children produced a family newspaper, “The Hodge-Podge or Weekly Efforts,” the first issue of which was dated 20 May 1843, and later a periodical titled “The Illustrated Scrapbook.” Christina’s early poetic efforts included experiments in lyric, devotional, pastoral, ballad, and fantasy forms.

Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. She was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement, as is documented in the annotations and illustrations she added to her copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and in her reading of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. For more than twenty years, beginning in 1843, she worshiped at Christ Church, Albany Street, where services were influenced by the innovations emanating from Oxford. The Reverend William Dodsworth, the priest there until his conversion to Catholicism in 1850, assumed a leading role as the Oxford Movement spread to London. In addition to coming under the religious influence of prominent Tractarians such as Dodsworth, W. J. E. Bennett, Henry W. Burrows, and E. B. Pusey, Rossetti had close personal ties with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser. The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

Gabriele Rossetti’s health collapsed in 1843, leaving him virtually blind and unable to teach. Frances Rossetti returned to her former employment as a daily governess. Maria and William also took employment, Maria as a nursery governess and William in the civil service. Dante Gabriel continued his art studies, while Christina remained at home as a companion to their ailing father. In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister. She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania. Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father’s breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter, Christina’s recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a “clammy fin” repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma. Rossetti had bouts of serious illness throughout her life; William insists in his memoir that one cannot understand his sister unless one recognizes that she “was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid.” The morbidity that readers have so often noted in her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina’s ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition.”

By her sixteenth birthday Christina, who was regarded as the poet in the family, had written more than fifty poems that were transcribed into a notebook by her sister. In 1847 a collection of her poems, titled Verses, was privately printed by her grandfather Polidori. As Marsh points out, this private publication, dedicated to her mother, decorously avoided anything resembling public display, but at the same time it constituted a juvenile literary debut in the tradition of other women poets such as Browning and Felicia Hemans. It was circulated among family and friends and was well received. The thirty-nine poems are notably literary in their inspiration, which is traceable to the Gothic writers Radcliffe, Lewis, and Charles Maturin; the English poets George Herbert, George Crabbe, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson; and the Italian poets Dante, Torquato Tasso, and Pietro Metastasio. The first and most striking poem in the collection is “The Dead City,” an ambitious 275-line dream vision of a magnificent city, succulent banquet, and voluptuous revelers all turned to stone, the evocative descriptions of which anticipate the Pre-Raphaelite style. Here, as in Rossetti’s most famous poem, “Goblin Market“ (1862), lusciously described fruits represent the temptations of self-indulgence and pleasure. This genre—a narrative that combines fantasy with moral allegory—was an important one for Rossetti, and she employed it in more-accomplished poems such as “Goblin Market,” “From House to Home,” “The Prince’s Progress,” and “A Ballad of Boding,” as well as in her tales “Nick,” “Hero,” and Speaking Likenesses, with Pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes (1874). A morbid strain can be seen in many of the poems in the collection: themes of mortality, inconstancy, and corruptibility figure prominently. Although Rossetti’s mature style is not fully realized at this point, Verses is important as a tangible sign of her commitment to poetry and of her family’s recognition of her vocation.”

Later in 1847 Dante Gabriel, William, and Christina began a tradition of playing bouts rimés, a game in which two of them would race to compose a sonnet conforming to a set of line endings provided by the third. Christina excelled at the exercise, composing sonnets in a matter of minutes. In 1848 she had her first taste of fame when, at Dante Gabriel’s instigation, she submitted two of her poems, “Death’s Chill Between” and “Heart’s Chill Between,” to the prestigious literary periodical The Athenaeum; their acceptance made her a nationally published poet at seventeen. During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group; she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings, on the grounds that such display was unseemly. Nevertheless, her poetry has been described as “Pre-Raphaelite” in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism. Later in her career a reviewer in the Catholic World (October 1876) called her the “queen of the Preraphaelite school”; but more-recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences. Certainly, Rossetti was involved in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism. She sat as Mary for Dante Gabriel’s paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), and her pensive Italianate countenance was a familiar image in the first phase of the movement. The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.”

Late in 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood initiated a periodical, The Germ, as a vehicle for the members’ innovative views on art. Its four issues—dated January to April 1850—provided a venue for seven of Rossetti’s poems: “Dreamland,” “An End,” “Song“ (“Oh roses for the flush of youth” ), “A Pause of Thought,” “A Testimony,” “Repining,” and “Sweet Death.” These publications, which were anonymous in the first issue and pseudonymous thereafter, found an appreciative, though small, audience. The poems, and others composed at this time but not published until later, show that Rossetti had by then attained her mature poetic style, in which pain, loss, and resignation are expressed in diction and images that strike the reader as simple, perfect, and effortless.”

One of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, James Collinson, proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848. She refused the offer, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism as the reason. Collinson promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted. Collinson has struck biographers as an unlikely suitor (anecdotes generally portray him as a lackluster sleepyhead), and opinion is mixed as to whether Rossetti was ever in love with him. The engagement ended in the spring of 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism.”

In 1850 Rossetti wrote Maude: A Story for Girls (1897), a novella that was not published until after her death. The title character’s appearance and personality bear many similarities to accounts of the author, and this work, with its exploration of the tensions among the sometimes incompatible categories of female, poet, and Anglo-Catholic, is usually considered a semi-autobiographical portrait of the adolescent Rossetti. Fifteen-year-old Maude Foster is a poet whose “broken-hearted” verse dwells on themes of suffering, world-weariness, resignation, and religious devotion. Some of Rossetti’s important early poems, later published under the titles “Song“ (“She sat and sang alway”), “Three Nuns,” and “Symbols,” are included as Maude’s productions, and a bouts rimés contest also appears in the narrative. Rossetti returned to this mixing of genres—prose punctuated with poetry—in her devotional works Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies, and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). Religious issues play a central role in the story when Maude suffers a spiritual crisis, and Anglo-Catholic practices are described as she discusses with her cousins the heavily symbolic lectern cover they are embroidering, the question of a vocation as a nun, and the Eucharist. The main conflict in the narrative revolves around Maude’s experience of the incompatibility of ladylike behavior and poetic achievement. Like the author, Maude is torn between pride in her work and moral qualms about that pride. The heroine’s overactive conscience and endless self-recriminations provide considerable insight into Rossetti’s own overscrupulous nature.”

The family’s financial crisis continued, and in 1851 the Rossettis moved from Charlotte Street to Camden Town, where Christina and her mother briefly ran a small day school. A second attempt at establishing a school, this time in Frome, lasted from March 1853 to February 1854, the only period in Rossetti’s life when she made her home outside London. When she returned to the city, the family moved to Albany Street. At this point Christina and her mother permanently gave up teaching, and the family lived on William’s and Mary’s earnings and Frances’s modest inherited income. Gabriele Rossetti died on 26 April 1854. For most of her adulthood Christina was financially supported primarily by William, a debt that she made provisions in her will to repay.”

Throughout her twenties Rossetti continued to write poetry and prose. Her Italian heritage is apparent in the Italian poems “Versi” and “L’Incognita” and an unfinished epistolary novel, “Corrispondenza [sic] Famigliare,” which were published in a privately printed periodical, The Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens during 1851 and 1852. Attempts at publication in prestigious periodicals such as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s in 1854 failed. In a letter of 1 August 1854 to William Edmonstoune Aytoun of Blackwood’s Rossetti declared: “poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality; and . . . I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right.”

Rossetti has often been depicted as shrinking from worldly concerns, but, in fact, she did engage in humanitarian work. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down. Her aunt Eliza Polidori did join Nightingale in Scutari, and Rossetti temporarily took over some of Polidori’s district visiting, providing assistance to the sick and poor of the parish. In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of “fallen“ women. As an “associate” at Highgate, Rossetti was known as “Sister Christina” and wore a habitlike black uniform with a veil. When she was on duty she resided at the penitentiary, probably for a fortnight at a time. By the summer of 1859 Rossetti was devoting a good deal of time to her work at Highgate, and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as “Cousin Kate,” “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,’“ and “From Sunset to Star Rise,” though poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate— “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and “Maude Clare” for instance—demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman. “Goblin Market,” with its theme of a fallen woman being saved by a “sister,” can also be seen as informed by Rossetti’s experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil; other Pre-Raphaelite treatments of the subject include Dante Gabriel’s poem “Jenny,” begun in 1847 and revised in 1858-1859 and again in 1870; his unfinished painting Found (1854-1881); and William Holman Hunt’s The Awakened Conscience (1853).”

In the 1850s a few of Rossetti’s poems were published in anthologies; “Maude Clare” appeared in Once a Week (5 November 1859) and the short stories “The Lost Titian” (The Crayon, 1856) and “Nick” (National Magazine, October 1857). In 1861 she submitted poems to Macmillan’s Magazine, and Dante Gabriel sent “Goblin Market“ to the art critic John Ruskin in the hope that he would recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray, editor of The Cornhill. Ruskin’s criticism of Rossetti’s masterpiece is infamous. In his letter of 24 January 1861 to Dante Gabriel, Ruskin singled out for criticism the original meter that is now so often praised: he acknowledged the poem’s “beauty and power” but asserted that it was unpublishable because it was “so full of quaintnesses and offences,” adding, “Irregular measure . . . is the chief calamity of modern poetry . . . your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like.” Almost simultaneously, Rossetti’s poem “Up-hill” was accepted enthusiastically for Macmillan’s (February 1861), and Alexander Macmillan expressed an interest in seeing more of her work. During 1861 Macmillan’s published two more of Rossetti’s poems: “A Birthday“ (April 1861) and “An Apple-Gathering” (August 1861). In June of that year Rossetti took a short vacation in France.”

In 1862 the Macmillan firm brought out Rossetti’s first commercially published volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems. Although some of the poems had been published in Macmillan’s, Once a Week, and The Germ, and others were included in the manuscript for Maude, most were taken from the notebooks in which Rossetti had been writing since the private printing of Verses in 1847. Comparisons of the manuscript and printed versions of the poems show that most were not substantially revised. Usually the earliest extant version of a given poem is the fair copy transcribed into the notebook; if Rossetti reworked it in the act of composition, such drafts no longer exist. She often changed a word or two in preparation for publication; where major revisions occurred, they took the form of the deletion of whole stanzas, sometimes reducing a poem by more than half its original length: such is the case with “Maude Clare,” “Echo,” and “Bitter for Sweet.” This tendency to reduce is part of the economy of expression that is a Rossetti trademark, and the result is poetry in which meaning is suggestive rather than explicit. Looking back on her career, Rossetti wrote in an 1888 letter to an unknown clergyman that “Perhaps the nearest approach to a method I can lay claim to was a distinct aim at conciseness; after a while I received a hint from my sister that my love of conciseness tended to make my writing obscure, and I then endeavoured to avoid obscurity as well as diffuseness. In poetics, my elder brother was my acute and most helpful critic.” Throughout her career Dante Gabriel not only critiqued her work but also negotiated with publishers, assisted with book design, corrected proofs, and provided illustrations for her publications. As Goblin Market and Other Poems was being prepared for the press, he advised on the selection of poems, suggested dividing them into secular and devotional sections, and proposed new titles for some—including the title poem, which was originally called “A Peep at the Goblins.” He also provided frontispiece and title-page designs drawn from that poem.”

Goblin Market and Other Poems was a critical success, with favorable notices in many periodicals, including The London Review (12 April 1862), The Spectator (12 April 1862), The Athenaeum (26 April 1862), The Saturday Review (24 May 1862), The Eclectic Review (June 1862), and The British Quarterly Review (July 1862). Critics welcomed a fresh and original poetic voice: The Eclectic Review hailed “a true and most genuine poet,” while The Athenaeum remarked that “To read these poems after the laboured and skilful but not original verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery, with its well-feigned semblances of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze.” “Goblin Market,” “Up-hill,” “An Apple-Gathering,” and “Advent” were frequently singled out for praise.”

Today “Goblin Market“ remains Rossetti’s most discussed poem. Critics have dismissed her protest that she intended no allegorical meaning and have interpreted in various ways her fairy tale of two sisters’ responses to the temptation of goblin fruit. Lizzie rejects the luscious fruit as “evil,” but Laura purchases it with a lock of her hair and indulges. Afterward she wastes away, pining for more fruit. The goblins refuse to allow Lizzie to purchase fruit to save her sister, try to persuade her to eat with them, then attempt to force the fruit into her mouth. Lizzie escapes and runs home to Laura, who is cured by tasting the juices smeared on her sister’s face. The poem ends years later with Laura telling the story to the sisters’ offspring; she concludes by saying:

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.

The suggestiveness of the narrative runs in many directions, and this multivalency is perhaps the most striking quality of the poem. It can be read as a straightforward moral allegory of temptation, indulgence, sacrifice, and redemption. It has also been interpreted as a specifically Christian allegory, with a reenactment of the temptation in the Garden of Eden and a Christ-like offer of redemption through sacrifice—a reading that is encouraged by the Eucharistic diction of Lizzie’s greeting, “‘Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me.’“ Significantly, this Christ is a female one, and feminist readings of “Goblin Market“ have often focused on its positive image of sisterhood. Psychoanalytic interpretations have regarded the sisters as two aspects of one psyche and have emphasized the sexuality of the poem, noting both its orality and its lesbian dynamics. Marxist critics have pointed to the poem’s separation of the domestic and commercial spheres and to Lizzie and Laura’s attempts to do business in a marketplace designed to make women into goods to be exchanged rather than agents in their own right. Critics of many orientations have noted that the sensuality of the fruit, its prohibition to maidens, and its association with nuptial pleasures suggest that Laura’s transgression is a sexual one. In this interpretation, Lizzie’s climactic redemption of Laura can be seen as a critique of the Victorian cultural understanding of the fallen woman, for here she is not forever lost but is saved by a sister’s intervention.”

In “Goblin Market“ the sisters are endangered by male goblins, and Laura is redeemed through the strength of sisterhood; elsewhere in Goblin Market and Other Poems, however, the danger that men pose as sexual predators is not offset by female solidarity. Throughout the volume Rossetti presents a bleak appraisal of gender relations. The flimsiness and inconstancy of romantic love is a recurring theme, as is the treachery of sister against sister in a ruthlessly competitive marriage market. In “Cousin Kate” the unnamed speaker has been seduced by a nobleman and has borne him a son; now she finds herself a discarded “plaything,” supplanted by her fair and pure cousin Kate, whom the lord has taken not as a mistress but as his wife. The women in this ballad do not live up to the code of sisterly conduct with which “Goblin Market“ concludes. Kate usurps her cousin’s position and ensures the latter’s status as “an outcast thing”; the speaker accuses Kate of betrayal of female loyalty, but her own moral integrity comes under question in the final stanza when she gloats that while she has borne her former lover a son, her cousin remains barren.”

Adversarial women are also depicted in “Noble Sisters,” a deftly ambiguous dialogue in which the reader must evaluate the reliability of two speakers with opposed moral viewpoints. Similarly, in “Sister Maude” the reader is asked to consider whose sin is greater: the woman who has taken a lover or her sister, who exposes the illicit union. Other pieces in Goblin Market and Other Poems that depict the failure or betrayal of human (as opposed to divine) love and explore women’s sexual and economic vulnerability include “At Home,” “A Triad,” “After Death,” “The Hour and the Ghost,” “An Apple-Gathering,” “Maude Clare,” and “The Convent Threshold.” These works serve to reinforce the devotional poems’ theme of looking to the next life for reward, happiness, and fulfillment. Indeed, with the exception of “A Birthday“ and its ecstatic declaration that “the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me,” little evidence exists anywhere in the volume that human love is satisfied or satisfying.”

The theme of the inconstancy and insufficiency of any love except God’s pervades the devotional section. Deferral of satisfaction is constantly advocated, as in “The Convent Threshold,” in which the speaker urges her lover to join her in repentance for their “pleasant sin.” The speaker’s motives are complex, however, for her purpose seems to be the prospect of resuming their “old familiar love” in heaven. Consistently in Rossetti’s poetry the concerns of this world are regarded as inconsequential in comparison to the promise of salvation. Throughout her canon, but especially in the devotional poems, biblical image and idiom merge with Rossetti’s own voice. Revelation and Ecclesiastes are favorite sources, and the “vanity of vanity” refrain is a recurring motif.”

Other pieces reveal some of Rossetti’s poetical range: the political subject matter of “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”; the social critique of “A Triad”; the banter of “No, Thank You, John” ; the whimsical, teasing mystery of “Winter: My Secret” ; and the darker, suggestive mystery of poems with enigmatic and unnamed significances, such as “My Dream,” “May,” and “A Pause of Thought.” In a style that has affinities with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but that she made distinctively her own, Rossetti’s precisely drawn natural details assume the weight of suggestive symbolism. For example, in “An Apple-Gathering,” in which the speaker finds herself abandoned by Willie and replaced by “Plump Gertrude,” the speaker’s ill-considered plucking of apple blossoms and the concomitant forfeit of a rich harvest resonates on many levels. Similarly, “Up-hill” and “Symbols” effortlessly evoke profound meaning from the simplest details: an uphill journey toward a place of rest, a flower that blooms and fades, and eggs that fail to hatch. Many poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems continue the morbid strain that was so prominent in Verses. “Dream-land,” “At Home,” “Remember,” “After Death,” “An End,” “Song“ (“Oh roses for the flush of youth”), “Echo,” “A Peal of Bells,” “May,” “A Pause of Thought,” “Shut Out,” “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest“), “Dead Before Death,” “Bitter for Sweet,” and “Rest” strike the signature Rossetti notes of longing, loss, resignation, and death. In the final two poems in the volume, “Old and New Year Ditties” and “Amen,” this loss is met with the promise of fulfillment, expressed in the biblical figures of marriage and the fruitful garden. Critics have noted that Rossetti’s volumes are carefully arranged into meaningful sequences, and Goblin Market and Other Poems includes many examples of significant continuities among the poems and correlations between the nondevotional and devotional sections.”

During the early 1860s Rossetti was often in contact with female artists—including the members of the Portfolio Society, an informal group organized by Barbara Bodichon—and female poets, such as Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell. She published poems in the feminist periodicals The English Woman’s Journal and Victoria Magazine and in various anthologies, in addition to making regular appearances in Macmillan’s. A respiratory complaint led her to spend the winter of 1864-1865 in Hastings, where she began work on her next poetry volume, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866).”

That Dante Gabriel played a large role in the preparation of the book is evident from the almost daily correspondence between brother and sister, which provides valuable insight into Rossetti’s methods and includes some spirited rebuttals to Dante Gabriel’s criticisms. Rossetti’s letters make it clear that she tried to write to order for the book, which was not her preferred method of composition. In later years she acknowledged in a 20 May 1885 letter to W. Garrett Horder that “Just because poetry is a gift . . . I am not surprised to find myself unable to summon it at will and use it according to my choice.” According to William Michael Rossetti in Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903), the title poem originated in a suggestion from Dante Gabriel that she “turn a brief dirge-song . . . into that longish narrative, as pièce de résistance for a new volume.” The Prince’s sojourn with the Alchemist gave Rossetti some difficulties, as she explained in a 16 January 1865 letter to Dante Gabriel: “the Alchemist makes himself scarce, and I must bide his time.” Rossetti was not given to rewriting, and once written, the Alchemist remained unchanged: “He’s not precisely the Alchemist I prefigured, but thus he came,” she wrote to Dante Gabriel on 30 January, “& thus he must stay: you know my system of work.”

In a letter of 10 February she rejected Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that she try to write an episode in which the Prince would fight in a tournament, pleading inability, lack of inspiration, and the formidable precedent of Tennyson’s two tournaments in Idylls of the King (1859). Publication of the volume was delayed for a year, while Rossetti waited for Dante Gabriel’s promised illustrations. In May 1865 she, William, and their mother traveled in France, Switzerland, and Italy. That same year she met Robert Browning, who visited her in London and told her about his work in progress, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869).”

The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems was met with mildly favorable reviews. The critic for The Saturday Review (23 June 1866) thought that the title poem lacked “subtle suggestion,” while the reviewer for The Reader (30 June 1866) pronounced it “too long to suit Christina Rossetti’s genius for short lyrical thoughts.” In a letter of 6 March 1865 to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti agreed that “The Prince’s Progress” lacked “the special felicity (!) of my Goblins.” “The Prince’s Progress” has never attracted the same intensity of critical scrutiny as “Goblin Market“ and typically suffers in comparisons with that masterpiece. As the reviewer for the 23 June 1866 issue of The Athenaeum observed, the two title poems are similar in that both are allegories of temptation; in “Goblin Market,” however, temptation is overcome, while in “The Prince’s Progress” it wins out. The Prince procrastinates at great length before setting out to claim his waiting bride. He does not, however, remain true to his purpose, and on his journey he is sidetracked and delayed first by a milkmaid, then by an alchemist, and finally by a circle of ministering females who save him from drowning. When he arrives at his bride’s palace, she is dead. The element of spiritual allegory is evident in “The Prince’s Progress”; even the title echoes Bunyan’s allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress, a literary influence from Rossetti’s earliest childhood. The pilgrimage of Bunyan’s Christian through an emblematic landscape is a topos that Rossetti must have absorbed into her own consciousness, for her poems often depict journeys in which topographical details, such as paths that go uphill or downhill, are morally and spiritually significant. For instance, the easy downhill path of “Amor Mundi“ is clearly the way to damnation, while the upward climbs of “Up-hill” and “The Convent Threshold” are made by those who aspire to salvation.”

While biblical language and image are pervasive in “The Prince’s Progress,” the poem also has a fairy-tale quality; the unhappy ending, however, serves to critique the gender roles typical of that genre. Relegated to a passive role, the waiting bride dies because of the Prince’s failure to complete his quest in a timely fashion; her fate underlines the dangerous predicament of women waiting to be rescued. Elsewhere in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, however, women engage in lives of active service, deferring satisfaction in this life in favor of the reward promised in the next. In “A Portrait” the sacrifice of “youth,” “hope and joy and pleasant ways” for the sake of serving the “poor and stricken” earns the heroine union with the Bridegroom Christ in Paradise. In “A Royal Princess,” which originally appeared in Poems: An Offering to Lancashire (1863), an anthology published in support of Lancashire textile workers, the title figure realizes that her wealth and privilege are based on the enslavement of others: “Once it came into my heart and whelmed me like a flood, / That these too are men and women, human flesh and blood.” The poem ends with the princess’s rebellion against the insulation from social concerns to which she has been subject because of her class and gender; echoing the biblical Esther, she risks all in offering herself and her wealth to an angry, hungry mob.”

Dante Gabriel was highly critical of a long poem that his sister included in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.’“ Responding in a letter of 13 March 1865, Rossetti vigorously defended the woman poet’s right to explore indelicate issues such as illegitimacy: “whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be-desired unreality of women’s work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within female range such an attempt as this: where the certainly possible circumstances are merely indicated as it were in skeleton, where the subordinate characters perform (and no more) their accessory parts, where the field is occupied by a single female figure whose internal portrait is set forth in her own words. . . . and whilst it may truly be urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don’t see why ‘the Poet mind’ should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities.” The speaker of “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children’“ lives as a servant in the household of her mother, who so fears social condemnation that she does not acknowledge her illegitimate daughter. Mother and daughter suffer the lifelong consequences of illegitimacy, while the seducer father is absent from the poem and, presumably, free of social stigma. The poem shows the injustice of conventional morality in a patriarchal society and offers the equality of the grave as the only solution.”

Typically, Rossetti’s poems evince a concern with individual salvation rather than social reform. Writing to Dante Gabriel in April 1870, she declared, “It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I, and having said my say may well sit silent.” The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems lays great emphasis on the transitoriness of this life, a recurring theme in the Rossetti canon. The lesson to be learned from poems such as “On the Wing,” “Beauty is Vain,” “The Bourne,” “Vanity of Vanities,” “Grown and Flown,” “A Farm Walk,” and “Gone for Ever” is that all earthly things are unreliable, illusory, and passing. Implicitly contrasted with the fleeting quality of this life is the permanence of God and the heavenly reward. With its comparison of human and divine love, “Twice” is a characteristic statement of this theme. The speaker first offers her heart to her lover, who, with a “friendly smile” and “critical eye,” sets it aside as “unripe.” The speaker then offers the broken heart to God, with the entreaty “Refine with fire its gold, / Purge Thou its dross away.” The failure of human love is a keynote in the volume, beginning with the title poem and appearing again in “Jessie Cameron,” “The Poor Ghost,” “Songs in a Cornfield,” “One Day,” “A Bird’s-Eye View,” “Light Love,” “On the Wing,” “Maggie a Lady,” “The Ghost’s Petition,” “Grown and Flown,” and “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.’“

In the autumn of 1866 Rossetti declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. Cayley had begun studying Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossettis’ enthusiasm for Dante and endearing himself to them with his attentive visits during their father’s final illness. A hesitant romance probably began to develop between Rossetti and the awkward, absentminded scholar around 1862. Rossetti’s reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised. In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down “on grounds of religious faith.” At the time, William thought that there might be financial obstacles to the union and offered the couple a place in his household; his sister responded on 11 September 1866: “As to money I might be selfish enough to wish that were the only bar, but you see from my point of view it is not.— Now I am at least unselfish enough altogether to deprecate seeing C.B.C. continually (with nothing but mere feeling to offer) to his hamper & discomfort: but, if he likes to see me, God knows I like to see him, & any kindness you will show him will only be additional kindness loaded on me.” Much is unknown about the relationship between Cayley and Rossetti. In his memoir William notes that “Christina was extremely reticent in all matters in which her affections were deeply engaged” and that “it would have been both indelicate and futile to press her with inquiries, and of several details in the second case [Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley]— though important to a close understanding of it—I never was cognizant.” Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883, and Rossetti served as his literary executor. She declined to have a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking that they be destroyed. After Rossetti’s death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian. Composed between 1862 and 1868 and titled “Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente” (The Reddening Dawn), the sequence is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley; it was first published in Rossetti’s New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (1896).”

In 1867 Rossetti published in The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine three religious and moralistic stories: “The Waves of this Troublesome World: A Tale of Hastings Ten Years Ago” (April and May 1867), “Some Pros and Cons about Pews” (July 1867), and “A Safe Investment” (November 1867); all were republished in Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870). For this volume Rossetti was persuaded by Dante Gabriel to defect from Macmillan to his publisher, F. S. Ellis. Commonplace and Other Short Stories was a commercial failure, though reviewers singled out “The Lost Titian” and the title story, with its Jane Austen-like social comment, for praise.”

From 1870 to 1872 Rossetti was dangerously ill, at times apparently near death, with a condition characterized by fever, exhaustion, heart palpitations, stifling sensations, occasional loss of consciousness, violent headaches, palsied hands, and swelling in the neck that made swallowing difficult. Her hair fell out, her skin became discolored, her eyes began to protrude, and her voice changed. After some months her doctors diagnosed a rare thyroid condition, exophthalmic bronchocele, more commonly known as Graves’ disease. Although Rossetti recovered, the threat of a relapse always remained. Moreover, the crisis left her appearance permanently altered and her heart weakened.”

The reception of Rossetti’s collection of stories left Ellis disinclined to publish her next work, a collection of poems for children. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book was published by Routledge in 1872 and was favorably received; the public was particularly pleased by the illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Some of the poems are primarily edifying, promoting, for instance, patience or good manners; others are memory aids for learning about numbers, time, money, months, and colors. The sound and meter of these little rhymes delight the ear, and Rossetti’s wit is evident in the playfulness of lines such as “A hill has no leg, but has a foot; / A wine-glass a stem, but not a root.” Again nature presents an emblematic aspect, and the phenomena of wind, rain, growth, and death and the alternation of night and day suggest a larger order. Most of the poems are evocative of the security of an ideal childhood, but others modulate into more-serious subject matter in simple and moving explorations of death and loss. Some critics have questioned the appropriateness of these darker themes for the intended audience.”

Dante Gabriel had been prone to insomnia for some time and had become dependent on alcohol and chloral in his attempts to sleep. By June 1872 his paranoid belief that there was a conspiracy led by Robert Buchanan, author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871), to ruin his reputation had become clearly delusional, and he was raving and hearing voices. William concluded that his brother was insane and put him under the care of Dante Gabriel’s friend Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, in whose home he took a large dose of laudanum in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Cared for by friends, Dante Gabriel made a partial recovery, though he continued his use of alcohol and chloral.”

In 1873 Maria Rossetti joined the All Saints’ Sisterhood. In March 1874 William married Lucy Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. The combined household of the newly married couple and William’s mother, sister, and aunts Charlotte and Eliza Polidori was not a harmonious one.”

Following her recovery from Graves’ disease Rossetti published the first of her six volumes of devotional prose, Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874). In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols. More generally, the devotional prose provides insight into Rossetti’s symbolic method, for she repeatedly indicates that this world is to be read as “typical,” “suggestive,” “emblematical,” and “symbolical.” Annus Domini consists of 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ. The texts are arranged in the order of their appearance in the Bible, and prayers throughout are intensely Christ-centered; even Old Testament passages prompt an address to Christ.”

Rossetti returned to Macmillan for the publication of Speaking Likenesses in 1874. The book consists of three tales framed by the dialogue among a storytelling aunt and her nieces. Many readers have noted the sexual implications of the monstrous children in the first tale—boys bristling with hooks, quills, and angles; girls exuding sticky and slimy fluids—and that the predatory games they play amount to a figurative rape. While terror predominates in the first tale, in the second a young child’s desire to have a gypsy tea ends in frustration and despair as she fails to master the tasks of lighting a fire and boiling a kettle. The final tale, in which danger and temptation are overcome, rounds out the volume with a happy ending. The influence of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) is evident, and Rossetti herself described the work to Dante Gabriel in a letter of 4 May 1874 as “a Christmas trifle, would-be in the Alice style, with an eye to the market.” The title, Rossetti explained to Macmillan on 27 July 1874, refers to the way the heroines “perpetually encounter ‘speaking (literally speaking) likenesses’ or embodiments or caricatures of themselves or their faults.” Ruskin lamented in a 21 January 1875 letter to the publisher Ellis that Speaking Likenesses was the worst of the children’s books from the previous Christmas season: “How could she or Arthur Hughes sink so low after their pretty nursery rhymes?”

In 1874 Macmillan offered to bring out a new edition of Rossetti’s complete poems and inquired after new compositions. On 4 February Rossetti responded, “the possibility of your thinking proper some day to reprint my two volumes, is really gratifying to me as you may suppose; but as to the additional matter, I fear there will be little indeed to offer you. The fire has died out, it seems; and I know of no bellows potent to revive dead coals. I wish I did.” In 1875 the idea of a new edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems and Prince’s Progress and Other Poems was taken up again. In a 30 January letter to Macmillan, Rossetti said that she would try to gather new pieces as well as “waifs and strays,” poems that had appeared in magazines but had not been published in her collections. In Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875) pieces from the previous volumes and thirty-seven new ones are intermingled into a single poetic sequence. Rossetti omitted some poems from the new collection, most notably “A Triad,” “Cousin Kate,” and “Sister Maude,” all of which explore sexual issues. Evidently she did not work under her brother’s guidance in preparing the volume, for Dante Gabriel’s 3 December 1875 letter addressed the book as a fait accompli. While he conceded that “A Royal Princess” is “too good to omit,” he thought it bore the taint of “modern vicious style,” a kind of “falsetto muscularity” in part traceable to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s influence. He also perceived this taint in “No, Thank You, John” and, more prominently, in “The Lowest Room,” and he lectured his sister that “everything in which this tone appears is utterly foreign to your primary impulses” and warned that she should “rigidly keep guard” against it. Although “The Lowest Room” had been published in Macmillan’s Magazine in March 1864, Dante Gabriel had prevailed in keeping it out of The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. In this extended dialogue between two sisters the younger asks, “Why should not you, why should not I / Attain heroic strength?”—a question at the heart of the poem’s engagement with Homeric epic and with women’s search for fulfilment in the modern Christian age. The tensions between the sisters, between aspiration and opportunity, and between ambition and resignation are highly charged and never fully resolved. One speaker’s hard-won submission—”Not to be first: how hard to learn / That lifelong lesson of the past; / Line graven on line and stroke on stroke; / But, thank God, learned at last”—and acceptance of the “lowest place” are undermined in the final stanza by her anticipation of an inversion of this hierarchy in the heavenly order, where “many last be first.” This inversion of earthly and heavenly status appears again in “The Lowest Place,” the final poem in the collection. The richness of this well-known lyric comes largely from its curious blend of timidity and temerity, for self-abnegation promises to be rewarded with exaltation, and thus the speaker’s humble request is also an audacious one.”

In 1876 Rossetti, her mother, and her aunts left William’s Euston Square home and moved to Torrington Square, Bloomsbury. In November, Maria died of cancer; Christina’s reminiscence in Time Flies portrays her death as an example of spiritual confidence and anticipation of salvation. Biographers have often commented on its contrast to Christina’s deathbed anguish.”

Rossetti’s next book, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies on the Benedicite (1879), was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), which published the rest of her devotional prose works as well as Verses (1893), her collection of devotional poems. Seek and Find consists of two series of studies on the Benedicite, a long poem praising a catalogue of God’s works that is included in the Book of Common Prayer as an apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel. The first series of studies in Seek and Find, “Creation,” contemplates each item in the Benedicite—heavens, waters, the sun, birds, other animals, and human beings—in the context of its creation by providing and discussing scriptural passages that are generally, though not exclusively, from the Old Testament. The second series, “Redemption,” considers the same items in relation to Christ and cites mainly New Testament passages.”

Like many of Rossetti’s poems, her devotional works are double-edged swords of submission and assertion: while they urge obedience to divine will, they also encroach into the traditionally male territories of theological study, biblical exegesis, and spiritual guidance. Similarly, Rossetti’s views on gender issues combine the conservative with the radical. Citing biblical teaching on woman’s subordination to man, Rossetti had written to the poet Augusta Webster in 1878 that because she believed that “the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes,” she could not sign a petition for women’s suffrage. She went on, however, to suggest that suffrage is not enough to protect women’s interests and that female representation in Parliament would be more consistent with the aims of the women’s movement. She also argued for the heroic possibilities of maternal love and its potential to sweep away “the barrier of sex.” It is not uncommon to find such traces of subversiveness in Rossetti’s apparently conservative statements on gender roles. An extended discussion of the subject in Seek and Find begins with a quite traditional discussion of woman as a lesser light—a moon to man’s sun. But Rossetti then moves from a statement about the feminine lot being one of obedience to a paragraph-long comparison between the feminine role and the position that Christ voluntarily assumed on earth, and she ends with a leveling of gender hierarchies: “one final consolation yet remains to careful and troubled hearts: in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one (Gal.iii.28).”

Biographers have painted an overly simplistic portrait of the middle-aged Rossetti as narrowly conservative, reclusive, and overly pious. Her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism certainly intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord’s name printed on them. From 1876, when she moved to Torrington Square, until her final illness Rossetti worshiped at Christ Church, Woburn Square. Mackenzie Bell relates the impression that she made on a fellow member of the congregation: “A friend informs me that towards the close of her life Christina always sat in the very front pew in church. She remained until the very last before leaving the building, and it was evident from her demeanour that even then she strove to avoid ordinary conversation, evidently feeling that it would disturb her mood of mind.” Never comfortable socially, by this time she was reluctant to venture beyond her intimate circle of family and friends: she was aware that she possessed a degree of fame, and she felt self-conscious in conversations that bore the aspect of an interview. She also dreaded receiving unsolicited poems from aspiring writers, because she was torn between kindness and honesty regarding the merit of the work. Though increasingly reclusive, however, Rossetti was more politically outspoken in these later years. Critical of slavery, imperialism, and military aggression, she was most passionately committed to the antivivisection movement, at one point breaking with the S.P.C.K. over its publication of a work condoning animal experimentation. She also petitioned for legislation to protect children from prostitution and sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent.”

Rossetti’s next work, Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, published in 1881, had been completed by 1876; Macmillan had turned it down under its previous title, “Young Plants and Polished Corners.” A devotional accompaniment for the red-letter saints’ days, Called to Be Saints provides for each day an account of the saint’s life, a prayer, an intricate “memorial” in two columns linking the saint’s life with biblical texts, and descriptions of the emblem, precious stone, and flower associated with the saint and discussions of their appropriateness. Although biographers have tended to emphasize the narrowing of Rossetti’s interests in her later life in that she then wrote in an exclusively devotional vein, one might note that she dealt with a wide array of topics within this framework. In Called to Be Saints she ranges from the biblical and hagiographical to the botanical and petrographical.”

As her poetic creativity decreased, Rossetti cultivated a modest scholarly impulse. Earlier instances of her scholarly writing include her entries on Italian writers and other celebrities in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-1863); in her article on Petrarch she claims to be a descendant of Laura. In 1867 she had published the first of two articles on Dante, a commendatory piece written in support of Cayley’s terza rima translation of The Divine Comedy (1851-1855). After attending lectures on The Divine Comedy at University College, London, from 1878 to 1880 she wrote a more ambitious article, “Dante: The Poet Illustrated out of the Poem” (1884). In 1882 she considered undertaking literary biographies of Adelaide Proctor and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and she took a commission and began to research a life of Ann Radcliffe, but a lack of materials prevented her from completing it. She agreed to trace allusions to Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio for Alexander Balloch Grosart’s scholarly edition of The Faerie Queene in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser (1882-1884), a project from which she withdrew because of ill health. She spent many afternoons at the British Museum and was a tireless reader of periodicals, including The Athenaeum, Macmillan’s Magazine, The Saturday Review, Blackwood’s, and The Edinburgh Review.”

Rossetti’s research on Petrarch and Dante informs one of the most important poems of her maturity, “Monna Innominata,” which appeared in her third commercially published poetry collection, A Pageant and Other Poems (1880). A sequence of fourteen sonnets— thus subtitled “A Sonnet of Sonnets”—”Monna Innominata” draws attention to its links to the medieval amatory tradition both in its prose preface and in the epigraphs from Dante and Petrarch that introduce each sonnet. In his notes in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti William Michael Rossetti attested that the introductory prose note was “a blind interposed to draw off attention from the writer in her proper person” and that the sonnet sequence was an “intensely personal” utterance. The subject matter of love deeply felt, reciprocated, and yet unfulfilled is generally taken to refer to Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley, but its import is not limited to this context. Recent criticism of “Monna Innominata” has explored its complex intertextual operations, particularly its revisionary treatment of the sonnet form, whose gender roles Rossetti deliberately and self-consciously reverses by having the unnamed lady, traditionally the silent object of the male sonneteer’s desire, express her love. In doing so, Rossetti is emulating the gender subversion of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to whom she refers in her preface as “the Great Poetess of our day and nation.”

Although it is not the title poem, “Monna Innominata,” with its valedictory mode, its questioning of the very possibility of fulfilled desire, and its reappraisal of the sonnet form, sets the tone for A Pageant and Other Poems. Rossetti opens the volume with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to her mother, drawing attention both to the expectations raised by the tradition of the genre— “Sonnets are full of love”—and to the preponderance of sonnets in her collection: “and this my tome / Has many sonnets.” But in the sonnet sequences that follow— “Monna Innominata,” “Later Life,” “‘If thou sayest, behold, we knew it not,’“ “The Thread of Life,” and “‘Behold a Shaking’“ — Rossetti veers away from the amatory tradition by dwelling on the love of and aspiration for union with God. These sonnet sequences are complemented by the abundance of multipart poems in the volume, such as “The Months: A Pageant,” “Mirrors of Life and Death,” and “‘All thy works praise Thee, O Lord.’ A Processional of Creation,” as well as smaller poetic sequences, such as the seasonal sequence “An October Garden,” “‘Summer is Ended,’“ and “Passing and Glassing” and the three Easter poems, “The Descent from the Cross,” “‘It is finished,’“ and “An Easter Carol.”

Anticipating the final farewell to youth, beauty, and song in “Monna Innominata,” in “The Key-note” Rossetti laments “the Winter of my year” and the silencing of “the songs I used to know.” Similarly, desire is relinquished in “Till Tomorrow”:”

Long have I longed, till I am tired
Of longing and desire;
Farewell my points in vain desired,
My dying fire;
Farewell all things that die and fail and tire.

By reiteration and accretion the passing months, the progression of seasons, and blooming and fading flowers become poignant and nostalgic symbols of the process of aging. Some poems provide consolation, as when the robin in “The Key-note” “sings thro’ Winter’s rest” or in the title poem, “The Months: A Pageant,” a performance piece consisting of a procession of personifications of the twelve months, where “October” offers comfort: “Nay, cheer up sister. Life is not quite over, / Even if the year has done with corn and clover.” But the real movement of the volume is toward relinquishment of love, beauty, Italy, hope, and life itself. The final poems of the non-devotional section return to the seasonal, vegetative cycle. “An October Garden” begins, “In my Autumn garden I was fain / To mourn among my scattered roses,” while the next poem, “‘Summer is Ended,’“ asks if bliss will inevitably end as the rose does, a “Scentless, colourless, . . . meaningless thing.” The following poem, “Passing and Glassing,” confirms the human analogy readable from “withered roses . . . the fallen peach,” and “summer joy that was,” saying that “All things that pass / Are woman’s looking glass; / They show her how her bloom must fade.”

Familiar Rossetti themes are in evidence in the devotional pieces: renounced desire, weariness with this life, the “vanity of vanities” refrain, and God’s love for the unworthy supplicant. Rossetti’s youthful verses had been called morbid, and death remains a central theme in A Pageant and Other Poems but with an altered emphasis. While in earlier verses death was presented in its more-sentimental aspect, often intruding into the frailty of romantic love, in A Pageant and Other Poems it is contemplated in a subdued and personal way, as a foreseeable and inevitable event. In the sonnet sequence “Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets” Rossetti writes, “I have dreamed of Death:—what will it be to die / Not in a dream, but in the literal truth / With all Death’s adjuncts ghastly and uncouth.” Always doubting her worthiness of salvation, Rossetti imagines her deathbed and acknowledges the possibility that she “May miss the goal at last, may miss a crown.” In “The Thread of Life,” a sequence of three sonnets, the speaker contemplates the essential and solitary self, aloof from external objects and bound by “inner solitude,” and realizes that “I am not what I have nor what I do; / But what I was I am, I am even I.” This self, her “sole possession,” she offers to God. The relation of the self to the external world is again contemplated in “An Old-World Thicket,” which begins with an epigraph from Dante and is obviously engaged with the legacy of Romanticism.

In “‘All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord.’ A Processional of Creation” all aspects of the created world declare God’s glory, each according to its nature. In “Spring and Autumn” the two seasons declare, respectively, “I hope,— / And I remember,” and these vernal and autumnal attitudes resonate through the volume. In “Later Life” the speaker is “glancing back” on “Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack, / Hopes that were never ours yet seemed to be.” The devotional poems trace the yielding of unfulfilled earthly hopes in exchange for the heavenly reward. This life is full of “promise unfulfilled, of everything, / That is puffed vanity and empty talk.” Paradoxes abound in “Later Life” as Rossetti writes, “This Life we live is dead for all its breath,” “Its very Spring is not indeed like Spring,” and she looks for rebirth through “Death who art not Death.” The conundrum/insight is reiterated in the pair of sonnets titled “‘Behold a Shaking’“: “Here life is the beginning of our death, / And death the starting-point whence life ensues; / Surely our life is death, our death is life.” The final poems bring a satisfying closure to the volume, looking past the end of this life and ending with a divine embrace in “‘Love is as strong as death.’“ Though sales were sluggish, A Pageant and Other Poems was a critical success: the sonnet sequences, in particular, were praised by reviewers, and “Monna Innominata” was compared favorably with Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in Birchington on Easter Sunday 1882. Christina’s commemorative poem, “Birchington Churchyard,” was published in The Athenaeum (25 April 1882). The following winter she composed her fourth book of devotional prose, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883), in which she considers the Ten Commandments in terms of Christ’s two great commandments, to love thy God and thy neighbor. “A Harmony on First Corinthians XIII,” first published in the January 1879 issue of New and Old, a church magazine, was revised and included as an appendix.

Rossetti’s next book, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, published in 1885, is both the most readable and the most autobiographical of her devotional works. As the subtitle suggests, the book is diarylike in structure, with daily entries consisting of meditations on religious feast days and saints’ days, poetic compositions, or personal reflections and reminiscences. The most often quoted passages are those in which Rossetti describes her experiences of nature and elaborates on the moral and symbolic meaning suggested by them. She regards a spider attempting to escape its own shadow as “a figure of each obstinate impenitent sinner, who having outlived enjoyment remains isolated irretrievably with his own horrible loathsome self.” One glimpses Rossetti’s affection for God’s smallest creatures in the pleasure she took in visiting a garden where she “sat so long and so quietly that a wild garden creature or two made its appearance: a water rat, perhaps, or a water-hunting bird.” She goes on, “Few have been my personal experiences of the sort, and this one gratified me.”

After her mother’s death in 1886 Rossetti continued to keep house for her elderly aunts Charlotte and Eliza until their deaths in 1890 and 1893, respectively, while working on a commentary on the Book of Revelation. The last of Rossetti’s six devotional studies, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, published in 1892, bears the familiar dedication to her mother, but now “for the first time to her beloved, revered, cherished memory.” A substantial work, The Face of the Deep consists of wide-ranging, free-association meditations on each verse of Revelation. While some passages engage in traditional exegesis, others are more personally contemplative and address issues of spiritual and moral duty. More important for today’s reader, The Face of the Deep includes more than two hundred poems; Rossetti combined them with poems from Called to Be Saints and Time Flies into a volume of devotional poems titled simply Verses. Published in 1893 by the S.P.C.K., this collection of 331 religious lyrics was Rossetti’s last volume to appear during her lifetime. She undertook extensive revisions and arranged the poems into eight sections that form a double poetic sequence: spiritual progress is traced in terms of the individual’s relationship with God in the first four sections and from a universal perspective in the final four. Rossetti’s devotional poems have received scant critical attention, but Verses enjoyed great popularity and continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century.

In 1892 Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that was performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on 29 December 1894. Rossetti had attained fame as a poet and had earned high regard as a spiritual guide; some had even speculated, after Tennyson’s death in 1892, that she would make a suitable successor to the laureateship. After her death many articles appeared with personal reminiscences, expressing admiration of her saintliness and assessing her poetry and prose. The sole surviving sibling, William made special efforts to document his sister’s life and edit her work. In New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected he made available carefully edited and annotated texts of poems from periodicals and anthologies and many unpublished ones, some written late in Rossetti’s life and others that she had written earlier but had not published presumably because she deemed them either too personal or not up to the standard of her best work. Maude appeared in 1897 and The Poetical Works in 1904; the latter remained, despite its awkward divisions and arrangement, the standard edition of her poetry until Rebecca W. Crump’s The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1979- 1990), which prompted a modern reassessment of Rossetti’s poetry.

While many other women poets are still in the process of being “rediscovered,” Rossetti is undergoing a radical revaluation which promises a new appreciation of the complexity and variety of her work. In the century after her death her reputation survived largely on the strength of “Goblin Market” and a handful of lyrics. Her lyric gift has never been doubted, but the unassuming tone and flawless finish of these compositions has sometimes led critics to suggest that their lyric purity is achieved at the expense of intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity. Such assessments have been bolstered by William’s description of her as a “casual” and “spontaneous” poet to whom verse came “very easily, without her meditating a possible subject,” and without her having to undertake substantial revisions. More recently critics have expressed suspicion of William’s reconstruction of his sister’s life, his censorship of her letters, and his revisionist editing in the posthumous collections of her poetry.
For several decades after her death Rossetti criticism tended to be narrowly biographical, her mournful lyrics and fantastic allegories being used to construct narratives of agonizing conflict between secular and sacred impulses, renounced love, and repressed passion. In the 1980s a Rossetti renaissance began as feminist critics undertook a reexamination of her poetry, addressing particularly “Goblin Market” and exploring Rossetti’s representation of sororal bonds, female creativity, and sexuality and her critique of patriarchal amatory values and gender relations. The trends today run toward a proliferation of critical approaches, many of which re-contextualize Rossetti in Victorian culture, and toward critical interest in a wider range of her works, including her fiction, nonfiction, and children’s poetry. Critics continue to study Rossetti’s response to and influence in a women writers’ tradition; also under discussion are gender-conscious models for positioning Rossetti in the mainstream (that is, predominantly male) canon. Christina Rossetti has often been called the greatest Victorian woman poet, but her poetry is increasingly being recognized as among the most beautiful and innovative of the period by either sex.



In 1892 Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that was performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on 29 December 1894. Rossetti had attained fame as a poet and had earned high regard as a spiritual guide; some had even speculated, after Tennyson’s death in 1892, that she would make a suitable successor to the laureateship. After her death many articles appeared with personal reminiscences, expressing admiration of her saintliness and assessing her poetry and prose. The sole surviving sibling, William made special efforts to document his sister’s life and edit her work. In New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected he made available carefully edited and annotated texts of poems from periodicals and anthologies and many unpublished ones, some written late in Rossetti’s life and others that she had written earlier but had not published presumably because she deemed them either too personal or not up to the standard of her best work. Maude appeared in 1897 and The Poetical Works in 1904; the latter remained, despite its awkward divisions and arrangement, the standard edition of her poetry until Rebecca W. Crump’s The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1979- 1990), which prompted a modern reassessment of Rossetti’s poetry.

Entire article was a pleasure to read and very, very informative.. especially so the above paragraphed quoted.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/09/rip-john-ashbery-1927-2017

Poetry News
RIP John Ashbery (1927-2017)
By Harriet Staff

John Ashbery

Yesterday, we received the devastating news of the death of John Ashbery, a poet whose seemingly boundless imagination opened more avenues of exploration for generations of poets and readers alike than possibly any other writer of his generation or poet since. Beyond the honors bestowed upon Ashbery during his life, essentially all possible honors a poet might be awarded, his body of work created the paradigm for writing poetry in America during the latter half of the twentieth century and continuing on through to the current moment. We can expect further possibilities for the art of poetry to be found in Ashbery's verse for a long time to come. Many news outlets have noted Ashbery's passing, but we'll begin with word from The Guardian:

John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the rare winner of the American book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry”.

Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, WS Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.

“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in the New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us.”

But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning.

Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music”. Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.

“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

Interviewed by the Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery”, it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people”.

Ashbery had a long history with Poetry magazine, beginning in the 1950s and continuing into every decade of his life. Of particular note was the publication of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the titular poem to the collection that would go on to win Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, which originally appeared in the August 1974 issue. More recently, in the April 2011 issue, Ashbery contributed a portfolio of translations to the magazine from Rimbaud's Illuminations. In 2015, Ashbery's "The Mauve Notebook" was featured on the then new podcast for the Foundation, PoetryNow. Even until a year ago, Ashbery continued to contribute poems, with his now final appearance in the magazine with four poems from the March 2016 issue. We encourage you to head over to our new collection, "Remembering John Ashbery," to read a poem and celebrate John's life and legacy.
Originally Published: September 4th, 2017

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetrys-place-history-banned-books



Poetry’s Place in the History of Banned Books
Posted
August 09, 2017



For as long as there have been writers, there have been texts that have been challenged, censored, burned, and banned. The stories of banned literature do not just belong in the history books; even today, some of the most influential texts in our bookstores and libraries are currently being challenged or have been challenged at some point before. Here we take a look at fifteen significant poems, poetry collections, and poets that have been censored and banned throughout history. Find out more about these books and others during Banned Books Week, September 24 to 30, 2017.



Les Fleurs du Mal
Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), Charles Baudelaire

As soon as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal was published in June of 1857, thirteen of its 100 poems were arraigned for inappropriate content. On August 20, 1857, French lawyer Ernest Pinard, who had also famously prosecuted French author Gustave Flaubert, prosecuted Baudelaire for the collection.

The court banned six of the erotic poems: “Lesbos,” “Femmes damnés,” Le Léthé,” “À celle qui est trop gaie,” “Les Bijoux,” and “Les Métamorphoses du Vampire.” The offensiveness of the texts, the court held, lay not only in their context, but also in their “realism.” According to the judges, the poems “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency.”

Baudelaire was charged with a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs, and Les Fleurs du mal suffered from the controversy, becoming known only as a depraved, pornographic work.

In 1861, a second, enlarged edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published, but the six banned poems would not be republished again until Baudelaire’s 1866 collection Les Épaves, published in Belgium. The official ban on the poems was not revoked until 1949.



“We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks

One of Gwendolyn Brooks’s most famous poems, “We Real Cool,” was banned in schools in Mississippi and West Virginia in the 1970s for the penultimate sentence in the poem: “We / Jazz June.” The school districts banned the poem for the supposed sexual connotations of the word “jazz.”

However, Brooks herself maintained that that interpretation was erroneous. As she was quoted as saying in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks (University Press of Mississippi, 2003): “I didn’t mean that at all. I meant that these young men would have wanted to challenge anything that was accepted by ‘proper’ people, so I thought of something that is accepted by almost everybody, and that is summertime, the month of June. So these pool players, instead of paying the customary respect to the loveliness of June—the flowers, blue sky, honeyed weather—wanted instead to derange it, to scratch their hands in it as if it were a head of hair. This is what went through my head; that is what I meant.

“However, a space can be permitted for a sexual interpretation. Talking about different interpretations gives me a chance to say something I firmly believe—that poetry is for personal use. When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.”



Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Though many are familiar with the poems and fantastical story of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, perhaps not as well known is the book’s history of censorship. The book has been challenged and banned several times since its publication in 1865, largely due to its alleged promotion of drug use. In the book, Alice encounters a caterpillar who sits on top of a mushroom smoking hookah. Alice herself becomes exposed to psychedelic, mind- and body-altering experiences, in which she grows and shrinks in size (undoubtedly inspired by Carroll’s own experiences with a rare neurological disorder that causes hallucinations and affects the sufferer’s perception of size—later named Alice in Wonderland Syndrome).

However, it was not the drug references but the talking animals that ultimately got Carroll banned in China in 1931. Though characters like the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit remain amongst the most popular in Carroll’s Wonderland novels, General Ho Chien, the governor of Hunan province, deemed it offensive that animals were anthropomorphized and placed on the same level as humans.



Canterbury Tales
Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

In the late 1300s, Geoffrey Chaucer, considered the “father of English literature,” wrote Canterbury Tales, a humorous and critical examination of twenty-nine archetypal characters of late medieval English society. The text drew immediate criticism due to its critical look at the medieval church, as well as its obscene language and sexual innuendos, the latter of which remained a point of contention even centuries later.

In 1873, Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, achieved a federal bill that banned the mailing of “every obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter writing, print or other publication of an indecent character.” The Comstock Act, officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, banned many world classics, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for its sexual content.



Mahmoud Darwish

Though he was widely considered the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish frequently faced controversy and censorship with his work. As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his activism. He later became increasingly involved in politics, openly criticizing Arab governments and Palestinian politicians. He lived in exile from Israel for twenty-six years, until he was able to return in 1996.

In 2000, Yossi Sarid, then the education minister of Israel, suggested including works by Darwish in the school curriculum. But right-wing members of President Ehud Barak’s government threatened to introduce a motion of no-confidence. Barak said Israel was “not ready” to teach Darwish in the schools. After Darwish had learned of the controversy, he said, “It is difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem.”

The issue of Darwish’s censorship came up again in 2014, when his works were removed from a major book fair in Saudi Arabia for containing “blasphemous passages.”



Howl
Howl, Allen Ginsberg

In the mid-1950s, Allen Ginsberg began writing “Strophes,” which he later renamed “Howl,” based on a peyote-inspired vision he had of the ancient Phoenician god Moloch. On October 7, 1955, Ginsberg publicly read part of “Howl” for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, to the praise and acclaim of his fellow Beat writers. The following day, City Lights publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram asking for the manuscript of the poem. Anticipating a controversial release, before City Lights published the manuscript, Ferlinghetti asked the American Civil Liberties Union if it would defend the book in court if he were prosecuted.

Howl and Other Poems was then published on November 1, 1956, as part of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. With its long, winding lines; profane language; and frank, racy content about drug use and sexuality, Howl was deemed obscene and Ferlinghetti was arrested and taken to court.

In the case of People of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Ferlinghetti was not guilty. The defense included reviews praising the collection and the analysis of nine literary experts, all of whom agreed that the work had “literary merit, that it represented a sincere effort by the author to present a social picture, and that the language used was relevant to the theme.”



Nazim Hikmet

Considered Turkey’s greatest modern poet, acclaimed both nationally and internationally for his works, Nazim Hikmet was a Communist who was stripped of his citizenship for his political views. His work, which praised his country and the common man, was deemed “subversive” and banned in Turkey from 1938 to 1965.

Hikmet himself spent several years in Turkish prisons and in exile. He wrote many of his most popular poems during these times, such as his masterpiece Human Landscapes from My Country, which he wrote while imprisoned from 1938 to 1950.

Despite the controversy surrounding his works, Hikmet’s poems won the praise and support of artists from all over the world, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Neruda, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Now Hikmet’s work is available in more than fifty languages, and he is praised as a major figure in modern poetry.



Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence was no stranger to censorship; his novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Rainbow were censored and banned. However, many of Lawrence’s poems came under fire as well. His poems—such as “All of Us," a sequence of thirty-one war poems—attacked politicians and criticized World War I and imperial policy, but the censorship and editing of the series ultimately rendered the works unreadable.

Lawrence, who wrote poetry from 1905 until his death in 1930, struggled to get his poems into print, especially after the controversy surrounding his other published works of the time. It wasn’t until decades later that Lawrence’s works began to be published in their entirety.



Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca is one of the most important Spanish poets and dramatists of the twentieth century, the author of such celebrated works as Romancero Gitano (The Gypsy Ballads), which was reprinted seven times during his lifetime. But his work was still the object of censorship in Spain in the early 1900s. Lorca was openly homosexual and known for his outspoken socialist views, and his works were deemed dangerous for their sexual content, language, and political underpinnings.

In 1936, Lorca was shot to death by Spanish nationalists due to his support of the deposed Republican government. Lorca’s work was burned in Granada’s Plaza del Carmen and banned from Francisco Franco’s Spain. His books remained censored until Franco’s death in 1975.



Ars Amatoria
Amores (Loves) & Ars amatoria (Art of Love), Ovid

Ovid, best known for his epic poem Metamorphoses, also considered himself a “teacher of love,” so at the end of the first century BC, he wrote Ars amatoria, a guide to love and courtship for his Roman contemporaries. The poem is split into three books; the first two books instruct men how to meet, seduce, and keep a woman, and the third gives comparable advice to women. In 8 AD Caesar Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the charge of what Ovid describes as “a poem and a mistake.” The poem in question may very well have been the risqué work, but some believe it may have been Metamorphoses.

In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk living in Florence, Italy, began burning all objects he found immoral and corruptive in what would be called the Burning of the Vanities. All of Ovid’s works were included in the pyre.

Ovid’s works were challenged again a century later in Elizabethan England as Amores, elegiac poems in a set of three books that describe one of Ovid’s affairs, was proscribed in the 1599 Bishops’ Ban. Ordered by John Whitgift, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, the Bishops’ Ban resulted into the cessation of the printing of questionable books and the destruction of existing copies of those texts. Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the Amores was included in the ban.

More recently, Ars amatoria was one of the books proscribed in the American Library Association catalogue in 1904, and the U.S. Customs Service banned the import of Ars amatoria as late as 1930.



Various Plays by William Shakespeare

Although undoubtedly a stalwart of English literature, Shakespeare has not been immune to various standards of censorship and banning. The Bard’s words have not all been music to the ears of some people, who have had classics like Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear withdrawn from school reading lists because of the obscenities, as well as the references to sex and violence. These references were not the full extent of the criticism Shakespeare’s plays have gotten from censors over the years; in the early 1800s, dialogue that in any way incriminated the monarchy or members of the clergy, as well as scenes that addressed differences in social classes, was considered risqué and in bad taste.

Thomas Bowdler was the first to censor Shakespeare’s works on a grand scale. In 1807, Bowdler published the first edition of Family Shakespeare, which included a version of Hamlet with large chunks of dialogue cut out. Bowdler and his sister, Harriet Bowdler, had removed what they considered profanities, obscenities, and indecencies that they believed detracted from the “genius” of the work. Bowdler wrote that nothing “can afford an excuse for profaneness or obscenity; and if these could be obliterated, the transcendent genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine with more unclouded luster.”

While censorship of Shakespeare’s plays certainly occurred in the past, the practice is hardly ancient history. The problematic The Merchant of Venice was banned in the 1930s in schools in Buffalo and Manchester, New York, for its anti-Semitism, but in 1949, a lower court in New York refused to uphold the ban. Still, the issue arose again in 1980, when the play was banned in schools in Midland, Michigan.

In 1996, a school in New Hampshire banned Twelfth Night—in which a young woman disguises herself as a man and attracts a countess—under the school board’s Prohibition of Alternative Lifestyle Instruction Act for allegedly promoting an alternative lifestyle that isn’t good for children to learn about.

More recently, in 2011, according to Arizona state law A.R.S.-15-112, The Tempest—in which a banished duke with magical servants seeks to reclaim his throne—was deemed inappropriate for schools, as the law prohibited courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”



A Light in the Attic
A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein

Known for his whimsical illustrations and verses about mischievous children, transformed adults, and strange monsters and beasts, Shel Silverstein published his second poetry collection, A Light in the Attic, in 1981. The book spent 182 weeks on The New York Times general nonfiction bestseller list and spent fourteen weeks in the number one spot.

However, Silverstein’s books were accused of being not for children, encouraging bad behavior, and addressing topics some people deemed inappropriate for kids. Challengers at two elementary schools in Wisconsin said one poem “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them,” and that other poems “glorified Satan, suicide, and cannibalism, and also encouraged children to be disobedient.”

The book was so contested that it became number fifty-one on the list of 100 most frequently challenged books in the 1990s.



Sappho

The Greek poet Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos and is famously known for her poems of romantic longing and her affairs with other women. Though Plato referred to her as the “tenth muse,” her sexuality occasionally overshadowed her work, which was frequently viewed as obscene and objectionable. In 180 AD, the Assyrian ascetic Tatian decried Sappho as a “whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her own licentiousness.”

Before it was destroyed, the library of Alexandria housed nine collections of Sappho’s poems. But in 380 AD, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the bishop of Constantinople, ordered her work burned. Later, in 1073, Pope Gregory VII also ordered that her work be publicly burned. Most of her work was destroyed; only one complete poem survived—until the discovery of some more of her poem fragments by scholars in 1898.



Dlatego żyjemy
Dlatego żyjemy (That’s What We Live For), Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborksa is considered one of the major modern Polish poets; she published several poetry collections and was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1996. Szymborska spent much of her life in a Stalinist Poland, in which socialism was enforced upon Polish artists.

In 1949 her first book, Dlatego żyjemy, was set for publication but was banned for being too preoccupied with the war and not loyal enough to the socialist regime. The book would not be published until 1952. By 1957, however, Szymborska had renounced Communism and her early poetry, which she viewed as no longer representative of her as a writer.



Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

Seminal to the history of American verse, Leaves of Grass, a frank and sensual celebration of America and the human body, would later be considered a classic that established Whitman as one of the originators of a uniquely American poetic voice.

Fellow writer and critic Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted to persuade Whitman to drop some controversial, sexualized passages, but Whitman refused. However, when it was first published in 1855, Emerson wrote a letter to Whitman praising the collection: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”

Many critics did not give such a warm welcome to the book, which they denounced as crude and offensive. The Watch and Ward Society in Boston and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice pressured booksellers to suppress the sale of the book, and the Society of Suppression of Vice then sought to obtain a legal ban of a new edition of the book in Boston, which caused it to be famously “banned in Boston” in 1882.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844–1889
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I.

Hopkins's idiosyncratic creativity was the result of interactions with others, beginning with the members of his family. Hopkins's extended family constituted a social environment that made the commitment of an eldest son to religion, language, and art not only possible but also highly probable. His mother, Kate Smith Hopkins (1821-1900), was a devout High Church Anglican who brought up her children to be religious. Hopkins read from the New Testament daily at school to fulfill a promise he made to her. The daughter of a London physician, she was better educated than most Victorian women and particularly fond of music and of reading, especially German philosophy and literature, the novels of Dickens, and eventually her eldest son's poetry.

Her sister Maria Smith Giberne taught Hopkins to sketch. The drawings originally executed as headings on letters from her home, Blunt House, Croydon, to Hopkins's mother and father reveal the kind of precise, detailed drawing that Hopkins was taught. The influence of Maria Smith Giberne on her nephew can be seen by comparing these letter headings with Hopkins's sketch, Dandelion, Hemlock, and Ivy, which he made at Blunt House. Hopkins's interest in the visual arts was also sustained by his maternal uncle, Edward Smith, who began as a lawyer but soon made painting his profession; by Richard James Lane, his maternal great-uncle, an engraver and lithographer who frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy; and by Lane's daughters, Clara and Eliza (or Emily), who exhibited at the Society of Female Artists and elsewhere. Another maternal uncle, John Simm Smith, Jr., reinforced the religious tradition which Hopkins's mother passed on to him; Smith was churchwarden at St. Peter's, Croydon.

These artistic and religious traditions were also supported by Hopkins's paternal relations. His aunt Anne Eleanor Hopkins tutored her nephew in sketching, painting, and music. His uncle Thomas Marsland Hopkins was perpetual curate at St. Saviour's Paddington, and coauthor with Hopkins's father of the 1849 volume, Pietas Metrica Or, Nature Suggestive of God and Godliness, "by the Brothers Theophilus and Theophylact." He was married to Katherine Beechey, who, with her cousin Catherine Lloyd, maintained close contacts with the High Church Tractarian movement which deeply affected Hopkins at Oxford. Her sister, Frances Ann Beechey, was a good painter, famous in North America for her documentary paintings of the Canadian voyageurs. In 1865 she was in London, where Hopkins met her, and after 1870 she exhibited at the Royal Academy. Charles Gordon Hopkins, Hopkins's uncle, developed the family interest in languages as well as religion. He moved to Hawaii, where he learned Hawaiian and helped establish an Anglican bishopric in Honolulu. In 1856 he helped Manley Hopkins, the poet's father, become consul-general for Hawaii in London.

Manley Hopkins was the founder of a marine insurance firm. It is no accident that shipwreck, one of the firm's primary concerns, was the subject of Hopkins's most ambitious poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875). Nor can the emphasis on religion in that poem be attributed solely to the mother's influence. Manley Hopkins was a devout High Church Anglican who taught Sunday School at St. John's in Hampstead, where he was churchwarden. He loved music and literature, passing on his fondness for puns and wordplay to his sons Gerard and Lionel and his love for poetry to Gerard especially. His publications include A Philosopher's Stone and Other Poems (1843), Pietas Metrica (1849), and Spicelegium Poeticum, A Gathering of Verses by Manley Hopkins (1892). He also reviewed poetry for the London Times and wrote one novel and an essay on Longfellow, which were never published.

This concern for art, language, and religion in Hopkins's extended family had a direct effect on the Hopkins children. Hopkins's sister Milicent (1849-1946) was originally interested in music but eventually became an "out-sister" of All Saints' Home, an Anglican sisterhood founded in London in 1851. She took the sister's habit in 1878. Hopkins's sister Kate (1856-1933) shared her brother's love of languages, humor, and sketching. She helped Robert Bridges publish the first edition of Hopkins's poems. Hopkins's youngest sister, Grace (1857-1945), set some of his poems to music and composed accompaniments for Hopkins's melodies for poems by Richard Watson Dixon and Robert Bridges.

Hopkins's brother Lionel (1854-1952) sustained the family interest in languages. He was top of the senior division of Modern School at Winchester, with a reputation for thoughtful and thorough work in French and German. He became a world-famous expert on archaic and colloquial Chinese. He loved puns, jokes, parodies, and all kinds of wordplay as much as his father and his brother Gerard. Hopkins's brother Arthur (1847-1930) continued the family interest in the visual arts. He was an excellent sketcher and became a professional illustrator and artist. He illustrated Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native in 1878, was a member of the Royal Watercolour Society, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. The youngest brother, Everard (1860-1928), followed in Arthur's footsteps. He too became a professional illustrator and cartoonist for newspapers and periodicals, and he exhibited his watercolors and pastels in London. Both Everard and Arthur were regular contributors to Punch and shared Hopkins's admiration for the paintings of John Everett Millais.

The relationship between Hopkins and his father reveals important early instances of creative collaboration and competition within the family. Hopkins copied eleven of the poems from his father's volume A Philosopher's Stone into his Oxford notebooks. In those poems his father expressed a Keatsian dismay over science's threat to a magical or imaginative response to nature. Manley Hopkins's desire to preserve a Wordsworthian love of nature in his children is evident in his "To a Beautiful Child":




... thy book

Is cliff, and wood, and foaming waterfall;

Thy playmates--the wild sheep and birds that call

Hoarse to the storm;--thy sport is with the storm

To wrestle;--and thy piety to stand

Musing on things create, and their Creator's hand!

This was a remarkably prophetic poem for Manley Hopkins's first "beautiful child," Gerard, born only a year after this poem was published. The phrase "And birds that call/Hoarse to the storm," invites comparison with the son's images of the windhover rebuffing the big wind in "The Windhover" (1877) and with the image of the great stormfowl at the conclusion of "Henry Purcell" (1879). The father's prophecy, "thy sport is with the storm/To wrestle" is fulfilled in Gerard's The Wreck of the Deutschland and "The Loss of the Eurydice" (1878). These two shipwreck poems, replete with spiritual instruction for those in doubt and danger, were the son's poetic and religious counterparts to his father's 1873 volume, The Port of Refuge, or advice and instructions to the Master-Mariner in situations of doubt, difficulty, and danger.

Gerard's response to nature was also influenced by a poem such as "A Bird Singing in a Narrow Street," one of the eleven poems from The Philosopher's Stone he copied into his notebook. This theme of the bird confined recurs most obviously in Gerard's "The Caged Skylark" (1877) but may be detected even in comments on the imprisoning narrowness of urban civilization in his letters. In addition, the son answered the father's representation of a bird filling the "throbbing air" with sound and "making our bosoms to thy cadence thrill" in "The Nightingale" (1866):




For he began at once and shook

My head to hear. He might have strung

A row of ripples in the brook,

So forcibly he sung,

The mist upon the leaves have strewed,

And danced the balls of dew that stood

In acres all above the wood.

This particular motif of the singing bird appears again in Gerard's "Spring" (1877): "and thrush/Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing." The father's attempt to represent what it is like to live in a bird's environment, moreover, to experience daily the "fields, the open sky, /The rising sun, the moon's pale majesty; /The leafy bower, where the airy nest is hung" was also one of the inspirations of the son's lengthy account of a lark's gliding beneath clouds, its aerial view of the fields below, and its proximity to a rainbow in "Il Mystico" (1862), as well as the son's attempt to enter into a lark's existence and express its essence mimically in "The Woodlark" (1876). A related motif, Manley's feeling for clouds, evident in his poem "Clouds," encouraged his son's representation of them in "Hurrahing in Harvest" (1877) and "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" (1888).

Competition and collaboration between father and son continued even long after Hopkins left home to take his place in the world. In 1879, for instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Bridges, "I enclose some lines by my father called forth by the proposal to fell the trees in Well Walk (where Keats and other interesting people lived) and printed in some local paper." Two months later Hopkins composed "Binsey Poplars" to commemorate the felling of a grove of trees near Oxford. Clearly, competition with his father was an important creative stimulus.

In addition to specific inspirations such as these, the father communicated to his son a sense of nature as a book written by God which leads its readers to a thoughtful contemplation of Him, a theme particularly evident in Manley and Thomas Marsland Hopkins's book of poems, Pietas Metrica. Consequently, Gerard went on to write poems which were some of the best expressions not only of the Romantic approach to nature but also the older tradition of explicitly religious nature poetry.

Pietas Metrica was devoted explicitly to that marriage of nature and religion which became characteristic of Gerard's poetry. This book is also valuable as a model of the norm of contemporary religious nature poetry which Hopkins was trying both to sustain and surpass. The aims of the authors of Pietas Metrica became Hopkins's own. As noted in the preface, "It was the design of the writers of this volume to blend together two of Man's best things, Religion and Poetry. They aimed at binding with another tie the feeling of piety with external nature and our daily thoughts. The books of Nature and Revelation have been laid side by side and read together.

The most joyous synchronic reading of the Bible and the Book of Nature was the hymn of creation, a traditional genre inspired by Psalm 148 to which such poems of Gerard's as "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), "Hurrahing in Harvest," and "Easter" (1866) belong. A line such as "Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes" in Hopkins's "Easter," for instance, would normally be ascribed to the influence of George Herbert, but the representation of a flower "breathing up to heaven/The incense of her prayer" like a "natural altar" in "The Fraxinella" in Pietas Metrica reveals that it is just as appropriate to look to contemporary poetry for a context for Hopkins's poems as it is to look back to Metaphysical poets such as Herbert. Indeed, in some cases it may be more appropriate to seek contemporary models. Though Herbert's "The Flower" is a famous example of a flower straining toward heaven, he employs no satellite imagery of opening eyes; indeed he only twice uses the word ope in all of his poems, neither time referring to flowers, and he never uses the adjective heavenward.

The personification of Earth in Hopkins's "Easter"--"Earth throws Winter's robes away, /Decks herself for Easter Day"--also recalls the personification of Nature in "Catholic Truth" from Pietas Metrica. A reader of Hopkins's poetry familiar with contemporary creation hymns such as "Catholic Truth" would also expect the song rhythm which Hopkins employs in the third stanza of "Easter," because in this genre nature, rather than mankind, is usually represented as more faithfully singing God's praise:




Gather gladness from the skies;

Take a lesson from the ground;

Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes

And a Spring-time joy have found;

Earth throws Winter's robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.

Ultimately, mankind joins in the song in related hymns in this genre, including Christina Rossetti's "And there was no more Sea," in which all possible voices are united "In oneness of contentment offering praise." Hence Hopkins extends the rhythm to include man in the fourth stanza of "Easter":




Beauty now for ashes wear,

Perfumes for the garb of woe.

Chaplets for dishevelled hair,

Dances for sad footsteps slow;

Open wide your hearts that they

Let in joy this Easter Day.



Although man and nature are ultimately bound by love in one hymn of creation, contemporary readers of poems such as "Easter" know that nature is traditionally represented not only as more consistently heeding the commandment to song which concludes Hopkins's "Easter" but also as best fulfilling the demand of his first stanza for a plenitude of offerings:




Break the box and shed the nard;

Stop not now to count the cost;

Hither bring pearl, opal, sard;

Reck not what the poor have lost;

Upon Christ throw all away:

Know ye, this is Easter Day.

"Where are the Nine?" in Pietas Metrica develops this concept of nature's unstinted offering and points the traditional contrast between man and nature implicit in the first stanza of "Easter": "And is it so that Nature stints her praise, /With niggard thanks makes offering to her God?" The answer of Hopkins's father and uncle is clear:




No, Nature is not backward, she declares

Each blessing as it comes, and owns her Lord,

She is no miser of her thanks, she spares

No praise, due to Heaven, beloved adored.

Hopkins agreed with his father and uncle that man seemed "backward" in comparison with nature, especially in "God's Grandeur," "Spring," "In the Valley of the Elwy" (1877), "The Sea and the Skylark" (1877), "Binsey Poplars," "Duns Scotus's Oxford" (1879), and "Ribblesdale" (1882). Hopkins also discovered to his despair the truth of the final complaint of "Where are the Nine?":




Alas for man! day after day may rise,

Night may shade his thankless head,

He sees no God in the bright, morning skies

He sings no praises from his guarded bed.



This apparent disappearance of God from nature in the nineteenth century inspired some of the didacticism which pervades Hopkins's later nature poetry. Unlike the Romantics, many Victorians thought of nature as another Book of Revelation to be used for the same practical ends as the Bible: to inculcate lessons in the religious life. As the statement in the Hopkins brothers' preface about placing the books of Nature and Revelation side by side suggests, Pietas Metrica is an excellent illustration of this tradition. While the Wordsworthian influence in the volume is occasionally implicit in poems such as "Love," the sermonical aim is almost always explicit, as in the title "Autumnal Lessons."

Flowers were especially popular for purposes of instruction, their function in Hopkins's "Easter." The flowers in "Catholic Truth," for example, are "All telling the same truth; their simple creed," and the author of "The Fraxinella" sighs, with the exclamation mark so characteristic of Hopkins, "Ah! could our hearts/Read thoughtful lessons from thy modest leaves." When we place Hopkins's nature poetry in this tradition we not only perceive the contemporary precedents for the homilies which conclude so many of his nature poems, we also begin to discern some of the distinguishing features of his didacticism. Hopkins's commands strike us as more direct and imperative, and we discover that his religious poetry was unusually proselytical before he became a Catholic and long before he became a Jesuit.

Nature poetry was not the only area in which father and son were rivals. Romantic love of childhood as well as nature is evident in Manley Hopkins's "To a Beautiful Child" and "The Nursery Window," and this theme of childhood innocence is also stressed by his son in "Spring," "The Handsome Heart" (1879), and "The Bugler's First Communion" (1879). The father also composed straightforward religious poems such as his long poem on John the Baptist in A Philosopher's Stone, and the son soon surpassed his father in this category as well. Gerard's many poems about martyrs recall his father's preoccupation with physical suffering in poems such as "The Grave-Digger" and "The Child's Dream" from A Philosopher's Stone.

The son's melancholy, evident in poems such as the undated "Spring and Death," "Spring and Fall" (1880), and "The Leaden Echo" (1882), can also be traced to poems such as his father's sonnet "All things grow old--grow old, decay and change" and "A Philosopher's Stone," which warns that "The withered crown will soon slide down/ A skull all bleached and blent" and concludes in that didactic mode typical of several of his son's religious poems:




"The Alchymists rare, are they who prepare

For death ere life be done;

And by study hard WITHIN THE CHURCHYARD

IS FOUND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE."

Gerard also wrote a poem about an alchemist, "The Alchemist in the City," but the poem of his which captures this didactic tone best is perhaps The Wreck of the Deutschland, especially the eleventh stanza:




`Some find me a sword; some

The flange and the rail; flame,

Fang, or flood' goes Death on drum,

And storms bugle his fame.

But we dream we are rooted in earth--Dust!

Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,

Wave with the meadow, forget that there must

The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.



The son clearly surpassed the father in many ways. For instance, the son resisted the temptation to become morbid better than the father's example might lead one to expect. Compare Gerard Manley Hopkins's version of an attempted rescue with the account in the London Times, one of the sources he used for The Wreck of the Deutschland. According to the Times , "One brave sailor, who was safe in the rigging went down to try to save a child or woman who was drowning on deck. He was secured by a rope to the rigging, but a wave dashed him against the bulwark, and when daylight dawned his headless body, detained by the rope, was swinging to and fro with the waves." Hopkins wrote:




One stirred from the rigging to save

The wild woman-kind below,

With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave--

He was pitched to his death at a blow,

For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:

They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro

Through the cobbled foam-fleece.

Hopkins transformed the prose into song, but he deleted the morbid details of the decapitation.

It was no doubt partly to escape contemplation of such details connected with his marine-insurance business that Manley Hopkins cultivated a Wordsworthian love of nature. The example of Wordsworth's youth in nature and the contrasting example of Coleridge's youth in the city, "Debarr'd from Nature's living images, /Compelled to be a life unto itself" (The Prelude VI: 313-314), encouraged Manley Hopkins to live in Hampstead rather than in London proper where he worked. He moved his family to Hampstead in 1852, and Gerard and his brother Cyril (1846-1932), who later rejoined his father's firm, were sent to live with relatives in the Hainault Forest, where they spent the summer exploring and studying nature. When he returned to his family, Gerard found himself living near groves of lime and elm, many fine views, the garden where Keats composed his "Ode to a Nightingale" under a mulberry tree and the Heath celebrated in painting after painting by Constable. Hopkins obviously enjoyed living there: Cyril recalls that he was a fearless climber of trees, especially the lofty elm which stood in their garden.

At the age of ten, Hopkins left the garden and his family home for Robert Cholmondley's boarding school at Highgate, a northern height of London less populous and more forested than Hampstead. Like Hampstead, it commanded a good view of the surrounding area and was associated with the memories of such artists as Marvell, Lamb, Keats, and De Quincey; the tomb, even the coffin, of Coleridge could be seen in Highgate when Hopkins was there. One of Hopkins's friends at Highgate was Coleridge's grandson E. H. Coleridge, who became a biographer of Byron and named one of his sons after his friend Hopkins. While at Highgate Hopkins composed "The Escorial" (1860), his earliest poem extant. The description of the destruction of the Escorial by the sweeping rain and sobbing wind recalls Byron, but the allusions to Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rubens, and Claude, as well as to various styles of architecture, reveal Hopkins's desire to unite in some way his love of the visual arts and his love of poetry.

The sketches of Bavarian peasants Hopkins produced when his father took him to southern Germany in 1860 reveal his growing interest in being a painter as well as a poet. The only drawing manual in the Hopkins family library, as far as is known, was John Eagles's The Sketcher (1856). Rev. Eagles, who was Manley Hopkins's maternal uncle, recommends the classical idealism of Gaspard Poussin and an elegant, expressive mode of pastoral. However, the fourth volume of John Ruskin's Modern Painters was published the same year as The Sketcher, and it promulgated important modifications of Eagles's ideal of amateur drawing. Ruskin's emphasis on objective, detailed representation of nature soon became evident in the sketches of Hopkins and other members of his family.

Hopkins's Ruskinese sketches are significant because although Hopkins is remembered as a poet, he wanted to be a painter, deciding against it finally because he thought it was too "passionate" an exercise for one with a religious vocation. Nevertheless, even after he became a Jesuit he continued to cultivate an acquaintance with the visual arts through drawing and attendance at exhibitions, and this lifelong attraction to the visual arts affected the verbal art for which he is remembered. In his early poetry and in his journals wordpainting is pervasive, and there is a recurrent Keatsian straining after the stasis of the plastic arts.

Hopkins's finely detailed black-and-white sketches were primarily important to him as special exercises of the mind, the eye, and the hand which could alter the sketcher's consciousness of the outside world. The typical Hopkins drawing is what Ruskin called the "outline drawing"; as Ruskin put it, "without any wash of colour, such an outline is the most valuable of all means for obtaining such memoranda of any scene as may explain to another person, or record for yourself, what is most important in its features." Many such practical purposes for drawing were advanced by Ruskin, but his ultimate purpose was to unite science, art, and religion. As Humphry House put it, "Because the Romantic tradition said that Nature was somehow the source of important spiritual experience, and because the habit of mind of the following generation (with an empiric scientific philosophy) was to dwell lovingly on factual detail, a suspicion came about that perhaps the cause of the spiritual experience lay in detail."

This is part of the motivation for the obsession with minute detail seen in Hopkins's Manor Farm, Shanklin Sept. 21, 1863 and in his May 12 n. r. Oxford. According to Ruskin, those who sketched in this way possessed the further advantage of cultivating certain special powers of the eye and the mind: "By drawing they actually obtained a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline, and which could only be known by the experienced student--he only could known how the eye gained physical power by the attention to details, and that was one reason why delicate drawings had, above all others, been most prized; and that nicety of study made the eye see things and causes which it could not otherwise trace." Manor Farm uses fairly heavy shading but combines it with fine detail for a more delicate effect. An effect of lighter delicacy is achieved in May 12 n. r. Oxford, a sketch of a convolvulus, by restricting the heavy shading to the shadows and by using fairly delicate gradations.

The powers of the mind which such study granted included the cultivation of patience, discipline, earnestness, and a love of work for its own sake, but perhaps the most important power developed was the ability to concentrate. Ruskin stressed the importance of concentration to perceptions of the unity of things: "No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look." By concentrating on the whole of a thing Hopkins was able to discover the "inscape," the distinctively unifying pattern of, say, "a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping--regularly curled knots springing up if I remember from fine stems, like foliage on wood or stone--had strongly grown on me.... Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.... if you look well at big pack-clouds overhead you will soon find a strong large quaining and squaring in them which makes each pack imprerssive and whole." By concentrating in this way also on the formal aspects of running water he was able to discover some of the deeper, recurrent formations of "scaping" even in a tumultuous river: "by watching hard the banks began to sail upstream, the scaping unfolded." This kind of concentration was clearly aided by drawing exercises such as July 18. At the Baths of Rosenlaui.

A search for recurring regularity and distinctively unifying forms was one of the primary motivations of an outline drawing of a tree such as June 26, '68. Many of Hopkins's sketches of trees seem to be attempts to discover what Ruskin called the "fountain-like impulse" of trees in which "each terminates all its minor branches at its outer extremity, so as to form a great outer curve, whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species"; ultimately both Ruskin and Hopkins were seeking "organic unity; the law, whether of radiation or parallelism, or concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees."

One of Hopkins's journal entries makes this motivation clear and serves as an effective summary of his typically Victorian union of science and aesthetics: "Oaks: the organization of this tree is difficult. Speaking generally no doubt the determining planes are concentric, a system of brief contiguous and continuous tangents, whereas those of the cedar would roughly be called horizontals and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards jutting points. But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating and the leaves grow some way in there is of course a system of spoke-wise clubs of greensleeve-pieces.... I have seen also the pieces in profile with chiselled outlines, the blocks thus made detached and lessening towards the end.... Oaks differ much, and much turns on the broadness of the leaves, the narrower giving the crisped and starring and Catherine-wheel forms, the broader the flat-pieced or shard-covered ones, in which it is possible to see composition in dips etc on wider bases than the single knot or cluster." Hopkins discovered that his genius lay in such translations of visual perceptions into words.

His drawings were often remarkably similar to the early sketches of his brother Arthur, although Arthur's drawings are often more fully detailed and unified. Hence it is difficult to accept the belief of critics that Gerard had more talent than his brother. On the contrary, the differences between Gerard's sketches and Arthur's suggest a need to revise the accepted opinion that Gerard could have been a professional painter if he had wanted to. Rather, it would appear that just as Lope de Vega's success in Spanish drama induced Cervantes to develop an alternative genre, Arthur Hopkins's superior sketching abilities encouraged his older brother to concentrate his energies on literary and religious creativity instead.

This sibling rivalry between Hopkins and his brother Arthur reveals how crucial adaptive compromise can be in the development of a genius's creative potential. Although some of Hopkins's drawings suggest that he could have achieved more detail if he had tried, it is apparent that, while he shared the motivations of his family for drawing, he soon developed specific aims and interests which often differed significantly from theirs. His letter of 10 July 1863 to his friend A. W. M. Baillie confirms that he had developed special interests and did not find any member of his own family a congenial thinker in these matters: "I venture to hope you will approve of some of the sketches in a Ruskinese point of view:--if you do not, who will, my sole congenial thinker on art?"

Some of the differences between Hopkins's aims and those of his brother Arthur are most obvious in the results of their sketching from the cliff in Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in 1863. Arthur, focusing on an unusual bridgelike rock formation in the sea, produced a memorable subject for a picturesque travel record: Arched Rock. Freshwater Bay. (from the cliff) July 23. 1863. Gerard, on the other hand, tried to reproduce the pattern made by the waves below and wrote: "Note: The curves of the returning wave overlap, the angular space between is smooth but covered with a network of foam. The advancing wave, already broken, and now only a mass of foam, upon the point of encountering the reflux of the former. Study from the cliff above. Freshwater Gate. July 23." Gerard's aims clearly diverged from Arthur's in at least two important ways: he became more interested in drawing as a means of visual research and more willing to supplement this visual art with verbal art.

In addition, these two sketches illustrate the meaning of "inscape," that conundrum of Hopkins's readers. A common misconception of the word is that it signifies simply a love of the unique particular, the unusual feature, the singular appearance, but that meaning fits Arched Rock better than it does Gerard's note on waves. Gerard lost interest in what was merely unique; as in the wave study he usually sought the distinctively unifying design, the "returning" or recurrent pattern, the internal "network" of structural relationships which clearly and unmistakably integrates or scapes an object or set of objects and thus reveals the presence of integrating laws throughout nature and a divine unifying force or "stress" in this world. The suggestion of metaphysical significance is obvious in an 1874 note by Hopkins on waves: "The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics."

Arthur was also fascinated by waves and produced some excellent sketches of them, especially 1st September, '75, Breaking Waves, Whitby, and Study of the back of a breaking wave seen from above and behind. Whitby. 30 Aug. '75. These sketches are clearly superior to any of Gerard's drawings of waves in detail, finish, delicacy of shading, and illusion of motion. Likewise, Arthur's Study of 'The Armed Knight', a reef at the Land's End. 4 Sept. '79 easily surpasses Gerard's 1863 sketches of rock formations, both in truth of detail and aesthetic development, and his At Whitnash. Warwickshire 8 Sept. '77 reproduces more subtle and delicate effects of light and shade than Gerard achieved in his studies of groups of trees.

Gerard did not even try to sketch the majesty and sublimity of an ocean wave as Arthur did, however. Characteristically, in his Study from the cliff above Gerard conveyed the motion of the waves with words. Phrases such as "the advancing wave already broken, and now only a mass of foam" supply a scenario, a succession of events in time to complement the spatial representation. Eagles recommended not only sea-pieces such as this but also shipwrecks, and eventually this advice, along with similar recommendations from Ruskin, and the family preoccupation with danger at sea due to the father's insurance business inspired Gerard's attempt to represent a shipwreck. Besides his father's publication of Port of Refuge another factor that motivated Gerard may well have been Arthur's wave studies of 30 August and 1 September 1875.

Only a few months after Arthur executed these studies, Gerard began his own response to the sea in the genre which was to make him famous: not painting, but poetry. If he had insisted on competing directly with his brother, he might well have gone on to become a draughtsman less well known than Arthur. However, his response to the sea, The Wreck of the Deutschland, was in some ways an even better fulfillment of the suggestion of his great-uncle, John Eagles, that those who appreciate the sublime acquire "greater notions of the power and majesty of Him who maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind."

It has been argued that the visual image, the painter's vision, is predominant in Hopkins's journal, but the essence of his creativity was verbal rather than visual, as this description of a glacier reveals: "There are round one of the heights of the Jungfrau two ends or falls of a glacier. If you took the skin of a white tiger or the deep fell of some other animal and swung it tossing high in the air and then cast it out before you it would fall and so clasp and lap round anything in this way just as this glacier does and the fleece would part in the same rifts: you must suppose a lazuli under-flix to appear. The spraying out of one end I tried to catch but it would have taken hours: it is this which first made me think of a tiger-skin, and it ends in tongues and points like the tail and claws: indeed the ends of the glaciers are knotted or knuckled like talons." Hopkins had tried to "catch" the spraying out of one end of the glacier in three sketches inscribed July 15, '68; July 15; and July 15, Little Scheidegg, but he realized that he had relatively little talent for sketching. He could have "taken hours" and persisted, but instead he let his visual impression stimulate his linguistic creativity, specifically his extraordinary capacity for metaphor. His frustration in one genre only stimulated him to be creative in another.

A similar shift from the visual to the verbal is suggested by his "A Vision of the Mermaids" (1862), a pen-and-ink drawing followed by a poem, both apparently inspired by the poetic vision of the mermaids in The Sketcher. Eagles's comment, "How difficult it would be, by any sketch, to convey the subject!," explains why Hopkins followed his drawing with words such as the following:




Plum-purple was the west; but spikes of light

Spear'd open lustrous gashes, crimson-white;

(Where the eye fix'd, fled the encrimsoning spot,

And gathering, floated where the gaze was not;)

And thro' their parting lids there came and went

Keen glimpses of the inner firmament:

Fair beds they seem'd of water-lily flakes

Clustering entrancingly in beryl lakes.

This kind of poetic diction reflects the influence of one of Hopkins's teachers at Highgate, Richard Watson Dixon. Dixon had been involved in the vanguard of much that seemed exciting in the art of the time. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had taught him painting and had praised his poems. Dixon's Christ's Company and Other Poems (1861) featured Rossetti's decorative, sensuous beauty and remote dream worlds and a typically Victorian love of wordpainting.

Yet Dixon's title emphasizes the fact that his longer poems are High Church hagiographical verses and the Incarnation is a pervasive theme in the poems in this volume. Dixon had been attracted to the Oxford Pre-Raphaelites who followed Rossetti because of their Ruskinese stress on Christian art and because of the original pietism of the group itself. Almost every member of the group had initially intended to take Holy Orders, but most of them were deflected from their purpose by their desire to be artists. Dixon also at one point had given up his religious commitment to become a Pre-Raphaelite painter, but, unlike other members of the group, Dixon finally did take Holy Orders. He thus became an important model for Hopkins of the possibility of combining poetic and religious vocations.

Hopkins praised and respected Dixon's poetry and even copied out favorite stanzas when he entered the Jesuit novitiate. The affinities between Dixon's poems and Hopkins's early poetry are evident when we compare the descriptions of the sunsets in "The Sicilian Vespers," Dixon's boyhood prize poem, and in "A Vision of the Mermaids," thought by some to be one of Hopkins's best poems at Highgate. Both teacher and student focus on an isle breaking the sunset's tide of light; and both reveal a preference for iambic pentameter couplets and the adjectival compounds, long sentences, and colorful pictorial images characteristic of Victorian wordpainting.

In short, Dixon introduced Hopkins to "the school of Keats" in Victorian poetry. As Hopkins recalled, Dixon would "praise Keats by the hour." The result is obvious in "A Vision of the Mermaids," which reproduces the archaic diction, literary and mythological allusiveness, precious neologisms, luxurious sensuality, subjective dreaminess, and amoral, otherworldly aestheticism of Keats's early poems. Hopkins's comments about Keats's choice of subjects apply to his own poem as well: "His contemporaries ... still concerned themselves with great causes [such] as liberty and religion, but he lived in mythology and fairyland the life of a dreamer." The mermaids' song of "piteous siren sweetness" in Hopkins's poem, the Keatsian temptation for him and the other Victorian poets, was to live alone in a world of private visions where the reality of the impersonal world might be freely altered to fit personal desire.

Yet Hopkins could resist the temptation even in his early poetry. Again what he said about Keats applies as well to his own early poems: "even when he is misconstructing one can remark certain instinctive turns of construction in his style, shewing his latent power." The most significant "instinctive turn" in Hopkins's early poetry occurs in "Il Mystico" (1862), in which older, more traditional religious ideals replace his Keatsian dream visions. "Il Mystico" anticipates that general move that Hopkins, like Tennyson, made from the imitation of Keats to a more explicitly Christian Romanticism, a conversion which enabled him to fulfill his own prophecy for Keats: "what he did not want to live by would have asserted itself presently and perhaps have been as much more powerful than that of his contemporaries as his sensibility or impressionableness, by which he did not want to live, was keener and richer than theirs."

"Il Mystico" contains another "instinctive turn." The poem begins as an imitation of Milton's "Il Penseroso," but its development embodies in embryo the general movement in Hopkins's early art from representations of ideal worlds to representations of this world which culminated in his famous 1877 poems on nature. His initial attempt to attain a spiritual vision in "Il Mystico" is fragmented until the speaker finds that his best expression of his aspiration for some other, more perfect realm is an objective correlative in nature, the ascent of the lark, which translates that desire into action.

Hopkins cultivated this "instinctive turn" and the result was his first published poem, "Winter with the Gulf Stream," which appeared in the popular periodical Once a Week on 14 February 1863, when Hopkins was only eighteen years old. This poem reveals the beginning of Hopkins's movement away from a pseudo-Keatsian dreamy subjectivity toward imitation of those traits of Keats's most valuable to Hopkins at this stage of his development: mastery of objective correlatives and evocative natural detail. Rather than being introduced to the speaker, as we are in "A Vision of the Mermaids," we are introduced to the object. The poem begins not with "Rowing, I reached a rock," but with "The boughs, the boughs"; the "I" is not introduced until six stanzas later. The objects to which we are initially introduced are, moreover, more closely observed than those of his earlier poems. We are not shown general features of a landscape from a distance but an immediate foreground of branches and vines--"Frost furred our ivies are and rough/With bills of rime the brambles shew." Instead of masses of trees we are shown their leaves hissing and scuttling along the ground and the clammy coats of foliage they become when the rain-blasts are unbound.

Hopkins eventually began to be critical of mere love of detail, however--"that kind of thought which runs upon the concrete and the particular, which disintegrates and drops toward atomism in some shape or other," he wrote in his journal--and he became increasingly aware of the importance of religion as the ultimate source of unity.

His religious consciousness increased dramatically when he entered Oxford, the city of spires. From April of 1863, when he first arrived with some of his journals, drawings, and early Keatsian poems in hand, until June of 1867 when he graduated, Hopkins felt the charm of Oxford, "steeped in sentiment as she lies," as Matthew Arnold had said, "spreading her gardens to the moonlight and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages." Here he became more fully aware of the religious implications of the medievalism of Ruskin, Dixon, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Inspired also by Christina Rossetti, the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist, and by the Victorian preoccupation with the fifteenth-century Italian religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola, he soon embraced Ruskin's definition of "Medievalism" as a "confession of Christ" opposed to both "Classicalism" ("Pagan Faith") and "Modernism" (the "denial of Christ").

At Oxford Hopkins's consciousness of competition with contemporaries increased, apparently partly as a result of the tradition of oral contests which persisted at Oxford and also because of Hopkins's decision to focus on classical studies which tended to be highly agonistic and rhetorically oriented. At Highgate Hopkins was encouraged to begin his literary career as a student of Keats by his teacher Dixon, who also showed Hopkins how to resist Keats's dominance, partly by sublimating it in devotional poetry. While the initiation and direction of Hopkins's creativity in the relationship with Dixon was positive, Hopkins's relationship with a more famous teacher at Oxford, Walter Pater, was fiercely dialectical, with Hopkins defining his position in opposition to Pater's. Yet there was also a curious symbiotic quality in their relationship; they remained friends and shared related interests in Dante, Savonarola, medievalism, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Among the Pre-Raphaelites the most important figure for Hopkins was Christina Rossetti. She benefited from the emphasis on the feminine in the Pre-Raphaelite focus on Marian figures such as Dante's Beatrice. When Hopkins met her in 1864 he met an icon, the model for the Virgin in the paintings of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She influenced Hopkins more than any other contemporary at this point in his career and was particularly important in Hopkins's replacement of Keats with Dante as the dominant paradigm in his poetic imagination.

Christina Rossetti became for Hopkins the embodiment of the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Oxford Movement, and Victorian religious poetry generally. In the 1860s Hopkins was profoundly influenced by her example and succeeded, unbeknownst to her and to the critics of his time, in becoming a rival far greater than any of her contemporaries.

Their rivalry began with Hopkins's response to her poem "The Convent Threshold." Geoffrey Hartman was clearly on the right track when he suggested in the introduction to Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) that "Hopkins seems to develop his lyric structures out of the Pre-Raphaelite dream vision. In his early `A Vision of the Mermaids' and `St. Dorothea' he may be struggling with such poems as Christina Rossetti's `Convent Threshold' and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's `The Blessed Damozel,' poems in which the poet stands at a lower level than the vision, or is irrevocably, pathetically distanced." Such poems were the essence of medievalism in poetry according to William Morris, who felt that Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" was the germ from which all Pre-Raphaelite poetry sprang. Standing beyond Keats, however, the primary source was Dante. Christina Rossetti clearly alludes to Beatrice's appeal to Dante in "The Convent Threshold":




I choose the stairs that mount above,

Stair after golden skyward stair,

.............................

Lo, stairs are meant to lift us higher:

Mount with me, mount the kindled stair.

Your eyes look earthward, mine look up.

.........................................

How should I rest in Paradise,

Or sit on steps of heaven alone?

.............................

Oh save me from a pang in heaven,

By all the gifts we took and gave,

Repent, repent, and be forgiven.



Hopkins read this appeal at a crucial moment in his career, when he was actually considering renouncing his own powerful attraction to this world for a life beyond the cloister threshold. He translated portions of Rossetti's poem into Latin elegiacs and devoted much of his poetic creativity in 1864 to his own response to it, which he called at first "A Voice from the World" (later "Beyond the Cloister") and subtitled "An Answer to Miss Rossetti's Convent Threshold ." The surviving fragments express the speaker's sense of spiritual inferiority and his admiration for the decision of Christina Rossetti's heroine to join the convent. Hopkins's first title identifies his persona as the one whose eyes "look earthward," but he is willing to lift up his gaze:




At last I hear the voice well known;

................................

You see but with a holier mind--

You hear and, alter'd, do not hear

Being a stoled apparel'd star.

...........................

Teach me the paces that you went

I can send up an Esau's cry;

Tune it to words of good intent.

This ice, this lead, this steel, this stone,

This heart is warm to you alone;

Make it to God. I am not spent

.............................

Steel may be melted and rock rent.

Penance shall clothe me to the bone.

Teach me the way: I will repent.



Hopkins was clearly oriented to the Pre-Raphaelite dream vision in which the poet is represented on a lower plane than the vision. By taking the part of Rossetti's heroine's earthly lover in his poem, moreover, Hopkins invites a comparison between his persona and Christina's erstwhile lover, James Collinson, who also became a follower of the Pre-Raphaelites and convert to Catholicism and, for a while, a Jesuit. Eventually, by converting to Catholicism himself and joining the Society of Jesus, Hopkins exchanged the inferior position articulated in "A Voice from the World" for a superior one, superior at least in the sense that Christina Rossetti apparently felt that her sister Maria, who actually did cross the convent threshold and become a religious, had achieved a higher stage of religious development than she herself did.

Both Hopkins and Christina Rossetti believed that religion was more important than art. The outline of Hopkins's career follows that of Christina Rossetti's: an outwardly drab, plodding life of submission quietly bursting into splendor in holiness and poetry. Both felt that religious inspiration was more important than artistic inspiration. Whenever religious renunciation and self-expression were felt to be at odds, as they often were, self-expression had to be sacrificed. Poetry had to be subordinated to religion.

No doubt partly as a result of this attitude, both Hopkins and Rossetti were subject to intermittent creativity. Both thought of poetry as a gift which could not be summoned at will, and each turned to prose between bursts of poetic inspiration. In fact each went through a stage of about seven years in which writing prose almost entirely replaced composing poetry. Hopkins's prose period stretched from 1868 to 1875, when his literary energies were devoted primarily to his journal. In addition to passing through periods of writing prose, both poets concluded their literary careers with devotional commentaries: in Hopkins's case, his unfinished "Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius."

The attitudes of Christina Rossetti and Hopkins toward art and religion have destined them to share much the same fate at the hands of twentieth-century readers: criticism for deliberately narrowing their subjects to a range too limited for modern palates, for expressing religious convictions with which it is now difficult to sympathize, for allowing religion to take precedence over poetry, or for actually impairing the creative gift itself. On the other hand, both are often praised by twentieth-century readers for the same feature: the expression of counterpoised forces generating dramatic tensions.

One of the most dramatic tensions was that between their attraction to this world and their determination to transcend it. Like Hopkins, Christina Rossetti often reveals a Keatsian attraction to the life of sensations, especially to nature. Hopkins's wide variety of responses to nature, especially in the 1860s and 1880s, ranging from strong attraction to its beauty to belief that this beauty must be denied on religious grounds, is congruent with the range of Christina Rossetti's responses. Ultimately, however, she believed that God was not in nature but above and therefore that one must ascend the heavenly stair invoked in "The Convent Threshold," "A Shadow of Dorothea," and other poems. Hopkins's version of the legend of Saint Dorothea, "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" (1864), and his "Heaven-Haven" reveal a similar transition from the natural to the supernatural in his early poetry.

Hopkins's "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" originated in that section of his journal devoted primarily to the representation of nature. However, the flowers in his poem are not rooted in the earth but in legend. Hopkins's aim was not truth to nature primarily in this poem but the revival of medieval legend by defamiliarizing it, putting it in a new context and thereby restoring its original impact in the service of religion.

In "Heaven-Haven" Hopkins again responded to the transcendental, otherworldly aspiration so evident in the Dorothea legend and in Christina Rossetti's "A Shadow of Dorothea." As "Heaven-Haven" suggests, Hopkins's sense of the unreliability and instability of this world led him to a desire to transcend this world in order to discover some other, better world less subject to the triumph of time. Of the two paths to holiness, the outward or the inward--contemplation of God's presence in this world or contemplation of His presence within the self--by far the most common is the one Christina Rossetti usually followed: withdrawal from the external world in order to plumb the secret depths of one's own soul. Hopkins is perhaps more famous for his 1877 nature sonnets which focus on God in nature, but his sonnets of desolation of the 1880s turn inward, returning to the impulse already apparent in "Heaven-Haven," subtitled "A Nun Takes the Veil":




I have desired to go

Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

And a few lilies blow.



And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea.

Hopkins's "A Soliloquy of One of the Spies Left in the Wilderness" (1864) is also a response to the recurrent call of desert Christianity. It appears to be based directly on one of the biblical interpretations of the great reformer Savonarola, the famous burner of profane art in Renaissance Italy. As Hopkins commented in a letter, Savonarola was "the only person in history (except perhaps Origen) about whom" he had "real feeling," because for Hopkins Savonarola was "the prophet of Christian art." Savonarola's example reinforced Christina Rossetti's and at first encouraged Hopkins to move beyond not only his Greek studies but also the imitation of nature that had characterized his early art. Ultimately, Savonarola's example inspired Hopkins to give up nature, beauty, and art altogether.

The sequence of events is clear. On 18 January 1866 Hopkins composed his most ascetic poem, "The Habit of Perfection." On 23 January he included poetry in the list of things to be given up for Lent. In July he decided to become a Catholic, and he traveled to Birmingham in September to consult the leader of the Oxford converts, John Henry Newman. Newman received him into the Church in October. On 5 May 1868 Hopkins firmly "resolved to be a religious." Less than a week later, apparently still inspired by Savonarola, he made a bonfire of his poems and gave up poetry almost entirely for seven years. Finally, in the fall of 1868 Hopkins joined a "serged fellowship" like Savonarola's and like the one he admired in "Eastern Communion" (1865), a commitment foreshadowed by the emphasis on vows of silence and poverty in "The Habit of Perfection."

Hopkins had been attracted to asceticism since childhood. At Highgate, for instance, he argued that nearly everyone consumed more liquids than the body needed, and, to prove it, he wagered that he could go without liquids for at least a week. He persisted until his tongue was black and he collapsed at drill. He won not only his wager but also the undying enmity of the headmaster Dr. John Bradley Dyne. On another occasion, he abstained from salt for a week. His continuing insistence on extremes of self-denial later in life struck some of his fellow Jesuits as more appropriate to a Victorian Puritan than to a Catholic.

Thus it is important to realize that he converted to Catholicism not to be more ascetic, for asceticism was as Protestant as it was Catholic, but to be able to embrace the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. This explanation was not enough to satisfy his family, however. Hopkins's letter informing them of his conversion came as a great shock. He wrote to Newman: "I have been up at Oxford just long enough to have heard fr. my father and mother in return for my letter announcing my conversion. Their answers are terrible: I cannot read them twice." Meanwhile, Manley Hopkins was writing to Gerard's Anglican confessor, H.P. Liddon: "The blow is so deadly and great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it. We had observed a growing love for asceticism and high ritual, and/ ... we believed he had lately resolved on taking orders in the English Church .... save him from throwing a pure life and a somewhat unusual intellect away in the cold limbo which Rome assigns to her English converts. The deepness of our distress, the shattering of our hopes and the foreseen estrangement which must happen, are my excuse for writing to you so freely." After receiving Liddon's reply, Manley Hopkins wrote to Liddon again, accusing Gerard of speaking "with perfect coldness of any possible estrangement from us, who have loved him with an unchanging love. His mother's heart is almost broken by this, and by his desertion from our Church, her belief in, and devotion to, which are woven in with her very being." Manley used similar terms in his letter to Gerard: "The manner in which you seem to repel and throw us off cuts us to the heart .... O Gerard my darling boy are you indeed gone from me?"

As these words suggest, when Hopkins converted to Catholicism he felt he had actually forfeited his rightful place in the family home; he did not even know if his father would let him in the house again. A letter from Hopkins reveals that his father consented to his presence there on one condition: "You are so kind as not to forbid me your house, to which I have no claim, on condition, if I understand, that I promise not to try to convert my brothers and sisters." This was not an easy condition for him to accept, however; "Before I can promise this I must get permission, wh. I have no doubt will be given. Of course this promise will not apply after they come of age. Whether after my reception you will still speak as you do now I cannot tell." Despite these differences Hopkins did spend his Christmas holidays with his family in 1866 and 1867, but what his father called "the foreseen estrangement which must happen" necessarily increased when Hopkins began his novitiate in the Society of Jesus at Manresa House, Roehampton, in September 1868 and later moved to St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst, for his philosophical studies in 1870. He spent Christmas away from his family from 1868 to 1871. He returned to the family hearth for the holiday in subsequent years, but in 1885 his Dublin poems still testify to the lonely isolation and anticipation of death characteristic of many Victorian orphans:




To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

Among strangers. Father and mother dear,

Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near

.......................................

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third

Remove. Not but in all removes I can

Kind love both give and get.

When, aged only forty-four, he was finally close to the farthest remove, death, another reconciliation was attempted, but it was too late. His was a painful and poignant tragedy all too typical of Victorian families.

His father had written "by study hard WITHIN THE CHURCHYARD/IS FOUND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE." Ironically, it was by following this advice that father and son became estranged. The son did study hard within the churchyard, and he found that the Catholic concept of the Real Presence was his philosopher's stone. The Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation became for him the mystical catalyst which could transmute into gold, redeem, and regenerate all that is base--what Hopkins called "the triviality of this life," "the sordidness of things." Contrary to his father's assertions, this was not a last-minute discovery. As early as June of 1864 Hopkins wrote to E. H. Coleridge: "The great aid to belief and object of belief is the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. Religion without that is sombre, dangerous, illogical, with that it is--not to speak of its grand consistency and certainty--loveable. Hold that and you will gain all Catholic truth." Ironically, as we have seen, "Catholic Truth" was the title of one of the poems in Pietas Metrica.

The next month Hopkins wrote to Baillie, "I have written three religious poems which however you would not at all enter into, they being of a very Catholic character." The first of these poems was apparently "Barnfloor and Winepress," published the next year in the Union Review. This poem adumbrates the poetic as well as religious importance of Hopkins's belief in the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist, the "Half-Way House" of God in this world as Hopkins called the sacrament in a poem of that name in 1864. "Barnfloor and Winepress" in some respects foreshadows the poetry of nature Hopkins was to compose in the late 1870s.

Though primarily a celebration of the Real Presence, this poem reveals how Hopkins could in his imagination extend the idea of the mystical Body of Christ in the communion bread and wine to the rest of nature. In this poem the wheat and grapes are not mere raw materials for Transubstantiation but are represented metaphorically as if they were already participating in the Being of God. One of the attractions of the doctrine of the Real Presence for Hopkins was that it was, as depicted in "Barnfloor and Winepress," the central instance of a metaphor participating in the reality it represents, an archetype for a sacramental poetry of nature.

This potential for a new sacramental poetry was first realized by Hopkins in The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hopkins recalled that when he read about the wreck of the German ship Deutschland off the coast of England it "made a deep impression on me, more than any other wreck or accident I ever read of," a statement made all the more impressive when we consider the number of shipwrecks he must have discussed with his father. Hopkins wrote about this particular disaster at the suggestion of Fr. James Jones, Rector of St. Beuno's College, where Hopkins studied theology from 1874 to 1877. Hopkins recalled that "What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for [presumably `Rosa Mystica' and `Ad Mariam']. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper."

The result is an ode of thirty-five eight-line stanzas, divided into two parts. The first part, consisting of ten stanzas, is autobiographical, recalling how God touched the speaker in his own life. The second begins with seven stanzas dramatizing newspaper accounts of the wreck. Then fourteen stanzas narrow the focus to a single passenger, the tallest of the five nuns who drowned. She was heard to call on Christ before her death. The last four stanzas address God directly and culminate in a call for the conversion of England.

The Wreck of the Deutschland became the occasion for Hopkins's incarnation as a poet in his own right. He broke with the Keatsian wordpainting style with which he began, replacing his initial prolixity, stasis, and lack of construction with a concise, dramatic unity. He rejected his original attraction to Keats’s sensual aestheticism for a clearly moral, indeed a didactic, rhetoric. He saw nature not only as a pleasant spectacle as Keats had; he also confronted its seemingly infinite destructiveness as few before or after him have done. In this shipwreck he perceived the possibility of a theodicy, a vindication of God’s justice which would counter the growing sense of the disappearance of God among the Victorians. For Hopkins, therefore, seeing more clearly than ever before the proselytic possibilities of art, his rector’s suggestion that someone write a poem about the wreck became the theological sanction he needed to begin reconciling his religious and poetic vocations.

Nevertheless, although The Wreck of the Deutschland was a great breakthrough to the vision of God immanent in nature and thus to the sacramentalism that was to be the basis of the great nature poems of the following years, when Hopkins sent the poem to his friendRobert Bridges, Bridges refused to reread it despite Hopkins’s pleas. The poem was also rejected by the Jesuit magazine the Month, primarily because of its new “sprung” rhythm, and many subsequent readers have had difficulty with it as well.

Hopkins’s readers have more easily understood the sonnets he wrote about the landscape he actually saw around him near St. Beuno’s College, Wales. It was in an earlier poem, “Half-Way House,” that Hopkins most clearly recorded his need to approach God in this world: “I must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven/If I shall overtake Thee at last above.” As “The Windhover,” “God’s Grandeur,” and Hopkins’s other sonnets of 1877 reveal, Hopkins found such a halfway house not only in the communion bread and wine but also in the Vale of Clwyd and the rest of the countryside around St. Beuno’s. Wales clearly provided the occasion for his greatest experience of nature, as it had for Wordsworth (on Mt. Snowdon and near Tintern Abbey),John Dyer (on Grongar Hill), and Henry Vaughan.

Some of the most luminous symbols of the presence of God in Hopkins’s Welsh poems are the sunrises and the “sea-sunsets which give such splendour to the vale of Clwyd,” as Wordsworth put it in the preface to his own Descriptive Sketches. Such sights were prized and distilled in Hopkins’s nature poetry in his imagery of sunlight which “sidled like dewdrops, like dandled diamonds” (“The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down,” 1879). Everything from ploughed furrows to clouds to their reflections in pools is shining and gleaming. Even night reveals a world of strangely translucent moonshine or of stars that gleam like “bright boroughs” or “diamond delves” or “quickgold” in gray lawns; all of nature was perceived as a “piece-bright paling” that was Christ’s “home” (“The Starlight Night,” 1877).

Hopkins’s most famous Welsh sonnet, “The Windhover,” reveals that for him this Book of Nature, like the Bible, demanded a moral application to the self. Hopkins wrote in his notes on St. Ignatius: “This world is word, exprerssion, news of God”; “it is a book he has written.... a poem of beauty: what is it about? His praise, the reverence due to him, the way to serve him.... Do I then do it? Never mind others now nor the race of man: DO I DO IT?” One of Hopkins’s attempts to answer that question is “The Windhover.”

The initial “I” focuses attention on the speaker, but the explicit application of the lesson of the Book of Nature to him does not begin until the line “My heart in hiding/stirred for a bird” at the conclusion of the octet. One biographical interpretation of this line is that he was hiding from fulfilling his ambitions to be a great painter and poet. Instead of ostentatiously pursuing fame in that way, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he had chosen to be the “hidden man of the heart” (1 Peter 3:4), quietly pursuing the imitation of Christ. As Hopkins put it, Christ’s “hidden life at Nazareth is the great help to faith for us who must live more or less an obscure, constrained, and unsuccessful life.”

Hopkins did live such a life, but the windhover reminded him of Jesus’ great achievements after Nazareth. The windhover “stirred” his desire to become a great knight of faith, one of those who imitate not only the constraint but also the “achieve of, the mastery of” this great chevalier. The “ecstasy” of the windhover recalls Hopkins’s initial desire in “Il Mystico” to be lifted up on “Spirit’s wings” so “that I may drink that ecstasy/Which to pure souls alone may be.” Ultimately, Hopkins became aware that he had been hiding from the emotional risks of total commitment to becoming a “pure” soul. The phrase “hiding” thus suggests not only hiding from the world or from worldly ambition but also hiding from God.

The words “here/Buckle” which open the sestet mean “here in my heart,” therefore, as well as here in the bird and here in Jesus. Hopkins’s heart-in-hiding, Christ’s prey, sensed Him diving down to seize it for his own. Just as the bird buckled its wings together and thereby buckled its “brute beauty” and “valour”and capacity to “act,” so the speaker responds by buckling together all his considerable talents and renewing his commitment to the imitation of Christ in order to buckle down, buckle to, in serious preparation for the combat, the grappling, the buckling with the enemy. As Paul said, “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil.”

Hopkins wrote “The Windhover” only a few months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest, the ultimate commitment to sacrifice his worldly ambitions. Just as Jesus’ paradoxical triumph was his buckling under, his apparent collapse, so Hopkins felt that the knight of faith must be prepared for the same buckling under or collapse of his pride, for a life of “sheer plod” and “blue-bleak” self-sacrifice, if need be. Nevertheless, the imagery of “The Windhover” promises that the knight of faith will have a fire break from his heart then—galled, gashed, and crucified in imitation of Christ. The fire will be “a billion times told lovelier” than that of his “heart in hiding,” and far more “dangerous,” both to his old self (for the fire is all-consuming) and to his enemy, Evil.

In Hopkins’s case, the fire also became far more “dangerous” to his worldly poetic ambitions. Among other things, “The Windhover” represents Hopkins’s Pegasus, the flying steed of classical myth. The collapse of his old poetic self is implied in the imagery, for Bellerophon was thrown off Pegasus because of his pride. Fearing his pride in his own poetry, Hopkins burned his poems upon entering the Society of Jesus: he believed that poetry always had to give way, buckle under, to the “greater cause” of religion. As a result there was a very real danger that his poems would never reach the public they deserved, that he would have to sacrifice all the worldly fame promised him as “the star of Balliol” for a life of “sheer plod.”

Yet the “plod” makes the plough “shine” in “The Windhover.” The plough scratching the field was in fact a common medieval metaphor for the writer’s pen scratching across the paper, the furrows corresponding to the rows of letters. Hopkins’s paradoxical triumph as a poet is that although his poems were created out of that life of sheer plod and remained as obscure as “blue-bleak embers” to most of his contemporaries, now that they have found an audience to appreciate them, they have burst into fire.

They remained unknown to most of his contemporaries, however, for whom nature existed only to be exploited. As Hopkins put it in “God’s Grandeur,” the shod feet of modern men “have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; /And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” It was both the immediate loss of the landscape and the fact that the “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been” (“Binsey Poplars”) that led Hopkins to plead, “What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, wildness and wet; /Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” (“Inversnaid,” 1881).

Industrialization continued to consume the wilderness as it still does, however; whole landscapes like those around Oxford were destroyed by what Hopkins called “base and brickish” suburbs (“Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” 1879). Finally, in 1882 Hopkins concluded the octet of “Ribblesdale” by replacing the image of God brooding protectively over nature (“God’s Grandeur”) with a new image of God giving all of nature over to “rack or wrong.” According to Hopkins the chief cause of that “self-bent” of man that made him “thriftless reave our rich round world bare/And none reck of world after” (“Ribblesdale”) was increasing urbanization.

Hence it was in Hopkins’s first extended comparison of the city and the country, “The Sea and the Skylark” (1877), that he first fully expressed his tragic vision of environmental degradation. For Hopkins the sounds of the sea and the skylark ushered out like bells at the end of the year his own “sordid turbid time.” His representation of his “sordid turbid time” breaking down to man’s last “dust,” draining fast toward man’s first “slime,” recalls similar accounts of dust, slime, and pollution in the works of Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and other Victorian writers.

In October of 1877, not long after he completed “The Sea and the Skylark” and only a month after he had been ordained as a priest, Hopkins took up his duties as subminister and teacher at Mount St. Mary’s College, Chesterfield. From this time until his death the pollution of the industrial cities to which he was assigned took a mounting toll on his energies and his spirit. Of his life in Chesterfield in 1878 he wrote, “Life here is as dank as ditch-water.... My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air.” In July of that year he became curate at the Jesuit church in Mount Street, London. In December he became curate at St. Aloysius’s Church, Oxford. While at Oxford he composed “Binsey Poplars” and “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” but in October 1879, he was put on the temporary staff as curate at St. Joseph’s, Bedford Leigh, near Manchester, which he described as “very gloomy.... there are a dozen mills or so, and coalpits also; the air charged with smoke as well as damp.” In December 1879 he began as select preacher at St. Xavier’s, Liverpool; there “the river was coated with dirty yellow ice from shore to shore.” In September of 1881 Hopkins was put on the temporary staff at St. Joseph’s, Glasgow, and he wrote, “My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life ... of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw.” After his third year novitiate at Roehampton and two years as a teacher of classics at Stonyhurst College, in 1884 Hopkins took up his post as fellow in classics at the Royal University of Ireland and professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, which he described as “a joyless place and I think in my heart as smoky as London is.” In 1889 Hopkins died in Dublin of typhoid fever, apparently caused by the polluted urban water supply, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery.

Although from the time of his departure from Wales in 1877 until his death Hopkins composed nature poems, his assignments in Victorian cities forced him to change the focus of his life and art from nature to man, and finally to one man—himself. No longer able to identify as completely with nature, an orphan in the surrounding world, Hopkins’s speaker in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (1884) becomes “sheathe-and shelterless.” Shifting from the outward way to God back to the inward, he decides to strip down to the essential self to concentrate on the generation of a “new self and nobler me,” as he puts it in “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.”

Shifting his energies from admiration of nature to attempts to bring love and grace to urban man, Hopkins often succeeded, as “Felix Randal” (1880) so eloquently testifies, but he also frequently experienced frustration and the increased sense of social degeneration lamented in “Tom’s Garland” (1887) and in the undated “The Times are nightfall.” In the last Hopkins can find only one alternative: “Or what is else? There is your world within. / There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. /Your will is law in that small commonweal.” “Rooting out sin” in the “world within” had been the subject of previous poems such as “The Candle Indoors” (1879) and his religious poems at Oxford, but it soon became the preoccupation of most of the poems of Hopkins’s final years. Most of these poems focus on acedia, the fourth deadly sin, the sin of “spiritual sloth” or “desolation.” These sonnets of desolation consist of the six original “terrible sonnets” of 1885—”Carrion Comfort,” “No worst, there is none,” “To seem the stranger,” “I wake and feel,” “Patience,” and “My own heart”—and three sonnets of 1889—”Thou art indeed just,” “The Shepherd’s Brow,” and “To R. B.”

According to his own testimony Hopkins was subject to melancholy all his life, but his “terrible pathos,” as Dixon called it, is most obvious in these late sonnets. Following Saint Ignatius, Hopkins defined “spiritual sloth” or “desolation” as “darkness and confusion of soul ... diffidence without hope and without love, so that [the soul] finds itself altogether slothful, tepid, sad, and as it were separated from its Creator and Lord.” Called acedia in Latin, this sin is differentiated from physical sloth by the fact that the victim realizes his predicament, worries about it, and tries to overcome it.

The sense of coldness, impotence, and wastefulness evident in Hopkins’s religious poetry of the 1860s is an important feature of acedia, but by far the most important is “world sorrow,” the predicament lamented in Hopkins’s “No worst, there is none” (1885). A great range of emotions are “herded and huddled” together in this “main” or “chief” woe as Hopkins calls it in the poem. Besides impotence and world sorrow per se, the acedia syndrome includes feelings of exile and estrangement, darkness, the disappearance of God, despair, the death wish, and attraction to suicide—all emotions which recur throughout Hopkins’s life and art but become particularly evident toward the end.

While Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are generally considered his most modern poems, they are virtually a recapitulation of the medieval treatises on acedia. Even the kind of estrangement from one’s family described in Hopkins’s “To seem the stranger” is an important feature of acedia in Saint John Chrysostom’s fourth-century Exhortations to Stagirius, for instance. John, whose homily on Eutropius Hopkins translated, begins with a summary of the tristitia or world-sorrow syndrome in Stagirius which bears a remarkable resemblance to Hopkins’s situation. A man converts, gives up his family and his position in society, and then struggles manfully against, yet often succumbs to, tristitia.

Just as in Hopkins’s “To seem the stranger,” Stagirius’s problem is exacerbated by the fact that he is exiled from his family. As in Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort,” Stagirius also feels that he is both a passive victim of various tortures and one who battles with God Himself in nightmares. Like Hopkins’s “No worst,” moreover, John’s final exhortation implies that tristitia is a universal phenomenon, that the whole “terrestrial kingdom” is full of causes for acedia, and John also uses the imagery of mountains and cliffs to represent the lure of insanity and suicide. Thus, although pride is usually regarded as the deadliest of the seven sins, John concluded that excessive sorrow was the most ruinous diabolic obsession.

One of the results of acedia is a feeling of the disappearance or withdrawal of God. This is most obvious in Hopkins’s “Nondum” (1866) and in his phrase “dearest him that lives alas! away” in “I wake and feel,” but is also implied in “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” in “No worst.” We think of this feeling as a modern phenomenon, but it is a common experience of the absence of spiritual consolation, and darkness is its traditional imagery, especially in Saint Bernard, Dante, Milton, and Saint John of the Cross, as it is in Hopkins’s “Nondum,” “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” “Carrion Comfort,” and “My own heart.” The darkness and confusion of soul represented in the first quatrain of Hopkins’s “I wake and feel” recall specifically the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the journey of my life I awoke to mystery in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

The ultimate result of God’s withdrawal from the soul and the consequent darkness is often the temptation to despair, that loss of all hope which is the state of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. This despair, the temptation resisted in the opening of Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort,” was the natural culmination of acedia according to John Chrysostom and others. Despair in turn often leads to the death wish, as implied in the conclusion of Hopkins’s “No worst,” in his “The Times are nightfall,” and in his lament in “To seem the stranger”: “Not but in all removes I can/Kind love both give and get.”

However, the conclusion of Hopkins’s “I wake and feel”—”The lost are like this, and their scourge to be/As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse”—is an allusion to Dante which clearly distinguishes the speaker of Hopkins’s terrible sonnets from the damned who are continually referred to in the Inferno as “the lost” and the “sorrowful” who have lost all hope, even hope of death. Like Dante, Hopkins faced the “lost” and that which was most like them in his own soul, but his speaker also remains separated from the lost in that he is a living soul still addressing God in his prayers, still purging himself of his sins, and still living by hope in grace.

The ultimate context of Hopkins’s purgation, therefore, as of Dante’s, was the Bible. One of the biblical incidents echoed in the imagery and phraseology of “No worst,” for instance, is that of Jesus’ exorcism of the demons of Gadara. Like the imagery of Dante’s Purgatorio, this exorcism imagery obviously provides a significant counterpoint of meaning. The suggestion is that the speaker is attempting to herd and huddle all the demons of ennui together in one category, “world-sorrow,” and “heave” them out of himself. Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are especially suited to this cathartic, purging function because they are prayers as well as poems. Like Jesus’ cry on the cross, Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation are addressed to God and are themselves consolations.

Eventually, Hopkins, like Dante, was granted a glimpse of Paradise. Hopkins’s sonnet of 1888, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” is apparently a direct reply to “No worst, there is none”: the question in the earlier poem, “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” is answered in the title of the later poem. Acedia has been conquered: “Enough! the Resurrection, /A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.”As Dante put it, “The inborn and perpetual thirst for the godlike kingdom bore us away.... It seemed to me that a cloud covered us, shining, dense, solid and smooth; like a diamond smit by the sun.” Hopkins concludes this poem with similar imagery: “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and / This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, /Is immortal diamond.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://bactra.org/Poetry/Tagore/modern-poetry.html


Modern Poetry
Rabindranath Tagore
Writing about modern English poets is by no means an easy task, for who defines the limit of the modern age in terms of the almanac? It is not so much a question of time as of spirit.

After flowing straight for a while, most rivers take a sudden turn. Likewise, literature does not always follow the straight path; when it takes a turn, that turn must be called modern. We call it adhunik in Bengali. This modernity depends not upon time but upon temperament.

The poetry to which I was introduced in my boyhood might have been classed as modern in those days. Poetry had taken a new turn, beginning from Robert Burns, and the same movement brought forth many other great poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.

The manners and customs of a society are shown in social usage. In countries where these social customs suppress all freedom and individual taste, man becomes a puppet, and his conduct conforms meticulously to social etiquette. Society appreciates this traditional and habitual way of life. Sometimes literature remains in this groove for long periods of time, and whosoever wears the sacred marks of perfect literary style is looked upon as a saintly person. During the age of English poetry that followed Burns, the barriers of style were broken down, and temperament made its debut. ``The lake adorned with lotus and the lily'' became a lake seen through the special view of official blinkers fashioned in the classic workshop. When a daring writer removes those blinkers and catch phrases, and looks upon the lake with open eyes, he also opens up a view through which the lake assumes different aspects and various fancies. But classic judgement cries ``fie for shame'' on him.

When we began to read English poetry, this unconventionally individualistic mood had already been acknowledge in literature, and the clamor raised by the Edinburgh Review had died down. Even so, that period of our life was a new era in modernism.

In those days, the sign of modernism in poetry was an individual's measure of delight. Wordsworth expressed in his own style the spirit of delight that he realized in nature. Shelley's was a Platonic contemplation, accompanied by a spirit of revolt against every kind of obstacle, political, religious or otherwise. Keat's poetry was wrought out of the meditation and creation of beauty. In that age, the stream of poetry took a turn from outwardness to inwardness.

A poet's deepest feelings strive for immortality by assuming a form in language. Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. There was a time when humanity in its moments of leisure sought to beautify that portion of the universe with which it came into contact, and this outer adornment was the expression of its inner love, and with this love, there could be no indifference. In those days, in the exuberance of his sense of beauty man began to decorate the common articles of daily use; his inspiration lent creative power to his fingers. In every land and village, household utensils and the adornment of the home and person bound man, in color and form, to these outward insignia of life. Many ceremonies were evolved for adding zest to social life, many new melodies, arts and crafts in wood and metal, clay and stone, silk, wool and cotton. In those days, the husband called his wife: ``beloved disciple in the fine arts.'' The bank balance did not constitute the principal asset of the married couple in the work of setting up house; the arts were a more necessary item. Flower garlands were woven, the art of dancing was taught, accompanied by lessons in the vina, the flute and singing, and young women knew how to paint the ends of their saris of China silk. Then, there was beauty in human relationships.

The English poets with whom we came into contact in my early youth saw the universe with their own eyes; it had become their personal property. Not only did their own imaginations, opinions and tastes humanize and intellectualize the universe, but they molded it according to their individual desires. The universe of Wordsworth was specially ``Wordsworthian,'' of Shelley, ``Shelleyan,'' of Byron, ``Byronic.'' By creative magic it also became the reader's universe. The joy that we felt in a poet's world was the joy of enjoying the delight of a particular world aroma. The flower sent its invitation to the bee through a distinctive smell and color, and the note of invitation was sweet. The poet's invitation possessed a spontaneous charm. In the days when the chief bond between man and universe was individuality, the personal touch in the invitation had to be fostered with care, a sort of competition had to be set up in dress and ornament and manners, in order to show oneself off to the best advantage.

Thus, we find that in the beginning of the nineteenth century the tradition which held priority in the English poetry of the previous age had given place to self-expression. This was called modernism.

But now that modernism is dubbed mid-Victorian senility and made to recline on an easy chair in the next room. Now is the day of the modernism of lopped skirts and lopped hair. Powder is applied to the cheeks and rouge to the lips, and it is proclaimed that the days of illusion are over. But there is always illusion at every step of the creation, and it is only the variety of that illusions which plays so many tunes in so many forms. Science has throughly examined every pulse beat, and declares that at the root of things there is no illusion; there is carbon and nitrogen, there is physiology and psychology. We old-fashioned poets thought the illusion was the main thing and carbon and physiology the by-products. Therefore, we must confess that we had striven to compete with the Creator in spreading the snare of illusion through rhyme and rhythm, language and style. In our metaphors and nuances there was some hide-and-seek; we were unable to lift aside that veil of modesty which adorns but does not contradict truth. In the colored light that filtered through the haze, the dawns and evenings appeared in a beauty as tender as a new bride. The modern, Duhshashsan, engaged in publicly disrobing Draupadi is a sight we are not accustomed to. Is it merely habit that makes us uncomfortable; is there no truth in this sense of shame; does not Beauty become bankrupt when divested of the veil which reveals rather than conceals?

But the modern age is in a hurry, and livelihood is more important. Man races through his work and rushes through his pleasure in a crowd of accelerating machines. The human being who used to create his own intimate world at leisure now delegates his duties to factory and rigs up some sort of provisional affair to suit his needs according to some official standard. Feasts are out of fashion; only meals remain. There is no desire to consider whether life is in harmony with the intellect, for the mind of man is also engaged in pulling the rope of the huge car of livelihood. Instead of music, we hear hoarse shouts of ``Push, boys, push!'' He has to spend most of his time with the crowed, not in the company of his friends; his mentality is the mentality of the hustler. In the midst of all this bustle he has no will power to bypass unadorned ugliness.

Which path must poetry now follow, then, and what is her destination? It is not possible these days to follow one's own taste, to select, to arrange. Science does not select, it accepts whatever is; it does not appraise by the standard of personal taste nor embellish with the eagerness of personal involvement. The chief delight of the scientific mind consists in curiosity, not in forming ties of relationship. It does not regard what ``I'' want as the main consideration, but rather what the thing in itself exactly is, leaving ``me'' out of the question; and without ``me,'' the preparation of illusion is unnecessary.

Therefore, in the process of economizing that is being carried out in the poetry of this scientific age, it is adornment that has suffered the biggest loss. A fastidious selectivity in the matter of rhyme, rhythm and words has become almost obsolete. The change is not taking place smoothly, but in order to break the spell of the past, it has become the fashion to repudiate it aggressively, like trying to arrange bits of broken glass in an ugly manner, lest the selective faculty should enter the house by jumping over the garden wall. A poet writes, ``I am the greatest laugher of all, greater than the sun, than the oak tree, than the frog and Apollo.'' ``Than the frog and Apollo'' is where the bits of broken glass come in, out of fear that someone will think that the poet is arranging his words sweetly and prettily. If the word ``sea'' were used instead of ``frog,'' the modernists might object to it as regular poetizing. That may be so, but mentioning the frog is a more regular poetizing of the opposite kind. That is to say, it is not introduced naturally, but is like intentionally walking on your toes; that would be modern.

But the fact of the matter is, the days are gone for the frog to be admitted into poetry with the same respect as other creatures. In the category of reality, the frog now belongs to a higher class than Apollo. I do not wish to regard the frog with contempt; rather, in an appropriate context, the croaking laugh of the frog might be juxtaposed with the laugh of the poet's beloved, even if she objected. But even according to the most ultra-scientific theory of equality, the laugh of the sun, of the oak tree, of Apollo, is not that of the frog. It has been dragged in by force in order to destroy the illusion.

Today. this veil of illusion must be removed and the thing must be seen exactly as it is. The illusion which colored the nineteenth century has now faded, and the mere suggestion of sweetness is not enough to satisfy one's hunger - something tangible is required. When we say that smelling is half the eating, we exaggerate by nearly three quarters. Let me quote a few lines from a poem addressed to a beauty of bygone days.

You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.

This kind of modern coinage is cheaper but stronger, and very definite; it clearly sounds the modern note. Old-fashioned charm had an intoxicating effect, but this poem has insolence; and there is nothing misty about it.

The subject matter of modern poetry odes not seek to attract the mind by its charm. Its strength consists in firm self-reliance, that which is called ``character'' in English. It calls out: Ho there! behold me, here am I. The same poetess, whose name is Amy Lowell, has written a poem on a shop of red slippers. The theme is that in the evening the snowflakes are whirling outside in the wind; inside, behind polished glass windows, rows of red slippers hang like garlands, ``like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the street, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas. The row of white, sparkling shop-fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers.'' The whole poem deals with slippers.

This is called impersonal. There is no ground for being particularly attached to these garlands of slippers, either as a buyer or a seller, but one has to stop and look; as soon as the character of the picture as a whole becomes apparent, it no longer remains trifling. Those concerned with meaning will ask, ``What does it all mean, sir? Why so much bother about slippers, even if they are red?'' To which one replies - ``Just look at them yourself.'' But the questioner asks, ``What's the good of looking?'' To which there is no reply.

Let us take another example. There is a poem by Ezra Pound called ``A Study in Aesthetics,'' in which a girl walks along the street, and a boy in patched clothes cries out in uncontrollable excitement, ``Oh! look, look, how beautiful!'' Three years later, the poet meets the boy again during a great haul of sardines. The father and uncles box the fish in order to send them to the market at Breschia. The boy jumps about, handling the fish, and his elders scold him to be quiet. The boy strokes the neatly-arranged fish, and mutters to himself in a tone of satisfaction ``How beautiful!'' On hearing this the poet says, ``I was mildly abashed.''

The pretty girl and the sardines elicit the same comment, "How beautiful!" This observation is impersonal, pure and simple; even the slipper-shop is not outside its purview.

In the nineteenth century poetry was subjective in character; in the twentieth it is objective. Hence, emphasis is now laid on the realism of the subject-matter, not on its adornment; for adornment expresses individual taste, whereas the power of reality consists in expressing the subject itself.

Before making its appearance in literature, this modernism exposed itself in painting. By creating disturbances, it sought to contradict the idea that painting was one of the fine arts. The function of art is not to charm but to conquer the mind, it argued; its sign is not beauty but truth. It did not acknowledge the illusion of form but rather the advertisement of the whole. This form has no other introduction to offer; it only wants to proclaim the fact that it is worth observing. This strong case for being observed is not made by appeals of gesture and posture, nor by copying nature, but by its own inherent truth, which is neither religious, moral, nor ideal - it is natural. That is to say, it must be acknowledged simply because it exists, just as we acknowledge the peacock and the vulture, just as we cannot deny the existence of the the pig or the deer.

Some are beautiful, others are ugly; some are useful, others harmful; but there is no possible pretext for discarding any from the sphere of creation. It is the same with literature and art. If any beauty has been created, it needs no apology; but if it possesses no innate strength of being, only sweetness, then it must be rejected.

Hence, present day literature that has accepted the creed of modernity, scorns to keep caste by carefully adjusting itself to bygone standards of aristocracy; it does not pick and choose. Eliot's poetry is modern in this sense, but not Bridges'. Eliot writes:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways,
Six o'clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of whithered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots.
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

Then comes a description of a muddy morning filled with the smell of stale beer. On such a morning, the following words are addressed to a girl:

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;

And this is the account given of the man:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

In the midst of this smoky, this muddy, this altogether dingy morning and evening, full of many stale odors, and waste papers, the opposite picture is evoked in the poet's mind. He says:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Here the link between Apollo and the frog is broken. Here the croaking of the frog in the well hurts the laughter of Apollo. It is clearly evident that the poet is not absolutely and scientifically impersonal. His loathing for this tawdry world is expressed through the very description he gives of it. Hence the bitter words with which he ends the poem:

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The poet's distaste for this gathering world is evident. The difference from the past consists in there being no desire to delude oneself with an imaginary world of rosy dreams. The poet makes his poetry trudge through this mire regardless of his laundered clothes; not because he is fond of mud, but because in this muddy world one must look at mud with open eyes, and accept it. If Apollo's laugh reaches one's ears in the mud, well and good; if not, then one need not despise the loud, leaping laughter of the frog. One can look at it for a moment in the context of the universe; there is something to be said for this. The frog will seem out of place in the cultured language of the drawing-room; but then most of the world lies outside the drawing-room....

But if modernism has any philosophy, and if that philosophy is to be called impersonal, then one must admit that this attitude of aggressive disbelief and calumny toward the universe, is also a personal mental aberration owing to the sudden revolution. This also is an illusion, in which there is no serious attempt to accept reality naturally in a calm and dispassionate frame of mind. Many people think that this aggressiveness, this wantonly destructive challenging is what is called modernity.

I myself don't think so. Even though thousands of people are attacked by influenza today, I shall not say that influenza is the natural condition of the body in modern times. The natural bodily state exists behind influenza.

Pure modernism, then, consists in looking upon the universe, not in a personal and self-regarding manner, but in an impersonal and matter-of-fact manner. This point of view is bright and pure, and there is real delight in this unclouded vision. In the same dispassionate way that modern science analyzes reality, modern poetry looks upon the universe as a whole; this is what is eternally modern.

But, actually, it is nonsense to call this modern. The joy of a natural and detached way of looking at things belongs to no particular age; it belongs to everyone whose eyes know how to wander over the naked earth. It is over a thousand years since the Chinese poet Li Po wrote his verses, but he was a modern; he looked upon the universe with freshly-opened eyes. In a verse of four lines he writes simply:

Why do I live among the mountains?
I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man,
The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on....

Another picture:

Blue water ... a clear moon ...
In the moonlight the white herons are flying.
Listen! Do you hear the girls who gather water-chestnuts?
They are going home in the night, singing.

Another:

Naked I lie in the green forest of summer...
Too lazy to wave my white-feathered fan.
I hang my cap on a crag,
And bare my head to the wind that comes
Blowing through the pine trees.

A river merchant's wife writes:

I would play, plucking flowers by the gate;
My hair scarcely covered my forehead, then.
You would come, riding on your bamboo horse,
And loiter about the bench with green plums for toys.
So we both dwelt in Chang-kan town,
We were two children, suspecting nothing.

At fourteen I became your wife,
And so bashful I could never bare my face,
But hung my head, and turned to the dark wall;
You would call me a thousand times,
But I could not look back even once.

At fifteen I was able to compose my eyebrows,
And beg you to love me till we were dust and ashes.

I was sixteen when you went on a long journey.
Traveling beyond the Ken-Tang gorge,
Where the giant rocks heap up the swift river,
And the rapids are not passable in May.
Did you hear the monkeys wailing
Up on the skyey height of the crags?

Do you know your footmarks by our gate are old,
And each and every one is filled up with green moss?
The mosses are too deep for me to sweep away;
And already in the autumn wind the leaves are falling.

The yellow butterflies of October
Flutter in pairs over the grass of the west garden
My heart aches at seeing them ...
I sit sorrowing alone, and alas!
The vermillion of my face is fading.

Some day when you return down the river,
If you will write me a letter beforehand,
I will come to meet you - the way is not long -
I will come as far as the Long Wind Bench instantly.

In this poem the sentiment is neither maudlin nor ridiculous. The subject is familiar, and there is feeling. If the tone were sarcastic and there was ridicule, then the poem would be modern, because the moderns scorn to acknowledge in poetry that which everybody acknowledges naturally. Most probably a modern poet would have added at the end of this poem that the husband went his way after wiping his eyes and looking back repeatedly, and the girl at once set about frying dried prawn fish-balls. For whom? In reply there are a line-and-a-half of asterisks. The old-fashioned reader would ask, ``What does this mean?'' The modern poet would answer ``Things happen like this.'' The reader would say, ``But they also happen otherwise.'' And the modern would answer, ``Yes, they do, but that is too respectable. Unless it sheds its refinement, it does not become modern....''

Edwin Arlington Robinson has described an aristocrat thus:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home a put a bullet through his head.

There is no modern sarcasm or loud laughter in this poem; on the contrary, there is pathos, which consists in the fact that there may be some fatal disease lurking inside the apparently healthy and beautiful.

He whom we consider rich has a hidden personality. The anchorites spoke in the same way. They remind the living that one day they would go to the burning-ground slung on bamboo poles. European monks have described how the decomposed body beneath the soil is eaten by worms. In dissertations on morality we have seen attempts to destroy our illusion by reminding us that the body which seems beautiful is a repulsive compound of bones and flesh and blood and fluids. The best way of cultivating detachment is repeatedly to instil into our minds a contempt for the reality which we perceive. But the poet is not a disciple of detachment, he has come to cultivate attachment. Is the modern age so very degenerate that even the poet is infected with the atmosphere of cremation, that he begins to take pleasure in saying that which we consider great is decayed, that which we admire as beautiful is untouchable at the core? ...

The mid-Victorian age felt a respect for reality and wished to accord it a place of honor; the modern age thinks it part of its program to insult reality and tear aside all the veils of decency.

If you call a reverence for universal things sentimentalism, then you must also call your rebellion against them by the same name. If the mind becomes bitter, for whatever reason, the vision can never be natural. Hence, if the mid-Victorian age is to be ridiculed as being the leader of ultra-respectability, then the Edwardian age must also be ridiculed with the opposite adjectives. The thing is not natural and therefore not perennial. As for science, so for art, the detached mind is the best vehicle. Europe has gained that mind in science, but not in literature.



Edwin Arlington Robinson has described an aristocrat thus:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home a put a bullet through his head.

There is no modern sarcasm or loud laughter in this poem; on the contrary, there is pathos, which consists in the fact that there may be some fatal disease lurking inside the apparently healthy and beautiful.

He whom we consider rich has a hidden personality. The anchorites spoke in the same way. They remind the living that one day they would go to the burning-ground slung on bamboo poles. European monks have described how the decomposed body beneath the soil is eaten by worms. In dissertations on morality we have seen attempts to destroy our illusion by reminding us that the body which seems beautiful is a repulsive compound of bones and flesh and blood and fluids. The best way of cultivating detachment is repeatedly to instil into our minds a contempt for the reality which we perceive. But the poet is not a disciple of detachment, he has come to cultivate attachment. Is the modern age so very degenerate that even the poet is infected with the atmosphere of cremation, that he begins to take pleasure in saying that which we consider great is decayed, that which we admire as beautiful is untouchable at the core? ...

The mid-Victorian age felt a respect for reality and wished to accord it a place of honor; the modern age thinks it part of its program to insult reality and tear aside all the veils of decency.
^^^^^^^^^^ ---This is truth to savor. Beauty oft hides dark and ugly underneath. Those that gaze into the world's well polished mirrors for inspiration ,have already abandoned the search for truth and honor..--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-finch

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
1661–1720

Although she has always enjoyed some fame as a poet, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, has only recently received greater praise and renewed attention. Her diverse and considerable body of work records her private thoughts and personal struggles but also illustrates her awareness of the social and political climate of her era. Not only do Finch’s poems reveal a sensitive mind and a religious soul, but they exhibit great generic range and demonstrate her fluent use of Augustan diction and forms.

Descended from an ancient Hampshire family, Finch was born in April 1661, the third and youngest child of Anne Haselwood and Sir William Kingsmill. At the age of twenty-one, Finch was appointed one of six maids of honor to Mary of Modena, wife of the Duke of York, in the court of Charles II. Her interest in verse writing began during this period and was probably encouraged by her friendships with Sarah Churchill and Anne Killigrew, also maids of honor and women of literary interests. It was during her residence in the court of Charles II that she met Colonel Heneage Finch, uncle of the fifth earl of Winchilsea and gentleman to the Duke of York. Finch fell in love with Anne and courted her persistently until they married. She resigned her post, although Heneage Finch continued to serve in various government positions. Their marriage was a happy one, as attested by his letters and several of her early poems. They led a quiet life, residing first in Westminster and then in London, as Heneage Finch became more involved in public affairs with the accession of James II in 1685. The couple wholly supported James throughout his brief and difficult reign and remained forever sympathetic to the interests of the Stuart court.

Following the revolution and deposition of James in 1689, Finch lost his government position and permanently severed himself from public life by refusing allegiance to the incoming monarchs, William and Mary. The subsequent loss of income forced the Finches to take temporary refuge with various friends in London until Heneage’s nephew Charles invited them to settle permanently on the family’s estate in Eastwell in 1689 or 1690, where they resided for more than twenty-five years. It was during the happy yet trying years of her early married life that Anne Finch began to pursue more seriously her interest in writing poetry. She adopted the pseudonym Ardelia, and not surprisingly, many of her earliest poems are dedicated to her “much lov’d husband,” who appears as “Dafnis” in her work. Finch’s poetry to her husband connects passionate love and poetry in subtle ways. In “A Letter to the Same Person,” she makes explicit the intertwined nature of love and verse, insisting that one is dependent on the other:

Love without Poetry’s refining Aid

Is a dull Bargain, and but coarsely made;

Nor e’er cou’d Poetry successful prove,

Or touch the Soul, but when the Sense was Love.

Oh! Cou’d they both in Absence now impart

Skill to my Hand, but to describe my Heart;

Finch’s early poems to her husband demonstrate her awareness of the guiding poetic conventions of the day, yet also point to the problems such conventions pose to the expression of intimate thought. In “To Mr F Now Earl of Winchilsea,” for example, she appropriately invokes the Muses for inspiration, only to reject such external sources in favor of her own emotion.

In addition to celebrating her love, Finch’s earliest verse also records her own frustration and sense of loss following her departure from court in 1689. She and her husband remained loyal to the Catholic Stuarts, a tenuous stance to assume given the popularity of the Protestant William and Mary in Britain in the 1690s. Finch’s most explicit recognition of the problem of succession and of the difficulty of her relationship to the Stuarts appears in her first published poem, an elegy for James II anonymously published in 1701 and titled Upon the Death of King James the Second. Writing the elegy herself, since “abler Writers” refuse to honor the unpopular James, Finch calls to those loyal to James to “let your Tears a heavier Tribute pay,” and acknowledges the problem of succession, since James was robbed of the throne by his daughter and her foreign husband, although it was his “right by birth.” The poem ends with an appeal to Britain’s “Maternal Bosome”—an attack on William and possibly on the currently reigning queen as well—to honor “Rightful Kings” and “All who shall intend thy Good.” Curiously, the speaker retreats in the final lines as one “devoted only to the Pen” who “craves” for “a safe Retreat amidst thee…/ Below th’ ambitious World and just above my Grave.” Here, Finch’s benign acceptance of her exile from court may reflect the comfort of her retirement in Eastwell. Yet the reversal of the bitter start attests to the poem’s politically unpopular and even dangerous attitude and to Finch’s own inability to speak very openly of her loyalty to the Stuart court. Although her sense of loss seemed to dissipate after the turn of the century as she became more comfortable with her husband’s family in Eastwell, Finch never forgot her happy days at court, or the devastation she felt after 1689. Even as late as 1717, in “A Supplication for the joys of Heaven,” Finch refers to her deep sense of loss following the revolution and her subsequent turn to God and Heaven for comfort.

As her work developed more fully during her retirement at Eastwell, Finch demonstrated an increasing awareness of the poetic traditions of her own period as well as those governing older verse. Her work’s affinity with the metaphysical tradition is evident in poems such as “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat,” which represents the distanced perspective of the speaker through the image of the telescope, an emblem common to much religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Finch experimented with rhyme and meter and imitated several popular genres, including occasional poems, satirical verse, and religious meditations, but fables comprise the largest portion of her oeuvre. Most likely inspired by the popularity of the genre at the turn of the century, Finch wrote dozens of these often satiric vignettes between 1700 and 1713. Most of them were modeled after the short tales of Jean La Fontaine, the French fable writer made popular by Charles II. Finch mocked these playful trifles, and her fables offer interesting bits of social criticism in the satiric spirit of her age.

However, Finch’s more serious poems have received greater critical attention than her fables. “A Nocturnal Reverie,” for instance, is clearly Augustan in its perspective and technique, although many admirers have tended to praise the poem as pre-Romantic: William Wordsworth mentioned its “new images of external nature” in his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” collected in his Poems, first published in 1815. Finch’s poem opens with classical references and proceeds through characteristically Augustan descriptions of the foxglove, the cowslip, the glowworm, and the moon. Finch imitates Augustan preferences for decorum and balance in her use of heroic couplets and the medial caesura in setting the peaceful, nocturnal atmosphere of the poem:

Or from some Tree, fam’d for the Owl’s delight,

She, hollowing clear, directs the Wand’rer right:

In such a Night, when passing Clouds give place,

Or thinly vail the Heav’ns mysterious Face;

When Odours, which declin’d repelling Day,

Thro temp’rate Air uninterrupted stray;

While Finch’s verse occasionally displays slight antitheses of idea and some structural balances of line and phrase, she never attains the epigrammatic couplet form that Alexander Pope perfected in the early eighteenth century. Her admission in “A Nocturnal Reverie” that her verse attempts “Something, too high for Syllables to speak” might be linked to the Romantic recognition of the discrepancy between human aspiration and achievement. But ultimately she retreats to God and solitude and displays a more properly Augustan attitude in the acceptance of her human limitations. At times her descriptions of natural detail bear some likeness to poets such as James Thomson, but Finch’s expression is more immediate and simple, and her versification ultimately exhibits an Augustan rather than a pre-Romantic sensibility.

Another form Finch appropriates is the Pindaric ode. Between 1694 and 1703 she wrote three such odes in the form introduced in England by Abraham Cowley in the 1650s, following his preference for complex and irregular stanzaic structures and rhyme schemes. These poems—”All is Vanity,” The Spleen (1709), and “On the Hurricane”—all depict metaphysical entities working against humanity to test its strength and faith in God. The Spleen, possibly Finch’s most well-known poem, was first published anonymously in 1709. The ode was immediately popular and received much attention for its accurate description of the symptoms of melancholia—the disease often associated with the spleen—which Finch suffered from throughout her life. The speaker begins by acknowledging that hypochondria is also often associated with the spleen, the “pretended Fits,” the “sullen Husband’s feign’d Excuse,” and the coquette’s melancholy pose, “careless Posture, and the Head reclin’d.” She then proceeds to undermine these portraits of feigned illness, treating the disease as a real and terrifying affliction:

From Speech restrain’d, by thy Deceits abus’d,

To Deserts banish’d or in Cells reclus’d,

Mistaken Vot’ries to the Pow’rs Divine,

Wilst they a purer Sacrifice design,

Do but the Spleen obey, and worship at thy Shrine.

In “Ardelia to Melancholy” Finch similarly presents a struggle against melancholy and depression, casting the disease as an “inveterate foe” and “Tyrant pow’r” from which “heav’n alone” can set her “free.” The poem shifts from the first to the third person, generalizing Ardelia’s particular experience to encompass all those who suffer from melancholia: “All, that cou’d ere thy ill got rule, invade, / Their uselesse arms, before thy feet have laid; / The Fort is thine, now ruin’d, all within, / Whilst by decays without, thy Conquest too, is seen.” The imperial language of the poem might also suggest a more abstract relation between her submission to the spleen and her status as a political exile.

Finch circulated two manuscripts of her work before she published Miscellany Poems, and several of her poems were published individually in broadsheets and smaller collections. Finch experienced some additional, though limited, recognition after the publication of her Miscellany Poems. Richard Steele, for instance, published several of her poems in his Miscellanies of 1714. She was personally acquainted with both Swift and Pope, though the full extent of her relationships with them is unknown. Finch is mentioned in several compilations, memoirs, and literary dictionaries during the 18th century, and to a lesser extent, in the 19th century, but has received sustained attention only recently. The first modern edition of her work, though incomplete, appeared in 1903. Much of the recent interest in Finch arises from current academic efforts to recover the work of previously neglected women writers, exploring how those writers depict themselves as poetic subjects and examining the ways in which they adopt and alter the poetic standards of a particular period. In addition to her representations of melancholy and the spleen—an affliction common to women—Finch also called attention to the need for the education of women and recorded the isolation and solitude that marked women’s lives. In “The Bird and the Arras,” for instance, a female bird enclosed in a room mistakes the arras for a real scene and flies happily into it. But she is soon trapped, “Flutt’ring in endless circles of dismay” until she finally escapes to “ample space,” the “only Heav’n of Birds.” Such images of entrapment and frustration are echoed in Finch’s description of the limitations of women’s social roles in England at the turn of the 18th century. In “The Unequal Fetters,” the speaker notes her fear of fading youth, but later refuses to be a “pris’ner” in marriage. Finch admits that marriage does “slightly tye Men,” yet insists that women remain “close Pris’ners” in the union, while men can continue to function “At the full length of all their chain.” For the most part, however, Finch’s message is subtle in its persistent decorum and final resignation and consolation in God. Although she was certainly aware of the problems many of her countrywomen faced, and particularly of the difficulties confronting women writers, Finch offers a playful yet firm protest rather than an outspoken condemnation of the social position of women. And although she endured a loss of affluence with James’s deposition, there is little evidence that she abhorred her twenty-five-year retirement in Eastwell, which afforded her the leisure in which to pursue her creative interests.

Finch died quietly on 5 August 1720 after several years of increasingly ill health. Following her funeral, Heneage Finch praised her Christian virtues and persistent loyalty to her friends and family, noting as well her talents as a writer: “To draw her...just character requires a masterly pen like her own. We shall only presume to say she was the most faithful servant to her Royall Mistresse, the best wife to her noble Lord, and in every other relation public and private so illustrious an example of all moral and divine virtues.” Much of the immediate appeal of Finch’s verse to a post-Romantic modern audience lies in the sincerity with which she expressed the Christian values her husband recalls in his eulogy. But clearly Anne Finch belongs to her age and merits greater appreciation for her poetic experimentation and her fluent use of Augustan diction and forms. Her voice is clear and self-assured, evidence of the controlled and confident poise of an aristocratic poet.

[Updated 2010]

A very enlightening read. Obvious that she being female did not get the recognition that her poetic talent deserved.
Yet such happened the men that had great poetic talent but were of lower class in society. Never having resources enough to pursue a writing career nor respect in society high enough to ever attain a wealthy sponsor as did other famous poets/painters, etc.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_death_poems_of_emily_dickinson-1718


The Death Poems of Emily Dickinson
Written by: Ross Vassilev

If each person's life were laid out as a book, then all these billions of books would end with the same concluding chapter: death. While such a thought might be depressing, it is nonetheless an inescapable fact. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of America's greatest poets, wrote approximately 1800 poems over the course of her life, and many of her best and most famous poems deal with the subject of death, which she explored more deeply than any other American writer. While it might seem an odd motif for a poet to focus on, it was the loss of many loved ones when she and they were still young that laid the basis for Dickinson's preoccupation with death.

Dickinson's early life started normally enough. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was enrolled from age ten at Amherst Academy, a prestigious private school, alongside her younger sister, Lavinia. Emily was apparently a bright student and excelled at composition. According to Dickinson biographer Connie Ann Kirk, one of her teachers called twelve-year-old Emily's writings “strikingly original” (28). But then came a series of deaths that would change Dickinson's life forever. The first occurred when Dickinson was only thirteen—her cousin Sophia Holland, a girl only a few years older than herself, died of typhus on April 29th, 1844. As Cynthia Wolff notes in her biography of Dickinson, she visited her ailing cousin often and was at her bedside in the girl's final hours (76-77). Grief over her cousin's untimely passing caused Dickinson herself to fall ill—her parents temporarily withdrew her from school and sent her to stay with her Aunt Lavinia in Boston for a month to recuperate (Kirk 63).

Upon returning to Amherst Academy in autumn of that year, she befriended the school's new principal, Leonard Humphrey, a young man only several years older than herself. In spite of her frequent absences due to illness, Emily saw enough of Humphrey so that she came to regard him as a kind of mentor, writes Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger (216). Sadly, Humphrey died of illness suddenly in 1850, a few years after Dickinson had graduated from Amherst Academy. Writing to Abiah Root, a girlfriend from her days at the academy, Dickinson confided, “The tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey” (Habegger 150). In 1847-1848, Dickinson studied for roughly two semesters at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a small women's college near Amherst. Her roommate there had been another cousin, Emily Lavinia Norcross. The two were of the same age and had been close since they were little. In 1852, Emily Norcross died of tuberculosis—yet another heartbreaking loss for Dickinson (Wolff 60).

Another young man with whom Dickinson had become acquainted was Benjamin Franklin Newton, a legal apprentice at Dickinson and Bowdoin, her father's law firm. Nine years her senior, Newton became to Dickinson, in her own words, “a gentle, yet grave Preceptor, teaching me what to read, what authors to admire, what was most grand or beautiful in nature, and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen....” (Habegger 217). Tragically, Newton died of tuberculosis in 1853, only a few years after they had first met. In one of her poems, Dickinson wrote mournfully of her lost friend, who had “slipped my simple fingers through / While just a girl at school” (“Benjamin Franklin Newton,” par. 5). These and other deaths of those near and dear to her were no doubt the catalyst for Dickinson's many poems on the subject of death. It might also be one reason why Dickinson became increasingly reclusive as she grew older, remaining a spinster all her life and rarely leaving her prominent family's stately manorial home (“Emily Dickinson” 177).

Having become familiar with Dickinson's biography, one better understands why she chose to write so many poems on the subject of dying and what might come after. The reader can now better comprehend lines such as “I never lost as much but twice / And that was in the sod”—with “the sod” obviously referring to loved ones now dead and buried (Dickinson 178-179, lines 1-2). One can easily speculate that the word “twice” in the first line most likely refers to among the aforementioned deaths of those dear to her. These tragedies hurt Dickinson terribly, as she makes clear in the following brief but exquisite poem:

"Each that we lose takes part of us;

A crescent still abides,

Which like the moon, some turbid night,

Is summoned by the tides." (Bartleby.com)

One of the more noteworthy aspects of Dickinson's poetic studies of death is that she evidently took it for granted that she and those she had lost would one day meet up again. In her poem “Death is a Dialogue between,” she affirms that she did not believe that death is truly the end:

"Death is a Dialogue between

The spirit and the Dust.

'Dissolve' says Death—The Spirit 'Sir

I have another Trust'—

Death doubts it—Argues from the Ground—

The Spirit turns away

Just laying off for evidence

An Overcoat of Clay." (quoted in McMichael 192)

The “laying off” of “An Overcoat of Clay” in the last two lines is obviously The Spirit's release from the grave, and thus its vindication and triumph over Death, who is left defeated in “the Ground,” presumably to argue with “the Dust” if He wishes. She expresses this same belief in another poem, especially in its last three lines:

"The Bustle in a House

The Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted upon Earth—

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity." (quoted in McMichael 193)

Having lost so many close to her at such a young age, and the fact that they had all died quite young—perhaps the thought of someday reuniting with them was the only thing that made her pain bearable. Then again, no one should be surprised at Dickinson's earnest faith in a life hereafter. She had been raised, after all, in a devoutly Calvinist home and took her faith seriously all her life, even if her inclinations were mostly at odds with New England's stodgy Puritan orthodoxy (“Emily Dickinson” 178). She eloquently affirms her belief in God and her vision of a Christian afterlife in the following poem:

"I never saw a Moor—

Death PoemsI never saw the Sea—

Yet know I how the Heather looks

And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God

Nor visited in Heaven—

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the Checks were given" (quoted in McMichael 193)

These deaths of close family and friends also made Dickinson consider her own mortality, inspiring two of her most famous poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” in which she imagines—hypnotically—what it must be like to experience the moment of death:

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading—treading—till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through—

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum—

Kept beating—beating—till I thought

My mind was going numb—

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space—began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down—

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing—then—" (quoted in McMichael 182)



And also,

"I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air—

Between the Heaves of Storm—

The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset—when the King

Be witnessed—in the Room—

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable—and then it was

There interposed a Fly—

With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—

And then the Windows failed—and then

I could not see to see—" (quoted in McMichael 186-187)

The two poems above are among the most unique in American literature. While it is common enough to write an elegy for the dearly departed, poems focusing on the moment of death are rare indeed—perhaps due to the unpleasantness of the idea, or it might be that most poets lack the imagination to compose such a dark fantasy. In yet another mesmerizing poem, Dickinson envisions the soul not at the moment of the body's death—but instead as it commences its journey afterward:

"Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children played

At Recess—in the Ring

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passes Us—

The Dews drew quivering and chill—

For only Gossamer, my Gown—

My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground—

The Roof was scarcely visible—

The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity—" (quoted in McMichael 191)

In line 21 above, Dickinson makes it clear that the female speaker in the poem is not someone who is recently deceased, but rather a woman who has been dead a very long time, and yet the “Centuries” seem to her to have sped by in less than a day. Perhaps this is Dickinson affirming the old adage that life is short.

Deaths of loved ones while she was a teenager and young woman profoundly affected the life and literary career of Emily Dickinson. As she wrote in the last two lines of her poem “My life closed twice before its close” (there's the word “twice” again): “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell” (Dickinson 196, 7-8). Grieving over the loss of so many dear to her, Dickinson wrote poetry to help her cope with the pain, rather than let it destroy her. In doing so, she gave humanity a number of unforgettable and timeless poems that the world will never stop reading.



Works Cited

“Benjamin Franklin Newton.” Emily Dickinson Museum. Emily Dickinson Museum. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2014.

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death.” McMichael: 191.

---. “Death is a dialogue between.” McMichael: 192.

---. “Each that we lose takes part of us.” Bartleby.com. 2014. Web. 3 Nov. 2014.

---. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” McMichael: 182.

---. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.” McMichael: 186-187.

---. “I never lost as much but twice.” McMichael: 178-179.

---. “I never saw a Moor.” McMichael: 193.

---. “My life closed twice before its close.” McMichael: 196.

---. “The Bustle in a House.” McMichael: 193.

“Emily Dickinson.” McMichael: 177.

Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.

Kirk, Connie A. Emily Dickinson: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Print.

McMichael, George and James S. Leonard, eds. Anthology of American Literature, Tenth Edition, Volume II. Boston: Pearson, 2011. Print.

Wolff, Cynthia G. Emily Dickinson. New York: Knopf, 1986. Print.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

The Poetry of Vincent Bourne
Written by: Arthur Christopher Benson

"I LOVE the memory of Vinny Bourne," said Cowper in a letter to Newton in 1781, thirty-four years after Bourne's death. "I think him," he went on, "a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him." Landor, in 1847, thought this criticism of Cowper's an unintelligent one; he could not conceive how a poet so great as Cowper came to pass such a judgment. The truth is that Landor was a better scholar than Cowper, and was thinking more of Bourne's Latinity than of his choice of subjects or mode of treatment. Cowper was not, it appears, a very acute Latinist, and his renderings of Vincent Bourne's poems, as we shall see, proved that he cared little for the simple terseness of Bourne's elegiacs. What is remarkable in Cowper's criticism is his preference of Ovid to Propertius. Ovid must almost have thought in pentameters; he had from boyhood an incredible facility in verse; "Et quod tentabam dicere, versus erat," he says, in that interesting autobiographical poem about his boyhood and youth; "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Ovid was a perfect master of his craft; he is one of the least amateurish of poets; he had the power of producing with luminous precision the exact effect that he intended, and as often as he intended. As a narrator he is perhaps without a rival; but his scope is limited, and his metrical scheme is, like Pope's, without variety. But if Ovid appears in his verse as a somewhat placid egotist, Propertius is full of unchastened fire and passion. His writing, like that of Catullus, bears the undefined stamp of something which can only be named genius. Bourne is more Ovidian perhaps than Propertian; and if his verses have not the easy and lucid movement of Ovid, this is amply compensated for by their originality of subject and treatment.

And we may now call into court a still better critic than either Cowper or Landor, the surefooted Charles Lamb, who in his innumerable appreciations of writers both in verse and prose, hardly ever makes a false step, save from some affectionate bias of the heart, hardly ever pronounces a judgment that has not been cordially endorsed by posterity. Writing to Wordsworth in 1815, he says, "Since I saw you, I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day, the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town schemes, a proper counterpoise to some people's rural extravaganzas! Why I mention him is that your 'Power of Music' reminded me of his poem of 'The Ballad-Singer in the Seven Dials.' Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the ABC, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton's Principia? I was lately fatiguing myself by going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow; excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales; but what an aching vacuum of matter! I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes, and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matterful creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin and his thoughts all English. Bless him! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why was he not content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?" And again, in one of the "Essays of Elia," "A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis," he says: "Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most classical, and, at the same time, most English of the Latinists, who has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog-and-man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the 'Epitaphium ad Canem,' or 'Dog's Epitaph.' Reader, peruse it; and say if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis." Here, of course, Lamb is really speaking of the spirit of the poems; his own Latinity, as shown by the Latin letters which he was fond of intermingling with his correspondence, was more copious than correct. Lamb, it is true, saw poetry in Bernard Barton, but that, as we have said, was an affair of the heart; if he could write as he did of Vincent Bourne, we may be sure that his words are worth attention.

The biographical facts of Bourne's life are of the simplest. He was born in 1695, educated at Westminster and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1720. His earliest published poetical effort seems to have been a copy of congratulatory verses addressed to Addison on his recovery from a severe illness in 1717. In 1721 he editedCarmina Comitialia, containing Tripos verses, satirical poems on local events, and miscellaneous poems. From Cambridge he returned to Westminster as a master, and there he remained till his death in 1747. In 1734 he was appointed, perhaps through the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, who had been a boy at Westminster with him, and to whom he dedicated the first edition of his poems, Housekeeper and Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons.

As a teacher he seems to have been wholly without energy or practical power. He made no attempt to preserve discipline, and Cowper, who was in his form for a time, says that he remembers seeing the Duke of Richmond, then a boy at the school, set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put the conflagration out. He does not even appear to have stimulated, as absent-minded, unpractical teachers often do, the keener and more ardent minds among his pupils. "I lost more than I got by him," says Cowper, "for he made me as idle as himself." Cowper also says that he was so inattentive to his pupils, and so utterly indifferent whether they brought him good or bad exercises, that "he seemed determined, as he was the best, so to be the last, Latin poet of the Westminster line." As to his good-nature, however, there appear to have been two opinions, as can be seen from a trenchant entry in Nichol's Literary Anecdotes. "Vincent Bourne was usher to the Fourth Form at Westminster, and remarkably fond of me. I never heard much of the goodness of heart. T. F." He was noted, too, for extreme slovenlinessin attire. Cowper says: "He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his person; and indeed in his writings, he has almost made amends for all." And again to Mr. Rose, in 1788, he writes: "I shall have great pleasure in taking now and then a peep at my old friend Vincent Bourne, the neatest of all men in his versification, though, when I was under his ushership at Westminster, the most slovenly in his person."

So Vincent Bourne lived his shabby, unpretending life, the secretum iter, et fallentis semita vitæ. Every one must have known some one of this kind,—good-natured, easy-going, murmuring a phantom music in his head, indifferent to what went on about him, without ambition or personal dignity. His patron, the Duke of Newcastle, was anxious to benefit him, but Vinny could not be coerced into taking Orders, and so the Prebend at Westminster and the Canonry at Christchurch, which were destined for him, went elsewhere. And yet he seems to have had some obscure visions of preferment, founded on a promise given by Dr. Arbuthnot, the friend of Pope. Bourne wrote in a copy of Arbuthnot's work on Coins: "[As] to the reputation of Dr. Arbuthnot, I never met with less honour and generosity than I have received from him; I scorn to charge that upon his country which he has been guilty of in his private character; he should have remembered his promise, and would have done it, if he had not been a courtier;" and there is a preceding passage, which looks as if Bourne had given Arbuthnot literary assistance which had neither been acknowledged nor repaid.

Bourne, in a curious letter to his wife, written shortly before and in anticipation of his death, gives her the reasons which prevented him from taking orders; he says that the importance of so great a charge, joined with a mistrust of his own sufficiency, made him fearful of undertaking it. And he adds, "If I have not in that capacity assisted in the salvation of souls, I have not been the means of losing any; if I have not brought reputation to the function by any merit of mine, I have the comfort of this reflection, I have given no scandal to it by my meanness and unworthiness." This letter shows that he considered the pastoral office in a different light from most of his contemporaries, as one of great personal responsibility; and the whole letter breathes a spirit of intense contrition and pathetic humility at the thought of the opportunities he has missed and the idleness and vanity of his life. He does not however write as if with any sense of his shortcomings as a teacher, for he says that his one desire has been to be humbly serviceable in his quiet sphere of duty. But the most touching part of the letter is the vague dismay which, in spite of his deep and sincerely Christian hope, he finds in the thought of dissolution; the terrors of the grave lie very hard upon him, as they would upon a man of imagination and sensibility who had lived a thoughtless and easy-going life. The whole letter is a singular contrast to another rhetorical epistle which has been preserved, addressed to a young lady on the thoughts suggested by a graveyard, in which he says with a pretentious philosophy that the more human document belies, that "the frequent perusal of gravestones and monuments, and the many walks I have taken in a churchyard, have given me so great a distaste for life." Poor Vinny! When he came to die he had little of the philosopher about him, but shivered and cried at the dark passage.

It may be a matter of wonder how Bourne found time or inclination to marry; but he did so, and the maiden's name was Lucia. He even begat children, of whom one was a Lieutenant of Marines, and left some vague property, a house in Westminster and land in Bungay. The poet's death took place in 1747, not unexpected by himself, as I have said, and by a disease which, he records with grateful thankfulness, left him in full and calm possession of his faculties. He had written his own epitaph, which may be thus rendered: Vincent Bourne, of unfeigned piety and utter humility, who in no place forgot his God or forgot himself, descends into the silence which he loved. It is a touching estimate, and shows, in its anxiety to deal only with essentials, how incidental his work was to his character; he forms no pompous appreciation of the value of his writings, but leaves them, like Sibylline leaves, for the wind to whirl away, the only testimony to his quiet and observant eye, his love of simple things, his intense interest in nature and humanity. Qui bene latuit, bene vixit, he might have said.

Cowper wrote to Newton in 1781, in reply to a letter suggesting that he should translate Vincent Bourne's Latin poems, and offering literary assistance. It appears to have been one of the few occasions on which Newton gave Cowper sensible advice. Cowper replies that he is much obliged for the offer of help: "It is but seldom, however, and never, except for my amusement, that I translate; because I find it impossible to work by another man's pattern. I should at least be sure to find it so in a business of any length. Again, that is epigrammatic and witty in Latin which would be perfectly insipid in English, and a translator of Bourne would frequently find himself obliged to supply what is called the turn.... If a Latin poem is neat, elegant, and musical, it is enough; but English readers are not so easily satisfied. To quote myself, you will find, on comparing 'The Jackdaw' with the original, that I was obliged to sharpen a point, which, though smart enough in the Latin, would in English have appeared as plain and blunt as the tag of a lace.... Vincent Bourne's humour is entirely original; he can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws, that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes. And with all his drollery, there is a mixture of rational and even religious reflection at times, and always an air of pleasantry, good-nature, and humanity, that makes him in my mind one of the most amiable writers in the world. It is not common to meet with an author who can make you smile, and yet at nobody's expense, who is always entertaining and yet always harmless; and who, though always elegant and classical to a degree not always found in the classics themselves, charms more, by the simplicity and playfulness of his ideas, than by the neatness and purity of his verse."

To turn to the poems in detail, almost the first thing that strikes one is the originality of his subjects. Nothing was common or unclean to our poet, at a time when poetry, except in Cowper's hands, was grandiose and affected to an uncommon degree. Vincent Bourne may be held to have been in a remote connection the parent of the poetry of common life, for he undoubtedly exerted a strong influence on Cowper. I do not think it is too much to say that Cowper's best contributions to literature, his exquisite lyrics on birds and hares and dogs, which will live when "The Task" and "Tirocinium" have gone down to the dust, would never have been written had it not been for Vincent Bourne. In the year 1750, the future of English poetry was dark; there were only two considerable writers at work, Gray and Collins. There was, it is true, a certain respectful attitude to nature prevalent, but it was a conventional attitude. Cowper, as I believe inspired by Bourne, was the first to make it unconventional. Then came the sweet notes of Burns across the border, and the victory was won.

Let me now give a few instances of Bourne. First must come "The Jackdaw," and I have given Cowper's rendering; but I have also ventured to subjoin a version of my own, not because I challenge even the most distant comparison with Cowper's sparkling and graceful lyric, but because Cowper's is in no sense a translation. It is a poem of which the line of thought is suggested by Bourne, and at a few points touches the Latin poem; but the turn, the colouring is Cowper's own. In my own translation, though I have several times sacrificed verbal accuracy, I have endeavoured to keep as closely to the Latin as is consistent with writing English at all.

CORNICULA.

Nigras inter aves avis est, quæ plurima turres,
Antiquas ædes, celsaque fana colit.
Nil tam sublime est, quod non audace volatu,
Aeriis spernens inferiors, petit.
Quo nemo ascendat, cui non vertigo cerebrum
Corripiat, certe hunc seligit illa locum.
Quo vix a terra tu suspicis absque tremore,
Illa metus expers incolumisque sedet.
Lamina delubri supra fastigia, ventus
Qua cœli spiret de regione, docet;
Hanc ea præ reliquis mavult, secura pericli,
Nec curat, nedum cogitat, unde cadat.
Res inde humanas, sed summa per otia, spectat,
Et nihil ad sese, quas videt, esse videt.
Concursus spectat, plateaque negotia in omni,
Omnia pro nugis at sapienter habet.
Clamores, quos infra audit, si forsitan audit,
Pro rebus nihili negligit, et crocitat.
Ille tibi invideat, felix cornicula, pennas,
Qui sic humanis rebus abesse velit.

THE JACKDAW.

(By William Cowper.)

There is a bird, who by his coat,
And by the hoarseness of his note,
Might be supposed a crow;
A great frequenter of the church,
Where bishop-like he finds a perch,
And dormitory too.

Above the steeple shines a plate,
That turns and turns, to indicate
From what point blows the weather;
Look up—your brains begin to swim,
'Tis in the clouds; that pleases him,
He chooses it the rather.

Fond of the speculative height,
Thither he wings his airy flight,
And thence securely sees
The bustle and the raree-show
That occupy mankind below,
Secure and at his ease.

You think, no doubt, he sits and muses
Of future broken bones and bruises,
If he should chance to fall;
No! not a single thought like that
Employs his philosophic pate,
Or troubles it at all.

He sees that this great roundabout
The world, with all its motley rout,
Church, army, physic, law,
Its customs and its businesses
Is no concern at all of his,
And says—what says he?—Caw.

Thrice happy bird! I too have seen
Much of the vanities of men,
And sick of having seen 'em,
Would cheerfully these limbs resign
For such a pair of wings as thine,
And such a head between 'em.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Of fowls with black and glossy coat,
One dear familiar bird I note;
In towers and ancient piles he dwells,
Above the din of sacred bells;
High fanes he seeks; with daring flight
Aspires, despising aught but height;
He sits where mortals mount with pain
Of reeling pulse and dizzy brain;
And where you shudder with alarm,
He's perched aloft, and free from harm.
The vane that on the steeple shows
Whither and whence the free wind blows,
He choosing, owns no care at all,
Much less is careful lest he fall;
And thence in lofty ease surveys
Mankind's inexplicable ways.
He sees the streets, the concourse dim,
They hold no interest for him;
And if some murmur upward floats
He heeds not, but with pensive notes
Beguiles the hour. Blest bird, I'd be
A winged and airy thing, like thee!
From human things I'd sit aloof
Like thee, above the minster-roof.

Next shall come Lamb's favourite, the Epitaph on the Beggar's Dog. Lamb's rendering is very fairly exact.

Pauperis hic Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis,
Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectæ,
Dux cæco fidus; nec, me ducente, solebat,
Prætenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum
Incertam explorare viam; sed fila secutus,
Quæ dubios regerent passus, vestigia tuta
Fixit inoffenso gressu; gelidumque sedile
In nudo nactus saxo, qua prætereuntium
Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras
Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam.
Ploravit nec frustra; obolum dedit alter et alter,
Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam.
Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile,
Vel mediis vigil in somnis; ad herilia jussa
Auresque atque animum arrectus, seu frustuia amice
Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei
Tædia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat.
Hi mores, hæc vita fuit, dum fata sinebant,
Dum neque languebam morbis, nec inerte senecta,
Quæ tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite cæcum
Orbavit dominum: prisci sed gratia facti
Ne tota intereat, longos deleta per annos,
Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit,
Et si inopis, non ingratæ munuscula dextræ;
Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque
Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque benignum.

———

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,
That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,
Had he occasion for that staff, with which
He now goes picking out his path in fear
Over the highways and crossings, but would plant,
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd:
To whom with loud and passionate laments
From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd.
Nor wail'd to all in vain: some here and there,
The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave;
I meantime at his feet obsequious slept;
Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear
Prick'd up at his least motion: to receive
At his kind hand my customary crumbs,
And common portion in his feast of scraps;
Or when night warned us homeward, tired and spent
With our long day and tedious beggary.
These were my manners, this my way of life,
Till age and slow disease me overtook,
And sever'd from my sightless master's side.
But, lest the grace of so good deeds should die,
Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost,
This slender tomb of turf hath Irus rear'd,
Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand,
And with short verse inscribed it, to attest,
In long and lasting union to attest,
The virtues of the Beggar and the Dog.

It may be noted that Lamb treats Lyciscus, which was evidently intended merely as a name, as referring to the species of dog; Virgil uses Lycisca as a dog's name in the third Eclogue. Probably Bourne was thinking of a fox-terrier, and the term wolf-dog is pompous and incongruous. Lamb's last line but three is a very lame one; it is a difficult point to determine, but did not he mean "no ungrateful hand"? The true sense of the original line is, "the slender gift of a hand which although poor is not ungrateful."

Bourne shows also a remarkable observation of street life, the quaint water-side manners, the odd obscure life that eddied near the river highway and round about the smoky towers of Wren. Absent-minded he may have been, but observant he was to a peculiar degree, and that not of broad poetical effects, but of the minute detail and circumstance of every-day life. It would be easy to multiply instances, but this extract from the "Iter per Tamisin," of the bargeman lighting his pipe, will serve to show what I mean. Why does he call tobacco pœtum, it may be asked? The only solution that I can suggest is that Pink-eye, or Squint-eye, was a cant term for some species of the weed at the time. It can hardly be, I think, the word peat Latinised. The version, as in the case of those which follow, is my own.

His ita dispositis, tubulum cum pyxide magna
Depromit, nigrum longus quem fecerat usus.
Hunc postquam implêrat pæto, silicemque pararat,
Excussit scintillam; ubi copia ponitur atri
Fomitis, hinc ignem sibi multum exugit, et haustu
Accendens crebro, surgentes deprimit herbas
Extremo digito: in cineres albescere pætum
Incipit et naso gratos emittit odores.

———

This thus disposed, a pipe with ample bowl
He handles, blackened with familiar use;
Stuffs with the fragrant herb, and flint prepares
To strike the spark: and thence from fuel stored,
Black provender, he spouts a plenteous flame,
Kindling with frequent gusts of breath indrawn:
Meanwhile he tends with cautions finger-tip
The rising fibres; into lightest ash
Whitening, they pour the aromatic fumes.

Vincent Bourne had that passionate sympathy with and delight in youth that is the surest testimony to a heart that does not grow old. The pretty ways and natural gestures of childhood pleased him. He was fond of his boys, and allowed that fondness to be evident, at a time when brow-beating and insolent severity were too much the fashion. In his epitaphs it is curious to note how many deal with the young, and touch on the immemorial fragrance of early death with a peculiar pathos. There is an epitaph on a Westminster boy of twelve years old, where hemost touchingly alludes to the thought that he died both beautiful and innocent; and an epitaph on a little girl who, he said in quaint phrase, had the modest red of roses and the pure whiteness of lilies in her face. Again the inscription to the memory of the young Earl of Warwick, who died at the age of twenty-four, is full of delicate beauty; but I will give in full what seems to me the sweetest of all. It is printed among the authentic epitaphs, but it is, I imagine, purely fanciful.

EPITAPHIUM IN SEPTEM ANNORUM PUELLULAM.

Quam suavis mea Chloris, et venusta,
Vitæ quam fuerit brevis, monebunt
Hic circum violæ rosæque fusæ:
Quarum purpura, vix aperta, clausa est.
Sed nec dura nimis vocare fata,
Nec fas est nimium queri caducæ
De formæ brevitate, quam rependit
Aeterni diuturnitas odoris.

———

My pretty Chloris—ah, how sweet
The roses o'er your head shall show;
The violets, strewn above your feet
How brief the life that sleeps below.
We must not chide the grudging fates.
Nor say how short a lot was thine,
For, ah, how amply compensates
The eternal fragrance of thy shrine.

I subjoin to these a couple of epigrams which give a good idea of the natural and solemn way in which he approaches death, as an event not necessarily of a gloomy and forbidding character, but as tending to draw out and develop an intimate and regretful hope in the survivors. There is nothing austere about his philosophy; it puts aside pompous and formal consolations, and goes right to the heart of the matter, with a child-like simplicity. The first deals with the Pyramids, the second with an incident, real or fancied, connected with the burial of Queen Mary at Westminster.

PYRAMIS.

Pyramidum sumptus, ad cœlum et sidera ducti,
Quid dignum tanta mole, quid intus habent?
Ah! nihil intus habent, nisi nigrum informe cadaver;
Durata in saxum est cui medicata caro.
Ergone porrigitur monumentum in jugera tota!
Ergo tot annorum, tot manuumque labor!
Integra sit morum tibi vita: hæc pyramis esto,
Et poterunt tumulo sex satis esse pedes.

———

Aspiring monument of human toil
What lies beneath that's worth so vast a coil?
A shapeless blackened corpse, set all alone,
Embalmed and mummied into silent stone.
The mighty pile its ponderous circuit rears;
Ah, ingenuity! ah, wasted years!
Pure be thy life; let pompous trappings be!
Six feet of kindly earth's enough for thee!

PIETAS RUBECULÆ.

Quæ tibi regalis dederant diadematis aurum,
Dant et funereum fana, Maria, tholum.
Quisque suis vicibus, mæsto stant ordine flentes;
Oreque velato femina triste silet.
Parva avis interea, residens in vertice summo,
Emittit tremula lugubre voce melos.
Vespera nec claudit, nec lucem Aurora recludit,
Quin eadem repetat funebre carmen avis,
Tale nihil dederint vel Mausolea; Mariæ
Hæc pietas soli debita vera fuit.
Venales lacrymæ, jussique facessite fletus;
Sumptibus hic nullis luctus emendus erit.

———

The ancient fane that crowned thy flashing head,
Oh queen, oh mother! now receives thee dead.
The mourning train, in funeral pomp arrayed,
Weeping adore the venerable shade.
A duteous bird the while, high perched above,
Utters the tremulous notes of tender love.
Each waning eve, each dewy opening day,
That gentle heart repeats his solemn lay.
No lamentable anthem pealing high
Can match the gift of pious minstrelsy.
Tears, venal tears, ye cannot give relief.
No lavished gold can purchase natural grief!

There have been several editions of Vincent Bourne; three of them deserve, bibliographically, a word. The first is the third of his publications, a very rare and beautiful book, which by the kindness of Mr. Austin Dobson I have been privileged to examine. This is Poematia, Latine partim reddita, partim scripta, printed by J. Watts, 1734, and dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; it is a small volume printed in italics of the tribe of Aldus, with quaint head and tail pieces, and red lines ruled by hand. The next is the Miscellaneous Poems of 1772, a handsome quarto, published by subscription. The third is Poems by Vincent Bourne published by Pickering in 1840, with a memoir and notes by the Rev. John Mitford. This is a carefully and beautifully printed book, with but one drawback. Whenever an ornamental head-piece is inserted at the top of a page, the number of the page is omitted. This tiresome affectation makes it very difficult to find any particular poem.

An exhaustive account of Vincent Bourne's Latinity would be a long enumeration of minute mistakes—mistakes arising from the imperfect acquaintance of the scholars of the day with the principles of correct Latinity. To give a few obvious instances, metrically, Bourne is not aware of the rule which forbids a short syllable to stand before sp, sc, st, sq. In classical Latin, such a collocation of consonants does not lengthen the preceding short syllable, but is simply inadmissible. Then again, he is very unsound in the quantity of final o. I am not speaking of such words as quando, ego, where there is a certain doubt. But he makes short such words as fallo, and even such a word as experiendo;, which is quite impossible. He also ends his pentameters with trisyllables such as niteat, a practice which has no Ovidian countenance. Grammatically, a considerable licence is observable in the use of the indicative for the subjunctive, as, for instance, after si forsitan and nedum. But these, it may be said, are minor points, and in form and arrangement his Latin is pure enough. His verse is of the school of Ovid and Tibullus, but his vocabulary is not Augustan; this, however, may be due to the fact that his choice of subjects necessitates the use of many words for which there is no Augustan authority.

It can hardly be expected that Vincent Bourne will be read or appreciated by the general reader. But any one with an adequate stock of Latin, who is given to wandering among the byways of literature, will find him a singularly original and poetical writer. His was no academic spirit, writing, with his back to the window, of frigid generalities and classical ineptitudes. He was rather a man with a warm heart and a capacious eye, finding any trait of human character, any grouping of the grotesque or tender furniture of life, interesting and memorable. He reminds one of the man in Robert Browning's poem, "How it Strikes a Contemporary," who went about in his old cloak, with quiet observant eyes, noting the horse that was beaten, and trying the mortar of the new house with his stick, and came home and wrote it all to his lord the king. Vincent Bourne had of course no moral object in his writings; he had merely the impulse to sing, and we may regret with Lamb that so delicate and sensitive a spirit chose a vehicle which must debar so many from walking in his company. With his greasy locks and dirty gown, his indolence and his good-humour, the shabby usher of Westminster, with his pure spirit and clear eyes, has a place reserved for him in the stately procession, "where is nor first, nor last."

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/aeschylus_an_introduction_to_prometheus_bound_and_ seven_against_thebes-945

Aeschylus: An Introduction to Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes
Written by: Theodore Alois Buckley

Æschylus, the first of the great Grecian writers of tragedy, was born at Eleusis, in 525 B.C. He was the son of Euphorion, who was probably a wealthy owner of rich vineyards. The poet's early employment was to watch the grapes and protect them from the ravages of men and other animals, and it is said that this occupation led to the development of his dramatic genius. It is more easy to believe that it was responsible for the development of certain other less admirable qualities of the poet.

His first appearance as a tragic writer was in 499 B.C., and in 484 B.C. he won a prize in the tragic contests. He took part in the battle of Marathon, in 490 B.C., and also fought in the battle of Salamis, in 480 B.C. He visited Sicily twice, and probably spent some time in that country, as the use of many Sicilian words in his later plays would indicate.

There is a curious story related as to his death, which took place at Gela in 456 B.C. It is said that an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise upon it in order to break its shell, and that the blow quite killed Æschylus. Too much reliance should not be placed upon this story.

It is not known how many plays the poet wrote, but vionly seven have been preserved to us. That these tragedies contain much that is undramatic is undoubtedly true, but it must be remembered that at the time he wrote, Æschylus found the drama in a very primitive state. The persons represented consisted of but a single actor, who related some narrative of mythological or legendary interest, and a chorus, who relieved the monotony of such a performance by the interspersing of a few songs and dances. To Æschylus belongs the credit of creating the dialogue in the Greek drama by the introduction of a second actor.

In the following pages will be found a translation of two of the poet's greatest compositions, viz., the "Prometheus Chained" and the "Seven Against Thebes." The first of these dramas has been designated "The sublimest poem and simplest tragedy of antiquity," and the second, while probably an earlier work and containing much that is undramatic, presents such a splendid spectacle of true Grecian chivalry that it has been regarded as the equal of anything which the author ever attempted.

The characters represented in the "Prometheus" are Strength, Force, Vulcan, Prometheus, Io, daughter of Inachus, Ocean and Mercury. The play opens with the appearance of Prometheus in company with Strength, Force and Vulcan, who have been bidden to bind Prometheus with adamantine fetters to the lofty cragged rocks of an untrodden Scythian desert, because he has offended Jupiter by stealing fire from heaven and bestowing it upon mortals.

Vulcan is loth to obey the mandates of Jove, but urged on by Strength and Force and the fear of the consequences viiwhich disobedience will entail, with mighty force drives the wedges into the adamantine rocks and rivets the captive with galling shackles to the ruthless crags.

Prometheus, being bound and left alone, bemoans his fate and relates to the chorus of nymphs the base ingratitude of Jove, who through his counsels having overwhelmed the aged Saturn beneath the murky abyss of Tartarus, now rewards his ally with indignities because he had compassion upon mortals.

Ocean then comes to Prometheus, offering sympathy and counsel, urging him not to utter words thus harsh and whetted, lest Jupiter seated far aloft may hear them and inflict upon him added woes to which his present sufferings will seem but child's play.

Ocean having taken his departure, Prometheus again complains to the chorus and enumerates the boons which he has bestowed upon mankind, with the comment that though he has discovered such inventions for mortals, he has no device whereby he may escape from his present misfortune.

Io, daughter of Inachus, beloved by Jove, but forced, through the jealous hatred of Juno, to make many wanderings, then appears, and beseeches Prometheus to discover to her what time shall be the limit of her sufferings. Prometheus accedes to her request and relates how she shall wander over many lands and seas until she reaches the city of Canopus, at the mouth of the Nile, where she shall bring forth a Jove-begotten child, from whose seed shall finally spring a dauntless warrior renowned in archery, who will liberate Prometheus from his captivity and accomplish the downfall of Jove.

viiiIo then resumes her wanderings, and Mercury, sent by Jove, comes to question Prometheus as to the nuptials which he has boasted will accomplish the overthrow of the ruler of the Gods. Him Prometheus reviles with opprobrious epithets, calling him a lackey of the Gods, and refuses to disclose anything concerning the matter on which he questions him. The winged God, replying, threatens him with dire calamities. A tempest will come upon him and overwhelm him with thunderbolts, and a bloodthirsting eagle shall feed upon his liver. Thus saying, he departs, and immediately the earth commences to heave, the noise of thunder is heard, vivid streaks of lightning blaze throughout the sky and a hurricane—the onslaught of Jove—sweeps Prometheus away in its blast.

The "Seven against Thebes" includes in its cast of characters Eteocles, King of Thebes, Antigone and Ismene, Sisters of the King, a Messenger and a Herald. The play opens with the siege of Thebes. Eteocles appears upon the Acropolis in the early morning, and exhorts the citizens to be brave and be not over-dismayed at the rabble of alien besiegers. A messenger arrives and announces the rapid approach of the Argives. Eteocles goes to see that the battlements and the gates are properly manned, and during his absence the chorus of Theban maidens set up a great wail of distress and burst forth with violent lamentations. Eteocles, returning, upbraids them severely for their weakness and bids them begone and raise the sacred auspicious shout of the pæan as an encouragement to the Theban warriors. He then departs to prepare himself and six others to meet in combat the seven chieftains who have come against the city.

ixHe soon re-enters, and at the same time comes the messenger from another part of the city with fresh tidings of the foe and the arrangement of the invaders around the walls of the city. By the gate of Prœtus stands the raging Tydeus with his helm of hairy crests and his buckler tricked out with a full moon and a gleaming sky full of stars, against whom Eteocles will marshal the wary son of Astacus, a noble and a modest youth, who detests vain boastings and yet is not a coward.

By the Electron gate is stationed the giant Campaneus, who bears about him the device of a naked man with a gleaming torch in his hands, crying out "I will burn the city." Against him will be pitted the doughty Polyphontes, favored by Diana and other gods.

Against the gate of Neis the mighty Eteoclus is wheeling his foaming steeds, bearing a buckler blazoned with a man in armor treading the steps of a ladder to his foeman's tower. Megareus, the offspring of Creon, is the valiant warrior who will either pay the debt of his nurture to his land or will decorate his father's house with the spoils of the conquered Eteoclus.

The fiery Hippomedon is raging at the gate of Onca Minerva, bearing upon his buckler a Typhon darting forth smoke through his fire-breathing mouth, eager to meet the brave Hyperbius, son of Œnops, who has been selected to check his impetuous onslaught.

At the gate of Boreas the youthful Parthenopæus takes his stand, a fair-faced stripling, upon whose face the youthful down is just making its appearance. Opposed to him stands Actor, a man who is no braggart, but who will not submit to boastful tauntings or permit the rash intruder to batter his way into the city.

xThe mighty Amphiarus is waiting at the gate of Homolöis, and in the meantime reproaches his ally, Tydeus, calling him a homicide, and Polynices he rebukes with having brought a mighty armament into his native city. Lasthenes, he of the aged mind but youthful form, is the Thebian who has been chosen to marshal his forces against this invader.

At the seventh gate stands Polynices, brother of Eteocles, bearing a well-wrought shield with a device constructed upon it of a woman leading on a mailed warrior, bringing havoc to his paternal city and desirous of becoming a fratricide. Against him Eteocles will go and face him in person, and leader against leader, brother against brother and foeman against foeman, take his stand.

Eteocles then departs to engage in battle, and soon after the messenger enters to announce that six of the Theban warriors have been successful, but that Polynices and Eteocles have both fallen, slain by each other's hand.

Antigone and Ismene then enter, each bewailing the death of their brothers. A herald interrupts them in the midst of their lamentations to announce to them the decree of the senate, which is that Eteocles, on account of his attachment to his country, though a fratricide, shall be honored with fitting funeral rites, but that Polynices, the would-be overturner of his native city, shall be cast out unburied, a prey to the dogs.

Against this decree Antigone rebels, and with her final words announces her unalterable intention of burying her brother in spite of the fate which awaits her disobedience to the will of the senate.


https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27458/27458-h/27458-h.htm



It is not known how many plays the poet wrote, but vionly seven have been preserved to us. That these tragedies contain much that is undramatic is undoubtedly true, but it must be remembered that at the time he wrote, Æschylus found the drama in a very primitive state. The persons represented consisted of but a single actor, who related some narrative of mythological or legendary interest, and a chorus, who relieved the monotony of such a performance by the interspersing of a few songs and dances. To Æschylus belongs the credit of creating the dialogue in the Greek drama by the introduction of a second actor.

My love of history, Greeks, Romans, Epic History of Carthage, Vikings, Native Americans, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrian, Germans,
Nordic nations, etc. oft leads to me to reading such articles as this.
Those ignorant of history, are doomed to repeats its mistakes, is a truism that I firmly believe in myself.
Man's greatest weapon is his brain, IMHO.
I BELIEVE IN HAVING GOOD WEAPONS... -TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://sites.google.com/site/walterdelamarewiki/-the-listeners-analytical-essay


Walter de la Mare
"The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare Analytical Essay



The poem opens with the scene being set. A mysterious man is knocking on the door only dimly lit by the moon. His horse is silently feeding on the grasses and ferns that cloak the forest floor. A bird flies out of a turret bound toward the moonlit sky. The Traveller, he is called, knocked on the dark door again but nobody came to him, nor did anybody peer out of the overgrown window to see who was calling upon them. The Traveller, grey eyed, is standing perfectly still and baffled.



A number of phantoms lurk inside the dark, old, rotting mansion, listening to his every move. The house is crumbling, the light of the moon showing down upon the stairs. The ghosts have appeared to have been awakened. Somehow the Traveller feels their presence in his heart. The phantoms answered his call with the silence. Then the Traveller knocked a third time, louder, and states that he had come, and that he had kept his promise. His voice echoed in the empty house, and the ghost’s herd him depart. The silence slowly crept back and the Traveller was gone.



The use of diction and imagery in the poem is not only profound but masterful. This is shown in phrases like “the forest ferny floor”, “phantom listeners”, and “the silence surges softly backward” give the poem an ominous and ere feel that adds to the mystery. This ominous feeling of supernatural suspense is what draws the reader in and makes them search for meaning, a purpose, an understanding. It is difficult to see why the author would write such an odd poem if it didn’t have a meaning.



At first glance, the purpose may seem non-existent. Maybe Walter de la Mare intended for this poem to have no meaning at all. Maybe he wanted people to fill in the blanks; maybe he wanted them to take something from it as unique as the poem itself. Perhaps this is a method used by the author to make the reader think more, even if subconsciously, about the poem. The purpose may also be simply to give people something to read that is interesting to both the author and the reader. People write sometimes to educate and sometimes to get a point across, but most importantly because they are passionate and it is what they love. La mare was known to write dark and mysterious pieces, and maybe this was something that he wrote for pleasure and other people happened to enjoyed it too.



There are many different possibilities of what happened to the Listeners. One theory of how the people of the house died is that they were killed by the bubonic plague. This was chosen because the Traveller was riding a horse, implying that the poem was set in older times. Also all of the people of the house were killed, supporting the theory. Another possible theory is that perhaps the ghosts where not ghosts at all. Maybe the Traveler was the ghost, maybe the phantoms where people still alive and the Traveller was the ghost lost in limbo between life and death…coming back to the house over and over every night for a reason that we may never know.




The Listeners
- Poem by Walter de la Mare


"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest's ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de la Mare

This great poet is not as well known as he should be, IMHO.
THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE POEMS THIS MAGNIFICENT TALENT CREATED..-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edmund-wilson


biography
edmund wilson, jr.
1895–1972

as one of the nation’s foremost literary critics, edmund wilson enjoyed a high position in the world of american letters. L.e. Sissman called him “the greatest of our critics of this century, and among the three or four greatest—along with t.s. Eliot, wallace stevens, and f. Scott fitzgerald—of our literary men.” wilson, according to t.s. Matthews, was “the foremost american man of letters of the twentieth century.” norman podhoretz judged wilson as “one of the greatest men of letters this country has ever produced.”

wilson’s influence upon american literature was substantial. Warner berthoff said that “for nearly every important development in contemporary writing edmund wilson was in some way a spokesman—an arbiter of taste, a supplier of perspective, at the least (to adapt his own phrase for hemingway) a gauge of intellectual morale.” leonard kriegel described wilson’s writing as “one of the standards of sanity in this culture.” despite misgivings about some of wilson’s strongly held opinions, berthoff believed that “all who have to do with literature have played parasite to his writings, his discoveries and revaluations, and are too much in his debt to allow much complaining. He has been one of his time’s indispensable teachers and transmitters of important news.”

one of wilson’s most important contributions was his role in giving an international perspective to american literature. Speaking of this, sissman praised wilson for his “destruction of the literary isolationism of this continent.” “no man,” anthony burgess wrote, “has had a profounder influence on the capacity of a couple of generations (including my own) to form its own judgements on a very large and important sector of european literature.” a times literary supplement reviewer cited wilson’s “incontestably important task” as “explaining the world to america and explaining america to itself.”

axel’s castle, wilson’s first book of literary criticism, established his reputation as a critic and still stands as one of his most important works. Sherman paul explained that the book, a study of the symbolist literary movement, “established the writers of the avant garde in the consciousness of the general reader: Not only did it place them in a significant historical development, it taught the uninitiated how to read them.” pointing out the book’s lasting value, taylor stated that “it is that rare work that can never really be dated or superseded.” kriegel agreed, writing that “the book remains one of the truly seminal works of literary criticism published in our century.”

wilson’s strongly held opinions were expressed in a manner that drew respect from even those readers who did not agree with him. When reading wilson, burgess claimed, one was “enlightened with conclusions that, so well are they stated and so logically arrived at, appear inevitable and hence obvious.” george h. Douglas believed that “even when we find [wilson’s] ideas eccentric, perverse, and opinionated, as at times all of his readers must, we cannot but admire his ability to think through all of his problems for himself, his ceaseless endeavor to understand the world that confronts him and bring some order to it.” alfred kazin wrote that wilson “fascinates even when he is wrong.” joseph epstein observed that “the stamp of wilson’s personality was on every sentence he wrote, yet nothing he wrote could by any stretch of the imagination be called ‘personable’.” nevertheless, he admired wilson as “a living embodiment of the belief in literature . . . As a guide to life, and a weapon . . . With which to bring some sort of order to an otherwise possibly quite senseless world.”

wilson’s concern with literary values was reflected in his concern for political values as well. “he always retained his strong faith in our american democratic traditions,” douglas wrote, “even though he found the original dream of the founding fathers foundering in a sea of commercial ethics and impersonal, insensate government.” after a brief interest in socialism, culminating in to the finland station, a study of the subject, wilson grew disillusioned with politics. His writings after world war ii ignored the contemporary scene. “having lived through two world wars in which he did not believe,” robert emmet long wrote, “[wilson could] no longer believe in the power of rationality to create a humane and meaningful world.” despite his disillusionment with politics, wilson protested the cold war of the 1950s by not paying his income taxes for nine years on the grounds that the money was used to purchase nuclear and bacteriological weapons.

“some years before he died,” luckett stated, “[wilson] attempted an assessment of his own contribution to modern literature, and seemed content to stand on his achievements as an interpreter, explaining the characteristics of the literatures of other nations to readers in the united states. This was absurdly modest.” matthews believed that wilson’s “place in the hall of literary immortals is secure.” summing up wilson’s career, douglas wrote: “he was not only an imaginative writer of the first rank but a great democratic idealist, and a spokesman for liberal learning in the best sense. And the combination of these virtues produced for us a remarkable body of works which is sure to remain one of the great contributions to american literature of the 20th century.”

wilson’s substantive contribution has continued even after his death, in the form of the many volumes of his writings that have been published in the ensuing decades. Among these are wilson’s journals from the 1930s to 1960s. According to lewis m. Dabney, editor of the final volume in the series, “the strength of wilson’s criticism and histories is his mastery of concrete details, and the journals illustrate his ability to catch the essence of a time and situation.” julian symons argued in the times literary supplement, “the primary impression left by any of these volumes covering the decades is of admiration for the power of wilson’s mind, and astonishment at the variety of his interests and the voracious curiosity with which he informs himself about them.”

among the other notable posthumous publications of wilson’s writings, in the opinion of david castronovo, was letters on literature and politics 1912-1972. In an essay for the dictionary of literary biography, castronovo wrote that “this collection shows the range of wilson’s informal interests as well as a partial record of his varied and often hectic life. Many of the letters also reveal him in the role of friend and encourager—a guider and nurturer of talent and relentless battler with circumstances, both personal and social, that keep writers from working.”

the portable edmund wilson, also edited by lewis dabney, gathered work that was representative of wilson’s remarkable career. Of its selections, saul goodwin proposed in the national review “that wilson, himself a pretty fair anthologist, would have been satisfied with the results.” r.w.b. Lewis, disappointed by the absence of representative fiction and poetry in the collection, nevertheless remarked in the new york times book review that the anthology does reveal wilson in the role of “critic of history.” lewis added, “to suggest the extraordinary reach of the man, one need only list the most powerful and comprehensive essays in [the portable edmund wilson,] those on marx and engels, dickens, the supreme court’s oliver wendell holmes, and the philoctetes myth.” gross expressed similar sentiments. “within the limits of portability,” he wrote, “it is everything that could reasonably be asked for, and even readers who know wilson’s work well will find that they come away from it with a renewed sense of his many-sidedness and his prodigious gifts.” christopher hawtree asserted in spectator: “a hod or a trolley would be necessary for the amount of edmund wilson’s writing one would wish to be in print.”

more of wilson’s magazine essays and articles were brought together in book form in 1995 by castronovo and janet groth in from the uncollected edmund wilson. The 50 pieces in this collection, arranged chronologically, cover nearly 50 years, range over the course of wilson’s life from his student days prior to world war i up to 1959. Included are many of the articles and essays wilson wrote for the new yorker in the 1940s and 1950s. “the selections,” according to a reviewer for publishers weekly, “show wilson’s scholarship, the maturation of his keen, expressive voice and the emergence of his humanistic concerns. … a feast for wilson devotees.”

in addition to his literary criticism, social commentary, and journalistic writings, wilson also penned novels, stories, poems, and plays. His first novel, i thought of daisy, is set in the 1920s in greenwich village in new york city. Described by a critic for kirkus reviews as “a tale of love, art, and politics,” i thought of daisy is a realistic narrative that relates the story of a young man who abandons bohemian life after he meets and falls in love with a chorus girl whom he sees as an american ideal. Picturesque characters abound in the portrait wilson paints of the era, including several based on real-life prototypes and friends such as john dos passos and edna st. Vincent millay. Wilson initially saw the novel as his own emulation of writers such as joyce and proust. However, the kirkus reviews critic noted “his episodic tale is more in the american grain.” in a 1950s edition of the novel, wilson added a preface that criticized his own work and described the book as flawed. The kirkus reviews critic concluded: “he was too hard on himself—the book stands up to time.”

in the early 1940s wilson worked on a novel that remained unfinished. Covering a period of two years in the late 1920s and dealing with the end of the jazz age and the beginning of the great depression brought on by the stock market crash of 1929, the unfinished manuscript, edited by neale reinitz, was published in 1998 as the higher jazz (reinitz’s title). Yale-educated fritz dietrich, a young businessman and would-be composer, is the protagonist of the book. Fritz’s aim is to create a classical composition that incorporates the essence of american popular music. As in i thought of daisy, a number of characters in the higher jazz are thinly disguised fictions of prominent literary figures of the era, including robert benchley, dorothy parker, and f. Scott and zelda fitzgerald. In his review of the higher jazz for the new york times book review, david walton commented that “there are too many characters in the novel, and not much plot for them to be essential to.” walton also noted that the novel had “a lot of clever dialogue—all of it mildly engaging, but never very captivating.” walton felt that reinitz’s commentaries, which connected events and characters in the higher jazz to wilson’s life, were “the chief interest of the book.” expressing a different opinion was a writer for kirkus reviews, who noted the book’s “haunting set pieces that depict fritz’s uneasy circulation among manhattan’s nightclubs, burlesque shows, and florid artistic circles,” and went on to praise wilson’s “considerable skill as a novelist.” in a like vein, a reviewer for publishers weekly remarked: “with an eye and ear for fashion and upper-class folly that may remind admirers of tom wolfe, wilson treats us to a bird’s eye view of the ‘whole night club racket, the hudson valley gentry and the algonquin table regulars.”

speaking of wilson’s standing in literature at the start of the twenty-first century, castronovo commented: “wilson’s name still stands for tireless dedication to literature, relentless pursuit of libertarian and progressive ideas, and yearning to transcend the limits of class, critical category, and fashion. His reputation, as well as threats to it, rests on his identity as a professor without a university, a critic without a field, a historian without a period, a thinker without a school.” in his review of jeffrey meyers’s edmund wilson: A biography for commentary, john gross stated: “the literary wilson will live. The longer the shadows cast over the field of literary studies by today’s deconstructionists and ideologues, the brighter his achievement will shine.”

although i am no big fan of his political ideas, i do recognize his great talent and high intelligence, as well as his great poems.--tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Tom%20Merrill%20Review%20Criticism%20Critique.htm

The HyperTexts

Tom Merrill: Recognizing a Rare Voice
by Michael R. Burch

It has been said that familiarity breeds contempt. But I don't believe that applies to the best poetry, or at least not for me. I have never tired of reading the best poems of my favorite poets. I can still remember discovering poems by William Blake, Robert Burns, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, A. E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats as I flipped forward through the pages of my high school English Literature textbook. I didn't bother with the prose sections; they could wait until the teacher imposed them. But there was something quite mysterious, even magical, about some of the poems. I wanted to read them, and I didn't want to wait. I was hooked. Nearly fifty years later, I'm still hooked by the best poems of the best poets: those poets I consider to be great.

But are there any great poets left, today? Haven't great poets become mythical beings, like Orpheus, or a long-vanished species, like so many exotic butterflies that no longer grace the earth with their presences?

For whatever it's worth, I'm going to nominate Tom Merrill as a candidate for what is commonly called the Canon. I do this realizing that my nomination is primarily a personal affair. Individual readers must decide which poets pass their tests for that sort of recognition, if the question interests them enough to consider it. The best I can do here is share the poems that convinced me Tom is worthy of such consideration. Perhaps you will agree with me, perhaps not. But I believe his poems below will make a strong case for your appreciation.

Before anyone accuses me of nepotism, please let me point out that I published Tom more than any other poet for years, before asking him to become an advisory editor to The HyperTexts. My deep admiration for his abilities came first. So I don't think there is anything out of order if I simply affirm here what I have long believed: that Tom Merrill is an exceptional poet. For me, he is a great poet. And thus he is included in my personal Canon, along with the poets I mentioned above. Furthermore, I believe Tom's is a rare—indeed a singular—voice for the right of the unborn to remain unborn, for the rest of us to exit life whenever we please and by the most merciful means available, and for the permanent consignment of religion and its "gods" and all other forms of superstition to the realm of mythology and ancient history where they so rightly belong. To my knowledge, no poet of the past or present has advanced as far as Tom in these crucial areas. And now, without further ado on my part, here are the reasons I think so highly of Tom and his work ...



Come Lord and Lift

Come Lord, and lift the fallen bird
Abandoned on the ground;
The soul bereft and longing so
To have the lost be found.

The heart that cries—let it but hear
Its sweet love answering,
Or out of ether one faint note
Of living comfort wring.



Advice for Winston

Why not just impose the old Zurich curfew,
drive everyone indoors early, arrest
anyone caught in the street past eleven.

Surely that would bring to an end
all disapproved transactions
conducted in the blind of night

as well as providing a superabundance
of quietude, a lullaby
for the fierce upholders of right.

Maybe you've never been approached
by someone peddling forbidden fruit
and felt glad the option was there,

but far better they, any day, I'd say
than heaven's unleashed hounds
accosting anyone they please

with gratuitous curiosities.
Do you really want to live that way?
And now with all the good people

being asked to spy on everyone else
and supplement the force, Winston,
make yourself thin, shrink

out of the screen's wide eye,
it's a quarter century ago,
and so,

1984, here we come.



Novenas

After defeat, in grief's most hopeless hours,
With no resort remaining but the void,
The vanquished yet may turn to hidden powers,
Begging protection for a heart destroyed.
As crown or cross perhaps recalls some scene,
Bead by sad bead they may beseech the air,
As though in precincts silent and unseen
Lost angels could be helped by human prayer.

Each may, as if some hearing had begun
In secret parts where all the dead yet live,
Cry out to walls the innocence of one
Whom now no other aid is left to give.
And whether justice anywhere may reign,
None here can prove their witness was in vain.



Filtering Out Impurities

Now too, just as before,
when others were hoping to slip smoothly through,
grim-faced guards at every gate

are keeping watch, alert for any
suspicious sign
or hint of possible heterodoxy.

Between times
as between places,
it never yet has been assured

that everything may pass, and words,
when untrimmed to the reigning flimflam
can count as much as any

pinch of inspirational herb
as dangerous contraband.
History could make the thoughtful wonder

what extant literature might include
had many voices not been stopped
for taking exception to The Truth,

had speech been a protected species
and braver tongues not failed to elude
the flames of purgative centuries.

And now, with anointed successors
of book-burning masters of auto-da-fé
becoming hi-tech-adept, who knows

which insubordinate texts may get through
to speak to newcomers facing the sure
ineluctable purge of each new day.

Some sanctified bug christened "error-free"
and targeting the inexemplary
could serve as well as fire to expunge

all trace of thought that struck the wrong key.
But life is rife with the righteous, you say
and all their fraternal twins in the state

have been just as given to radical cleansing,
just as determined to root out the rot,
and just as partial to choirboys as they.

True, and the sun's no conservator either,
and no words will last long either way,
So maybe it comes out the same—saved or not.



Officially Speaking

What nugget gleaned may we bestow
To mark the passing of the torch
Who watch the darkness watch us go
Steaming across a lamp-lit porch.
A few steps off our haloed stage
The boundless night with sealed lips
Counts out the customary wage:
An ineluctable eclipse.

It comes to us in daily thought
And haunts us every day we breathe,
How we without a hope have sought
To love where we could only grieve
And only honed a skill so wise
To take a sage to his demise.



Current Attractions Besides Frère André

Living alone in a box before you're dead
can prove a bit of a trial, to wit
how to remove a weight of hours

from early-rise to early-abed
when there's nothing but time ahead,
not even a stint at the treadmill for fun,

hardly a thing but forced absorptions,
self-imposed puzzles or chores,
evasive maneuvers performed to diminish

a sense of infinitesimal progress,
of standing still in a stagnant dimension
stretching to kingdom come.

So happily facing another black morning,
its only stimulant chuggishly trickling
into a stained pyrex pot,

I lugged two bags of recyclables down,
dropped them in their usual spot
beside an ailing tree in the pre-dawn

murk of an amber-lit sidewalk.
And now, hooray, a check to be written
presents itself as another fine way

of slightly budging the clock.
Later I'll probably latch onto other
rare rungs in my climb through the day,

the latest edition of Tass let's say
(as I dub a local free speech organ)
with its monolithic insipid array

of enemy lines to be spied on,
or maybe some noticed urgency,
like recurrent gaps in my liquor stock.

That's about what it's come to
since they banned the entertainment industry,
ran out the only wizards at hitting

the daily jackpot of foreign spare income,
crowned their virtue with a virtual ghosttown,
brought to an utterly derelict end

a nonstop ten-year winning spree
that had showered down riches on everyone.
So now,

with the children safe as can be
in a warm woolly sock of deprivation
where only the rampant fuzz are free,

with pretty much nothing left to see
but strings of tots passing sluggishly
through a sort of spiffed-up cemetery lot,

I'm thinking of starting a free soup kitchen
(for nothing but the company)
as well as an overnight shelter (why not?)

perhaps out of some recrudescent desire
for even a lukewarm body's comfort
as much as to nudge something hot.

Knuckle down to the family life I say,
bow to the dictates of the day,
when things have entirely gone to pot

there's hardly a reason for staying awake
except to join the flock and Baa
or methodically feel inspired to jot

out a ditty, and sing
hurrah.



Time in Eternity

When you were as an angel in my arms,
Had laid your bare head just below my chin,
Your length pressed up to mine, entrusting charms
My whole youth's starward longing could not win;
With still the murmur of your love in me,
Miracle-tones of all my lifelong hope,
I wished that there might start eternity
And seal forever that sweet envelope;
And as it did, my thoughts are now for you
As every star is blotted by the sun,
And so the sun itself
Has perished too,
And with it, every dream of mine
But one.



Madame LaBouche

Her ears pricked up so much, Madame
LaBouche, decrying all disturbance
Insisted sounds around be less
City-like and more suburban.

One bistro gave Madame no rest
Until it was at last subdued,
And vexed by yakky cabbies next,
She finally got their stand removed.

Yet still, some night-owl might abort
The dreamshift of LaBouche's week,
And pop her prized unconsciousness
By passing with a piercing shriek,

Or other nuisances emerge—
But when, for my part, out a window
I spot Madame surveying things,
Hard eye a-gleam, arms set akimbo

All poised to nail some passerby
With shrill bursts from her magic flute—
I see the sole noisemaker I
Have lately dreamed of going mute.



Leitmotif

The eye is turned inward these days,
away from the gloom in the glass,
the window's vacancy,

the desolate picture left in the wake
of the latest revanchist crusade
to restore a compliant past.

Facing the remains, an imposed deprivation,
saddled with a heftier load of time,
one begins to make adjustments,

resorts to creating distractions
like this very problem I'm solving now,
whose unyielding grip on the mind

won't be shaken until it's fully resolved.
The social regime of rural religion
leaves one in a doctor's waiting room

and makes absorption in such problems
useful in diverting
consciousness from the creeping clock.

So the eye is turned inward these days,
turned inward because it has to be,
though a few staunch rebels

still lingering out there like sitting ducks
ensure that even now
ironically embellishing seats of wisdom

with inspired masterstrokes relieves,
a little at least, one's awareness the doctor
is seeing countless other patients first,

like that always too-busy god for which they wait.



In God We Trust

Absolve yourselves, believe them saved,
Whom hungrily you brought to fare
As chance decrees, and leave to them
The fortune to which you rose heir.
Now theirs shall be the kingdom too,
This one and that, and all they hold,
All marvels present, and as well
Fresh wonders when the flesh turns cold.

All you who by blind pulse renew
The primal blessing cast in heat,
And to a season's course entrust
Frail issue weather can defeat,
Who from flung seed grew anxious too—
Deny earth feeds on them and you.



A Brief Alarm

Like everything, this too will soon be lost,
Forever out of sight and out of mind,
A brief alarm resorbed into the sum
Of passing things that leave no trace behind.
For its duration, it would summon all
To a restraint heroic—to be brave
Beyond all generations gone before,
And make a sacrifice more sure to save:

To starve the ground, and lay no further feast
For bloated Earth's unflagging appetite,
But be content to plow redemptively
A barren field in which no seed seeks light
And make your plots the last wherein to toss
A harvest raised for neverending loss.



A Demurral

Why keep your senses grounded here,
Or let them have you sharp and clear

Who wakened you to numbered days
To yoke you to their futile ways?

While tickings winch you nearer toward
Your execution and reward,

Why not imbibe—or pick your trip,
Let them ram home the standard script

As you, absorbing what you like
Risk transport on a one-way flight;

Let our grand architects complain,
Who pull their mighty weight in vain,

Only to end as they began,
Fragile freight of a circling hand

That flicks the feeble out and in
And each back to his origin.



Who Long Kept Hid

I prayed to stars, when I was young,
To lure love where I lay
Lone as a shore that calls a sea
The tide has turned away.

Love did not come, and oh they seemed
Indifferent to my cry,
Who long kept hid how love could be
A kindness to deny.



In the Stillness of Many

Many nights when undrawn to the living,
I have gone to the graveyard instead,
And sought out my truth among ashes,
And for beauty,
Lain down with the dead.

In the stillness of many a midnight,
I have warmed to their wakening sound,
The impassioned, and scorned, and unliving
Who speak to my heart
From the ground.



How Only Cold

If to such happiness an end must come,
As ends may swallow all dear hopes and dreams,
And should you vanish, and my heart grow numb
With sorrow, as though yet so soon it seems;
And if the bitterness should long consume
My thoughts of you, who briefly lit the day,
And sun no more return to re-illume
And lift the flower withered in the clay;
Yet memory of a distant atmosphere,
Travail obscure as rock in some dark field,
The glassed-in din's dull pulsing in my ear,
Faint throb of stars, so long astir but sealed,
Recalls a love left even more alone,
How only cold released the ache of stone.



I Had of Love

I had of love, when it first came,
A single, lonesome bolt;
It had but one—and I could find
No living antidote.

And so, I made my cure of hearts
A cold night wind instead,
And all the sadly brimming stars
Shone down on our chill bed.

And then I hummed forgotten fields
A lover's lullaby,
And by the fallen gates of hope,
We wept, the wind and I.



Though Sorrow Mock

I shall not give you up for lost,
though grief prevail,
tears overcome,
strength fail;

Though silence join with ash
to prove all perish;
though sorrow mock my hope
for all I cherish.



Incidental Effects of the Revival of Fascism on a Provincial French Island

And now they begin
to get uppity, par exemple
as when Alex, a freewheeling

handsome young local
schizophrenic and militant
tippler (I mean, it's

his right. . .it's
. . .his destiny!) on his way
to my door the other day (de

rigueur bottle in hand)
was accosted by some smart
superior new neighbor and advised

to scram, take a hike
exit the area, or
Mr. Class would stick forth a grand

digit, regally
poke off a trio of beeps, blow
his personal horn, order

a special unscheduled pickup, and
in short, summon
some troops to sweep

out the trash. Now, Alex, who was born
just a few houses down,
has lived in and around

the neighborhood all his life,
while the arriviste
prick, whoever it was

but likely equipped
with a custom-crafted
bathroom throne in the shape of

an ice cream cone (that thick,
squat waffle-wafer model, say)
to sit on and be moved,

as prompted by his muse,
sublimely to extrude
and duly
t
h
e
r
i
n

drop

impeccably, his
most richly inspired passages
in softly

spiraling swirls (each maybe with
a maraschino cherry on top)
is only an imported gift,

one tip of an insidious
viral transmigration from
a very correct, catechistic world. But,

like Alexander, Julius and a lot
of bugs, he has conquered, can afford
the rent (perhaps not

alone) in the adjacent
newly refurbished Victorian
flat-front apartment house adorned

with sooty brick, stained and leaded
windows, doors,
iron-railed balconies and a few

transitional art deco
architectural frills,
so of course

supposes he's the boss,
just like the tall
bald guy with the little

dog the other evening as I
was putting out my
weekly donation of well-drained

bottles and stale news:
"Contravention!" he yells
(me thinking: Mon Dieu!

not another
Fudge Sundae on the block?) "Well,
but what should one do?

I'm asleep when the new
law says to
put it out," I protest. "It's true,"

he admits, "but it's not
very pretty, after all, and you'll
be fined if they find

your name in it." Recalling
a sticker on The Gazette,
I took my cue,

hauled it back in,
concerned lest Mr. Park Avenue
should have a trigger

finger
too. It even occurred
to me from his arresting yammer he

might be an official
Bloomenbroom Party member,
or maybe

a quaintly camouflaged cop. It anyway
seems my turn had come
to learn the price of Eden, see

how it feels to be out of grace
with the lord of the manor, welcome
as a turd on the kitchen floor, invasively

checked, challenged, monitored,
saddled with the fate of being
a foreigner

in your own backyard. It's hard
facing an alien infiltration,
enduring the callous axioms

of a purifying regime,
a circumambient animus,
a purging, pestilent atmosphere

aggressively seeded with threats
by slime-leaking snots. For
the window boxes this year,

I wanted black flowers,
draping down from mon balcon, yes
to mark a funereal mood, but more

by way of displaying dissent
from the clean, pretty, homogenous,
uniform, ceaselessly

patrolled and guarded
stifling prison culture where
blossoms are rife but somehow merde

is still the only
scent in the air (though,
no doubt, they'd

just be smelling gardenias there)
but had to settle instead for the cheery
standard party-colored rainbow

of saumons, purples, yellows, reds,
as if the daily promenade
still featured la resistance francaise

and not Bloomenbroomers on parade,
as if there were cause
to celebrate,

anything more ahead than that
when someday Alex and I are vagrantly
sipping a vintage Armagnac

from my popular crystal snifters,
some sitting local resident bard
will plosively half-evacuate

both nether and nasal
outlets, sniff his
heady art, decide to apply

for a patent on that nifty
poetic device of mine for royal
asses (in white or tan

shiny gold-crested porcelain) and
thereby
make such a splashy killing off my

cone-thrones he can scoop up every
piece of the Skippy
Peanut Butter pie, take

Gray Poupon to the cleaner's, become
The Emperor of Ice Cream, rake
in shitloads of cash by

providing a fitting place,
a due
repository for the race's

ripest, most eloquent,
most reliable product:
... waste.



Praise the Lord!

Some ensure their speech prevails
by turning on their built-in microphone,
mastering mass by volume.

It's hardly a wonder when you see
them all alone. Still,
their agitated yapping

meets less resistance in some people,
borderline bestialists maybe,
who perhaps derive a secret thrill

from manic bursts of such weaponry.
I hear one haranguing the world right now,
jamming airways with high-amp yammer

not unlike that obstreperous steeple
down at the corner,
whose tyrannic clangings and gongings

flood mon balcon twice daily
with an insurmountable clamor,
enforcing its will that none but the bellwether's

blustery ring should be heard,
that all further persiflage be deferred,
usurping acres of space with a grandly

imposed reminder of hell's infernal
contempt for any affairs but its own.
A tiny bit softer tinkle or ding,

something a little more in tune
with their promise of heavenly harmony
might seem just a tad less ironic,

would certainly be less deafening,
might even bolster one's sagging assurance
God's welcome committee could maybe be more

than a gang of roaring pigfaced louts.
Try addressing a barking dog someday―
then praise the Lord for not muzzling its snout.



Unwithered

Unwithered by all casting out
My demon drives me yet
Down the dark path that always ends
In sorrow and regret,

And leaves me to repent again
My neverending part
In injuring a perfect love,
And breaking my own heart.



Forever Lacking

However well you show the way,
My brave and ailing child,
By meeting every demon with
A spirit angel-mild,

Still I go plunging toward regret,
And cannot learn your art,
Forever lacking strength to bind
My action to my heart.



Infiltration

Useless though these walls have been
For keeping out hell's horrors,
Here they stand, against what glides
With ease through solid borders;

Or stand they must, if seeming no
More bound to serve than I,
Who know how fiends come drifting in,
Yet wait love's urgent cry.



Spring Fever

The current outlook has started me brooding,
asking myself as I writhe in my box
how many long stretches more

should be left to chance, to whatever
common treacheries still lie in store.
Of course,

between decidedly wishful
enlistments of any chore or bore,
there's scenery galore,

just oodles of riveting decoration
to help expel the daily prospect
of sluggish passage through a void

and expand the rescue team of vital
things like this still left to be done.
Right now it's springtime again,

and a week or two ago while pacing
the space between uneasy escapes,
I must've paused to check the view,

a proscenium arch of chartreuse leaves
disclosing an anemic row
of daffodils over across in the park,

all which might've seemed less deja vu
had the politicos ordered a headstone or two
to cap off their visionary landscape art.

In the meantime, the scene's turned green,
and I note the hanging half-wreath is capturing
a bloomless bed's gray edging of cobbles,

so I guess that brand of granite instead
must serve to show how a dream of beauty
can produce so engrossing a land of the dead.

Well, don't expect anything great.
It's just a way of knocking off
another block of time.



Pollyanna Having A Nightcap

What's to say in the long run
except that it all seemed useless.

To augment drying up in the sun
a few may have helped pump you juiceless

but for any profounder wisdom
you'd better consult Confucius.



God's Universe

Be as content as you can with being
an item on the food chain,
just another fine canapé

suited for diners genetically steered
to eat you all up.
Be consoled that at least at present

it's mainly the small fry,
bacteria, viruses, fungi
that visit you uninvited to sup.

There's more than one way, mon frere,
of feeding on celestial substance,
and if other consumers someday arrive,

perhaps equipped with man-sized
Cuisinarts and Jennairs,
your very own soul-bearing brand of beast,

pleasingly plump or spare,
could conceivably come to occupy
a quite prominent place at the feast,

might even culminate presented
under glass just like a pheasant,
who knows. Things

could always be a tad worse, so why
not just be glad you're not yet popping
every scoping eye,

may still be eluding the sensors of many
space-hunting species with cravings akin
to those of anthropophagi,

that still for some you likely remain
an undiscovered rare tidbit,
yet to be tagged irresistible fare

fit for a ravenous king in God's
divinely inspired universe, where,
let's face it, everything

from microbes to stars,
always sucks the brains out
of everything else.



Departure

Well boxed, and neatly packaged like a thing,
Back from the final purge he duly came,
The pulverized reduction postmen bring
When bodies have become cold feast for flame.
Into a vessel made to store the crushed
I poured the coarse remains of someone fine—
A bag of bits, of gray and grainy dust,
One shocking essence spirit leaves behind.
Housed now in hard cement beneath the ground,
He cannot share the living's deep concerns,
Nor must he yet endure, unsafe, unsound
As we who tremble while we wait our turns.
Behind him lies the pain past all relief,
The love that yet makes good its threat of grief.



Quoth the Raven from the Ballroom Bar

Neither the understanding of the dead
nor that of the living, can ever be enough,
can ever be more

than a sort of dark familiar, say
which, when perched on your belly at night
often speaks to you when you gaze

through its locked obsidian eyes
and see a kind of chronic
malady of mind,

an inescapable vision reverting
again and again to life's bright harvest,
the permanent absence ahead,

and you sense at the core a sort of shocked
apprehension of being's essential neverness,
of the blot-out factor in the blood,

at least until an indifferently riddling
tongue begins to block your thinking,
and you start sinking

down toward desired oblivion,
down toward the ocean's nightbound floor,
where seeing hopefully is done.

There really is nothing more
to share than this ultimate understanding
of organic fact, the process of decay,

innate corruptibility and the gradual
breakdown of all that seemed solid
and real. And yet, notwithstanding,

it's a ball, an opera, a bar—your due
and fully owed ration of every sought thrill
though it's still,

though none of it ever really happened,
just whatever happens to you.



Equestrian Event

Their agenda being to keep all the stock
in harness and pulling, right up to the grave,
they discourage you from running wild
and urge you to breed an amenable child
they can hitch to a workload and duly enslave.

"Industry and sobriety"
are the gist of their merry marching song,
since producing things is what they do,
myriad things they hope that you
will spend your cash (or credit) on.

They're such a thrill to listen to,
like the clock's relentless tick-tick-tick;
who'd ever think to chuck their plan,
jump the fence, say yoke be damned
fuck the plow and go maverick?



Between Frosts

Framed in my front slider now,
maples masquerading as giant
forsythias in full bloom
will very soon be revealing how
an early leaf's a short-lived flower.

But greater than any loss I prevision
in April's fleeting golden hour
is a building promise of release
from another eternal winter's prison,
wide-open doors and the long-awaited

warm luxurious freedom of being
part of the scene again, at least
till its culminant powers unfold a final
tapestry made to fade away . . .
in earth's perennial pageant of decay.



Romance by the Book

Suppose just one might suffice, one
matching your vision well enough
to blind you to the rest.

Imagine how in your covers at night
you could fall apart,
perish in the pillows together,

vacate the present
perhaps to reunite in the future,
where one of you might awaken

to behold again
in the other's unshifting immortal light
how nothing alone survives night.



Our Bodies Are Our Sworn Enemies

― for B. Russell ("The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice")

They're intent on their lives having meaning
and on making them seem worth the price
which is why they're so hellbent on screening
out all futures but bright Paradise.

But when fact points to nothing redeeming
with its sweet gifts of torture and dread
can it ever be more than pipedreaming
to think earth augurs great things ahead?



Epitaph

"Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs...."―PL

Too long it had only been for this
that he slogged through each duplicate day:

to sink so deep into sleep
that no trespass of any perception

could make his escape incomplete;
only for perfect vacancy,

space with no inner sense,
a truly out-of-touch retreat,

with no chance or threat of intrusion―
no memory, no thought, no night-borne illusion.



Consolation for the Disenchanted

Time will stop
and death will come;
all will perish,
fade,
be done.

Why complain then?
Drink!
Be merry!
Life—
is only temporary.



The Suspicion of Being Noticed

I sometimes see myself
in what others say,
in their descriptions
as if I might've been their subject.

Most likely not but still I've wondered
if I've stirred some comment along the way.

Do I give a damn?
Probably only in rare jurisdictions.



The Grand Bequeathal

Soon enough the world will be theirs
as once it was ours;
only they (oremus) will know cares
or wait out long hours;
have dreams, dreads, body repairs,
odd slants on dumb powers;
retire to underground lairs
where God freshens His flowers. (oremus)



Porcine Predations

Despoilers in their cochonmobiles
have been gliding around today,
and daily for years,

like tiger sharks in a tank of puffers.
A mean-eyed school of them
has been steering alertly through

intent on a catch. Even the low
quasi-fastback body-make
evokes that grim subtracter's shape.

And there's indeed
been a dwindling of merchant
marine life in the pool.

One stunningly veers to left or right,
targeting this or that fucked fish,
startling its prey with a sort of sinking

blow on its inner tuba. Often
another gap appears in the ranks.
The tank has become so full of sharks,

maybe soon they'll turn on themselves,
start devouring one another.
It almost

gives one a tingle at the tip
of one's pecker, to imagine them going
after about all that's left.



Mechanism Will Of Course Prevail

Who really knows if what's borne by the born
is confined to known mercies of sense
or if death can be trusted to really provide
a final escape from existence.

Infinities more may lie in store
(to hope not is not to be sure)
and maybe once in, there's no way out
and you're forced to forever endure.

But why try to nudge with possible fates
when those sure ones we all can see
never seem to deter nature's tools from deploying
their brute power to make a life be.



Lost In The Crowd

When a new grief sets in, the kind endured
when the core of your life goes increasingly missing
and "then there were none" seems to sum up your prospects

a simmering anger mixed with gloom
can mingle you more with streams of space-litter
floating endlessly by on your vacant moon.

Symptoms of heightened blankness return
like my own recurrent mechanical pulsion
toward extra journeys to shrink time with distance,

excursions expanding a fixed routine
which might be stale enough already
without added tours of a desert scene.



Never Quite Perfect

There's always something better he said
and it's true, since whatever you most long to touch
will always remain untouchable
like any shape in the realm of ideals.

But if semblances of secret snapshots
filed in your mind's most revisited album
ever step up to talk businesswise
you might sign some lines on proximate deals.



Smoking Up an Image

After a puff or two,
I typically study myself,
my composed reflections,
something I never do when grounded,
and am always struck by their alien sound
and start wondering whom I'm talking to.

No mirror provides an outside view
but when scanning my mind's from illicit heights
I sense an advance scout,
one dispatched to gather data
for the use of some future delegation
unversed in the native milieu.



A Response To A Friend Who Saw No Difference
Between Characters In Sacred Poetic Fiction (e.g. Hopkins)
And Those in Fantasies and Fairy Tales

Well, Odin and Thor are fine, I agree;
to us they're like figures from fables;
but a trio like The Trinity.........

are they seen as quite as unreal?

Call out a name like The Paraclete's
and some may jump from their seats as if seized
and begin to shake and reel.
Which kind of figure do you think is more likely

to be taken to heart by anyone,
and become as possessing as zeal?
Not those embalmed in mythology,
which only retain historic appeal.



From a Bystander's Perspective

They've all been winning prizes,
and triumphantly getting published;
you hear that some of their stuff's
not being heaved and rubbished.

It almost shakes your conviction
that crowers so noncommittal
could always be safely ignored
having questioned so little.



For The Seeing-Impaired

The original cause is the culprit, God,
accidental chemical interaction, the thing
that started the whole ball rolling,
call it whatever you like.

Nature is too adept by far,
either by chance or design,
at dealing out incommutable sentences
for forced engagement in a futile fight.

To find it a great adventure, like Whitman,
or to say like Jeffers that one part's majestic
but another is monstrous, well, others just grow blind
to any charm where justice is nowhere in sight.

Heat engenders, darkness engulfs;
diverse imaginations explain it all;
but what it bodes for consciousness
is anyone's call.



Branding Branders

Is there anything more to life-creation
than mechanistic murder?

Consider anyone's darling,
some steamy union's hapless fruit

that plumpened until it was time to be pushed
out into Adam's lost Eden,

a punitive state of perpetual peril
where every arrival is left in the lurch

and the ultimate prospect is soil enrichment
and embedment beneath tended turf.

If guilt is assuaged by supposing your loves
are bound for compensatory bliss

since anything less would be wrong,
overriding all proud celebrations of birth

a constant chorus of hopeless keenings
keeps bewailing new tributes to earth.

So whenever I hear they're out fighting crime,
I recall what creation's Creator said

about whom to finger first.



Adventure Beckons

Adventure beckons everywhere
To any child at heart;

Creation, just by being there,
Precludes a life apart.

Undimmed within by souls grown old
They never lose the world,

That oyster with its magic hold,
For them forever pearled.



Orbiting a Potentially Dead Star

My heart got hooked again last week,
and today,

full of foreboding,
I'm reading all the signs as grave,

sensing an ominous vacancy,
non-existence as fait accompli,

a savior come and gone like a god
no god can grant eternity.

Two sacred little bottles missing
from my quaint majolica humidor,

a perpetual "sorry, call-limit reached,"
that hopeless head two nights ago

wet on my ceded chest and sobbing
"I curse the day I was born" all seem

to point to those two times before
when he tried to rob the world of treasure,

plunged deep enough for wakelessness,
for being forever out of means

to deflect a mind from helpless orbit
around a single constant care,

from a huge gravitational trap of feeling
bound to a heart no longer there.



A Minor Croak

I hear them trilling bird songs to each other
in the cherry blossom climate
of togetherness.
Pigeons on the roof
seem to parody this pair—
but they will go
with the wandering summer ease of lovers
along the river's turns, and I—
I can only feel very
like a frog held captive in a columbary.



Outlaw's Retreat

It runs through the yellowed,
unblown leaves,
where listening
has rewards:

Sweet stream
of banished melodies
whose song
I hasten towards.



Thanking Seashells

for WS

He lives, beyond his life, in many
projections,
in many imagined things,

though only as speaker,
as one to whom it is possible only
to listen . . . and listen.

He never listens himself anymore,
his hearing having grown impaired;
never hears ceilings or floors

channeling rare selections
through a medium uniquely attuned
to whatever-the-matter's tongue;

no, he only broadcasts now,
a distant turbulence funneled
like wind through a conch—like ocean's

ferment echoed afar,
like some deeply inconsolable sound
from fathomable depths offshore.



Tempis Fugit When They Go Slow

Just say it's nothing much more
than his latest accession to its never-yielding
demand that it be done right,

or call it the nearest proof to hand
of maestro's having again been driven
to demonstrate his might, or,

quite possibly for
no glorified reason, of his having given
himself the glorious chore.

The chore.

So why not imagine
some mundane explanation for
his having forced himself to be forced

to bring such a thing to completion . . . ?
He had this insight he'd sometimes share
with jobbers bobbing away with all their

pistons firing in a hyper-rapid
countdown to the launch, i.e.,
how awareness of time precluded pleasure.

Could that shed any light
on what brought the finished thing about?
He at any rate kept devising scores

he knew were bound, like himself, for the furnace,
devoting days to smoothing them out,
whittling away at perishable substance

though maybe he liked them better inchoate,
preferred the vanished hours before
the thing got done, when the outcome was still in doubt.



Working For Peace

It's not unlike a pressure valve: with a bit
of manipulation, some of the pent-up
element is released.

I'm reminded of this
because just a moment ago
I spent a few minutes adjusting it.

I never really notice
how much of the stuff is sprung, so to speak,
but it's done

till further adjustment suggests itself.
Probably not tonight.
We'll see.

For a modicum of manual labor,
you can get back a seismically sizable burst
(complete with an attendant shudder)

and can feel, if you got your money's worth,
relieved of sufficient supercharge
to limply gravitate toward sleep.

That's half the point of the exercise—
a purpose, for me, it shares with reading
a novel or poetry,

or studying a foreign tongue.
The other half? . . . to pull the mind free
of a restless distraction, an urge for action

disrupting its idle drift. Those then
are the foremost reasons I often resolve
to rise to the occasion, try my

hand at the shooting-range, so to speak—
and why I, fairly frequently,
grab my trusty pistol and,

with a will, start to polish my gun.
It never lasts too long, the time
between when the trip begins and the final

bang, but it's still
a nice enough way to depressurize
the head-space of the mind,

as well as pretty solid proof, I'd say
that working for peace
can sometimes be fun.

It every now and then can seem
as if you lived in a pressure cooker,
the way the steam

starts kicking at the lid, announcing
it's soon about to blow and now's
the time to lift the top and lose some heat.

But be entirely assured,
the intervals between
your valve adjustments may grow longer . . .

volcanoes sleep, after all,
geysers dwindle,
no one's upsurge is getting any stronger,

and sadly enough
your element's likely to grow more inert.
But, for anyone oddly like me,

who continues to find it a useful technique,
you might want to keep on hand a special shirt
. . . to catch any spillage or spurt.



A Sad Instance of History for Once Not Repeating Itself

Now that we're even more lost to each other,
me to you, you to me,
what's left, to one of us at least

is a satellite bound
to its conditioned orbit,
an unreleased

captive revolving by habit around
its accustomed center, which keeps on
exerting gravity though gone.

Matter's physics isn't quite
the same as that of the mind,
which sometimes

stays inconveniently locked in circuit
however uncompanioned in space
by anything solid or bright.

You're asking me yet again to forgive you,
to absorb and try to get beyond
the latest shock in your latest militant

marathon of recidivism,
to stay in a recurrently losing
game and keep paying to throw the dice.

Many would rather suffer a crime
in silence than summon assistance,
because, however much needed

when the help at hand is far from the kind
you'd care to recruit for resistance,
it's easy to get defeated,

stalled in a squall of conflicted emotion,
stuck just careening
through the labyrinth of a paralyzed self.

But after enough crazed laps in the maze,
your dizzy head can start palpably pleading
for any escape you can find,

for any shutoff switch you can flick
to unload the frenzied circuits
and blow the storm out of your mind,

even if the exit ticket's
a force more adept at breeding tension
than at hosting a comfortable time.

Some funerals are bound to seem anticlimactic,
but impeaching your judgment's the hard part,
branding your standard trusty tactic

for beating the odds as no more than a fond
belief that your inner guidance system's
so sound it could never keep driving you on

toward most gamblers' fate.
Faith is no easy thing to abandon
when your heart's acuity's at stake.



A Crack in the Confraternity

Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.—P.L.

They hate it when truth
is actually spoken;

it contradicts everything
they believe;

and thus the pretense
of kinship is broken:

when their mantra's new life
and yours is just leave.



Peut-etre au Naturel!

Bobby came two nights ago,
his back still hurting (probably
a lumbar strain, so-called, from a fall
in basketball) but still
performed without a flinch (and eagerly)
exactly what I like

despite the position (which isn't
the simplest) and despite
the trial of that lingering pinch.
He came as soon as he could, too.
(But then, last night, when he came again,
he aborted the launch when he started to wince.)

Some cynics might contend he came
only for my salty rival (or should I say
accomplice?. . . ) but every now and then
I'm willing to bet (how much I'm not sure)
that's just not true. (Chalk it up
to all my antennae gone askew.)

He looks, if you care to know—like what?—like . . .
all I've got. Compact, small,
bronze skin drum-tight
over ripples, back bowed (and delectably curving
into prominent mounds), a decent holding,
if I say so myself, as hot properties go.

By custom, we jauntily haggle
over the fee, the outcome known (give or take a few)
in advance. (But even for your slightly pricier
pre-dawn special, sweetheart—take my word—
you're never overcharging—plus, as we know
I can always score on you for free . . .

which reminds me . . . my birthday's coming,
and you still owe me three! And,
since I see you're back today with your back
miraculously healed overnight,
I guess I won't be afraid
to execute my designs a smidgeon less guiltily.)



Canadian Club vs. Catechism Class

Can it be me?
Or is it by chance
that whenever I sing
there's no one to dance?
(I might as well put
the whole world in a trance.)

With my opulent view
am I so out of touch?
Too far out of sync?
Not normal enough?
Are my sparkling bijoux
just a little too much?



Going with the Flow

Pick for yourself
something you'd like;
let it be deep
or guiltily light;

let it have rhythm,
let it be sad,
let it be happy,
let it be mad.

Who really cares
if it's any of those;
you might as well stick
to conversing in prose;

you might as well say
what they'd all like to hear:
how it's good, really good
that we all landed here

where nature's best laws
backed by church and by state
keep dispatching fresh ranks
toward a heavenly fate.



Love's Legacy

Still Abraham, with ready blade
Prepares the altar, hangs the vine
Each season with new fruit to quench
Earth's thirst for sacrificial wine.

Executor of nature's will,
He serves the sod, must till and bring
With every celebrated birth
His ancient lord an offering:

His ripened yield, the precious fruit
Half-shrunken back to seed in time
Yet one more wrathful vintage crushed
By rote transitions of the clime.



Auscultation

Inside oneself one sounds all parts:
A vague suspension of the breeze,

A rift between raw pulp and clime
The first frost of the meta-freeze.

A rugged oarsman's heave and pull
Keeps muffled drumming audible,

Mind mindful of an aural whir
Like summer nightfall's teeming chirr,

Of ice, locked hinges, treacheries,
Cold timbers groaning on high seas.



The Way of All Scents

Good news! Someone's apprised me how
To write the one true poetry:
The key is sounding just like you,
The one your friends all recognize,
And not like one they never knew.

As if it mattered either way,
The stranger's voice, your own—Mon Dieu!
More soundtracks made to be erased—
More dying echoes to recall
Your one-time residence in space.

When history lapses and the words
Go mute as all the blotted blessed,
When not a nose is left to sniff
Your gas, who then will even like
Whiffs of his own emissions best?



Chapeau Bouquet

Magic lovers longed for more
From seedlings sprung in restive hours,

Some hint of happy times in store,
A forecast bright as springtime flowers.

He hatched them in his hat at night,
Companions courted to advance

The time, but struck by chilling light
They withered like a failed romance.



The Immortal Path

"The assassin discloses himself,
The force that destroys us is disclosed....
an adventure to be endured
With the politest helplessness...."—WS from EDM

While Pater Noster blazed away above
Cell blocks in Hartford, he would turn the dial
And scan eclectic spaces of his mind
For airings of a more dissenting style.
Deaf-eared to channels wooing from the past
He'd sound electric pipelines like the blind
Until seditions took the place at last
Of all illusions crooned to toys of time.

Perhaps a vision came of Heraclitus
A fireball packed with rabbits in his hand
Dispersing from his hot magician's hat
Menageries to fertilize the land,
While farther off he saw our father raze
His daughters, sons, the search, each novel phrase.



ee cummings

some say ee cummings had a poets soul
loved his motherfather (wifefriends) could write
most beautifully (if always on the whole
not as those with higher eyes and oes might;
but then it was lamented sorely by
a few at harvard at the time that all
the best poems had been written;so why
try to climb old mountains but to fall
(having etched short of the supreme engrav (e)
ing) back into a crumpled ball; and why not
try hand at some quite unbeforedone (brave
thing) and outjink the comparative blot
of shakespeare shelley byron moore hood keats
and leave them towering high; in
(old) dead beats



Frequent Flyer Program

Life sometimes seems like slower suicide,
Since taking happy flights is half what kills:
The fuel consumed, the surge and beat past dawn
Of countless re-accelerated thrills.
Still, why put off all flying stunts till heaven
When now or never's when to claim your due—
With yeast to hand, and Sodom yet uncrushed
Why not let geysers gush in Xanadu?

Embarrassment abates inside a cloud,
Where blushing selves more freely join the act—
Sworn tipplers lose and find themselves in fog,
With other trippers who steer off the track.
Some say it's best to live before you die,
And silent choirs of angels all know why.



On the Urgency of Replenishing the Workforce

When all earth's paths are bound to double back
Upon themselves, no matter what we do,
It somehow seems mere critical presumption
To be demanding anything of you
As if one bore more claim to any right.
The fly is on the wheel, and we are on it,
All brought around in time, to something black,
Dumb and unknowing, cured of every zeal,
The race's bluster, and all pride of reason.
Enough to bear with that, to where it leads
Without a superadded servitude.
No wonder some slip harness and secede,
Go snatching wages where and how they dare,
Then fling them cavalierly in the air.



The Rock of the Redeemer

Each week he orbits back again to mine
Old quarries, prop the faithful, and be swept
Rock-borne from door to door, through days and nights
And on to where revered remains are kept.
Some groomed disciple then will softly keep
Long watch, until the moment when at last
All done with sacrifice, the rock rolled back,
The lamb bursts forth, intent on breaking fast;

So weekly feasts are hastily prepared,
By way of thanks for many feats performed
And toils endured to keep old fans attached—
Some scourging, blood, and other gifts to leaven
The outlook of his flock, which deems the rock
His church stands on, the keystone of their heaven.



Behind Enemy Lines

"I have learned that to be with those I like
is enough."—Walt Whitman

Spotted where dropped, its neat, unread
Still folded pages testified
I'd been afloat inside my head,
So buoyed by a presence I'd
Escaped resorting to the trends,
Or tracking our squirearchy's scheme
For locking my more wayward friends
Out of the landscape of their dream.

Then—lift for lift—I'd played chauffeur—
Slipped out an outcast who slips in
And braves the backlash of the pure
To smuggle me my favorite sin
Or just pass out a room away
While I drift in my mind all day.



That Old-Time Religion

"Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy
your philosophy of life, too."——-John Ashbery, from "My Philosophy Of Life"

Ashbery wishes us good times,
And me, I hope they won't abate.
I want the moments I have now
Never to evaporate.
I've made a niche, and won some thrills
By luck at playing hit or miss—
Enough to keep my outlook rich
And life appearing generous.

Since one now holds a special claim,
I tend desire's lesser leaks
Until that bronze funicular
Returns to run me to the peaks
And sets an eager artist free
To blanch a canvas jauntily.

—————pour Beekerson Fleurimond



A Loan and A Lease

He lay so quietly I reached
Over to feel if he was warm;
Hearing no breath, I needed proof
No chill was on that too-still form.
He came without his one-track side,
Just humbly handsome and polite,
And it was good of him to both
Show himself and spend the night.

A switch I got to mute the bells
Stays off or on as I allow,
But at the moment keeps the peace.
My house will not withstand its flaws,
But while my lucky star shines on
I'm hoping to renew the lease.



Cell Theory

Where they now go to catch a wink
Who stretched out on the green before
Or made hard benches beds because
They lacked a key to any door,
Who knows, but parks gone tenantless
And prisons crammed and overfull
Suggest how sudden aesthetes made
The local scene so wonderful.
Fat tabs for sleeping out of doors
Collectible in cash or time
Now equal several millions owed
La ville by ones without a dime,
And jail for all nonpaying guests
Keeps flowerpaths more picturesque.



Square Times Blues

The only show in town shut down,
Dispatched to some unknown address,
A leafy peace has settled in
Where none had come to convalesce.
Le carnaval, for all those tricks
Condignly sampled on the cheap,
Still leavened with expectancy
A long day's journey into sleep.
Perhaps in some unpurged locale
Yet free for all to occupy,
Our banished horde of hawkers hail
And hook such gamer passersby
As we who, undeprived had plied
A city not yet countrified.



A Mon Vieux Mon'ray'al

Not to clip sick summer leaves,
Nor watch them drop like autumn gold
Into a leafy lane nor see
A mimic's rustic dream unfold,
Not to endure a vision void
Of promise more than early sleep,
Not for a filtered view was my
Balcony seat acquired cheap.
It was because all clocks had stopped
Before the wholesale cleansing came,
And for a common ground where most
Could set themselves and stake a claim,
Or loose and slick and maverick, roam
The scene, and almost feel at home.



Palmistry in Paradise

Strange, how in the park today,
Three wheeled around on me and one
Required the reason I was there;
No doubt some wondered what I'd done,
As I, best as I could impaired
By lips gone gummy with alarm,
In forced defense invoked the plot's
Exclusive new Edenic charm.
Directed—"for our safety"—next
To show my palms, I did; and then,
"We want no more dead bodies here,"
Said he, who may, to weed out men
Check lifelines of all comers who
Resemble him he said I do.



Preparing for the Pageant

Our tiny central park transformed,
Renewed, its state-appointed heirs
On brighter workdays come at noon
To claim the space an hour as theirs.
Few, of the once emboldened who
Had plied a seedy green unchecked,
Now brave the odds and navigate
The precincts of the New Elect.
Unleashed by some contestant's dream,
Wry rovers licensed to coerce
Compliance, hound and hold them back,
While I, who watch the tide reverse,
See, where the undisturbed now tarry
A pretty city cemetery.



Bagatelle I

"Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf." ― P.L.

If brute nature's too strong for arresting
in its drive to keep planting new seed
the result so cries out for protesting
no lost cause seems more worthy to plead.

It concerns those at risk of induction
into ills we all suffer and mourn
and the facing of grief and destruction
for no reason but having been born.

It commends sparing others diseases
and anger and fear and despair
and such mercies as flow from sweet Jesus
and the hopelessness driving all prayer.



Bagatelle II

"Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself." ― P.L.

To do it ourselves would be faster,
but since instinct seems bound to prevail
it's more likely to be by disaster
that we come to the end of travail.

One could argue there's cause for heroics
and good reason to expedite fate
but it's asking too much of born stoics
to do more than resignedly mate.

So while forces too fierce for engaging
go on beating us down till we're done
we'll keep rearing new conscripts for waging
the same war that can never be won.



Death in Life

Though his demise was not like that
Of billions lodged beneath the ground,
Yet it was cast as such to one
Who must believe him buried now.
It helped sidestep analysis
Of faith's demolishment by phone,
And rendered pointless idle queries
About affairs no longer known.
Should he be spotted on some rue
Not visibly yet void of breath,
That hunched ghost shinning into view
Might but recall his sudden death,
The funeral held, the obit quoted,
And down an aisle a coffin toted.



I Do Not See

I do not see the stars tonight
Nor wonder if they shine,
For many years have passed since I
Wished any beauty mine.

I do not seek the flowered wood's
Unworldly hush and stir,
Nor are there cherished haunts of mind
As long ago there were.

I find no sail to lull me now
Away to courts of dream,
And upward from the sod I push
Blue skies fade out unseen.



Then to Thee Gladly

O Lord,
if in the sight of Thee
is peace, and happiness
fills all who look
on Thee;
And where Thou art,
all troubles
truly cease, and Thou
art truly, and as said
to be;
Then to thee gladly
I send forth
my love—to Thy
protection, speed
an ill-used guest;
From sorrow, anguish,
tears, to aeons of
that light,
which but to look upon
is rest.

This poem hangs between two flags in the museum at the Cathedral of the Pines in New Hampshire.



Return

When somehow you appeared and took
this heart not mine to give,
and spring broke out again and gave
me every cause
to live,

It seemed as if some power had sent
a spirit to restore
that other Eden
that I knew,
when all was lost before.



Blessing the Cup

While morning yet was rose,
not thorn,
earth glistening
as if newly born,
I came across
a romance here:
he hadn't seen
the shadows clear,
nor seemed
to be at all aware;
she watched,
and was content to stare.

I thought of how a love began,
of Eden, too,
the dawn of man
and how that garden
turned to grief;
of sorrow
borne without relief;
and yet,
I did not fail to bless
the tainted cup of happiness,
nor reverently to tiptoe by
this sleeper in the flower's eye.

The HyperTexts

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/importance-poetry



The Importance of Poetry
It's the key to happiness.

Poetry is an art form that has survived for thousands and thousands of years. We study it in school and we hear quotes from poems scattered thorughout our life. But do we ever truly make meaning of it? Does it even matter? My answer to you is yes it does. Reading poetry and or writing poetry can drastically improve your life, because it has improved mine. In this article I will attempt to articulate why poetry is important to read and also to write

Reading Poetry

Poetry is one of the most powerful forms of writing because it takes the english language, a language we believe we know, and transforms it. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. The pattern of the sentences sound new and melodious. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. No poem can be read in the same way, because the words mean something different to each of us. For this reason, many find poetry and elusive art form. However, the issue in understanding poetry lies in how you read poetry. Reading it logically results in an overall comprehension, rigid and unchanging. However, reading it emotionally allows the nuances and paradoxes to enter our understanding. Anyone who writes poetry can attest, you have to write it with an open heart. So as a reader, we must do the same. All poems are insights into the most intimate inner workings of the writer's mind and soul. To read it coldly and rationally would be shutting the door on the relationship that the writer is attempting to forge with you. Opening your heart to poetry is the only way to get fulfillment from it.

If you imagine poetry as a journey, you must be willing to trust the writer to guide you. Unwilling readers will never experience every part of the adventure in the same way open minded readers do. The journey may be filled with dead ends and suffering or endless joy and happiness. And still, you go. You pick up the poem, you read, you listen, and you feel.

In our culture we are experiencing a crisis where American people are the unhappiest people in the world statistically. How do we solve this? I answer: Mindfullness, gratitude, and poetry.

Writing Poetry

From a writer’s perspective, writing poetry can be equally elusive as reading poetry. When I first started writing poetry, the advice I always heard was practice, find your voice, keep a journal. I did all these things but still my poems were flat and inert. What was I missing? I poured over poems by Angelou, Shakespeare, Austen, and Wilde looking for a pattern, something I could emulate. This was the problem. I was unwilling to open my heart. I thought poetry could be a mask I could craft. But no matter how beautiful I made it, it would never come to life. It would never fit on another person’s face. It did not eve fit on mine.
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My first poem that came alive was written in the dark late at night. I was lying in bed and I felt something stifling me. I could not sleep. I let the thoughts stew in my head until they could not remain locked away forever. I reached for my journal and I wrote.

Vulnerability was the key. Poetry is about expressing those thoughts and feelings we keep the most suppressed. We must be honest with ourselves about what we feel in order to write anything worth reading. It’s stopping and grabbing a thought by the tail and pulling it up into our conscious mind. It’s trying to express the beauty, and wonder we see. It’s about connecting our hearts and our minds to ourselves and our surroundings. It’s about finding peace.

Poetry is perhaps a more effective stress relief than working out or meditating because it forces you to express your feelings through words, which helps you not only understand your feelings but also communicate them more effectively. Furthermore, it is a skill that will remain in use for your entire life no matter what you end up doing professionally.

So reach for the pen, and let go of those things that have been burdening your freedom. Read poetry with your heart and let it affect you. The answer to our questions about the meaning of life, and the purpose of pain were written in poems. They have always been there.


Much wisdom in this article. If one can not write poetry, they can read and enjoy it.
If neither appeals, then there is no need to try to belittle poets. I know of no poets that try to force the reading of their poetry upon others.
Yet it is a true art form.
True Poetry is not Prose nor is it mindless blather, stupidity, sign of weakness or any other negative applied to it by some..
If one is intelligent enough to read and understand the great Classic Poets, they have aleg up on those that do not -Or else do not care to read, tho' they could understand, IMHO.
Poetry writing is not a sign of manly weakness, if any think it is, they only have to face me-one on one-- to see the folly and great error in that thinking.
I can and will assure any--nothing weak about me , never has been-- with the exception of my being a bit weaker in my old age, that I have now been blessed to have lived long enough to enjoy with my family.-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://penandthepad.com/advantages-sonnet-form-poems-1838.html

The Advantages of the Sonnet Form in Poems
by Anita Weingarten
The sonnet form has been used since the thirteenth century.
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Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?

Poetry, like other kinds of artistic expression, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The sonnet, which originated in the thirteenth century and is still used today, is a poetic form to which writers as varied as John Donne, Robert Frost and e.e. cummings have been drawn. There are reasons the form has been around for so long. For both writers and readers, the sonnet offers advantages, including its versatility, its place within a long poetic tradition, and the way it lends itself to a concentrated focus and the rigorous use of language.

Rigorous Language

One advantage of a sonnet, or of any poem in which form, rhythm and rhyme are strictly defined, is that it forces the poet to work within very specific parameters, which results in an increase of poetic discipline. Whereas free verse allows a poet to follow his whimsy to a large extent, the demands of the sonnet form require every word to be carefully weighed, leading to potentially more satisfying poetry, as the poet is forced to become more intentional and careful with the words he chooses.

Concentrated Focus

According to the website Poeticon, the sonnet may be the perfect poetic form for the expression or elaboration of a single thought or feeling. With its relatively short length -- just fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter -- the sonnet provides the perfect laboratory for a poet's exploration of an intense emotion. Short enough to be manageable to writer and reader alike, the sonnet is nevertheless long enough to do justice to complex poetic subjects.

Versatility

Another reason the sonnet is so popular among poets is that it has shown a great ability to adapt to different needs and purposes. Sonnets lend themselves to many subjects and themes, such as love, politics, nature, death -- the possibilities are endless. Even the sonnet’s meter and rhyme, which in some ways define the form, have proven to be fair game for poets who favor innovation and experimentation. For instance, George Starbuck's poem "Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree," while having more than fourteen lines, roughly follows a sonnet's traditional rhyme scheme.

A Long Tradition

The sonnet has endured the test of time. From the earliest sonnets of 14th-century Italy to sonnets written today, every sonnet is a part of this great tradition. Whether obediently following the rules for rhythm and rhyme scheme or flouting those rules to break new ground and shake things up, every sonneteer has to, in some measure, reckon with the poets who have come before him. Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 130, for example, plays on and against the tradition of love sonnets that idealize the women they take as their subjects. Like all traditions, the demands of the sonnet can be both limiting and liberating, but they can never be ignored.

References

Folger Shakespeare Library: A Short History of the Sonnet
Poeticon: Sonnet
Poetry Foundation: Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

About the Author

Anita Weingarten holds a Master's Degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been writing professionally since 2001. Her writing experience ranges from technical manuals and marketing materials to guides designed to help young people understand classic literature.

************************


https://penandthepad.com/significance-sonnet-2962.html

What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
by Jordan Weagly
William William Shakespeare wrote an important collection of sonnets that discuss the emotional experiences of love.
Related Articles

What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?
What Are Five Characteristics of a Sonnet?
Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
The Parts of a Sonnet
The Parts of a Sonnet Poem
Traditional Subjects of Sonnets

Understanding the significance of a sonnet can help you strengthen close reading and analytical skills, build a better appreciation for poetry, and derive more meaning from your reading. The sonnet is a significant form of poetry with a set structure. In Western literary traditions, sonnets have played an important role because of the works of authors such as Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and William Shakespeare. Since these early beginnings, the sonnet has held a significant place in literature for both its unique form and presentation of content.

Form

Sonnets are poems with 14 lines, usually with 10 syllables in each line, following the traditional English rhythm of unstressed and stressed beats called iambic pentameter. Like haiku, sonnets are strong examples of poetry with a strict form, as opposed to free verse, which allows for unrestricted use of rhyme and stanza structure. The significance of the sonnet is closely linked to this form and how it has been used by authors. Rhyme schemes vary, but notable types have developed throughout literary history.

The most prominent types of sonnets in English are the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of one eight-line stanza (an octave) followed by one six-line stanza (a sestet), traditionally with a rhyme scheme such as abbaabba cdecde. The English sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas (quatrains) followed by a single two-line stanza (a couplet), following a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The Spenserian sonnet is another prominent type of English sonnet, which has a traditional rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Historic Significance

According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, sonnets first became prominent during the 14th century when the form used by Petrarch became significant in Italy. The form then spread during the Renaissance to England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and France, and in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare mastered the sonnet in the English language. During the Romantic period in Germany, the work of August Wilhelm von Schlegel gave sonnets significance in the German literary tradition. After Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, the sonnet form continued to be used in poetry, but it was not until the work of writers during the English Romantic period like William Wordsworth that they became popular again. It remained a significant poetic form in the 20th century through the work of American poets such as Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Content

Dating back to Petrarch, traditional sonnets contain strong themes of love. Petrarch discussed unattainable love and the pain that it can bring, and English poets such as Shakespeare followed this example during his time. While sonnets often discuss the difficulties of love, other themes are also appropriate. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Petrarch’s sonnets also explored the notion that poems, and art works in general, will outlive their creators.

Contemporary Significance

Sonnets remain significant because they offer examples of how strict, formal poetry can also offer some flexibility to authors. For example, switching the rhythm of a sonnet’s typical unstressed/stressed pattern to a stressed/unstressed pattern in one line draws attention to the line and does not violate the more important formal requirements such as stanza length. Contemporary poets have used the traditional rules of line, rhythm and rhyme and the opportunity to bend these rules as a way to add new meaning and unique expression to their poetry.


**************************



http://maher.filfre.net/writings/sonnets.htm


Sidney and Shakespeare:

Contrasting Approaches to the Art of the Sonnet

By Jimmy Maher

The sonnet is among the most restrictive of poetic forms. Its list of requirements are long and daunting, as anyone who has tried to write one can well attest. Paradoxically, though, great flexibility and creativity is possible within the form. Many poets would likely argue that, by placing such restrictions on them at virtually every turn, and by forcing them to distill their words down to such a brief length, the sonnet actually aids their creativity, forcing them to write only those words that are absolutely essential to the experience being conveyed. Like an even more restrictive form of poetry, the haiku, a well-written sonnet is a little jewel reflecting an instant’s feeling distilled down to its absolute essence. As D.G. Rossetti wrote:

The Sonnet is a moment’s monument,
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. ("The Sonnet", 1-3)

I will examine the work of two famous practitioners of the art of the sonnet, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, and in the process try to convey something of the great potential for innovation within the form when in the hands of a master. Sidney made important changes to the technical form of the sonnet, while Shakespeare vastly expanded the scope of what a poet could write sonnets about and in the process produced work of human relevance unmatched by Sidney or his contemporaries, who remained wedded to Petrarch’s conception of courtly love.

Proof that poets of the English Renaissance considered the sonnet an aid rather than restriction to creativity is provided when we consider the obvious fact that no one forced them to write in this form. These poets were not even strict traditionalists, for they proved willing to alter the form to suit their purposes. Sidney found the traditional Italian form too restrictive and rather unsuited for the different rhythms of the English language, and so he chose to write his important Astrophil and Stella sequence using a modified form of his own devising which freed him from the strict rhyming requirements of the traditional Italian approach. Sidney’s rhymes vary quite widely from sonnet to sonnet, depending on the requirements of the poem. Structurally, he constructs his sonnets as two quatrains followed by a pair of triplets, each generally expressing one complete and separate thought.

If Sidney was willing to alter the traditional structure of the sonnet to suit his purposes, he proved less interested in changing its subject matter. Like virtually everyone who used the form before him, Sidney writes exclusively about courtly love in the tradition of Petrarch. His Astrophil and Stella tells the story in archly romantic terms of the doomed love of the former for the latter. As everyone in Sidney’s own time knew, the narrative is based on real events. Sidney did in fact fall in love with a beautiful, cultured young lady nine years his junior by the name of Penelope Devereux, and claimed Astrophil and Stella to be a chronicle of those events. Whatever their origins, though, it is hard to see these poems as realistic accounts of being in love. They are too romanticized, too idealized. One cannot help but feel at times that these verses are as much about the poet’s pride in his craft and his desire for acceptance in polite literary society as they are about the sweat and passion of a real love affair. The poet himself all but admits to an ulterior motive. In the very first sonnet of the sequence, he tells us that he seeks "studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain" (Damrosch 1043). In the fifteenth sonnet, he halts proceedings long enough to engage in a bit of boasting at the expense of those that believe they can match his eloquence:

You that do Dictionary's method bring
Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows
You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing,
You take wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such
As do betray a want of inward touch (Jokinen).

He concludes by smugly telling these pour second-class poets that they should first "Stella behold, and then begin to endite" (Jokinen), yet I sense that his access to the fair Stella has little to do with the condescension just displayed.

Much of Sidney’s verse is beautiful. In that sense, he is justified in his egotism. Yet it is beautiful in such a mannered, ornamental way that it threatens at times to fly away on its own silvery wings of eloquence. Stella is an angelic creature, described in the 81st sonnet as "Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart; / Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise!" (Joniken), and Astrophil is defined only by his hopeless love for her. There is little of flesh and blood reality to be found here.

The mannered nature of Sidney’s work stands in contrast to that of a slightly later Renaissance poet, William Shakespeare. Unlike Sidney, Shakespeare did not particularly innovate when it comes to the technical form of the sonnet. By the time he began to write, his chosen form, consisting of three quatrains followed by a couplet, all using a fixed rhyme scheme, was already quite well established. In one of the great ironies of literary history, this form became known after Shakespeare’s time as the Shakespearean sonnet, even though Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with its development. Still, if Shakespeare did little to advance the sonnet’s technical form, he had a huge impact on its tone.

It is not as if Shakespeare revolutionized the subject matter of the sonnet. Like Sidney, he writes mostly about love, whether it is between man and man or man and woman. His diction is often equally elevated, and like Sidney he often chooses to compare his beloved to the wonders of nature: "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate" (Harbage 1456). It is even true that at times he seems more concerned with making sure his verse preserves his genius for posterity than with the beloved to whom he is allegedly writing, as in Sonnet 19: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong / My love shall in my verse ever live young" (Harbage 1456). Yet at other times he displays a realistic maturity far beyond anything Sidney is capable of, and the sentiments he expresses are made all the more touching by the aura of real life, difficult, disappointing, and painful, that underlies them. Consider Sonnet 29. Here, Shakespeare’s narrator spends the first two quatrains bemoaning his state. He is a poor man of no great talent, looking upon the rich and powerful of the world with envy while living a discontented and dreary existence. Then there is a change in tone, though, as he remembers his love, and suddenly "thy sweet love remem’red such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings" (Harbage 1458). This poem displays an emotional maturity that eludes Sidney. While Sidney describes one whose "beauty draws thy heart to love" (Damrosch 1045), Shakespeare describes the strength that a man draws from a love that one suspects has been with him for years. Sidney describes, albeit beautifully and with consummate skill, what we might today term puppy love; Shakespeare describes the mellow luster of a strong and lasting relationship.

Even more striking in their earthy realism are the so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets. These are written to a lover who possesses none of the ethereal virtues of Sidney’s Stella. She is neither good, beautiful, nor even trustworthy. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare writes:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head (Harbage 1475).

Shakespeare almost seems to be deliberately subversive in this poem and others like it, mocking the fairy-tale world of Sidney and his contemporaries. Yes there is more to these works than just the desire to shock. As we read them, Shakespeare gradually draws for us a picture of a mutual dependency between his narrator and Dark Lady that is not ideal or romantic, but nevertheless rings very true to life. The narrator is filled with both love and loathing for his lady, with both attraction and repulsion. The complex feelings thus aroused have a mature relevance to life, both then and now, that Sidney (and many of Shakespeare’s more "traditional" sonnets, for that matter) never approaches. Consider Sonnet 138, in which Shakespeare informs us that "When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies" (Harbage 1477). He goes on to describe a relationship built on self-absorption and self-deception on the parts of both parties. His Dark Lady knows that the narrator is not the handsome young man she flatters him to be, and the narrator knows that she is not faithful to him. Yet as long as nothing shatters the illusion, both can continue to deceive themselves and draw sustenance from the relationship. The psychological complexity and knowing, melancholic wisdom here is quite unlike anything to be found elsewhere at the time. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare more so than of his contemporaries is still so widely read and discussed today.

The sonnet in Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s time was not the archaic straightjacket that it might first appear. Both poets freely adopted the form to suit their own styles and purposes while using its sense of structure as a spur to their creativity. Shakespeare then proceeded to explode the possibilities not only for the sonnet but for all poetry by choosing to abandon, at least at times, other poets’ world of romantic fantasy and to explore the possibilities offered by a realistic exploration of thoughts and feelings in the real world. His poetry continues to be a "moment’s monument" to "one dead, deathless hour." However, the sense of honest ambiguity within that "hour" increases exponentially, and because of that his poetry rings true in a way that Sidney’s does not. Sidney’s sonnets are ornate works of artifice, often beautiful but dead on the page and always of their time; Shakespeare’s are real, breathing evocations of life. His work is for all times.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. "Shakespeare’s Sonnets." The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Penguin, 1969. 1453-1479.

Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Longman Anthology of British Literature (2nd ed.) Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman, 1043-1050.

Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Works of Sir Philip Sidney. January 2, Luminarium. October 3, 2005. http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sidbib.htm.



Now that free verse is all the rage--oft because it is so much easier to write, sonnets are too oft ignored or even criticized as being inferior and unworthy by modern poets and many publishers.
Yet, one should learn about a thing before condemning it and calling it inferior or unworthy to be read or admired.
Myself, I admire many free verse poems and have been awed by many.
But I do not go on a path to vilify, condemn and even castigate poets that only write in free verse!
Which happens today, to poets that only or primarily write in sonnet form.......
If one but stretches the limits in the sonnet form, any subject can be written about well.
Thus creativity immensely expanded and a poet's freedom greatly enlarged.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://penandthepad.com/advantages-sonnet-form-poems-1838.html

The Advantages of the Sonnet Form in Poems
by Anita Weingarten
The sonnet form has been used since the thirteenth century.
Related Articles
Different Types of Poetry
Traditional Subjects of Sonnets
The Parts of a Sonnet
What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?

Poetry, like other kinds of artistic expression, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The sonnet, which originated in the thirteenth century and is still used today, is a poetic form to which writers as varied as John Donne, Robert Frost and e.e. cummings have been drawn. There are reasons the form has been around for so long. For both writers and readers, the sonnet offers advantages, including its versatility, its place within a long poetic tradition, and the way it lends itself to a concentrated focus and the rigorous use of language.

Rigorous Language

One advantage of a sonnet, or of any poem in which form, rhythm and rhyme are strictly defined, is that it forces the poet to work within very specific parameters, which results in an increase of poetic discipline. Whereas free verse allows a poet to follow his whimsy to a large extent, the demands of the sonnet form require every word to be carefully weighed, leading to potentially more satisfying poetry, as the poet is forced to become more intentional and careful with the words he chooses.

Concentrated Focus

According to the website Poeticon, the sonnet may be the perfect poetic form for the expression or elaboration of a single thought or feeling. With its relatively short length -- just fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter -- the sonnet provides the perfect laboratory for a poet's exploration of an intense emotion. Short enough to be manageable to writer and reader alike, the sonnet is nevertheless long enough to do justice to complex poetic subjects.

Versatility

Another reason the sonnet is so popular among poets is that it has shown a great ability to adapt to different needs and purposes. Sonnets lend themselves to many subjects and themes, such as love, politics, nature, death -- the possibilities are endless. Even the sonnet’s meter and rhyme, which in some ways define the form, have proven to be fair game for poets who favor innovation and experimentation. For instance, George Starbuck's poem "Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree," while having more than fourteen lines, roughly follows a sonnet's traditional rhyme scheme.

A Long Tradition

The sonnet has endured the test of time. From the earliest sonnets of 14th-century Italy to sonnets written today, every sonnet is a part of this great tradition. Whether obediently following the rules for rhythm and rhyme scheme or flouting those rules to break new ground and shake things up, every sonneteer has to, in some measure, reckon with the poets who have come before him. Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 130, for example, plays on and against the tradition of love sonnets that idealize the women they take as their subjects. Like all traditions, the demands of the sonnet can be both limiting and liberating, but they can never be ignored.

References

Folger Shakespeare Library: A Short History of the Sonnet
Poeticon: Sonnet
Poetry Foundation: Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

About the Author

Anita Weingarten holds a Master's Degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been writing professionally since 2001. Her writing experience ranges from technical manuals and marketing materials to guides designed to help young people understand classic literature.

************************


https://penandthepad.com/significance-sonnet-2962.html

What Is the Significance of a Sonnet?
by Jordan Weagly
William William Shakespeare wrote an important collection of sonnets that discuss the emotional experiences of love.
Related Articles

What Is the Difference Between an Elizabethan & Petrarchan Sonnet?
What Are Five Characteristics of a Sonnet?
Romantic Italian Sonnet Poetry
The Parts of a Sonnet
The Parts of a Sonnet Poem
Traditional Subjects of Sonnets

Understanding the significance of a sonnet can help you strengthen close reading and analytical skills, build a better appreciation for poetry, and derive more meaning from your reading. The sonnet is a significant form of poetry with a set structure. In Western literary traditions, sonnets have played an important role because of the works of authors such as Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and William Shakespeare. Since these early beginnings, the sonnet has held a significant place in literature for both its unique form and presentation of content.

Form

Sonnets are poems with 14 lines, usually with 10 syllables in each line, following the traditional English rhythm of unstressed and stressed beats called iambic pentameter. Like haiku, sonnets are strong examples of poetry with a strict form, as opposed to free verse, which allows for unrestricted use of rhyme and stanza structure. The significance of the sonnet is closely linked to this form and how it has been used by authors. Rhyme schemes vary, but notable types have developed throughout literary history.

The most prominent types of sonnets in English are the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of one eight-line stanza (an octave) followed by one six-line stanza (a sestet), traditionally with a rhyme scheme such as abbaabba cdecde. The English sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas (quatrains) followed by a single two-line stanza (a couplet), following a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The Spenserian sonnet is another prominent type of English sonnet, which has a traditional rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Historic Significance

According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, sonnets first became prominent during the 14th century when the form used by Petrarch became significant in Italy. The form then spread during the Renaissance to England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and France, and in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare mastered the sonnet in the English language. During the Romantic period in Germany, the work of August Wilhelm von Schlegel gave sonnets significance in the German literary tradition. After Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, the sonnet form continued to be used in poetry, but it was not until the work of writers during the English Romantic period like William Wordsworth that they became popular again. It remained a significant poetic form in the 20th century through the work of American poets such as Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Content

Dating back to Petrarch, traditional sonnets contain strong themes of love. Petrarch discussed unattainable love and the pain that it can bring, and English poets such as Shakespeare followed this example during his time. While sonnets often discuss the difficulties of love, other themes are also appropriate. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Petrarch’s sonnets also explored the notion that poems, and art works in general, will outlive their creators.

Contemporary Significance

Sonnets remain significant because they offer examples of how strict, formal poetry can also offer some flexibility to authors. For example, switching the rhythm of a sonnet’s typical unstressed/stressed pattern to a stressed/unstressed pattern in one line draws attention to the line and does not violate the more important formal requirements such as stanza length. Contemporary poets have used the traditional rules of line, rhythm and rhyme and the opportunity to bend these rules as a way to add new meaning and unique expression to their poetry.


**************************



http://maher.filfre.net/writings/sonnets.htm


Sidney and Shakespeare:

Contrasting Approaches to the Art of the Sonnet

By Jimmy Maher

The sonnet is among the most restrictive of poetic forms. Its list of requirements are long and daunting, as anyone who has tried to write one can well attest. Paradoxically, though, great flexibility and creativity is possible within the form. Many poets would likely argue that, by placing such restrictions on them at virtually every turn, and by forcing them to distill their words down to such a brief length, the sonnet actually aids their creativity, forcing them to write only those words that are absolutely essential to the experience being conveyed. Like an even more restrictive form of poetry, the haiku, a well-written sonnet is a little jewel reflecting an instant’s feeling distilled down to its absolute essence. As D.G. Rossetti wrote:

The Sonnet is a moment’s monument,
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. ("The Sonnet", 1-3)

I will examine the work of two famous practitioners of the art of the sonnet, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, and in the process try to convey something of the great potential for innovation within the form when in the hands of a master. Sidney made important changes to the technical form of the sonnet, while Shakespeare vastly expanded the scope of what a poet could write sonnets about and in the process produced work of human relevance unmatched by Sidney or his contemporaries, who remained wedded to Petrarch’s conception of courtly love.

Proof that poets of the English Renaissance considered the sonnet an aid rather than restriction to creativity is provided when we consider the obvious fact that no one forced them to write in this form. These poets were not even strict traditionalists, for they proved willing to alter the form to suit their purposes. Sidney found the traditional Italian form too restrictive and rather unsuited for the different rhythms of the English language, and so he chose to write his important Astrophil and Stella sequence using a modified form of his own devising which freed him from the strict rhyming requirements of the traditional Italian approach. Sidney’s rhymes vary quite widely from sonnet to sonnet, depending on the requirements of the poem. Structurally, he constructs his sonnets as two quatrains followed by a pair of triplets, each generally expressing one complete and separate thought.

If Sidney was willing to alter the traditional structure of the sonnet to suit his purposes, he proved less interested in changing its subject matter. Like virtually everyone who used the form before him, Sidney writes exclusively about courtly love in the tradition of Petrarch. His Astrophil and Stella tells the story in archly romantic terms of the doomed love of the former for the latter. As everyone in Sidney’s own time knew, the narrative is based on real events. Sidney did in fact fall in love with a beautiful, cultured young lady nine years his junior by the name of Penelope Devereux, and claimed Astrophil and Stella to be a chronicle of those events. Whatever their origins, though, it is hard to see these poems as realistic accounts of being in love. They are too romanticized, too idealized. One cannot help but feel at times that these verses are as much about the poet’s pride in his craft and his desire for acceptance in polite literary society as they are about the sweat and passion of a real love affair. The poet himself all but admits to an ulterior motive. In the very first sonnet of the sequence, he tells us that he seeks "studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain" (Damrosch 1043). In the fifteenth sonnet, he halts proceedings long enough to engage in a bit of boasting at the expense of those that believe they can match his eloquence:

You that do Dictionary's method bring
Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows
You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing,
You take wrong ways, those far-fetched helps be such
As do betray a want of inward touch (Jokinen).

He concludes by smugly telling these pour second-class poets that they should first "Stella behold, and then begin to endite" (Jokinen), yet I sense that his access to the fair Stella has little to do with the condescension just displayed.

Much of Sidney’s verse is beautiful. In that sense, he is justified in his egotism. Yet it is beautiful in such a mannered, ornamental way that it threatens at times to fly away on its own silvery wings of eloquence. Stella is an angelic creature, described in the 81st sonnet as "Breathing all bliss and sweet'ning to the heart; / Teaching dumb lips a nobler exercise!" (Joniken), and Astrophil is defined only by his hopeless love for her. There is little of flesh and blood reality to be found here.

The mannered nature of Sidney’s work stands in contrast to that of a slightly later Renaissance poet, William Shakespeare. Unlike Sidney, Shakespeare did not particularly innovate when it comes to the technical form of the sonnet. By the time he began to write, his chosen form, consisting of three quatrains followed by a couplet, all using a fixed rhyme scheme, was already quite well established. In one of the great ironies of literary history, this form became known after Shakespeare’s time as the Shakespearean sonnet, even though Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with its development. Still, if Shakespeare did little to advance the sonnet’s technical form, he had a huge impact on its tone.

It is not as if Shakespeare revolutionized the subject matter of the sonnet. Like Sidney, he writes mostly about love, whether it is between man and man or man and woman. His diction is often equally elevated, and like Sidney he often chooses to compare his beloved to the wonders of nature: "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate" (Harbage 1456). It is even true that at times he seems more concerned with making sure his verse preserves his genius for posterity than with the beloved to whom he is allegedly writing, as in Sonnet 19: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong / My love shall in my verse ever live young" (Harbage 1456). Yet at other times he displays a realistic maturity far beyond anything Sidney is capable of, and the sentiments he expresses are made all the more touching by the aura of real life, difficult, disappointing, and painful, that underlies them. Consider Sonnet 29. Here, Shakespeare’s narrator spends the first two quatrains bemoaning his state. He is a poor man of no great talent, looking upon the rich and powerful of the world with envy while living a discontented and dreary existence. Then there is a change in tone, though, as he remembers his love, and suddenly "thy sweet love remem’red such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings" (Harbage 1458). This poem displays an emotional maturity that eludes Sidney. While Sidney describes one whose "beauty draws thy heart to love" (Damrosch 1045), Shakespeare describes the strength that a man draws from a love that one suspects has been with him for years. Sidney describes, albeit beautifully and with consummate skill, what we might today term puppy love; Shakespeare describes the mellow luster of a strong and lasting relationship.

Even more striking in their earthy realism are the so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets. These are written to a lover who possesses none of the ethereal virtues of Sidney’s Stella. She is neither good, beautiful, nor even trustworthy. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare writes:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head (Harbage 1475).

Shakespeare almost seems to be deliberately subversive in this poem and others like it, mocking the fairy-tale world of Sidney and his contemporaries. Yes there is more to these works than just the desire to shock. As we read them, Shakespeare gradually draws for us a picture of a mutual dependency between his narrator and Dark Lady that is not ideal or romantic, but nevertheless rings very true to life. The narrator is filled with both love and loathing for his lady, with both attraction and repulsion. The complex feelings thus aroused have a mature relevance to life, both then and now, that Sidney (and many of Shakespeare’s more "traditional" sonnets, for that matter) never approaches. Consider Sonnet 138, in which Shakespeare informs us that "When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies" (Harbage 1477). He goes on to describe a relationship built on self-absorption and self-deception on the parts of both parties. His Dark Lady knows that the narrator is not the handsome young man she flatters him to be, and the narrator knows that she is not faithful to him. Yet as long as nothing shatters the illusion, both can continue to deceive themselves and draw sustenance from the relationship. The psychological complexity and knowing, melancholic wisdom here is quite unlike anything to be found elsewhere at the time. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare more so than of his contemporaries is still so widely read and discussed today.

The sonnet in Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s time was not the archaic straightjacket that it might first appear. Both poets freely adopted the form to suit their own styles and purposes while using its sense of structure as a spur to their creativity. Shakespeare then proceeded to explode the possibilities not only for the sonnet but for all poetry by choosing to abandon, at least at times, other poets’ world of romantic fantasy and to explore the possibilities offered by a realistic exploration of thoughts and feelings in the real world. His poetry continues to be a "moment’s monument" to "one dead, deathless hour." However, the sense of honest ambiguity within that "hour" increases exponentially, and because of that his poetry rings true in a way that Sidney’s does not. Sidney’s sonnets are ornate works of artifice, often beautiful but dead on the page and always of their time; Shakespeare’s are real, breathing evocations of life. His work is for all times.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. "Shakespeare’s Sonnets." The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Penguin, 1969. 1453-1479.

Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Longman Anthology of British Literature (2nd ed.) Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman, 1043-1050.

Sidney, Sir Philip. "Astrophil and Stella." The Works of Sir Philip Sidney. January 2, Luminarium. October 3, 2005. http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sidbib.htm.



Now that free verse is all the rage--oft because it is so much easier to write, sonnets are too oft ignored or even criticized as being inferior and unworthy by modern poets and many publishers.
Yet, one should learn about a thing before condemning it and calling it inferior or unworthy to be read or admired.
Myself, I admire many free verse poems and have been awed by many.
But I do not go on a path to vilify, condemn and even castigate poets that only write in free verse!
Which happens today, to poets that only or primarily write in sonnet form.......
If one but stretches the limits in the sonnet form, any subject can be written about well.
Thus creativity immensely expanded and a poet's freedom greatly enlarged.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/are_shakespeare_and_dante_dead_white_european_male s_part_1-1840

Are Shakespeare and Dante Dead White European Males? Part 1
Written by: David B. Gosselin

The answer to the above question is of course no. Shakespeare and Dante are not dead because every true poet is immortal.

However, much of our contemporary thinkers seem to be under the impression that they are dead, and that they are not as relevant and talented as first thought, but that rather their qualities were simply exaggerated because they happened to belong to a ‘historically dominant gender and ethnic group’. However any discerning eye will notice that such a ‘dead white European male’ argument avoids actually taking on the content of a Shakespeare’s or Dante’s ideas, which in fact have a continuity spanning over thousands of years, through the Golden Renaissance, through the Dark Ages, back to the times of ancient Greece and the Homeric epics. Moreover these ideas address some of the most fundamental questions concerning the human condition.

However, before we continue, I can hear protests saying that the canon above mentioned, really only refers to dead white European males. But the truth is that this kind of humanist thinking has parallels in virtually every culture, from the Confucian traditions in China, to those of Tilak and Tagore in India, to those of Ibn Sina of Persia and the many bards of Moorish Spain. There are great thinkers from cultures across the world.

Therefore, what the contemporary brand of thinking is really dismissing, is not a specific grouping or period, as the ideas embodied by these individuals span virtually as far back as recorded history, but rather they are witting or unwittingly dismissing those humanist ideas traced throughout history.

Unfortunately much of what is referred to by the ‘contemporary’ and modernist schools of thinking,renders itself largely irrelevant by virtue of the fact that they wish to treat the recent decades of modernist thinking, which span mere seconds on the scale of human history, as some isolated phenomena detached from the entirety of that continuity out of which it unfolded.

Were they to compare those few seconds with the universal arc of history, they would quickly discover the relevancy of a Shakespeare or Dante’s ideas.

Take but one small example from Shakespeare, which in only 14 lines manages to capture and develop the most fundamental of paradoxes underlying our individual mortal existence:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Shakespeare opens by saying we are all attracted to beauty and long for it, and desiring ‘increase’ i.e. to reproduce, yet even in the first two lines, it’s stated that this beauty fades and that even the fairest of creature’s is no match for time. Yet, in recognizing that this beauty does fade, only then is one ready to discover an even higher order of beauty: the power to generate new beauty.

What does a world look like, where each individual is acting with the conscious idea that they are responsible for the re-creation and continued development of the human species; that they are not a mere individual but are defined and in turn define themselves by this eternal process for which they are now a mediating part. What does that look like vs. someone who has a baby because they made a mistake or someone who does not want children because it takes to much time and costs too much? What image of beauty are they after?

The truth is they have not truly considered the paradox of their mortality, likely, they refuse to face it, and prefer to hang on to that ever fleeting image of earthly beauty, which so entices the senses, but ultimately 'eats itself by the grave and thee.'

For more visit www.thechainedmuse.com


Great article. Makes a damn lot of sense too.
Now , we do follow our own paths and see the world( in regards to the opposite sex) and its beauty or lack thereof by way of our own self-interests, sexual desires and lusts.
Truth is- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
In regards to fleshly beauty, it is a fleeting image , captured for a brief time by a soon to be deceased being.
Yet what we would be or enjoy if not for that mutual treasure, that of love and love making?
Poets and their words oft try to go past that state and create , words, images and thoughts that live longer--thousands of years
and may serve to aid further man's development in this realm.---- Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://thepoeticsproject.com/2013/09/22/i-would-totally-take-my-panties-off-for-the-right-poem-part-4/

Creative Writing Uncategorized
I Would Totally Take my Panties off For The Right Poem, Part 4
By Amanda Riggle on Sunday, September 22, 2013

Is poetry the greatest form of seduction? I think many people would answer that question with a yes. I don’t know – maybe I’m seduction proof or just a big ol’ spoil sport, but I would have to stay that most seductive poetry is almost anything but seductive.

Today I’m going to look at, No Platonic Love by William Cartwright.

Tell me no more of minds embracing minds,
And hearts exchang’d for hearts;
That spirits spirits meet, as winds do winds,
And mix their subt’lest parts;
That two unbodied essences may kiss,
And then like Angels, twist and feel one Bliss.

I was that silly thing that once was wrought
To practise this thin love;
I climb’d from sex to soul, from soul to thought;
But thinking there to move,
Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then
From soul I lighted at the sex again.

As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast,
Who yet in closets eat;
So lovers who profess they spririts taste,
Feed yet on grosser meat;
I know they boast they souls to souls convey,
Howe’r they meet, the body is the way.

Come, I will undeceive thee, they that tread
Those vain aerial ways
Are like young heirs and alchemists misled
To waste their wealth and days,
For searching thus to be for ever rich,
They only find a med’cine for the itch.

Oh, William. I think we may have a winner here.

While this poem is from the 1600’s and does use older diction, the idea contained within is very, shall we say, liberated.

The speaker of this poem denounces the idea of platonic, disembodied love where souls mingle while bodies do not touch. The speaker flat out says that kind of love is B.S. and the only real love comes from physicality.

Sure I think people can have emotional connections and that platonic love does exist between friends, but the idea that you can be in love with someone but never physically with them kind of sucks.

What I really like about this poem is the way it addresses the audience – it doesn’t put down women or focus on their imagery like some Shakespeare sonnets do, it doesn’t have an imaginary conversation with the audience with strange, strange religious logical reasonings the way John Dunne’s The Flea does, and it doesn’t make sex sound creepy and wrong the way To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick does.

This poem is logical, well presented, and if someone where have to written this to me and presented it in the hopes of getting me into bed, it probably would have worked. I don’t feel put down as a woman. I don’t feel religious pressures. I feel like, yeah, if I care about the speaker and want to express that, physical rather than spiritual would be the best avenue. The speaker really had me by the line “Come, I will undeceive thee,” because I now love the word undeceive and want to incorporate it into my personal vocabulary.

I think this poem’s homerun worthy.
– Amanda Riggle

About Latest Posts

Amanda Riggle
Amanda Riggle
Amanda is the Managing Editor at The Poetics Project and of The Socialist, the national magazine of The Socialist Party USA, as well as the Lead Editor of Pomona Valley Review's upcoming 11th issue. She graduated with a BA in English Education and a minor in Political Science. She is currently enrolled in an English MA program with an emphasis in Literature. During her free time, Amanda enjoys writing poetry, reading, traveling, crocheting, watching entire seasons of campy shows on Netflix, and, of course, writing blogs.

Yes, being the red-bloodied American that I am, the title struck me--so I read the writings.
That is the title about removing panties not the poem title. lol:laugh:
Although the poem is a great one my ind, still thinks of days of my youth , when the pretty gals were indeed the greatest treasure on earth!
Now my beautiful wife is and my mind wandering is just an old man pondering youth and its treasures that were found over time...
Yes, I know,I've written many poems on my youth, my adventures and wanderings....
And yes , this article and source is from a SOCIALIST !!!!!!
BUT KNOW THIS ,WHERE POETRY IS CONCERNED I HAVE NO BIAS IN REGARDS TO A PERSON'S POLITICAL LEANINGS, ETC..

WHICH REMINDS ME OF THIS IN REGARDS TO THE PANTIES THING.
BACK IN 1973, my first wife's exceptional beautiful and sexy friend, came to stay with us for a while.
One morn , I was very late getting out the door to go to work, sitting in the living room putting my shoes on.
My wife was in the kitchen and her friend knowing that I was always already gone to work at that time wandered right into the living room ,thinking I had left the house.
She came from the shower completely naked and had a pair of blue panties in her hand!
I saw everything and believe me it was glorious , for she could have posed for Playboy-she was that fine!
Hell, I went into shock and could not break my eyes away until she look up and over at corner were I was sitting!
My wife on hearing her scream ran into the room and helped break my trance.
We sorted it all out and they laughed about it later-but know this-that sight never left me.......
After a week of straying thoughts I demanded that my wife help her hurry up and find another place to live.
My wife resisted rushing her to find an apartment until I told her about thoughts I was having--such is the power of a very beautiful naked women 's beauty. After being told why I demanded her early exit, my wife got very busy helping find her another place to live....
Here it is 44 years later and I can still vividly see that tremendously beautiful and wondrously sexy image- so yes we men are dogs- genetically programmed towards visual images of beautiful women-especially if they are wearing no clothes.
The article and its title about dropping panties, jogged that ancient memory, so you get this true story.
And true, I have seen Playboy centerfolds that her friend could have put to shame....
So perhaps this is just another example of how we men are dogs...
To my credit,I resisted that overpowering urge to act upon my genetic impulses. To this day,I do not know how I did so--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70234/on-poetry


Prose from Poetry Magazine
On Poetry
The Cultural Revolution—and the necessity of culture.
By Ai Weiwei

My father, Ai Qing, was an early influence of mine. He was a true poet, viewing all subjects through an innocent and honest lens. For this, he suffered greatly. Exiled to the remote desert region of Xinjiang, he was forbidden to write. During the Cultural Revolution, he was made to clean the public toilets. At the time, those rural toilets were beyond one’s imagination, neglected by the entire village. This was as low as one’s condition could go. And yet, as a child 
I saw him making the greatest effort to keep each toilet as clean and as pleasant as possible, taking care of the waste with complete sincerity. To me, this is the best poetic act, and one that I will never forget.

My father was punished for being a poet, and I grew up in its consequences. But even when things were at their most difficult, I saw his heart protected by an innocent understanding of the world. For poetry is against gravity. Reading Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Vladimir Mayakovsky at a young age, 
I discovered that all poetry has the same quality. It transports us to another place, away from the moment, away from our circumstances.

In my own work, the process of creation always requires the understanding of aesthetics in relation to morality, to the pureness of a form, or to a personal language, one which extends us clearly to another. Many of my projects have poetic elements. In 2007, 
I brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12. For many, it was their first time traveling outside of China. This was Fairytale. In 2008, we researched, under extremely harsh and restrictive conditions, the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake and unearthed the names and birth dates of 5,196 student victims, otherwise buried forever.

I used to say that Twitter is the perfect form for poetry. It is the poetry of society in the modern age. In engaging social media and the forms of communication it makes possible, again and again we find ourselves deeply moved with emotion. By anger, joy, even feelings that are new and indescribable. This is poetic. It makes today a unique time.

To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.
Originally Published: July 1st, 2015

Ai Weiwei is an artist. He resides and works in Beijing, China. He is an outspoken advocate of human rights and freedom of speech.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/corrupted-into-song-the-complete-poems-of-alvin-feinman/[/QUOTE]

This is a book that was brought to my attention and sent to me by James Geary, who has written an introduction to Feinman’s Complete Poems. Being a poet in Vermont, Geary corrupted thought I might be interested. Having been a summer student at Bennington College, and learning that Feinman taught there, also piqued my interest.

Feinman seems to have been reluctantly public. As Geary writes, “Alvin was reticent about his own work.” It’s tempting to write of him, and myself, that poetry was our first and only love; and to write a good poem, and only that, was reward enough. Our argument was with ourselves—all the work we needed. But I don’t know. In his waning years, Feinman was asked “if he ever thought of starting a family or being a more traditional breadwinner”. “No,” he said, “I thought of nothing but poetry.” He shared his love of poetry with students at Bennington College. I do the same at PoemShape.

In their introduction to Feinman’s Unpublished Poems, Geary writes:

Early on in the process, I asked Deborah what Alvin would have thought of what we were doing. After all, he chose not to publish those poems while he was alive. Why should we? ¶ Deborah felt strongly, as I do, that Alvin’s work deserves a much wider audience than it has so far achieved.

So if you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of Alvin Feinman, this is partly the reason.

Feinman’s poems remind me of the poetry I was reading at The Mountain School (Vershire, Vermont) when it was a full time high shool—poetry of the seventies and early eighties. Feinman was very much a poet of that era. The difference? His poetry’s clarity of language—a language that allows for a complexity of thought and argument when, all too often, poets bed a paucity of thought and argument beneath a veneer of complexity.

Feinman’s poems are short, compressed, and the collected book amounts to what many modern poets would consider, merely, a substantial first book. Geary, for example, notes that Feinman could spend several classroom sessions on the simplest of poems, this one being by an anonymous 16th century poet:

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my lover were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

Geary writes that “Alvin slowed things down. He wasn’t finished with a poem until every line, every word was scrutinized, every punctuation mark felt.” I too can find more beauty and sympathy in this little poem than in pages and pages of exposition. It seems to me that this love of the briefly and exquisitely spoken informs all of Feinman’s poetry. That is, it’s no coincidence that he could spend days on such a short poem. He probably labored over his own with equal devotion. He was a poet of beautifully crafted brevities.

But here’s what I like most about Feinman, it’s that though he writes free verse, he writes like a poet. You won’t find the flavorless discourse of a W.S. Merwin—the apotheosis of 2oth century generic poetry.

This Face of Love

Nor prospect, promise solely such
Breathed honey as in breathing
Clamps the lung and lowers life
Into this death the very dying
Meaning of that breath that beats
To black and beating honey in an air
Thrown knowledgeless imageless
Or only the wet hair across her eyes.

How do I read the poem?—sublimely erotic and as fearless as any of EE Cummings erotic poems. Feinman’s meaning resists analysis, preferring to be understood intuitively like an elusive and allusive chain of haiku.

Or consider one of his unpublished poems:

Snow. Tree tranced. O silent
It would be outside. Dark it would be
And caged in moonlight. Half afraid,
To go, and needing to, to know, not
Knowing what to know, to stand
And need the words, and need to not
Need words for white and cold, and far
And lone, and lovely sighing dark
Like nothing, like a leg,
A cheek pleased in the cold,
A furred eye flaking into light.

As with This Face of Love, Feinman’s poem resists summarization. The pointillist of poets, look too close and Feinman’s poem vanishes. In poems like these, few because of his modest output, Feinman is at his best and unique among 20th century poets. If Debussy had written poetry, they might sound like Feinman’s—impressionist interludes without opening declarations or concluding summaries.

I remember wanting to write like this, and did, in my way

But there are more reasons to recommend Feinman’s poetry. He was never satisfied with the easy adjective or adverb. He seems always looking for new ways to express sense, thought and emotion. In the poem Snow:

The light snow holds and what
Its bodyable shape
Subdues, the gutter of all things
A virgin unison….

Bodyable. That’s the kind coinage Shakespeare reveled in, called anthimeria, and one of the most linguistically inventive figures available to poets. The vast majority of contemporary poets never or rarely use it, including Ashbery, but it’s a sure sign that you’re dealing with something other than the run-of-the-mill, generic poet. When Mark Edmundson, in his Harpers Essay “Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Poetry” described being taken by Robert Lowell’s lines in “Waking Early Sunday Morning”—by “the artistry of the lines, by their subtlety and their melancholy grace”—he could have been describing any number of passages from Feinman’s poems.

For the sun hangs
····like a leaden crust
········weary of color
cold and skeletal as desire in an idiot’s palm.

Neither speech, nor vision…

For the day crumbles
····into ciphers
words litter the streets like dirty snow…

~ For Lucina

Feinman, despite being sparsely published, was an ambitious poet and yet, that said, he mostly stuck to the conventions of free verse. Criticizing him for that, I suppose, is a bit like criticizing a stone mason for not being a wood worker, but I can’t help wonder what the range of his abilities might have produced. Though Harold Bloom, self-effacing as always, laments there is nothing in the unpublished collection of poems equal to the book “he [Mr. Harold Bloom] helped to foster”, I’m not so sure. You see some effort on Feinman’s part to fit his pointillist, discursive style into something other than free verse:

Song

Water buds in the water-tap
Words bubble up within the mind
The highways curve across the map
The light crawls down the blind

A diamond splinters in the sink
The nouns digest their verb
Collision closes like the rose
Two moons are kissing at the curb.

This, in its way, reminds me of the little anonymous 16th century poem Feinman so lovingly scrutinized. Feinman must have prized the poem for its contrasting simplicity and power; and I wonder if that’s not the way he would have liked to go, and if an inability to do so curtailed his output? How to reconcile a rich and discursive style with the simplicity of a song? In Feinman’s poem Song, each line is end-stopped. They follow each other the way the refrains of a song might, as if each were its own performance. Though the effect might be deliberate, the poem is a bit child-like and rudimentary. If the imagery remains original, reminding me of Pablo Neruda’s surrealism, the imagistic language seems uneasy with the kind of clarity that made the 16th century poem so powerful.

Feinman demonstrates a more flexible use of form in other “unpublished” poems:

…the mocked brain consecrates
your art—though eyes go blind
within this woman-will your blaze creates

as scadent shadows cleave
the evening all to probe
cold stone, in vain to re-enact, believe…

~ Natura Naturans

According to a brief internet search, scadent is Romanian, meaning “due to expire”. I love that Feinman used the word. Nothing so typifies the Elizabethan writer and poet as the eagerness to colonize languages, to take the best words and import them, to mix them into their vocabulary the way new spices might be sprinkled in old recipes.

I hope Feinman’s book finds a broader readership. When so many contemporary poets are writing nothing more than lineated prose, Feinman is the poet for lovers of language and imagery. But he’s also, and strikingly so, our modern Coleridge, a brilliant and formidable mind outstripped by the poetry he imagined writing—a tragic figure, perhaps, whose first works were his last, and whose final unpublished poems were riddles without solutions.

Alvin Feinman’s collected poems were released August 3rd, 2016.

upinVermont | September 19th 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/importance-poetry


The Importance of Poetry
It's the key to happiness.

Poetry is an art form that has survived for thousands and thousands of years. We study it in school and we hear quotes from poems scattered thorughout our life. But do we ever truly make meaning of it? Does it even matter? My answer to you is yes it does. Reading poetry and or writing poetry can drastically improve your life, because it has improved mine. In this article I will attempt to articulate why poetry is important to read and also to write

Reading Poetry

Poetry is one of the most powerful forms of writing because it takes the English language, a language we believe we know, and transforms it. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. The pattern of the sentences sound new and melodious. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. No poem can be read in the same way, because the words mean something different to each of us. For this reason, many find poetry and elusive art form. However, the issue in understanding poetry lies in how you read poetry. Reading it logically results in an overall comprehension, rigid and unchanging. However, reading it emotionally allows the nuances and paradoxes to enter our understanding. Anyone who writes poetry can attest, you have to write it with an open heart. So as a reader, we must do the same. All poems are insights into the most intimate inner workings of the writer's mind and soul. To read it coldly and rationally would be shutting the door on the relationship that the writer is attempting to forge with you. Opening your heart to poetry is the only way to get fulfillment from it.

If you imagine poetry as a journey, you must be willing to trust the writer to guide you. Unwilling readers will never experience every part of the adventure in the same way open minded readers do. The journey may be filled with dead ends and suffering or endless joy and happiness. And still, you go. You pick up the poem, you read, you listen, and you feel.

In our culture we are experiencing a crisis where American people are the unhappiest people in the world statistically. How do we solve this? I answer: Mindfullness, gratitude, and poetry.

Writing Poetry

From a writer’s perspective, writing poetry can be equally elusive as reading poetry. When I first started writing poetry, the advice I always heard was practice, find your voice, keep a journal. I did all these things but still my poems were flat and inert. What was I missing? I poured over poems by Angelou, Shakespeare, Austen, and Wilde looking for a pattern, something I could emulate. This was the problem. I was unwilling to open my heart. I thought poetry could be a mask I could craft. But no matter how beautiful I made it, it would never come to life. It would never fit on another person’s face. It did not eve fit on mine.
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My first poem that came alive was written in the dark late at night. I was lying in bed and I felt something stifling me. I could not sleep. I let the thoughts stew in my head until they could not remain locked away forever. I reached for my journal and I wrote.

Vulnerability was the key. Poetry is about expressing those thoughts and feelings we keep the most suppressed. We must be honest with ourselves about what we feel in order to write anything worth reading. It’s stopping and grabbing a thought by the tail and pulling it up into our conscious mind. It’s trying to express the beauty, and wonder we see. It’s about connecting our hearts and our minds to ourselves and our surroundings. It’s about finding peace.

Poetry is perhaps a more effective stress relief than working out or meditating because it forces you to express your feelings through words, which helps you not only understand your feelings but also communicate them more effectively. Furthermore, it is a skill that will remain in use for your entire life no matter what you end up doing professionally.

So reach for the pen, and let go of those things that have been burdening your freedom. Read poetry with your heart and let it affect you. The answer to our questions about the meaning of life, and the purpose of pain were written in poems. They have always been there.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/


SIZE=5]
Can Poetry Matter?[/SIZE]

Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

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American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.

The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's institutional success—the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university—have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

To the average reader, the proposition that poetry's audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art's current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry's material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.

Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

One can see a microcosm of poetry's current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor's The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones's Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.
How Poetry Diminished

Arguments about the decline of poetry's cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse's role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism's emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so "fleeting and quintessential" that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse—which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation—retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.

Wilson was a capable analyst of literary trends. His skeptical assessment of poetry's place in modern letters has been frequently attacked and qualified over the past half century, but it has never been convincingly dismissed. His argument set the ground rules for all subsequent defenders of contemporary poetry. It also provided the starting point for later iconoclasts, from Delmore Schwartz to Christopher Clausen. The most recent and celebrated of these revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988 critique "Who Killed Poetry?" first appeared in Commentary and was reprinted in an extravagantly acrimonious symposium in AWP Chronicle (the journal of the Associated Writing Programs). Not coincidentally, Epstein's title pays a double homage to Wilson's essay—first by mimicking the interrogative form of the original title, second by employing its metaphor of death.

Epstein essentially updated Wilson's argument, but with important differences. Whereas Wilson looked on the decline of poetry's cultural position as a gradual process spanning three centuries, Epstein focused on the past few decades. He contrasted the major achievements of the modernists—the generation of Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism into the twentieth century—with what he felt were the minor accomplishments of the present practitioners. The modernists, Epstein maintained, were artists who worked from a broad cultural vision. Contemporary writers were "poetry professionals," who operated within the closed world of the university. Wilson blamed poetry's plight on historical forces; Epstein indicted the poets themselves and the institutions they had helped create, especially creative-writing programs. A brilliant polemicist, Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and it did ignite an explosion of criticism. No recent essay on American poetry has generated so many immediate responses in literary journals. And certainly none has drawn so much violently negative criticism from poets themselves. To date at least thirty writers have responded in print. The poet Henry Taylor published two rebuttals.

Poets are justifiably sensitive to arguments that poetry has declined in cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers have used such arguments simplistically to declare all contemporary verse irrelevant. Usually the less a critic knows about verse the more readily he or she dismisses it. It is no coincidence, I think, that the two most persuasive essays on poetry's presumed demise were written by outstanding critics of fiction, neither of whom has written extensively about contemporary poetry. It is too soon to judge the accuracy of Epstein's essay, but a literary historian would find Wilson's timing ironic. As Wilson finished his famous essay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics, economics, religion, and philosophy, are among the most culturally inclusive in the history of the language. At the same time, a new generation, which would include Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, A. D. Hope, and others, was just breaking into print. Wilson himself later admitted that the emergence of a versatile and ambitious poet like Auden contradicted several points of his argument. But if Wilson's prophecies were sometimes inaccurate, his sense of poetry's overall situation was depressingly astute. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.
Inside the Subculture

One sees evidence of poetry's diminished stature even within the thriving subculture. The established rituals of the poetry world—the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences—exhibit a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater? At most readings the program consists of verse only—and usually only verse by that night's author. Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.

Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.

Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader's interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews—a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn't command the reader's attention wasn't considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell's poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories.

A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic and The New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture.

What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.

By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments. In his new book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Robert Bly has accurately described the corrosive effect of this critical boosterism:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.

A clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled for readers outside the academy. More than one editor has discovered that the best way to get an anthology assigned is to include work by the poets who teach the courses. Compiled in the spirit of congenial opportunism, many of these anthologies give the impression that literary quality is a concept that neither an editor nor a reader should take too seriously.

The 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, for example, is not so much a selective literary collection as a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers (it even offers a photo of each author). Running nearly 800 pages, the volume presents no fewer than 104 important young poets, virtually all of whom teach creative writing. The editorial principle governing selection seems to have been the fear of leaving out some influential colleague. The book does contain a few strong and original poems, but they are surrounded by so many undistinguished exercises that one wonders if the good work got there by design or simply by random sampling. In the drearier patches one suspects that perhaps the book was never truly meant to be read, only assigned.

And that is the real issue. The poetry subculture no longer assumes that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy.

In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable poem—Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose," for example, or Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe," which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers—an unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,

A poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume.

Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.

The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy. Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake. Luckily, no one outside the subculture cares enough to press the point very far. No Woodward and Bernstein will ever investigate a cover-up by members of the Associated Writing Programs.

The new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but by providing specialized educational services. Most likely he or she either works for or aspires to work for a large institution—usually a state-run enterprise, such as a school district, a college, or a university (or lately even a hospital or prison)—teaching others how to write poetry or, on the highest levels, how to teach others how to write poetry.

To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class's economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry's case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom—where society demands that the two groups interact—poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.

The divorce of poetry from the educated reader has had another, more pernicious result. Seeing so much mediocre verse not only published but praised, slogging through so many dull anthologies and small magazines, most readers—even sophisticated ones like Joseph Epstein—now assume that no significant new poetry is being written. This public skepticism represents the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary society.

The irony is that this skepticism comes in a period of genuine achievement. Gresham's Law, that bad coinage drives out good, only half applies to current poetry. The sheer mass of mediocrity may have frightened away most readers, but it has not yet driven talented writers from the field. Anyone patient enough to weed through the tangle of contemporary work finds an impressive and diverse range of new poetry. Adrienne Rich, for example, despite her often overbearing polemics, is a major poet by any standard. The best work of Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and Richard Wilbur—to mention only writers of the older generation—can hold its own against anything in the national literature. One might also add Sylvia Plath and James Wright, two strong poets of the same generation who died early. America is also a country rich in emigre poetry, as major writers like Czeslaw Milosz, Nina Cassian, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, and Thom Gunn demonstrate.

Without a role in the broader culture, however, talented poets lack the confidence to create public speech. Occasionally a writer links up rewardingly to a social or political movement. Rich, for example, has used feminism to expand the vision of her work. Robert Bly wrote his finest poetry to protest the Vietnam War. His sense of addressing a large and diverse audience added humor, breadth, and humanity to his previously minimal verse. But it is a difficult task to marry the Muse happily to politics. Consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing that they are virtually invisible in the larger culture, focus on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse. (And a few loners, like X. J. Kennedy and John Updike, turn their genius to the critically disreputable demimonde of light verse and children's poetry.) Therefore, although current American poetry has not often excelled in public forms like political or satiric verse, it has nonetheless produced personal poems of unsurpassed beauty and power. Despite its manifest excellence, this new work has not found a public beyond the poetry subculture, because the traditional machinery of transmission—the reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies—has broken down. The audience that once made Frost and Eliot, Cummings and Millay, part of its cultural vision remains out of reach. Today Walt Whitman's challenge "To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too" reads like an indictment.
From Bohemia to Bureaucracy

To maintain their activities, subcultures usually require institutions, since the general society does not share their interests. Nudists flock to "nature camps" to express their unfettered life-style. Monks remain in monasteries to protect their austere ideals. As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

At first they existed on the fringes of English departments, which was probably healthy. Without advanced degrees or formal career paths, poets were recognized as special creatures. They were allowed—like aboriginal chieftains visiting an anthropologist's campsite—to behave according to their own laws. But as the demand for creative writing grew, the poet's job expanded from merely literary to administrative duties. At the university's urging, these self-trained writers designed history's first institutional curricula for young poets. Creative writing evolved from occasional courses taught within the English department into its own undergraduate major or graduate-degree program. Writers fashioned their academic specialty in the image of other university studies. As the new writing departments multiplied, the new professionals patterned their infrastructure—job titles, journals, annual conventions, organizations—according to the standards not of urban bohemia but of educational institutions. Out of the professional networks this educational expansion created, the subculture of poetry was born.

Initially, the multiplication of creative-writing programs must have been a dizzyingly happy affair. Poets who had scraped by in bohemia or had spent their early adulthood fighting the Second World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs. Writers who had never earned much public attention found themselves surrounded by eager students. Poets who had been too poor to travel flew from campus to campus and from conference to conference, to speak before audiences of their peers. As Wilfrid Sheed once described a moment in John Berryman's career, "Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English Departments." The bright postwar world promised a renaissance for American poetry.

In material terms that promise has been fulfilled beyond the dreams of anyone in Berryman's Depression-scarred generation. Poets now occupy niches at every level of academia, from a few sumptuously endowed chairs with six-figure salaries to the more numerous part-time stints that pay roughly the same as Burger King. But even at minimum wage, teaching poetry earns more than writing it ever did. Before the creative-writing boom, being a poet usually meant living in genteel poverty or worse. While the sacrifices poetry demanded caused much individual suffering, the rigors of serving Milton's "thankless Muse" also delivered the collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.

Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession—not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. Only a philistine would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty of yesteryear. But a clear-eyed observer must also recognize that by opening the poet's trade to all applicants and by employing writers to do something other than write, institutions have changed the social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator. In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

Even within the university contemporary poetry now exists as a subculture. The teaching poet finds that he or she has little in common with academic colleagues. The academic study of literature over the past twenty-five years has veered off in a theoretical direction with which most imaginative writers have little sympathy or familiarity. Thirty years ago detractors of creative-writing programs predicted that poets in universities would become enmeshed in literary criticism and scholarship. This prophecy has proved spectacularly wrong. Poets have created enclaves in the academy almost entirely separate from their critical colleagues. They write less criticism than they did before entering the academy. Pressed to keep up with the plethora of new poetry, small magazines, professional journals, and anthologies, they are frequently also less well read in the literature of the past. Their peers in the English department generally read less contemporary poetry and more literary theory. In many departments writers and literary theorists are openly at war. Bringing the two groups under one roof has paradoxically made each more territorial. Isolated even within the university, the poet, whose true subject is the whole of human existence, has reluctantly become an educational specialist.
When People Paid Attention

To understand how radically the situation of the American poet has changed, one need only compare today with fifty years ago. In 1940, with the notable exception of Robert Frost, few poets were working in colleges unless, like Mark Van Doren and Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects. The only creative-writing program was an experiment begun a few years earlier at the University of Iowa. The modernists exemplified the options that poets had for making a living. They could enter middle-class professions, as had T. S. Eliot (a banker turned publisher), Wallace Stevens (a corporate insurance lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician). Or they could live in bohemia supporting themselves as artists, as, in different ways, did Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore. If the city proved unattractive, they could, like Robinson Jeffers, scrape by in a rural arts colony like Carmel, California. Or they might become farmers, like the young Robert Frost.

Most often poets supported themselves as editors or reviewers, actively taking part in the artistic and intellectual life of their time. Archibald MacLeish was an editor and writer at Fortune. James Agee reviewed movies for Time and The Nation, and eventually wrote screenplays for Hollywood. Randall Jarrell reviewed books. Weldon Kees wrote about jazz and modern art. Delmore Schwartz reviewed everything. Even poets who eventually took up academic careers spent intellectually broadening apprenticeships in literary journalism. The young Robert Hayden covered music and theater for Michigan's black press. R. P. Blackmur, who never completed high school, reviewed books for Hound & Horn before teaching at Princeton. Occasionally a poet might supplement his or her income by giving a reading or lecture, but these occasions were rare. Robinson Jeffers, for example, was fifty-four when he gave his first public reading. For most poets, the sustaining medium was not the classroom or the podium but the written word.

If poets supported themselves by writing, it was mainly by writing prose. Paying outlets for poetry were limited. Beyond a few national magazines, which generally preferred light verse or political satire, there were at any one time only a few dozen journals that published a significant amount of poetry. The emergence of a serious new quarterly like Partisan Review or Furioso was an event of real importance, and a small but dedicated audience eagerly looked forward to each issue. If people could not afford to buy copies, they borrowed them or visited public libraries. As for books of poetry if one excludes vanity-press editions, fewer than a hundred new titles were published each year. But the books that did appear were reviewed in daily newspapers as well as magazines and quarterlies. A focused monthly like Poetry could cover virtually the entire field.

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it "might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient." Or read Weldon Kees's one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser's Wake Island—"There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy." But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

Ill-paid, overworked, and underappreciated, this argumentative group of "practical" critics, all of them poets, accomplished remarkable things. They defined the canon of modernist poetry, established methods to analyze verse of extraordinary difficulty, and identified the new mid-century generation of American poets (Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman, and others) that still dominates our literary consciousness. Whatever one thinks of their literary canon or critical principles, one must admire the intellectual energy and sheer determination of these critics, who developed as writers without grants or permanent faculty positions, often while working precariously on free-lance assignments. They represent a high point in American intellectual life. Even fifty years later their names still command more authority than those of all but a few contemporary critics. A short roll call would include John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan, John Ciardi, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters. Although contemporary poetry has its boosters and publicists, it has no group of comparable dedication and talent able to address the general literary community.

Like all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They believed that if modern poets did not have an audience, they could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers. This group constituted a literary intelligentsia, made up mainly of nonspecialists, who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama. Recently Donald Hall and other critics have questioned the size of this audience by citing the low average sales of a volume of new verse by an established poet during the period (usually under a thousand copies). But these skeptics do not understand how poetry was read then.

America was a smaller, less affluent country in 1940, with about half its current population and one sixth its current real GNP. In those pre-paperback days of the late Depression neither readers nor libraries could afford to buy as many books as they do today. Nor was there a large captive audience of creative-writing students who bought books of contemporary poetry for classroom use. Readers usually bought poetry in two forms—in an occasional Collected Poems by a leading author, or in anthologies. The comprehensive collections of writers like Frost, Eliot, Auden, Jeffers, Wylie, and Millay sold very well, were frequently reprinted, and stayed perpetually in print. (Today most Collected Poems disappear after one printing.) Occasionally a book of new poems would capture the public's fancy. Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tristram (1927) became a Literary Guild selection. Frost's A Further Range sold 50,000 copies as a 1936 Book-of-the-Month Club selection. But people knew poetry mainly from anthologies, which they not only bought but also read, with curiosity and attention.

Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry, first published in 1919, was frequently revised to keep it up to date and was a perennial best seller. My 1942 edition, for example, had been reprinted five times by 1945. My edition of Oscar Williams's A Pocket Book of Modern Poetry had been reprinted nineteen times in fourteen years. Untermeyer and Williams prided themselves on keeping their anthologies broad-based and timely. They tried to represent the best of what was being published. Each edition added new poems and poets and dropped older ones. The public appreciated their efforts. Poetry anthologies were an indispensable part of any serious reader's library. Random House's popular Modern Library series, for example, included not one but two anthologies—Selden Rodman's A New Anthology of Modern Poetry and Conrad Aiken's Twentieth Century American Poetry. All these collections were read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were memorized. Difficult authors like Eliot and Thomas were actively discussed and debated. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.

Today these general readers constitute the audience that poetry has lost. Limited by intelligence and curiosity this heterogeneous group cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation. Representing our cultural intelligentsia, they are the people who support the arts—who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films and serious theater, opera, symphony, and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals. (They are also often the parents who read poetry to their children and remember, once upon a time in college or high school or kindergarten, liking it themselves.) No one knows the size of this community, but even if one accepts the conservative estimate that it accounts for only two percent of the U.S. population, it still represents a potential audience of almost five million readers. However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry's bridge to the general culture.
The Need for Poetry

But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, "The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness." Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.

But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. To the general reader, discussions about the state of poetry sound like the debating of foreign politics by emigres in a seedy cafe. Or, as Cyril Connolly more bitterly described it, "Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well." Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry's audience—critic, teacher, librarian, poet, or lonely literary amateur—faces a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that poetry still matters?

A passage in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" provides a possible starting point. Written toward the end of the author's life, after he had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons about poetry and audience that Williams had learned over years of dedication to both poetry and medicine. He wrote,

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Williams understood poetry's human value but had no illusions about the difficulties his contemporaries faced in trying to engage the audience that needed the art most desperately. To regain poetry's readership one must begin by meeting Williams's challenge to find what "concerns many men," not simply what concerns poets.

There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it—be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet's central mission to "purify the words of the tribe." And Ezra Pound warned that

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn't matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. . . .

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Or, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, "One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . ."

Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping the nation's language clear and honest, but one is hard pressed to imagine a country's citizens improving the health of its language while abandoning poetry.

The second reason why the situation of poetry matters to all intellectuals is that poetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely exists as a living art outside university departments and conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot find places to perform in many metropolitan centers—and for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.
How Poets Can Be Heard

The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly succeed in being heard? Wouldn't it take a miracle?

Toward the end of her life Marianne Moore wrote a short poem called "O To Be a Dragon." This poem recalled the biblical dream in which the Lord appeared to King Solomon and said, "Ask what I shall give thee." Solomon wished for a wise and understanding heart. Moore's wish is harder to summarize. Her poem reads,

If I, like Solomon, . . .
could have my wish—

my wish . . . O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!

Moore got her wish. She became, as all genuine poets do, "a symbol of the power of Heaven." She succeeded in what Robert Frost called "the utmost of ambition"—namely "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." She is permanently part of the "felicitous phenomenon" of American literature.

So wishes can come true—even extravagant ones. If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture. I don't think this is impossible. All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people's work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author's work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry's gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse's property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.

6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art's audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets' reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience.

The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions—outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the dessicated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

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Can Poetry Matter?[/SIZE]

Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

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American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.

The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's institutional success—the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university—have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

To the average reader, the proposition that poetry's audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art's current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry's material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.

Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

One can see a microcosm of poetry's current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor's The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones's Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.
How Poetry Diminished

Arguments about the decline of poetry's cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse's role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism's emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so "fleeting and quintessential" that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse—which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation—retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.

Wilson was a capable analyst of literary trends. His skeptical assessment of poetry's place in modern letters has been frequently attacked and qualified over the past half century, but it has never been convincingly dismissed. His argument set the ground rules for all subsequent defenders of contemporary poetry. It also provided the starting point for later iconoclasts, from Delmore Schwartz to Christopher Clausen. The most recent and celebrated of these revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988 critique "Who Killed Poetry?" first appeared in Commentary and was reprinted in an extravagantly acrimonious symposium in AWP Chronicle (the journal of the Associated Writing Programs). Not coincidentally, Epstein's title pays a double homage to Wilson's essay—first by mimicking the interrogative form of the original title, second by employing its metaphor of death.

Epstein essentially updated Wilson's argument, but with important differences. Whereas Wilson looked on the decline of poetry's cultural position as a gradual process spanning three centuries, Epstein focused on the past few decades. He contrasted the major achievements of the modernists—the generation of Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism into the twentieth century—with what he felt were the minor accomplishments of the present practitioners. The modernists, Epstein maintained, were artists who worked from a broad cultural vision. Contemporary writers were "poetry professionals," who operated within the closed world of the university. Wilson blamed poetry's plight on historical forces; Epstein indicted the poets themselves and the institutions they had helped create, especially creative-writing programs. A brilliant polemicist, Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and it did ignite an explosion of criticism. No recent essay on American poetry has generated so many immediate responses in literary journals. And certainly none has drawn so much violently negative criticism from poets themselves. To date at least thirty writers have responded in print. The poet Henry Taylor published two rebuttals.

Poets are justifiably sensitive to arguments that poetry has declined in cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers have used such arguments simplistically to declare all contemporary verse irrelevant. Usually the less a critic knows about verse the more readily he or she dismisses it. It is no coincidence, I think, that the two most persuasive essays on poetry's presumed demise were written by outstanding critics of fiction, neither of whom has written extensively about contemporary poetry. It is too soon to judge the accuracy of Epstein's essay, but a literary historian would find Wilson's timing ironic. As Wilson finished his famous essay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics, economics, religion, and philosophy, are among the most culturally inclusive in the history of the language. At the same time, a new generation, which would include Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, A. D. Hope, and others, was just breaking into print. Wilson himself later admitted that the emergence of a versatile and ambitious poet like Auden contradicted several points of his argument. But if Wilson's prophecies were sometimes inaccurate, his sense of poetry's overall situation was depressingly astute. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.
Inside the Subculture

One sees evidence of poetry's diminished stature even within the thriving subculture. The established rituals of the poetry world—the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences—exhibit a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater? At most readings the program consists of verse only—and usually only verse by that night's author. Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.

Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.

Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader's interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews—a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn't command the reader's attention wasn't considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell's poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories.

A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic and The New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture.

What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.

By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments. In his new book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Robert Bly has accurately described the corrosive effect of this critical boosterism:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.

A clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled for readers outside the academy. More than one editor has discovered that the best way to get an anthology assigned is to include work by the poets who teach the courses. Compiled in the spirit of congenial opportunism, many of these anthologies give the impression that literary quality is a concept that neither an editor nor a reader should take too seriously.

The 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, for example, is not so much a selective literary collection as a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers (it even offers a photo of each author). Running nearly 800 pages, the volume presents no fewer than 104 important young poets, virtually all of whom teach creative writing. The editorial principle governing selection seems to have been the fear of leaving out some influential colleague. The book does contain a few strong and original poems, but they are surrounded by so many undistinguished exercises that one wonders if the good work got there by design or simply by random sampling. In the drearier patches one suspects that perhaps the book was never truly meant to be read, only assigned.

And that is the real issue. The poetry subculture no longer assumes that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy.

In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable poem—Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose," for example, or Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe," which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers—an unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,

A poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume.

Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.

The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy. Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake. Luckily, no one outside the subculture cares enough to press the point very far. No Woodward and Bernstein will ever investigate a cover-up by members of the Associated Writing Programs.

The new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but by providing specialized educational services. Most likely he or she either works for or aspires to work for a large institution—usually a state-run enterprise, such as a school district, a college, or a university (or lately even a hospital or prison)—teaching others how to write poetry or, on the highest levels, how to teach others how to write poetry.

To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class's economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry's case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom—where society demands that the two groups interact—poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.

The divorce of poetry from the educated reader has had another, more pernicious result. Seeing so much mediocre verse not only published but praised, slogging through so many dull anthologies and small magazines, most readers—even sophisticated ones like Joseph Epstein—now assume that no significant new poetry is being written. This public skepticism represents the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary society.

The irony is that this skepticism comes in a period of genuine achievement. Gresham's Law, that bad coinage drives out good, only half applies to current poetry. The sheer mass of mediocrity may have frightened away most readers, but it has not yet driven talented writers from the field. Anyone patient enough to weed through the tangle of contemporary work finds an impressive and diverse range of new poetry. Adrienne Rich, for example, despite her often overbearing polemics, is a major poet by any standard. The best work of Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and Richard Wilbur—to mention only writers of the older generation—can hold its own against anything in the national literature. One might also add Sylvia Plath and James Wright, two strong poets of the same generation who died early. America is also a country rich in emigre poetry, as major writers like Czeslaw Milosz, Nina Cassian, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, and Thom Gunn demonstrate.

Without a role in the broader culture, however, talented poets lack the confidence to create public speech. Occasionally a writer links up rewardingly to a social or political movement. Rich, for example, has used feminism to expand the vision of her work. Robert Bly wrote his finest poetry to protest the Vietnam War. His sense of addressing a large and diverse audience added humor, breadth, and humanity to his previously minimal verse. But it is a difficult task to marry the Muse happily to politics. Consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing that they are virtually invisible in the larger culture, focus on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse. (And a few loners, like X. J. Kennedy and John Updike, turn their genius to the critically disreputable demimonde of light verse and children's poetry.) Therefore, although current American poetry has not often excelled in public forms like political or satiric verse, it has nonetheless produced personal poems of unsurpassed beauty and power. Despite its manifest excellence, this new work has not found a public beyond the poetry subculture, because the traditional machinery of transmission—the reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies—has broken down. The audience that once made Frost and Eliot, Cummings and Millay, part of its cultural vision remains out of reach. Today Walt Whitman's challenge "To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too" reads like an indictment.
From Bohemia to Bureaucracy

To maintain their activities, subcultures usually require institutions, since the general society does not share their interests. Nudists flock to "nature camps" to express their unfettered life-style. Monks remain in monasteries to protect their austere ideals. As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

At first they existed on the fringes of English departments, which was probably healthy. Without advanced degrees or formal career paths, poets were recognized as special creatures. They were allowed—like aboriginal chieftains visiting an anthropologist's campsite—to behave according to their own laws. But as the demand for creative writing grew, the poet's job expanded from merely literary to administrative duties. At the university's urging, these self-trained writers designed history's first institutional curricula for young poets. Creative writing evolved from occasional courses taught within the English department into its own undergraduate major or graduate-degree program. Writers fashioned their academic specialty in the image of other university studies. As the new writing departments multiplied, the new professionals patterned their infrastructure—job titles, journals, annual conventions, organizations—according to the standards not of urban bohemia but of educational institutions. Out of the professional networks this educational expansion created, the subculture of poetry was born.

Initially, the multiplication of creative-writing programs must have been a dizzyingly happy affair. Poets who had scraped by in bohemia or had spent their early adulthood fighting the Second World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs. Writers who had never earned much public attention found themselves surrounded by eager students. Poets who had been too poor to travel flew from campus to campus and from conference to conference, to speak before audiences of their peers. As Wilfrid Sheed once described a moment in John Berryman's career, "Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English Departments." The bright postwar world promised a renaissance for American poetry.

In material terms that promise has been fulfilled beyond the dreams of anyone in Berryman's Depression-scarred generation. Poets now occupy niches at every level of academia, from a few sumptuously endowed chairs with six-figure salaries to the more numerous part-time stints that pay roughly the same as Burger King. But even at minimum wage, teaching poetry earns more than writing it ever did. Before the creative-writing boom, being a poet usually meant living in genteel poverty or worse. While the sacrifices poetry demanded caused much individual suffering, the rigors of serving Milton's "thankless Muse" also delivered the collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.

Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession—not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. Only a philistine would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty of yesteryear. But a clear-eyed observer must also recognize that by opening the poet's trade to all applicants and by employing writers to do something other than write, institutions have changed the social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator. In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

Even within the university contemporary poetry now exists as a subculture. The teaching poet finds that he or she has little in common with academic colleagues. The academic study of literature over the past twenty-five years has veered off in a theoretical direction with which most imaginative writers have little sympathy or familiarity. Thirty years ago detractors of creative-writing programs predicted that poets in universities would become enmeshed in literary criticism and scholarship. This prophecy has proved spectacularly wrong. Poets have created enclaves in the academy almost entirely separate from their critical colleagues. They write less criticism than they did before entering the academy. Pressed to keep up with the plethora of new poetry, small magazines, professional journals, and anthologies, they are frequently also less well read in the literature of the past. Their peers in the English department generally read less contemporary poetry and more literary theory. In many departments writers and literary theorists are openly at war. Bringing the two groups under one roof has paradoxically made each more territorial. Isolated even within the university, the poet, whose true subject is the whole of human existence, has reluctantly become an educational specialist.
When People Paid Attention

To understand how radically the situation of the American poet has changed, one need only compare today with fifty years ago. In 1940, with the notable exception of Robert Frost, few poets were working in colleges unless, like Mark Van Doren and Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects. The only creative-writing program was an experiment begun a few years earlier at the University of Iowa. The modernists exemplified the options that poets had for making a living. They could enter middle-class professions, as had T. S. Eliot (a banker turned publisher), Wallace Stevens (a corporate insurance lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician). Or they could live in bohemia supporting themselves as artists, as, in different ways, did Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore. If the city proved unattractive, they could, like Robinson Jeffers, scrape by in a rural arts colony like Carmel, California. Or they might become farmers, like the young Robert Frost.

Most often poets supported themselves as editors or reviewers, actively taking part in the artistic and intellectual life of their time. Archibald MacLeish was an editor and writer at Fortune. James Agee reviewed movies for Time and The Nation, and eventually wrote screenplays for Hollywood. Randall Jarrell reviewed books. Weldon Kees wrote about jazz and modern art. Delmore Schwartz reviewed everything. Even poets who eventually took up academic careers spent intellectually broadening apprenticeships in literary journalism. The young Robert Hayden covered music and theater for Michigan's black press. R. P. Blackmur, who never completed high school, reviewed books for Hound & Horn before teaching at Princeton. Occasionally a poet might supplement his or her income by giving a reading or lecture, but these occasions were rare. Robinson Jeffers, for example, was fifty-four when he gave his first public reading. For most poets, the sustaining medium was not the classroom or the podium but the written word.

If poets supported themselves by writing, it was mainly by writing prose. Paying outlets for poetry were limited. Beyond a few national magazines, which generally preferred light verse or political satire, there were at any one time only a few dozen journals that published a significant amount of poetry. The emergence of a serious new quarterly like Partisan Review or Furioso was an event of real importance, and a small but dedicated audience eagerly looked forward to each issue. If people could not afford to buy copies, they borrowed them or visited public libraries. As for books of poetry if one excludes vanity-press editions, fewer than a hundred new titles were published each year. But the books that did appear were reviewed in daily newspapers as well as magazines and quarterlies. A focused monthly like Poetry could cover virtually the entire field.

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it "might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient." Or read Weldon Kees's one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser's Wake Island—"There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy." But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

Ill-paid, overworked, and underappreciated, this argumentative group of "practical" critics, all of them poets, accomplished remarkable things. They defined the canon of modernist poetry, established methods to analyze verse of extraordinary difficulty, and identified the new mid-century generation of American poets (Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman, and others) that still dominates our literary consciousness. Whatever one thinks of their literary canon or critical principles, one must admire the intellectual energy and sheer determination of these critics, who developed as writers without grants or permanent faculty positions, often while working precariously on free-lance assignments. They represent a high point in American intellectual life. Even fifty years later their names still command more authority than those of all but a few contemporary critics. A short roll call would include John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan, John Ciardi, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters. Although contemporary poetry has its boosters and publicists, it has no group of comparable dedication and talent able to address the general literary community.

Like all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They believed that if modern poets did not have an audience, they could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers. This group constituted a literary intelligentsia, made up mainly of nonspecialists, who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama. Recently Donald Hall and other critics have questioned the size of this audience by citing the low average sales of a volume of new verse by an established poet during the period (usually under a thousand copies). But these skeptics do not understand how poetry was read then.

America was a smaller, less affluent country in 1940, with about half its current population and one sixth its current real GNP. In those pre-paperback days of the late Depression neither readers nor libraries could afford to buy as many books as they do today. Nor was there a large captive audience of creative-writing students who bought books of contemporary poetry for classroom use. Readers usually bought poetry in two forms—in an occasional Collected Poems by a leading author, or in anthologies. The comprehensive collections of writers like Frost, Eliot, Auden, Jeffers, Wylie, and Millay sold very well, were frequently reprinted, and stayed perpetually in print. (Today most Collected Poems disappear after one printing.) Occasionally a book of new poems would capture the public's fancy. Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tristram (1927) became a Literary Guild selection. Frost's A Further Range sold 50,000 copies as a 1936 Book-of-the-Month Club selection. But people knew poetry mainly from anthologies, which they not only bought but also read, with curiosity and attention.

Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry, first published in 1919, was frequently revised to keep it up to date and was a perennial best seller. My 1942 edition, for example, had been reprinted five times by 1945. My edition of Oscar Williams's A Pocket Book of Modern Poetry had been reprinted nineteen times in fourteen years. Untermeyer and Williams prided themselves on keeping their anthologies broad-based and timely. They tried to represent the best of what was being published. Each edition added new poems and poets and dropped older ones. The public appreciated their efforts. Poetry anthologies were an indispensable part of any serious reader's library. Random House's popular Modern Library series, for example, included not one but two anthologies—Selden Rodman's A New Anthology of Modern Poetry and Conrad Aiken's Twentieth Century American Poetry. All these collections were read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were memorized. Difficult authors like Eliot and Thomas were actively discussed and debated. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.

Today these general readers constitute the audience that poetry has lost. Limited by intelligence and curiosity this heterogeneous group cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation. Representing our cultural intelligentsia, they are the people who support the arts—who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films and serious theater, opera, symphony, and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals. (They are also often the parents who read poetry to their children and remember, once upon a time in college or high school or kindergarten, liking it themselves.) No one knows the size of this community, but even if one accepts the conservative estimate that it accounts for only two percent of the U.S. population, it still represents a potential audience of almost five million readers. However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry's bridge to the general culture.
The Need for Poetry

But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, "The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness." Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.

But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. To the general reader, discussions about the state of poetry sound like the debating of foreign politics by emigres in a seedy cafe. Or, as Cyril Connolly more bitterly described it, "Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well." Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry's audience—critic, teacher, librarian, poet, or lonely literary amateur—faces a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that poetry still matters?

A passage in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" provides a possible starting point. Written toward the end of the author's life, after he had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons about poetry and audience that Williams had learned over years of dedication to both poetry and medicine. He wrote,

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Williams understood poetry's human value but had no illusions about the difficulties his contemporaries faced in trying to engage the audience that needed the art most desperately. To regain poetry's readership one must begin by meeting Williams's challenge to find what "concerns many men," not simply what concerns poets.

There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it—be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet's central mission to "purify the words of the tribe." And Ezra Pound warned that

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn't matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. . . .

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Or, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, "One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . ."

Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping the nation's language clear and honest, but one is hard pressed to imagine a country's citizens improving the health of its language while abandoning poetry.

The second reason why the situation of poetry matters to all intellectuals is that poetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely exists as a living art outside university departments and conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot find places to perform in many metropolitan centers—and for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.
How Poets Can Be Heard

The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly succeed in being heard? Wouldn't it take a miracle?

Toward the end of her life Marianne Moore wrote a short poem called "O To Be a Dragon." This poem recalled the biblical dream in which the Lord appeared to King Solomon and said, "Ask what I shall give thee." Solomon wished for a wise and understanding heart. Moore's wish is harder to summarize. Her poem reads,

If I, like Solomon, . . .
could have my wish—

my wish . . . O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!

Moore got her wish. She became, as all genuine poets do, "a symbol of the power of Heaven." She succeeded in what Robert Frost called "the utmost of ambition"—namely "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." She is permanently part of the "felicitous phenomenon" of American literature.

So wishes can come true—even extravagant ones. If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture. I don't think this is impossible. All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people's work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author's work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry's gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse's property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.

6. Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art's audience. Poetry is an aural medium, and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture format of living poets' reading their own work. Mixing poetry with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship between poetry and the general audience.

The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted conventions—outmoded ways of presenting, discussing, editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.

It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the dessicated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

The failure of the public school system has had a large impact upon the numbers of people that read poetry, that due to the fact that millions have not the mental capacity(mental acuity) to understand the more intellectually deep and philosophical poems.
Well, if truth be told , millions can not understand even, most of the far simpler poems, IMHO.-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/are_shakespeare_and_dante_dead_white_european_male s_part_1-1840



Are Shakespeare and Dante Dead White European Males? Part 1
Written by: David B. Gosselin

The answer to the above question is of course no. Shakespeare and Dante are not dead because every true poet is immortal.

However, much of our contemporary thinkers seem to be under the impression that they are dead, and that they are not as relevant and talented as first thought, but that rather their qualities were simply exaggerated because they happened to belong to a ‘historically dominant gender and ethnic group’. However any discerning eye will notice that such a ‘dead white European male’ argument avoids actually taking on the content of a Shakespeare’s or Dante’s ideas, which in fact have a continuity spanning over thousands of years, through the Golden Renaissance, through the Dark Ages, back to the times of ancient Greece and the Homeric epics. Moreover these ideas address some of the most fundamental questions concerning the human condition.

However, before we continue, I can hear protests saying that the canon above mentioned, really only refers to dead white European males. But the truth is that this kind of humanist thinking has parallels in virtually every culture, from the Confucian traditions in China, to those of Tilak and Tagore in India, to those of Ibn Sina of Persia and the many bards of Moorish Spain. There are great thinkers from cultures across the world.

Therefore, what the contemporary brand of thinking is really dismissing, is not a specific grouping or period, as the ideas embodied by these individuals span virtually as far back as recorded history, but rather they are witting or unwittingly dismissing those humanist ideas traced throughout history.

Unfortunately much of what is referred to by the ‘contemporary’ and modernist schools of thinking,renders itself largely irrelevant by virtue of the fact that they wish to treat the recent decades of modernist thinking, which span mere seconds on the scale of human history, as some isolated phenomena detached from the entirety of that continuity out of which it unfolded.

Were they to compare those few seconds with the universal arc of history, they would quickly discover the relevancy of a Shakespeare or Dante’s ideas.

Take but one small example from Shakespeare, which in only 14 lines manages to capture and develop the most fundamental of paradoxes underlying our individual mortal existence:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Shakespeare opens by saying we are all attracted to beauty and long for it, and desiring ‘increase’ i.e. to reproduce, yet even in the first two lines, it’s stated that this beauty fades and that even the fairest of creature’s is no match for time. Yet, in recognizing that this beauty does fade, only then is one ready to discover an even higher order of beauty: the power to generate new beauty.

What does a world look like, where each individual is acting with the conscious idea that they are responsible for the re-creation and continued development of the human species; that they are not a mere individual but are defined and in turn define themselves by this eternal process for which they are now a mediating part. What does that look like vs. someone who has a baby because they made a mistake or someone who does not want children because it takes to much time and costs too much? What image of beauty are they after?

The truth is they have not truly considered the paradox of their mortality, likely, they refuse to face it, and prefer to hang on to that ever fleeting image of earthly beauty, which so entices the senses, but ultimately 'eats itself by the grave and thee.'



For more visit www.thechainedmuse.com

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

MAY 1991 ISSUE
American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.
The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large profe..........

Read more at the link shown below--



https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

One of my sources found during my research into the decay in modern poetry. A decay that in my opinion matches quite well with the moral decay within our culture.
What gets me is the fierce attack made upon the great and legendary poets of old. Attacks made because those that hold the reins now , want not quality and heart in poetic verse but rather instead-- feel-y, touch-y, rant-y style free verse that exhibit and promote any form of emotion even if it is chaotic ramblings, rude/crude blatherings, or crazy-babble...
One look at how and which poets are now being covered in literature classes in high school and universities shows this decay and the deliberate course change by the so-called enlightened liberals that destroy any vestige of decency, greater intellectual thought , Christian based morality that they can seize upon to do so, IMHO. --Tyr



https://english.columbia.edu/20th-century-poetry-interdependent-modernisms-0


20th-Century Poetry: Interdependent Modernisms

Each of the authors on this list has made a fundamental contribution to 20th century poetry, modernism in the comprehensive, inwardly conflicted sense. To understand the meaning of this claim, we should view these figures and their most important works in juxtaposition with one other. This topic entails a "comparative" perspective, but "contrastive" may be the more appropriate term. Some relevant questions might be:

— How can we speak fruitfully of "modernism" in a comprehensive sense? To what extent must we think in terms of distinct and conflicting modernisms? What, for example, do figures as different as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Derek Walcott have in common, and what are the rationales for the different kinds of work they do, the positions they take?

— To what should we attribute the allusiveness (and anti-allusiveness) of modern poetry? What is or should be the relation between the Modern, the Romantic, and the Classic traditions, according to Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, Auden, Heaney, or Walcott? In what sense do the Romantics remain the first moderns, despite the efforts of most moderns to define their work in contradistinction to that of the Romantics? How, moreover, might we define the influences that the Romantics and the earlier moderns (Wordsworth, Hopkins, Hardy, and Yeats) had on later modern and "post-modern" figures, such as Auden, Heaney, and Walcott? In what ways have 20th century poets also been influenced by the work of thinkers such as Kant, Rousseau, Darwin , Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud?

— How have social realities (such as urbanization), and political/historical events (such as the two World Wars) impacted on or defined the concerns of 20th century poetry?

— What should we make of the religious or visionary claims of poets such as Lawrence ("star-polarity") , Yeats (gyres, images), Eliot (the still point), and Auden (agape, etc.), especially in light of their more materialist and political themes?

— What is the relationship between formal methodology (metric strutures, Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian structures) and moral, aesthetic, or political statement in the work of Yeats, Eliot,Williams, Auden, Heaney or Walcott? How does this relationship evolve in the course of a given poet's career?

— How do we account for the genres adopted by a given poet? In the twentieth century, to what do terms such as "drama" and "epic" refer? What are the generic characteristics of longer works, such as The Wasteland, Ulysses, The Sea and the Mirror, and Omeros, or are these elaborate lyric works, in a sense?

— How does the work of a given modern poet define significant tensions between abstract social or political statements and more personal concerns?



PRIMARY READINGS

HOPKINS
— Collected Poems

YEATS
— Crossways
— The Rose
— The Wind Among the Reeds
— The Green Helmet
— Responsibilities
— The Wild Swans at Coole
— Michael Robartes and the Dancer
— The Tower
— The Winkling Stair New Poems
— Last Poems
— Autobiographies: Memories and Refelections (London: Bracken, 1995)
— A Vision (London: Arena, 1990)
— Collected Plays (London: Macmillan. 1966)
— Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1968)

LAWRENCE
— The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988)
— Selected Letters (New York: Penguin, 1978)
— Essays and Critical Writing (New York: Viking, 1966)

ELIOT
— Prufrock and Other Observations
— Poems 1920
— The Waste Land, 1922
— The Hollow Men, 1925
— Ash Wednesday, 1930
— Unfinished Poems
— The Four Quartets
— Tbe Waste Land. Facsimile Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1971)
— Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1988)
— Selected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975)
— Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1988)

STEVENS
— Harmonium
— The Man with the Blue Guitar
— Parts of a World
— Transports of Summer
— The Auroras of Autumn
— Opus Posthumous (New York: Knopf, 1990)
— The Necessary Angel

WILLIAMS
— Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1986)

AUDEN
— Collected Poems
— The Dyer's Hand
— Forewards and Afterwards

HEANEY
— New Selected Poems, 1966-87 (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Includes texts from Death of a Naturalist to North
— Preoccupations: Selected Prose

WALCOTT
— Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)
— Omeros
— Plays



SECONDARY READINGS

Paul de Man
— Blindness and Insight
— The Rhetoric of Romanticism
Harold Bloom
— The Visionary Company
Paul Fussel
— The Great War and Modern Memory
Hugh Kenner
— The Pound Era
Frank Kermode
— The Romantic Image
— The Sense of an Ending
Jean-François Lyotard
— The Unpresentable
Perry Meisel
— The Myth of the Modern
Georg Simmel
— The Metropolis and Modern Life


Bannerjee, A., ed.
— D. H. Lawrence's Poetry
Benamou, Michel
— Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination
Blamires, Harry
— Word Unheard: A Guide through T.S. Eliot's 'Four Ouartets'
Bloom, Harold, ed.
— William Butler Yeats
— Seamus Heaney: Modem Critical Views
Brown, Stewart, ed.
— The Art of Derek Walcott
Cullingford, Elizabeth B.
— Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry
Draper, R.P.
— Twentieth Century Poetry in English
— The Literature of Region and Nation
Ellman, Richard
— Yeats: The Man and The Masks
Fraser, G.S.
— Essays on Twentieth Century Poets
Friedman, Barton
— Adventures in the Deeps of the Mind
Hynes, Samuel
— The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry.
Jeffares, Norman
— Yeats's Poems
— A New Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Lucas, John
— Modem English Poetry from Hardy to Yeats
Jain, Manju
— A Critical Reading of The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot
Kiely, Benedict
— Yeats's Ireland
Mariani, Paul
— William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked
Marshall, Tom
— The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D.H. Lawrence
Markos, Donald W.
— Ideas in Things: The Poems of William Carlos Williams
Mendelson, Edward
— Early Auden
— Later Auden
Stallworthy, Jon
— Vision and Revision in Yeats's 'Last Poems'
Tamplin, Ronald
— A Preface to T.S. Eliot
Terada, Rei
— Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry
Vendler, Helen
— Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire
Williamson George
— A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/strand/poetics.htm


Mark Strand on Poetry and Poetics--from Essays and Interviews

On Donald Justice

From the very beginning Justice has fashioned his poems, honed them down, freed them of rhetorical excess and the weight, however gracefully sustained, of an elaborate diction. His self-indulgence, then, has been with the possibilities of the plain statement. His refusal to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands--minimal, narcissist, negating--has nourished him. . . .

If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of fife, the poem for Justice is an act of recovery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival.

From Contemporary Poets. Ed. James Vinson. (St. Martin’s, 1980)

On The Monument

I strated writing The Monument and it became less and less about the translator of a particular text, and more about the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book.

From an interview with Frank Graziano in Graziano, ed. Strand: A Profile (1979)

From The Monument (1978)

(#9)

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am passing it on. The monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer. I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am.

(#22)

This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self. I--and this pronoun will have to do--have not permitted anything worthwhile to be part of this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. Again, it is everything that history is not.

From "A Statement about Writing"

Ideally, it would be best to just write, to suppress the critical side of my nature and indulge the expressive. Perhaps. But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious--never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. And because it has no power, let alone appetite, for self-scrutiny, it fits the reductive, dominating needs of the critical side of me. The more I think about this, the more I think that not writing is the best way to write.

Whether I admit it or not, I write to participate in the delusion of my own immortality which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistance irresistible. (317)

In William Heyen, ed. The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets (1984)

Introduction to the Poems in the Winter 1995-96
Issue of Ploughshares

I was very casual about the way I chose poems for this issue of Ploughshares. I asked a few friends--those I happened to be in touch with--for recent unpublished work. I picked what I wanted. Then I went through poems that had come directly to Ploughshares and which the editors thought would interest me. I recall that most of the poems which I chose came to me this way.

I have no method for picking poems. I simply pick what pleases me. I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. I tend to like poems that engage me--that is to say, which do not bore me. I like elaboration, but I am often taken by simplicity. Cadences move me, but flatness can also seduce. Sense, so long as it's not too familiar, is a pleasure, but so is nonsense when shrewdly exploited. Clearly, I have no set notion about what a poem ought to be.

Editing a single issue of Ploughshares has not allowed me to reach any conclusions about the state of American poetry. American poetry still seems to be "out there," practiced by others in many different places and under many different conditions. The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions. Whether or not this is a healthy state of affairs I cannot say. I simply don't know. And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written. A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. This is probably because it speaks for a level of experience unaccounted for by other literary genres or by popular forms of entertainment. So, perhaps, the fact that so many are writing poetry is a sign of health.

Whatever the case, I hope that the poems I have chosen for this issue of Ploughshares find appreciative readers.

source: www.emerson.edu/ploughshares/Winter1995/Strand_Intro.html

from An April 1999 Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth on PBS

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm very interested in your ideas about how a poem works. You've said, "A poem releases itself, secretes itself slowly, sometimes almost poisonously, into the mind of the reader." How do you think poetry does that?

MARK STRAND: Well, I think it -- a lot of it depends on the reader. The reader has to sort of give himself over to the poem and allow the poem to inhabit him and -- how does the poem do that? It does it by rearranging the world in such a way that it appears new. It does it by using language that is slightly different from the way language is used in the workday world, so tha you're forced to pay attention to it.

[. . . .]

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you look for when you read a poem?

MARK STRAND: I look for astonishment. I look to be moved, to have my view of the world in which I live somewhat changed, enlarged. I want both to belong more strongly to it or more emphatically to it, and yet, to be able to see it, to have -- well, it's almost a paradox to say this -- a more compassionate distance.

from the complete interview go to http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pulitzer_4-15.html

from "Notes on the Craft of Poetry"

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better. And I for one am not even sure that I have a recognizable way of doing things, or if I did that I could talk about it. I do not have a secret method of writing, nor do I have a set of do's and don'ts. Each poem demands that I treat it differently from the rest, come to terms with it, seek out its own best beginning and ending. And yet I would be kidding myself if I believed that nothing continuous existed in the transactions between myself and my poems. I suppose this is what we mean by craft: those transactions that become so continuous we not only associate ourselves with them but allow them to represent the means by which we make art. But since they rarely declare themselves in procedural terms, how do we talk about them? To a large extent, these transactions I have chosen to call craft are the sole property of the individual poet and cannot be transferred to or adopted by others. One reason for this is that they are largely unknown at the time of writing and are discovered afterwards, if at all.

. . .

One essay that had great importance for me when I began to write was George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Reading it, I encountered for the first time a moral statement about good writing. True, Orwell was not considering the literary use of language, but language as an instrument for expressing thought. His point was that just as our English can become ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, so the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The following rules, he explains, can be relied upon when the writer is in doubt about the effect of a word or phrase and his instinct fails him.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These are of course very elementary rules and you could, as Orwell admits, keep all of them and still write bad English, though not as bad as you might have. But how far will they take us in the writing of a poem? And how much of that transaction I mentioned earlier is described by them? If following a simple set of rules guaranteed the success of a poem, poems would not be held in very high esteem, as, of course, they are. And far too many people would find it easy to write them, which, naturally, is not the case. For the poems that are of greatest value are those that inevitably, unselfconsciously break rules, poems whose urgency makes rules irrelevant.

. . .

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. These limits exist in turn within the limits of the individual poet's conception of what is or is not a poem. For if the would-be poet has no idea what a poem is, then he has no standard for determining or qualifying his actions as a poet; i.e., his poem. "Form," it should be remembered, is a word that has several meanings, some of which are near opposites. Form has to do with the structure or outward appearance of something, but it also has to do with its essence. In discussions of poetry, form is a powerful word for just that reason: structure and essence seem to come together, as do the disposition of words and their meanings.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. They argue that there is formal poetry and poetry without form -- free verse, in other words; that formal poetry has dimensions that are rhythmic or stanzaic, etc., and consequently measurable, while free verse exists as a sprawl whose disposition is arbitrary and is, as such, nonmeasurable. But if we have learned anything from the poetry of the last twenty or thirty years, it is that free verse is as formal as any other verse. There is ample evidence that it uses a full range of mnemonic devices, the most common being anaphoral and parallelistic structures, both as syntactically restrictive as they are rhythmically binding. I do not want to suggest that measured verse and free verse represent opposing mnemonics. I would rather we considered them together, both being structured or shaped and thus formal, or at least formal in outward, easily described ways.

Form is manifested most clearly in the apparatus of argument and image or, put another way, plot and figures of speech. This aspect of form is more difficult to discuss because it is less clear-cut; it happens also to be the area in which poems achieve their greatest individuality and where, as a result, they are more personal. This being the case, how is it possible to apply ideas of craft? Well, we might say that mixed metaphors are bad, that contradictions, unless they constitute intentional paradox, must be avoided, that this or that image is inappropriate. All of which is either too vague, too narrow, or mostly beside the point -- although there are many creative-writing teachers who have no difficulty discussing these more variable and hidden characteristics of form. And I use the word "hidden" because somehow, when we approach the question of what a poem means, we are moving very close to its source or what brought it into being. To be sure, there is no easy prescription, like George Orwell's, of what to say and what not to say in a poem.

. . .

In discussing his poem "The Old Woman and the Statue," Wallace Stevens said:

While there is nothing automatic about the poem, nevertheless it has an automatic aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to do.

This is as precise a statement of what is referred to as "the creative process" as I have ever read. And I think it makes clear why discussions of craft are at best precarious. We know only afterwards what it is we have done. Most poets, I think, are drawn to the unknown, and writing, for them, is a way of making the unknown visible. And if the object of one's quest is hidden or unknown, how is it to be approached by predictable means? I confess to a desire to forget knowing, especially when I sit down to work on a poem. The continuous transactions of craft take place in the dark. Jung understood this when he said: "As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition." And Stevens, when he said: "You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound: and you do in fact know, without knowing how. Your knowledge is irrational." This is not to say that rationality is wrong or bad, but merely that it has little to do with the making of poems (as opposed, say, to the understanding of poems). Even so rational a figure as Paul Valéry becomes oddly evasive when discussing the making of a poem. In his brilliant but peculiar essay "Poetry and Abstract Thought," he says the following:

I have . . . noticed in myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind.

And he goes on to say that "the state of poetry is completely irregular, inconstant, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident," and that "a poet is a man who, as a result of a certain incident, undergoes a hidden transformation." At its most comic, this is a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde situation. And I suppose at its m........

No poet has ever lived that wrote a "perfect " poem.....
Man being an imperfect creature such must be the case.
Tho' we celebrate those that we deem to have came close.. Question is, how accurate are with in that judgment?
I laugh with others have boldly declared that the greatest poet that ever lived was William Shakespeare.
Methinks that they somehow confuse the word "playwright" with the word "poet".-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/strand/poetics.htm


Mark Strand on Poetry and Poetics--from Essays and Interviews

On Donald Justice

From the very beginning Justice has fashioned his poems, honed them down, freed them of rhetorical excess and the weight, however gracefully sustained, of an elaborate diction. His self-indulgence, then, has been with the possibilities of the plain statement. His refusal to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands--minimal, narcissist, negating--has nourished him. . . .

If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of fife, the poem for Justice is an act of recovery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival.

From Contemporary Poets. Ed. James Vinson. (St. Martin’s, 1980)

On The Monument

I strated writing The Monument and it became less and less about the translator of a particular text, and more about the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book.

From an interview with Frank Graziano in Graziano, ed. Strand: A Profile (1979)

From The Monument (1978)

(#9)

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am passing it on. The monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer. I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am.

(#22)

This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self. I--and this pronoun will have to do--have not permitted anything worthwhile to be part of this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. Again, it is everything that history is not.

From "A Statement about Writing"

Ideally, it would be best to just write, to suppress the critical side of my nature and indulge the expressive. Perhaps. But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious--never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. And because it has no power, let alone appetite, for self-scrutiny, it fits the reductive, dominating needs of the critical side of me. The more I think about this, the more I think that not writing is the best way to write.

Whether I admit it or not, I write to participate in the delusion of my own immortality which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistance irresistible. (317)

In William Heyen, ed. The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets (1984)

Introduction to the Poems in the Winter 1995-96
Issue of Ploughshares

I was very casual about the way I chose poems for this issue of Ploughshares. I asked a few friends--those I happened to be in touch with--for recent unpublished work. I picked what I wanted. Then I went through poems that had come directly to Ploughshares and which the editors thought would interest me. I recall that most of the poems which I chose came to me this way.

I have no method for picking poems. I simply pick what pleases me. I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. I tend to like poems that engage me--that is to say, which do not bore me. I like elaboration, but I am often taken by simplicity. Cadences move me, but flatness can also seduce. Sense, so long as it's not too familiar, is a pleasure, but so is nonsense when shrewdly exploited. Clearly, I have no set notion about what a poem ought to be.

Editing a single issue of Ploughshares has not allowed me to reach any conclusions about the state of American poetry. American poetry still seems to be "out there," practiced by others in many different places and under many different conditions. The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions. Whether or not this is a healthy state of affairs I cannot say. I simply don't know. And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written. A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. This is probably because it speaks for a level of experience unaccounted for by other literary genres or by popular forms of entertainment. So, perhaps, the fact that so many are writing poetry is a sign of health.

Whatever the case, I hope that the poems I have chosen for this issue of Ploughshares find appreciative readers.

source: www.emerson.edu/ploughshares/Winter1995/Strand_Intro.html

from An April 1999 Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth on PBS

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm very interested in your ideas about how a poem works. You've said, "A poem releases itself, secretes itself slowly, sometimes almost poisonously, into the mind of the reader." How do you think poetry does that?

MARK STRAND: Well, I think it -- a lot of it depends on the reader. The reader has to sort of give himself over to the poem and allow the poem to inhabit him and -- how does the poem do that? It does it by rearranging the world in such a way that it appears new. It does it by using language that is slightly different from the way language is used in the workday world, so tha you're forced to pay attention to it.

[. . . .]

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you look for when you read a poem?

MARK STRAND: I look for astonishment. I look to be moved, to have my view of the world in which I live somewhat changed, enlarged. I want both to belong more strongly to it or more emphatically to it, and yet, to be able to see it, to have -- well, it's almost a paradox to say this -- a more compassionate distance.

from the complete interview go to http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pulitzer_4-15.html

from "Notes on the Craft of Poetry"

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better. And I for one am not even sure that I have a recognizable way of doing things, or if I did that I could talk about it. I do not have a secret method of writing, nor do I have a set of do's and don'ts. Each poem demands that I treat it differently from the rest, come to terms with it, seek out its own best beginning and ending. And yet I would be kidding myself if I believed that nothing continuous existed in the transactions between myself and my poems. I suppose this is what we mean by craft: those transactions that become so continuous we not only associate ourselves with them but allow them to represent the means by which we make art. But since they rarely declare themselves in procedural terms, how do we talk about them? To a large extent, these transactions I have chosen to call craft are the sole property of the individual poet and cannot be transferred to or adopted by others. One reason for this is that they are largely unknown at the time of writing and are discovered afterwards, if at all.

. . .

One essay that had great importance for me when I began to write was George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Reading it, I encountered for the first time a moral statement about good writing. True, Orwell was not considering the literary use of language, but language as an instrument for expressing thought. His point was that just as our English can become ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, so the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The following rules, he explains, can be relied upon when the writer is in doubt about the effect of a word or phrase and his instinct fails him.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These are of course very elementary rules and you could, as Orwell admits, keep all of them and still write bad English, though not as bad as you might have. But how far will they take us in the writing of a poem? And how much of that transaction I mentioned earlier is described by them? If following a simple set of rules guaranteed the success of a poem, poems would not be held in very high esteem, as, of course, they are. And far too many people would find it easy to write them, which, naturally, is not the case. For the poems that are of greatest value are those that inevitably, unselfconsciously break rules, poems whose urgency makes rules irrelevant.

. . .

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. These limits exist in turn within the limits of the individual poet's conception of what is or is not a poem. For if the would-be poet has no idea what a poem is, then he has no standard for determining or qualifying his actions as a poet; i.e., his poem. "Form," it should be remembered, is a word that has several meanings, some of which are near opposites. Form has to do with the structure or outward appearance of something, but it also has to do with its essence. In discussions of poetry, form is a powerful word for just that reason: structure and essence seem to come together, as do the disposition of words and their meanings.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. They argue that there is formal poetry and poetry without form -- free verse, in other words; that formal poetry has dimensions that are rhythmic or stanzaic, etc., and consequently measurable, while free verse exists as a sprawl whose disposition is arbitrary and is, as such, nonmeasurable. But if we have learned anything from the poetry of the last twenty or thirty years, it is that free verse is as formal as any other verse. There is ample evidence that it uses a full range of mnemonic devices, the most common being anaphoral and parallelistic structures, both as syntactically restrictive as they are rhythmically binding. I do not want to suggest that measured verse and free verse represent opposing mnemonics. I would rather we considered them together, both being structured or shaped and thus formal, or at least formal in outward, easily described ways.

Form is manifested most clearly in the apparatus of argument and image or, put another way, plot and figures of speech. This aspect of form is more difficult to discuss because it is less clear-cut; it happens also to be the area in which poems achieve their greatest individuality and where, as a result, they are more personal. This being the case, how is it possible to apply ideas of craft? Well, we might say that mixed metaphors are bad, that contradictions, unless they constitute intentional paradox, must be avoided, that this or that image is inappropriate. All of which is either too vague, too narrow, or mostly beside the point -- although there are many creative-writing teachers who have no difficulty discussing these more variable and hidden characteristics of form. And I use the word "hidden" because somehow, when we approach the question of what a poem means, we are moving very close to its source or what brought it into being. To be sure, there is no easy prescription, like George Orwell's, of what to say and what not to say in a poem.

. . .

In discussing his poem "The Old Woman and the Statue," Wallace Stevens said:

While there is nothing automatic about the poem, nevertheless it has an automatic aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to do.

This is as precise a statement of what is referred to as "the creative process" as I have ever read. And I think it makes clear why discussions of craft are at best precarious. We know only afterwards what it is we have done. Most poets, I think, are drawn to the unknown, and writing, for them, is a way of making the unknown visible. And if the object of one's quest is hidden or unknown, how is it to be approached by predictable means? I confess to a desire to forget knowing, especially when I sit down to work on a poem. The continuous transactions of craft take place in the dark. Jung understood this when he said: "As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition." And Stevens, when he said: "You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound: and you do in fact know, without knowing how. Your knowledge is irrational." This is not to say that rationality is wrong or bad, but merely that it has little to do with the making of poems (as opposed, say, to the understanding of poems). Even so rational a figure as Paul Valéry becomes oddly evasive when discussing the making of a poem. In his brilliant but peculiar essay "Poetry and Abstract Thought," he says the following:

I have . . . noticed in myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind.

And he goes on to say that "the state of poetry is completely irregular, inconstant, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident," and that "a poet is a man who, as a result of a certain incident, undergoes a hidden transformation." At its most comic, this is a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde situation. And I suppose at its m........

No poet has ever lived that wrote a "perfect " poem.....
Man being an imperfect creature such must be the case.
Tho' we celebrate those that we deem to have came close.. Question is, how accurate are with in that judgment?
I laugh with others have boldly declared that the greatest poet that ever lived was William Shakespeare.
Methinks that they somehow the word "playwright" with the word "poet".-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/

Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

MAY 1991 ISSUE

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.
What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.
The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of .....

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/24/poetry-is-going-extinct-government-data-show/?utm_term=.aa1bea4992b1


Poetry is going extinct, government data show

By Christopher Ingraham April 24, 2015

Flickr user Stefan Powell.
Is verse a dying technique? How dead is poetry? Who killed poetry? Does anybody care? Is poetry dead? Is poetry dead? Is poetry dead?

Inquiries into the death of poetry comprise a tradition almost as rich and varied as American poetry itself. Earlier this month, a college literary magazine proposed a tidy solution to the evergreen problem: "if you have to keep declaring, over and over, that poetry is dead, it can’t actually be dead."

Fair enough. Most of discussion around the question involves qualitative assessments that are inherently unsolvable. Is poetry too political, or not political enough? Is it too popular, or too elitist? Too pretentious or too profane?

I can't answer any of these questions. But there are a number of facts about poetry that are knowable, and given that April is National Poetry Month (which I bet you didn't know), now would be a good time to know them.


The first is that ever-elusive question of readership: does anyone read poetry anymore? Given the widespread availability of poetry on the internet, "it’s possible that poetry’s audience might be greater now than ever," wrote Kate Angus in The Millions last year. But the numbers below show that that's emphatically not the case. Some people are still reading it, although that number has been dropping steadily over the past two decades.


In 1992, 17 percent of Americans had read a work of poetry at least once in the past year. 20 years later that number had fallen by more than half, to 6.7 percent. Those numbers come from the national Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), a massive survey that's run every few years as part of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey.

The survey finds that the decline in poetry readership is unique among the arts -- particularly the literary arts. "Since 2002, the share of poetry-readers has contracted by 45 percent—resulting in the steepest decline in participation in any literary genre," the study concludes. Over the past 20 years, the downward trend is nearly perfectly linear -- and doesn't show signs of abating.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

And not noted is that our liberal education system is graduating students from high school that can barely even read, let alone read and understand poetry. This steep decline, in regards to education system is that said education system , no longer teaches to improve the mind, improve intellect - but instead puts its most effort into brainwashing our children into being liberal minded robots.
I'll say no more as , politics is to be kept out of this sub-forum but in this case politics and our liberal designed/controlled public education system are the two main culprits, IMHO.
I get that not everybody likes poetry, and that is ok with me, as four of my own brothers think its sissy junk, but a true in-depth look at poetry, its rich history and how it has positively affected hundreds of millions of people proves that ids indeed a very worthy and a much needed art form.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Deleted....

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/importance-poetry


The Importance Of Poetry
It's the key to happiness.


Poetry is an art form that has survived for thousands and thousands of years. We study it in school and we hear quotes from poems scattered throughout our life. But do we ever truly make meaning of it? Does it even matter? My answer to you is yes it does. Reading poetry and or writing poetry can drastically improve your life, because it has improved mine. In this article I will attempt to articulate why poetry is important to read and also to write

Reading Poetry

Poetry is one of the most powerful forms of writing because it takes the english language, a language we believe we know, and transforms it. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. The pattern of the sentences sound new and melodious. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. No poem can be read in the same way, because the words mean something different to each of us. For this reason, many find poetry and elusive art form. However, the issue in understanding poetry lies in how you read poetry. Reading it logically results in an overall comprehension, rigid and unchanging. However, reading it emotionally allows the nuances and paradoxes to enter our understanding. Anyone who writes poetry can attest, you have to write it with an open heart. So as a reader, we must do the same. All poems are insights into the most intimate inner workings of the writer's mind and soul. To read it coldly and rationally would be shutting the door on the relationship that the writer is attempting to forge with you. Opening your heart to poetry is the only way to get fulfillment from it.


If you imagine poetry as a journey, you must be willing to trust the writer to guide you. Unwilling readers will never experience every part of the adventure in the same way open minded readers do. The journey may be filled with dead ends and suffering or endless joy and happiness. And still, you go. You pick up the poem, you read, you listen, and you feel.

In our culture we are experiencing a crisis where American people are the unhappiest people in the world statistically. How do we solve this? I answer: Mindfullness, gratitude, and poetry.

Writing Poetry

From a writer’s perspective, writing poetry can be equally elusive as reading poetry. When I first started writing poetry, the advice I always heard was practice, find your voice, keep a journal. I did all these things but still my poems were flat and inert. What was I missing? I poured over poems by Angelou, Shakespeare, Austen, and Wilde looking for a pattern, something I could emulate. This was the problem. I was unwilling to open my heart. I thought poetry could be a mask I could craft. But no matter how beautiful I made it, it would never come to life. It would never fit on another person’s face. It did not eve fit on mine.........

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/20-best-poems/

20 Classic Poems Every Man Should Read
20 poems every man should read | young man leaning against a tree reading

Editor’s note: This article was written through a collaboration between C. Daniel Motley and the AoM Team.

Matthew Arnold, a Victorian poet, once claimed, “The crown of literature is poetry,” and if our neglect of poetry is any indication, the crown is rusting. While books sales fluctuate from year to year, fewer and fewer publishing houses are printing volumes of poetry. The demand for poets and their poems has ebbed.

However, we do ourselves a great disservice when we neglect the reading of poetry. John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, commended poetry to his son John Quincy. Both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt committed their favorite poems to memory. Ancient kings were expected to produce poetry while also being versed in warfare and statecraft. That poetry has fallen out of favor among men in the 21st century is a recent trend rather than the norm.

To help remedy this, we have compiled a list of 20 classic poems that every man should read. Spanning the past two thousand years, the poems on this list represent some of the best works of poetry ever composed. But don’t worry—they were selected for both their brevity and ease of application. Some are about striving to overcome, others about romantic love, and still others about patriotism. Whether you’ve been reading poetry for years or haven’t read a single line since high school, these poems are sure to inspire and delight you.

1. “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
ulysses poem alfred lord tennyson to strive to seek to find and not to yield

Tennyson, poet emeritus of England during the latter half of the 19th century, has composed a number of classic poems that deserve careful reading. “Ulysses,” possibly his most anthologized poem, begins at the end of Odysseus’ life after the events of Homer’s Odyssey. Tennyson depicts the desire of a man wanting to set out on new adventures and see new sights, even as his life is passing into twilight. Ulysses’ memorable phrases will encourage even the most settled soul to strike out and start something new.

Read “Ulysses” here.

2. “If–” by Rudyard Kipling
if poem by rudyard kipling quote

Literature is filled with examples of fathers passing their wisdom down to their sons, from the biblical Book of Proverbs to Ta Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. While not everyone had a father to teach them life lessons, Kipling’s most read poem provides an education in living that anyone can benefit from. Soldiers and athletes have drawn from its wisdom, and boys (and men!) have committed its lines to memory for over a century. A celebration of the British “stiff upper lip,” this Victorian classic is worth meditating on every so often as a reminder of the virtues and actions that make up a life well-lived.

Read “If–” here.

3. “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats
sailing to byzantium poem that is no country for old men

Socrates, speaking to a friend, once asked, “Is life harder at the end?” W.B. Yeats’ meditation on adolescence and what it means to grow old is a salve for world-weary souls. Writing near the end of his life, Yeats confesses that, although his body wastes away, his desire for what is good will not cease. Yeats’ vision for what is “true, good, and beautiful” reminds us that youth and vitality are ultimately about how one sees the world and not about age. Filled with beautiful imagery, “Sailing to Byzantium” offers a corrective to our modern obsession with chasing the phantom of eternal youth.

Read “Sailing to Byzantium” here.

4. Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare
sonnet 29 by william shakespeare

No list of poems is complete without the Bard himself. Known primarily for his plays, universally accepted as some of the best works in world literature, Shakespeare was also a poet, composing over 150 sonnets in his lifetime. Sonnet 29 is a lamentation on the loss of fame and fortune but ends with a meditation on the love that he has for his beloved. Works such as It’s a Wonderful Life echo the themes in Shakespeare’s Sonnet, showing us that the company of loved ones far outweighs all the riches that the world offers.

Read Sonnet 29 here.

5. “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley
invictus poem by william ernest henley captain of my soul

We’re not promised a life absent trials and suffering. While horrific events have sidelined many men, William Ernest Henley refused to be crushed on account of hardship. As a young man he contracted tuberculosis of the bone, which resulted in the amputation of the lower part of one of his legs. The disease flared up again in Henley’s twenties, compromising his other good leg, which doctors also wished to amputate. Henley successfully fought to save the leg, and while enduring a three-year hospitalization, he wrote “Invictus” — a stirring charge to remember that we are not merely given over to our fates. While life can be “nasty, brutish, and short,” we cannot sit idle while waves crash against us. A product of Victorian stoicism, and lived struggle, Henley’s poem is a clarion call to resist and persevere through the hardest of trials.

Read “Invictus” here.

6. “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost
mending wall poem by robert frost he is all pine

Robert Frost once told John F. Kennedy that “Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age.” If that is the case, then Frost brought both to bear in this poem about two neighbors rebuilding a fence between their property during a cold winter in New England. A story told in blank verse, Frost critiques the phrase that he attributes to the other man in the story, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Dedicated to neighborliness and good will towards others, Frost’s work is a helpful tonic against 21st century individualism and selfishness.

Read “Mending Wall” here.

7. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” by Walt Whitman
pioneers o pioneers poem walt whitman

The West has captivated the imaginations of America’s greatest writers, from James Fenimore Cooper to Cormac McCarthy. Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” mixes adventure and a summons to tread out on new paths. Published at the end of the Civil War and the start of the great migration west, Whitman is rightly considered to be one of the earliest poets to distill America down to its essence. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” still moves the spirit to chart a new course and serves as both a reminder of where we have come from and where we can go.

Read “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” here.

8. “Horatius” by Thomas Babington
horatius poem by thomas babington how can men die better

While serving the English government in India during the 1830s, politician, poet, and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay spun semi-mythical ancient Roman tales into memorable ballads or “lays.” His most famous lay was “Horatius,” a ballad that recounted the legendary courage of an ancient Roman army officer, Publius Horatius Cocles, who was lauded for making a stand with two comrades, and then alone, against a horde of advancing enemy Etruscans. Macaulay’s homage to the honor of Horatius has proved an inspiration to many men, including Winston Churchill, who is said to have memorized all seventy stanzas of the poem as a boy.

Read “Horatius” here.

9. “On the Stork Tower” by Wang Zhihuan
on the stork tower old chinese poem

The shortest poem on this list (the entirety of its text is contained on the image above), Zhihaun’s meditation on nature also serves as an epigram, a short motivational work meant to encourage seeking out new and better prospects. While the poem is only four lines long, it works as a meditative focus point, something to ponder whether sitting alone outside or during a crisis as a reminder that there is a solution to be found no matter the problem. Combining Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian religious ideas, Zhihuan’s only surviving poem provides food for thought dressed in the language of nature.

10. “The Builders” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
the builders poem henry wadsworth longfellow

While we often think of builders as limited to those who work with their hands, the ethos of the craftsman is something everyone should strive to emulate and cultivate. Life is a craft in and of itself — one that needs to be learned and attended to with the same kind of patience, care, and integrity that go into shaping tangible materials. All of us, Longfellow argues in this poem, are architects; all of our days are building blocks that contribute to the structure of our existence; and all of our actions and decisions (even those no one else sees) determine the strength, and thus the height, that the edifices of our lives can reach.
...................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/

CULTURE
Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

MAY 1991 ISSUE
American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

This article appears in the May 1991 issue.

What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.

The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's institutional success—the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university—have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

To the average reader, the proposition that poetry's audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art's current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry's material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.



Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

One can see a microcosm of poetry's current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor's The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones's Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.

How Poetry Diminished
Arguments about the decline of poetry's cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse's role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism's emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so "fleeting and quintessential" that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse—which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation—retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.



Wilson was a capable analyst of literary trends. His skeptical assessment of poetry's place in modern letters has been frequently attacked and qualified over the past half century, but it has never been convincingly dismissed. His argument set the ground rules for all subsequent defenders of contemporary poetry. It also provided the starting point for later iconoclasts, from Delmore Schwartz to Christopher Clausen. The most recent and celebrated of these revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988 critique "Who Killed Poetry?" first appeared in Commentary and was reprinted in an extravagantly acrimonious symposium in AWP Chronicle (the journal of the Associated Writing Programs). Not coincidentally, Epstein's title pays a double homage to Wilson's essay—first by mimicking the interrogative form of the original title, second by employing its metaphor of death.

Epstein essentially updated Wilson's argument, but with important differences. Whereas Wilson looked on the decline of poetry's cultural position as a gradual process spanning three centuries, Epstein focused on the past few decades. He contrasted the major achievements of the modernists—the generation of Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism into the twentieth century—with what he felt were the minor accomplishments of the present practitioners. The modernists, Epstein maintained, were artists who worked from a broad cultural vision. Contemporary writers were "poetry professionals," who operated within the closed world of the university. Wilson blamed poetry's plight on historical forces; Epstein indicted the poets themselves and the institutions they had helped create, especially creative-writing programs. A brilliant polemicist, Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and it did ignite an explosion of criticism. No recent essay on American poetry has generated so many immediate responses in literary journals. And certainly none has drawn so much violently negative criticism from poets themselves. To date at least thirty writers have responded in print. The poet Henry Taylor published two rebuttals.

Poets are justifiably sensitive to arguments that poetry has declined in cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers have used such arguments simplistically to declare all contemporary verse irrelevant. Usually the less a critic knows about verse the more readily he or she dismisses it. It is no coincidence, I think, that the two most persuasive essays on poetry's presumed demise were written by outstanding critics of fiction, neither of whom has written extensively about contemporary poetry. It is too soon to judge the accuracy of Epstein's essay, but a literary historian would find Wilson's timing ironic. As Wilson finished his famous essay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics, economics, religion, and philosophy, are among the most culturally inclusive in the history of the language. At the same time, a new generation, which would include Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, A. D. Hope, and others, was just breaking into print. Wilson himself later admitted that the emergence of a versatile and ambitious poet like Auden contradicted several points of his argument. But if Wilson's prophecies were sometimes inaccurate, his sense of poetry's overall situation was depressingly astute. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

Inside the Subculture
One sees evidence of poetry's diminished stature even within the thriving subculture. The established rituals of the poetry world—the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences—exhibit a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater? At most readings the program consists of verse only—and usually only verse by that night's author. Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.



Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.

Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader's interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews—a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn't command the reader's attention wasn't considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell's poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories.

A few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic and The New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue, but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture.

What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.



By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments. In his new book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Robert Bly has accurately described the corrosive effect of this critical boosterism:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.
A clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled for readers outside the academy. More than one editor has discovered that the best way to get an anthology assigned is to include work by the poets who teach the courses. Compiled in the spirit of congenial opportunism, many of these anthologies give the impression that literary quality is a concept that neither an editor nor a reader should take too seriously.

The 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, for example, is not so much a selective literary collection as a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers (it even offers a photo of each author). Running nearly 800 pages, the volume presents no fewer than 104 important young poets, virtually all of whom teach creative writing. The editorial principle governing selection seems to have been the fear of leaving out some influential colleague. The book does contain a few strong and original poems, but they are surrounded by so many undistinguished exercises that one wonders if the good work got there by design or simply by random sampling. In the drearier patches one suspects that perhaps the book was never truly meant to be read, only assigned.

And that is the real issue. The poetry subculture no longer assumes that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy.

In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable poem—Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose," for example, or Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe," which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers—an unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,

A poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume.
Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemplo

The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of th ...................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/modernism

Modernism

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence. In the early 20th century, novelists such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf (and, later, Joseph Conrad) experimented with shifts in time and narrative points of view. While living in Paris before the war, Gertrude Stein explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices. Ezra Pound vowed to “make it new” and “break the pentameter,” while T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the shadow of World War I. Shortly after The Waste Land was published in 1922, it became the archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages. Other poets most often associated with Modernism include H.D., W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Modernism also generated many smaller movements; see also Acmeism, Dada, Free verse, Futurism, Imagism, Objectivism, Postmodernism, and Surrealism. Browse more Modern poets.

Browse all terms
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It has been my experience that by and large about 85% of modern poetry, if one narrows it down to just the last 50 years, is only barely average poetry at best ... with at least 60% of that 85-- being sup par..
The other higher 15 % goes in as 10% above average and the highest 5 % breaks into about 2% great, 2% very fine, 1% fantastic and worthy of the golden Era of Poetry and its Legendary masters, IMHO--
which to me is very sad and truly shows the downgraded education system in this nation...,.. Tyr

[Kathianne]

Trying to keep the poetry forum going, while the moderator is absent. I'm not the best at poetry, but do have my favorites. Hoping that Tyr returns or maybe SassyLady would step in? I'll do what I can in the meantime.

The Four Steps to Making Poetry Discussions Accessible
For students of all ages, discussing poetry can sometimes seem intimidating. Poetry often comes off as more abstract than prose, and students tend to get the impression that it will be more complicated than other types of literature. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. This poetry month, I think it’s time we open our minds to some new ways to make poetry more accessible for our students.


When I discuss poetry with my (sometimes resistant) undergrad students, I ask specific questions that pull intuitive insights from them. And even though I follow these steps for college-age students, this methodology makes poetry more approachable for students at all levels, especially middle and high school students who are more likely to have critical discussions about literature in the classroom.


Here's the question guide I use when discussing poetry with my students:


1. Open with a discussion about the title and form
To get your students’ wheels turning about a new piece of poetry, start with questions they can answer without hesitation. These can be simple yes or no questions about their first impressions. Then, you can ask them to dive a little deeper into why they had those impressions.


These sorts of questions dust off the cobwebs and help students feel more comfortable speaking out loud about their ideas. Once they’re at ease expressing their opinions about their surface-level observations of a piece, they’ll be more willing to dive deeper.


Ask questions like:


Were you intrigued by the title of the piece?
Did the poem match your expectation after reading the title?
Do you notice anything interesting about the structure or form?
2. Encourage students to focus on an emotional, gut reaction
Ask students how a piece of poetry made them feel. If you find your students are hesitant to be a bit more vulnerable and discuss their own emotions, consider rephrasing your question to focus on the mood of the piece.


Once your students have articulated the mood and tone of a poem, encourage them to explore any emotions they felt while reading the piece and why they may have felt that way. The “whys” are the most important part of these discussions and encourage deeper levels of critical thinking from your students.


Ask questions like:


How did the piece make you feel?
Were you surprised by anything?
How would you describe the mood or tone of the piece?
If there were characters in the piece, how did they seem to feel?
3. Draw connections to other pieces or experiences


Make comparisons between other pieces of literature and real life. Students often make connections to songs, movies, and TV shows and sometimes to their own lives, and you can help them connect these dots.


In a recent discussion, some of my students had interesting interpretations of "Summer Solstice, New York City" by Sharon Olds. A scene in the poem where police officers are trying to save a suicidal man reminded some of them of a procedural drama like Law and Order. This comparison helped them better visualize the scene and dig into its meaning.


Then, at the end of the poem, in a moment of kindness and sympathy, the police officers offer the man a cigarette. The students were surprised by this and cited TV shows and media to show how their expectations were subverted, which helped the poem have an even deeper impact.


Ask questions like:


Did the piece remind you of any other literature?
Did it remind you of other popular culture like music, movies, or TV shows?
Were you reminded of any of your own life experiences?
Does anything about the poem’s similarities or dissimilarities to those things surprise you?
4. Finally, ask the tough questions
Now that the group has fully warmed up, go into higher-level, open-ended questions. These questions encourage deeper thinking and help students consider the larger ideas at hand. Again, ask them “why.” If students can express why they believe a poem is making an important observation about the world, their analytical skills will be improved.


For example, in the poem “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, the speaker describes how “delicious,” “sweet” and “cold” plums he ate were, and he apologizes for eating them because the reader was likely saving them for breakfast. In this instance, you might ask your students why the speaker describes the plums the way he does, and what he might be saying beyond a strictly literal interpretation––about life and being human.


Exploring big picture topics, like the theme and message, is a strength developed with practice. So even if students struggle to find those deeper meanings in early discussions, don’t give up. The more you discuss poetry with your students, the better they’ll get at analyzing it.


Ask questions like:


What is it saying about the world as a whole?
What does it say about being human?
What is the theme of the piece?


Through my work with the Great Books Foundation and their Shared Inquiry method of discussing literature, I discovered the value of collaborative discussion. This method can and should be applied to every poetry discussion. Don’t just ask the questions, but also encourage students to ask questions of one another, even questions they may not know the answer to. This will spark broader conversations and deeper thought from everyone in the classroom, pushing them to think about poetry through a lens of open-ended curiosity exploration instead of black-and-white analysis.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/category/tags/death


Death
You are here: Home » Death
Daniel Tiffany: On "In a Station of the Metro"
What difference would it make to the history of Anglo-American poetic modernism if we were to read Pound as a poet whose progress begins and ends in the realm of the dead, the author (and protagonist) of a literary odyssey culminating in a political inferno haunted by his earliest poetic principles? What if we were to read Pound essentially as a poet of mourning—not elegiac precisely, but fetishistic and transgressive. . . .

[. . . .]

Pound is unable. to part with the. "cadaverous dead," to complete the task of mourning. The. poet's lost male companions become remote and inexorable fathers to his writing. In a very real sense, death both quickens and captures Pound's writing. "The work of the phantom," Nicolas Abraham writes, "coincides in every respect with Freud's description of the death-instinct" ("Phantom" 291). Haunted by a series of ghosts, Pound continually seeks to return to a place he has never been, to converse with the dead. His experience of the dead (which is the experience of the unknown or the impossible) and his conception of memory converge with the poetics of the Image. If, indeed, Images and the phantoms of memory are analogous in Pound's mind (as in the phrase "resurgent EIKONES"), then we should view the poetic Image as the return of a lost or dead object, a moment in which the subject is haunted by reality .The Image is life imaged as death, a living death) as the Egyptian Book of the Dead taught Pound and others (including Yeats and Wyndham Lewis) around the turn of the century.

[. . . .]

Pound's infatuation with the dead was not lost on his contemporaries, or on his later critics. Wyndham Lewis, for example, wrote of Pound, "Life is not his true concern . . . His field is purely that of the dead . . . whose life is preserved for us in books and pictures" (Lewis, Time 87). Elsewhere, Lewis described Pound as "a bombastic galleon " with "a skull and crossbones" flying from its mast. Richard Aldington's parody of the famous "Metro" poem also registers Pound's necrophilic bias:

The apparitions of these poems in a crowd:

White faces in a dead black faint. (SC 191)

As tor Pound's critics., Hugh Witemeyer has described "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" as aIl "elaborate autopsy" ( Poetry of Ezra Pound 162 ), and Humphrey Carpenter describes Pound's fifth volume of poetry,Canzoni, as "the last twitch of a poetic corpse, the body being recognizably that of the Pre-Raphaelites" (SC 157).

[. . . .]

Distilled to a handful of syllables, the Imagist poem derives its power from its resistance to language, from the perilous condition of its own medium—a form that is inherently self-destructive. Thus, the influence of ]apanese haiku on Imagism, for example, can be understood as an exotic means of formalizing and dignifying a poetic suicide. The remains of Victorian poetry assume the haiku form as a cipher of ritual death (hence the arduous and protracted deletion of "In a Station of the Metro"—reduced over a period of six months from thirty lines to fourteen words).

[. . . . ]

Imagism's entanglement with the idea of death portrays allegorically the mortality of poetry itself, as well as the essential negativity of the Image: language is consistently deployed against itself in the name of the Image.

[. . . .]

Pound worked on the poem sporadically from 1911 to 1913, a period of tremendous ferment and change in his poetry ( and, incidentally, the period in which he produced his translations of Cavalcanti ). Pound reprints the poem in his memoir of Gaudier:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals, on a wet, black bough. (GB 89)

Bearing in mind Pound's affection for medieval concepts of memory, the "station" of the metro can be compared to the locus of memory in which the "apparitions" (imagines) appear. What's more, Hugh Kenner argues that the poem records a descent "underground," and recalls Odysseus' encounter with the souls of the dead in Hades. The "faces in the crowd," like the "EIKONES" of memory, are "apparitions": they emerge into visibility (as images), yet they are also phantoms. Obviously, this poem, which is cited by Pound (and everyone else) as a paradigm of the modern, formalist Image in poetry, is haunted by other conceptions of the Image. Indeed, Pound portrayed the "Metro" poem as a crucial turning point in his career, a work that forced him into an "impasse" ( GB 89). He struggled during a period of a year and a half to complete the poem, and cut it down from thirty lines to a single sentence. Pound leaves no doubt that the "Image" of the poem is ultimately a product of shaping and carving resistant materials. The Image is made, not received. Yet the content of the poem alludes to the Image as phantom, even as its mode of creation identifies it as an artifact. Hence, we can understand the "Metro" poem as the moment in Pound's career when the Image as phantom begins to assume the artifactual properties of the formalist Image.

[. . . .]

Images pieced together like mosaics, "in little splotches of color" (as Pound described the genesis of the "Metro" poem), arise from a place that hides its identity as an Image, a place that is no place: the crypt.

[. . . .]

One discovers in Pound's "Metro" poem (the most famous of all Imagist poems) a striking illustration of the principle of sublimation informing the Image. In his "Vorticism" essay, published in the Fort nightly Review in September 1914, Pound offers his readers a detailed account of the origins and compositional history of the "Metro" poem, as an exposition of Imagism in practice. He dates the genesis of the poem to a moment three years prior to the writing of the "Vorticism" essay, which would be 1911—the same year he wrote "Silet," the opening poem of Ripostes. Following what Pound calls "the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion" ( GB 89 ), he writes a series of drafts of the poem, each more condensed than the previous one. By eliminating what he calls material of "second intensity," Pound shrinks the poem from thirty lines to a single sentence. Clearly this process, whose principles Pound formulates during the "impasse" between 1911 and 1913, represents the essential negativity of the Image—that is, the regime of elimination and prohibition that I have described as fundamental to the "objectivity" of Imagist poetics.

The sublime aspect of the Image derives from its irrepressible "substance"; indeed, the negative practice of Imagism serves not to eliminate but to preserve the "life" of the crypt: its elegiac feeling, its eroticism, its fatality. The remains of language—the Image—render the volatile materiality of the crypt; the ascetic mode of the Image draws attention to the body by making it disappear. Though Pound presents the "Metro" poem as a paradigm of modernist practice, its reference to an apparitional event in an underground "station" quite obviously links it, as I indicated in the previous chapter, to the Decadent properties of Pound's crypt poetry. Indeed, the archaic dimension of the "Metro" poem is more pronounced than Pound suggests. He dates the origin of the poem to 1911, without indicating any possible precedent in his earlier published poetry. K. K. Ruthven has demonstrated, however, that the specific "image" of the "Metro" poem derives from a very early poem of Pound's, "Laudantes Decem Pulchritudinis Johannae Templi," published in Exultations (1909). One section of the poem, addressed to "my beloved of the peach trees," describes "the vision of the blossom":

the perfect faces which I see at times

When my eyes are closed—

Faces fragile, pale, yet flushed a little,

like petals of roses:

these things have confused my memories of her. ( CEP 119 )

The essential features of this vision" survive intact in the "Metro" poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals, on a wet, black bough. ( GB 89)

It is essential to emphasize that the original "vision" occurs with eyes closed, and that the visuality of the Imagist poem must therefore be described as highly ambiguous, if not dependent on a kind of blindness.

By 1913 (if not from the outset) the "vision of the blossom" becomes associated in Pound's mind with Japanese poetry (haiku). Indeed, the "vision of the blossom " continues to circulate in his work in a manner that eventually discloses its specifically archaic, or nostalgic, dimension. An early manuscript of Canto 4, composed in 1918, contains the following lines: "the thousand-year peach trees shed their flakes / into the stream, out of a former time." These lines suggest that the apparitional petals of the "Metro" poem should be viewed as drifting "out of a former time," as ghosts. The "peach trees in magical blossom" appear in yet another context, in Pound's essay on Remy de Gourmont, published in March 1919: "I do not think it possible to overemphasize Gourmont's sense of beauty . . . His pays natal was near to the peach-blossom fountain of the untranslatable poem" (L 343). The "vision of the blossom," which we now understand to be an apparition of the dead, is described here by Pound as "an untranslatable poem." Indeed, we could argue that the "pays natal" of the modernist Image is an "untranslatable poem"—a poem encrypted in the Image, a vision preserved and concealed by the negative praxis of Imagism. Yet the phantasmic "substance" of the "Metro" poem differs not at all from its antecedent, its forgotten ancestry, in Exultations. Thus, the "Metro" poem emerges as the nucleus of a constellation of apparitional poems spanning the entire Imagist period, from 1909 to 1919.

The figure of the crypt mediates the divergent symbolic economies that lay claim to the modernist Image. On the one hand, the crypt is the symbolic site of modern literary positivism, and the Image is what lies within the crypt: corpse, fact, word-thing, symptom. The irreducible materiality of the Image, in this case, poses a challenge to the hermeneutical concept of meaning itself, which is based on a distinction between surface and depth, the manifest and the latent, history and divination. Yet the Image, like the figure of the crypt, harbors figurative debts to this hermeneutical model, and must therefore also be understood as reviving the phantom of meaning from the dead letter of the crypt. That is, the Image, as an emblem of hermeneutical understanding, is not an inscrutable yet all-too-obvious "thing" in the crypt, but the crypt itself and its spiritual "content."

From Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. [Note: This little collage of passages is meant only to suggest the outlines of a more complex argument detailed in Tiffany's book.]

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Paula Bennett: On 465 ("I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--")
Like many people in her period, Dickinson was fascinated by death-bed scenes. How, she asked various correspondents, did this or that person die? In particular, she wanted to know if their deaths revealed any information about the nature of the afterlife. In this poem, however, she imagines her own death-bed scene, and the answer she provides is grim, as grim (and, at the same time, as ironically mocking), as anything she ever wrote.

In the narrowing focus of death, the fly's insignificant buzz, magnified tenfold by the stillness in the room, is all that the speaker hears. This kind of distortion in scale is common. It is one of the 'illusions' of perception. But here it is horrifying because it defeats every expectation we have. Death is supposed to be an experience of awe. It is the moment when the soul, departing the body, is taken up by God. Hence the watchers at the bedside wait for the moment when the 'King' (whether God or death) 'be witnessed' in the room. And hence the speaker assigns away everything but that which she expects God (her soul) or death (her body) to take.

What arrives instead, however, is neither God nor death but a fly, '[w]ith Blue—uncertain--stumbling Buzz,' a fly, that is, no more secure, no more sure, than we are. Dickinson had associated flies with death once before in the exquisite lament, 'How many times these low feet/staggered.' In this poem, they buzz 'on the/ chamber window,' and speckle it with dirt (# 187, F, 152), reminding us that the housewife, who once protected us from such intrusions, will protect us no longer. Their presence is threatening but only in a minor way, 'dull' like themselves. They are a background noise we do not have to deal with yet.

In 'I heard a Fly buzz,' on the other hand, there is only one fly and its buzz is not only foregrounded. Before the poem is over, the buzz takes up the entire field of perception, coming between the speaker and the 'light' (of day, of life, of knowledge). It is then that the 'Windows' (the eyes that are the windows of the soul as well as, metonymically, the light that passes through the panes of glass) 'fail' and the speaker is left in darkness--in death, in ignorance. She cannot 'see' to 'see' (understand).

Given that the only sure thing we know about 'life after death' is that flies--in their adult form and more particularly, as maggots--devour us, the poem is at the very least a grim joke. In projecting her death-bed scene, Dickinson confronts her ignorance and gives back the only answer human knowledge can with any certainty give. While we may hope for an afterlife, no one, not even the dying, can prove it exists.

Like 'Four Trees--upon a solitary/Acre, ' 'I heard a Fly buzz' represents an extreme position. I believe that to Dickinson it was a position that reduced human life to too elementary and meaningless a level. Abdicating belief, cutting off God's hand, as in 'I heard a Fly buzz' (a poem that tests precisely this situation), leaves us with nothing. Not just God, but we ourselves are reduced--a fact that has become painfully evident in twentieth-century literature. . . .

From Emily Dickinson, Woman Poet. Copyright © 1990 by Paulk Bennett. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Caroline Rogue: On 465 ("I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--")
Emily Dickinson's "I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died" should be read, I think, with a particular setting in mind—a nineteenth-century deathbed scene. Before the age of powerful anodynes death was met in full consciousness, and the way of meeting it tended to be stereotype. It was affected with a public interest and concern, and was witnessed by family and friends. They crowded the death chamber to wait expectantly a burst of dying energy to bring on the grand act of passing. Commonly it began with last-minute bequests, the wayward were called to repentance, the backslider to reform, gospel hymns were sung, and finally as climax the dying one gave witness in words to the Redeemer's presence in the room, how He hovered, transplendent in the upper air, with open arms outstretched to receive the departing soul. This was death's great moment. Variants there were, of course, in case of repentant and unrepentant sinners. Here in this poem the central figure of the drama is expected to make a glorious exit. The build-up is just right for it, but at the moment of climax "There interposed a fly." And what kind of a fly? A fly "with blue, uncertain stumbling buzz"—a blowfly.

How right is Mr. Gerhard Friedrich in his explication . . . to associate the fly with putrefaction and decay. And how wrong, I think, is Mr. John Ciardi . . . in calling the fly "the last kiss of the world," and speaking of it as one of the small creatures Emily Dickinson so delighted in. She could not possibly have entertained any such view of a blowfly. She was a practical housewife, and every housewife abhors a blowfly. It pollutes everything it touches. Its eggs are maggots. It is as carrion as a buzzard.

What we know of Emily Dickinson gives us assurance that just as she would abhor the blowfly she would abhor the deathbed scene. How devastatingly she disposes of the projected one in the poem. "They talk of hallowed things and embarrass my dog" she writes in 1862 in a letter to Mr. Higginson (Letters, 1958, II, 415).

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Thomas H. Johnson: On 258 ("There's a certain Slant of light")
[Emily Dickinson's] dread of winter [is] expressed in one of her remarkable verses, written about 1861 [,"There's a certain Slant of light"]. It is, like the somewhat later "Further in Summer than the Birds," an attempt to give permanence through her art to the impermanent; to catch that fleeting moment of anxiety which, having passed, leaves the beholder changed. Such moods she could catch most readily in the changing seasons themselves. . . . /89/ Winter to her is at moments intolerably dreary, and she here re-creates the actual emotion implicit in the Persephone-Pluto myth. Will spring never come? Sometimes, winter afternoons, she perceives an atmospheric quality of light that is intensely oppressive. The colloquial expression "heft" is especially appropriate in suggesting a heavy weight, which she associates with the weight of great bells or the heavy sound that great bells create. This might be the depressing chill and quiet preceding a snowfall. Whatever it is, it puts the seal on wintriness. Coming as it does from heavens, it is an imperial affliction to be endured ("None may teach it—Any"). Even the landscape itself is depressed. When it leaves, she fe....................
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much more at link given...--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/8-reasons-why-poetry-is-good-for-the-soul


8 Reasons Why Poetry Is Good for the Soul
By: Robert Lee Brewer | June 16, 2016

Here’s a guest post from KM Barkley, a writing coach and editor from Lexington, Kentucky, in which he shares his eight reasons why poetry is good for the soul. If you have an idea for a guest post too, just send an e-mail to robert.brewer@fwcommunity.com with the subject line: Poetic Asides Guest Post.

*****

The Digital Age is booming. That means attentions are shrinking and focus is altering. With 140-character communication on Twitter, picture and visual postings on Pinterest, and classrooms shying away from difficult material in favor of easy reading and easy grades, poetry has become one of the most underutilized, and underestimated, mediums in modern culture.

I think Phyllis Klein from Women’s Therapy Services said it best: “Turning to poetry, poetry gives rhythm to silence, light to darkness. In poetry we find the magic of metaphor, compactness of expression, use of the five senses, and simplicity or complexity of meaning in a few lines.”

**********

1. POETRY IS GOOD FOR DEVELOPMENTAL LEARNING
In child education, children’s verbal and written skills are somewhat underdeveloped. Poetry helps by teaching in rhythm, stringing words together with a beat helps cognitive understanding of words and where they fit. Additionally, it teaches children the art of creative expression, which most found highly lacking in the new-age educational landscape. In essence, poetry gives them a great tool for developing one’s self.

2. POETRY IS GOOD FOR DEVELOPING SKILLS
Writing, speaking, and understanding can all be greatly influenced and nurtured by the use of poetry. Learning rules for writing, and then breaking them with poetry, can give writing alternative beauty. Speaking poetry aloud with its beat, rhythm, and rhyme can loosen the tongue and craft a firm foundation for verbal communication. Learning to understand poetry also gives the mental fortitude, as well as the drive, to understand written communication (an invaluable trait in business, from my perspective).

3. POETRY HELPS IMPROVE IDEAS
Have you ever sat there and not known what to write? Picking up poetry, reading through different excerpts from classic poets can blossom ideas you never knew existed. Reading and writing poetry makes you think of new ideas, but can also dramatically change the way you perceived old ones. It is a way to process experiences, visual descriptions, and emotions.

4. POETRY IS THERAPEUTIC FOR THE WRITER
Biblio/Poetry Therapy is a creative arts therapy using the written word to understand, and then communicate, feelings and thoughts. Poetry is typically short, but largely emotional. Writers get in touch with sentiments they might not have known they had until it was down on paper. Depression and anxiety are among the top two mental illnesses being treated with Biblio-therapy, and through poetry, one can start to understand the hindrances and blocks being formed around their mind. Expressing how one feels is difficult. I’ve found that poetry is one of the best outlets.

5. POETRY IS THERAPEUTIC FOR THE READER
For those who have a harder time expressing themselves, reading poetry can have a similar positive effect as writing it. Reading poetry allows one to see into the soul of another person, see what is weighing on their minds and on their hearts, and can open doors to feelings that are sometimes suppressed until that door is opened. Reading can shine a light on all those dark and hidden crevices of the heart and mind once thought permanently closed off to the world.

**********

6. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS THEMSELVES
By design, poetry is broken into short, but strategic sentences. By doing so, writing and reading poetry makes one understand the significance of every single word and their placement. Sometimes, without a single word, it can change the entire rhythm and meaning of the poem itself. Writing poetry forces the person to consider, and reconsider, each piece and length of their verses. In poetry, words are magic, moods, depth, and difficult. One gains the utmost appreciation for them when handling delicate sentence structures provided in poetry pieces.

7. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND PEOPLE
One of the hardships of the current age is the ability to understand one another. Miscommunication and misunderstandings lead to mass amounts of frustration. Reading and writing poetry actually gives people the improved ability to understand others. From a writer’s prospective, you have to be able to convey the true nature of your writing to an unknown reader. That means diving deep into what parts you want them to understand, what you want them to feel, and what to take home with them that will resonate long after reading. For a reader of poetry, it gives you the patience to look into someone else’s mind and cultivate empathy for another person. Both conveying personal opinion and the ability to empathize are tantamount to respectable communication.

8. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND YOURSELF
Ever felt out of place? Have you ever wondered why you are thinking or feeling a certain way? Ever been frustrated because your friends or partners couldn’t ever possibly understand you because you don’t even understand what is going through your head? I have found that the best way to grasp internal turmoil is to write poetry. It slows the world down around you. It streamlines your thoughts to short, direct sentences, while soothing the anxiety out of your body with the lyrical style. It makes you think. It puts a spotlight on what the issues might be and forces you to logically and methodically answer to it. Poetry can give you insights into yourself that you never knew existed but always wanted to understand. There is no greater sadness than not knowing one’s self-worth, but there is no greater power than complete understanding of one’s identity. Poetry can give you that power.

*****

KM Barkley
KM Barkley

KM Barkley is a writing coach and editor from Lexington, KY. He has written articles for professional corporate HR training and has edited novels as well as scripts and screenplays for The Art Institute of Houston. He is an active member of Writer’s Digest and The Warrior Forum.

Barkley launched http://WriterIntellect.us – a hub for writing tips for Aspiring Authors, Bloggers, and Corporate HR Business.

Find him on Twitter @writeBarkley

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/04/16/why-its-important-teach-poetry-schools

Well Versed: Why Teaching Poetry Matters
In this era of short attention spans and 40-word tweets, poetry may be the ideal vehicle for enticing students to learn.


APR 19, 2014· 3 MIN READ Suzi Parker is a regular contributor to TakePart. Her work also appears in The Christian Science Monitor and Reuters.
Bio

In classrooms across the country, Emily Southerton witnesses the magic of poetry and its ability to transform kids.

As Teach for America’s digital initiative specialist, Southerton is part of the organization’s Poet Warriors Project, a nationwide program that helps kids write and publish poetry on tough issues they face, such as poverty, gangs, and peer pressure. The idea is to generate positive changes in their lives. More than 50 classrooms around the country, and more than 2,500 students, have written for it.
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“Poetry ignites students to think about what it’s like to share their opinion, be heard, and make a difference in their world,” Southerton said. “Students can let go of traditional writing rules with poetry. I tell the kids the most important thing about poetry is that people feel differently after reading it.”

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Want Kids to Embrace Books? Tell Them to Read to a Dog
For centuries, poetry has enlightened students in classrooms and, yes, occasionally bored them to tears. In 1996, the Academy of American Poets inaugurated National Poetry Month; it's held in April, “when schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets throughout the United States band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture,” according to its website.

Literature teacher Andrew Simmons lamented, in a recent story for The Atlantic, that many schools no longer teach poetry and that it often gets a bad rap for being boring. He wrote: “In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.”

Simmons, however, said that teachers shouldn’t shy away from poetry because it can help students become more versed in writing and literature. He’s not alone. Throughout the country, teachers and academics say that poetry should be a curriculum priority in English classes.

“Writing poetry remains one of the best tools we have for knowing what we think and what we really feel,” said Anna Marie Hong, a published poet and a visiting writer at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. “Writing provides a way for us to process experience, which is often difficult for young adults, to understand it better, to connect our lives with the experiences of others, and to change events through this new understanding.”

Schools and programs are striving to expose students in every grade to poetry and not just during the month of April.

In New York, P.S. 163, a public school in the Bronx, launched a haiku program last fall for second graders that brought to life the haiku of Sydell Rosenberg, a public school teacher, an ESL teacher, and a published American haiku poet who lived in New York City before her death in 1996. The haiku program, which continued this spring, was led by Arts for All, a nonprofit in New York City that offers accessible artistic opportunities to inner-city children who face socioeconomic, physical, or emotional barriers to exploring the arts.

Resident artist Vidho Lorville led six visual arts workshops that used Rosenberg’s haiku as a teaching tool. The students painted landscapes inspired by the short poems. Students drew and colored animals that were mentioned in the haiku and then put them on scenic backgrounds. The children were taught that they should see haiku and poetry everywhere and then turn those moments into poetry by writing down their thoughts and creating art.
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“I am neither a teacher nor a poet, but I think children need poetry in their lives—poetic language that engages them…words that can open up worlds and help them not just to ‘see’ and to imagine in a heightened way but to interpret what they see artistically,” Amy Losak, Rosenberg’s daughter, says. “Every observation, no matter how seemingly mundane or ‘small,’ can be turned into a haiku poem, and the images conjured or captured in haiku can be ‘translated’ into a highly personal piece of art. The art the kids create brings the words to tangible life.”

The Poet Warriors Project gives students from low-income neighborhoods an outlet through which their voices can be heard about the issues that affect them.

“Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for their communities and wrote for the purpose of the nation hearing about their communities,” Southerton says. “Not just for the joys of writing, but they had the drive to change the national dialogue. They try to imitate that and try to speak for their communities honestly.”

The project’s website publishes poems by students, including many in ESL classes; it also offers National Poetry Month activities and a year-round curriculum for teachers.

In this era of short attention spans and 40-word tweets, poetry may very well be the ideal vehicle for enticing students to learn.

“The fact is that poems are short to read, and that makes it less intimidating to read and write one,” Southerton says. “The shortness is something that students really, really connect to. We’ve had an overwhelming positive response. So many students have said they feel like a writer and also see what their purpose is in life. They say, ‘I am a person who has something to say to the world.’ ”

This article was created as part of the social action campaign for the documentary TEACH, produced by TakePart's parent company, Participant Media, in partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/importance-poetry

Odyssey

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ARTS ENTERTAINMENT
The Importance Of Poetry
by Adeline Fecker University of Oregon Oct 10, 2016
Quote fancy

Poetry is an art form that has survived for thousands and thousands of years. We study it in school and we hear quotes from poems scattered thorughout our life. But do we ever truly make meaning of it? Does it even matter? My answer to you is yes it does. Reading poetry and or writing poetry can drastically improve your life, because it has improved mine. In this article I will attempt to articulate why poetry is important to read an

Reading Poetry

Poetry is one of the most powerful forms of writing because it takes the english language, a language we believe we know, and transforms it. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. The pattern of the sentences sound new and melodious. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. No poem can be read in the same way, because the words mean something different to each of us. For this reason, many find poetry and elusive art form. However, the issue in understanding poetry lies in how you read poetry. Reading it logically results in an overall comprehension, rigid and unchanging. However, reading it emotionally allows the nuances and paradoxes to enter our understanding. Anyone who writes poetry can attest, you have to write it with an open heart. So as a reader, we must do the same. All poems are insights into the most intimate inner workings of the writer's mind and soul. To read it coldly and rationally would be shutting the door on the relationship that the writer is attempting to forge with you. Opening your heart to poetry is the only way to get fulfillment fr

If you imagine poetry as a journey, you must be willing to trust the writer to guide you. Unwilling readers will never experience every part of the adventure in the same way open minded readers do. The journey may be filled with dead ends and suffering or endless joy and happiness. And still, you go. You pick up the poem, you read, you listen, and you feel.


In our culture we are experiencing a crisis where American people are the unhappiest people in the world statistically. How do we solve this? I answer: Mindfullness, gratitude, and poetry.

Writing Poetry

From a writer’s perspective, writing poetry can be equally elusive as reading poetry. When I first started writing poetry, the advice I always heard was practice, find your voice, keep a journal. I did all these things but still my poems were flat and inert. What was I missing? I poured over poems by Angelou, Shakespeare, Austen, and Wilde looking for a pattern, something I could emulate. This was the problem. I was unwilling to open my heart. I thought poetry could be a mask I could craft. But no matter how beautiful I made it, it would never come to life. It would never fit on another person’s face. It did not eve fit on mine.

My first poem that came alive was written in the dark late at night. I was lying in bed and I felt something stifling me. I could not sleep. I let the thoughts stew in my head until they could not remain locked away forever. I reached for my journal and I wrote.

Vulnerability was the key. Poetry is about expressing those thoughts and feelings we keep the most suppressed. We must be honest with ourselves about what we feel in order to write anything worth reading. It’s stopping and grabbing a thought by the tail and pulling it up into our conscious mind. It’s trying to express the beauty, and wonder we see. It’s about connecting our hearts and our minds to ourselves and our surroundings. It’s about finding peace.

Poetry is perhaps a more effective stress relief than working out or meditating because it forces you to express your feelings through words, which helps you not only understand your feelings but also communicate them more effectively. Furthermore, it is a skill that will remain in use for your entire life no matter what you end up doing professionally.

So reach for the pen, and let go of those things that have been burdening your freedom. Read poetry with your heart and let it affect you. The answer to our questions about the meaning of life, and the purpose of pain were written in poems. They have always been there.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.vqronline.org/poetry/free-verse-killing-poetry?page=1


Is Free Verse Killing Poetry?
By William Childress
PUBLISHED: September 4, 2012
William Childress

Editor’s note: After VQR’s Spring 2012 issue released, I received an e-mail response to Willard Spiegelman’s essay, “Has Poetry Changed?” from former National Geographic photojournalist and published poet William Childress. I asked him to elaborate further on that commentary, to which he sent the following.

–––

When Willard Spiegelman, noted scholar, critic, and editor of Southwest Review,wrote a penetrating essay in the Spring 2012 Virginia Quarterly Review, “Has Poetry Changed?”, I wanted to reply, “Not fast enough to suit me!” However, the change I wanted was to step back a century and start re-assessing rhymed and metrical poetry.

Free verse has now ruled the poetry roost for ten decades, and its record for memorable poetry is spotty. Catching on around 1912 when Harriet Monroe was starting Poetry,the apparent writing ease of vers libreattracted millions of poetasters, not to mention the support of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and other important poets. No more struggling to find le mot juste,or create original images.Just sit down and write.

As you may have guessed, I’m a formalist, but I’ve written and published a lot of free verse—mainly because of editorial bias against form poetry. In the hands of the right poet, which is true of any form, vers librecan shine—but we’ve had a steady diet of it for way too long. We are, unofficially at least, a one-poetry nation, and various editors, publishers and hidden agenda-ites seem determined to keep us there. As David Orr points out in Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry,“There is complete avoidance and disdain for the kinds of poetry pre-Baby Boomers were raised on.”

Well, I’m a pre-Baby Boomer, and I think such favoritism is stupid, petty, and demeaning to poetry. Form poetry is the kind of poetry a third of living Americans grew up with. A nation that discards its traditions and history is a nation without pride in itself. When I was a youth in the 1940s, most poetry was gentler and more pleasant in tone, but powerful in effect. As a migrant worker and the son of a sharecropper, my schooling was sporadic and interrupted. But somewhere I came across a poem by John Crowe Ransom, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.” The way he used words to paint pictures was so powerful, it was like a stonecutter engraving them in my memory.

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud,
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas …

A few years after reading the lyrical beauty of a poem that could make me feel good, even about death, came Howl,Allen Ginsberg’s nihilistic free verse oral diarrhea—and suddenly the world was supposedly singing the praises of Ginsberg’s drug-poisoned pals, who

let themselves be fucked in the ass
by saintly motorcyclists
and screamed with joy
who blew and were blown by those human seraphims, the sailors

Howlin’ Allen has the right to describe the rotting sowbelly of life, but I have the right to say it’s pointless, and as far from real poetry as shit is from Chanel #5. Beat poetry went far toward making ordinary Americans see poets as drug-crazed society-wreckers who wrote only for themselves. By definition, that makes them elitists.

I researched a large stack of Beat poetry magazines from the 1970s and 1980s for this post, ranging from Doug Blazek’s Olé Anthology to Kumquat 3 and E.V. Griffith’s highly touted Hearse (“A Vehicle for Conveying the Dead”). Not only were 95 percent of the poems free verse, many of them hewed to a core of societal destruction that in another era would sound like fascism. It was an argument for too much freedom encouraging anarchy. Vitriol was plentiful, but ways to improve things were not.

A blind person can see that American society is in turmoil, with a fractured government and enormous debt. Both political parties are to blame—but shouldn’t poets be trying to change things instead of writing chaos-poetry or “woe is me” diaries? Who will read poetry when they can’t find a common bond in a poet’s writing? Who likes ruptured grammar, twisted syntax and what my grandpa called flapdoodle? There’s at least a partial consensus that free verse these days consists of a lot of badwriting. I forget who said, “Poets should learn to write before they try to write poetry.” Many of today’s poets don’t seem to realize that all writing is connected.

Here’s another example of free verse:

Clench-Watch:
Fear-spores in-coil taut
(and calm) as copper-snakes
or-springs—before they cause.

From the sweeping grandeur of The Iliad and The Odyssey to this unfinished fragment in less than 3,000 years. God bless progress. This techie poem is tighter than post-Preparation-H hemorrhoids, but is it poetry, or what we called, back in the day, doodling? It was written by a pleasant-faced young man named Atsuro Riley, and is being hailed as a breakthrough for free verse. Breakthrough to what? This is the amazing shrinking poem. Soon we’ll be gone. Can modern poets be poeticidal?

I agreed with Spiegelman in several areas. Like him, I don’t read much modern poetry. Of today’s writing students he said, not unkindly, “Only a small percentage can satisfy the technical prosodic demands and also write a syntactically accurate English sentence.” And they want to be poets? Free verse must be sending students a message that form poetry does not: beginning poets don’t need “syntactically accurate sentences” to write free verse.

At 80, I won’t spend time trying to fathom the Rubik’s Cube verse of Atsuro Riley, although I wish him well. His poetry just doesn’t move me, and movements are important to octogenarians. I’d rather read Lewis Carroll than Atsuro Riley.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that snatch,
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious bandersnatch!

***

In 2006 John Barr, head of the Poetry Foundation, wrote: “American poetry is ready for something new, because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue and stagnation about the poetry being written today.”

Who determines what’s poetry and what’s not? Who are the grand taste-makers? I have always heard, and understood, that poetry has no definition—an argument that goes back to at least the 17th century. If true, how is it that critics, reviewers, and bureaucracies can give awards, prizes, and accolades to certain poets and poetry? How do they define the best of an indefinable art? And why do the rest of us sheep go along with it?

How about something old, Mr. Barr, instead of something new? Really good poems, like wine, improve with age. But free versers have welded shut the doors to the past. Where once we recited favorite poems (always rhymed), or had them taught in school, we now ignore the orphan art in droves. We’re trying everything but free coupons, and the results are a combination circus (slam poetry) and coldly mechanical poems that verify the nature of our earplug-wearing, neighborless, push-button society. Where are the sabot throwers when we need them?

Poet Dana Gioia wrote in his 1992 essay “Can Poetry Matter?”:

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. Like priests in a town of agnostics they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists, they are almost invisible.

Not only a telling comment 20 years ago, but an accurate prophecy of our current malaise. Poets should also be aware of a report from the University of Florida at Gainesville, which followed MFA graduates for a decade. Only ten percent landed writing or editing jobs. The rest found jobs in real estate, insurance, or McDonald’s. Memphis State University’s Thomas Russell wrote, “Ninety percent of the MFA students are never going to publish a word after they leave the program.”

Poetry needs readers, not writers, but how many poets read any poetry but their own? As one editor said, “All poets should stop writing for a year.” When I was studying poetry in Philip Levine’s class in 1962, he made a point of telling us, “Poetry is the most useless art.”

Yet poetry has been discovered by commerce. The dean of American verse magazines, Poetry, turned 100 in 2012, and is trying to avert a poetryless future. In 2003, it received a $200 million dollar bequest from Ruth Lilly, and has become a kind of Sears Roebuck for poets and readers. That’s fine with me. I grew up with Sears Roebuck, and not just in our outhouse. Christian Wiman’s inking of all kinds of poetry means there’s now something for everyone. The fact that Wiman’s editorship has increased Poetry’s readers from 11,000 to 30,000 is a hopeful sign. He also says poets should be well-grounded in form poetry before leaping into vers libre. Even that ol’ fascist Ezra Pound announced: “Poetry should be at least as well-written as prose.”

When Germaine Greer declared, “Art is anything an artist calls art,” she probably didn’t mean Thomas Kinkade, who painted for more plebian tastes and died very rich. The gulf between what is and is not art has been debated forever—the blind leading the blind into a kind of elitism. If no definition exists, why are critics, reviewers and the American Academy of Poets tripping over each other to laud the hottest vers libre poet in years? Perhaps I’m unkind—but everyone else is so laudatory, I felt that at least one ordinary mortal should challenge the gods.

What goals do modern poets have? At least during the Viet Nam War, poets wrote antiwar poems and marched. I was among the 225,000 anti-Viet Nam War marchers in 1969, when Nixon watched football in a White House surrounded by a protective ring of buses. A former student of mine, Danae Walczak, contacted me not long ago to remember that march. Why have there been no major demonstrations against Afghanistan, when our government can’t even say why we’re there? As a Korean War veteran in the Washington march, my goal was to get our guys home. In August 2012, a young marine, murdered by one of our “Afghan allies” did come home—in a casket. The turnout for his funeral was enormous, with hundreds lining highways and bridges. How many poets will be concerned enough to write poems? Or will they be too busy entering contests and seeking easy recognition?

I’m not advocating control of vers libre, which has been around since the Book of Kings,just that its adherents stop stifling rhyme and meter poems. If poetry is to survive, it needs to use everything in its armory, especially metrical rhymed poems—serious, humorous, nonsensical, satirical, even insult poems. Variety, as Christian Wyman found, is the spice of life, and it’s absurd to think that vers libre should be the only form American poetry should take. No wonder John Barr found stagnation in American poetry. So loosen up, vers librists, and ask formalists to join you. Poetry needs all the help it can get. Or can’t you write good rhymed and metrical poems? Walt Whitman couldn’t.

************************************************** ****


I’m not advocating control of vers libre, which has been around since the Book of Kings,just that its adherents stop stifling rhyme and meter poems. If poetry is to survive, it needs to use everything in its armory, especially metrical rhymed poems—serious, humorous, nonsensical, satirical, even insult poems. Variety, as Christian Wyman found, is the spice of life, and it’s absurd to think that vers libre should be the only form American poetry should take. No wonder John Barr found stagnation in American poetry. So loosen up, vers librists, and ask formalists to join you. Poetry needs all the help it can get. Or can’t you write good rhymed and metrical poems? Walt Whitman couldn’t.

This snippet is pretty much my take on modern poetry. And yes I have written free verse myself and see some merit in it when it is done well, with heart, depth and a message within. Which seems about 95% of today's free verse, lacks entire entirely, or lacks at least enough to make it a sad excuse for poetry, IMHO..
Chaotic ramblings do not real/true poetry make..
Great rhyming, depth , message and at least some clarity does.
Or isn't the reader supposed to understand or get some benefit from reading it?
Majority of free verse seems to be written by the poet/author as if its reminder note themselves about themselves and others be damned if they dont see it or agree with it as magnificent writing!! .-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/why-teaching-poetry-is-so-important/360346/


Why Teaching Poetry Is So Important
The oft-neglected literary form can help students learn in ways that prose can't.

ANDREW SIMMONS
APR 8, 2014

Poetry is far more than Dead Poets Society .
16 years after enjoying a high school literary education rich in poetry, I am a literature teacher who barely teaches it. So far this year, my 12th grade literature students have read nearly 200,000 words for my class. Poems have accounted for no more than 100.

This is a shame—not just because poetry is important to teach, but also because poetry is important for the teaching of writing and reading.


High school poetry suffers from an image problem. Think of Dead Poet’s Society's scenes of red-cheeked lads standing on desks and reciting verse, or of dowdy Dickinson imitators mooning on park benches, filling up journals with noxious chapbook fodder. There’s also the tired lessons about iambic pentameter and teachers wringing interpretations from cryptic stanzas, their students bewildered and chuckling. Reading poetry is impractical, even frivolous. High school poets are antisocial and effete.

I have always rejected these clichéd mischaracterizations born of ignorance, bad movies, and uninspired teaching. Yet I haven’t been stirred to fill my lessons with Pound and Eliot as my 11th grade teacher did. I loved poetry in high school. I wrote it. I read it. Today, I slip scripture into an analysis of The Day of the Locust. A Nikki Giovanni piece appears in The Bluest Eye unit. Poetry has become an afterthought, a supplement, not something to study on its own.

In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.

Yet poetry enables teachers to teach their students how to write, read, and understand any text. Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions. Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.

Students who don’t like writing essays may like poetry, with its dearth of fixed rules and its kinship with rap. For these students, poetry can become a gateway to other forms of writing. It can help teach skills that come in handy with other kinds of writing—like precise, economical diction, for example. When Carl Sandburg writes, “The fog comes/on little cat feet,” in just six words, he endows a natural phenomenon with character, a pace, and a spirit. All forms of writing benefits from the powerful and concise phrases found in poems.

I have used cut-up poetry (a variation on the sort “popularized” by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) to teach 9th grade students, most of whom learned English as a second language, about grammar and literary devices. They made collages after slicing up dozens of “sources,” identifying the adjectives and adverbs, utilizing parallel structure, alliteration, assonance, and other figures of speech. Short poems make a complete textual analysis more manageable for English language learners. When teaching students to read and evaluate every single word of a text, it makes sense to demonstrate the practice with a brief poem—like Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.”

Students can learn how to utilize grammar in their own writing by studying how poets do—and do not—abide by traditional writing rules in their work. Poetry can teach writing and grammar conventions by showing what happens when poets strip them away or pervert them for effect. Dickinson often capitalizes common nouns and uses dashes instead of commas to note sudden shifts in focus. Agee uses colons to create dramatic, speech-like pauses. Cummings of course rebels completely. He usually eschews capitalization in his proto-text message poetry, wrapping frequent asides in parentheses and leaving last lines dangling on their pages, period-less. In “next to of course god america i,” Cummings strings together, in the first 13 lines, a cavalcade of jingoistic catch-phrases a politician might utter, and the lack of punctuation slowing down and organizing the assault accentuates their unintelligibility and banality and heightens the satire. The abuse of conventions helps make the point. In class, it can help a teacher explain the exhausting effect of run-on sentences—or illustrate how clichés weaken an argument.



Yet, despite all of the benefits poetry brings to the classroom, I have been hesitant to use poems as a mere tool for teaching grammar conventions. Even the in-class disembowelment of a poem’s meaning can diminish the personal, even transcendent, experience of reading a poem. Billy Collins characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” he writes: “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”

The point of reading a poem is not to try to “solve” it. Still, that quantifiable process of demystification is precisely what teachers are encouraged to teach students, often in lieu of curating a powerful experience through literature. The literature itself becomes secondary, boiled down to its Cliff’s Notes demi-glace. I haven’t wanted to risk that with the poems that enchanted me in my youth.

Teachers should produce literature lovers as well as keen critics, striking a balance between teaching writing, grammar, and analytical strategies and then also helping students to see that literature should be mystifying. It should resist easy interpretation and beg for return visits. Poetry serves this purpose perfectly. I am confident my 12th graders know how to write essays. I know they can mine a text for subtle messages. But I worry sometimes if they’ve learned this lesson. In May, a month before they graduate, I may read some poetry with my seniors—to drive home that and nothing more.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://businessinrhyme.com/2016/05/15/writing-poetry-takes-courage-and-a-dash-of-craziness-and-how-is-that-good-for-you-as-a-writer/

Writing-Poetry-Takes-Courage


BUSINESS IN RHYME
THE POET’S MANIFESTO


E.E. Cummings
Writing poetry takes courage and a dash of craziness (and how is that good for you, as a writer)

May 15, 2016 by maja todorovic,
posted in business in rhyme, write, create, innovate!, writer's creative bites
e.e. cummings

Confronting blank page takes courage? It might sound silly to many, but if you are a writer, especially a poet, you probably know what I mean:

It takes courage to spend time with yourself and dig deep, to the darkest and scariest parts of yourself and let them shine through your poems.

Only very few are brave enough to go somewhere place quiet, shut down the noise of the outer world and start listen to themselves; to hear who they truly are, and with open heart receive what ever they encounter. All experiences full of disappointments, grief, hurts, desires and happiness live and expand in each of these verses that we can read in the poems of those brave enough to write about their feelings. And they give us opportunity to live them also.

It takes courage to accept who you are and be honest about it.

Poetry is so personal on the one hand and universal on the other, that you simply can’t fake it. In every poem, your writing is like stripping your soul to the bare bones, where you become even more vulnerable. But that doesn’t make you anything more weak – that brevity adds up to your uniqueness that world is hungry for.

It takes courage to write, despite all the negative connotation that majority of people hold against poetry and simply not to care.

Some people simply don’t like poetry. There maybe many reasons for that. But also, there are not very supportive of those who does enjoy writing poetry. And it takes courage to continue to write and share our thoughts, no matter the impressions. I love what Jesse Graves, an assistant professor of English at East Tennessee State University said on the topic in this article:

For me, poetry expresses more about what it is like to be alive in the world today than any other art form. For a poem to work, it needs to address matters of the heart and of the head in almost equal measure. Since there is no interference between the reader and the text, poetry can deal with emotions in an intellectual way, and deal with abstractions in a way that evokes feelings.

It does take courage to try writing poems, especially if you are going to share them with others. Students also have to be willing to enter an unknown territory, even if I give them an assignment to write about, or a form, like a sonnet, they still have to find their own way into the subject matter. There is no real blueprint for how to write a poem..

It takes courage to write poetry and constantly juggle between loving and hating your own writing.

There are days when writing for you is like breathing – that without it you simply couldn’t live. But there are also days when you are unsatisfied with anything you write and you simply need a break. And that’s completely O.K. Actually that distancing yourself from writing can reignite your passion and it takes courage to do that also.

And someone might just call you crazy because you see world a bit differently: you see the joy in the heavy autumn storm, the warmth in the cold winter day or beauty in your teared bag and spilled groceries on the street. For me personally, writing poetry brings the opportunity to see and embrace life’s little imperfections in humble, and sometimes humorous way: instead of dwelling on how everything is wrong and complain – just to accept it, make the best of what I can in given situation and write a great poem about it 🙂

Poetry is everywhere, it just needs editing.

is what James Tate once said, and we are not even aware how much truth there is in those words.

All these aspects, contribute to forming one, in my opinion, a divine process that happens while you write poetry. It shapes you into a person you are supposed to be, the writer you strive to be. And for that kind of growth you do need courage – to accept your weirdness and just enjoy the ride.

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Anne Sexton

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23 THOUGHTS ON “WRITING POETRY TAKES COURAGE AND A DASH OF CRAZINESS (AND HOW IS THAT GOOD FOR YOU, AS A WRITER)”
Elusive Trope
may 15, 2016 at 7:23 pm
I am reminded of Tyler Joseph’s (of the band twenty one pilots) song “Car Radio” – discussing life after someone has stolen his car radio:

Sometimes quiet is violent
I find it hard to hide it
My pride is no longer inside
It’s on my sleeve
My skin will scream
Reminding me of
Who I killed inside my dream
I hate this car that I’m driving
There’s no hiding for me
I’m forced to deal with what I feel
There is no distraction to mask what is real
I could pull the steering wheel
…..
I ponder of something terrifying
‘Cause this time there’s no sound to hide behind
I find over the course of our human existence
One thing consists of consistence
And it’s that we’re all battling fear
Oh dear, I don’t know if we know why we’re here
Oh my,
Too deep
Please stop thinking
I liked it better when my car had sound............

more AT LINK.........

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://theconversation.com/poetry-is-more-popular-than-ever-but-not-all-poets-are-happy-about-it-89784


Poetry is more popular than ever – but not all poets are happy about it
January 29, 2018 7.21am EST
Author
JT Welsch
Lecturer in English and Creative Industries, University of York

Disclosure statement
JT Welsch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
University of York
University of York provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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We believe in the free flow of information
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


The joke among poets is that it’s never a good thing when poetry makes the news. From plagiarism scandals to prize controversies, casual readers would be forgiven for thinking the so-called “poetry world” exists in a state of perpetual outrage. In a recent article, The Guardian reported that an essay published in the magazine PN Review “has split the poetry establishment”.

Rebecca Watts’ contentious essay, The Cult of the Noble Amateur, first appeared in the magazine’s print edition in December. In it, she laments social media’s “dumbing effect” on recent poetry, and a “rejection of craft” that is fueling the success of what she calls “personality poets”. In particular, Watts criticizes Rupi Kaur, whose bestselling verse initially found an audience on Instagram, and Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest, whose performances have garnered millions of YouTube views.

To some extent, the only surprise in this latest debate is the wider media interest. Within days, what might have passed like so many online squabbles had prompted further coverage in The Guardian and Bookseller, a segment on Radio 4’s World at One, and an interview with Watts herself on BBC’s Front Row. It’s with no small irony, of course, that the essay’s viral spread came only after it was posted on PN Review’s website, then shared on Facebook and Twitter.

But by focusing on the false opposition of quality and popularity, both sides have been reluctant to see the debate itself as a symptom of the media’s growing interest in the art form. As Watts’ essay admits, poetry is more popular than ever. And over the past few years, news of scandals has increasingly been replaced by celebrations of its renewed relevance.

Within days of the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, the LA Times, CNN, Buzzfeed, Vox and dozens of other outlets were offering what The Guardian called “poems to counter the election fallout”. The Atlantic declared “Still, Poetry Will Rise”, and Wired warned: “Don’t Look Now, But 2016 is Resurrecting Poetry.”


Is Trump unwittingly behind some of the surge in poetry’s popularity? JStone / Shutterstock.com
The political impetus for poetry’s media “resurrection” has also fed into a more general sense of its coolness. In the same week that inspired so many election poems, “London’s new generation of poets” were seen “storming the catwalks of Fashion Week”. Meanwhile, Teen Vogue offered a slideshow of young poets who “are actually making the genre cool again” and a Guardian columnist who has written in the past about coconut water trends assured us that poetry is now “the coolest thing”.

For some, this visibility might seem to justify Watts’ worry that poetry like Kaur’s (which featured among The Guardian’s “coolest things”) has become a form of “consumer driven content”. Like some jazz or comic book devotees, certain poetry lovers remain uncomfortable with its widening fanbase. Indeed, in his mapping of the cultural field, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested that poetry’s economic priorities are “reversed”, and that relative obscurity has long been part of its caché.

Desperate to preserve that, perhaps, Watts begins her attack by suggesting that poetry’s “highest ever” sales over the past two years are to blame for declining standards. But she’s not the only one to bristle at poetry’s growing currency, or to assume it proves that “artless poetry sells”.

After Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke went viral in 2013, Adam Plunkett, writing for the New Yorker, sneered at her “crowd-pleasing poetry” for its appeal to the “lowest common denominator” online. A similar cycle of praise and censure was repeated last month, when Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person earned a seven-figure book-deal after going viral in the New Yorker itself.

Celebrities trying their hand at verse have been another easy target for the preservationists. The Independent declared that Kristen Stewart had written the “worst poem of all time”, after her piece appeared in Marie Claire in 2014. And in November 2016, Cosmopolitan called on Harvard professor Stephanie Burt to explain why the poems included in Taylor Swift’s new album didn’t really work for her as poems.

Yet, beyond poetry’s appearances at Fashion Week or in financial adverts, there are signs that hang ups over its popular appeal are losing their grip. Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire’s work in 2016’s Lemonade, for example, was met with few claims that it was dumbing anything down. Just as tellingly, the week that saw such heated battles over the PN Review essay also saw the singer Halsey’s moving Women’s March poem go viral to unanimous praise. And there was hardly a peep from the “poetry world”.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Poetry is more popular than ever – but not all poets are happy about it
January 29, 2018 7.21am EST
Author
JT Welsch
Lecturer in English and Creative Industries, University of York

Disclosure statement
JT Welsch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
University of York
University of York provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

View all partners
CC BY ND
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The joke among poets is that it’s never a good thing when poetry makes the news. From plagiarism scandals to prize controversies, casual readers would be forgiven for thinking the so-called “poetry world” exists in a state of perpetual outrage. In a recent article, The Guardian reported that an essay published in the magazine PN Review “has split the poetry establishment”.

Rebecca Watts’ contentious essay, The Cult of the Noble Amateur, first appeared in the magazine’s print edition in December. In it, she laments social media’s “dumbing effect” on recent poetry, and a “rejection of craft” that is fueling the success of what she calls “personality poets”. In particular, Watts criticizes Rupi Kaur, whose bestselling verse initially found an audience on Instagram, and Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest, whose performances have garnered millions of YouTube views.

To some extent, the only surprise in this latest debate is the wider media interest. Within days, what might have passed like so many online squabbles had prompted further coverage in The Guardian and Bookseller, a segment on Radio 4’s World at One, and an interview with Watts herself on BBC’s Front Row. It’s with no small irony, of course, that the essay’s viral spread came only after it was posted on PN Review’s website, then shared on Facebook and Twitter.

But by focusing on the false opposition of quality and popularity, both sides have been reluctant to see the debate itself as a symptom of the media’s growing interest in the art form. As Watts’ essay admits, poetry is more popular than ever. And over the past few years, news of scandals has increasingly been replaced by celebrations of its renewed relevance.

Within days of the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, the LA Times, CNN, Buzzfeed, Vox and dozens of other outlets were offering what The Guardian called “poems to counter the election fallout”. The Atlantic declared “Still, Poetry Will Rise”, and Wired warned: “Don’t Look Now, But 2016 is Resurrecting Poetry.”


Is Trump unwittingly behind some of the surge in poetry’s popularity? JStone / Shutterstock.com
The political impetus for poetry’s media “resurrection” has also fed into a more general sense of its coolness. In the same week that inspired so many election poems, “London’s new generation of poets” were seen “storming the catwalks of Fashion Week”. Meanwhile, Teen Vogue offered a slideshow of young poets who “are actually making the genre cool again” and a Guardian columnist who has written in the past about coconut water trends assured us that poetry is now “the coolest thing”.

For some, this visibility might seem to justify Watts’ worry that poetry like Kaur’s (which featured among The Guardian’s “coolest things”) has become a form of “consumer driven content”. Like some jazz or comic book devotees, certain poetry lovers remain uncomfortable with its widening fanbase. Indeed, in his mapping of the cultural field, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested that poetry’s economic priorities are “reversed”, and that relative obscurity has long been part of its caché.

Desperate to preserve that, perhaps, Watts begins her attack by suggesting that poetry’s “highest ever” sales over the past two years are to blame for declining standards. But she’s not the only one to bristle at poetry’s growing currency, or to assume it proves that “artless poetry sells”.

After Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke went viral in 2013, Adam Plunkett, writing for the New Yorker, sneered at her “crowd-pleasing poetry” for its appeal to the “lowest common denominator” online. A similar cycle of praise and censure was repeated last month, when Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person earned a seven-figure book-deal after going viral in the New Yorker itself.

Celebrities trying their hand at verse have been another easy target for the preservationists. The Independent declared that Kristen Stewart had written the “worst poem of all time”, after her piece appeared in Marie Claire in 2014. And in November 2016, Cosmopolitan called on Harvard professor Stephanie Burt to explain why the poems included in Taylor Swift’s new album didn’t really work for her as poems.

Yet, beyond poetry’s appearances at Fashion Week or in financial adverts, there are signs that hang ups over its popular appeal are losing their grip. Beyoncé’s use of Warsan Shire’s work in 2016’s Lemonade, for example, was met with few claims that it was dumbing anything down. Just as tellingly, the week that saw such heated battles over the PN Review essay also saw the singer Halsey’s moving Women’s March poem go viral to unanimous praise. And there was hardly a peep from the “poetry world”.

Poets that are informed about poetry's rich history. legendary poets and can both write, understand and delve into its infinite depths, view most of this modern poetry as shallow, too oft chaotic, emotionally stirred ramblings that are so highly praised by modern poetry critics as more proof that modern critics are themselves shallow, liberal, snooty morons that out of intensive jealousy and abject hatred, infinitely loathe the past golden age poets, IMHO...--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.cprw.com/is-that-really-the-best-you-can-do-quincy-lehr-on-poetry-and-personal-style

Categorized | Essays, This Month

“Is That Really the Best You Can Do?” Quincy Lehr on Poetry and Personal Style
Posted on 17 January 2012
When Solon declared that he learned something new every day (or was it Pericles?—some dead Greek guy, at any rate), he perhaps was not thinking of the utility of the Pratt-Shelby Knot when trying to keep a leather tie proportional enough that the thin end does not emerge at an inconvenient and insistent angle. However, after futzing around with the Windsor and half-Windsor (which rather vitiate the point of wearing a leather tie, don’t they?), I am quite convinced I’m right. I make no apologies for that.

The tediously ubiquitous Seth Abramson recently wrote in an essay on corruption in poetry that: “If you spend even 10% of the energy you spend on your writing on efforts to be a hipster in dress or manner or behavior or social proclivities, you may be a tiny bit corrupted.” And sure, everybody hates a hipster, but one suspects that Abramson, who still looks like the defense attorney he once was, means something else. That is, he means that excessive attention to one’s own appearance, social manners, and activities will distort one’s artistic output. This may well be true if one is the sort of little conformist shit who clogs the pipes of the poetry system in the U.S., but in such a case, the problem isn’t the ten percent of one’s energy that one spends adjusting one’s narrow-brimmed pork pie hat to exactly the right angle—the distressing thing is the ninety percent spent on poetry.

If Balzac is right that clothes “are the most tremendous modification social man has experienced,” then far from it being a question of dead time better spent cranking out the verse, one’s sartorial proclivities are important indeed. There is an amiability to Richard Wilbur’s ugly sweaters that is somehow the same amiability that suffuses his poetry, whereas there is a rumpled elegance in both Mark Strand’s verse and in his wrinkled white suit. They would be hard to mistake for anyone else (though Wilbur has a depressing number of imitators in the middle-to-upper echelons of New Formalism), not only in the way they write, but in the way they look and the way they act. Sadly, the same does not hold true for most contemporary poets. Indeed, there are some broad types, each of whom tends to be associated with certain kinds of verse.

One of the most depressing things about poetry is that it seems to attract preps to a far greater degree than most of the arts, though I suspect orchestral music may come close. You know the sorts—the “classic” American tailoring in the khakis and blazers (which unless you have linebacker shoulders or a huge case of being… well… huge, make it look like you’re wearing the collected sails of the Spanish Armada), the knit sweaters, the non-distressed, preternaturally tidy trousers, etc. And with the women, an older version of that girl in Advanced English II with the brown hair pulled back in a ponytail who’d never talk to you. (Okay, I imagine Chelsea Rathburn would have spoken to me in high school, but I wouldn’t have liked her tone.) Indeed, the prettier female examples can provoke some rather pathetic drooling and awkward jump-start conversations at poetry conferences.

And much as it happens in the Homo Prepiens species more generally, one gets a fair bit of gender demarcation. The women work their way through the Loeb Classics, interspersed with slightly saccharine words of thirtyish wisdom about… you know… relationships and feelings and shit. (All of this being naturally foul-protected as “women’s poetry,” even though it frequently reflects and perhaps even reinforces traditional gender roles.) As for the guys… Oh, you hated them in high school, and you hate them now. It’s either smug cleverness or slightly embarrassing earnestness, more typically the former, though the latter is often filtered through a gauze of WASP nostalgia. It’s bad enough when W. S. Merwin writes about Martha’s Vineyard. For the under-fifty crowd, it should be punishable by death.

As for the hipster dipsters, oh please. Anyone with a mustache that stupid has no right to be in the arts in any capacity whatsoever, and the sartorial gimmickry of depressing po-mo pastiche finds a mirror in the verse. Any resident of Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, or Fort Greene here in Brooklyn knows the type of poet I mean, the sort who looks like a walking advertisement for American Apparel and writes poems with titles like “Godzilla Battles the California Raisins.” If you don’t know what I mean, wander into readings at the Union Pacific on Fourth Avenue or Pete’s Candy Store on Lorimer. You’ll probably not have heard of the poets in question—they tend to be legends among the recent graduates of the Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, New School, and NYU MFA programs more than the general public. There are often flashes of brilliance in phrases and images, but, as is the way with hipster culture, they get buried in the worst kind of affectation—the “I don’t give a fuck, but I do, but you can’t know that, so I’ll make sure that I do whatever I do shittily” sort.

The end result is poetry that sounds like Michael Robbins knock-off—and Robbins (who’s based in Chicago, but same difference in this case) has the look down, though his receding hairline does ruin the effect somewhat. But look at his picture on the Poetry Foundation web site. The stubbly near-beard, the wink-nudge Slayer t-shirt (an indie band would be too obvious, see; metal is less cool and therefore more cool, if you follow), the glasses with thick, shitty frames, and the “retro” headphones around his neck—he has it all. May God have mercy on his soul. Oh, and his debut collection (named after a poem of his in The New Yorker) is Alien vs. Predator.

One could go on—the blah suburbanites and slubbish shapeless crowd, that thugged-out slam shouter, etc., but the point is that predictability in costume and verse too often march in tandem. An artist should craft one’s art from every fiber of one’s being, so why in the name of flame-broiled Jesus on a Kaiser roll would one coat that being in stereotyped, uninspired dress? The insistence that life imitate art is not an escape—it is a polemic against the homogenized late capitalist banality that surrounds us. Granted, there can be a certain pathetic holdover from the Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and while Jorie Graham looking a bit like Judy Collins’s nightmare of herself may in fact say something, I’m pretty sure I’d as soon not listen.

Of course, the Godmother of Suburban Hausfrau Ennui, Oprah Winfrey—whose forays into poetry publishing and promotion remind us that our art’s waning popularity has its upside— has stepped into the breach. The March 8, 2011 issue of Oprah Magazine featured “rising poets” saying ridiculous things about poetry (even while looking quite female and photogenic). Here’s the bit on slam poet Suheir Hammad:

The author of Breaking Poems, and an original cast member of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Hammad writes about “how people maintain their humanity in difficult circumstances.” She likes her clothes to tell a story, too: “I don’t always look the way people expect a poet to look. Onstage, you’ll find me in sequins.” For spring, a to-the-ankle skirt and sweeping chiffon duster make for a dramatic entrance. “Materials and shape interest me,” Hammad says. “There are no rules—just, ‘How am I going to make this work?'”

In the interests of “keeping it real,” one should note Hammad is pictured in a duster, flowing skirt, and dress that cost $582—never mind her shoes and accessories. Sarah Lawrence professor Rachel Eliza Griffiths is pictured in clothing worth in excess of $5,000. While the whole thing was a somewhat hokier (if more subdued) version of runway stereotype, it nevertheless indicated that one can be a poet and look good rather convincingly—even if, well, some of the outfits were a bit fucktarded and, as David Orr remarked in The New York Times (March 25, 2011), some of the models “are rising poets mostly in the ‘I get up in the morning’ sense.”

Despite this, though, and despite Winfrey’s magazine’s generally ham-handed handling of poetry (contrary to fashion’s generally ludic nature, much of the remainder of the poetry coverage focused on poetry’s putative moral and psychological benefits—YAWN!!!), its pairing of poetry and fashion was nevertheless by no means without merit. One is no less an artist for wearing good clothes—and $582 is not that much money where dressing up is concerned. (At the time of writing, I’m wearing $735 worth of clothing—which does, however, include shoes, underwear, etc.) But look, if you’re not an MBA poet like John Barr or Dana Gioia, money probably is a bit of an object for you, and besides you’re not an Enemy of the People, so why dress like you want that job laying off people in the Midwest in order to nudge stocks up by half a point?

Why is this even controversial? It’s probably rather deeply rooted in our culture. In the first place, there’s that tripe one hears from less responsible school teachers and workshop leaders about how “everyone is a poet” if they can only be inspired enough (“O Captain! My Captain!”). The concomitant is that if everyone is a poet, then everybody looks like everybody, and looking too different is a mark of… elitism perhaps. That people like me make hopeless accountants and operatic tenors never seems to even the ....
--- more at link...

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Gleaning truth and light from the piece -it helps if one has a solid base in understanding of the true definition of the words , 1.snob, 2.arrogant elitist. 3. blind self-worship 4. crying for fame and 5. bullshit
Yet some small bits of gold were hidden within.
Tho' it takes a keen eye, developed sense of humor and dancing irony along with the courage to say- even fools sometimes find favor -if the lights are dimmed just right!-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.gradesaver.com/of-modern-poetry/study-guide/modern-poetry-in-the-world-war-eras

Of Modern Poetry
by Wallace Stevens Buy Study Guide

Of Modern Poetry Modern Poetry in the World War Eras
By 1942, when "Of Modern Poetry" was published, Modernism as a literary movement had evolved significantly from its roots in the 1910s. In Modernism's first years, World War I was an unavoidable influence on writers everywhere, even if indirectly. Industrialization and world war were the major factors that led poets like Stevens, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams to vigorously break down and reinvent poetic standards that they saw as insufficient to make sense of the changing modern world. These poets responded to the war in their own ways, largely in that their aesthetics reflected a notion of a shattered or upended world order—"The Waste Land" of modernity, to use the title of Eliot's masterpiece.

World War I did generate a group of visceral war poets, primarily British, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and John McCrae, all of whom served in the war—a group who form something of their own canon apart from the overall Modernist greats. However, a degree of ambivalence prevailed among many major poets on how to address the war itself, if at all: William Butler Yeats, a precursor and paternal figure to many Modernists, offered his non-commentary bluntly in "On being asked for a War Poem," writing, "I think it better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent."

Between the wars, Modernist poetry grew and changed. The fiery, experimental poets established distinct careers as each pushed the genre in different, new directions: perhaps it is most accurate to say that Modernism was revealed to have never been one cohesive movement, but a diverse array of writers with vastly differing techniques. When Stevens published Parts of a World in 1942, he had the vantage point to look back on Modernism as a movement. The decades of distance from modern poetry's origins make it all the more striking that Stevens chose at that time to write a "Modern Poetry" manifesto, defining the genre and essentially issuing commandments for it.


In many ways, World War II forced Stevens' generation of poets to reflect anew on their past work, as they found themselves in a dire global situation similar to when they were starting to publish. In this context, it is impossible not to read "Of Modern Poetry" as Stevens' response, in his own intellectual way, to the horrors of World War II. 1942 was a particularly bleak moment in the war, especially for America: Pearl Harbor had just been bombed, launching the United States into the war, and Nazi Germany was reaching the height of its domination over Europe. This apocalyptic turmoil is contained within Stevens' simple line, "It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice," emphasizing poetry's vital duty to help people find meaning, solace, or "satisfaction"—anything that "will suffice" to keep life bearable. Though this context is not addressed directly by Stevens, it is invaluable in clarifying why he writes so adamantly here about the need for poetry to face the real world, reach people, bring them together, and give them happiness......................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://poets.org/text/reasons-poetry

Reasons for Poetry

The Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco, in a poem called "Dissertation on Poetic Propriety," asks for "a new definition. . . a name, some term or other. . . to avoid the astonishment and rages of those who say, so reasonably, looking at a poem: 'Now this is not poetry.'" I too want to argue for a broader definition of poetry, a definition which will increase our sense of the multitudes that poetry contains. For those of us who care about poetry in this time of widely diverging definitions are apt to be consciously limited in our tastes and churlish in our distastes. We often have more precise ideas, based on these distastes, about what poetry is not than about what it is.

If I cannot come up with the new definition Pacheco asks for, what I say is at least intended to turn aside the easy negative response in myself and in others to poems which are not immediately congenial. For whenever we say, "Now this is not poetry," we are adding to the disuse of all poetry.

Perhaps the most useful definition, in fact, would begin with a statement about expectation: the expectation with which a reader engages a poem, and the reasons for which a poet may have undertaken the poem, and the possible discrepancy between these two. We have all had the experience of fighting a work of art because it was not doing what we were asking of it. John Ashbery said in an interview: "My feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known to the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him." Since what is communicated in a work of art is also how it is communicated, a false expectation is almost certain to produce a false reading. And often we confirm this by the happy surprise that comes when a work we had been defeated by suddenly opens itself to us—we find that it performs very well the job of work which was its reason, once we stop asking it to perform some other service which was no part of its intention.

A word here about liking a poem. This should of course be our primary objective and motive. But to like is a function of the critical intelligence, as this passage by W. H. Auden makes clear:

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage as long as we
cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long,
that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a
book are two: this I like, this I don't like.

He goes on with the lovely, schoolmasterly, and abashing accuracy of an Audenism:

For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five; I can see
this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't
like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't
like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like
it; I can see this is trash but I like it; I can see this is trash
and I don't like it.

My argument is that we should use the third option as often as possible, when the first response is not spontaneous with us. When we can't say of a poem, especially of a poem that comes recommended, "I can see this is good and I like it," we owe it to ourselves and the poem to try to say, "I can see this is good, and though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance, et cetera."

Poems seem to come into being for various and distinct reasons. These vary from poem to poem and from poet to poet. The reason for a poem is apt to be one of the revelations attendant on its making. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, Frost said. The reason for a new poem is, in some essential, a new reason. This is why poets, in the large Greek sense of makers, are crucial to a culture. They respond newly, but in the familiar tribal experience of language, to what new thing befalls the tribe. I shall have some comments to make here about three generic reasons for which poems seem to come into being, but even within these genera, the occasion of a poem is always a new thing under the sun.

And poets don't respond as one, they respond in character, with various intuition, to the new experience. What each maker makes is poetry, but why he makes it, his reason, is his unique intuition. The reason determines the proper mode of apprehension. It is part of the purpose of every poem to surprise us with our own capacity for change, for a totally new response. For example, David Wagoner’s lines called aggressively, "This Is a Wonderful Poem":

Come at it carefully, don't trust it, that isn't its right name,
It's wearing stolen rags, it's never been washed, its breath
Would look moss-green if it were really breathing,
It won't get out of the way, it stares at you
Out of eyes burnt gray as the sidewalk,
Its skin is overcast with colorless dirt,
It has no distinguishing marks, no I.D. cards,
It wants something of yours but hasn't decided
Whether to ask for it or just take it,
There are no policemen, no friendly neighbors,
No peacekeeping busybodies to yell for, only this
Thing standing between you and the place you were
headed,
You have about thirty seconds to get past it, around it,
Or simply to back away and try to forget it,
It won't take no for an answer: try hitting it first
And you'll learn what's trembling in its torn pocket.
Now, what do you want to do about it?

The resilience such a poem asks of us is a reader's first responsibility. To assume one knows what a poem is going to do is (to turn John Ashbery’s statement around) to show a lack of respect for it. I think it is chiefly a lack of resilience that has kept the poetry public so small in our country, and has divided what public there is into dozens of hostile sects. We say of our own chosen poetry—Olsen or Frost, Lowell or Bly—the poetry whose reasons strike us as reasonable, "Now this is poetry," and then generally, of everything else, loudly, airily, and with great conviction, "and this is not." Criticism, which is at its most perceptive when most appreciative, is thus often narrowly appreciative. It divides and rules and does little to promulgate the astonishment, the larger force of poetry.

And it is very easy to reject poems whose reasons do not declare or recommend themselves to us. Take an extreme mode of recent poetry which Robert Pinsky has described in The Situation of Poetry. This school, he says, has "a prevalent diction or manner" which embodies, "in language, a host of reservations about language, human reason, and their holds on life." He quotes a poem by W. S. Merwin and says of it: "It moves in a resolutely elliptical way from image to atomistic image, finally reaching a kind of generalization against generalizing in the line: "Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one."

Pinsky concludes: "This poem presents a style well suited to a certain deeply skeptical or limiting vision of the poetic imagination and its place in the world."

To appreciate a poem conceived in these terms—conceived for what many readers would consider non-reasons—is not easy for most of us. What kind of poem harbors "a host of reservations about language, human reason, and their holds on life," and with a "deeply skeptical or limiting vision of the poetic imagination and its place in the world"? Aha! says the part of our mind that waits with a club for what is not a poem. How can anything call itself a poem if it mistrusts language and the power of the poetic imagination? Is not all mystery made lucid to the poetic imagination, and precisely in language? But the often ill-advised left side of the brain is wrong to thus object. Let us ask it to consider a poem whose last line proclaims this heresy, whose last line in fact is, "There are limits to imagination." This is Robert Hass’s beautiful "Heroic Simile." It purports to be a simile about how a soldier falls in a certain Japanese movie, and it likens him chiefly to a great pine tree, an image which does not appear in the movie:

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

At one critical point in the narrative—and the simile is offered as a story—the poet heightens the mystery of metamorphosis by dramatizing the process itself:

They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. . .
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them

. . . I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.

We are asked to believe that the poem takes place at the limits of imagination, where the poet's debilitating reluctances threaten to overpower his fancy and drag it back into the territory of the literal. And the poem shows us, by exhibiting its own process, how the energy is to be found, in the process of...

more at link given........

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://news.psu.edu/story/378071/2015/11/02/research/probing-question-poetry-relevant-american-society-today

Probing Question: Is poetry relevant in American society today?

Despite the minuscule national marketplace for poetry books, the American public still longs for the kinds of insights that only poetry can deliver.IMAGE: ©ISTOCKPHOTO / LESZEKGLASNER
By Melissa Beattie-Moss
November 02, 2015
Can you name a television talent show with over 100 million viewers worldwide, huge studio audiences, hundreds of people vying to perform, and a prize worth up to $13 million?

If you're thinking of The Voice or American Idol, think again. Since 2007, one of the world's most popular reality TV shows has been Million's Poet, a program from the United Arab Emirates that invites contestants to recite their own poetry, composed in a traditional Bedouin style called Nabati, which dates back to the fourth century. The poets are judged both on the quality of the poetry and on the skill of their recitation. How popular is the show? Its ratings are a runaway success, soaring past those for soccer, UAE's national sport.

If we can't imagine such a phenomenon in the U.S. (and who can?) should we conclude that poetry is less relevant than ever in American society? Not so fast, says Erin Murphy, professor of English and creative writing at Penn State Altoona.

Murphy -- the award-winning author of six collections of poetry, recipient of several teaching awards, and recent inductee into the Blair County Arts Hall of Fame -- believes that, despite the minuscule national marketplace for poetry books, the American public still longs for the kinds of insights that only poetry can deliver, and poetry still has an important place in our schools.

"For me, teaching poetry is not about turning all of my students into poets," says Murphy. "It's about economy of language and concision, and there are so many applications. An engineering major who is now getting his Ph.D. at MIT took my intro to creative writing course and credited poetry with teaching him how to explain the technical elements in his field using narrative and metaphor. I also met an attorney who said the class that best prepared him for writing legal briefs was a poetry writing class. So is poetry relevant? Yes, for poets and also for anyone who needs to write or express himself or herself."

We should also take care not to measure the place of poetry in American life by book sales, notes Murphy, nor should we pose television, the Internet, or other technologies or venues as being opponents of poetry.



"There is something about a human truth expressed in poetry that has the power to reach us on both an emotional and intellectual level."



While we may not have tens of millions of viewers tuning in to watch televised poetry recitation contests, Americans still have come up with a variety of creative ways to weave poetry into our culture and daily lives. For instance, says Murphy, the Favorite Poem Project, founded by our 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky, gives ordinary citizens the chance to upload videos of themselves reciting their favorite poems.

"Poetry has its roots in oral culture, of course," says Murphy. "At special occasions on both a personal and national level, when people celebrate and when they mourn -- think of our Presidential inaugurations, weddings, funerals, and commemorations of tragedies, such as September 11 and Hurricane Katrina -- they turn to poets to provide the words that are difficult to summon."

In the aftermath of 9/11, W.H. Auden's poem September 1, 1939 went "viral" online, with countless readers finding meaning in the poem, written in response to Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, and the almost prophetic feeling of lines such as:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers used
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective man

At the crossroads of the poetry slam movement and YouTube, the topic and performance of a poem can touch a nerve and captivate millions. As Jeff Shotts, poetry editor at Graywolf Press, put it, "The Internet is basically one big poetry audiobook." A YouTube video of Neil Hilborn's poem "OCD" -- performed during the 2013 Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam -- has been viewed over 10 million times and generated almost 10,000 comments. The sheer volume of poetry audio files online is staggering and a very positive development, says Murphy.

Poetry also turns up frequently in our public spaces, she adds. Since 1992, New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority has displayed poems (chosen in association with the Poetry Society of America) in its subway cars, on the sides of MetroCards, on touch-screen kiosks, and other transit venues, all as part of the city's beloved "Poetry in Motion" project. The project proved so successful, says Murphy, that it was replicated in many other cities across the nation.

Other examples of public poems abound. "I love the Poetry in the Zoos project," says Murphy. Providing permanent installations in zoos across the country, the project does double-duty to raise the public's awareness of environmental issues as well as foster an appreciation for the beauty and power of poetry, she explains.

Poetry even has a place in our current world of technological security, says Murphy. "I heard a piece on NPR recently about how the new passwords will be poems -- 'passpoems' -- because they are longer, and therefore more secure, than traditional passwords but easier to remember since they are based on the oral tradition."

The way we share and access poems may change as society and technology evolve, says Murphy, but the drive to explore and express our lives through poetry is a constant. "There is something about a human truth expressed in poetry that has the power to reach us on both an emotional and intellectual level," she adds. "It can be a bold and transformative art form."

Hissa Hilal might agree. She is the Saudi Arabian poet who, in 2010, was the only woman to become a finalist on the TV show Million's Poet. She came in third, won the equivalent of almost a million U.S. dollars, and stretched the boundaries of visibility for Arab women in public life. In a video interview, Hilal said (imagining she is speaking to her own poems), "The people who love you will love you because truth and transparency is enough."

"Truth and transparency -- that's something that will always be relevant in any country and any time period," concludes Murphy.



Erin Murphy is Professor of English and creative writing at Penn State Altoona and can be reached at ecm14@psu.edu.

Erin Murphy
Erin Murphy, professor of English at Penn State Altoona, says the drive to explore and express our lives through poetry remains despite vast changes in society and technology. IMAGE: MOLLY DEPROSPO

Knowledge is key to life and the complexities, mysteries and general course one must take to wade through this world's pyramid of obstacles and
high and low ebb tides given unto us all..
Without it (or far too little of it) far more darker elements prevail and life is far less peaceful , happy, successful , and worth living etc., for most people... -RJL...

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69111/and-the-winner-is-pindar

ESSAY
And the Winner Is ... Pindar!
Can any modern poet beat the world record Pindar set 25 centuries ago?
BY STEPHANIE BURT

You may not associate ambitious poetry with sports at all, much less with the Olympics, but Pindar certainly did. Perhaps the most-praised poet (besides Homer) in Greek antiquity, and one of the earliest poets for whom many complete poems survive, Pindar (5th century BCE) celebrated in his best-known work the victors in ancient Greek athletic festivals. We now call those poems his epinician odes (from epi, “upon,” and nike, victory): Pindar seems to have written each one on commission—the sponsor whose chariot won the chariot-race, or the family of a winning boxer, paid Pindar to compose verse about the event, which was then performed, with music and dancing.

Each of Pindar’s epinician odes designates in its title the games, the winner, and the event (e.g., Olympian, Theron of Akragas, chariot race). The odes honor both the aristocratic winner and his family or city-state, often by retelling an apposite myth. Pindar declares in Olympian XI that athletic victories require appropriate poems (meligarues humnoi, honey-sweet hymns) as crops require rain: in Frank Nisetich’s elegant translation,



Sometimes men need the winds most,
at other times
waters from the sky,
rain descendants of the cloud.
And when a man has triumphed
and put his toil behind,
it is time for melodious song
to arise, laying
the foundation of future glory,
a sworn pledge securing proud success.

For Olympian victors, such acclaim
is laid in store
without limit, and I
am eager to tend it with my song.

Sometimes modern Olympics are still tended with his song. The 1984 Los Angeles and 2004 Athens Olympics included classical scholars reciting Pindar, or reading their own commissioned “Pindaric” odes. Our term “athletics” comes from Greek games of the kind that Pindar praised, aethloi (competitions, or ordeals; the word can also denote battles) whose victors could take home an aethlon, a prize. Of all the games, Pindar said (and his audience would have agreed), the Olympics were most important: Olympian I begins, in Anthony Verity’s new rendition,

Water is best,
while gold gleams like blazing fire in the night,
brightest amid a rich man’s wealth;
but, my heart, if it is of games that you wish to sing,
look no further than the sun; as there is no star
that shines with more warmth by day from a clear sky,
so we can speak of no greater contest than Olympia.

Many epinician odes connect the present honor of athletic prizes with the honor and deeds of legendary heroes, especially those in the victor’s family tree.

Pindar has long been a byword for lofty inspiration, for poetic difficulty, and for the supposed connection between them, as if a poet so close to the gods and their power must dwell far from ordinary human speech. Writing in ancient Rome, Horace declared Pindar one of a kind; to copy his effects, Horace continued (Odes, 2.4), would be like trying to imitate a flood. Around 1629, Ben Jonson composed the “Cary-Morison Ode,” the first English poem to imitate Pindar’s complex but regular three-part form. Many poets (though not Jonson) identified Pindar with wildness, irregularity, and mysterious, even supernatural, influence.

Pindar’s language really is difficult, partly because his stanzas use words and sounds from many Greek dialects, rather than staying with one. The 17th-century poet Abraham Cowley called Pindaric composition “the noblest and highest kind of writing in verse,” even though he also claimed, “If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Mad-man had translated another.” Cowley then translated Pindar anyway, and wrote his own elaborate “Pindaric” odes.


In Pindar’s Footsteps

20th-century poets, following Cowley, remembered Pindar as a poet of sublime victories over language, not as a poet of well-born athletes who wrestled and raced. The few exceptions to this rule are strongly ironic: Robert Pinsky’s resonant “Glory,” for example, or Delmore Schwartz’s “Exercise in Preparation for a Pindaric Ode to Carl Hubbell,” a self-mocking poem about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ decline. Robert Duncan’s vivid “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” takes up—as classical scholars now also take up—Pindar’s interest in the life of the state, in the virtues of rulers and politics: “This is magic,” Duncan says, then goes on to list American presidents (“Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower”) in whom no poetic magic lay. For Duncan, as for his 17th-century forebears, Pindar had something to do with majesty, history, and tradition, and with ancient ritual, but very little to do with athletic events.

Modern poems about sports, on the other hand, forget Pindar, and many of them forget about victories too: perhaps from a sense of fairness, perhaps from the contrarian impulse endemic to modernism, the poets of the past century most often laud things and people who would not (without the poet’s attention) get the respect they deserve. A.E. Housman was also a classical scholar: his popular “To an Athlete Dying Young” (1896) is the exception that proves the rule, making a local boy’s recent triumph (“the time you won your town the race”) an occasion to remind us all that we will die. More recent poets who address sports tend to describe either losing teams, or else amateurs, who could use the recognition that poetry gives. Consider the ex-NFLer “Big Daddy Lipscomb” in Randall Jarrell’s 1965 poem about him, “who found football easy enough, life hard enough / To ... die of heroin”; consider the tennis players in Robert Hass’ “Old Dominion” (1979), “graceful from this distance” but stressed-out up close (the same poem laments the death of Jarrell).

Poems about basketball and about ice skating (Mary Jo Salter’s “Sunday Skaters,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” Ed Hirsch’s “Fast Break,” Major Jackson’s “Hoops”) seem more likely than poems about other sports to emulate, in the suspensions and arcs of their own verse, the skillful motions that the athletes themselves undertake. Yet those same poems (including all four named above) also emphasize the amateur, impromptu nature of the contests that they portray. They emphasize, too, the fact that contests always end. For Salter (whose skaters are children), “It’s all / about time, about time!” For Jackson, “a sneaker’s a cave” and a playground dunk could be a prelude to oblivion. Modern poems that do show competitive victors come down hard on victory’s irony, on what the winners gave up in order to win: Donald Finkel’s “Interview with a Winner” begins “What was it like? / like losing” and continues “For what? / to do it again.” Elizabeth Alexander’s fine 12-part “Narrative: Ali” dwells mostly on Muhammad Ali’s setbacks away from the ring: “Olympic gold / can’t buy a black man / a Louisville hamburger / in nineteen-sixty.” After such slights “The People’s Champ,” “The Greatest,” must boast (“come and take me”) in order to keep back his own self-doubt.

The critic Don Johnson, who wrote The Sporting Muse: A Critical Study of Poetry About Athletes and Athletics and edited the baseball-poetry book Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves, believes that each team sport implies its own poetic subject: American football means pain and injury. Baseball means nostalgia and inheritance from fathers (not mothers) to daughters and sons. Basketball, with its fluid moves, fast pace and high leaps, means escape, self-transcendence, stopped time. Ice hockey, as Johnson does not say, frequently means Canada (Randall Maggs would likely agree); poems about women’s sports usually invoke women’s solidarity, and focus (with recent exceptions) on amateur or noncompetitive events.

What gets lost in many of these poems is the analogy that Pindar’s work implies, between technical excellence in one craft—the handling of a chariot, the running of a race, a serve, an assist—and technical or professional excellence in another: the handling of words. Jarrell used to make that analogy in conversation. Asked how he knew if a poet was any good, Jarrell used to respond (I paraphrase), “How do you know that Johnny Unitas is any good?”

Pindar sometimes predicted that his odes would make victors’ names last: he was right, too. (Here we are, reading about Theron of Akragas.) Can anyone now alive imitate Pindar by writing memorable verse in a living language about an Olympic champion? Should a contemporary poet even try? No one now speaks, as a first language, Pindar’s Greek, and no public ceremony provides the occasion for complex versification that Pindar and his rival poets-for-hire enjoyed. Few Anglophone poets these days want to confer divine sanction on sporting triumphs, much less on the nation-states that the Olympics glorify.

You might, however, say that modern doubts provide all the more reason to imitate Pindar, or at least to try, if we write about sports at all. Despite their obvious elements of chance (does the wind help or hinder the javelin-thrower? will that last three-pointer fall?), athletic competitions can seem like an oasis of justice in an unfair world; sports are one of the few parts of human life where we can see, and choose en masse to see, superior skill or effort (years of practice for individual events; months of learning to play as a team) receive an immediate, evident reward.

If we are looking for modern poets who celebrate triumphs in sports, we can find them, but we may have to look in unexpected places. W.H. Auden said that poetry was the clear expression of mixed feelings. Modern poems about competitive sports, with their praise for losers and the amateurs, their ironies for the winners, fit that rubric; so does Geoffrey Hill’s long poem, The Triumph of Love (1998). His vast knowledge of the past seems at times to match his contempt for the present, and his poem found “Stunned words of victory less memorable / than those urged from defeat.” Yet Hill nonetheless found something to praise, and something to emulate, as he watched the Boston Marathon:

how
amazing it still is, the awaited name
hailed through our streets, under the pale leafage,
springing from the hierarchies of splendour
and salutation, prodigious messengers
with their own heralds and outriders—
yes, look! the Kenyan runners, look, there they go!
stippled with silver, shaking off the light
garlands of sweat—

Hill’s laudatory passage breaks off unfinished: one of the runners will win, and the race goes on.

Originally Published: August 21st, 2008
Stephanie (also Steph; formerly Stephen) Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. In 2012, the New York Times called Burt “one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation.” Burt grew up around Washington, DC and earned a BA from Harvard and PhD from Yale. She has published four collections of poems: Advice...

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/8-reasons-why-poetry-is-good-for-the-soul

8 Reasons Why Poetry Is Good for the Soul
Here's a guest post from KM Barkley, a writing coach and editor, in which he shares his eight reasons why poetry is good for the soul.
GUEST COLUMNJUN 16, 2016
Here’s a guest post from KM Barkley, a writing coach and editor from Lexington, Kentucky, in which he shares his eight reasons why poetry is good for the soul. If you have an idea for a guest post too, just send an e-mail to robert.brewer@fwcommunity.com with the subject line: Poetic Asides Guest Post.

*****

The Digital Age is booming. That means attentions are shrinking and focus is altering. With 140-character communication on Twitter, picture and visual postings on Pinterest, and classrooms shying away from difficult material in favor of easy reading and easy grades, poetry has become one of the most underutilized, and underestimated, mediums in modern culture.

I think Phyllis Klein from Women’s Therapy Services said it best: “Turning to poetry, poetry gives rhythm to silence, light to darkness. In poetry we find the magic of metaphor, compactness of expression, use of the five senses, and simplicity or complexity of meaning in a few lines.”

*****

Re-create Your Poetry!

Recreating_Poetry_Revise_Poems
Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.


Click to continue.

*****

1. POETRY IS GOOD FOR DEVELOPMENTAL LEARNING
In child education, children’s verbal and written skills are somewhat underdeveloped. Poetry helps by teaching in rhythm, stringing words together with a beat helps cognitive understanding of words and where they fit. Additionally, it teaches children the art of creative expression, which most found highly lacking in the new-age educational landscape. In essence, poetry gives them a great tool for developing one’s self.

2. POETRY IS GOOD FOR DEVELOPING SKILLS
Writing, speaking, and understanding can all be greatly influenced and nurtured by the use of poetry. Learning rules for writing, and then breaking them with poetry, can give writing alternative beauty. Speaking poetry aloud with its beat, rhythm, and rhyme can loosen the tongue and craft a firm foundation for verbal communication. Learning to understand poetry also gives the mental fortitude, as well as the drive, to understand written communication (an invaluable trait in business, from my perspective).

3. POETRY HELPS IMPROVE IDEAS
Have you ever sat there and not known what to write? Picking up poetry, reading through different excerpts from classic poets can blossom ideas you never knew existed. Reading and writing poetry makes you think of new ideas, but can also dramatically change the way you perceived old ones. It is a way to process experiences, visual descriptions, and emotions.

4. POETRY IS THERAPEUTIC FOR THE WRITER
Biblio/Poetry Therapy is a creative arts therapy using the written word to understand, and then communicate, feelings and thoughts. Poetry is typically short, but largely emotional. Writers get in touch with sentiments they might not have known they had until it was down on paper. Depression and anxiety are among the top two mental illnesses being treated with Biblio-therapy, and through poetry, one can start to understand the hindrances and blocks being formed around their mind. Expressing how one feels is difficult. I’ve found that poetry is one of the best outlets.


5. POETRY IS THERAPEUTIC FOR THE READER
For those who have a harder time expressing themselves, reading poetry can have a similar positive effect as writing it. Reading poetry allows one to see into the soul of another person, see what is weighing on their minds and on their hearts, and can open doors to feelings that are sometimes suppressed until that door is opened. Reading can shine a light on all those dark and hidden crevices of the heart and mind once thought permanently closed off to the world.

*****

The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms
Play with poetic forms!

Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

Click to continue.

*****

6. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS THEMSELVES
By design, poetry is broken into short, but strategic sentences. By doing so, writing and reading poetry makes one understand the significance of every single word and their placement. Sometimes, without a single word, it can change the entire rhythm and meaning of the poem itself. Writing poetry forces the person to consider, and reconsider, each piece and length of their verses. In poetry, words are magic, moods, depth, and difficult. One gains the utmost appreciation for them when handling delicate sentence structures provided in poetry pieces.

7. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND PEOPLE
One of the hardships of the current age is the ability to understand one another. Miscommunication and misunderstandings lead to mass amounts of frustration. Reading and writing poetry actually gives people the improved ability to understand others. From a writer’s prospective, you have to be able to convey the true nature of your writing to an unknown reader. That means diving deep into what parts you want them to understand, what you want them to feel, and what to take home with them that will resonate long after reading. For a reader of poetry, it gives you the patience to look into someone else’s mind and cultivate empathy for another person. Both conveying personal opinion and the ability to empathize are tantamount to respectable communication.

8. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND YOURSELF
Ever felt out of place? Have you ever wondered why you are thinking or feeling a certain way? Ever been frustrated because your friends or partners couldn’t ever possibly understand you because you don’t even understand what is going through your head? I have found that the best way to grasp internal turmoil is to write poetry. It slows the world down around you. It streamlines your thoughts to short, direct sentences, while soothing the anxiety out of your body with the lyrical style. It makes you think. It puts a spotlight on what the issues might be and forces you to logically and methodically answer to it. Poetry can give you insights into yourself that you never knew existed but always wanted to understand. There is no greater sadness than not knowing one’s self-worth, but there is no greater power than complete understanding of one’s identity. Poetry can give you that power.

*****

KM Barkley
KM Barkley

KM Barkley is a writing coach and editor from Lexington, KY. He has written articles for professional corporate HR training and has edited novels as well as scripts and screenplays for The Art Institute of Houston. He is an active member of Writer’s Digest and The Warrior Forum.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2020/07/07/poets-and-poems-maurice-manning-and-railsplitter/


POETS AND POEMS: MAURICE MANNING AND “RAILSPLITTER”
BY GLYNN YOUNG


Poet Maurice Manning has done something unusual for a poetry collection. He’s crawled inside the head of a famous historical figure and told stories about the man’s life from his own posthumous perspective.

In Railsplitter: Poems, the historical figure is Abraham Lincoln. Manning explains that his affinities for Lincoln have been long-standing. “I grew up near his birthplace,” he writes in the preface, “and I live in the same county where his parents were married. My ancestors were early settlers of Kentucky. All my life I have had a sense of the world Lincoln came from, and meeting him through poetry has seemed, especially in recent years, inevitable.” He says his great-great-grandfather would boast that he voted for Lincoln twice.

It was Lincoln who drew me to Manning’s collection. I came late to Lincoln, growing up in the South, with a family invested in the Civil War and its memory and re-invention. Lincoln was rarely spoken of, and when he was, it was not with admiration. When I was an adult, and working as a speechwriter, I discovered Lincoln first through his speeches, like the Second Inaugural Address and especially the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Once I discovered him, Lincoln became almost heroic, because he was, a plain-speaking frontier lawyer who led the United States through the most difficult period of its history.


Abraham Lincoln

In Manning’s poems, you find a Lincoln who sounds so authentic and realistic that you think the man himself must have written these first-person poems. It’s that realistic and compelling. In no chronological order, the poems consider scenes of boyhood, his years as a frontier lawyer, his own family, the Civil War period, and even his assassination at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865. Avoiding chronological order is important. Manning’s Lincoln understands and remembers his own life like we all do—with the stories we and others tell about ourselves; we don’t tell them in the order that they happened.

The collection begins with the surprising “To a Chigger,” the mite long famous for aggravating and irritating people in woods, grasses, beds, and anywhere else people inhabit. Growing up on a farm and sleeping in hotel beds when he argued various legal cases, Lincoln would have been more than familiar with this pest. But then the collection moves on to consider language, the Wilmot Proviso, rumors about rearing his children, the Know-Nothings, Transcendentalism, his law partner William Herndon, the Civil War, his assassination, the poems he wrote (including the vulgar ones), the Civil War, reading Robert Burns, and more.

The collection contains many poems that are moving, and they tend to be the ones that capture his struggles as a leader and the great loneliness he must have felt.

The Winter of My Discontent

That was 1862,
and February was the depth,
and yet the grief went deeper still,
continuing as an endless valley,
and I was walking down it alone.
Death was everywhere a fog
over the land, and in my house,
I concluded, was where the fog began,
I was alone, as I am now,
to pronounce my soliloquies in the dark,
and my thoughts did dive down.
Am I a living ghost? What fate
is now foreshadowed by this moment?
How desperate must I be in this scene?
What resolution must I make?
To call for a horse? Where would I go?
Something happens to time in despair.
It ceases to divide, and yet
division was my residence.
So practicing soliloquies
revealed my mind, and the absence of time
gave me, strangely, time to practice.
And I had a discerning audience,
one who was familiar with my voice.


Maurice Manning

The title poem, “Railsplitter,” is the final poem, a meditation upon Lincoln’s death, his legacy, and the meaning of one’s life. Rarely have I been so moved by a poem.

Manning has published six other poetry collections, including Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001), A Companion for Owls (2004), Bucolics (2007), The Common Man (2010), The Gone and the Going Away (2013), and One Man’s Dark (2017). A native of Kentucky, he attended Earlham College and the University of Alabama. After teaching at both DePauw and Indiana universities, he joined the faculty of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in numerous literary publications. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2011 for The Common Man and was named a Guggenheim Fellow that same year.

Railsplitter is a collection for our divisive time. Like Lincoln, we live in a sharply divided country, and we’re not even sure if we want to continue living together. Lincoln, and Manning’s poems about him, remind us that the difficulties may seem insurmountable but that there is always hope, and we were born for such a time as this.

Photo by Johan Neven, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, Dancing King, and the newly published Dancing Prophet, and Poetry at Work.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.studymode.com/essays/Comparing-London-William-Blake-And-Composed-Upon-Westminst-65177161.html

Comparing "London" (William Blake) and "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802" (William Wordsworth)
Topics: Poetry, Sonnet, Romanticism Pages: 5 (1853 words) Published: September 18, 2006
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and William Blake (1757-1827) were both romantic poets. Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in the late 18th Century. Blake and Wordsworth tended to write about the same things such as nature, people and structures, such as cities like London. Emotions also played a big part in romantic poems. Often poets would be inspired by a simple view and would write a masterpiece about it. For example, Wordsworth lived in the Lake District for most of his life and this inspired many of his poems.

Romanticism is thought to have started in Germany and England in 1770s and by the early 1800s it had spread through most of Europe. Romanticism spread westward quickly and was greatly influenced by music and for many years it was used in concert halls. Today it is known as neoromanticism and is used in many things without the public even knowing. Even the soundtrack from Star Wars was based on the style of romanticism.

Both poems are about London, but based around two very different opinions. Blake's poem describes London as hell on Earth, while Wordsworth's praises London as heaven on Earth. To more contrasting poems have never been written.

In "London" the poem is written in the first person account (this could be Blake). The person notices the terrible living conditions and suffering life of Londoners who live by the Thames. The use of detracting language (weakness, hapless) drives his feelings of sympathy for the people. "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" however is full of praise for London, but does not describe the people of London as it is written in the morning before the city has awoken for a new day. It describes the landscape and architecture of London as "majestic, bright and glimmering". Wordsworth says that London is the most beautiful place on Earth and anyone who would walk past without a glance would be "dead of soul". Blake, on the other hand, probably thinks that the people who live IN London are dead of soul. His London is a bleak city, torn apart by corruption in the royal family and the church. In lines 9 and 10 Blake links chimney-sweeps and the church through both contrast due to their wealth and also through a small likeness because both or unhappy. The chimney-sweep is extremely poor and has a terrible quality of life whereas the church has the opposite of this but has forsaken religion and Christ. No one can by happy when a city is like this.

In Wordsworth's poem, the chimney-sweeps have been hard at work because "Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie...All bright and glittering in the smokeless sky"

The skyline of the city captured Wordsworth heart and he fell in love with it. However he couldn't see past the buildings and look inside them. Blake did and that is why the two poems differ so greatly. Wordsworth saw the outer casing, but Blake delved deeper into the heart of the city and found out what it was really like under the outer garments.

"London", being the harsher poem, conjures much more powerful images, the strongest probably being from line 8. "Mind-forged manacles". Here Blake implies that the important restrictions come from mental limitations, not physical ones that can be seen and touched. It also might suggest that the leaders of the city (Kings or mayors) might be controlling people through fear or that they are too bothered about being rich and having a good reputation than to care about the poor and needy and do something about it.

The repetition of "every" (seven times in all) makes clear the extent of suffering in London. It is not just in isolated incident, or a few people dotted about all over the city, it is everyone connected with London. The whole society.

Beauty, reality, truth-- all are seen differently depending upon the --eye of the beholder.
The emotions of the specific author. In this case, a different picture painted by each poet.
Could both poets be right? -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/

CULTURE
Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

MAY 1991 ISSUE

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

This article appears in the May 1991 issue.

Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.

See More
What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.


The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's institutional success—the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university—have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

To the average reader, the proposition that poetry's audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art's current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry's material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.

Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

One can see a microcosm of poetry's current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor's The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones's Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.

How Poetry Diminished
Arguments about the decline of poetry's cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse's role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism's emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so "fleeting and quintessential" that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse—which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation—retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://interestingliterature.com/2019/12/the-best-poems-of-the-1920s/

Interesting Literature

LITERATURE
The Best Poems of the 1920s
The 1920s was a key decade in poetry: modernism really came to the fore, with a number of major poets adopting an increasingly experimental approach to form, rhyme, imagery, and subject matter. Below, we introduce and discuss some of the best and most notable poems from the 1920s.

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. We begin our pick of the best 1920s poems with a poem from 1920, which is very much a watershed poem: the US-born Pound described it as his ‘farewell to London’, before he moved to Europe and worked on his more ambitious long work, The Cantos. Mauberley sees Pound responding to the last few decades of English verse, his attempts to ‘make it new’, and various failed poetic projects such as the 1890s ‘Rhymers’ Club’. A difficult and allusive work, it’s well worth diving into and reading – though perhaps our introduction to the poem will help (click on the link above to read the first part; part II is also online).


T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. In 1922, the American-born T. S. Eliot – who had settled in London in 1914 – produced this masterpiece of some 433 lines, incorporating numerous verse forms and taking in the post-war world from squalid encounters in bedsits to chatter in East End pubs. The allusions to nymphs, Tiresias, and Elizabethan England suggest at once a continuum with the past and a break with it: everything is simultaneously worse than it used to be, and yet the same as it ever was. In some ways, Eliot’s poem represents the end of civilisation as Shakespeare, Greek myth, and various holy texts go through the literary waste-disposal, regurgitated only as fragments. One of the high points of the modernist movement and one of the most important and influential poems of the twentieth century.

Marianne Moore, ‘Marriage’. Published in 1923, a year after Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘Marriage’ is a long(ish) poem by one of American modernism’s greatest poets. And like The Waste Land, Moore’s poem is allusive, taking in Shakespeare and the Bible as the poet explores the obligations and meaning of marriage (Moore herself never married). The poem is radical in both its form (modernist, free verse) and politics (we can label Moore’s treatment of marriage ‘feminist’).


William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. This 1923 poem should more properly be referred to as ‘XXII’, since it’s the 22nd poem to appear in Williams’s 1923 collection Spring and All, and the title ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is one retrospectively applied to the poem (not by the poet himself). One of the most famous examples of American imagism, the poem invites us to reflect upon the importance of something as simple as red wheelbarrow and some white chickens.

Wallace Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’. 1923 was the year Wallace Stevens’ landmark collection Harmonium was published. Stevens, like Williams, was an American modernist – and an American who stayed in America, rather than moving to England (as Eliot did). ‘Sunday Morning’ is about a woman who stays home on a Sunday morning in America, instead of going to church. Does this make her any less spiritual or religious than her neighbours?


Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. Was 1923 the annus mirabilis for American poetry? 1922 may have been the high point of European modernism, with Eliot’s The Waste Land (written in London and Lausanne, although Eliot himself was American), James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room among some of the important works published in that year; but 1923 saw Frost, Stevens, and Williams all publish some of their most famous works. Here, Frost (pictured right) observes the ‘lovely, dark and deep’ woods as he travels home one night, in an altogether more Romantic scene than many of the other poems on this list.

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’. After he wrote The Waste Land, Eliot spent the next years working on a sort of follow-up poem whose form and language allude to that earlier poem in suggestive ways. Published in 1925, ‘The Hollow Men’ reflects the general malaise and sense of limbo that characterised the mid-1920s in Britain for many people: in the US many of the wealthiest may have been enjoying the Jazz Age, but post-war Britain was marked, for Eliot, by a loss of spiritual meaning and direction. ‘The Hollow Men’ brilliantly captures this.


Nancy Cunard, Parallax. Although not as famous as Moore, Cunard was another female modernist poet who wrote a long poem in the wake of Eliot’s The Waste Land – and, in Cunard’s case, she seems to have deliberately alluded to Eliot’s work in order to challenge his despairing and pessimistic view of modernity. Parallax was, like The Waste Land, published in Britain by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (in 1925). Not all of Parallax is available online, but you can read an excerpt by following the link above and discover more about it here.

Langston Hughes, ‘I, Too’. The finest poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes (1902-67) often writes about the lives of African Americans living in America, especially in New York, in the early twentieth century. In this poem from 1926, and with an allusive nod to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘I Hear America Singing’, Hughes – describing himself as the ‘darker brother’ – highlights the plight of black Americans at the time, having to eat separately from everyone else in the kitchen when guests arrive, but determined to strive and succeed in the ‘Land of the Free’.


W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Written in September 1926 and published the following year, this poem is about growing older and feeling out of touch with the new generation superseding you, feeling surplus to requirements, waiting for death. Perhaps this is something to do with the age gap between Yeats – who concludes this list of significant 1920s poems but was the oldest of the poets listed here – and modernists like Eliot, Pound, and Moore, all of whom were born at least twenty years later. So Yeats’s thoughts of death and ageing in this poem are, perhaps, inevitable for a poet in his sixties when he wrote this powerful piece about one’s twilight years.

I am quite familiar with all listed except- Nancy Cunard...
Which just gave me today's poetry assignment.
And with any luck maybe even a new find that will give inspiration for me to compose a new poem today.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Just found this on Cunard-- Tyr


https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/feb/13/poem-of-the-week-in-the-studio-by-nancy-cunard

Poem of the week: In the Studio by Nancy Cunard
Superficially traditional, this 1923 sonnet on an artist and his model conceals some of the daring that made the author a groundbreaking modernist

‘Beget again / Fresh meaning on dead emblem’ … detail from Picasso’s 1930 lithograph Artist and Model.
‘Beget again / Fresh meaning on dead emblem’ … detail from Picasso’s 1930 lithograph Artist and Model. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Carol Rumens
Mon 13 Feb 2017 05.05 EST

27
106
In the Studio

Is it March, spring, winter, autumn, twilight, noon
Told in this distant sound of cuckoo clocks?
Sunday it is – five lilies in a swoon
Decay against your wall, aggressive flocks
Of alley-starlings aggravate a mood.
The rain drops pensively. ‘If one could paint,
Combine the abstract with a certain rude
Individual form, knot passion with restraint …
If one could use the murk that fills a brain,
Undo old symbols and beget again
Fresh meaning on dead emblem … ’ so one lies
Here timeless, while the lilies’ withering skin
Attests the hours, and rain sweeps from the skies;
The bird sits on the chimney, looking in.


That Nancy Cunard’s poetic achievement had its own unpredictable rhythms is revealed in the 40-year stretch of work covered by Sandeep Parmar in her magnificent edition of Cunard’s Selected Poems. Her development as a modernist poet is more jagged than it might first look when comparing the often rhymed, often metrical, sometimes crepuscular verses of her first, 1921 collection, Outlaws, with the sweeping free verse and direct address of her Spanish civil war poems. She anticipates herself in some early poems, and, later, may revert to earlier styles. Content leads form: she makes her poems reflect what she witnesses, and if, sometimes, this presents formal problems, it also underlies some of her best experiments. Parmar approvingly notes “the shared high modernist aesthetics” of Cunard’s long poem of 1925, Parallax, and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, while finding that she adds a layer of influence from French surrealist poetry. French Symbolism, too, might be added to the poetic kaleidoscope – it flickers in this week’s poem.

In the Studio comes from a particularly interesting section of Previously Unpublished or Uncollected Poems. Dated 1923, it’s almost traditional in form, yet the small innovations add up to a polished originality. The diction is tougher than in many of the Outlaws poems. The symbolism is offset by some brilliant observation: the five lilies may be “swooning” but we’re in no doubt of their state of decay against the painter’s wall. We see and hear those alliterative “aggressive flocks / Of alley-starlings” and can imagine exactly, gratingly, how they “aggravate a mood”. The atmosphere is fin-de-siècle, perhaps, but grounded in the sitter’s distinct, time-haunted perspective. And, yes, the surrealist touch is intriguingly present in that opening question about the confusing message of the cuckoo clocks.

The Paris studio where the poem is set is that of the painter (William) Eugene McCown. In her introduction, Parmar tells us that German troops “bayonetted her portrait by Eugene McCown” when they ransacked Cunard’s home: presumably, it was the same portrait.

I must admit I prefer this poem to any “iconic” picture of Cunard I’ve ever seen. It’s cleverly, elegantly made, a harmonious chord progression of different nuances. With a sardonic yawn, the speaker rebuts both the narcissism of the model and the pretension of the artist, defusing the latter through fine-tuned mimicry. The artist’s speech is gently parodied but he’s allowed to say something fundamentally interesting, especially at the beginning: “If one could paint, / Combine the abstract with a certain rude / Individual form, knot passion with restraint … ” That extra beat allotted to the eighth line is beautifully judged. I like the unexpected couplet, too, as a more rambling and thoughtless note is struck in lines nine and 10. And the connection in the line “dead emblem … so one lies” forges a critique of artistic convention and the part of the woman’s passive body in it. The image of the bird (one of those alley-starlings?) brings vitality and curiosity in a deft “turn” right at the end.

Cunard is probably remembered now chiefly for her Spanish civil war poems, such as To Eat Today and any new reader should get their measure. They are rough-edged but open up the terrain of what poetry in the 20th century finds it can do. Frontline political engagement is what drives such work. But Cunard was a literary activist too, and contributed importantly to modernism through her efforts on behalf of other writers. Her press, The Hours, was famously the first to publish Samuel Beckett. I think she understood the talents of other people better than her own were ever understood.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/06/classical-modern-poetry-adam-sedia.html

Clarity and Obscurity: The Essences of Classical & Modern Poetry
By Adam Sedia|June 27th, 2019|Categories: Culture, Literature, Modernity, Poetry, Tradition
As a sustained artistic school, modernism cannot endure. But classical art is eternal because the ideas it expresses are eternal. A resurrection of classical form does not represent a return to the past, real or imagined, but instead a return to sanity, a reorientation of the artistic eye back to its natural, fully human purpose and use.

Classical and modern poetry are inarguably different. Indeed, modernism’s chief boast is its break with classicism and tradition more broadly. The difference is palpable in even the most cursory reading of a classical poem alongside a modernist one. Yet in what does the difference lie? It might be tempting to follow Justice Stewart’s famous maxim “I know it when I see it.” Of course we know the difference when we see it, but a fairly surface-level analysis of the two styles of poetry reveals what the difference is and why it is so.

The first aspect immediately noticeable about a classical poem is its clarity of expression. The language might be lofty or florid or sensuous, but the meaning—the underlying truth the poet is conveying through his art—is never lost. By contrast, a modernist poem is notable at first for its opacity. Symbolism unique to the poet or even the poem, inexplicable without footnotes, pervades the work. And the language always speaks in riddles, conjuring many possible interpretations, none of them necessarily wrong.

The divergence in opinion over clarity more fundamentally stems from a difference in worldviews. The classical poet operates under the presumption of truth. Poetry is merely a vehicle for expressing that truth, and a poem that is not clear in that expression is a failure. The modernist poet, by stark contrast, denies either the discoverability or the existence itself of any absolute truth. Truth then becomes subjective, identical to the perceptions of the observer. With the observer as the ultimate arbiter of truth, effect becomes paramount, and the success of a poem is determined by the power of the effect it has over the reader, regardless of the conclusions to which the reader arrives. Thus, in a modernist poem, the timbre, the nuance, the imagery of language is paramount, for they themselves contain, rather than convey, truth to the reader.

Two poems that beautifully illustrate this divergence are Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Hart Crane’s “Voyages.” Similar in structure and vividness and grandeur of their imagery, they serve as perfect contrasts to analyze the use of poetic language by a classicist and by a modernist in contrast with each other. These, along with both classicist and modernist polemical writings, illustrate this fundamental difference over the nature of truth and its measurable stylistic effects.

I.

First, Shelley. Before examining his verse, it is worthwhile to consider what he himself considered the end of poetry to be. After all, what better benchmark to measure the success of his poem than the one he himself set out? In his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley divides the human mental processes into reason, or “the enumeration of quantities already known,” and imagination, or “the perception of the value of those quantities.”[1] Poetry is “the expression of the imagination.”[2] Thus, the language of poets “is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words, which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts . . .”[3]

For Shelley, “[a] poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”[4] Whereas a story is merely “a catalogue of detached facts” related only through time, place, and causality, a poem “is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.”[5] Poetry thus captures the ideals themselves, rather than the forms observed.

But poetry also acts in another “diviner” way: “[i]t awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought;” it “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”[6] In this way poetry precedes and is superior to moral law, for it “enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food.”[7]

Towards the end of his essay, Shelley lays down the role and function of poetry in human society. “The functions of poetry are two-fold,” he says; “by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good.”[8] Poetry, then, is the “center and circumference of knowledge” and “comprehends all science,” and is most needed when “the accumulation of the materials of external life”—knowledge and perception—“exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.”[9]

Ambitious stuff—not surprising for a piece that famously ends by calling poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[10] But Shelley was not one for small thoughts. To him, poetry was no less than the revelation of truth more comprehensively than either science or ethics could achieve.

To see Shelley put his poetic ideal into practice, his “Mont Blanc” provides one of the best examples of clarity of expression. The poem has become something of a war-horse for undergraduate classrooms, but this in no way diminishes its worth for study. Its sweeping, grandiose imagery captures the quintessence of the Romantic ideal of the sublime as beautiful, and renders the poem a perfect case study to observe clarity of expression even through a heavy surface layer of imagery.

The first stanza begins:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark — now glittering — now reflecting gloom —
Now lending splendour . . .

Here Shelley brings the reader from the broadest possible topic, “the everlasting universe of things,” unconstrained by place or even time, and frames it as thought within the mind of the observer. It is the human mind alone that contains the universe entire. Then he introduces the first metaphor:

. . . where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, — with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

The human mind, which contains the universe, is likened to a “feeble brook,” so frail amidst the titanic forces of mountains, waterfalls, and river rapids. Despite the intensity of the images, neither the metaphor nor the main idea is lost. Indeed, the imagery serves the metaphor, highlighting the brook’s feebleness among mightier forces of nature.

Having set the mountain scene for the brook that represents the human mind, Shelley spends the first twenty-two lines of the second stanza immersing the reader in vivid description of the “awful scene” of raw, untamed, overpowering natural forces in the Arve Valley beneath Mont Blanc: the “giant brood of pines;” the “chainless winds;” the “earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep / Of the aethereal waterfall whose veil / Robes some unsculptured image.” Then Shelley returns to the human mind—his own, this time—reflecting on the awesome sight he just described:

Seeking among the shadows that pass by⁠
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

Here Shelley’s Platonism surfaces. He sees in the images before him mere “shadows” and seeks among them the “ghosts of all things that are,” not very subtly evoking Plato’s famous analogy of the shadows on the cave wall.

In the third stanza, Shelley explores the Platonic ideal further, pondering the existence of the ideal beyond “[t]he veil of life and death.” Now halfway into the poem, Shelley introduces its main metaphor:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene —
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
And the wolf tracks her there — how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.

The imagery is awesome and frightening. The mountain, aloof above the clouds, serves as the metaphor for the Platonic ideals Shelley has just been pondering. At last Shelley addresses the mountain directly, calling on it (or, rather, the ideal it represents) to act upon the imperfections in the perceivable world:

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

Again, even at the poetic climax, the most awe-inspiring images in a poem packed with awe-inspiring natural imagery, the poetic language serves only as a vehicle for expressing the metaphor of the mountain as representing the Platonic ideal.

The fourth stanza descends from the serene, unreachable mountaintop to the chaotic scene beneath. Throughout the imagery is powerful and frightening: “glaciers creep / Like snakes that watch their prey;” the piled rocks resemble “A city of death . . . yet not a city, but a flood of ruin;” “Vast pines . . . branchless and shattered stand.” These images show the irresistible power of nature, amid which “The race / Of man flies far in dread, his work and dwelling / Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream . . .” Thus, humanity is fleeting not only in comparison to the idealized, unreachable mountaintop, but also to the natural, if transient, forces of nature beneath.

The fifth and final stanza concludes, “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there.” It ponders how high on the isolated peak the winds rush and the lightning flashes silently. And yet:

. . . The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

With that question, the immovable, eternal ideal represented by the mountaintop is framed within the mind of the creatures portrayed as miniscule and powerless only a few lines before. The power of the mountain rests only in the human mind’s ability to perceive it and grasp the ideal it represents in the poem.

Throughout the poem, Shelley’s meaning is never lost. It is a philosophical lesson vividly, breathtakingly described. Nowhere is any imagery gratuitous. It serves only to support the metaphor. Be it the frailty of human nature and the human mind, the raw, overpowering grandeur of untamed nature, or the unreachable Platonic ideal, all the vivid description serves the point being made. Nowhere is the meaning vague or ambiguous. Indeed, the poem would be a failure otherwise. If Shelley is going to propound philosophy, it would ill serve him to make his readers guess at his meaning. Philosophy is, of course, the search for truth, and presumes the existence of a truth to discover.

Shelley uses the poetic language not as a mask, but as a lens to reveal that truth. The imagery makes the ideas they convey come alive, phrased in concrete terms to which any reader can immediately relate. Rather than forcing the reader to guess at his meaning, Shelley reveals it more clearly and more powerfully through imagery with power and detail enough to conjure the emotions.

Before moving to modernism, some additional words of classical polemics supply a worthy supplement to Shelley’s. An equally enthusiastic polemicist, Edgar Allan Poe echoes Shelley in his posthumously published essay, “The Poetic Principle.” Poe, after concluding that the ideal poem is short but not too short, addresses the function of poetry. Whereas Shelley’s human mind is dual, Poe’s is tripartite, divided between intellect, taste, and moral sense.[11] The intellect concerns itself with truth; taste with beauty; and moral sense with duty.[12] Regarding taste, “[a]n immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments amid which he exists.”[13]

Mere reproduction of those sense-impressions, though “is not poetry.”[14]

There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable . . . no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.[15]

It is “the struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness” that “has given to the world all that which it . . . has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.”[16]

In concluding, Poe summarizes his poetic principle as “strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty.”[17] And “the manifestation of the Principle is always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul” independent of passion or even truth.[18] Poe, however, is quick to hedge his exclusion of truth from the poetic principle: “if . . . through the attainment of a truth, we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience, at once, the true poetical effect”—but the effect refers to the harmony perceived, not the truth itself “which merely served to render the harmony manifest.” [19]

Thus, for Poe, as with Shelley, the principle upon which all poetry is founded is the revelation of a truth. But for Poe, revelation is not through a direct telling of the truth, as in prose, but a showing of it through a “harmony” or metaphor previously unrealized by the reader. Any of Poe’s works readily demonstrate his use of this principle. “The Bells,” with its stark imagery and oppressive repetition, is one example.

Let us conclude the discussion of the classical approach with a statement from Keats in a letter to his friend, the poet John Hamilton Reynolds:

Poetry should be great [and] unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. – How beautiful are the retired flowers! [H]ow would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, “[A]dmire me I am a violet! [D]ote upon me I am a primrose!”[20]

This simple statement of methodology stands in stark contrast to the sweeping, grandiose philosophizing of Shelley and Poe. With this simple, almost childlike statement, Keats more succinctly and perhaps better than either Shelley or Poe captures the essence of classical aesthetic: meaning is never subverted to the sensory delight of the imagery.

II.

If philosophy and rhetoric do not belong in poetry, all that remains is the raw emotional effect of the language itself. The modernist conception, which sees the effect of language as the true substance of poetry, leaves no room for philosophizing. Or rather, it makes its philosophy about the poem—and therefore external to the poem—rather than within the poem. In this way modernist poetry, which bills its opacity as depth, is actually superficial.

To illustrate the modernist conception of poetry as superficial, few better examples are available than Hart Crane’s “Voyages.” While on its surface the poem might seem a poor comparison to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” as its poems are indisputably love poems. To be sure, contemporary critics, mired in the dominance of sexual identity politics, tend to view Crane’s “Voyages” as primarily expressions of homosexual love. But Crane himself characterized them as primarily “sea poems” and only secondarily as “also love poems.”[21] The sweeping imagery Crane uses in portraying a subject as grand and universal to the human experience as the sea compares perfectly to Shelley’s equally sweeping description of a similarly grand and universal object of nature.

Before turning to the poems themselves, it is once again worthwhile to examine polemics, this time modernist. “Voyages” emerged in the modernist milieu, and understanding modernism is essential to examining its language. Crane did not leave us with any sweeping polemic stating his conception of poetry as Shelley did, but he left voluminous correspondence that permits insight into his poetic ideals. There, Crane expressed his high regard of both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.[22] Both Pound and Eliot, it so happens, were highly influential polemicists, and their arguments should provide some helpful insight into Crane’s ideals.

In his short but tight 1913 essay, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Pound begins by defining the poetic “image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”[23] The presentation of this emotional “complex,” in turn, “gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[24] To Pound, “[i]t is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.”[25]

Pound advises poets, “Don’t be ‘viewy’—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays,” and “Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation, as compared with Milton’s rhetoric.”[26] Pound’s use of “viewy” is unclear. Though it would usually mean “showy” or “ostentatious,” he associates it instead with philosophy rather than the display of imagery he advocates. Given the primacy of the image in his conception, his preference for “presentation” over “rhetoric,” and his earlier definition of the image complex, it is not a difficult leap to conclude that Pound conceives of poetry not as the conveyance of a message so much as the conveyance of an emotional effect.

T.S. Eliot’s profoundly influential 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” provides a much more detailed and eloquent articulation of the modernist approach to poetry. Though the essay’s primary focus is the relationship between the heritage of past literature and present poetry, its entire second section describes the purpose of poetry in Eliot’s modernist conception.

For Eliot, the mature poet is a mere catalyst, a “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” in the same way that platinum catalyzed the formation of sulfuric acid without itself being consumed.[27] The elements that the poet catalyzes are “emotions and feelings,” and their product, “[t]he effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it[,] is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art.”[28] This effect “may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result.”[29] Great poetry may even “be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely.”[30]

On examining the greatest poetry, Eliot perceives “how completely any semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity’ misses the mark.”[31] Its greatness lies not in “the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”[32] Even though poetry might “employ[ ] a definite emotion,” its “intensity . . . is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of.”[33] Providing the example of Keats, Eliot asserts, “The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.”[34]

Eliot also rejects the Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” For Eliot, the poet does not recollect emotion, but collects experiences, using ordinary emotions and working them through poetry “to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”[36] In concluding, Eliot calls this emotion in art impersonal, and has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.

These two essays reveal the modernist conception of poetry as completely alien to that of Shelley, Poe, or Keats. However highly Eliot regarded those poets as part of the historical tradition he and his generation were to expand, his views of their art could not be more alien to theirs. For both him and Pound (and the rest of the modernists), the poem is not the conveyance of an underlying truth in a manner that delights—a concept, at least in English, stretching back to Sir Philip Sidney in the Renaissance—it is rather the conveyance of an effect on the reader. For Pound, the conveyance is a complex formed from the poetic image, and for Eliot it is a concentration of an impersonal experience that conjures a new emotion. But Eliot’s definition is only a more expansive view of Pound’s. The essence of both—the essence of modernism—is that poetry’s purpose is to convey an effect, not a truth. It works on, rather than speaks to, the reader.

If “effect” is merely the emotional response of the reader to the language used, then poetry is but a cosmetic art, and a poet is but a writer who can string together a series of pretty-sounding words that conjure an image. That task requires no special skill. Like architecture or carpentry, true craftsmanship in poetry requires attention to structure and foundation, not merely color and ornament. And shoddy constructions and Potemkin villages never endure. True art lies in the essence of the work, not its impressions. This is yet another sense in which to read Keats’s famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

The language Crane uses in “Voyages” perfectly encapsulates modernism: poetry as the conveyance of effect rather than truth. The first poem paints a vivid picture of the grandeur of the sea: “fresh ruffles of the surf,” “[b]right striped urchins.” “The sun beats lightning on the waves, / The waves fold thunder on the sand.” But as soon as it leaves these images, it concludes with an exhortation to “brilliant kids”—“frisk with your dog” and “[f]ondle your shells and sticks”—along with a warning that “[t]he bottom of the sea is cruel.”

The second poem follows the same pattern, beginning with a portrayal of the sea in sweeping images: “rimless flood, unfettered leewardings, / Samite sheeted;” the “undinal vast belly moonward bend[ing];” the “scrolls of silver snowy sentences;” and the striking simile “as the bells of San Salvador / Salute the crocus lustres of the stars / In these poinsettia meadows of her tides.” Here Crane likens the sea to a “great wink of eternity” and urges the lover to whom the poem is addressed to “hasten . . . – sleep, death, desire / Close round one instant in one floating flower.” Again, the poem ends with an address, this time as a double invocation, first to the “Seasons clear” to “bind us in time” and “awe,” then to the “minstrel galleons of Carib fire” to “bequeath us to no earthly shore.”

Both of the first two poems contain striking imagery undeveloped in relation to any metaphor. Instead, they are atmospheric pieces serving essentially the same purpose twice: to portray the beauty and grandeur of the sea. The first presents the sea from the shore and the second on the high seas, but these images are just a backdrop for the true message of the poem, which is shouted at the end of each as a direct announcement. Finally, the essential message of poems, rather than being developed as an argument throughout the poem, is stated plainly in summary fashion at the end, as an exhortation and then as an invocation. Pretty descriptions followed by a blunt statement of prosaic literality, though, for however many fine turns of phrasing they contain, do not make poetry.

The third poem is darker, hinting at death. It begins with an impression of the “tendered theme” of the lover “that light / Retrieves from sea plains where the sky / Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones.” Meanwhile, the narrator is separated in “ribboned water lanes . . . laved and scattered with no stroke,” to be “admitted through black swollen gates / That must arrest all distance otherwise”—an image of death under the waves, “Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments.” Moving from shore to sea, the third poem has now brought the reader under the water, to see “Light wrestling there incessantly with light, / Star kissing star through wave on wave . . . / Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn.” Here Crane mentions death explicitly, not as something to fear but something which “if shed, / presumes no carnage”—a calming transformation that the underwater calm evokes. As with the others, this poem closes with an invocation, this time directly to the lover: “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . . .”

The language of the fourth poem is much less concrete, as it is the most message-oriented rather than atmospheric, of the six poems. Here, the narrator sings the immortality of love between two mortals, the love “Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe / Chilled albatross’s white immutability),” that renders the narrator’s mortality “clay aflow immortally” to the lover. The only truly striking images given are the “Bright staves of flowers and quills” and the “Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes.” The rest of the language is remarkably abstract in comparison to the other five poems, at the same time that the poem’s message flows consistently through the poem. This is not coincidental. The fourth poem is the closest Crane comes to expounding on a theme, but he fails to do so with any unifying metaphor, instead speaking directly about the immortality of his love.

What metaphor is lacking? Metaphor as a single underlying idea that unifies the sensory descriptions of the poem into a coherent whole. Metaphor is the meaning of a poem, in the classical sense. Without this unifying principle, “Voyages” as a whole appears as little more than a series of gaudy descriptions passing one after the other like floats in a Mardi Gras parade.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://booktherapy-by-bijal.medium.com/why-poetry-is-one-of-the-most-powerful-forms-of-therapy-f3553cb909b4


Why poetry is one of the most powerful forms of therapy
Bijal A Shah
Bijal A Shah

Apr 7, 2018·8 min read



April is National Poetry Month and naturally a great time to explore the immense therapeutic powers of poetry. Reading and writing poetry both engage our senses along with our emotions, making the art form experiential and hugely effective in connecting with our minds.
Both writing and reading poetry, through their expression of feelings and words have highly therapeutic effects on the mind.
The structure of a poem favours brevity yet the best poems also capture succinct detail, making them incredibly powerful in getting a message across to the reader. Writing poetry requires the poet to be extremely disciplined with his choice of words and the number of words, to create a sharp and accurate snapshot of what he or she is feeling. This combination of brevity and detail gives the reader open access to the poet’s mind and enables the reader to truly connect with the poet.
Writing poetry as therapy
Writing poetry requires us to be open and honest about our feelings so that we can voice them through pen and paper, which is the first step to truly expressing ourselves.
This acknowledgement of our innermost thoughts allows us to be true to ourselves and boosts our self-esteem (as beautifully explained by author Geri Giebel Chavis in Poetry and Story Therapy: The Healing Power of Creative Expression (Writing for Therapy or Personal Development) which I highly recommend).
The best poetry is written when we are truly in the midst of our emotions and struggling to gain clarity. This is when the cathartic release of emotions to pen and then paper as an outlet calms us, gives us clarity and enables us to move forward.
Poetry’s powerful healing qualities have been documented during both world wars and the American civil war: poems were read to soldiers to help them cope with trauma and the brutalities of war. In fact doctors would write poems for their patients, emotionally connecting with them. A striking example of this is John Keats who also trained as a doctor.
Poetry has also been used by modern-day doctors and physicians at Yale University School of Medicine and University College London School of Medicine. Yale actually has a committee that maintains a required literary reading list which includes poetry. Poetry allows both the doctor and the patient to understand the emotions that the patient might be going through which adds another facet to their overall care.
The use of poetry continues to grow as a recognised form of therapy. More and more psychotherapists across the US, UK and Europe continue to use poetry therapy as part of their practice. Globally the International Federation for Biblio / Poetry Therapy sets standards of excellence in the training and credentialing of practitioners in the field of biblio/poetry therapy, qualifying them to practice.

Writing Confessional Poetry
Writing confessional poetry specifically, which gives writers the opportunity to make a confession about something private or difficult is a great way to focus your mind, express your emotions and bring some clarity by writing down your feelings and thoughts in a poetic format.
Often the best poems are written from the heart, raw, emotional and to the point. A mindful exercise, it truly is game-changing. After the poem is written there is a certain sense of calm as we no longer hold the burden of our confession. We feel lighter and relieved.
You may initially struggle with starting a poem, however it does become easier with practice. The key is to let your thoughts wander and write what comes to mind. Do not hold back, let go and allow the emotions, words and images to unfold. Sometimes it is easier to write it all down and then piece it together using line breaks (pauses), restructuring paragraphs and sentences, pulling it together into a coherent form. A great book on writing poetry is The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio which includes helpful techniques, suggested themes, how to deal with self-doubt and writer’s block and the highs and lows of writing life.
For me personally poetry has been a lifeline and literally a saving grace. Below I share a poem I wrote that is very personal to me and something I wanted to express to my own mother before it was too late:

Mother’s Tribute
Dear mother
So much in my heart I want to express.
At one I wanted to sleep next to you all night.
At two I wanted to hold your hand and never let it go.
At five, I wanted to share my daily stories from nursery.
At ten, I wanted to hang out with my girlfriends.
At twelve, I wanted to do my own thing.
At sixteen, I kept secrets.
At twenty, I had found my own. Life was busy managing social affairs.
At twenty five, I was consumed with career ambitions, men and big life plans.
At thirty, I was getting married and wanted you to celebrate in my joy.
At thirty five, the grandkids had arrived. I felt what you felt when I was born.
At forty, I missed you. Wished to see you more.
At fifty my heart ached, for the pain you were suffering. I really missed you.
At sixty, I was nostalgic, revering in my childhood memories of you and daddy.
Dear mother, your presence makes life worthwhile.
It blooms hope in every dark corner.
It allows us to truly experience and give unconditional love.
You make my soul feel warm.
May our souls be entwined forever, knotted together.
I normally write poetry when dealing with confusing situations or when dealing with loss or pain. It has really helped me during difficult transitions in my life such as dealing with illness, loved ones who were suffering, moving countries and losing people close to me. The transformation from difficult emotions to lighter ones, post writing, is one of the reasons that makes me reach for the pen every time. Here are some suggestions to get you started with your poem if you find yourself stuck.
Name the emotion you are feeling and describe it in a four line stanza
Talk about your fears
Talk about your losses
Talk about your dreams
Focus on a powerful image and describe it
Write about what inspires you.
Hopefully these tips will help you get started.

Reading poetry as therapy
We are often drawn to a poem when we connect with the poet’s feelings, either feeling the same as the poet or empathising with him/her. It feels like a 2-way dialogue, where there is a sense of mutual understanding. In How to Read a Poem…: and Start A Poetry Circle, Molly Peacock makes a great observation that readers often feel a poem is about them because it captures exactly how they are feeling. This has a profound, almost cathartic impact on the reader.
Reading poetry is apt for expressing emotions and perhaps the the reason why it has been so popular as therapy through the ages. Images and metaphors embedded within a poem in a rhythmic pattern create a similar effect to music: the poetic format enables the expression of emotion that might otherwise be hard to verbally express or may have felt too threatening to do so in a direct way.
Reading poetry for stress relief, in particular, has been the most beneficial for my clients. One of my all-time favourite poems for stress relief is ‘Leisure’ by W H Davies:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
What effect did the poem have on you? As we read the poem, it imposes a sense of calm; conjuring up images of spring time and happy-go-lucky wildlife, connecting with nature. The poem gives us a stark realisation of how quickly life passes us by and how sad it is when we are not truly living but just passing time. It nudges us to stop and reconsider our lives. The feelings of sadness and ‘emptiness’ that it provokes, makes us acknowledge the feelings held within us. It also encourages us to enjoy the present moment and be more mindful.

Another one of my favourite poems of all time is by Robert Frost called ‘The Road Not Taken’:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The poem resonates with us all — making life-changing decisions and when faced with two different choices, which one is the right one? Do we go down the safe path (taken by many others before us?) Or do we forge our own path, no matter how difficult this might be in the anticipation that a unique, independent choice might make life that much better. What are your thoughts about this poem?
Tell us what you thought of the poems above and do share your writing/poems in the comment section below!
A big hello and thank you for reading! Passionate about literature, psychology, and life I launched Book Therapy as an alternative form of therapy using the power of literature. I create reading lists/personalised book prescriptions based on your individual needs, this is my signature personalised reading service. My book recommendations have featured in The Guardian, NBC News and Marie Claire. You can also check out Book Therapy’s free reading lists and A- Z of book prescriptions (covering both fiction and non-fiction). These suggest books based on your existing life situation (e.g. anxiety, job change, relationship heartache) as well as interests (e.g memoir, historical fiction, non-fiction, crime etc). There’s also a Children’s A — Z of Book Prescriptions. Feel free to check out the blog for more literary gems. There’s also a post on my personal story of how I entered the world of bibliotherapy and book curation. And if you’d like to connect, email me at bijal@booktherapy.io or www.booktherapy.io.
Book Therapy is a participant in the Amazon EU, US and Canada Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

**********************************

Finally Seeing The Truth And Embracing A Truth

Such was a truth, a sad tale hidden well
Its fires, flames from hottest depths of mind's hell
A massive mountain of pain deep within
Pealing layers to eat away 'neath skin
But desolation and hurt you would not know
For in those darken seeds you did not sow
The waiting ground to raise the poison tree
That gifts wicked fruits that fed such as she
Alas! True, I now fear to reveal more
For revelations will open more doors.

Reality, in this accursed new world
Vile poison on arrows her bow hurls
And what of my own blindness and error
That epic love that hath brought such terror?

Such was a truth, a sad tale hidden well
Its fires, flames from hottest depths of mind's hell
A massive mountain of pain deep within
Pealing layers to eat away 'neath skin.

R.J. Lindley, 7-27-2021
Dark Rhyme

*****************

The Revelation, The Prayer, The Plea

O'heart dare to hope for soothing relief
Quell this growing sorrow with belief
Wake anew, wake a far, far truer path
Let the coming light destroy the dark wrath
And be gentle to the reformed soul
For this world's evil took a heavy toll.

R.J. Lindley, 7-27-2021
Rhyme

[LongTermGuy]

~ "This acknowledgement of our innermost thoughts allows us to be true to ourselves and boosts our self-esteem (as beautifully explained by author Geri Giebel Chavis in Poetry and Story Therapy:

The Healing Power of Creative Expression (Writing for Therapy or Personal Development) which I highly recommend).


The best poetry is written when we are truly in the midst of our emotions and struggling to gain clarity. This is when the cathartic release of emotions to pen and then paper as an outlet calms us, gives us clarity and enables us to move forward." ~




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTawF13BzGM

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/152025/an-introduction-to-modernism

COLLECTION
An Introduction to Modernism
The monumental artistic movement that changed poetry forever.
BY THE EDITORS
Large Composition A with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow and Blue (Grande composizione A con nero, rosso, grigio, giallo e blu), by Piet Mondrian, 1919-1920, 20th Century, oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm
Large Composition A by Piet Mondrian (Photo by Alessandro Vasari/Archivio Vasari/MONDADORI PORTFOLIO via Getty Images)
“Poets in our civilization,” T.S. Eliot writes in a 1921 essay, “must be difficult.” Such difficulty, he believed, reflected the times: advanced industrialization transformed the West, Europe reeled from World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution ignited Russia. Thinkers such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Einstein changed people’s understanding of history, economics, philosophy, science, psychology, physics, and even religion. “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,” Eliot continues, and “this variety and complexity … must produce various and complex results.” With the inventions of everything from the automobile to the airplane, the vacuum cleaner to the incandescent lightbulb, the motion picture to the radio, and the bra to the zipper, people’s lives were changing with unprecedented speed. Many English-language artists, including poets, thought a new approach was needed to capture and comment on this new era, requiring innovation in their own work: the result was called Modernism, the largest, most significant movement of the early 20th century.

Difficult, various, complex: these are often the very terms critics use to describe Modernist poetry in general. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is often seen as the acme of Modernist writing—so much so that William Carlos Williams later compared its publication in 1922 to “an atom bomb” dropped on the landscape of English-language poetry. The long, obscure poem exhibits many of the techniques associated with the movement: use of collage and disjunction, free verse, an unsentimental impersonality, and a dense web of references to both high and low culture. However, neither those gestures nor the poem’s apocalyptic atmosphere fully represents Modernist poetry, which is often, in its “variety and complexity,” difficult to read and to define.

One of Modernism’s most famous slogans is a case study in its contradictions. For later critics, “make it new” became a shorthand for the movement’s goals, especially its obsession with artistic novelty. But the phrase, attributed to Ezra Pound, wasn’t well-known to the Modernists themselves and, ironically, wasn’t itself new. In fact, it’s an ancient, a translation of a translation: according to the Confucian texts Pound took the phrase from, it was once emblazoned on the bathtub of the first ruler of the Shang dynasty.

For Pound, the it in “make it new” was perhaps not so much poetry as history. His magnum opus, The Cantos, is a case in point: it retells classical stories as it attempts to revitalize outmoded forms, such as accentual verse. Both a scholar and an agitator, Pound had a hand in many of Modernism’s decisive turns. In the 1910s, he dabbled in theories under the heading of futurism, and alongside H.D. and Amy Lowell, he founded Imagism, an early Modernist school crucial to the development of free verse. Pound’s friendships with W.B. Yeats and Eliot propelled both men toward the visionary, and Pound’s influence on dozens of writers helped define Modernism more than that of any other poet.

Not every Modernist poet thought as Eliot and Pound did. Wallace Stevens, another giant of the era, saw contemporary upheavals in a less pessimistic light. His lavish philosophical poems explore how poetry might constitute a “supreme fiction” that could take the place of organized religion. And Hart Crane positioned his varied, ornate epic The Bridge as a direct challenge to The Wasteland in an expansive, Whitmanesque vein.

Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade. Marianne Moore mixed “plain American which cats and dogs could read” with quotations from a huge range of sources, and measured her jagged lines by syllable instead of stress. Some poets discarded the line altogether. Gertrude Stein, one of the earliest Modernist innovators, wrote prose poems that sought to focus readers on the sonic and associative textures of words. And E.E. Cummings seized on the potential of the typewriter, using the space of the page, the parenthesis, and even the individual letter in radically new ways.

Mina Loy also experimented with typography, but saw her male counterparts far eclipse her reputation. Her example raises questions about who is included in conversations about the movement. For instance: should Robert Frost, with his ear for both the vernacular and the iambic, be part of the story of Modernist poetry? Langston Hughes offers another limit case: is his blues prosody better understood as a Modernist achievement, or in the context of the Harlem Renaissance? What about such poets as César Vallejo and Anna Akhmatova, innovators outside the Anglo-American tradition? As with any far-reaching movement, individual artists rise above any particular tradition: not everyone’s work adheres to all the same principles nor does a movement’s output exhibit all the same styles and tendencies.

Such questions are crucial but vexing; more certain is Modernism’s legacy. The movement’s most immediate heirs were the Objectivists, whose varied writings extended the work of the first-generation Modernists starting in the later 1920s and ‘30s. But the influence of the Modernists extends well into the postwar period. Charles Olson’s influential 1950 essay “Projective Verse” consciously aligned the Black Mountain School and the later San Francisco Renaissance with “the experiments of Cummings, Pound, and Williams,” but they would “make it new” by innovating their own poetics to address their different times and culture. The formidable effects of Modernism are also measurable by later reactions against them, the postwar turn towards Confessionalism in particular.

The following selections of poets, poetics essays, poems, articles, poem guides, and audio recordings are intended as an introductory sample of the Poetry Foundation’s offerings on Modernism; they cannot be an exhaustive representation of the school’s many and varied aspects.

POETS
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
William Carlos Williams
William Butler Yeats
Wallace Stevens
Charles Olson
Mina Loy
E. E. Cummings
Gertrude Stein
Marianne Moore
Hart Crane
Basil Bunting
POETICS ESSAYS
Preface to Some Imagist Poets
AMY LOWELL
“A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts”
EZRA POUND
The Poetry of the Present
D. H. LAWRENCE
Tradition and the Individual Talent
T. S. ELIOT
Hamlet
T. S. ELIOT
Composition as Explanation
GERTRUDE STEIN
Introduction to The Wedge
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The Poem as a Field of Action
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Projective Verse
CHARLES OLSON
SEMINAL POEMS
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. ELIOT
The Waste Land
T. S. ELIOT
In a Station of the Metro
EZRA POUND
Three Cantos
EZRA POUND
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part I]
EZRA POUND
Sea Rose
H. D.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
WALLACE STEVENS
Sunday Morning
WALLACE STEVENS
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part I]
EZRA POUND
Sea Rose
H. D.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
WALLACE STEVENS
Sunday Morning
WALLACE STEVENS
At Melville’s Tomb
HART CRANE
from The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge
HART CRANE
The Red Wheelbarrow
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
To Elsie
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass
GERTRUDE STEIN
[anyone lived in a pretty how town]
E. E. CUMMINGS
The Second Coming
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Leda and the Swan
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Sailing to Byzantium
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Wild Common
D. H. LAWRENCE
From "Paterson V"
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
from Briggflatts: An Autobiography
BASIL BUNTING
ARTICLES
Edward Thomas 101
THE EDITORS
E.E. Cummings 101
THE EDITORS
William Carlos Williams 101
BENJAMIN VOIGT
100 Years of Poetry: “In the Middle of Major Men”
LIESL OLSON
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
THE EDITORS
All Things Original and Strange
GREGORY WOODS
Significant Soil
CHRISTINA DAVIS
Willing to Be Reckless
ANGE MLINKO
Reading the Difficult
PETER QUARTERMAIN
The Modernist Journal Project: The Little Review, Blast, Coterie, The Owl, The Crisis, and more magazines for you to download (seriously)
HARRIET STAFF
POEM GUIDES
Hart Crane: “Voyages”
BRIAN REED
Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker”
JESSICA BURSTEIN
Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”
AUSTIN ALLEN
Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
AUSTIN ALLEN
William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”
CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER
Gertrude Stein: “The house was just twinkling in the moon light”
JOEL BROUWER
William Carlos Williams: “To a Poor Old Woman”
STEPHANIE BURT
Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”
KATHERINE ROBINSON
Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”
AUSTIN ALLEN
Amy Lowell: “The Garden by Moonlight”
D. A. POWELL
Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Renascence”
HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL
AUDIO
Gertrude Stein: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
Wallace Stevens: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
E.E. Cummings: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
William Carlos Williams: Essential American Poets
FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
William Carlos Williams
FROM POETRY LECTURES
Langdon Hammer: American Perspectives
FROM POETRY LECTURES
Helen Vendler: American Perspectives
FROM POETRY LECTURES
The Waste Land: The App
FROM POETRY OFF THE SHELF
Robert Pinsky
FROM POETRY LECTURES
ONLINE RESOURCES
Modernist Journals Project
The Modernism Lab at Yale
EdSITEment: Introduction to Modernist Poetry
Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s



*************************************


"" Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade. Marianne Moore mixed “plain American which cats and dogs could read” with quotations from a huge range of sources, and measured her jagged lines by syllable instead of stress. Some poets discarded the line altogether. Gertrude Stein, one of the earliest Modernist innovators, wrote prose poems that sought to focus readers on the sonic and associative textures of words. And E.E. Cummings seized on the potential of the typewriter, using the space of the page, the parenthesis, and even the individual letter in radically new ways.""

I adamantly reject that totally biased view- "" “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. ""

As it casts away the very historic foundation of poetry -pre-1900.
Many of those comments are made by great modern poets but also have such bias, intense conceit and self -promotion that it is alarming and even to any with true knowledge, true appreciation of poetry such will be wholely rejected, imho..
I admit my own bias against William Carlos Williams.
As I have never seen in Williams poems the genius and the true heart of poetry...

Seems to me that they that could not match the greats of the past chose to decry their magnificent talents and seek to stray far afield while calling that collection of rejection- fantastic new innovation..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Today is a day of giving thanks. Thanks for our lives and the wonderful blessings that it gives.
Love, family, beauty , etc.
Here is to wishing you one and all a -- Very Happy Thanksgiving Day....--Tyr




https://poets.org/poems-thanksgiving

Poems about gratitude, family, food, home, and giving thanks for the Thanksgiving holiday.


Classic Poems for Thanksgiving

“Thanksgiving Day” by Lydia Maria Child
Over the river, and through the wood...

“The Thanksgivings” by Harriet Maxwell Converse
We who are here present thank the Great Spirit...

“A Song for Merry Harvest” by Eliza Cook
Bring forth the harp, and let us sweep its fullest, loudest string …

“A Thanksgiving Poem” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
The sun hath shed its kindly light…

“Grace for a Child” by Robert Herrick
Here, a little child I stand...

“A Thank-Offering” by Ella Higginson
Lord God, the winter has been sweet and brief …

“Thanksgiving Turkey” by George Parsons Lathrop
Valleys lay in sunny vapor…

“The Harvest Moon” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes...

“Thanksgiving” by James Whitcomb Riley
Let us be thankful—not only because…

“The Pumpkin” by John Greenleaf Whittier
Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun...

“Thanksgiving” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We walk on starry fields of white…

*************

A Thanksgiving Poem
----Paul Laurence Dunbar - 1872-1906


The sun hath shed its kindly light,
Our harvesting is gladly o’er
Our fields have felt no killing blight,
Our bins are filled with goodly store.

From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword
We have been spared by thy decree,
And now with humble hearts, O Lord,
We come to pay our thanks to thee.

We feel that had our merits been
The measure of thy gifts to us,
We erring children, born of sin,
Might not now be rejoicing thus.

No deed of our hath brought us grace;
When thou were nigh our sight was dull,
We hid in trembling from thy face,
But thou, O God, wert merciful.

Thy mighty hand o’er all the land
Hath still been open to bestow
Those blessings which our wants demand
From heaven, whence all blessings flow.

Thou hast, with ever watchful eye,
Looked down on us with holy care,
And from thy storehouse in the sky
Hast scattered plenty everywhere.

Then lift we up our songs of praise
To thee, O Father, good and kind;
To thee we consecrate our days;
Be thine the temple of each mind.

With incense sweet our thanks ascend;
Before thy works our powers pall;
Though we should strive years without end,
We could not thank thee for them all.

This poem is in the public domain.


***********************

Thanksgiving
Ella Wheeler Wilcox - 1850-1919

We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
And conquers if we let it.

There’s not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

This poem is in the public domain.

************************

Grace for a Child
Robert Herrick - 1591-1674


Here, a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand:
Cold as paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a benison to fall
On our meat, and on us all. Amen.
This poem is in the public domain.


*******************************

Thanksgiving Turkey
George Parsons Lathrop - 1851-1898


Valleys lay in sunny vapor,
And a radiance mild was shed
From each tree that like a taper
At a feast stood. Then we said,
"Our feast, too, shall soon be spread,
Of good Thanksgiving turkey."

And already still November
Drapes her snowy table here.
Fetch a log, then; coax the ember;
Fill your hearts with old-time cheer;
Heaven be thanked for one more year,
And our Thanksgiving turkey!

Welcome, brothers—all our party
Gathered in the homestead old!
Shake the snow off and with hearty
Hand-shakes drive away the cold;
Else your plate you'll hardly hold
Of good Thanksgiving turkey.

When the skies are sad and murky,
'Tis a cheerful thing to meet
Round this homely roast of turkey—
Pilgrims, pausing just to greet,
Then, with earnest grace, to eat
A new Thanksgiving turkey.

And the merry feast is freighted
With its meanings true and deep.
Those we've loved and those we've hated,
All, to-day, the rite will keep,
All, to-day, their dishes heap
With plump Thanksgiving turkey.

But how many hearts must tingle
Now with mournful memories!
In the festal wine shall mingle
Unseen tears, perhaps from eyes
That look beyond the board where lies
Our plain Thanksgiving turkey.

See around us, drawing nearer,
Those faint yearning shapes of air—
Friends than whom earth holds none dearer
No—alas! they are not there:
Have they, then, forgot to share
Our good Thanksgiving turkey?

Some have gone away and tarried
Strangely long by some strange wave;
Some have turned to foes; we carried
Some unto the pine-girt grave:
They'll come no more so joyous-brave
To take Thanksgiving turkey.

Nay, repine not. Let our laughter
Leap like firelight up again.
Soon we touch the wide Hereafter,
Snow-field yet untrod of men:
Shall we meet once more—and when?—
To eat Thanksgiving turkey.

This poem is in the public domain.

*************************

A Thank-Offering
Ella Higginson - 1861-1940


Lord God, the winter has been sweet and brief
In this fair land;
For us the budded willow and the leaf,
The peaceful strand.

For us the silver nights and golden days,
The violet mist;
The pearly clouds pierced with vibrating rays
Of amethyst.

At evening, every wave of our blue sea
Hollowed to hold
A fragment of the sunset’s mystery—
A fleck of gold.

The crimson haze is on the alder trees
In places lush;
Already sings with sweet and lyric ease
The western thrush.

Lord God, for some of us the days and years
Have bitter been;
For some of us the burden and the tears,
The gnawing sin.

For some of us, O God, the scanty store,
The failing bin;
For some of us the gray wolf at the door,
The red, within!

But to the hungry Thou hast given meat,
Hast clothed the cold;
And Thou hast given courage strong and sweet
To the sad and old.

And so we thank Thee, Thou most tender God,
For the leaf and flower;
For the tempered winds, and quickening, velvet sod,
And the gracious shower.

Yea, generous God, we thank Thee for this land
Where all are fed,
Where at the doors no freezing beggars stand,
Pleading for bread.

This poem was published in When the Birds Go North Again (The Macmillan Company, 1898). It is in the public domain.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://lithub.com/youre-probably-misreading-robert-frosts-most-famous-poem/


You Â’re Probably Misreading Robert FrostÂ’s Most Famous Poem
On the Many Tricks and Contradictions of "The Road Not Taken"
By David Orr
August 18, 2016
My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all
set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.
Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my
blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people
would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark.
Forward, you understand, and in the dark.

FROST TO LEONIDAS W. PAYNE JR., November 1, 1927

* * * *

“The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” under the title “Two Roads.” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by ThomasÂ’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposiÂ*tion for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a genÂ*tle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’”

That wasnÂ’t what occurred. Instead, Thomas sent Frost an admiring note in which it was evident that he had asÂ*sumed the poemÂ’s speaker was a version of Frost, and that the final line was meant to be read as generations of high school valedictorians have assumed. The sequence of their correspondence on the poem is a miniature version of the confusion “The Road Not Taken” would provoke in millions of subsequent readers:

1. Frost sends the poem to Thomas, with no clarifyÂ*ing text, in March or April of 1915.

2. Thomas responds shortly thereafter in a letter now evidently lost but referred to in later correÂ*spondence, calling the poem “staggering” but missing FrostÂ’s intention.

3. Frost responds in a letter (the date is unclear) to ask Thomas for further comment on the poem, hoping to hear that Thomas understood that it was at least in part addressing his own behavior.

4. Thomas responds in a letter dated June 13, 1915, explaining that “the simple words and unemphatic rhythms were not such as I was accustomed to expect great things, things I like, from. It stagÂ*gered me to think that perhaps I had always missed what made poetry poetry.” ItÂ’s still clear that Thomas doesnÂ’t quite understand the poemÂ’s stance or FrostÂ’s “joke” at his expense.


5. Frost writes back on June 26, 1915: “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh [in line 16] was a mock sigh, hypoÂ*critical for the fun of the I donÂ’t suppose I was ever sorry for anyÂ* thing I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.”

6. Thomas responds on July 11, 1915: “You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake . . . I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”

Edward Thomas was one of the keenest literary thinkers of his time, and the poem was meant to capture aspects of his own personality and past. Yet even Thomas needed explicit instructions—indeed, six entire letters—in order to appreciate the series of double games played in “The Road Not Taken.” That misperception galled Frost. As Thompson writes, Frost “could never bear to tell the truth about the failure of this lyric to perform as he intended it. Instead, he frequently told an idealized version of the story” in which, for instance, Thomas said, “What are you trying to do with me?” or “What are you doing with my character?” One can understand FrostÂ’s unhappiness, considering that the poem was misunderstood by one of his own early biographers, ElizÂ*abeth Shepley Sergeant (“Thomas, all his life, lived on the deeply isolated, lonely and subjective ‘way less travelled byÂ’ which Frost had chosen in youth”), and also by the eminent poet-critic Robert Graves, who came to the somewhat baffling conclusion that the poem had to do with FrostÂ’s “agonized decision” not to enlist in the British army. (There is no evidence that Frost ever contemplated doing so, in agony or otherwise.) Lyrics that are especially lucid and accessible are sometimes described as “critic-Â*proof”; “The Road Not Taken”—at least in its first few decades—came close to being readerÂ*-proof.

* * * *

The difficulty with “The Road Not Taken” starts, apÂ*propriately enough, with its title. Recall the poemÂ’s concluÂ*sion: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” These are not only the poemÂ’s bestÂ*-known lines, but the ones that capture what most readers take to be its central image: a lonely path that we take at great risk, possibly for great reward. So vivid is that image that many readers simply assume that the poem is called “The Road Less Traveled.” SearchÂ* engine data indicates that searches for “Frost” and “Road Less Traveled” (or “Travelled”) are extremely common, and even acÂ*complished critics routinely refer to the poem by its most famous line. For example, in an otherwise penetrating essay on FrostÂ’s ability to say two things at once, Kathryn Schulz, the book reviewer for New York magazine, mistakenly calls the poem “The Road Less Traveled” and then, in an irony Frost might have savored, describes it as “not-very-Frosty.”


Because the poem isnÂ’t “The Road Less Traveled.” ItÂ’s “The Road Not Taken.” And the road not taken, of course, is the road one didnÂ’t take—which means that the title passes over the “less traveled” road the speaker claims to have folÂ*lowed in order to foreground the road he never tried. The title isnÂ’t about what he did; itÂ’s about what he didnÂ’t do. Or is it? The more one thinks about it, the more difficult it beÂ* comes to be sure who is doing what and why. As the scholar Mark Richardson puts it:

Which road, after all, is the road “not taken”? Is it the one the speaker takes, which, according to his last description of it, is “less travelled”—that is to say, not taken by others? Or does the title refer to the supposÂ*edly better-Â*travelled road that the speaker himself fails to take? Precisely who is not doing the taking?

We know that Frost originally titled the poem “Two Roads,” so renaming it “The Road Not Taken” was a matter of deliberation, not whim. Frost wanted readers to ask the questions Richardson asks.

More than that, he wanted to juxtapose two visions—two possible poems, you might say—at the very beginning of his lyric. The first is the poem that readers think of as “The Road Less Traveled,” in which the speaker is quietly conÂ* gratulating himself for taking an uncommon path (that is, a path not taken by others). The second is the parodic poem that Frost himself claimed to have originally had in mind, in which the dominant tone is one of selfÂ*-dramatizing regret (over the path not taken by the speaker). These two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible. If this is what Frost meant to do, then itÂ’s reasonable to wonder if, as Thomas suggested, he may have outsmarted himself in addition to casual readers.

But this depends on what you think “The Road Not Taken” is trying to say. If you believe the poem is meant to take a position on will, agency, the nature of choice, and so forth—as the majority of readers have assumed—then it can seem unsatisfying (at best “a kind of joke,” as Schulz puts it). But if you think of the poem not as stating various viewpoints but rather as performing them, setting them beside and against one another, then a very different reading emerges. Here itÂ’s helpful, as is so often the case, to call upon a 19th-Â*century logician. In The Elements of Logic, Richard Whately describes the fallacy of substitution like so:


Two distinct objects may, by being dexterously preÂ*sented, again and again in quick succession, to the mind of a cursory reader, be so associated together in his thoughts, as to be conceived capable . . . of being actually combined in practice. The fallacious belief thus induced bears a striking resemblance to the optiÂ*cal illusion effected by that ingenious and philosophiÂ*cal toy called the Thaumatrope; in which two objects painted on opposite sides of a card,—for instance a man, and a horse,—a bird, and a cage,—are, by a quick rotatory motion, made to impress the eye in combination, so as to form one picture, of the man on the horseÂ’s back, the bird in the cage, etc.

What is fallacious in an argument can be mesmerizing in a poem. “The Road Not Taken” acts as a kind of thaumatrope, rotating its two opposed visions so that they seem at times to merge. And that merging is produced not by a careful blendÂ* ing of the two—a union—but by “rapid and frequent transiÂ*tion,” as Whately puts it. The title itself is a small but potent engine that drives us first toward one untaken road and then immediately back to the other, producing a vision in which we appear somehow on both roads, or neither.

* * * *

That sense of movement is critical to the manner in which the poem unfolds. We are continually being “reset” as we move through the stanzas, with the poem pivoting from one reading to the other so quickly that it’s easy to miss the transitions. This is true even of its first line. Here’s how the poem begins:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .

The most significant word in the stanza—and perhaps the most overlooked yet essential word in the poem—is “roads.” Frost could, after all, have said two “paths” or “trails” or “tracks” and conveyed nearly the same concept. Yet, as the scholar George Monteiro observes:

Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word “roads.” . . . In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, “Two paths diverged in a yellow wood,” Frost reacted with such feeling—“Two roads!”—that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word “roads” and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost reÂ*cited the poem all right, but, as his friend rememÂ*bered, “he didnÂ’t let me get away with ‘two paths!’”


What is gained by “roads”? Primarily two things. First, a road, unlike a path, is necessarily manÂ*made. Dante may have found his life similarly changed “in a dark wood,” but Frost takes things a step further by placing his speaker in a setting that combines the natural world with civilization—yes, the traveler is alone in a forest, but whichever way he goes, he follows a course built by other people, one that will be taken, in turn, by still other people long after he has passed. The act of choosing may be solitary, but the context in which it occurs is not. Second, as Wendell Berry puts it, a path differs from a road in that it “obeys the natural conÂ* tours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” A road is an assertion of will, not an accommodation. So the speakerÂ’s deÂ*cision, when it comes, whatever it is, will be an act of will that can occur only within the bounds of another such act—a way of looking at the world that simultaneously undercuts and strengthens the idea of individual choice.

This doubled effect continues in the poemÂ’s second and third lines, which summarize the dilemma around which “The Road Not Taken” is constructed: “And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler . . .” Frost often likes to use repetition and its cousin, redundancy, to suggest the complex contours of seemingly simple concepts. In this case, we have what seems like the most straightforward proposiÂ*tion imaginable: If a road forks, a single person canÂ’t “travel both” branches. But the concept is oddly extended to include the observation that one canÂ’t “travel both” and “be one travÂ*eler,” which seems superfluous. After all, Frost might more easily and obviously have written the stanza like so (emphaÂ*sis mine):

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
To where they ended, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .

What, then, is the difference between saying one canÂ’t “travel both” roads and saying one canÂ’t “travel both / And be one traveler”? And why does Frost think that difference worth preserving? One way to address these questions is to think about what the speaker is actually suggesting heÂ’s “sorry” about. He isnÂ’t, for instance, sorry that he wonÂ’t see whatÂ’s at the end of each road. (If he were, it would make more sense to use the modified version above.) Rather, heÂ’s sorry he lacks the capability to see whatÂ’s at the end of each road—heÂ’s objecting not to the outcome of the principle that you canÂ’t be two places at once, but to the principle itself. HeÂ’s resisting the idea of a universe in which his selfhood is limited, in part by being subject to choices. (Compare this to the case of a person who regrets that he canÂ’t travel through time not beÂ* cause he wishes he could, say, attend the premiere of Hamlet, but simply because he wants to experience time travel.)

This assumes, of course, that the speaker regrets that he canÂ’t travel both roads simultaneously. But what if he instead means that it would be impossible to “travel both / And be one traveler” even if he returned later to take the second road? As Robert Faggen puts it, the suggestion here is that “experience alters the traveler”: The act of choosing changes the person making the choice. This point will be quietly reÂ*inforced two stanzas later, when the speaker says that “knowÂ* ing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back”—the doubt is not only that he might return again to the same physical spot, but that he could return to the crossroads as the same person, the same “I,” who left it. This reading of the poem is subtly different from, and bolder than, the idea that existence is merely subject to the need to make decisions. If we canÂ’t persist unchanged through any one choice, then every choice becomes a matter of existential significance—after all, we arenÂ’t merely deciding to go left or right; weÂ’re transforming our very selves. At the same time, however, if each choice changes the self, then at some point the “self” in question becomes nothing more than a series of accumulated actions, many of them extremely minor. FrostÂ’s peculiar addition—“And be one traveler”—consequently both elevates and reduces the idea of the chooser while at the same time both elevating and reducing the choice. The thauÂ*matrope spins, the roads blur and merge.


* * * *

This is only the first stanza of “The Road Not Taken,” and already its lines seem papered over with potential interpretations, some more plausible than others, but none of which can be discarded. One can see why Thomas said he found the poem “staggering.” But then Frost takes things a step furÂ*ther. Having sketched the speaker and his potential choice in all their entangled ambiguity, he undermines the idea that there is really a choice to be made at all:

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

The speaker wants to see the paths as different (one has “perÂ*haps the better claim”) but admits that the distinctions, if they even exist, are minute (“the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”). The sameness of the roads will later be revised in the story the speaker says heÂ’ll be telling “ages and ages hence”—as he famously observes, heÂ’ll claim to have taken “the one less traveled by.”

Two things are worth pausing over in these stanzas. First, why is the physical appearance of the roads mentioned in the first place? We typically worry more about where roads go than what they look like. (Here again itÂ’s worth contrasting “road” with “path” or “trail,” neither of which implies a desÂ*tination as strongly as “road.”) So if all Frost intended was to parody a kind of romantic longing for missed opportunities, wouldnÂ’t it be more effective to imply that the roads reached the same location? As in:

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And making perhaps the better case,
Because it seemed to lead elsewhere,
Though at dayÂ’s end each traveler there
Would finish in the selfsame place.

Second, if youÂ’re determined to make the appearance of the roads the central issue, why make that appearance solely a function of how much travel each road had received? Why not talk about how one road was sunnier or wider or stonier or steeper? “I took the one less traveled by” is often assumed to mean “I took the more difficult road,” but this isnÂ’t necesÂ*sarily true in either a literal or metaphorical sense. In scenic areas, after all, the less traveled paths are usually the least interesting and challenging (think of an emergency-Â*vehicle access road in a state park), and if we imagine “roads” as reÂ*ferring to “life choices,” the array of decisions that are “less traveled” yet both easy and potentially harmful is nearly endÂ* less (drug abuse, tax evasion, and so on). So if the idea was to suggest that the speaker wants to perceive his chosen road as not just lonely, but demanding, why not make a more direct statement that would lead to a more direct conclusion, like:


Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one that dared me to try.

These lines are bad, admittedly, but not much worse at first glance than the poemÂ’s actual concluding lines, which inÂ*volve the addition of an apparently superfluous preposition—“by”—that is almost always omitted when the poemÂ’s crowning statement is invoked. (ThereÂ’s a reason M. Scott PeckÂ’s bestseller is called The Road Less Traveled rather than The Road Less Traveled By.)

So whatÂ’s going on here? Again, itÂ’s helpful to imagine “The Road Not Taken” as consisting of alternate glimpses of two unwritten poems, one the common misconception, the other the parody Frost sometimes claimed to have intended. Every time the poem threatens to clarify as one or the other, it resists, moving instead into an uncertain in-Â*between space in which both are faintly apparent, like overlapping ghosts. This is relatively easy to see with respect to the “naive” readÂ*ing of “The Road Not Taken” as a hymn to stoic individualÂ*ism. Had Frost wanted to write that poem, it would indeed have been titled “The Road Less Traveled,” and it might have gone something like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
To where they ended, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And posing perhaps the greater test,
Because it was narrow and wanted wear,
Rising so steeply into thinning air
That a man would struggle just to rest,

While the other offered room to play
Or stand at ease along the track.
I took the lonelier road that day,
And knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one that dared me to try,
And that has made all the difference.

I make no claims for the elegance of this version, but it does have all the elements generally attributed to the actual “Road Not Taken”: an emphasis on solitary challenge, a tone of weary yet quietly confident resignation (what a skeptic would call selfÂ* congratulation), and a plain choice between obviously different options. It would have been easy for Frost to write this poem.

Yet thatÂ’s not what he did. But neither did he write the parody that “The Road Not Taken” is widely considered to be among more sophisticated readers (or at least more careÂ*ful readers). Frost had a barbed, nimble wit, and he would have had no trouble skewering romantic dithering more pointedly if that was all he had in mind. Such a poem might have been called “Two Roads” and gone like so:


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
To where they ended, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And making perhaps the better case,
Because it seemed to lead elsewhere,
Though at dayÂ’s end each traveler there
Would finish in the selfsame place,

For both, I learned, were arms that lay
Around the wood and met in one track.
And whichever one I took that day
Would lead itself to the other way
And send me forward to take me back.

Still, I shall be claiming with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one on the left-hand side,
And that has made all the difference.

One of the essential elements of a parody is that it is recogÂ*nized as such: A parody that is too obscure has failed its basic purpose. In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost passes up several opportunities to make his “joke” more explicit, most notably by failing to give the roads a shared destination rather than simply a similar condition of wear. (And even that similarity is qualified, because it depends on the speakerÂ’s perception, not his actual knowledge—after all, having failed to take the first road, he canÂ’t be sure how traveled it is or isnÂ’t, beyond his immediate line of sight.) The usual interpretation of “The Road Not Taken” is almost certainly wrong, but the idea that the poem is a parody doesnÂ’t seem exactly right, either.

* * * *

And this brings us to the final stanza—more particularly, it brings us to one of the most carefully placed words in this delicately balanced arrangement. That word is “sigh”:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence . . .

Frost mentions the sigh several times in his remarks about “The Road Not Taken,” and while those comments are often oblique, itÂ’s evident that he considered the word “sigh” esÂ*sential to understanding the poem. It is “a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing,” he told Edward Thomas in 1915. It is “absolutely saving,” he told an audience at the Bread Loaf Conference half a century later. According to Lawrance Thompson, he would sometimes claim during public readings that a young girl had asked him about the sigh, and that he considered this a very good question—an anecdote that (in ThompsonÂ’s view) was meant to encourage the audience to appreciate the poemÂ’s intricacy.

But why would it? After all, a sigh fits both of the usual readings of the poem, and therefore doesnÂ’t seem likely to make either of them more interesting. If we give the poem its popular, naive interpretation, then the sigh is one of tired yet self-Â*assured acceptance bordering on satisfaction: The speaker has taken the hard road, faced obstacles, lost things along the way, regrets, heÂ’s had a few—and yet heÂ’s ended up in a better, stronger place. ItÂ’s a sigh of hardÂ*-won maturity or tedious faux humility, depending on how you look at it. By contrast, if we think of the poem as an ironic commentary on romantic selfÂ*-absorption, then the sigh signals straightforÂ*ward regret: The speaker is genuinely troubled by the consequences of every small choice he makes, and his preoccupation with his own decisions renders him slightly ridiculous.

But neither of these explanations for the sigh seems espeÂ*cially obscure, let alone “absolutely saving.” Perhaps thatÂ’s because both of them glide past a key point: The sigh hasnÂ’t yet occurred. Recall the final stanza:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The speaker isnÂ’t “telling this with a sigh” now; heÂ’s sayÂ* ing that heÂ’ll be sighing “ages and ages hence.” He knows himself well enough—or thinks he does—to predict how heÂ’ll feel about the consequences of his choice in the future. But if he actually knows himself this well, then itÂ’s reasonÂ* able to ask whether he would, in fact, behave in the way heÂ’s suggesting. Which is to say that the speaker isnÂ’t necessarily the kind of person who sighs while explaining that many years ago he took the less traveled road; rather, heÂ’s the kind of person who thinks he would sigh while telling us this story. HeÂ’s assuming that heÂ’ll do something that will strike others as either selfÂ*-congratulatory or paralyzingly anxious.


ItÂ’s a small difference, but as with so many small differÂ*ences in “The Road Not Taken,” it matters a great deal. BeÂ*cause it allows us to feel affectionate compassion toward the speaker, whom itÂ’s now possible to view less as a boaster or a neurotic than as a person who is perhaps excessively critical of his own perceived failings. This feature of the poem goes strangely unremarked in most commentary, and even when itÂ’s noted, it tends to be folded into one of the two standard interpretations. Writing in The New Yorker, for instance, the critic Dan Chiasson declares that the sigh represents “a later version of the self that this current version, though moving steadily in its direction, finds pitiable,” and he declares the poem to be a “cunning nugget of nihilism.” But oneÂ’s selfÂ* image is only rarely accurate in the moment, let alone as a predictor of future behavior, and the poem itself provides no reason to conclude the speaker is “moving steadily” toward anything. WeÂ’re no more bound to take his view of himself at face value than we are to believe Emma Bovary or Willy Loman.

ItÂ’s important to remember that while “The Road Not Taken” isnÂ’t strictly “about” Edward Thomas, it was, at least, strongly associated with Thomas by Frost. And as the scholar Katherine Kearns rightly notes, Frost “by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas.” Indeed, “FrostÂ’s protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than ‘anyone in England or anywhere else in the world.’” If you admire someone more than anyone “anyÂ* where else in the world,” you probably arenÂ’t going to link that person with a poem whose speaker comes off as either obnoxious or enfeebled. But you might well connect him with an exquisitely sensitive and self-Â*aware speaker who thinks of himself—probably incorrectly—as fundamentally weak, and likely to behave in ways that will cause others to lose patience. “But you know already how I waver,” Thomas wrote to Frost in early 1914, and “on what wavering things I deÂ*pend.” This is the figure who emerges between the two more common interpretations of “The Road Not Taken,” and his doubting yet ardent sensibility is the secret warmth of the poem. This is what is, or can be, “absolutely saving.”

* * * *

Poetry has always oscillated between guardedness and fervor. The effusions of Dylan Thomas give way to the iroÂ*nies of Philip Larkin; the reticence of Elizabeth Bishop yields to the frenzy of Sylvia Plath; the closed becomes open; the hot grows cold. In this system of binaries, Frost has genÂ*erally been regarded as not merely guarded, but practically encircled by battlements. In part this is a matter of temperaÂ*ment: His refusal to commit to positions can seem princiÂ*pled, in a roundabout way, but also evasive in a manner that PoundÂ’s Cantos, for all their difficulty, are not. There is a sense that, like Thomas Hardy, Frost sometimes saw himself as more allied with the impersonal forces often depicted in his poems than with the human characters those forces so frequently overwhelm. He isnÂ’t warm. He doesnÂ’t tell us what heÂ’s thinking. His poetry doesnÂ’t advertise its ambitions. “He presents,” declares the introductory note on Frost in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “an example of reserve or holding back in genre, diction, theme, and even philosophy, which is impressive but also, as seen after his death by a generation bent on extravagance, cautious.”

“Cautious”: not a word Frost would have liked. In his perÂ*sonal life, he was anything but, as is demonstrated by his nearly monomaniacal courtship of his wife, to say nothing of his decision to move to England at age 38 on the basis of a coin toss. (He was much bolder in this regard than almost all of his modernist peers.) And the word seems equally inapplicable to his strongest writing, which is audacious in its willingness to engage multiple audiences (and be judged by them), as well as in its determination to disÂ*play its technical wizardry in a way that was certain to be initially underestimated. It takes tremendous nerve to be willing to look as if you donÂ’t know what youÂ’re doing, when in fact youÂ’re a master of the activity in question. Even in 1915, for example, it was far from “cautious” for an ambiÂ*tious poet to open his first book by deliberately rhyming “trees” with “breeze,” a pairing so legendarily banal that it had been famously singled out for derision by Alexander Pope 200 years earlier. True, Frost became tremenÂ*dously successful by writing in the way he did, but success in a tricky venture doesnÂ’t make the venture itself any less risky.


Yet if the word “cautious” is wrong, itÂ’s interestingly wrong. “The Road Not Taken” seems to be about the diffiÂ*culty of decision making but is itself strangely reluctant to resolve. It keeps us in the woods, at the crossroads, unsure whether the speaker is actually even making a choice, and then ends not with the decision itself but with a claim about the future that seems unreliable. There is, in this sense, no road that “The Road Not Taken” fails to take. Is that desire to cover all possibilities “cautious”? Here itÂ’s useful to turn to another poem from FrostÂ’s early career, “Reluctance.” That poem ends:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

The conclusion of the poem is a protest against conclusions—an argument, you might say, for delay. But itÂ’s not an argument for caution, even though caution and delay are intertwined. After all, a stubborn sensibility also delays. A playful sensibility delays. An arrogant sensibility deÂ*lays, because it wonÂ’t be rushed. And while Frost can claim the greatest selfÂ*-penned epitaph in the history of EnglishÂ* language poetry—I HAD A LOVERÂ’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD—it would have been no less accurate for his stone to have read STUBBORN, PLAYFUL, AND ARROGANT. Or even HE NEVER HURRIED. “The Road Not Taken” isnÂ’t a poem that radiates this sort of confidence, obviously. But there is an overlap between its hesitations and evasions and the extent to which Frost, as a poet, simply doesnÂ’t like to leave the page. Here is Frost from an interview with The Paris Review in 1960, talking about the act of writing:

The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don’t critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why don’t they talk about that? Scoring. You’ve got to score.

Poetry is frequently (endlessly, tediously) compared to muÂ*sic, but only rarely does one see it compared to ice hockey. Yet here is Frost—“YouÂ’ve got to score”—doing exactly that. This is of a piece with his famous quip that writing free verse is “like playing tennis without a net,” a bon mot that is probably more interesting for its underlying metaphor (poets, those sedentary creatures, are like sportsmen) than for its actual claim. There is a sinewy, keyed-Â*up athletiÂ*cism to FrostÂ’s writing and, like all great athletes, heÂ’s relucÂ*tant to leave the field, which is, after all, the place heÂ’s most fully himself. Consider the end of his great love poem “To Earthward”:


When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Yes, these stanzas are about the hunger for sensation. But they’re also about delay: Frost wants to feel the friction of love through the “length” of his body, but also to the “length” of his days, and through the “length” of the poem. Not just more touch, but more time.

And here is where Robert Frost and Edward Thomas (or FrostÂ’s idea of Thomas) are perhaps not so different. “The Road Not Taken” gives us several variations on the standard dilemmas associated with the romantic sensibility: How can one transcend oneÂ’s self (“travel both”) while still remaining oneself (“And be one traveler”)? How can one ever arrive anywhere if one is constantly reaching for something purer (“the one less traveled by”)? What is the difference between the stories we tell about ourselves and the actuality of our inner lives? In the moment of choosing—the moment of delay—all answers to these questions remain equally possiÂ*ble. But when a choice is made, other possibilities are foreÂ* closed, which leads to what Frost describes as “crying over what might have been.” So the romantic embraces delay (“long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could”) because it postpones the inevitable loss. He hesitates like a candle flame wavers: hot but fragile, already wrapped in the smoke that will signal its extinction.

Both Frost and the speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” then, are attracted to the idea of prolonging the moment of decision making (achieving a “momentary stay against conÂ* fusion,” as Frost would put it in a different context). The difference between them is one of attitude and degree. The speaker—and, by extension, FrostÂ’s conception of Thomas—is afraid of what heÂ’ll lose when the process of choosing ends, so he pauses over nearly any choice. Frost is afraid of losing the process itself, so he pauses over a decision that might reÂ*sult in genuine resolution—that might result, for instance, in a poem that is conclusive and immobile. He wants the ball to pass through the hoop, only to return to his hands, because for Frost the process—the continuation, the endless creation of endless roads—is everything. “No one,” he writes, “can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.” You donÂ’t just have to score; you have to keep scoring.

* * * *

But no game can continue forever. FrostÂ’s fascination with delay allows him to understand the romantic sensibility, to sympathize with its fear of closure, even if its preoccupaÂ*tions arenÂ’t his own. And this understanding lets him create his own version of romantic yearning. This being Frost, of course, that yearning has very little in it of the “sigh” from “The Road Not Taken,” or the overt regret that animates it. But it has a road, and the consequences of that road. Here is the beginning of “Directive,” from 1946, which is usually considered to be FrostÂ’s last great poem:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>

*************************

Did Not Poet Frost Bemoan That Road Not Taken

I raced into unknown and rage filled path
Soul aflamed, heart eating its plentiful wrath
Can one so lost ever again see saving light
Or heal when their soul is stricken by such dark blight
Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

Mind hellbent on destroying my cowardly foe
There lay dark-traps hidden under night's heavy snow
And ever constant curse of world's vicious blows
Are we but puppets in some sad and tragic show
Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

Stumbling I fell headfirst into that darkset pit
Perhaps a just reward for my outrageous fit
I that had foolishly yielded to insane rage
Acting as a child not a mature man my age
Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

Woe be he that impulsively runs forth to fight
Much worse, if into the unknown in dark of night
I survived was by luck, or else hand of fate
Mercy was given me before it was too late
Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

Robert J. Lindley, 12-2-2021
Rhyme
********************************
Composed this morn for this posting here at this site--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://thoughtcatalog.com/emma-doherty/2017/07/modern-poetry-is-much-different-than-it-used-to-be/


Modern Poetry Is Much Different Than It Used To Be
By Emma Doherty, July 24th 2017


Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Edgar Allan Poe. These are the names that typically come to mind whenever the subject of poetry is brought up.

However, poetry has changed so much in the last century alone that it is almost near impossible to compare any poetry of the late 1900s and 2000s to any of that pre nineteenth century poetry.

In order to understand postmodern poetry we must first understand the history of poetry leading up to this point.

Seventeenth century poetry is what is known as metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical poetry can be seen with the frequent use of paradoxes, the juxtaposition of complexity and subtlety of thought, among other devices.


William Shakespeare is plausibly the most common poet of this era, and arguably of all time. Granted the title The Bard, Shakespeare’s legacy is still being discussed in literature classes today due to his ineffable ability to produce lyrical and rhythmic lines (including his well famed iambic pentameter) that transcend translation through various languages and times, as well as his ability to relate his poems and plays to those of all social classes of the time, kings and peasants alike.

Much of Shakespeare’s influences came from current events leading to various forms of social commentary which would have been deeply frowned upon if he had merely stated his discretions directly. Poets today still strive to achieve his fame, if not his eloquence of verse alone.

Eighteenth century poetry is what is typically referred to as classical poetry. The early eighteenth century saw the birth of Romanticism, which included poets like William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and although surprisingly dark in his poetic nature, Edgar Allan Poe.

Expanding on the questionable Romantic nature of Poe’s work, he elicits the characteristics of classical Gothic Romantic poetry including the fact that he draws deeply upon the balance between the delicate nature of life, and love lost, cleverly in an untraditional manner that sets him apart from other Romantics.

Classical poetry is defined by its emphasis upon form and meter. Something that has been left behind in the evolution toward postmodern poetry.

Classical poets of the eighteenth century strove to epitomize the delicate balance between passionate emotions and intellect, while maintaining a steady flow of thought rather than utilizing enjambments to separate schools of thought.

Almost simultaneously, the transcendentalism or naturalist movement came about as a sub-movement of the Romantic Era. Two of the most well known transcendentalists that claimed fame in this era were Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.


Typical characteristics of transcendental poetry consist of the use of writing to somewhat communicate with nature in search of answers to life’s hardships, or to create rich metaphors by utilizing the tangible aspects of nature such as trees, leaves, and rivers to contrast the fragility of life itself.

The naturalistic approach continues somewhat in postmodern poetry, although significantly less than that of the transcendentalist era.

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman came into their active poetry years (even though Dickinson’s poetry was published posthumously) during the late end of the Romanticism period toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, where the transition to realism was just starting out.

Whitman and Dickinson alike created a mystifying intrigue to readers of their complex poems everywhere. Whitman specifically, combines the elements of both Romantic as well as Realist poetry in his piece ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.’

Including the emphasis of passion, perseverance, and the cycle of life and death which would fit perfectly in the Romantic era, but he also uses free verse form to compose his 206 line and rather long poem into three separate yet synchronous poems.

Dickinson, on the other hand, is the mother of American free verse, as Dickinson is the father, but that is where their similarities end. Whitman formalizes his free verse into long, densely detailed sentences that often called Americans to action, and gave them a voice in times of hardship and the fear of potential turmoil that plagued the nation after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

Dickinson, on the other hand, writes short, obscure, and vague lines that come across as sporadic due to her recurring use of enjambment.


Dickinson’s poetry is exceptionally similar to that of postmodern poets, specifically the short metaphorical use of imagery to vaguely portray the hardships that afflict the nation.

Lots of Dickinson’s poetry dwells on the negativities and inevitabilities of life, most notably death. Poetry critics have drawn upon Dickinson’s near obsession with death, many diagnosing her as depressed.

Although we may never know for certain, modern feminists have discredited this idea. They have instead proposed that Dickinson was a feminist even before the term was widely modernized.

Many critics would not doubt that Dickinson used her poems as her own form of social commentary of women’s roles in the nineteenth century, and that depression may have been a side effect of women’s oppression.


Covert feminist poetry during the nineteenth century, was not all that uncommon. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is renowned for her own commentary on women’s roles in her famed short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’

Feminists of this era chose to maintain their covert and obscure nature of their writings in order to avoid being sent to asylums or outcast from communities for going against the societal norms.

As the centuries have changed, feminist poetry has become increasingly popular, now it is used as a way to state directly what is wrong with our society rather than having to write covertly as it was in the past.
Twentieth century poets emerged with vengeance, spreading their empowering words like wildfire that fueled the nation in times of change, providing roots for equality movements to grow out of.

Twentieth century poets often began retelling events of their past, putting a modern spin on them by tying them to current events. Maya Angelou is seen as one of the leading contemporary writers.

Her soulful, ballad-like poetry inspired greatly by Dr. Martin Luther King helped her use her own gift of verse to inspire civil rights activist movements long before the Black Lives Matter movement came about.

However, her poetry isn’t specifically aimed at any group in particular, which makes her such a renowned poet. Her poetry was relatable to everyone, but specifically minority groups, most notably African Americans and women.


Her most famous poems ‘Still I Rise’ and ‘Caged Bird,’ personify overcoming obstacles that have made Angelou into a beacon of hope and inspiration.

Another twentieth century celebrated poet is feminist icon Margaret Atwood. Like Angelou, Atwood channels her talents into lyrical verse.

Atwood’s take on contemporary poetry is based largely on myths, legends, and fairy tales which set her apart from other contemporary poets. Her poetry also comments largely on the “Prozac Nation” we now live in, specifically in her poem ‘A Sad Child.’

Poetry that directly touches base on depression and other mental illness, specifically in women, is what feeds postmodern poetry of the twenty-first century.

Finally, we have reached the era of postmodern or twenty first century poetry. Postmodern poetry is an intriguing combination of some of the most fundamental elements of poetry from each era, while taking on unique traits that make the postmodern era distinctly its own.

Twenty-first century poetry often takes shape in fragmented sentences, with a heavy use of enjambment, without strict forms of punctuation, grammatical or syntactical rules, and rarely any distinct rhyme scheme.


Much like the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson, postmodern poetry often takes shape in dark, dramatic forms, often recounting events where things went horribly wrong or things the poet or speaker wish they have said or done differently.

Contemporary poetry also takes on many characteristics of the Romantic era including the balance between passionate emotions and intellect, but maintains its own heavy use of free verse form from the nineteenth century.

However, the free verse form that much of twenty-first century poetry takes upon either a dissociated take on the ideals presented, or a direct first person, almost letter like approach to writing poetry, using pronouns to directly make the reader feel as if they are either the receiving audience or the writer/speaker themselves.

Influences of twenty-first century free verse poetry include the newfound freedom for all genders and all races to express themselves on a common medium.

Poetry has given us a voice and a creative outlet to express ourselves when doing so in other ways may be difficult.
Postmodern poetry includes the New York Times bestselling book Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, as well as works by R.H. Sin. Postmodern poetry often touches upon the fact that suffering and pain are inevitable, but also should and can be used as fuel to better yourself and come out stronger than before.

Overall, the riveting changes of different centuries of styles, culture, movements, feelings, and societies have shaped everything we know, even down to what we now know as contemporary poetry. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.readpoetry.com/romantic-poets-in-the-modern-age/

POETRY
ROMANTIC POETS IN THE MODERN AGE
------by Raquel Dionísio Abrantes June 18, 2020

All historical and artistic events have something crucial to tell us. Through them, we understand the development of the world. One of them is the artistic, philosophical, and intellectual movement called Romanticism, referring to the birth of a new set of ideas. It began in Western Europe between the late 18th and 19th centuries in the work of poets, artists, and philosophers understood as a reaction to the modern world. The Romantic Movement emphasizes the importance of individual subjectivity and emotional sensitivity. For Romantic souls, imagination rather than reason is the most important creative ability.



Romanticism is present in artistic manifestations such as literature, music, and painting. This movement also manifests itself in the following way:



Celebration of the individual – Romantics praise the triumphs of the misunderstood outcast;



Strong emotions and senses – Romantics feel that knowledge is gained through intuition and not by deduction;



Importance of imagination – Romantics exalt the imagination as a supreme faculty to create;



Admiration of nature – Romantics are profound lovers of nature, and they bring the natural world into their works. They reject the rationalization of nature elevated by the former thinkers of the Enlightenment period.

Although its expression is dissolved these days, its characteristics can be glimpsed in some poems of poets of the modern age. Here are four poems that feature the moody love, the connection with nature, the celebration of self, and the loss of Romanticism.




“BE THE ONE” BY LANG LEAV
You couldn’t be the one – the one to love her.

She dazzled you, but your eyes could never get used to

the light. So you remained clothed in shadow, and you

ignored the hand that reached for you.

You ignored your own heart.

And that is why you couldn’t be the one.

She wasn’t just the moon; she was the whole sky, but

you couldn’t see beyond the stratosphere.

Your souls loved each other as much as any two souls

could possibly love –

but you couldn’t be the one.



“CORPSE FLOWER”
------ BY VANESSA ANGÉLICA VILLARREAL

Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone.

The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spine

and built you on a dark day. You are still missing

some parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shells

in your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal’s yolk, live seawater,

my trenza, a piece of my son’s umbilical cord, and still you don’t return.

A failure fragrant as magic. Ascend the spirit into the design.

My particular chiron: the record that your perfect feet ever graced

this earth. Homing signal adrift among stars, our tender impossible longing.

What have I made of your sacrifice. This bone: it is myself.



“TAKE THIS AS YOUR SIGN”
------BY NIKITA GILL

When will you stop being afraid

of everything you can be.

I have never seen the sky, nor the earth

wear their flaws like they are apologies,

Instead they defiantly present them as

their truth, take it or leave it, it is up to you.

When will you realise that you can still grow

forests from the scorched earth of your soul

Remind yourself that the moon even with

her scars is still the fairest of them all

It’s the light she gives to the world that

matters in the end, the calm of her heart

When will you understand that

those broken parts of you have learned

How to sing more elegant songs

than the loveliest of songbirds.

Everything around you is asking you

to set yourself free, become everything

that you do not think you can be.



“TOKEN LOSS”
--------BY KAY RYAN

To the dragon
any loss is
total. His rest
is disrupted
if a single
jewel encrusted
goblet has
been stolen.
The circle
of himself
in the nest
of his gold
has been
broken. No
loss is toke

My view is that modern poetry attempts to remove the solid foundation of poetry that the famous/historic masters gave us.
By rejecting the gold in that treasure vault and replacing it with the concept that anything written with high enough emotion rates
as high as or even higher than the works of the great masters of old.
To which I must say-- "poppycock and pig ears"....

Some of us are not blind and see the abject ignorance and shallow nature of these modern, so-called poetry experts/elitists.. --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://archive.naplesnews.com/entertainment/poetry-can-be-a-depth-experience-ep-405133918-334649181.html/


Poetry can be a depth experience
Posted: Dec. 06, 2006

By Michael Hickey

Poetry can be defined as an attempt to try to understand the world in spiritual terms through literary composition. It allows the writer and the reader of poetry to communicate on personal and universal levels. A poem can point to a reality beyond itself and beyond the words it contains. The poem may not exactly represent reality, but is usually created in a language that is intended to convey meaning. As an art form, poetry does what all art does, and that is to represent something of and to the world.

Any poem stands on its own merit and is self-defining. The words of a poem cannot be put into a test tube where a particular reaction by the reader can be predicted each time, like you can do with chemistry, nor is it like a recipe where the words are the food ingredients. On the other hand, poetry doesn't operate in a vacuum either; there are certain literary techniques which can enable the poet to possess the ability to touch others who read the poem at the deepest level of their humanity.

Because poetry can be a depth experience, it has the potential to touch, evoke, arouse, and move some of its reader's deepest feelings and emotions. Poetry can stir the soul. Not everyone will have the same depth experience in reading every poem, but when a particular poem resonates with a reader at the deepest levels of their humanity, something spiritual happens, and a depth experience occurs. The reader's mind and heart are opened in both conscious and unconscious ways. The poem is then seen through the eyes of the soul. The same poem that is cherished, read, and reread by one individual may appear not understandable, useless, and not resonate or move another at all; poetry is like that.

Furthermore, the words of certain poems have the ability to touch some individuals at their very depths in a way that the words of prose simply cannot. This is because the poem is written in a language that conveys more than logic, thought, and reason and goes beyond the words to speak from deep to deep in the language of life experience; this makes poetry a wisdom language. Poetry has a way of speaking to an individual through words which were heretofore inexpressible. When one is moved by a poem at the deepest level of humanity, the transition is often one where the reader is moved within from a point of having read the words of the poem, to a silence within their very depths that lies beyond words, thoughts, feelings, or emotions.

What follows is a short poem. I do not say that the poem will resonate within the depths of your humanity; that would be the height of pride and arrogance. I can only say I wrote it, in part, from my depths. I hope you enjoy it.

Slaying the great

sea dragon

By Michael Hickey


You never see him on the

surface

Only at deepest of the deep

His one and only purpose

Is the life he wants to keep

Falseself is his name

He's fully self sufficient

Worship him - he's tame

His pride; eternally

deficient

He'll not allow me

Prayerfully to seek

Or open inner eye to see

God is humble and is meek

I turn away - he chases

He's relentless in pursuit

Masked with many faces

Even hiding at my root

I can find my self at center

Beyond dragon's bounded

reach

There's a place he cannot

enter

For that would cause a

breach

Christ leads the way

To my victory at sea

I claim that word today

"Love God; neighbor

as me"

To yield on my sea-journey

Allows Falseself to live on

I can slay him by my dying

Trueself would then be born

(Michael Hickey is a local writer and poet who lives in Pelican Bay and Swampscott, Mass. His new book, "Get Wisdom," is recently published by Xlibris Div. Random House Publishing and is available at 1-888-795-4274 ext. 822 or at www.xlibris.com. If you have feedback or have a poem you have written and would like it considered for publication in this column, you may e-mail him at MikeHic@Nii.net.)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.thoughtco.com/epic-literature-and-poetry-119651

Humanities › Literature
The Genre of Epic Literature and Poetry
A Blend of Narrative Fiction and History Found World Wide

Achilles sacrificing to Zeus for Patroclus&#39; safe return
Achilles sacrificing to Zeus for Patroclus' safe return, from the Ambrosian Iliad, a 5th-century illuminated manuscript.
Wikimedia Commons/Public domain

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By N.S. Gill
Updated on May 09, 2019
Epic poetry, related to heroic poetry, is a narrative art form common to many ancient and modern societies. In some traditional circles, the term epic poetry is restricted to the Greek poet Homer's works The Iliad and The Odyssey and, sometimes grudgingly, the Roman poet Virgil's The Aeneid. However, beginning with the Greek philosopher Aristotle who collected "barbarian epic poems," other scholars have recognized that similarly structured forms of poetry occur in many other cultures.


Two related forms of narrative poetry are "trickster tales" that report activities of very clever disrupter beings, human and god-like both; and "heroic epics," in which the heroes are ruling class, kings and the like. In epic poetry, the hero is an extraordinary but also an ordinary human being and although he may be flawed, he is always brave and valorous.


How to Choose Genre, topic, and Scope for an Essay
Characteristics of Epic Poetry
The characteristics of the Greek tradition of epic poetry are long-established and summarized below. Almost all of these characteristics can be found in epic poetry from societies well outside of the Greek or Roman world.

The content of an epic poem always includes the glorious deeds of heroes (Klea andron in Greek), but not just those types of things—the Iliad included cattle raids as well.

All About the Hero
There is always an underlying ethos that says that to be a hero is to always be the best person he (or she, but mainly he) can be, pre-eminent beyond all others, primarily physical and displayed in battle. In Greek epic tales, intellect is plain common sense, there are never tactical tricks or strategic ploys, but instead, the hero succeeds because of great valor, and the brave man never retreats.


Homer's greatest poems are about the "heroic age", about the men who fought at Thebes and Troy (a. 1275–1175 BCE), events that took place about 400 years before Homer wrote the Illiad and Odyssey. Other cultures' epic poems involve a similarly distant historic/legendary past.

The powers of the heroes of epic poetry are human-based: the heroes are normal human beings who are cast on a large scale, and although gods are everywhere, they only act to support or in some cases thwart the hero. The tale has a believed historicity, which is to say the narrator is assumed to be the mouthpiece of the goddesses of poetry, the Muses, with no clear line between history and fantasy.

Narrator and Function
The tales are told in a mannerly composition: they are often formulaic in structure, with repeated conventions and phrases. Epic poetry is performed, either the bard sings or chants the poem and he is often accompanied by others who act out the scenes. In Greek and Latin epic poetry, the meter is strictly dactylic hexameter; and the normal assumption is that epic poetry is long, taking hours or even days to perform.

The narrator has both objectivity and formality, he is seen by the audience as a pure narrator, who speaks in the third person and the past tense. The poet is thus the custodian of the past. In Greek society, the poets were itinerant who traveled throughout the region performing at festivals, rites of passage like funerals or weddings, or other ceremonies.

The poem has a social function, to please or entertain an audience. It is both serious and moral in tone but it doesn't preach.

Examples of Epic Poetry
Mesopotamia: Epic of Gilgamesh
Greek: The Iliad, The Odyssey
Roman: The Aeneid
India: Loriki, Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, Ramayana
German: The Ring of the Nibelung, Roland
Ostyak: The Song of the Golden Hero
Khirghiz: Semetey
English: Beowulf, Paradise Lost
Ainu: Pon-ya-un-be, Kutune Shirka
Georgia: The Knight in the Panther
East Africa: Bahima Praise Poems
Mali: Sundiata
Uganda: Runyankore
Source:
Hatto AT, editor. 1980. Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. London: Modern Humanities Research Association.

When and where modern schools fail to use what I call heroic poetry they have done a great disservice to our kids.
Of course, the omission is by deliberate design, imho. As one may surmise, the better educated a citizen is the less likely there are to be gullible and
thus swayed to vote against their own best interests and as well vote against the well being of this nation.
Question is what group is sold on fostering such an agenda.
Answer is quite easy to find out....
At least it is for any wanting to not be made a fool of and used like an ignorant slave to that political group.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69407/the-minds-own-place

ESSAY ON POETIC THEORY
The Mind’s Own Place
BY GEORGE OPPEN
Introduction
In the 1930s, George Oppen was considered a member of what Louis Zukofsky termed the objectivist poets. After publishing his first book of poetry (Discrete Series, 1934), he withdrew from publishing, and, largely, writing, for more than 25 years. He later explained this silence as a combination of political activism—Oppen was first an active member of the Communist Party and then served in World War II—and a commitment to actively raising his daughter with his wife. When his daughter left for college, Oppen rejoined the poetry community and began to publish again.

“The Mind’s Own Place” was originally written in early 1962 for The Nation, who ultimately rejected it. It appeared in the literary journal Kulchur in 1963, and stands as Oppen’s defining statement of poetics. The title is a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place of time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

In the essay, he examines the evolution and responsibilities of the American poet, particularly in terms of the tension between political and artistic action. Oppen does not see poetry as a form of political action, and he dismisses the political poem in which poetry is used as “an advanced form of rhetoric” as “merely excruciating.”

Oppen complicates his assertion, “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning,” by binding it to William Stafford’s sense of a poet’s work: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”

Refusing to simplify the context in which an American poet seeks to write, Oppen sees the existential act of perceiving as the core of poetry. Notes Oppen, “The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics.”

Sargent is reported to have said to Renoir that he painted “cads in the park.” And Sargent was of course quite right.(1) The passion of the Im*pressionists to see, and to see more clearly was a desire to see past the subject matter and the art attitudes of the academy. It is true that the artist is not dependent on his subject in the sense that he can be judged by its intrinsic interest, or that the discussion of his work can become a discussion of its subject. But the emotion which creates art is the emotion that seeks to know and to disclose. The cocoon of “Beauty” as the word is often used, the beauty of background music and of soft lights, though it might be an art, is an art of the masseur and the perfumist.

Modern American poetry begins with the determination to find the image, the thing encountered, the thing seen each day whose meaning has become the meaning and the color of our lives. Verse, which had become a rhetoric of exaggeration, of inflation, was to the modernists a skill of accuracy, of precision, a test of truth. Such an art has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant, and it is the nightmare of the poet or the artist to find himself wandering between the grim gray lines of the Philis*tines and the ramshackle emplacements of Bohemia. If he ceases to be*lieve in the validity of his insights—the truth of what he is saying—he becomes the casualty, the only possible casualty, of that engagement. Philistia and Bohemia, never endangered by the contest, remain pre*cisely what they were. This is the Bohemia that churns and worries the idea of the poet-not-of-this-world, the dissociated poet, the ghostly bard. If the poet is an island, this is the sea which most lovingly and intimately grinds him to sand.

There comes a time in any such discussion as this when the effort to avoid the word reality becomes too great a tax on the writer’s agility. The word of course has long since ceased to mean anything recogniz*ably “real” at all, but English does seem to be stuck with it. We cannot assert the poet’s relation to reality, nor exhort him to face reality, nor do any of these desirable things, nor be sure that we are not insisting merely that he discuss only those things we are accustomed to talk about, unless we somehow manage to restore a meaning to the word. Bertrand Russell wrote “If I were to describe reality as I found it, I would have to include my arm.”(2) In the shock of that sentence—out of context—perhaps the meaning of the word maybe restored, or in the fragment of Heraclitus: “If it all went up in smoke” that smoke would remain.(3) It is the arbitrary fact, and not any quality of wisdom literature, which creates the impact of the poets. The “shock of recognition,” when it is anything, is that. If we can hold the word to its mean*ing, or if we can import a word from elsewhere—a collective, not an abstract noun, to mean “the things that exist”—then we will not have on the one hand the demand that the poet circumstantially describe everything that we already know, and declare every belief that we already hold, nor on the other hand the ideal of the poet without any senses at all. Dante’s “sweet new style” presaged a new content, a new attitude: and it was a new vision, an act of vision that ushered modern art into France, as it was an extension of awareness that forced the development of a modern poetry in this country.(4) The early moderns among painters of the United States found themselves promptly identified as the Ash Can school, and it happens that Lindsay, Sandburg, Kreymborg, Williams—the poets of the little magazine Others which came off a hand press in a garage somewhere in New Jersey about 1918—were almost a populist movement.(5) Though it is hard to register now, the subjects of Sandburg’s poems, the stockyards and the railroad sidings, gave them their impact. Of the major poets it is only William Carlos Williams, with his insistence on “the American idiom,” on the image derived from day-to-day experience, on form as “nothing more than an extension of content,” who shows a derivation from pop*ulism.(6) But it is the fidelity, the clarity, including the visual clarity and their freedom from the art subject which is the distinction also of Pound and Eliot and the force behind their creation of a new form and a new prosody; the “speech rhythms” of Pound, the “prose quality” of Eliot. Their intelligence rejected the romanticism, the mere sentimen*tal “going on” of such men as Sandburg and Kreymborg, but for them too art moves forward only when some man, or some men, get their heads above—or below—the terrible thin scratching of the art world. It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the im*age is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.(7) They meant to replace by the data of experience the accepted poetry of their time, a display by the poets of right thinking and right sentiment, a dreary waste of lies. That data was and is the core of what “modernism” restored to poetry, the sense of the poet’s self among things. So much depends upon the red wheel*barrow. The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics. It is a part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth. It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate them*selves in the concrete materials of the poem. It is not to say that the poet is immune to the “real” world to say that he is not likely to find the moment, the image, in which a political generalization or any other generalization will prove its truth. Denise Levertov begins a fine poem with the words: “The authentic!” and goes on to define

the real, the new-laid
egg whose speckled shell
the poet fondles and must break
if he will be nourished

in the events of a domestic morning: the steam rising in the radiators, herself “breaking the handle of my hairbrush,” and the family break*fast, to the moment when, the children being sent to school,

cold air
comes in at the street door.(8)

These are, as poetry intends, clear pictures of the world in verse, which means only to be clear, to be honest, to produce the realization of reality and to construct a form out of no desire for the trick of grace*fulness, but in order to make it possible to grasp, to hold the insight which is the content of the poem.

T.S. Eliot’s immense reputation was already established by the end of the twenties: Pound’s somewhat later. It is within the present decade that Williams has achieved a comparable position. It was Eliot’s influence, far more than Pound’s, and Eliot’s influence by way of Au*den which formed the tone of the so-called Academic poets who domi*nated the field during the forties and early fifties, and whom the Beats assailed. It is quite possible that both Eliot and the Academic poets tend at this moment to be underrated: the Academics are perhaps suf*fering the difficulties of middle age. They are not Young Poets nor Old Masters, nor are they news in the exhilarating sense that they might bite a dog. But they too are not writing in complacent generalities, and the word academic can give a false concept of their content and form. The fact is, however, that the poets of the San Francisco school, the poets called Beat, took off not at all from Eliot, but from Pound and still more directly from Williams, and to varying degrees from Whit*man, and the influence—perhaps indirect—of such men as Sandburg and Lindsay and even Kreymborg is, as a matter of fact, perfectly evi*dent in their work. But it is to Williams that the young poets of this school acknowledge the greatest debt, and if the word populism applied to Williams may not be entirely justifiable, it is at any rate true that Williams is the most American of the American poets of his generation, and these young poets have been markedly and as a matter of course American.(9) I think it has been part of their strength, and in fact I fear the present pilgrimage to Japan and the exotic arms of Zen. I feel quite sure, to begin with, that Hemingway has expressed Zen to the West about as well as is likely to be done. The disciple asked: “What is Truth?” And the Master replied, “Do you smell the mountain laurel?” “Yes,” said the disciple. The Master said, “There, I have kept nothing from you.” What Master was that? “The archer aims not at the target but at himself.”(10) Nor, as we have read, at the bull. If we are to talk of the act performed for its own sake, I think we will get more poetry out of the large fish of these waters—even out of the large fish in these waters—than from all the tea in Japan. But this may be because I be*long to a generation that grew more American—literarily at least—as it approached adult estate: we grew up on English writing—and Ger*man fairy tales—as I think no American any longer does. Starting with Mother Goose—in the absence of “It Happened on Mulberry Street” or “Millions of Cats” or whatever has become current since my daughter grew up—and proceeding to Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Rover Boys, perhaps the only American writing we saw was in the Oz books and in Mark Twain. I have not discussed this with other writers, and risk the statement, but I believe that many a young American writer-to-be was astonished on reaching adolescence to discover that he was not easily going to take his place as the young master, or even as a Thackerayan young man who manages, with what*ever difficulty, to equip himself with fresh linen and varnished boots for his crucial morning call on the Duchess. We found ourselves below stairs, possibly: certainly among the minor characters. Which was a factor I believe in our need to make our own literature. Huck Finn, if this were a scholarly work, might be contrasted to Tom Brown, or even to Christopher Robin of Pooh Corners. Alice wandered from her gov*erness; Dorothy of Oz ran too late for the storm cellar and was caught in a Kansas cyclone. Together and contrastingly they dawned on our infant minds, and may have contributed to the aesthetic, if not social sentiment, which went in search of the common, the common experi*ence, the life of common man. Or it may be, more simply, that the more open society made possible the literary career of the obviously non*-aristocratic spokesman who, once he tired of Invocation to Someone Else’s Muse, had to make his own poetry. I myself was not the barefoot American boy. Having been born near New York, like many of these young poets, I was undoubtedly shod by the age of three months. But neither the barefoot boy nor Robert Frost is really the most American thing in the world, and there are facts to consider beyond the orthope*dic. I am constantly amazed by the English response to the Angry Young Men,(11) whose news-value appears to be that they are not of the aristocracy and are bitterly concerned with that fact in all its ramifications, whereas I have not met an American writer who had ever wondered what Vanderbilts or Morgans or Astors felt about his accent, his vocabulary, or his neckwear. Or if he wondered, he would not know, as the English seem to know, and the setting of Henry James’s novels is to us—and even to Henry James—a curiosity, a lit*erary paradox. And the search of the Beats, the thing which they have in common with the Ash Can school of painting and the Chicago liter*ary renaissance of the twenties is an authentic American phenomenon, a search for the common experience, for the ground under their feet. I have strained matters considerably using the word populist: certainly no more specifically political word could be used. The poet means to trust his direct perceptions, and it is even possible that it might be useful for the country to listen, to hear evidence, to consider what indeed we have brought forth upon this continent.

The DAR is not a notably liberal organization.(12) I am aware that there must be descendents of Old Families in all possible political groupings, but a considerable portion of the population, and I think a considerable proportion of the most liberal population, is made up of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants. Certainly the DAR is of that opinion. But I need not assume statistical facts which neither the DAR nor I know. The oldest families are of puritan background, and the American family histories of the descendents of later immigrants begin typically with men and women who found refuge in the tenements of these shores from political and financial shipwreck. There they developed a morality of crisis, an ethos of sur*vival, a passionate philosophy of altruism and ambition. To a puritan morality—or I should say a puritanical morality—they added altruism in some cases, solidarity in others, and thereby completed a political morality. But neither ambition nor solidarity nor altruism is capable of establishing values. If the puritanical values proved themselves in material well-being, in the escape from danger of starvation, in TVs and radios, electric toasters and perhaps air-conditioners, electric ra*zors and strawberry corer, and are now pushing the electric toothbrush, then altruism demands these things also for the other man. It cannot, of itself, get beyond that. We can do so only when, with what*ever difficulty, with whatever sense of vertigo, we begin to speak for ourselves. Be-razored and be-toastered, and perhaps anarchist and irresponsible, the grandson of the immigrant and the descendent of the puritan better begin to speak for himself. If he is a poet he must. If he is not, perhaps he should listen. For mankind itself is an island: surely no man is a continent, and the definition of happiness must be his own.(13) The people on the Freedom Rides are both civilized and courageous; the people in the Peace Marches are the sane people of the country. But it is not a way of life, or should not be. It is a terrifying necessity. Bertolt Brecht once wrote that there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees. I happen to think that the statement is valid as he meant it.(14) There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning. If one goes on to imagine a direct call for help, then surely to refuse it would be a kind of treason to one’s neighbors. Or so I think. But the bad fiddling could hardly help, and similarly the question can only be whether one intends, at a given time, to write poetry or not.(15)

It happens, though, that Brecht’s statement cannot be taken literally. There is no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of “flowers.” “We want bread and roses”: “Let a thousand flowers bloom” on the left: on the right, the photograph once famous in Germany of Handsome Adolph sniffing the rose. (16) Flowers stand for simple and undefined human happiness and are frequently mentioned in all politi*cal circles. The actually forbidden word Brecht, of course, could not write. It would be something like aesthetic. But the definition of the good life is necessarily an aesthetic definition, and the mere fact of de*mocracy has not formulated it, nor, if it is achieved, will the mere fact of an extension of democracy, though I do not mean of course that re*striction would do better. Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for its elf, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled “Vocation” (he is speaking of the poet’s vocation) with the line: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”(17) And though it may be presumptuous in a man elected to nothing at all, the poet does under*take just about that, certainly nothing less, and the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, turn wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.”(18)

It is possible that a world without art is simply and flatly uninhab*itable, and the poet’s business is not to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to seek to give to political statements the aura of eter*nal truth. It should not really be the ambition even of the most well-meaning of political and semipolitical gatherings to do so, and to use verse for the purpose, as everyone perfectly well knows, is merely ex*cruciating. Therefore the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his politi*cal nonavailability as clearly as the classic pronouncement: “If nomi*nated I will run: if elected I will hide” (I quote from memory).(19) Surely what we need is a “redemption of the will”—the phrase from a not-yet-produced young playwright whose work I have read—and indeed we will not last very long if we do not get it. But what we must have now, the political thing we must have, is a peace. And a peace is made by a peace treaty. And we have seen peace treaties before; we know what they are. This one will be, if we get it, if we survive, like those before it, a cynical and brutal division of the world between the great powers. Everyone knows what must be in that document: the language of both sides has been euphemistic but clear. A free hand in Eastern Europe to Russia: to the United States in Western Europe and in this continent and some other places. And the hope that China will not soon acquire a bomb. And where is the poet who will write that she opened her front door, having sent the children to school, and felt the fresh authentic air in her face and wanted—that?



NOTES

(1) John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), American portraitist and painter; Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), French impressionist painter.

(2) Oppen is paraphrasing, not entirely faithfully, a recurrent image in Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy used to illustrate the epistemological complications of traditional philosophy. In chapter 1 (“Appearance and Reality”), for example:

It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth’s rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true.

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 7-8. Again, in chapter 3 (“The Nature of Matter”):

[I]t is rational to believe that our sense-data—for example, those which we regard as associated with my table—are really signs of the existence of something in-dependent of us and our perceptions. That is to say, over and above the sensations of colour, hardness, noise, and so on, which make up the appearance of the table to me, I assume that there is something else, of which these things are appearances. The colour ceases to exist if I shut my eyes, the sensation of hardness ceases to exist if I remove my arm from contact with the table, the sound ceases to exist if I cease to rap the table with my knuckles. But I do not believe that when all these things cease the table ceases. On the contrary, I believe that it is because the table exists continuously that all these sense-data will reappear when I open my eyes, replace my arm, and begin again to rap with my knuckles.” (page 27)

(3) Oppen’s adaptation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 7, translated by G.S. Kirk thus: “If all existing things were to become smoke the nostrils would distinguish them.” See G.S. Kirk, ed., Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 232. Oppen later used the fragment as the title to a poem in Primitive (NCP 274).

(4) The dolce stil novo, or “sweet new style,” was the mellifluous style of Dante’s early philosophical love poetry, as well as that of other Italian poets in the late thirteenth century. The phrase itself comes from Dante’s Purgatorio 24.57.

(5) Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931); Carl Sandburg (1878-1967); Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966); William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). The “Ash Can” school was founded (loosely) by painter Robert Henri (1865-1929) in 1891 in Philadelphia. The group’s dictum was “art for life’s sake” and their aesthetics centered largely on subject matter, rather than form and/or style (see Oppen’s comment on Sandburg’s poetry).

(6) The phrase is misidentified as Williams’s; it actually occurs in Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse,” where Olson in turn attributes it to Robert Creeley. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 240. Oppen may have read the phrase in Williams’s Autobiography, however, and misattributed it thus.

(7) See “West” (NCP 208; SP 124): “In wrath we await // The rare poetic / Of veracity that huge art whose geometric / Light seems not its own in that most dense world West and East / Have denied have hated have wandered in precariousness.”

(8) The poem is Levertov’s “Matins,” in The Jacob’s Ladder (New York: New Directions, 1961), 57.

(9) “Williams was a populist,” Oppen says to Burton Hatlen and Tom Mandel in an interview, “but he really didn’t know what he was talking about” (MP 25). The subject is political poetry, and Williams is contrasting Williams’s populism to Pound’s elitism.

(10) A commonly cited proverb in Chinese Buddhism. Oppen’s source is unknown.

(11) A term used by British journalists to refer to a diverse (and otherwise unorganized) group of politically radical British novelists and playwrights. The term gained prominence in the mainstream press after a press release for the first performance of John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger used it to describe the play’s author.

(12) “DAR” refers to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

(13) Oppen misappropriates (purposefully) the famous lines from John Donne’s “Meditation 17” (1624): “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…”

(14) From Brecht’s poem “To Those Born Later” (“An Die Nachgeborenen”): “What kind of times are they, when / A talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” See Bertolt Brecht Poems, 1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen, 1976), 318.

(15) Also in the Hatlen/Mandel interview, in response to a question regarding his return to the writing of poetry, Oppen says: “Rome had recently burned, so there was no reason not to fiddle”(MP 34).

(16) “We want bread and roses” is a slogan associated with a textile strike that took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. “Let a thousand flowers bloom” is a misquotation of Mao’s 1957 slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

(17) In William Stafford, Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 107. Incidentally, the line appears in the poem as a quotation of the speaker’s father’s advice.

(18) Robert Duncan (1919-88). The quotation is from an unknown source.

(19) Ironic misconstrual of American civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman’s response to the notion that he might be drawn into the 1884 presidential race: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”

George Oppen, "The Mind’s Own Place" from Selected Poems, copyright © 1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Originally Published: October 8th, 2009
George Oppen, a prominent American poet, was one of the chief exponents of Objectivism, a school of poetry that emphasized simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme. Born in 1908 to a wealthy family and expelled from a high school military academy, Oppen and his wife Mary traveled across..

Along article. Take what you will from it as poetry is in itself a very diverse animal.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-is-modern-poetry.htm

What Is Modern Poetry?
Alan Rankin
Last Modified Date: June 30, 2023

Modern poetry refers to the verse created by the writers and poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. The actual definition of “modern” varies, depending on the authority cited. Some people would define modern poetry to include the poets of the 19th century, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. Recognizable aspects of modern poetry include an emphasis on strong imagery and emotional content and less reliance on the use of rhyme. Modern movements such as Beat poetry and poetry slams also would be included.


Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literary art. Preliterate societies used rhyming verse as a method to make stories and passages of history easier to remember. These verses were passed from one generation to the next as oral narratives. Some of these were eventually written down and have survived to this day. Epic tales such as Beowulf and The Odyssey were originally written in verse, influencing later poets such as Dante and John Milton.


American poet Walt Whitman is one of the founders of modern poetry.
American poet Walt Whitman is one of the founders of modern poetry.
American poet Walt Whitman, who published his influential book Leaves of Grass in 1855, is one of the founders of modern poetry. His disregard for traditional rhyme and meter led him to be called “the father of free verse” and made him an influence on later writers. Edgar Allan Poe, working a few years earlier, brought his own approach to traditional methods. Although he was a literary master who wrote short stories, novels and journalism, he is perhaps best known for a poem, The Raven.

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Modern poetry emphasizes less of a reliance upon the use of rhyme.
Modern poetry emphasizes less of a reliance upon the use of rhyme.
In the early 20th century, T.S. Eliot fled the United States for England and produced a series of important poems. The Waste Land is considered one of the great works of English literature. It contains many aspects of modern poetry: strong imagery, obscure details of high significance to the poet and a lack of rhyming verse. William Carlos Williams was another American poet with a strong influence on the Beat generation that would follow him. Rainier Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda brought these modern influences to their own languages, German and Chilean Spanish, respectively.

Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literary art.
Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literary art.
The 1950s saw an explosion of modern poetry in the form of the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. Allan Ginsberg’s Howl caused controversy and won a devoted following, two surefire signs of a literary movement. As the 20th century ended, modern poetry took on new forms, including rap songs, spoken-word performances and poetry slams. Meanwhile, more traditional poets such as Tony Hoagland and Charles Bukowski brought their own sensibilities to an art form as old as literature itself.

[AHZ]

“The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics.”

this is like the difference between me and gunny.

[AHZ]

1.B
On May 19, 2009 at 10:20 am Michael J. wrote:
I find that the moment one says “there are exceptions”, the act of generalization becomes a fallacy. It is impossible to generalize unless you are willing to deal in stereotypes and false structures.
I grew up in a family of women, a house of women. And when I say this, I don’t mean we were outnumbered by a small margin… I mean we equaled 3 or 4 other men in the range of 50 women. If that. And if I were to remove those other men, I was usually alone with upwards of 15 women at a time.
But I agree female creatives are way more fascinating to me than my male counterparts. I recently bought Sandra Beasley’s “Theories of Falling” and Olena K. Davis’ first book “And her soul out of nothing”. They should arrive this week. But they aren’t the only ones tickling my poetics.
Anyway… I really don’t think it comes down to simply male and female, though we have our differences… but those differences, I am realizing, are less inherent.
You could view me as the exception, meaning, I am very in touch with my feminine side — what does that mean? Nearly all the personality qualities you may associate with the feminine, you could see in me. Same with the masculine. Which then tend to cancel each other out and simply allow one to be themselves, without the need to tag certain qualities with “masculine” or “feminine”.
And if I am then viewed as an exception, I am not special enough to believe I am *the* exception. This means there is another, and if this is two, there is likely three, and so on and so on… which then possibly leads us back to the phrase: there are exceptions, but I will deal in generalizations…
It is possible then that when people say this, they are saying (obviously, I guess) generalizations outweigh the exceptions… of course, this is impossible to account for. As generalizations exist in this outer realm of opinions and wants and other things…
You did mention personal experience coloring ones self and in turn ones work… which I agree with…
And I haven’t attempted to answer your original question — why are women creatives so enticing (read: popular?) these days when put parallel with the male creatives…
Maybe it is the swing of times that we, males that is, are truly and finally noticing such things? Maybe there are more women on the position to give notice to other women who may go unnoticed? (this I want to doubt, because I’d hope art is the only space where such prejudices and sexism do not exist… but this is only a wish, as I have seen mass amounts of ego and childish antics involved in poetry when I used to perform with a poetry group).
I feel I am contradicting myself here.
It is very likely we are all exceptions…
I dunno…
On May 19, 2009 at 12:14 pm Zachary Bos wrote:
The will to debunk this post point-by-point has been leached right out of me by the solar intensity of the poor reasoning on display. Among the topics misunderstood are ontology, gender, Heidegger, instinct, creativity, and logic. Pious affirmations of generally agreeable statements do not give shoddy thinking a pass. To self: is my hyper-critical response a masculine trope?
On May 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Joseph Hutchison wrote:
Michael J.—I take exception to your statement about generalities and exceptions. We can all agree that there are mammals, and that mammals are distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of their young, and by giving birth to live young. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater are exceptions: mammals that lay eggs, i.e., monotremes. The problem is not with the generalities; the problem is that our systems are not completely congruent with the world.
This is part of Martin’s point, I think: in a world where gender equality is assumed, we still find women writing stronger poems. By “we,” of course, I mean Martin and me; I share his feeling but know as well as he does that it’s highly personal and subjective.
Nevertheless, I think what Martin says is true about the superiority of women poets, especially in certain “camps.” I’ve especially felt this when criticizing so-called Language poets for their many weaknesses. I always have to insert the caveat that I admire several poets in that camp, and that for some reason they are all women. (Not that I admire all female Language poets!) I too wonder why this should be so. But I’m a poet and a reader, not a critic and certainly not a theorist. So I’ll have to wait for someone with talents in that direction to suggest an answer….
On May 19, 2009 at 1:27 pm Daniel E. Pritchard wrote:
I’m interested to know who the women are to which you refer. (Also, I think it’s accepted generally that anyone over 40 isn’t young anymore, by any standard except comparison.) Also, though my memory may not serve me, I recall that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the most popular and well-respected authors, essayists, and poets were women, though few have persisted — how would this be a substantially different phenomenon?
On May 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm thomas brady wrote:
Who is this mysterious gunslinger leaning quietly against the wall?
Be still, my heart!
On May 19, 2009 at 2:51 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
I think this measuring the contemporary quality of one’s writing based on gender, contains elements of both truth and fantasy, but is ultimately a defective and redundant position to put forward.
Consider the following statement, which is the exact same as Jason makes, but with the genders reversed:
“Men make better bloggers than do their female counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the men are clearly superior.”
The comedian in me calls to mind a (good looking and cunning) pal i knew when i was in my mid twenties, who donned a right-on cloak of ultra PC Femminism when in his university years.
any (often totally innocuous) comment which he construed as sexist and/or insulting to women, even when the (inevitably) student-men making what he considered to be such, did so in innocence and even if though most others would not see the anti-woman slant — my pal would stand up for the sisterhood and generally sing to the skies of his battle for the gals.
But in reality, it was all an act he engaged in purely to ingratiate himself with the women, in order to pursue a thoroughly male agenda of bedding as many women as he could. And it worked. he got a name as the metro-sexual all caring fella, amongst early twenties women and when this three year period of his life finished, went back to being the sexists git i always knew.
My own background is, i was reared with four sisters, three older, one younger and myself and my father, the only men.
Currently i have seven neices and three nephews, all seven necies arriving on the scene before the nephews. Growing up, i was effectively a token girl in the sense of having no brothers.
~
I think the Amergin text i have been banging on about, which explains what Poetry is, the fundamental of it, that 50% of all humanity will be born with the poetic gift, can be appropriated to this debate.
Rather than reversing it and elevating Woman to the position Man previously held in the delsion that He was God, my learning has brought me to making Jason’s statement this:
“wo/men make better bloggers, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the wo/men are clearly superior.”
This is true 50/50 gender neutrality.
Our mind is neither male or female, but a s/he and once we transcend gender, come to understand it in these plain terms. The bnest writing is gender neutral, a third person eye speaking for all pronouns.


generalizations are valuable.

[Gunny]

this is like the difference between me and gunny.Stay out of tyr's poetry threads unless you have something to contribute directly to the poetry or tyr. His threads have nothing to do with politics or personal issues with other members and will not be cluttered up by such garbage.

This is your one and only warning on this matter. Next will be a permanent thread ban. You already have been advised where you can take up your personal issues with other members.

[AHZ]

Stay out of tyr's poetry threads unless you have something to contribute directly to the poetry or tyr. His threads have nothing to do with politics or personal issues with other members and will not be cluttered up by such garbage.

This is your one and only warning on this matter. Next will be a permanent thread ban. You already have been advised where you can take up your personal issues with other members.


I've contributed much to his poetry threads.

if he wants me to stay out I will.

but it has to come from him.

He's actually a fan of mine.

and me of him also too.

[AHZ]

histrionic.....

[Gunny]

I've contributed much to his poetry threads.

if he wants me to stay out I will.

but it has to come from him.

He's actually a fan of mine.

and me of him also too.I have no problem with that. Stick to poetry. What I stated stands.