'Poetry Instructs by Delighting'

“There are persons in society with whom we put up and others for whom we pull up a chair by the fire; there are volumes of poetry that we pore through dutifully and others to which we return with a sociable pint of beer and a chunk of Stilton.” 

That’s the late Fred Chappell’s way of saying that with some poets – and I would widen the category to include writers other than poets – we form a lasting companionable bond. Their work we read and reread, perhaps memorize, and read yet again. Seasoned readers may have dozens of such reliable relationships -- Shakespeare, Yeats, Robinson, others.

 

Sometimes such bonds take years to mature. With others, it’s instantaneous surrender. That’s how, about twenty years ago, I fell for the poems of Helen Pinkerton. The book was Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press), published in 2002. The fourth poem in the collection, “Red-Tailed Hawk,” was the first to grab me:

 

“Your hawk today floated the loft of air

That lifts each morning from the valley floor.

Dark idler, predator of mice and hare

And greater vermin, as I watched him soar

 

“Out of my sight, taking a certain path,

Knowing from ancient blood, instinctive might,

How to survive beyond the present drift,

He seemed to shift from nothingness toward flight.

 

“Yet it was real, the warm column of air—

Like being, unrecorded, always there.”

 

The shift in the final couplet, like the hawk’s effortless course correction, is breathtaking. No longer is the bird the focus, but the thermal, “the warm column of air,” the invisible shaft of energy buoying the bird. Hawks, like all creation, move from nothingness to being, invisibly. All of Helen’s work carries a similar philosophical charge.

 

In early 2011, a package arrived containing Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers, the second edition, “corrected and enlarged,” published in 1952 by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. Helen sent the book and an email:

 

“I had three copies including an unmarked second copy of the 2nd edition, which I include. Reading this book when I was about 21 and at Stanford changed my life, I found in it the philosophical grounds for believing in God’s existence, which delivered me from youthful atheism and have sustained my faith ever since. Though [Yvor] Winters recommended reading Gilson’s histories of philosophy, he did not mention this book. When I asked him in later years about it, he confessed that he had not read it. I wish that he had.” 

 

Helen’s emails were always surprising, often legitimate works of literature in their own right. Once she wrote to say she had just finished reading Vasily Grossman’s great novel Life and Fate. She went on to liken certain passages to others she had marked in The Gulag Archipelago, and that started an exchange on Solzhenitsyn. She was a scholar of Herman Melville and the Civil War, which always gave us something to talk about. We shared an admiration for Ulysses Grant's Personal Memoirs. She had studied with Yvor Winters at Stanford and befriended Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers. Here is another of her poems, “Visible and Invisible”:

 

“In touching gently like a golden finger,

The sunlight, falling as a steady shimmer

Through curling fruit leaves, fills the mind with hunger

For meaning in the time and light of summer.

 

“Dispersed by myriad surfaces in falling,

Drawn into green and into air dissolving,

Light seems uncaught by sudden sight or feeling.

Remembered, it gives rise to one's believing

 

“Its truth resides in constant speed descending.

The momentary beauty is attendant.

A flicker of the animate responding

Shifts in the mind with time and fades, inconstant.”

 

Helen died December 28, 2017, age ninety. Chappell writes, “Poetry instructs by delighting. So says our ancient wisdom, and I’m not yet fool enough to attempt contradiction.”

 

[The Fred Chappell passages are taken from “Attempts Upon Delight: Six Poetry Books,” published in the Summer 1990 issue of The Kenyon Review.]

'I Have No Puling Apology to Make'

People used to get sick and die of exotically named diseases we have never heard of. We have cancer and congestive heart failure. They had quinsy and squinsy (two of the Seven Dwarfs), dropsy, catarrh, French disease, gleet and bone-break fever. It was a more colorful time. As S.J. Perelman puts it: “I've got Bright’s Disease and he’s got mine.” 

Leave it to Charles Lamb to die of erysipelas, from the Greek for “red skin,” also known as St. Anthony’s Fire and “the rose.” It occurs when streptococcus enters a break in the skin. Today it would be quickly cured with a simple course of antibiotics. Lamb died on December 27, 1834, five days after tripping on a stone on Edmonton High Street in London and slicing open his face. He was probably returning from the nearby Bell Tavern, a favorite drinking spot. Eric G. Wilson in Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022) tells us:

 

“Wounds, in particular face wounds, are a common conduit for the bacteria. Within forty-eight hours, a hot, painful rash appears at the point of infection, and it swells and spreads. Its texture resembles an orange peel, frequently dotted with blisters and vesicles. Fever, chills, headaches, and vomiting ensue. Sometimes the lymph nodes swell. Those with compromised immune systems are most susceptible to the condition, such as older people and alcoholics.”

 

At age fifty-nine, Lamb was unquestionably an alcoholic. He admitted as much in his essay “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1813; rev. 1822): “Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it.” For a certain species of alcoholic, humor is the mask used to deny or minimize the problem, and Lamb was a notably funny writer. In a letter to Robert Southey, Lamb once wrote: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

 

Wilson continues: “[E]rysipelas can intensify into necrotizing fasciitis, a ‘flesh-eating’ infection causing hideous coloring, corrosion, and death. Charles Lamb likely died disfigured and in agony.” That Lamb drank to excess, that he was a tippler, a toper, a tosspot, seems inarguable. In his final letter, composed on the day of his fall, Lamb writes to the wife of his friend George Dyer and closes with a typical Lambian wisecrack:

 

“I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at your house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called [Edward] Phillip’s Theatrum Poetarum; but it is an English book. I think I left it in the parlour . . . If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.”

'The Happy Morning Is Over'

“Well, so that is that.” 

W.H. Auden captures the hangover, alcoholic or otherwise, of the day after Christmas. As I’ve gotten older the holiday’s passing is no longer so profoundly disappointing, but as a kid disappointment inevitably followed on disproportionate expectations. The presents were never quite what we had hoped for. Some were already broken. The dolor of Christmas afternoon had mostly passed, replaced by the dread of school’s resumption, though most of the arguing had ceased. Every year the predictable emotional roller-coaster: hope and good cheer frittered away. Remembering this exercise in ingratitude remains a little uncomfortable. The passage at the top is taken from the final section of Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (1942):

 

“Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –

Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school. There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully –

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.”

 

And this:

 

“In the meantime

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,

Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem

From insignificance. The happy morning is over . . .”

'That Late Death Took All My Heart for Speech'

I’m not by nature a brooder. My brother died sixteen months ago yesterday, enough time for his death to have taken its place in the region of memory I think of as a reliquary. Precious but not to be fiddled with too often. On Tuesday at Kaboom Books here in Houston I was talking to the owner, John Dillman. For some reason the topic was the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I told John a friend and I cut school in the spring of our senior year in high school to attend the first Earth Day – April 22, 1970. In a downtown church, Ferlinghetti spoke and read some poems, of which I remember nothing.

Memory, of course, is a series of linkages. My talk with John reminded me that my brother once had a cat he named Lawrence Ferlingkitty, which I hadn’t thought about in years. Coupled with the nearness of Christmas another memory returned. My mother was a notoriously indifferent housekeeper. Clutter accumulated on every horizontal surface. We even felt sorry for the Christmas tree, freighted with too many ornaments, too much tinsel. One year, my brother and I bought a sack of hotdog buns and hung them all from the tree without telling anyone. No one noticed, not parents or visitors, so it became an annual tradition. That may be my favorite memory of my brother. The final stanza of Yeats’ “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”:

 

“I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind

That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind

All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved

Or boyish intellect approved,

With some appropriate commentary on each;

Until imagination brought

A fitter welcome; but a thought

Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

'In the Middle of a Seismic Cultural Change'

Brooke Allen’s preface to Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading (Tivoli Books, 2025) will read to some like a eulogy delivered by a clinically depressed cleric: “The authors I’ve covered in this collection, though all were famous in the very recent past, are figures that will probably disappear in the post-literate society if they have not done so already.” 

It’s time to accept that aliteracy and illiteracy are no longer looming threats. They have already arrived and are thriving. As a critic, Allen is a realist not a deluded cheerleader. Nor does she scold us or applaud her own readerly accomplishments (she seems to have read everything). She holds no illusions about rallying the troops or turning the non-reading tide. It’s simply a reality. Her collection includes reviews of books, many first published in The New Criterion and The Hudson Review, by and about Oscar Wilde, Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and John Updike, among others – figures we could have assumed until recently most bookishly educated people would have read or at least recognized by name. Her tone is not mournful or hectoring but matter of fact:

 

“We are in the middle of a seismic cultural change, as transformative as that which followed the appearance of the printing press half a millennium ago. And just as that invention turned the Western world into a literate society, we are now transitioning into a post-literate one. Despite universal public education, thirty percent of American adults read at the level of a ten-year-old. Which is not to say that the other seventy percent read at an adult level; many of them are not much more advanced, and a significant portion are functionally illiterate.”

 

In her reviews, Allen carries on dutifully, evaluating books with insight, skeptical intelligence and obvious pleasure. Her approach is never academic or pseudo-populist. She doesn’t write about certified masterpieces, books by Nabokov or the James Brothers, but often about writers once described as “middlebrow” who might today pass for “highbrow” – W. Somerset Maugham, Ogden Nash, Lord Berners, Sybille Bedford. Here she is reviewing a three-volume biography of the English poet John Betjeman:

 

“The obsession of academic critics with differentiating ‘major’ writers from ‘minor’ ones, and summarily dismissing the latter, serves the interest of no one but their fellow-academics and actively harms not only those authors they deem minor, but also that large majority of the public who reads novels and poems purely for pleasure, with no scholarly or careerist motives.”

 

This illustrates Allen’s unpretentious, non-academic approach to reading and reviewing. She positions herself as the latest incarnation of Dr. Johnson’s “common reader,” and continues:

 

“Within the academy, ‘major,’ at least since the heyday of Eliot and Pound, has tended to mean ‘difficult’ —possibly because difficulty supposes a need for expert interpretation and therefore justifies the existence of professional explicators. Kipling and Trollope, for example, so popular during the Victorian era as to have become an integral part of England’s cultural fabric, are not only ignored in modern universities but actively denigrated.”

Snobbery by professors of literature, of course, is part of the reason literature has turned into a harmless pastime, on a par with collecting beer cans or cultivating bonsai trees. Allen has a knack for reviewing writers who might otherwise be ignored as “non-literary,” who work in forms other than the usual novels and poetry. Eric Newby, for instance, the wonderful English travel writer, author of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Allen notes that Newby went to work for his father as a young man and never attended university:

 

“Perhaps it is this background that accounts for his steadfast refusal to lapse into the occasional mandarin riffs that Waugh, Fermor, and Wilfred Thesiger indulged in, and even occasionally [Peter] Fleming.”

 

Even books formerly deemed scandalous are largely forgotten. Take Samuel Butler and his posthumously published The Way of All Flesh (1903), once read by adolescents (including this one) as a sort of declaration of independence and defiance. Allen tells us “it would be hard to exaggerate the influence it once exerted over entire generations of angry young men and women.” Readers of this blog have told me they still read The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Allen concludes her review:

 

“The Way of All Flesh is indisputably his masterpiece. In this hugely entertaining novel Butler said many things that were at that time unsayable and even unthinkable. And in spite of the revolutionary social changes that have occurred over the last hundred years and more, a great deal of what he said is still unsayable, and still needs saying.”

 

The late Irish poet and critic Dennis O’Driscoll in 2005 published an essay, “The Library of Adventure”(The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays, Gallery Books, 2013), that reads like an exultant celebration of reading by a boy from rural Ireland. O’Driscoll already was acknowledging the lingering demise of pleasure-driven reading, though his tone is more joyous than Allen’s. He writes, in words I think Allen would endorse:

 

“It is difficult to state precisely why reading is so essential. It is impossible to disentangle the linguistic pleasures from the moral insights, the wisdom from the knowledge, the cadence from the characterization. . . . The nearest adult experience I know to being a child, eagerly turning pages in the kitchen while my mother—hands gloved in a dishcloth—takes from the oven a sugar-dusted apple pie that is sweating cinnamon through its pores, is being a slow reader of a great book, entering a zone of timelessness. I suspect that it is only in such a state that we are detached enough from the attachments of the everyday to gain access to those profound truths and poignant yearnings that are the ultimate goal of serious readers and the richest reward a writer can bestow.”

 

[O’Driscoll, a marvelous poet, died on this date, December 24, in 2012 at age fifty-eight.]  

'Only Two Loop-holes Then I Might Behold'

I’ve been quietly lobbying for William Cowper’s verse for many years. Born in 1731, spanning the Augustan and Romantic eras, he’s among England’s “mad poets,” a periodic depressive, a deeply religious writer of hymns and an occasional unsuccessful suicide. He would seem to be an utterly benign, though self-tormenting fellow. Take this excerpt from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of his long poem The Task (1785): 

“’T is pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,

To peep at such a world; to see the stir  

Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;       

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates,         

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.”

 

The OED credits Cowper with the phrase “loopholes of retreat,” later used by, among others, George Meredith in The Egotist, another book no one reads today: “Dim as the loophole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered light.” Today we think of a loophole as a sort of escape clause, a way to avoid an obligation, especially in the legal sense. For Cowper, it's a way to view the world, an aperture. Among his other qualities, Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. Cowper was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal as a friend but plagued by madness. He hardly recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not troublemaking. Later I would discover Cowper’s phrase in a bravura passage in William Hazlitt’s essay “On Living to One’s Self” (1821):

 

“What I mean by living to one’s-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take in the affairs of men: calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamed of by them. He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.”

 

Advice Hazlitt applied to the world but not necessarily to himself. He was never a “silent spectator.” He had a streak of meddlesomeness and finished his career with a four-volume biography of Napoleon that no one reads today. I favor writers who at least try to write most impersonally when addressing personal matters. One of the attractions of blogging is the qualified anonymity it permits. Words matter, not our precious “personality.” Except for the bit about “pure spirit” – no one I know – Hazlitt describes a writer’s ideal of spectatorship

 

“Loop-holes” in Hazlitt suggests a means of observing the world. Even earlier, “loop-holes” shows up in a 1619 sonnet by Michael Drayton:

 

“There’s nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste,

That in my days I may not see thee old,

That where those two clear sparkling eyes are placed

Only two loop-holes then I might behold;

That lovely, arched, ivory, polished brow

Defaced with wrinkles that I might but see;

Thy dainty hair, so curl’d and crisped now,

Like grizzled moss upon some aged tree;

Thy cheek, now flush with roses, sunk and lean;

Thy lips with age as any wafer thin;

Thy pearly teeth out of thy head so clean,

That, when thou feed’st, thy nose shall touch thy chin.

    These lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,

    Then would I make thee read but to despite thee.”

 

Drayton is a close contemporary of Shakespeare. Scholars have suggested his work might have been better known if he hadn’t been overshadowed by the author of King Lear. Both wrote sonnet cycles, a popular form at the time. Drayton’s sonnet ponders the effects of aging on his loved one, its inevitable ravages. Through the poet's own “loop-holes” he observes its sad workings. Born in 1563, Drayton died on this date, December 23, in 1631 at age sixty-eight.

[The Irish writer Brian Lynch published his novel about Cowper, The Winner of Sorrow, in 2005, and Dalkey Archive brought it out in the U.S. in 2009. It’s among the finest novels of our still-young century.]

'A Distant Dissonance, Treble-cleft'

“Night-train noises, muffled and low, / nights when the Northern Limited left.”

I first read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) in the summer after graduating from high school, and remained under its spell long after I accepted Anderson’s limitations as a writer. More than a decade later I was hired as a reporter for the newspaper in Bellevue, a town in North Central Ohio six miles east of Clyde along Route 20. Clyde was home to Anderson as a boy and served as his model for Winesburg.

 

The dominant business in Clyde and the region was and remains the Whirlpool Corp., the largest washing machine factory in the world. In 2003, the state put up a historical marker commemorating Anderson’s gift of immortality to the town, where he lived from 1884 to 1895. During my years in Bellevue (1981-83), the only public nod to Anderson I remember was the Winesburg Inn. Bellevue was a railroad hub and after a while you stopped hearing the train whistles and the low rumble of the engines. In “Tandy,” one of the stories collected in Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson writes:

 

“It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the railroad that ran along the foot of a little incline before the hotel. Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast from the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in the roadway arose and barked.”

 

A recurrent character in the stories is George Willard, a young newspaper reporter who leaves Winesburg on a westbound train. Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Anderson’s collection: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”

 

I remembered Anderson and his stories when reading Maryann Corbett’s “Lament for the Midnight Train.” Its opening lines are quoted at the top. Few sounds are as lonesome-sounding as a train whistle late at night. Corbett writes:

 

“Midnights, we’d hear its strange chord blow,

a distant dissonance, treble-cleft.

Languid in summer, dulled in snow,

it spoke to me calmly: Trust and rest.

The night world works on a steady clock.”