'Loving the Past But Settled in the Living'

In 1994, the late Helen Pinkerton published Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems about paintings, sculptures, pottery and photographs. Her publisher was the poet R.L. Barth. Helen’s ekphrastic poems are not art criticism or mere descriptions of subject matter. They are more fanciful than that and sometimes read like contemplative fables. Helen projects her imagination sympathetically into the works and their creators. One of my favorites in the series is about an artist unknown to me before first reading her poem some years ago: “On Gari Melchers’s ‘Writing’ (1905) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” Helen uses the first line (and the third line and the title) of Wallace Stevens’ “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” as the poem’s epigraph: 

“How often did she make such quiet, one wonders,

This woman writing at a covered table—

Full summer light warming the roseate hues,

Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.

A Wedgwood pier glass shows three Roman figures

In ritual dance—cool neoclassic Graces—

Beside a clay pot of geraniums.

Her taste eclectic—like our modern lives—

Loving the past but settled in the living,

 

“She seems meticulous—even, perhaps,

Like Edith Wharton, passionate for order,

Feeling, as she did, that in house and novel,

‘Order, the beauty even of Beauty is.’

Stevens, though you sought order in the sea

And grander heavens, the threat of nothingness

Unmanned you. Most women have no time for such,

For fate constrains them to immediate means,

The quiet art of keeping calm the house.”

 

When viewed for the first time, Melchers’ palette is stunning – “roseate hues, / Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.” Often, portraits of writers at work indoors are heavily shadowed, very serious and almost grim. Melchers’ painting is a sumptuous celebration of the writer and writing – and of painting. Outside, it’s summer. Indoors, facing the faceless woman are the Graces – the goddesses of beauty, grace and charm – the virtues of all good art. The quoted line is taken from Thomas Traherne’s “The Vision.”

 

Imagining the writing woman as Edith Wharton (whom Helen’s teacher, Yvor Winters, thought superior to Wharton’s friend Henry James) is inspired. I especially admire Helen’s knock at Wallace Stevens, who could be awfully fey when entering his philosophical mode. Call it noble feminism – or simply dismissing a clichéd notion about sexual roles. The poem’s first line – “How often did she make such quiet, one wonders” – suggests we may be witnessing not a routine event but a privileged moment. What she’s writing we’ll never know.

 

[You can find the poem in Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and in A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016, (Wiseblood Books, 2016). Helen died on December 28, 2017, at age ninety.]

'Wisdom Is Heavy Stuff'

From a biochemist I learned a phrase new to me – “epigenetic switching.” It means changes in gene expression without corresponding changes in the DNA sequence. What struck me was the profusion of English words with the prefix epi-: epitaph, epilogue, epitome, epicenter, epithet, episode, epinephrine, epilepsy, epidermis, epithalamium, epiglottis, epicarp, epidemic, Silas Marner’s adopted daughter and my favorite, epigram. English is epically promiscuous. 

The root is the Greek epi meaning “upon, at, close upon (in space or time), on the occasion of, in addition.” “Epigram” is from ἐπίγραμμα (epigramma), “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. Their appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. They mean something and are about something, rare qualities in poetry today. Every syllable has its place. None is superfluous. Take “You Don’t Have to Be So Smart” from Edward Case’s posthumously published The Business Of The Dancer (2026):

 

“If you want a pound of wit

An epigram will fit.

Even an ounce of sense

Is weighty though not dense.

With minimal reflection

You may glass perfection.

A drop of thought’s enough.

Wisdom is heavy stuff.”

 

The late X.J. Kennedy was likewise a master of the form. “In writing epigrams, most poets gain control over their natural tendency to blab. Besides, an epigram permits them to get a gripe off their chests.” Kennedy is writing in “Gists, Piths, and Poison-Pills: The Art of the Epigram” (An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, 2002). As bloat proliferates, short forms look attractive as a corrective to congenital logorrhea. Kennedy published eleven epigrams in the April 1996 issue of Chronicles, including “For a Friend to Whom He’d Sent His Book”:

 

“I wish you’d say, ‘What hopeless trash, you twit,’

And not ‘look forward soon to reading it.’”

 

Another master of the epigram in English is J.V. Cunningham. Kennedy elsewhere says of him, “you had to respect a man of his sour integrity,” a quality almost unique among poets, at least since the death of Walter Savage Landor. Here is his “Epigram 23” from the sequence "Epigrams: A Journal" (The Judge is Fury, 1947): 

 

“Dark thoughts are my companions. I have wined

With lewdness and with crudeness, and I find

Love is my enemy, dispassionate hate

Is my redemption though it come too late,

Though I come to it with a broken head

In the cat-house of the dishevelled dead.”

A contemporary practitioner of the epigram is Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War R.L. Barth. Here is “De Bello,” collected in Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“The troops deploy. Above, the stars

Wheel over mankind’s little wars.

If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.”

 

Barth’s Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026) will be published later this month. Bob has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years.

'I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also'

I acknowledge that William Cowper never rises to the first rank of poets but his Poems (1931) in the Everyman’s Library edition – complete and yet modestly sized in 428 pages – rests on the shelf closest to my desk, between volumes by Edwin Arlington Robinson and Walter de la Mare. I read him often. His complicated personality – intermittently mad and suicidal, yet devout and always amusing with friends, a lover of hares and other animals – makes him a character worthy of a novel by Jane Austen, who was among his devoted admirers. Here is Cowper on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful: 

“I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.”

 

Cowper’s metaphors often mingle playfulness and precision. A bauble is a plaything, a toy or trinket. Cowper finds in them an endorsement of his faith. Clearly, he is writing in the manic phase of his madness. On other occasions, guilt overwhelms him and God becomes a scourge. In the same letter he exults:

 

“I draw mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks [“grebes” in the U.S.]. I admire them myself, and Mrs. Unwin admires them, and her praise and my praise put together are fame enough for me. Oh! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a lovely prospect! My eyes drink the rivers as they flow. If every human being upon earth could think for one quarter of an hour as I have done for many years, there might, perhaps, be many miserable men among them, but not an unawakened one would be found from the arctic to the antarctic circle.”

 

And yet, the same man in his poem “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” can write: “I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb am / Buried above ground.” Here is Cowper writing to another friend, the Rev. Robert Unwin, on Jan. 17, 1782:

“To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, and without seeming to displace a single syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.”

 

In a letter to Unwin, always his stalwart friend, written on April Fool’s Day in 1782, shortly after publishing his first volume of verse, Cowper thanks him for publicizing the collection: “I could not have found a better trumpeter.” When not insane, Cowper was the wittiest and most gracious of men. He never says “thank you” when a more baroque expression of gratitude is handy. Two sentences later, and extending the musical metaphor, Cowper writes:

 

“Methinks I see you with the long tube at your mouth, proclaiming to your numerous connections my poetical merits and at proper intervals levelling it at Olney, and pouring into my ear the welcome sound of their approbation. I need not encourage you to proceed, your breath will never fail in such a cause; and thus encouraged, I myself perhaps may proceed also, and when the versifying fit returns produce another volume.”

'Our Essayists Have Defected'

At the bottom of a box of odds and ends I found a printout of an essay published more than eighteen years ago at a site called Truthdig. I don’t remember reading it but must have found it interesting. The author is Cristina Nehring (about whom I know nothing else), her title is “What’s Wrong With the American Essay” and you can still read it online. It’s pure provocation: 

“The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization.”

 

Things have only gotten worse in subsequent decades. Contemporary essays are characterized principally by the writer’s desire to impress readers with his sensitivity and virtue, usually of a political nature, as though the essay were a form of loyalty oath. Of course, a few first-rate essayists are still at work, still getting published: Cynthia Ozick (age 98), Joseph Epstein (89), Gary Saul Morson (78), Theodore Dalrymple (76), Peter Hitchens (74). All are lineal descendants of the father of essays, Montaigne, whom Nehring goes on to cite:    

 

“Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. ‘Where I have least knowledge,’ said the blithe Montaigne, ‘there do I use my judgment most readily.’ And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read -- and to spar with -- Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.”

 

Well, yes and no. Argument without wit or style is tiresome. It’s at this point that Nehring’s assessment of the essay applies to that endangered species, the blog (a name I still find ugly and amusing). After all, the best blogs are those closest in form to essays, and they are sadly rare. They embody the essay (to try, to attempt) impulse without being "formal" essays. I place “formal” in quotes because since its birth in the sixteenth century (yes, I know there are ancient precursors) , in the sensibility of Montaigne, the essay has remained notoriously slippery, though its mercurial nature is part of its glory and charm. In “On Vanity,” Montaigne writes, “My style and my mind alike wander.”

 

I’ve read first-rate essays disguised as book reviews, travelogues, sermons, op-ed pieces, philosophy, letters, biographies, poems, culinary criticism, medical and scientific texts, dictionary entries, diaries and journals, and passages in novels (see George Eliot). Essay writing is an impulse, the sensibility's mingling of experience and learning, more than a sophomoric screed or polemic.

 

Jacques Barzun reviewed Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne when it was published in 1957. He writes:

 

“Tastes, feelings, instincts, come into play and incite the passion for diversity. Montaigne finds in himself a taste for books, but not for bookishness; he can think and write for weeks or months together without reading. He loves travel and the immediate sensation of things. Truth being his delight, he loathes the life of a courtier. Yet its opposite, the philosopher's, should not be withdrawn or vexatious by design. Philosophy is a gay science, to which the satisfaction of the senses is a proper minister. Money is to buy pleasure, and Montaigne ‘hates poverty as the peer of pain.’ But human condition or no, there are terms on which alone it is fitting to live: ‘by right and authority not by permission or as a reward.’”

 

The energizing freedom of the essay, its resistance to formalization and even definition, invites abuse. Just as everyone is certain of his rightness for parenthood, so is everyone convinced he can write an essay. Give the Nehring the last word:

 

“Our essayists have defected, leaving us on our own, with the impression that to traffic in boldness and generality is to be a blowhard or a huckster. The moderation of these triflers is immoderate, and it is only right that readers allow their work to rot in basements.”

 

[You can find Barzun’s article at Isaac Waisberg’s invaluable IWP Books.]

'Those Little Cracklings of Mirth and Folly'

Who is being described and who is doing the describing:

“His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not grovelling; pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. [He] never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour.”

 

A respectable guess as to the identity of the writer whose prose is being assessed might be Daniel Defoe. Perhaps John Bunyan. With a bit of a stretch, even Jonathan Swift or John Dryden. No, it’s the less well-remembered Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and the encomiast is Dr. Johnson in his “Life of Addison.” Addison is best remembered as a pioneering periodical essayist, a precursor to Johnson himself, but he was also a poet, a Member of Parliament and a playwright. Though painfully shy he was a very public man and writer.

 

I came late to Addison, and he was presented to me as one half of a double act, like Laurel or Hardy: Addison and Steele. Together they founded The Spectator in 1711 and the Guardian two years later. Richard Steele had already founded The Tatler in 1609 and Addison became a regular contributor. Here is Addison’s opening paragraph from the May 17, 1712, edition of The Spectator:

 

“I have always preferred Chearfulness to Mirth. The latter, I consider as an Act, the former as an Habit of the Mind. Mirth is short and transient. Chearfulness fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest Transports of Mirth, who are subject to the greatest Depressions of Melancholy: On the contrary, Chearfulness, tho’ it does not give the Mind such an exquisite Gladness, prevents us from falling into any Depths of Sorrow. Mirth is like a Flash of Lightning, that breaks thro a Gloom of Clouds, and glitters for a Moment; Chearfulness keeps up a kind of Day-light in the Mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual Serenity.”

 

The prose is readily understood by most readers. His psychologizing will remind some of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Hamlet’s “I have of late—but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth . . .” Addison's essay is an endorsement of mental health. Those with a capacity for "Chearfulness" -- and mirth -- are likely to be sane. Most nut jobs, cranks and fanatics are humor deficient. Addison concludes:

 

“Such Considerations, which every one should perpetually cherish in his Thoughts, will banish, from us all that secret Heaviness of Heart which unthinking Men are subject to when they lie under no real Affliction, all that Anguish which we may feel from any Evil that actually oppresses us, to which I may likewise add those little Cracklings of Mirth and Folly that are apter to betray Virtue than support it; and establish in us such an even and chearful Temper, as makes us pleasing to our selves, to those with whom we converse, and to him whom we were made to please.”

 

Johnson concludes his “Life of Addison” with a further assessment of the essayist’s prose:

 

“What he attempted, he performed; he is never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetick; he is never rapid, and he never stagnates. His sentences have neither studied amplitude, nor affected brevity: his periods, though not diligently rounded, are voluble and easy. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”

 

Addison was born on today’s date, May 1, in 1672, and died in 1719 at age forty-seven.

'Then ’twas the Roman, Now ’tis I'

“Contempt for the past is an inbuilt feature of modernity, its preoccupation with change and the future, its determination to be new and different, its deep intolerance (in President Obama’s revealing words) of those who stand ‘against the tide of history’.” 

I’ve written before about Nicholas Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. Now I have a copy of the book and have finished reading it. For those of us who read, who value the great books of our precursors, it serves as a tonic, a reminder of what the culture has lost but also what individuals can preserve. The sentence cited above is taken from near the conclusion of the book, the section despairingly titled “For the First Time in History, the Past is ‘Dead and Silent.’”  

 

A quality that distinguishes our age from earlier periods is this drive to extinguish the past. A theme I have often addressed at Anecdotal Evidence is the impossibility of originality. Even those most vehemently stricken with “presentism” are nothing new. Without a million anonymous forebears, they would not exist, nor would we. I’m not convinced it’s possible to write good prose or poetry without reference to some earlier work, consciously or otherwise. Guy Davenport once put it to me more bluntly: every book is a reply to an already existing volume. Tate continues:

 

“The last half-century, with its identity politics and the increasing dominance of a left liberal pensée unique, has further intensified this attitude towards the past as a result of the West’s self-flagellation over its historical record in relation to its former colonial subjects, women, sexual minorities, and other minority groups. Although this has helpfully revised the historical record, it has left us with an image of the past as the site of oppression, discrimination, and trauma and encouraged the idea that one studies or teaches about the past mainly to wag one’s finger at it for the disgraceful ways in which it failed to conform to current liberal values.”

 

Believers in such creeds are characterized by naïveté about human nature. As Evelyn Waugh put it in Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939): “Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.” They also fail to appreciate what is best about our species. One of the authors of Tate’s seven books is Edward Gibbon. In Vol. I, Chap. 3, “Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines” in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he writes: “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Gibbon is describing the reign of Antoninus Pius, emperor of Rome from 138 to 161. He was the adoptive son of Hadrian and in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, who succeeded him as co-emperors. The irony of Gibbon’s bleakly clear-eyed view of human history is that it comes in the context of his praise for Antoninus, one of the “Five Good Emperors.” Here is the context:

 

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Humanity is infinitely more complex than the simple-minded deniers of history would have it. Here are Gibbon’s subsequent sentences: “In private life, he was an amiable, as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed, with moderation, the conveniencies of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.”

 

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet was a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and is famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius’ Astronomicon. Here is Housman’s Poem XXXI from A Shropshire Lad (1896), “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”: “Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.”

'You Delude Yourself'

A reader has sent me yet another lengthy screed about the State of the World and it leaves me as ignorant as I was before reading most of it. I know little about politics and nothing about economics, and I can’t muster the grit to change that situation. The writer seems like a bright, certainly well-educated guy but overly dependent on jury-rigging a grand unified theory of everything, rather like Coleridge in his gaseous phase. I defer to Dr. Johnson in The Rambler for July 9, 1751:

 

“Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind.”

 

Johnson, ever the no-nonsense realist. One of his admirers, Flannery O’Connor, writes on October 26, 1963, my eleventh birthday, to her friend “A.” (Elizabeth “Betty” Hester):

 

“Who do you think you understand? If anybody, you delude yourself. I love a lot of people, understand none of them. This is not perfect love but as much as a finite creature can be capable of.”

 

Systemic lupus erythematosus killed O’Connor nine months later, at the age of thirty-nine. You can find the complete letter in The Habit of Being (ed. Sally Fitzgerald, 1979). O’Connor serves as a literary palate cleanser. Like Johnson, she abhorred nonsense and intellectual pretentiousness.