'Nothing is Redundant, Nothing Wanting'

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.” The essay originally served as the introduction to an anthology, Epigrammatum delectus (1659), intended for use in classrooms. It omitted some poems by such epigrammatic masters as Martial and Catullus because they were “quite filthy and obscene,” Cunningham tells us in his introduction. He continues:

 “Young people are led by curiosity to read these, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such books; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.”

 

We sense Cunningham, an epigrammatic descendent of Jonson and Landor, and translator of Martial and Catullus, is having a good time here. His own epigrams could be rather salty, as in “Epitaph for Someone or Other”:

 

“Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,

And naked was my pastime in between.”

 

And “The Lights of Love”:

 

“The ladies in my life, serially sexed,

Unscrew one lover and screw in the next.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek 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. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today.

 

Another gifted epigrammist, R.L. Barth, republished Nicole’s essay in Cunningham’s forty-four-page translation, with notes, in 1997. Bob and Cunningham would concur with this passage near the conclusion of Nicole’s essay:

 

 “[O]f all the special capabilities of the epigram none is more difficult to realise or more rarely achieved than the adroit handling, the suitable and easy unfolding, of the subject so that nothing is redundant, nothing wanting, nothing out of order, obscure, or tangled up in verbiage, and yet at the same time nothing too unexpected, nothing not adequately prepared for. Martial is pre-eminent in this; he develops his subjects so aptly, clearly, and perceptively that he obtains for ideas of no special note otherwise a good deal of distinction by the charm of the handling.”

 

Cunningham translated Martial’s 4.33:

 

“You write, you tell me, for posterity.

May you be read, my friend, immediately.”

 

Here is Barth’s version of the same epigram:

 

“Your manuscripts are stacked, bookcases groan,

And yet you’ve published nothing of your own.

‘My heirs will publish . . .’ What? After you’re dead?

Sosibianus, it’s past time you’re read.”

 

Cunningham was born on this date, August 23, in 1911, and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Barth’s versions of Martial are collected in Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]

'Nothing to Be Despised'

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.” 

Leave it to Dr. Johnson to remind us of the vanity of our wishes. Human striving often comes to little or nothing. Above he writes of a poet whose posthumous place in English literature seems to confirm Johnson’s dismissive verdict. Perhaps a few eighteenth-century scholars still read the poetry of George Lyttelton. I know him almost exclusively through Johnson’s brief biography in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, most of which is devoted to Lyttelton’s public life as a Member of Parliament and Chancellor of the Exchequer, not his work as a poet.

 

Johnson speaks well of a single poem by Lyttleton, “Advice to Belinda,” also known as “Advice to a Lady.” It “contains,” he writes, “much truth and much prudence, very elegantly and vigorously expressed, and shews a mind attentive to life, and a power of poetry which cultivation might have raised to excellence.” Note the qualification. Lyttelton writes:

 

“Hard is the fortune that your sex attends;

Women, like Princes, find few real friends:

All who approach them their own ends pursue:

Lovers and ministers seldom are true.”

 

Even the praise is lukewarm. He writes: “Lord Lyttelton’s Poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment, devoting part of his time to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and little to be admired. . . . His little performances, whether Songs or Epigrams, are sometimes spritely, and sometimes insipid. His epistolary pieces have a smooth equability, which cannot much tire, because they are short, but which seldom elevates or surprizes.”

 

Lyttleton was born in 1709 and died on this date, August 22, in 1773 at age sixty-four.

'The Boundless Complexity of Life'

The poet W.S. Di Piero introduces Montaigne without mentioning his name: “‘Essay’ has embedded in it ‘assay,’ ‘weighing,’ ‘testing,’ ‘proofing,’ ‘trying out,” ‘attempting.’ When writing prose I’m arguing mostly with myself and the friends and predecessors whose voices are in my head.”

What passes for essay writing today too often looks like someone laying down the law, telling readers what they ought to be doing, thinking or saying. It comes off as bullying monomania. I want more from an essay than a cavalcade of opinions, which are usually the least important and interesting things I can know about you. Tell me about your experience. Tell me what you know. Share your learning. Don’t just spout off like the drunk at the end of the bar or some crank on A.M. radio. How long since you last read an essay that moved you or illuminated some aspect of your life that has been puzzling or troubling? For me it happened Thursday while reading Joseph Epstein’s “Turning Ninety” in the September issue of Commentary.

 

In his first paragraph Epstein writes: “I should like to have written an essay in which I toted up how age has brought me wisdom and given me a decidedly sunny view of life. Alas, it is not so.” Old Epstein hands will recognize the tune and hum along. The essayist will turn ninety in January and his situation report is neither rosy nor despairing. He writes like an adult, rare in contemporary letters:

 

“While I am grateful to be arriving at 90, life now seems less amusing. More and more, it seems about loss, loss both personal and of so many of the things that made life interesting and often amusing. The loss of friends, to begin with.”

 

Throughout “Turning Ninety,” I experienced little shocks of recognition like that. What Epstein recounts isn’t peculiar to his life. For instance:

 

“Then there are the many things I have lost interest in. Travel is high among them.”

 

“An ‘expert economist’ is an oxymoron. In the current day, few are the experts who aren’t already lined up for or against Donald Trump. Some peddle opinions full-time; it is their job.”

 

“[M]y walk, too, has changed, almost but nearly qualifying for Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks. I fear falling, which I have done three or four times, and so when out of doors walk looking down at the pavement. ‘Don’t fall’ is my mantra.”

 

“I, at any rate, live on the culture of the past: the great Russian and English novelists, French and Italian painters, the American Songbook.”

 

Epstein concludes with a fine resolution in the musical sense: “Allow me to close this essay—disquisition? diatribe? sustained groan?—with a toast. May all who have read it attain the age of 90 and as far beyond as seems to give them more pleasure than pain. May they end their days on neither a bang nor a whimper but a quiet smile in recognition of the boundless complexity of life.”

 

Epstein devoted an essay to the first essayist, Montaigne, in the March 1993 issue of Commentary. It too nicely resolves:

 

“By being a man on whom not much was lost, by studying the complex variousness of human nature through looking first into his own soul, by carefully considering his experience of the world, by not asking the impossible of himself and being suspicious of those who asked it of others, by understanding that man’s problem on earth is to attain such wisdom as will help him live a fit and reasonably happy life, Montaigne, for those who read him more than four centuries after he wrote, continues to lessen life’s terror and to add to its pleasure. More than this no writer can hope to do, and none has done it better than Michel de Montaigne.”

'The Pure Astonishment of Life'

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “I thought you hated science fiction,” he writes. “You always seemed like a snob about it.” Guilty as charged, I guess. I read science fiction and related genres from roughly ages ten to fourteen. At some point I just lost interest. The arrival of puberty may have been an unrelated factor. A serious reader is forever culling aspects of his past, discarding previous favorites. Call it maturation or honing one’s critical gifts. The genre was no longer satisfying to read. I’ve never had a grand theoretical explanation for the change, though I retain a general lack of interest in any thesis-driven fiction -- 1984, for instance. 

I don’t recall why I read Gibson’s novel. I remember it getting a lot of attention when it was published in 1984, even in non-sci-fi circles. Perhaps a friend recommended it. Neuromancer is not the only novel I’ve read about which I remember nothing or almost nothing. The same can be said of books by such non-genre writers as Conrad Aiken, James Baldwin, Thomas Wolfe and others. In fiction I look for an ineffable but recognizable quality called by William Maxwell, in a note to his collection of reviews and essays The Outermost Dream (1989), “the breath of life.” He writes:

 

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”

 

No binding theory there, but I intuitively understand what Maxwell is getting at. In 1997, in the new introduction to The Outermost Dream, reissued by Graywolf Press, Maxwell writes: “[W]hen I read for my own enjoyment I cannot—or mostly do not—read authors whose way of writing doesn’t give me pleasure. But of course style is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.”

 

It’s a quality difficult to articulate and simple to perceive. Henry James’ fiction has it, as does Tolstoy’s and George Eliot’s. They convince us. We forget them and ourselves while reading. Science fiction no longer does that for me.

'It Happens Every Year Almost the Same'

When we think of ferocious predators among animals we likely think of sharks and grizzly bears, big creatures with teeth. But I remember as a kid watching ladybugs on a rose bush moving through aphids like a combine through wheat. They can consume thousands in their brief life span.

Another small and notably efficient hunter is the order Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies. I spent a day in an upstate New York marsh with a neuroethologist, a biologist who studies how an animal’s nervous system determines its behavior. Odonata was his specialty. His research showed their kill rate for insects, most often mosquitoes, topped ninety-seven percent. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision, and their field of vision is 360 degrees. Like ladybugs they are harmless to humans.

I remembered that day when reading the Louisiana poet David Middleton’s “August into Autumn” (Time Will Tell: Collected Poems (Texas Review Press, 2025):

 

“It happens every year almost the same

And always late in August when we pause

Just long enough to see what time has done,

Sly changes nearly imperceptible

Moment to moment holding us at last

While molting birds gone quiet watch the stars

And summer moves to its appointed end.

 

“The mated dragonflies, whose months are years,

Their eggs already floating in the reeds,

Now glide more slowly over lake and blade,

The great blue skimmer, eastern amber-wing

Still hunting for mosquitoes, dusk and dawn,

But farther off as the dense swarms grow thin

And crickets call all night through cooling trees.”

 

Middleton describes the slow change of seasons in the South, with none of the North’s drama or unambiguous demarcations. Autumn is little different from summer here if you’re not paying attention. Temperature changes are incremental. No gaudy red or yellow explosion among the maples (we have few maples). We’ll see more hummingbirds here in September as they migrate south. For a transplanted Northerner, autumn in Texas and Louisiana can be a disappointment. In “The Dragonfly,” Louise Bogan describes the insect’s “ceaseless movement, / Unending hunger . . .” In the poem’s final lines she is almost clinical: “And you fall / With the other husks of summer.”

'A Wild Sostenuto of the Heart'

At the center of the screen is an acute triangle with a rounded bottom. Its shape resembles the pattern left by wipers on a dirty windshield, inverted. Before the device is activated it’s a gray blank and reminded me of the opening sentence of a novel I read more than forty years ago: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” -- the only thing I remember from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. 

This was my second echocardiogram in less than two weeks. The first detected “reduced systolic function.” The second was performed using contrast. The technician put transparent jelly on the left side of my chest and moved the transducer probe around until she got a clean image. That picture replaces the “dead channel”: my pulsing heart. Seeing it seems miraculous, a gift denied us for most of human history. I remembered the first time I saw an ultrasound performed, which was also the first time I saw my oldest son, in utero.

 

The word that came to mind is sostenuto, which I learned from the fifth stanza of Richard Wilbur’s poem “For C.” (Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (2000):

 

“Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love

Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

 

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,

Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,

A passion joined to courtesy and art

Which has the quality of something made,

Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,

Like a rose window or the firmament.”

 

Wilbur wrote the poem for his wife, known as Charlee. Sotenuto is a musical term, an adjective meaning, according to the OED, “to be sung or played in a sustained manner.” It’s from the Italian verb for sustain, which is precisely what I want my heart to continue doing for me.

'Conserved in Treasure, Finally'

Rare is the poet who can simultaneously think and sing. C.H. Sisson once quoted the French critic Charles Maurras saying, “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” Prose writers don’t talk much about the rhythms of their words, which is probably a good thing. Prose is the draft horse of style, getting the heavy job done. Too much filigree and the language turns precious. The reader rightly suspects the writer is compensating for sparsity of content (e.g., John Updike). 

Words are never in isolation and are more like notation in a musical score than stones in a mosaic. One word follows another according to the logic of sound and sense. We spend a lot of time matching words to the rhythm that already exists in our heads, a rhythm we can’t begin to perceive until we start arranging the words. Sometimes for emphasis we purposely break the rhythm, always with resolution or absence of resolution in mind.

 

Much of the poetry written in the last century and a quarter is indistinguishable from prose – often tone-deaf prose. No need to name names. A writer who wrote superior prose and poetry, a rare feat of juggling, is Janet Lewis. Consider “Carmel Highlands” (Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, ed. R.L. Barth, 2000):

 

“Below the gardens and the darkening pines

The living water sinks among the stones,

Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones

Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines.

The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines,

And now the definite mountain-side disowns

The fluid world, the immeasurable zones.

Then white oblivion swallows all designs.

 

“But still the rich confusion of the sea,

Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing,

Rises through veils of silence past the trees;

In restless repetition bound, yet free,

Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing

An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.”

 

The words float like leaves in the currents of a river. There’s no hurry, no rush to the finish, but the lines are suffused with a steady, uninsistent sense of momentum. Throughout the seventy years of Lewis’ writing life, she wrote poems in both form and free verse. She is a writer seriously in need of rediscovery. One of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), is among the four or five finest ever written by an American. Here is a 1945 poem, “Lines with a Gift of Herbs”:

 

“The summer's residue

In aromatic leaf,

Shrunken and dry, yet true

In fragrance, their belief,

  

“These from the hard earth drew

Essence of rosemary,

Of lavender, faintly blue,

While unconfused nearby

 

“From the same earth distilled

Grey sage and savory,

Each one distinctly willed,

Stoic morality.

 

“The Emperor said: ‘Though all

Conspire to break thy will,

Clear stone, thou emerald, shall

Be ever emerald still.’

 

“And these, small, unobserved,

Through summer chemistry,

Have all their might conserved

In treasure, finally.”

 

“The Emperor” is Marcus Aurelius in Meditations (trans. Maxwell Staniforth): “Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to keep myself good; just as a gold piece, or an emerald, or a purple robe insists perpetually, ‘Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to remain an emerald and keep my color true.’” The passage suggests Lewis’ courage and steadfastness, her “Stoic morality.” Here is a 1941 poem she wrote after the death of a friend and fellow novelist, “For Elizabeth Madox Roberts”:

 

“From the confusion of estranging years,

The imperfections of the changing heart,

This hour leaves only tears;

Tears, and my earliest love, Elizabeth, and changeless art.”

 

Lewis, in her fiction and verse, is one of the few essential American writers of the last century, along with Cather, Nabokov and her husband, Yvor Winters. Lewis was born on this date, August 17, in 1899 and died in 1998 at ninety-nine.