Memorable Concision

Clive Wilmer this week celebrates the poetry of Samuel Johnson for the Poet on the Poet of the Week feature at Carcanet Press. Johnson was not a prolific poet, and many of his poems were translations or imitations (in Robert Lowell’s sense) from the Latin and Greek. Wilmer samples Johnson’s best and best known, “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” and such lesser-known works as his touching tribute to the itinerant violinist Claudy Phillips. Wilmer writes:

“If the epigrammatic closure of his couplets announces Pope as his master, it also points to the differences between them. Where Pope is waspish, mordant and suavely elegant, Johnson is grave, compassionate and severe. His poetic style has the same sturdy eloquence as his prose and has been praised for observing the prose virtues, though this should not blind us to his poetic qualities, above all memorability and concision.”

Can we ask more of a work of art than “memorability and concision?” Johnson’s biographer, W. Jackson Bate, describes “The Vanity of Human Wishes” as “strangely powerful.” He further writes of Johnson’s imitation of the 10th Satire of Juvenal:

“The result is a poem that (as was once said of Burke) dazzles the strong and educated intellect far more than the feeble, and sways intelligent and cultivated readers as a demagogue would a mob….There is indeed nothing else like it in the English language, or indeed any other language.”

Bate notes it was the first work in which Johnson put his name on the title page, and T.S. Eliot prized it highly. In a lecture from 1944, “Johnson as Critic and Poet,” composed soon after he completed Four Quartets, Eliot wrote:

“Great poetry of the type of The Vanity of Human Wishes is rare; and we cannot reproach Johnson for not writing more of it, when we consider how little of such poetry there is. Yet this type of poetry cannot rise to the highest rank. It is, by its nature, of rather loose construction; the idea is given at the start, and as it is one universally accepted, there can be but little development, only variations on the one theme.”

In other words, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is not La Divina Commedia. Nor is “London” The Dunciad, but who wishes to inhabit 21st-century America without the succor of its invective:

“Here Malice, Rapine, Accident, conspire,
And now a Rabble Rages, now a Fire;
Their Ambush here relentless Ruffians lay,
And here the fell Attorney prowls for Prey;
Here falling Houses thunder on your Head,
And here a female Atheist talks you dead.”