'Rest and Have Ease'

William Wordsworth in anyone’s book is a major poet but I seldom read him any longer because I find much of his work dull as dishwater. There was a time when that sentiment could have consigned me to non-personhood in certain literary circles. His contemporary Walter Savage Landor is rightly judged a minor poet but I return with pleasure to his epigrams. Am I confused? Cutely paradoxical? Can we make such distinctions? The American poet Robert B. Shaw addresses these questions in “The Puzzle of Minor Poetry”: 

“Like many others, over the years I have been often bemused, and sometimes rankled, by the terms ‘minor poet’ and ‘minor poetry.’ The adjective ‘minor’ seems at once vague and peremptory. Vague: The suggestion is that such poetry is called minor because something is wrong with it, but since there are many ways in which poems can go wrong, this is not helpfully descriptive. Peremptory: The implication is that such poetry will not repay our expenditure of time and attention like the work of a major poet will—and yet anyone who reads poetry with more than cursory attention can attest that this is not the case.”

 

Shaw’s honesty is refreshing. He confirms my experience. I first encountered many, perhaps most, of the poets I enjoy and admire (and many whom I learned to ignore) in anthologies. Shaw argues the case for a writer whose work I hardly know, Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962), judging him a good minor poet, worthy of the reader’s attention:

 

“He is known exclusively for the handful of his poems that for much of the twentieth century appeared in anthologies. He is undoubtedly a minor poet, yet his work is more complex than his ‘anthology poems’ would suggest.”

 

A genre of essays I especially appreciate are those dedicated to obscure, neglected or utterly forgotten writers. Alexander Smith (1830-67), the Scottish essayist, is a good example. So are American essayist Agnes Repplier (1855-1950) and American poet Catherine Davis (1924-2002). No one would canonize these writers but to ignore them is foolish and to deny oneself honest pleasure. Too often, “major status” is the work of marketing or fashion, not a critical sense.

 

To put alongside Shaw’s Hodgson I would propose another minor English poet, Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940). His poems are wispy, often nostalgic and reminiscent of Walter de la Mare’s. Here is “In the Street of Lost Time” (The Unknown Goddess, 1925):

 

“Rest and have ease;

here are no more voyages;

fold, fold your narrow, pale hands;

and under the veil of night lie,

 

“as I have seen you

Lie in your deep hair;

but patiently now that new loves,

new days have gone their ways.”

'I Shall at Least Discover the Coast'

 Knuff, looby, lubber, clotpoll, chucklehead, chuff, bedpresser, fopdoodle, pricklouse, pickthank, jackalent, dandiprant, jobbernowl, mooncalf, et al. 

English, like Yiddish, is blessedly rich in insults, nouns applied to those we deem dangerously (or pitifully) stupid, lazy or inept. Few such words endure for long. My spell-check software fails to recognize seven of the fourteen words cited above. Invective seems less imaginative and entertaining today, relying as it does on a small cache of predictable monosyllables. W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick (1940), in the role of Egbert Sousé (“Sousé – accent grave over the ‘e’”), uses some of the words above carrying the Johnsonian imprimatur when giving advice to his future son-in-law, Og Oggilby (“Sounds like a bubble in a bathtub”): “Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a mooncalf! Don’t be a jabbernowl! You’re not those, are you?”

 

Johnson scholar Jack Lynch tells us 663 dictionaries of English already existed when Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on April 15, 1755, despite its mistaken reputation as the first in the language. What distinguishes Johnson’s Dictionary from others is its comprehensiveness, the vast number of citations (turning the book into an anthology of English literature), and the nine years of labor a single man put into creating it. Johnson is stereotyped as a finicky, moralizing prude, yet we find in his Dictionary such impolite words as fart (“wind from behind”) and turd (“excrement”). Boswell reports Johnson saying: “The difference between coarse and refined abuse is as the difference between being bruised by a club, and wounded by a poisoned arrow.”

 

Johnson defines 41,712 words. That first edition was published in two folio-sized volumes, each containing more than 1,100 pages and weighing more than twenty pounds. For this reader, language is the chief glory of the human species. That’s why I think of Johnson’s Dictionary not as an old reference book but as a celebration and a grandly ambitious undertaking. Johnson writes in “The Plan of an English Dictionary” (1747), addressed to Lord Chesterfield:

   

“When I survey the plan which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Cæsar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.”

 

Half a century ago I read in Time magazine that Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose Awakenings (1973) I had already read, would read the Oxford English Dictionary while in bed at night. The anecdote charmed me because I too read dictionaries, though not at that time the OED. We’ve learned since his death in 2015 that Sacks may have embellished some of his stories. I can’t say. But here is what he wrote in On the Move: A Life (2015):

     

“I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell’s bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for £44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.”

'None of the Miseries Foretold for the Retired'

A reader asks what I make of retirement after fifteen jobless months. I’m mildly surprised by what little difference it makes. I started working at age twelve and without trying developed a reliable work ethic. Twenty-five years as a newspaper reporter, almost twenty years as a science writer for universities. No regrets, I learned a lot and met a lot of interesting people but I don’t miss it. I heard stories about guys who retired and promptly had heart attacks. I’ve never had a gift for boredom, real or feigned. 

On average I now drive twice a week, at least once to visit the Fondren Library at Rice University. I never liked driving so that’s a gift. I sleep in a little later. I’m learning to take my time in the morning. I enjoy my coffee. I answer emails at leisure. I read, usually seated by the front window so I can observe the garden and its visitors. I’ve never been able to believe in the future so I dwell in the present, which is more real, and the past, which is more interesting.

 

Consider “Sleep, Loss” (In Code, 2020) by Maryann Corbett, who likewise has experienced “none of the miseries foretold / for the retired”:

 

“Once past the pang of handing in her keys,

she met none of the miseries foretold

for the retired. Those bus-stop waits in the cold

were well lost, and she slept the sleep of peace

alarmless. What dawned slowly was a dulled

or loosened hold on morning’s luxuries—

the moon, a sliced pearl set in lapis skies

diamonded by one planet, with the gold-

red band of sunrise chasing her.

And she thought

then of an older loss: when her last child

had learned to sleep till daylight, and her lulled

limbs fled communion with the monk, the night-

watcher, the graveyard shift, as she became

an outcast from the house of two a.m.”

'To Take the Bad Taste Out of My Mouth'

“We live in a fanatical age, an age of propaganda, when everybody wants the support of the whole herd in order to be quite at peace in his own conscience.” 

George Santayana is writing to his friend and future literary executor Daniel Cory on April 13, 1938. It’s the age of Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco. Santayana is seventy-four and in a few years will move into a convent run by the Little Company of Mary sisters in Rome. He already lives as a monastic atheist, withdrawn from most worldly affairs. He reads and writes and has few material demands. Here is the next and final sentence in his letter to Cory: “I am reading the Upanishads, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Spinoza’s Politics, to take the bad taste out of my mouth.”

 

The flip side of the sentence at the top, as true today as it was in 1938 -- the year of the Anschluss, Munich, the continuance of Stalin’s great purge and Kristallnacht – is that strays from the herd face suspicion and rancorous contempt. Independence of thought has grown scarce. In 1936, Michael Oakeshottt wrote in his notebook: “Politics are an inferior form of human activity.”

 

[For the Oakeshott see Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]

'That We May Look Unflinchingly on Death'

My wife vows never to shop again at our neighborhood grocery, less than a mile from our house. I agree that a semi-Third World atmosphere pervades the place. Once I found a puddle of urine on the floor in produce. I watched a woman stuff a bottle of wine into her yoga pants. The customer ahead of me in the checkout line screamed when the guy packing her bag dropped a cantaloupe on the eggs she had just paid for. Twice I’ve witnessed fist fights in the aisles. 

I’m certain plenty of people in the world would marvel at our grocery shelves. So much bounty, so much redundancy and waste. I remember as a kid seeing photos of empty shelves in Soviet stores, with a babushkaed woman staring forlornly. Cold war propaganda? Of course. But accurate, not staged.

 

When I go grocery shopping I assume the role of anthropologist. Much of today’s world is a foreign country to me. I see stuff my parents wouldn’t recognize as food – sushi, plantain, kale, pico de gallo, canned menudo. The last item my father might actually have enjoyed. Like Mr. Bloom he “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

 

In “Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket” (The Blue Swallows, 1967), Howard Nemerov treats the modern American grocery as an exercise in mathematics, divine grace and the denial of mortality:

 

“This God of ours, the Great Geometer,

Does something for us here, where He hath put

(if you want to put it that way) things in shape,

Compressing the little lambs into orderly cubes,

Making the roast a decent cylinder,

Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,

Getting the luncheon meat anonymous

In squares and oblongs with all the edges bevelled

Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).

 

“Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance

Upon our appetites, and on the bloody

Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,

Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes

Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,

Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives

They come to us holy, in cellophane

Transparencies, in the mystical body,

That we may look unflinchingly on death

As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.”

'A Kind of Aesthetics'

Almost twenty years ago the late poet and Melville scholar Helen Pinkerton urged me to read Wisdom and Wilderness: the Achievement of Yvor Winters (1983) by the English-born poet Dick Davis. She had been a student of Winters at Stanford in the Forties and remained loyal to his work and memory. Helen judged Davis’ book the most reliable written on the too-often-forgotten poet-critic (admittedly, not a crowded field). Then I learned that Davis was a gifted poet and famed translator of Persian verse. 

Interviews with poets tend to be exercises in pablum and self-promotion, but Elijah Perseus Blumov’s with Davis at New Verse Review is a pleasing exception. Blumov describes Davis as “a true master of verse craft.” We learn his favorite poets are Chaucer, Hardy and Auden: “I like them because they are brilliant technicians.” About Winters he says:

 

“[T]he fact that you could write poetry in the plain style is something that I got from Winters. Also, the sense that—and this sounds trite and obvious but it’s not something that was talked about when I was young—that you can think in poetry. Winters is very keen on people thinking. He loves Fulke Greville, for example, who actually thinks as the verse goes along, and you can see him pondering and changing his mind. I wasn’t aware of that strand of poetry, and Winters’ work introduced me to the plain style, to thinking in verse, and also to taking poetry seriously.”

 

Davis befriended another former student of Winters, Edgar Bowers:

 

“His personality was quite mercurial in many ways. He was very funny when he disapproved of people, and he would say things like, ‘Oh, he couldn’t tell a good poem from a hole in the wall!’ I actually remember him saying that about someone. He would speak with utter contempt about people. He hated people who showed off and didn’t have anything to show off about—that really infuriated him.”

 

And here is Davis beginning with autobiography and turning quietly to philosophy:

 

“I was a very moralistic young man, a rather unpleasant young man, I think– always telling people how to live and what to do. I really dislike people who do that nowadays. Aesthetics and morality don’t seem to me to be opposites. Morality—this is going to sound hopelessly precious—but morality, in a way, is a kind of aesthetics. It’s an instinct for what is appropriate and right, which is what aesthetics is too. So I don’t see them as totally separate.”

 

Davis has written several poems about Edgar Bowers, including “Edgar,” which carries the dedication “(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)”: 

 

“A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:

 

“A stately ’80s Buick; hearing a car

Referred to by a coaxing soubriquet--

’ Now come on, Captain, don’t you let me down.’

French spoken in a conscious southern accent;

An idiom calqued and made ridiculous

(’Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin’).

’Silly,’ dismissive in its deep contempt,

’Oh he’s a silly; an amiable silly,

But still a silly.’ The words I first

Encountered in your captious conversations,

’Tad,’ ‘discombobulated,’ ’cattywampus.’

The usage that you gave me once for ’totaled’–

’Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totaled me.’

 

Most recently, in Cleveland’s art museum,

The French Medieval Tapestries brought back

Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,

And how, for once, you’d stood there almost speechless,

Examining Time’s Triumph inch by inch,

Enraptured by its richness, by the young man

Proud in his paradisal place, until

You saw what his averted gaze avoided--

The old man, beaten, bent double by fate’s blows,

Driven from youth’s charmed, evanescent circle:

And how you’d wanted to be sure I’d seen him.”

 

To read Davis’ work find Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2017).

'Enlightened Spectators'

In his 1825 essay “On Old English Writers and Speakers,” William Hazlitt rather uncharacteristically waves the Union Jack in rousing defense of English literature in contrast to the French. He begins by browsing a Paris bookstall and seeing French books stacked “to the height of twenty or thirty volumes.” He goes on (and on):

“There is scarcely such a thing as an English book to be met with, unless, perhaps, a dusty edition of [Samuel Richardson’s] Clarissa Harlowe lurks in an obscure corner, or a volume of [Laurence Sterne’s] the Sentimental Journey perks its well-known title in your face.”

Seldom has prose mastery been so wedded to crankiness, but that’s part of Hazlitt’s charm. He’s passionate about almost everything. What distinguishes him from run-of-the-mill ranters is the deftness of his language. The essay continues:

“We sympathise less, however, with the pompous and set speeches in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille, or in the serious comedies of Moliere, than we do with the grotesque farces of the latter, with the exaggerated descriptions and humour of Rabelais (whose wit was a madness, a drunkenness), or with the accomplished humanity, the easy style, and gentlemanly and scholar-like sense of Montaigne. But these we consider as in a great measure English, or as what the old French character inclined to, before it was corrupted by courts and academies of criticism.”

Hazlitt has the gall (sorry) to make the French essayist a sort of honorary Englishman. It’s almost as though he were precognitive. His son, also named William Hazlitt, would edit and publish Montaigne’s Complete Works in the Charles Cotton translation in 1842. William Carew Hazlitt, the essayist’s grandson, revised his father’s edition in 1877.

Clearly, the paterfamilias is a lineal descendent of the great Frenchman. In his 1819 essay “On the Periodical Essayists.” Hazlitt writes:

“There is no one to whom the old Latin adage is more applicable than to Montaigne, Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra dixerunt [“May they perish, who said first what we were going to say.”]. There has been no new impulse given to thought since his time.”

The ideal essay, Hazlitt writes, “ . . . takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.”

At the conclusion of the “On Old English Writers” essay, Hazlitt generalizes and returns to his patriotic theme:

“Man, whatever he may think, is a very limited being; the world is a narrow circle drawn about him; the horizon limits our immediate view; immortality means a century or two. Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bound countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown. A little importation from foreign markets may be good; but the home production is the chief thing to be looked to.” 

Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778, and died in 1830 at age fifty-two.

[A recommendation: I rely on Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (Nonesuch Press, 1934). It’s a sturdy hardcover with legible print and an excellent selection of essays by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, a surgeon and literary scholar.]