'Dust and Shadows'

Here I encounter yet again the bothersome issue of major vs. minor writers. When “minor” is used as a purely dismissive judgment, beware. There are minor writers who write beautifully and earn our respect and even love – Max Beerbohm is the first who comes to mind – and others who never transcend their triviality. Say, Carl Sandburg. No serious reader reads Shakespeare exclusively, and consider the poor soul who consumes a steady diet of Sandburg. 

I was surprised in 2023 when The European Conservative, of all journals, published an essay titled “A.E. Housman, Poet and Pessimist” by the American writer Thomas Banks. He makes his judgment clear in the first sentence: “[I]t is not likely that either the critic or the lay reader would represent him as a major poet.” To substantiate his conclusion, Banks cites the relatively small quantity of poems Housman produced and continues: “Additionally, the verse he wrote, though for quality it is one of the most even bodies of composition in the English language, is as slender in its themes as it is slight in its volume.”

 

Does “slender in its themes” mean Housman’s themes are small in number or trivial in substance? There’s no law obligating poets to address some phantom number of subjects, and it’s surely not the latter. Consider XL from A Shropshire Lad, a poem that has mysteriously charmed me since I was a teenager:

 

“Into my heart an air that kills 

  From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

  What spires, what farms are those? 

 

“That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

  And cannot come again.”

 

I’ve been reading Landor lately and was pleased to see Banks liken him to Housman:

 

“Housman was not a dry man, and he cast less peaceful and somber a shadow on the page than he probably thought. Something like Walter Savage Landor’s ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’ does not really get at the heart of the man, for in truth, Housman was professionally combative and none to suffer fools gladly. The same, ironically, could be said for the Romanesque Landor himself, whose notoriously acrimonious nature gives the lie to ‘The Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher.’”

 

Housman was Kingsley Amis’ favorite poet and Philip Larkin called him, with Larkin-esque authority, “the poet of unhappiness,” though he added provocatively that Housman “seems to have been a very nice man.” In more than his devotion to Juvenal, Housman reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson. Consider the hatred of cant they shared, the passionate, sometimes tortured inner lives they led, and their devotion to scholarship. Banks respects Housman enough to take him seriously and not trivialize his poems. Nothing is accomplished by labeling a writer “major” or “minor,” except perhaps discouraging future readers. Banks acknowledges that Housman left us “a few poems of exquisite perfectionism.” He writes well, never raises the subject of Housman’s homosexuality and proves he has a sense of humor:

 

“Creation was for him pulvis et umbrae [dust and shadows] and no more, in spite of any appearance to the contrary. The vision addresses itself to the reader in nearly everything he wrote, and never is it mitigated by even an occasional coloring of optimism. The narrator of quite a number of the Shropshire poems tenders the eternal consolation of the glum, that at least our lot now is no worse than anyone’s ever was, and the present is no blacker than the past or future. The Valley of the Shadow of Death has no sunny uplands at either end of it, so let us study perseverance at the expense of hope. Of all mature attitudes, this is one of the least enviable. So, concluding, he was not one for causes. An intensely private man, he is a monument to a time, long since lost to us, when not every man or woman of letters felt the urge to pester the editor about the evils of processed food or Big Tobacco.”

 

Housman was born on this date, March 26, in 1859 and died at age seventy-seven in 1936. Go here and here to read more by Thomas Banks, a first-rate writer.

'The Least Motion of Wonder in Himself'

In 1968, my high-school English teacher loaned me the anthology of short stories she had used at Kent State University just a few years earlier. Included were the usual suspects -- Maupassant, Hemingway, Chekhov, Eudora Welty – but I read them because I knew nothing. Among the unknowns was Flannery O’Connor and her “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a title I knew as a young blues fan from the Bessie Smith song. I stayed up late one school night and read the story in bed. I had never encountered anything so violent and disturbing that came under the heading of “literature” and was defiantly not pulp. It was more shocking than a vicious film noir like “Kiss of Death.” Hugh Kenner would call O’Connor’s story a “nice morbid little shocker.” 

To this day I’ve never read anything like O’Connor’s mingling of murderousness and what might be called applied theology – a combination I've seldom encountered outside Dante. As a non-Catholic, my understanding is not profound. At first I read it for the Misfit’s psychotic behavior – and the narcissistic grandmother’s comeuppance. Now it’s a permanent gloss on the human condition.

 

In her final short story, “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor has O.E. (Obadiah Elihue) Parker, at age fourteen, see a tattooed man at the county fair. The sight transforms his life:

 

“Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”

 

Self-absorbed and always self-seeking, Parker has never indulged in a self-reflective thought. He moves by instinct, following obscure impulses as they lead him. In his Rambler essay for July 9, 1751, Johnson writes:

 

"It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of inquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate inquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing; and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties."

 

Parker sleeps in “the gloomy quiescence of astonishment,” at least until he crashes a tractor into a tree and instinctively yells, “God above!” I’m not describing influence; more an elective affinity. O’Connor admired Johnson’s work, especially his Lives of the Poets. His name shows up five times in her published letters, The Habit of Being (1979), always with approval. We know from Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (ed. Arthur F. Kinney, 1985) that her personal library included Dr. Johnson’s Prayers (ed. Elton Trueblood, 1947) and a two-volume Lives of the Poets, as well as Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

 

Johnson and O’Connor would have agreed that evil is a mystery to be endured not a problem to be solved, and that self-delusion is endemic among humans. On April 14, 1750, Johnson wrote in The Rambler:

 

“When a man finds himself led, though by a train of honest sentiments, to wish for that which he has no right, he should start back as from a pitfall covered with flowers. He that fancies he should benefit the public more in a great station than the man that fills it will in time imagine it an act of virtue to supplant him; and as opposition readily kindles into hatred, his eagerness to do that good, to which he is not called, will betray him to crimes, which in his original scheme were never proposed.”

 

Today is O’Connor’s centenary. She was born on March 25, 1925, and died in 1964 at age thirty-nine from systemic lupus erythematosus.

 

[Kenner’s quip can be found in Vol. 1, p. 268 of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018).]

'The Earliest of My Friends Is Gone'

I often speak or exchange texts with my nephew. Soon he’ll turn thirty-six, but he lives in Cleveland, 1,200 miles away, and I seldom see him. Distance warps the sense of duration, so I think of him as frozen in his early twenties. We spoke on Sunday and for the first time since my brother’s death last August, we didn’t even mention his father. When I realized this afterwards I felt a pang of guilt, as though I were forgetting him. But attending to the living supersedes our obligations to the dead. They don’t constitute a cult to be worshipped. They live in memory and in that way we weigh their losses and honor them. On February 24, 1854, Walter Savage Land0r's sister Elizabeth died after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-seven. A month later he wrote a poem about her titled “March 24”: 

“Sharp crocus wakes the froward year;

In their old haunts birds reappear;

From yonder elm, yet black with rain,

The cushat looks deep down for grain

Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes

The redbreast to the sill for crumbs.

Fly off! fly off! I can not wait

To welcome ye, as she of late.

The earliest of my friends is gone.

Alas! almost my only one!

The few as dear, long wafted o’er,

Await me on a sunnier shore.”

 

Some glosses: “froward,” despite what my spell-check software tells me, is not a typo. Here is the OED definition, which is applicable to Landor himself -- “disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” "Cushat" is Scottish and northern England dialect for a wood pigeon or ring-dove.

In his 1954 biography of Landor, R.H. Super writes of him after Elizabeth's death: "He told [John] Forster [his friend and first biographer] that the loss of his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend had deprived him of sleep, appetite, digestion, everything."

'Better to Have a Distinct Word for Each Sense'

On Monday, March 23, [1772], I found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary.” 

Dr. Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary on April 15, 1755, two-hundred-seventy years ago. It contained some 42,000 entries and he had worked on it for seven years. It’s great innovation, the reason we still read it, are the 114,00 citations that accompany the entries. The Dictionary can be read as an anthology of English literature (the way Jefferson read it), with Johnson relying most heavily on Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Pope and Dryden. As a young man, Robert Browning read the Dictionary in order to “qualify” as an author. Samuel Beckett found words to recycle into his own work. Boswell continues in his Life:

 

“Mr. Peyton, one of his original amanuenses, was writing for him. I put him in mind of a meaning of the word side, which he had omitted, viz. relationship; as father’s side, mother’s side [see definition eight]. He inserted it.”

 

The Dictionary is a substantial volume, built to last. By “folio,” Boswell means the pages measured eighteen inches by twenty inches – larger than most books published today. I enjoy comparing Johnson's entries with those in the Oxford English Dictionary, which often cites Johnson. 

 

“I asked him if humiliating was a good word. He said, he had seen it frequently used, but he did not know it to be legitimate English. [Johnson omitted the word.] He would not admit civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses, which civility is, in his way of using it.”

 

A second edition followed a few weeks after the first. It was published in 165 weekly sections. The third edition followed in 1765. The fourth, which came out in 1773, included heavy revisions of the original work by Johnson, who identified himself as a lexicographer, defined as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

'What a Delight in Being a Discoverer!'

The library catalogue said Walter Savage Landor’s Poems, the 1964 Centaur Press edition selected and introduced by Geoffrey Grigson, had not been checked out by another patron (hardly surprising) and should be on the shelf. I couldn’t find it. Not a good sign. That could mean the volume had been stolen (not likely) or misshelved. In either case, it might be lost forever. 

While heading to the circulation desk on the first floor to report the missing book, I passed through the voluminous Dickens section, and there among the commentaries and biographies, with a dark blue cover and typography on the spine resembling an Oxford University Press volume, was the Landor Poems I had been looking for, hiding in plain sight. A clerk had likely misshelved it.

 

The error is partially understandable. Dickens based his character Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House on his friend Landor and named his fourth child Walter Savage Landor Dickens. I’ve come to almost expect such acts of happy serendipity, especially in libraries. I once found a twenty-dollar bill in a history of Argentina.

 

Recently I had read “Pericles and Aspasia” from Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Aspasia says to Cleone: “Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library. What a delight in being a discoverer! Among a loose accumulation of poetry, the greater part excessively bad, the verses I am about to transcribe are perhaps the least so.” The following poem is mediocre so I’ll transcribe only the opening stanza:

 

“Life passes not as some men say,

If you will only urge his stay,

And treat him kindly all the while

He flies the dizzy strife of towns,

Cowers before thunder-bearing frowns.

But freshens up again at song and smile.”

'Your Literary Judgments Are Not Interesting'

All of us when young – readers, I mean – fancy ourselves rebels and independent thinkers but most of us are afflicted to varying degrees with the superego of the age. That is, we are influenced, whether we know it or not, by the critical climate, by the judgments and fashions of critics and other readers, especially those among our contemporaries.

For decades starting in my early teens my model of a great writer, one worthy of rereading, study, annotation and – though I would have denied it – worship, was James Joyce. Now I know that much of my veneration for the Irishman was rooted in his reputation for difficulty. Dubliners and Ulysses remain among the supreme works of twentieth-century fiction, and one wonders what all the fuss was about regarding the purported obscurity of the latter. Today, any reasonably attentive reader can enjoy Ulysses without breaking a sweat, though I wouldn’t reread Finnegans Wake with a gun to my head.

Never underestimate the role of snobbery in human affairs, especially among readers, writers and anyone associated with the academic study of literature. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve generally lost interest in ranking writers and books – including deciding who is major and who is minor -- and gained interest in those who appeal to me and reward my efforts, regardless of pedigree. It’s not unlike friendship. At some point we decide who is worth spending time with, who is reliable, worthy of trust and who rewards our efforts.  

I’ve scratched some writers from my mental list of favorites but added many more, most of whom I ignored when young. A few examples, mostly English: Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter Savage Landor, E.A. Robinson, Rebecca West, Charles Doughty, Paul Valéry, Walter de la Mare. Another is Desmond MacCarthy, who collected the essay “Literary Snobs” in Criticism (1932). He speaks to the snobs:

“It is true that your literary judgments are not interesting, but you get a great deal of fun out of your rapid revulsions and temporary admirations – and fun is human. Moreover, if you are always ludicrously unfair, you are at any rate unstinting in praise while giving it, which is, in a way, amiable.”

[Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books has published Criticism and five other MacCarthy titles, along with links to dozens of other good books.]

'Gives to Airy Nothing a Local Habitation'

What attracted me was the anthologist’s audacity in titling his book: 100 Best Poems in the English Language (1952). In his introduction, Stephen Graham does little to impress us with his literary humility. His anthology is, he writes, “perhaps the only one of its kind, being exclusive, not inclusive.” The contents are arranged chronologically, from the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” to Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The most often represented poets, with five poems each, are Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Three Americans are here – Poe, Whitman and Lanier (“The Marshes of Glynn”). No Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot or Stevens. Graham includes two poets I had never heard of -- Arthur O’Shaughnessy (“Ode”) and John Davidson (“The Last Journey”). 

In other words, Graham’s anthology is rather predictable – in 1952 and in 2025 -- and stuffed with warhorses and no previously undiscovered treasures. “Of course,” the editor admits, magnanimously, “everyone is entitled to make his own selection of what he would consider the hundred best poems in the language.” A nice choice for the volume’s epigraph, unaccompanied by source, is spoken by Theseus in Act V, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

  

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.”

 

Best of all is the bookplate pasted to the front endpaper:

 

“From the Library of

Edgar Odell Lovett

First President of the Rice Institute”

 

Lovett (1871-1957) served as president of Rice University from 1912 until his retirement in 1946. He was educated and employed as a mathematician but I have borrowed dozens of books from his personal library, now in the collection of Rice’s Fondren Library, and all were belles lettres – poetry, essays, fiction, literary biography. Such university presidents have long been extinct.