`Sentences Suffused with Mind'

Philip Roth refers to Primo Levi’s “sentences suffused with mind,” a quality rare in prose and poetry. When we read the newspaper, the sentences are suffused with – what? Formula, I suppose, albeit clever or skillfully honed. How often are we surprised by word or thought? And should the news to surprise us? We may remember a story but how often do we remember a sentence or word of journalism? The mantra of the newsroom has always been “Same shit, different day.” In “A Treatise of Civil Power,” section XXXVI, Geoffrey Hill writes:

“And news is civil power in the free falling
oligarchical free world: the null stridor
and prattle that ignores its switching-off.
Others are murderers and these are not,
or not directly. Again the words swing by
imagined as rebuke: that kindling her
undazl’d eyes… No change
saying that I have changed, divine Thanatos.”

Reading Hill approximates the wonder and work of reading Donne and late Shakespeare. “Stridor” is “a harsh, shrill or creaking noise,” which I remember Robert Penn Warren using to describe the sound of wind in the pines. It nicely echoes “strident,” but also has a suggestive medical meaning: the ugly sound made when the airway is obstructed. Rimbaud uses the French cognate in "Voyelles": “O, suprême Clairon plein de strideurs estranges…” Hill lifts the four unattributed words in italics from Aereopagitica, Milton’s rousing defense of freedom of the press.

“Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl'd eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav'nly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amaz'd at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticat a year of sects and schisms.”

“Sentences suffused with mind.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life

My review of Edwin Arlinton Robinson: A Poet's Life, by Scott Donaldson, appears today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

`The Terror of Pleasure'

In one of his essays Guy Davenport observed that Americans are the first people in history to possess documented proof of their illiteracy: Just ask them to produce a college degree. He wrote that in the seventies, when the trivialization of higher education was well underway but not yet complete. Last week at his blog, Ron Rosenbaum reported on the finalization of the dumbing-down process:

“U.S.A. Today recently reported deeply depressing news on the study of Shakespeare in U.S. colleges. With one exception (Harvard) no study of Shakespeare, the greatest artist of the English language is required in any U.S. college, and indeed even by most English major programs at those colleges.”

Explanations for the creeping idiocy include the juggernaut of pop culture, especially television, but Rosenbaum blames most of the problem on precisely the people who are paid to know better -- English professors and “two generations of pseudo-scientific sophistry that gave itself the shorthand name Theory in literary studies.” Rosenbaum reiterates the argument he made in The Shakespeare Wars, rooted in what he calls “the terror of pleasure”:

“A terror that had led them to flee to, to fabricate, elaborate scaffoldings of French literary theory to shield themselves from having to stare into the abyss of pleasure close reading opened up, to give themselves an illusion of control over, indeed superiority to the literature.”

Rosenbaum’s clear-eyed witness is bracing. For thoughtful readers, Shakespeare is an indulgence in pure pleasure. It doesn’t cost a penny and lasts a lifetime. Can we even call a person truly literate if he or she hasn’t read and internalized Shakepeare? If you’re reading this, you most likely know the answer.

In the April 28-29 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Edward Herrmann reviews The Shakespeare Riots, an account by Nigel Cliff of street fights between partisans of two leading Shakespearean actors in 1849. They occurred in New York City and resulted in at least 23 deaths. One-hundred sixty years ago, average Americans, people without benefit of college degrees, took their Shakespeare seriously. Hermann writes:

“It is hard to believe, but is nonetheless true, that the words of Shakespeare meant more to 18th- and 19th-century America than those of any other author, except the Bible’s. Mr. Cliff is eloquent when describing the hold that Shakespeare had on the psyche of a young America: We made him our own around campfires, in barrooms, on riverboats and within tents along the farthest reaches of the West.”

Walt Whitman, who never set foot on a college campus, enjoyed reciting the Shakespearean set pieces, and mentioned the playwright more than 100 times in his late conversations with Horace Traubel. Here’s an excerpt from “A Thought on Shakspere,” a brief essay from November Boughs:

“The inward and outward characteristics of Shakspere are his vast and rich variety of persons and themes, with his wondrous delineation of each and all – not only limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource, but great excess, superfoetation – mannerism, like a fine, aristocratic perfume, holding a touch of musk (Euphues, his mark) – with boundless sumptuousness and adornment, real velvet and gems, not shoddy nor paste – but a good deal of bombast and fustian – (certainly some terrific mouthing in Shakspere!)”

`This Trawl of Gratitude'

Like the U.S. Postal Service, libraries reliably perform daily miracles no one seems to notice or appreciate. One week after I ordered A Treatise of Civil Power, by Geoffrey Hill, through the interlibrary loan service at my university library, I received an e-mail telling me it had arrived. Handsomely published in 2005 by the Clutag Press of Thame, in Oxfordshire, England, in an edition of 400 copies (the one I’m holding is hand-numbered 178), the eight-poem pamphlet was shipped from the Widener Library at Harvard. Presumably this is a valuable piece of Hilliana, as it sold out and went out of print almost immediately. Yale University Press has announced it will publish a hardcover edition later this year in the U.S., and Penguin will bring it out in England, but for now I can enjoy a beautiful piece of printing and Hill’s priceless work because a library at the other end of the continent trusts me to take good care of it.

The centerpiece of the collection is the title poem of 42 eight-line stanzas, in which Hill expresses gratitude for his poetic forebears, some of them unexpected -- Milton, Ben Jonson (Hill calls him “my god”), Robert Herrick, William Blake, Robert Lowell (“Closet Confederate”) and, most surprisingly, John Berryman. Here’s Stanza XX:

“And Berryman – how did he slip through
this trawl of gratitude? The Dream Songs, then,
with other things; their bone-yard vaudeville,
sparkish, morose, multi-voiced monologue,
erratic tenderness to self and lovers.
A gentle courteous man, no-nonsense scholar,
badly transmitted, blarneying on location,
face-fungused wizard in a camp film.”

There’s a childish part of me that prefers my friends to approve of each other, if not exactly becoming friends themselves. I’m pleased Hill esteems Berryman, though his scorn wouldn’t have altered my devotion. I’m also pleased he writes of Berryman without bringing up alcoholism, depression or suicide. I’m reminded of a profile of Christopher Ricks, written by Nicholas Wroe and published in the Guardian in 2005. Wroe writes:

“[Ricks] doesn't hesitate to include [Bob] Dylan in his personal pantheon alongside [William] Empson, [T.S.]Eliot, [Samuel] Beckett, [Philip] Larkin, [Robert] Lowell and [Geoffrey] Hill.”

Then he quotes Ricks:

“I felt it was an extraordinary bit of luck to be alive at the same time as these great creators. I've had great pleasure from lots of dead poets as well, but I can't imagine not chafing to get hold of a new something by, say, Beckett in the week it came out.”

Thirty-Seven Words

While reading the chapter about the late plays in Shakespeare the Thinker, by A.D. Nuttall, I came upon one of the loveliest poems in the language, a funeral song, a mere six lines long, 37 words, from a tragedy masquerading as a comedy, or is it the other way around? The song goes on for three more stanzas, but I always think of the first as a self-contained poetic unit. Here is Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, lines 258-263:

“Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun.
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Nuttall, too, loves the poem, and permits himself a digression from the scholarly to the personal:

“I first heard these lines when I was about eight years old. They ravished me at once and have haunted me ever since. I knew nothing about Shakespeare. I suppose that if today someone were to ask me, `What is the finest lyric poem in the English language?’ I would point to this. And yet I do not understand the lines. Why `chimney-sweepers?’ It has been suggested that this is an old-fashioned word for dandelions. I hope this explanation is wrong.”

Nutall goes on to explain why he judges the dandelion explanation wrong, but read his book, pages 337-338 for details. I’m convinced the chimney-sweepers represent flowers, in part because that explanation was my introduction to the poem and the play it’s drawn from. In 1971, I was a college sophomore and had already read most of Shakespeare but not Cymbeline, or The Winter’s Tale. That year, as soon as it was published, I read The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner. It remains one of the great books published in my lifetime, essential to my ongoing education, and one of its minor accomplishments was to introduce me to Cymbeline and the funeral song. In the chapter titled “Words Set Free,” Kenner writes:

“As language changes something happens to old poems, the range of whose words changes...How do words found in 1611 stir us now?”

After quoting the poem, he continues:

“`Golden lads’: fine words to caress our post-Symbolist sensibilities. English lads, perhaps, with yellow hair; `golden,’ because once precious when they lived; `golden,’ touched with the nobility and permanence of gold (that royal metal, colored like a cold sun, in which wages are paid), as now, gone home, they receive the wages of immortality; `golden,’ in contrast to `dust’: a contrast of color, a contrast of substantiality, a contrast of two immemorial symbols, at once Christian and pagan: the dust to which all sons of Adam return, the gold by which human vitality braves time…”

And so on for six more lines of ingenious explication, before this:

“Yet a good guess at how he [Shakespeare] found it [`golden’] is feasible, for in the mid- 20th century a visitor to Shakespeare’s Warwickshire met a countryman blowing the grey head off a dandelion: `We call these golden boy chimney-sweepers when they go to seed.’”

In his notes, Kenner identifies the visitor as William Arrowsmith, the scholar-poet-translator, who reported the story to Guy Davenport, who reported it to Kenner. I number Davenport and Kenner among my reading teachers, supplementing the work my first-grade teacher, Miss McClain, started in 1958, at Pearl Road Elementary School. Reading, if it amounts to more than a mere decoding of signs on a page, is a species of communion with the world, permitting us to enter conversations that started centuries ago. Another voice in that conversation is Samuel Johnson, who had harsh things to say about Cymbeline but glossed the final couplet of the funeral song like this:

“All human excellence is equally subject to the stroke of death.”

Take a Word Out for a Walk

Three years ago an editor asked if I’d be interested in writing a column about words for his online journal. His pitch was vague though he encouraged me to develop the electronic persona of a grammar bully – a thoroughly unattractive idea. I’m interested in words mutating over time, particularly when the concrete turns metaphorical, so I suggested looking at words as linguistic kitchen middens. I would play archeologist and tease out gradations of meaning, relying on sources high and low. He tepidly agreed and then his journal went belly-up.

I want to devote occasional posts to words that catch my eye or ear, with an emphasis on the way shifts in meaning are reflected in the works of writers. To adapt a quip from Paul Klee, I want to take a word out for a walk. When, as a kid, I first read Poe’s “The Bells,” I was smitten by “tintinnabulation,” and sometimes that still happens. I’ll adopt the working assumption voiced by Emerson in “The Poet”:

“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

Recently I read That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda, in William Weaver’s translation. Here are the first two sentences of the novel:

“Everybody called him Don Ciccio by now. He was Officer Francesco Ingravallo, assigned to homicide; one of the youngest and, God knows why, most envied officials of the detective section: ubiquitous as the occasion required, omnipresent in all tenebrous matters.”

The seductive word here is tenebrous, derived from the Latin tenebrosus, from tenebrae, meaning “darkness.” To my inner ear, it doesn’t sound dark, but it does sound a little high-toned. Italo Calvino described Gadda’s style as “a thick amalgam of folk expressions and learned speech, of interior monologue and artistic prose, of various dialects and quotation.” In other words, it resembles Moby-Dick, another novel into which almost any word, any tone of voice, any scrap of learning, might find a home. In most novels, “all tenebrous matters” would sound pretentious. In vernacular American-English, “dirty business” would probably suffice. I don’t know what word Gadda used in the original Italian, but Weaver’s choice of tenebrous works perfectly.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it succinctly as “Full of darkness, dark.” The first citation, circa 1420, is from The Assembly of Gods: or The Accord of Reason and Sensuality in the Fear of Death, by John Lydgate: “Tyll Cerberus/Had hem beshut withyn hys gates tenebrus.” After another three citations, the OED quotes Longfellow’s Evangeline, from 1847: “Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress/Met in a dusky arch.” Longfellow put it to good use again in his translation of Canto VI of the Inferno:

"Huge hail, and water sombre-hued, and snow,
Athwart the tenebrous air pour down amain;
Noisome the earth is, that receiveth this.”

By 1599, the word was being used figuratively to mean “obscure, gloomy,” as in Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe: “To...run astray...raking out of the dust-heape or charnell house of tenebrous eld, the rottenest relique of the monuments.” In 1693, in his translation of Rabelais, Urquhart wrote: “Heraclitus, the grand Scotist, and tenebrous darksome Philosopher.” Surprisingly, Samuel Beckett seems not to have used the word, even in his most Dantean work, The Lost Ones, nor will you find it in Shakespeare or Milton.

Related to tenebrous is tenebrae, first used in English in 1651. Here’s the OED definition:

“The name given to the office of matins and lauds of the following day, usually sung in the afternoon or evening of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in Holy Week, at which the candles lighted at the beginning of the service are extinguished one by one after each psalm, in memory of the darkness at the time of the crucifixion.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia dates the practice of extinguishing lights to the fifth century. Some sources suggest the rites are rooted in the Jewish fast day of Tish B’Av, when passages from Lamentations are read and the synagogue is darkened. Geoffrey Hill titled his fourth book of poems Tenebrae (1978). In an interview with Blake Morrison, Hill said Tenebrae is:

“a ritual, and like all rituals it obviously helps one to deal with and express states which in that particular season of the church’s year are appropriate – suffering and gloom. Tenebrae does at one level mean darkness or shadows, but at another important level it clearly indicates a ritualistic, formal treatment of suffering , anxiety and pain.”

The title poem, “Tenebrae” -- eight brief poems, including two Petrarchan sonnets – seems less concerned with suffering and church ritual than others in the collection. One of the sonnets comes as close to a conventional, albeit tortured, love poem as anything Hill has published:

“And you, who with your soft but searching voice
drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,
who held me near your heart that I might rest
confiding in the darkness of your choice:
possessed by you I chose to have no choice,
fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.
You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust,
in desolation where my sins rejoice.
As I am passionate so you with pain
turn my desire; as you seem passionless
so I recoil from all that I would gain,
wounding myself upon forgetfulness,
false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain
as you sustain each item of your cross.”

We’ve come a long way in a short space from a translated passage in Carlo Emilio Gadda, but that shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve often thought of the Internet as a grand recapitulation of human language – a vast Borgesian web. Start anywhere and explore creation. Just pick a word and take it for a walk.

`A Life Diversified by Misery': And a Happy Birthday to You

As a birthday present to my brother, please visit his blog, the cleverly named Mr. Ken Kurp, known formerly, before the acclaim went to his head, as Ken Kurp. We work in different media but our blogs share a predilection for making connections across time, space and, in my brother’s case, all standards of decency. Here’s Samuel Johnson on the subject of birthdays, from a letter he wrote to Hester Thrale on Sept. 21, 1773:

“Boswell, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family, and reminded me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to be content.”

Hardly Hallmark sentiments, but you get the idea: Happy birthday, Ken!

`But One Idea'

Since moving to Houston almost three years ago, when I still thought of Texas as the Land of Beef, I have met more vegetarians than at any time in my life. My boss, the neighbors across the street, a librarian, one of my wife’s friends at work, and lately our 6-year-old son have given up meat – in my boss’ case and the neighbors’, for more than 30 years. Their motives are various, involving some mingling of ethics and health. In the mid-seventies I tried vegetarianism for a year or so until a plate of meatballs undid my resolve, so for me it’s a way of life that makes sense even if I’m not willing to adopt it as my own.

While reading William Hazlitt over the weekend, his collection Table-Talk, I came upon “On People with One Idea,” an essay distilled in its title and opening sentence:

“There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.”

We all know bores, strident button-holers who pin you to the conversational mat with details of their pet enthusiasms. In junior-high school, I had a classmate who committed the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack to memory and who happily inflicted “If I Were a Rich Man” on innocent bystanders. The true object of Hazlitt’s scorn is not the bore but that sub-class of bores who bore you while trying to convert you to their cause, whether political, religious, culinary or otherwise. Here’s Hazlitt:

“People of the character here spoken of, that is, who tease you to death with some one idea, generally differ in their favourite notion from the rest of the world; and indeed it is the love of distinction which is mostly at the bottom of this peculiarity. Thus, one person is remarkable for living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to entertain you all dinner-time with an invective against animal food. One of this self-denying class, who adds to the primitive simplicity of this sort of food the recommendation of having it in a raw state, lamenting the death of a patient whom he had augered to be in a good way as a convert to his system, at last accounted for his disappointment in a whisper -- `But she ate meat privately, depend upon it.’”

Hazlitt pinpoints the chief motivator of all proselytizing, vegetarian or otherwise – self-righteousness. Proselytizers cannot abide waywardness. Difference is an affront, proof of unworthiness. Proselytizers are morally compelled to set you straight, compounding righteousness with bullying – for many, an irresistibly heady cocktail of emotions. In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James devotes a chapter to Hazlitt, including this digression on prose style I can’t resist quoting:

“Rhythm is never effortless. To achieve it, you must start rewriting in your head and then continue rewriting on the page. The hallmark of a seductive style is to extend natural speech rhythm over the distance of a complex sentence.”

On the subject of bores and proselytizers, however, see James’ chapter on Adolf Hitler. Along with all his other more obvious deformations of character, Hitler must have made for hellishly tedious company. In a digression on Hitler’s obsession with architecture, James writes:

“He had no sense of proportion in any of his ostensibly civilized enthusiasms. His interests lacked the human element, so they could never have amounted to a true humanism.”

To announce the obvious, I’m not equating vegetarians with Hitler, even though Hitler was a sometime vegetarian (but so were Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer). My point is that the bore spectrum is broad and varied, from the bullying vegan to the perpetrator of the Holocaust. The mind is bottomless and elastic, able to contain almost anything we feed it. Having only one idea is not a good idea.

Stoned

My youngest sons obsessively collect stones. Stones cover the shelves in my 6-year-old’s room, and when I forget to empty pockets before doing laundry, they turn the dryer into a rock tumbler. I understand the attraction. Stones are elemental and can’t be reduced to anything except smaller stones. On the human scale, they represent permanence. Stones are irresistible as metaphors. Consider the obsessive comedy of Beckett’s Molloy and his stone-sucking:

“But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed…”

Here’s an early Zbigniew Herbert poem, “Pebbles,” as translated by Alissa Valles:

“The pebble
is a perfect creature

“equal to itself
mindful of its limits

“filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

“with a scent which does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

“its ardor and coldness
are just and full of dignity

“I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

“-- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye”

For Herbert, a pebble represents everything a human is not. A pebble is a reproach to human imperfection. Its existence, undivided, is identical to its meaning. It is without guile and readily understood. Spinoza likewise uses stone as a ready contrast to the human. In Part IV of The Ethics, “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions,” he writes:

“So, if we say a man and a stone only agree in the fact that both are finite – wanting in power, not existing by the necessity of their own nature, or, lastly, indefinitely surpassed by the power of external causes – we should certainly affirm that a man and a stone are in no respect alike; therefore, things which agree only in negation, or in qualities which neither possess, really agree in no respect.”

For Osip Mandelstam, whose first book of poems was titled Stone, stones are the primal building material of human habitation. He likens them to words, the primal building material of poems. A poem is a construction of words, not themes or meanings. Words have an existence of their own and long to be included in a poem, as an affront to the hovering silence. In a poem from Stone, written in 1912, Mandelstam writes, in Robert Tracy’s translation:

“Stone, become a web,
A lace fragility:
Let your thin needle stab
The empty breast of sky.”

Mandelstam always returns to Petersburg – literally, Stone City, built of gray Finnish granite. The city’s name echoes the pun made by Jesus and much loved by Joyce: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. (“You are Stone, and upon this stone I will build my church.”) In his essay “Conversation About Dante,” as translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link, Mandelstam writes:

“Black Sea pebbles tossed up on shore by the rising tide helped me immensely when the conception of this conversation was taking shape. I openly consulted with chalcedony, cornelians, gypsum crystals, spar, quartz and so on. It was thus that I came to understand that mineral rock is something like a diary of the weather, like a meteorological blood clot. Rock is nothing more than weather itself, excluded from atmospheric space and banished to functional space.”

And now, the formidable common sense of Samuel Johnson, as reported in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“We stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, `I refute it thus.’”

`At the Mercy of Fortune'

On Friday I interviewed Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University and a native of Israel. After finishing the business at hand we talked about his parents, Jews from Rumania and Hungary who survived the Holocaust. Late in the war, his mother endured a Nazi death march and now lives in Israel. I told Moshe about Miklos Radnoti, the Hungarian poet murdered by the Nazis during a similar march, whose final poems were found on his disinterred body more than a year after his death.

Apropos of something I no longer remember, I mentioned Spinoza and Moshe said he had delivered the annual Spinoza Lecture in 1998 at the European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Dark thoughts had been flickering all week, and the convergence of Spinoza and Germany helped to rekindle them. In his preface to Part IV of The Ethics, the section titled “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions,” Spinoza writes:

“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.”

And I thought of The Idler, No. 52, published April 14, 1759, in which Samuel Johnson expresses similar thoughts:

“No man, whose appetites are his masters, can perform the duties of his nature with strictness and regularity; he that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.”

By these reckonings, Seung Hui Cho was a slave. He was not “troubled,” he didn’t have “issues,” he wasn’t in need of “support services.” He was, as Peggy Noonan describes him in the weekend Wall Street Journal, “a walking infestation of evil,” and the package he mailed to NBC News contained “the self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist.” Trying to understand Cho is as pointless as trying to fathom the motives of the suicide bombers who murdered hundreds of innocents last week in Baghdad. Human evil is not reducible to simpler, easier-to-comprehend categories like “low self-esteem” or “political grievances.” It simply is.

Moshe and I were in his office in the building that houses much of the university’s engineering school, not unlike Norris Hall on the Virginia Tech campus, where Cho worked out most of his issues. At that same hour on Friday, a few miles south of where we were sitting and talking, another gun-wielding narcissist, this one at the Johnson Space Center, took two people hostage and ended up killing one of them and himself.

It’s our nature to question when faced with the implacably irrational: Why do we persist in our self-defeating selfishness? Why do we will our own suffering and the suffering of others? Moshe and I shook our heads, and he promised to e-mail his mother what I had told him about Miklos Radnoti. In Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein helps us understand how Spinoza tried to understood evil and human bondage and suffering:

“The mystery of human suffering, its inevitability and extravagance – he had contemplated it often enough in his boyhood…. But the mystery is no mystery. The world was not created with a view toward human well-being. Logic entails what it does, despite our parochial wishes. It’s not surprising that out of the vastness of logical implications there are a profusion that threaten our endeavor to persist in our being and to thrive. So nature will produce such illnesses and disasters as make men’s lives a misery. And so, too, men will through their blind bondage to their emotions compound the misery of their own lives and those of others. It is only reason that can save us. Why then, we might ask, did not God make men more reasonable? Why then did he not make them more intelligent? That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. Why did God make men so stubbornly stupid?”

Short and Sweet

Seated at his desk in his Brooklyn apartment, Joseph Brodsky suffered a fatal heart attack on Jan. 28, 1996. A few months earlier he had granted one of his last interviews to The Argoist, an arts journal in England. Here’s an exchange from that interview, as reprinted in Joseph Brodsky: Conversations:

“A.: You glibly put [Mikhail] Sholokov’s Nobel Prize (1965) down to `a huge shipbuilding order placed in Sweden’ (Less Than One). How credible do you find the `All Literature Is Politics’ argument.

“J.B.: It’s bullshit.”

`What I Want is a Collaboration, Really'

The worst writers patronize us, write down to us, condescend, treat us like simpletons. The worst readers are lazy and dim, without memory, patience or learning, easily offended by affronts to their passivity.

The best writers respect us enough to challenge our sloth and complacency. The best readers welcome the challenge. Here’s what some of the best writers have to say on the reader/writer partnership:

In April 1990, the novelist William Gaddis told me during an interview:

“What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page... What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him.”

William Bronk included this poem, “How It Works (or Doesn’t),” in All of What We Loved, published in 1998, the year before he died:

“The reader has to make it on his own.
The writer isn’t there to help him out.
A work of art’s an encounter somebody had.
You’ll know it when you meet it. Watch for it.”

In 2002, Geoffrey Hill told a writer for the Guardian:

"In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.”

`I'd like To Go Unnoticed'

Reading and rereading Kay Ryan’s poems this week led me to a brief essay she wrote last year for Poetry about the poet William Bronk. Here’s a sample:

“However little you thought you’d been trafficking in surfaces and ornament, after a Bronk poem you realize it was much too much; however cleansed of illusions you believed yourself to be, it looks like they built up anyhow. Bronk takes them off like paint stripper. You’re shriven, your head is shaved. The experience is religious in its ferocity and disdain for cheap solace.”

Ryan expresses kinship with a poet who did more with less, and she rekindled my old fondness for Bronk and his work. I pulled Life Supports off the shelf, his volume of new and collected poems that won the American Book Award for Poetry in 1982, and that announced his gift (at the age of 64) to the world beyond small presses and fellow poets. Tucked inside was a letter from Bronk that I had forgotten, dated Aug. 12, 1993. I was working then as a writer for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., and had written him asking for an interview. Bronk had lived for most of his life in Hudson Falls, N.Y., a town along the Hudson River about 50 miles north of Albany. I remember reading a review published in New York Newsday around that time in which the novelist Thomas McGonigle had referred to Bronk as the greatest living American poet, and I was living less than an hour away from him. Here’s the text of Bronk’s letter:

“Dear Mr. Kurp,

“Sure, come talk if you like most anytime; I like hearing people and their reactions to the work and I like talking myself.

“I think I am to understand that the further intention of your letter is to say that with my cooperation the talk will lead to a promotional human interest piece in your newspaper. This is a perfectly proper offer and I thank you for the courtesy but I don’t want that. I like having my work noticed and reviewed even if the reviewer’s reaction to the work is less than warm. If you want to write about the work and your responses to it that’s fine with me and you don’t need my help or my permission. I don’t mean to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. I want only to say what I am willing to be part of. I’m willing that the work be noticed; I’d like to go unnoticed.

“Good wishes,

“Wm. Bronk”

What an admirably forthright letter, courteous yet candid and unyielding, especially the final sentence, though it disappointed me at the time. Bronk wrote on a sheet of white, unlined note paper with a fine-point pen. The letter is concise and free of verbal fat, like his poetry. For the return address he used only his zip code.

Bronk (the Bronx was named for one of his ancestors) was born in Fort Edward, N.Y., a town on the Hudson River rich in colonial and revolutionary history. I had covered the excavation of a camp used by Rogers' Rangers during the French and Indian War on Rogers Island, adjacent to Fort Edward. An archeologist with the Melvillean name David Starbuck unearthed a hospital, blockhouse, barracks and huts -- an appropriate setting for Bronk, a quintessentially American writer.

Bronk and his family moved to Hudson Falls when he was still a toddler. In 1947, after Army service and a brief job as a college instructor, Bronk took over management of the Bronk Coal and Lumber Co. in Hudson Falls, which he had inherited from his father. That’s what he did for most of the rest of his life, living in the same sprawling Victorian house in which he had grown up. There are parallels here with Wallace Stevens (one of his models), who worked as an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams, a physician. None of these poets, all businessmen, was self-consciously bohemian. Poetry was their calling, not a pose or “lifestyle.”

Bronk (1918-1999) needs rescue from academics and partisans of postmodernism. His poetry is too good to be squandered on readers unable or unwilling to do the hard work of loving it. Here’s one of the new poems (as of 1981) in Life Supports, “Flowers, the World and My Friend, Thoreau”:

“It no longer matters what the names of flowers are.
Some I remember; others forget: ones
I never thought I should. Yes, tell me one.
I like to hear that. I may have forgotten again
next week. There’s that yellow one whose name
I used to know. It’s blossoming, secure
as ever as I walk by looking at it,
not saying its name or needing to.

“Henry, it’s true as you said it was, that this
is a world where there are flowers. Though it isn’t our truth,
it’s a truth we embrace with gratitude:
how should we endure our dourness otherwise?
And we feel an eager desire to make it ours,
making the flowers ours by naming them.

“But they stay their own and it doesn’t become our truth.

“We live with it; live with othernesses
as strangers live together in crowds. Truths
of strangeness jostle me; I jostle them
walking past them as I do past clumps of flowers.
Flowers, I know you, not knowing your name.”

To use Melville’s term, Bronk numbered among the “isolatoes.” He was, like Thoreau, a solitary by nature, and I find it touching that he addresses Thoreau as a friend. He was clearly an enduring companion and influence. The best piece in Bronk’s collected essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves, is “Silence and Henry Thoreau,” in which which he writes:

“Silence is the world of potentialities and meaning beyond the actual and expressed, which the meanness of our actions and the interpretations put upon them threatens to conceal. Yet all actuality is to be referred to it and valued accordingly as it includes or suggests it. Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.”

A guy who ran a lumber yard in upstate New York wrote those sentences and conjured those thoughts, and we react with the same sense of delight remembering the sentences of a shiftless surveyor in Concord, Mass.

`Poetry is a Kind of Money'

Kay Ryan is a quietly allusive writer who seldom cites proper names or grand-sounding abstractions like courage or jealousy in her poems. But then again, you won’t find suicide in Hamlet or madness in King Lear. Ryan builds her poems out of particulars, a quality she shares with Zbigniew Herbert and Osip Mandelstam. The latter, along with love (a word Ryan, like all prudent poets and others, uses sparingly), show up unexpectedly in a poem from her third collection, Flamingo Watching. Here’s “Poetry is a Kind of Money”:

“Poetry is a kind of money
whose value depends upon reserves.
It’s not the paper it’s written on
or its self-announced denomination,
but the bullion, sweated from the earth
and hidden, which preserves its worth.
Nobody knows how this works,
and how can it? Why does something
stacked in some secret bank or cabinet,
some miser’s trove, far back, lambent,
and gloated over by its golem, make us
so solemnly convinced of the transaction
when Mandelstam says love, even
in translation?”

“Reserves” is a word of delicious, multiple connotations. Ryan, like Mandelstam and Herbert, is a poet of reserves and strategic withholding. She is most expressive when least forthcoming, and says much with a single name – Mandelstam, a poet who was likelier to say Aphrodite than love. For Ryan to choose Mandelstam, of all poets, is shrewd, for the marriage of Osip and Nadezda (bitterly, hope in Russian) Mandelstam is the most moving love story of the 20th century. They were together for 19 years before Stalin had him murdered. She memorized her husband’s poems, salvaging them from oblivion. She wrote two of the last century’s great books of witness – Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. By all accounts, Nadezda Mandelstam was tough, smart and resourceful. She lived alone for more than 40 years, dying in 1980. The Soviet Union outlived her by 11 years.

I have in front of me five selections from Mandelstam in English, all by different hands. A quick perusal confirms, without surprise, that love is rare in his work and it’s seldom used in a romantic or sexual sense. For instance, there is poem dated Dec. 29-30, 1936, written during his exile to Voronezh. Here is R.H. Morrison’s translation in his Poems from Mandelstam:

“In my perception winter
is a belated gift:
I love, at the start,
it’s uncertain sweep.

“As an alarm, it is beautiful,
Like the beginning of stern deeds:
Before the whole treeless cycle
Even the raven’s grown timid.

“But precariously strongest of all
Is the blue: the semicircular
Temple-bone ice of salient
Rivulets speaking without sleep . . . .”

This is the version prepared by Richard and Elizabeth McKane, in The Voronezh Notebooks:

“This winter touches me
like a gift late in coming,
I love its wide reach
that develops out of uncertainty.

“It is beautiful in its fear,
like the menace of threats.
even the raven is afraid
before all the forest clearing.

“The pale blue of the hemispherical, protuberant ice
of streams and sleepless lullabies
is unstable, but more
powerful than anything.”

Finally, here is the same poem translated by James Greene, in his Osip Mandelstam:

“Like a tardy present,
Winter is now palpable:
I like her initial,
Diffident sweep.

Her fright is beautiful,
Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:
Even ravens are alarmed
By the woodless circle.

“But more powerful than anything
Is her infirmly-bulging blueness;
The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,
Lullabying unsleepingly . . .”

In Greene, love has been demoted to like, but who likes winter? As Northern natives, we may love it, but winter won’t tolerate half measures and neither will Mandelstam. In the Morrison and McKane versions, love sounds like respect or awe. In the McKanes’ note to the poem they write: “Written after the first latecoming snow had fallen in Voronezh.” As a poem in English, Greene’s loses not only love but any sense of seriousness or coherence: “infirmingly-bulging blueness.”

Back to Ryan: She’s right. In two of the three translations, love survives, and we as readers remain “solemnly convinced of the transaction.” In poetry, even love can endure, burning through the persiflage. Here’s a Ryan poem from Say Uncle with love in it – “Waste”:

“Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.”

`The Almost-Twin of Making-Do'

Dave Lull sent me a brief story from 2004 about the poet Kay Ryan, which includes this passage:

“Ryan’s work is often compared to Emily Dickinson’s; her poems are seldom more than 100 words long. `Something can be a few words on the page and expand in the mind and the ear,’ she explains. `I have a strong affinity for Dickinson.’

“Who else? `I love to read Philip Larkin. I love Robert Frost. I love the prose of Samuel Johnson. I love the Greek writer Cavafy. I love Steve Smith, the British writer -- she’s very funny, very wry.’”

Our tastes in writers, except for Frost, converge. I’m impressed by her mention of Johnson, the only writer she cites specifically for prose. His concision, humor and moral depth make him an ideal prose model for poets – and the rest of us. I would expect myself to expect others to share my enthusiasms – that’s my self-centered nature – but instead I’m surprised. The day Dave sent the Ryan piece, a reader in Philadelphia wrote, near the middle of a lengthy e-mail:

“Beckett I prize above all writers, just as I prize Samuel Johnson above all other men. `The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope,’ Johnson wrote in Rambler essay number 2 (I quote from memory). In his essay titled `On London,’ Max Beerbohm wrote, `Dr. Johnson had a way of being right – but he had a way of being wrong, too, else we shouldn’t love him quite so much.’ In the mid-seventies I bought, for $70, the 16-volume Grove Press edition of Beckett’s Collected Works. (I now own the new four-volume edition.) Those books, and Johnson’s Idler, Adventurer, and Rambler essays, have sustained me through adulthood.”

Another unexpected convergence: My essential writers, reliably sustaining, are Johnson and Beckett, and Beckett shared a similar devotion to Johnson. He spent years, on and off, researching and writing a play, his first, about Johnson’s supposed unrequited love for Mrs. Thrale. Ultimately, he abandoned Human Wishes, and only a fragment survives, but in the working notebooks Beckett kept of the project, scholars have found this hand-written paraphrase of a passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“Much as he dreaded the next world he dreaded annihilation still more. `Mere existence’ he said on one occasion `is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain than not exist.’ He went on to say, in answer to an objection that was raised, `The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.’”

Beckett found the familiar Beckett themes already latent in Johnson. In her biography, Deidre Bair quotes a letter Beckett wrote in the sixties: “They can put me wherever they want, but it’s Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me. And if I follow any tradition, it is his.”

In one of her poems, Ryan distantly echoes Beckett’s well-known conclusion to The Unnamable: “Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” Here’s “Hope”:

“What’s the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope –
the almost-twin
of making-do,
the isoptope
of going on:
what isn’t in
the envelope
just before
it isn’t:
the always tabled
righting of the present.”

Johnson often wrote of hope, and often with two minds. In addition to the Rambler citation quoted by my Philadelphia reader above, he wrote in the Adventurer No. 69, on July 3, 1753:

“I am afraid, every man that recollects his hopes must confess his disappointment; and own that day has glided unprofitably after day, and that he is still at the distance from the point of happiness.”

He had written, 17 months earlier, in the Rambler No. 196 (Feb. 1, 1752):

"We naturally indulge those ideas that please us. Hope will predominate in every mind, till it has been suppressed by frequent disappointments."

Beckett wrote in Company: “Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken.”

`Added Significance'

After the slaughter in Virginia comes the inevitable orgy of self-righteous blaming, the indecent feeding on the newly dead. From The Niagara River, read Kay Ryan's “Added Significance”:

“In the wake of
horrible events
each act or word
is fortified with
added significance,
unabsorbable as
nutrients added
to the outside
of food: it can’t
do any good.
As if significance
weren’t burdensome
enough. Now
the wave-slapped
beach rocks not
just made to talk
but made to teach.”

`A Quick Thorough Job'

In A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders, Gary M. Lavergne writes:

“Charles Whitman knew what he was doing was evil. Explanations for his crimes describe the sources of his frustrations, but they do not excuse his killing. Almost every premeditated murder results from frustration of some sort, and Whitman’s troubles were not particularly remarkable.”

On Aug. 1, 1966, Whitman shot and killed 15 people and wounded 31 from the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin. The night before, after killing his mother and wife, Whitman wrote in a notebook:

“I imagine it appears that I brutally killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job . . . If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts . . . donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.”

In The Anatomy of Melancholy, in the chapter titled “Emulation, Hatred, Faction, Desire of Revenge, Causes,” Robert Burton writes:

“This hatred, malice, faction, and desire of revenge, invented first all those racks and wheels, strappadoes, brazen bulls, feral engines, prisons, inquisitions, severe laws to macerate and torment one another. How happy might we be, and end our time with blessed days and sweet content, if we could contain ourselves, and, as we ought to do, put up injuries, learn humility, meekness, patience, forget and forgive, as in God's word we are enjoined, compose such final controversies amongst ourselves, moderate our passions in this kind, and think better of others, as Paul would have us, than of ourselves: be of like affection one towards another, and not avenge ourselves, but have peace with all men. But being that we are so peevish and perverse, insolent and proud, so factious and seditious, so malicious and envious; we do invicem angariare, maul and vex one another, torture, disquiet, and precipitate ourselves into that gulf of woes and cares, aggravate our misery and melancholy, heap upon us hell and eternal damnation.”

`Sometime a Paradox'

Most of us, of course, embody paradox merely by being human, but I have met a man after whom a paradox has been named. Yakobson’s Paradox is the brainchild of Boris I. Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice University. Except for knowing it has something to do carbon nanotubes, I don’t begin to understand it, but you can go here for a spirited debate on the matter.

Boris was born in the Soviet Union and is well-read and well educated -- Ph.D., Russian Academy of Sciences, 1982 – and he is urbane, ironic by nature and necessity, and qualified to savor paradox, physical or metaphysical. As I’ve been rereading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in the handsome New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, with an introduction by the late Anthony Hecht, I’ve been weighing whether paradox – seeming contradiction belying a subtler, more essential truth – lies at the heart of great art. In poetry, paradox is a benignly spring-loaded trap of logic. Tripped, it catches us in a dense mesh of meanings, and demands that we be active readers. Look at “Sonnet 66,” a veritable cluster-bomb of paradoxes:

“Tired with all these for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that to die, I leave my love alone.”

Some clarification: “Desert” means merit or worth. “Unhappily,” in the sense of sinfully or unfortunately. “Art,” as in learning or science. “Simple truth” is honesty or innocence, as opposed to “simplicity,” meaning ignorance or foolishness. The rhetorical device of anaphora – 10 consecutive lines beginning with “And” – hammers home the paradox in bravura fashion. I especially like “needy nothing,” meaning a worthless person, lacking in moral qualities – the opposite of “desert.”

The word “paradox” does not appear in the Sonnets, though Shakespeare used it three times in the plays, most famously in Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, just after the big soliloquy:

Hamlet: “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”

Ophelia: “Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”

Hamlet: “Ay truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.”

Ophelia: “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”

Since first reading the play in junior high school, I have always found Price Hamlet insufferable – not for his reputed indecisiveness but for snottiness and casual cruelty. His treatment of Ophelia (who understands this: “you made me believe so”) and Polonious makes for uncomfortable reading. Zbigniew Herbert, in a poem he dedicated to Czeslaw Milosz, “Elegy of Fortinbras,” takes on Hamlet after he has gotten his comeuppance, in a meditation on history as paradox. Here is the conclusion:

“Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
Since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
A star named Hamlet We shall never meet
What I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

“It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince”

History condemned Yakobson’s countryman, Osip Mandelstam, to a life of ultimately murderous paradox, and paradox became the creative engine of his poetry. In May 1934, he was arrested for the first time, for a poem he had written about Stalin. Indiscreetly, he had recited it to several friends, one of whom reported him to the NKVD. The informer was soon arrested and died in a camp before Mandelstam. The poem in question juxtaposes the words of poets with the words of the dictator – the former unheard, the latter turned immediately into violent action. Here are the first three stanzas, as translated by Robert Tracy:

“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us;
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard,

“And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue –
Then they remember the Kremlin mountaineer.

“His fat fingers are slimy, like slugs,And his words are absolute, like grocers’ weights.”

`A Childlike Vision Leaping Into View'

In the April 14-15 edition of The Wall Street Journal (page P14 in the print edition), Tom Nolan proposes an ingenious solution to an almost-40-year-old mystery: Who is the eponymous Madame George of Van Morrison’s song? Nolan rightly calls the cut on the Astral Weeks album “a melancholy, 10-minute, slow-march requiem.” It’s also an achingly beautiful melody, with lyrics, as in many Morrison songs, mingling equal parts Irish realism and mystical mush. The song begins like this:

“Down on Cypress Avenue
With a childlike vision leaping into view
Clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe
Ford & Fitzroy, Madame George
Marching with the soldier boy behind
He's much older with hat on drinking wine
And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through
The cool night air like Shalimar
And outside they're making all the stops
The kids out in the street collecting bottle-tops
Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops”

By the time Morrison released Astral Weeks, in November 1968, millions of listeners were decoding rock lyrics with the intensity of Talmudic scholars. Most of the speculation about “Madame George” focused on Dublin transvestites and pedophilia. Nolan’s unmasking of the title character is infinitely more informed and convincing as he argues the case for George Hyde Lees, better known as Madame George Yeats, who was married to William Butler Yeats from 1917 until the poet’s death in 1939.

Morrison knows his fellow Irishman Yeats. He mentions him in “Rave On, John Donne,” and pairs him with Lady Gregory in “Summertime in England,’ where he also cites Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Mahalia Jackson. In “Too Long in Exile” he names Joyce again, along with Wilde and Beckett. Nolan writes:

“For those who look, there is no end of connections between Van Morrison and W.B. Yeats – a poet whose life and oeuvre were assertively revived by a woman named George, a self-declared medium and a proactive muse who spurred her husband’s creativity through automatic writing and the inducement of trance states.”

Yeats and Morrison share a confounding obsession with New Age claptrap. In 1994, I interviewed William M. Murphy, the Yeats scholar at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. He was about to publish Family Secrets, his examination of the entire Yeats clan. Sixteen years earlier he had published Prodigal Father, a biography of John Butler Yeats, the painter, raconteur and father of the poet. Murphy was fed up with the whole bunch, and described W.B. Yeats’ occult predilections as “silly.” Murphy told me:

“Willie was not always an easy fellow to get along with. He was a very arrogant and abrasive character. Nobody seemed to like him.”

This echoes countless assessments of Van Morrison’s own temperament. The coexistence of mysticism and self-centered truculence should hardly surprise us. While recording A Sense of Wonder in 1984, Morrison wanted to include his version of Yeats’ “Crazy Jane on God.” The Yeats estate bridled, and Morrison is reputed to have said, “My songs are better than Yeats’!” The song showed up in 1998 on The Philosopher’s Stone.

`It Summed the Situation Up'

In the April 14 issue of The Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple writes a tart, clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s kidnapping of the English sailors and marines, their release and the vulgar circus surrounding their return to England. For Dalrymple, Tony Blair is a virtual reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain, c. 1938, and his nation’s journalists are even more craven:

“The sub-death-of-Diana hysteria which gripped the tabloids was bad enough. The picture on the front page of the Daily Mirror, of Faye Turney reunited with her daughter with the caption of MUMMY! MUMMY! was enough to make any inveterate enemy of this country laugh with pleasurable — and justified — contempt. President Ahmadinejad was quite right all along (though he didn’t quite put it this way): if you’re going to go all soppy and weak at the knees over the fate of a young mother, and demand special consideration for her, you shouldn’t send her to a war zone. It is well-known that war zones are bad for young mothers.”

In Cold Calls, the most recent installment of Christopher Logue’s Tarantino-esque adaptation of The Iliad, he describes the vividly gory death of the Greek hero Nyro:

“Took his head off his spine with a backhand slice --
Beautiful stuff ...straight from the blade...”

Dalrymple reminded me of the passage that follows several lines later:

“When Nyro's mother heard of this
She shaved her head; she tore her frock; she went outside
Ripping her fingernails through her cheeks:
Then down her neck; her chest; her breasts;

“'I saw her running round.
I took the photograph.
It summed the situation up.
He was her son.
They put it out in colour. Right?
My picture went around the world.'”

The juxtaposition of mother and photographer, in Dalrymple and Homer-cum-Logue, is striking. Logue devotes much of Cold Calls to the horrors of war, yes, but also to its media representations. A picture snapped by his boastful photographer might readily be captioned: “MUMMY! MUMMY!” In a moment of elevated bullshit, I once told a fellow reporter that you could learn more about war from Homer than from The New York Times. In “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” Simone Weil writes:

“Battles are not determined among men who calculate, devise, take resolutions and act on them but among men stripped of these abilities, transformed, fallen to the level either of purely passive inert matter or of the blind forces of sheer impetus. This is the ultimate secret of war…”

`We Must Always Be Ready to Try Something Fresh'

Blindness is an inevitable, self-imposed hazard for dedicated readers. It starts with accepting limitations: We can’t read everything, nor can we enjoy, appreciate and understand all that we do find the time to read. Some books and writers, some centuries and national literatures, we jettison out of self-preservation. Others we engage and then abandon as unworthy. If we are fortunate and honest, we incrementally assemble a private library of reliably useful and essential volumes, books that give us pleasure regardless of how often we read them.

I say “hazard” because each time we elect blindness, we risk losing a book that might deserve a space on that sustaining shelf. Most of the books in my collection are long-time acquaintances, some of which I read first as a teenager and to which I have always remained faithful. But others took their place only after I reevaluated faulty or premature assessments. Evelyn Waugh is a good example. So are Robert Musil and Anthony Hecht. Other volumes linger only as memories. Happily gone are Malcolm Lowry, John Barth and Claude Simon.

On Thursday, on the third floor of the university library, I was looking for something in P.G. Wodehouse, a verb he used to render Jeeves’ manner of entering a room. I had been thinking about the comic use of verbs, as in Ring Lardner’s “`Shut up,’ he explained,” but couldn’t remember in which of the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories the verb I half-remembered had appeared. I sat on the floor in front of almost two shelves of gratifyingly well-worn Wodehouse titles, hoping to skim my way to an answer. Instead, I noticed on the shelf below the start of the far more extensive but equally well-worn Virginia Woolf collection. I have read most of her fiction, though not in many years. I feel no compunction about ignoring her endless diaries and volumes of letters, and the vast Bloomsbury industry remains effortlessly simple to avoid. You might assume I’m blind to Woolf’s charms but I have enjoyed some of her essays, especially those in the Common Reader collections.

I found several sets of her collected essays, as well as a lone volume from 1977, Books and Portraits, published by The Hogarth Press, which she and her husband had founded 60 years earlier. I skimmed the contents page and was surprised to see an entry for “Thoreau,” a review that appeared in The Times Literary Supplement on July 12, 1917. I never knew it existed. I had read Woolf on Emerson but never Thoreau, and she surprised me by admiring him as man and writer, without a hint of snobbery and with some suggestion of self-awareness:

“Few people, it is safe to say, take such an interest in themselves as Thoreau took in himself; for if we are gifted with an intense egoism we do our best to suffocate it in order to live on decent terms with our neighbors. We are not sufficiently sure of ourselves to break completely with the established order. This was Thoreau’s adventure; his books are the record of that experiment and its results. He did everything he could to intensify his own understanding of himself, to foster whatever was peculiar, to isolate himself from contact with any force that might interfere with his immensely valuable gift of personality. It was his sacred duty, not to himself alone but to the world; and a man is scarcely an egoist who is an egoist on so grand a scale.”

This says much about Thoreau and more about Woolf. “Gifted with an intense egoism” is priceless, and I was pleased by my unexpected discovery. I continued reading:

“We can never lull our attention asleep in reading Thoreau by the certainty that we have now grasped his theme and can trust our guide to be consistent. We must always be ready to try something fresh; we must always be prepared for the shock of facing one of those thoughts in the original which we have known all our lives in reproductions.”

By this point, of course, she was talking to me: “we must always be ready to try something fresh.” Thank you for the reminder, Virginia. And while reminding us of Thoreau’s fabled night in jail and his zeal for John Brown, she also notes:

“He seems to hug his own happiness.”

`Dark Lamps'

Occasionally a poem by a previously unknown poet illuminates some dim interior region we never knew existed. This happened as I was reading The God of This World to His Prophet, by Bill Coyle, which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. I was hopping about, reading poems that caught my attention for unpoetic reasons (title, length, upper-case nouns), when I flipped to “Aubade,” the final poem in the collection:

“On a dead street
in a high wall
a wooden gate
I don't recall

“ever seeing open
is today
and I who happen
to pass this way

“in passing glimpse
a garden lit
by dark lamps
at the heart of it.”

Technically, the poem is a marvel, one long wending sentence, three rhymes, 41 mostly one-syllable words, unpunctuated until the end. For reasons I can’t identify, I set the poem in Alexandria, Egypt – a downhill walk on a cobblestone street (none of which appears in the poem). Perhaps I hear an unconscious echo of Cavafy. The final lines contain “heart” and embody it – this is the heart of the poem. Why “dark” lamps? I read the poem again and conclude “dead street” is not the same as “dead end.” In so laconic a poem, “pass” followed so quickly by “passing” merits attention. One sort of passing, a euphemism I hear more often of late, is dying. And the speaker, like this reader, “happen[s]/to pass this way.” And why is the garden empty, without people? That brings us to the poem’s 42nd word, the title.

To well-versed readers, “Aubade” means Philip Larkin, his great late poem, one of his last, from 1977. Larkin claimed the word as his own and effectively redefined it. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us “A musical announcement of dawn, a sunrise song or open-air concert.” Pieces by Bizet, Lalo and Poulenc carry the name. It’s French, Provencal, ultimately Latin, from “dawn” (aube) by way of alba – “white.” Implied is the regret of parting lovers. That’s how William Empson intended it in his “Aubade,” from 1933, with “The heart of standing is you cannot fly” repeated four times until it modulates, once, into “The heart of standing is we cannot fly.”

Empson retains the tradition of parting lovers – woken by a pre-dawn earthquake in Tokyo – but the speaker in Larkin’s “Aubade” wakes up alone except for “Unresting death.” Hints of the older tradition remain – “In time the curtain edges will grow light” and “The sky is white as clay, with no sun” -- but this “Aubade” is not so much sad as desolate and comfortless.

Coyle, surely, knows all of this and more. Why has he chosen to join this company by titling his poem “Aubade?” Has the speaker just parted from a lover? Is it dawn? Is that why the “dark lamps” burn? Coyle crafts a fruitful mystery with his 42nd word.

`Smelling Slightly of Camphor'

For a week, my 6-year-old and I measured out nightly doses of Stuart Little, even stopping mid-chapter to prolong our pleasure and delay the inevitable conclusion to a story so open-ended it never really concludes. Not since finishing Roald Dahl’s ample shelf have we so helplessly enjoyed a book.

Published in 1945, Stuart Little was E.B. White’s first book for children and has for too long been eclipsed by Charlotte’s Web, a lesser work. White patented a tone of poker-faced whimsy. The events are fantastic – the Littles of New York City give birth to a two-inch boy with the appearance of a mouse – but the premise is treated matter-of-factly, with little cuteness. Stuart is dapper, intelligent, resourceful and idealistic. Much of the dialogue is archly formal, presumably for the amusement of adult readers, though Michael sometimes laughed at Stuart’s elevated manner of speaking. We were disappointed when Stuart turned his back on a budding relationship with Harriet Ames, who is also two inches tall but otherwise resembles a conventional little girl. Stuart’s decision, instead, to continue his search for Margola, an elusive bird, casts a satisfying adult shadow across the ending of the story.

I mention White (1899-1985) because Stuart Little is so much fun, but also because he seems almost to have vanished from our common culture, if such a thing still exists. Someone, I’m certain, is reading the children’s books, but he or she may never consult The Elements of Style or read the personal essays that earned White so ardent a following. I confess I have never been able to embrace his work without reservations. His style is described as crisp and graceful, but just as often it is precious and arch, like Stuart Little’s speech. Look at this conclusion to one of White’s most-admired essays, “Once More to the Lake”:

“When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

Why does this seem false to me, so cloying and almost offensive? Because a trivial event is made to carry a disproportionate burden of significance. White’s love for his son and the pang of mortality any parent feels are not in question. A passage like this, and I speak as a writer and father, belongs in a private notebook, not an essay for publication. White seems to have had some awareness of this objection, though it may be a stylized awareness, a self-defensive part of his writerly persona. In the foreword to Essays of E.B. White, he wrote:

“I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in this complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egotistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor.”

This is disingenuous. From its birth, the essay was an undefined, open-ended form, and that has been its glory and curse. From essayer, “to try,” it never guaranteed the attempt would prove successful. Of course, in the 30 years since White wrote his foreword, the floodgates of memoir, confession and MySpace narcissism have burst, drowning us in oceans of self-infatuation and leaving White’s trifles, by contrast, reading like models of reticence and discretion. Are all essays “much too self-conscious and self-serving [a] form?” No, I seldom feel that way reading Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Orwell, Hubert Butler, Guy Davenport or Cynthia Ozick. The openness of the essay demands a self-imposed discipline beyond the willingness and reach of most essayists.

Cultural Remembering

There’s an atavistic part of me -- I work mightily to ignore it, usually -- convinced Clive James wrote Cultural Amnesia for me. Not readers like me, whatever that demographic might represent, but me, the guy writing these words, the guy reading an 876-page edifice of a book who is already, on page 497 (Eugenio Montale), anxious about its too-imminent conclusion. James, born in Australia, a poet, journalist and television “personality,” is a throwback to some heroic age of amateur learning and reading. I intend amateur in the etymological sense – rooted in love. He is unapologetically non-academic. Reviewers have likened James to Edmund Wilson, but Wilson was too dull and provincial, his prose too flat-footed. James recalls aspects of Johnson, Coleridge and Henry James the nonfiction writer, as well as such less familiar figures as Ernst Renan, George Saintsbury and several polymathic writers James includes in Cultural Amnesia –Gianfranco Contini, Egon Freidell and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

The format is simple: James writes essays about 106 men and women, mostly from the 20th century, using quotations from each figure as a springboard into – what? Enthusiastic digressions, learned rambles in which books and life twine, untwine and twine again, like DNA, in unexpected combinations. These are not potted biographies. The chapter on Peter Altenberg, the Viennese writer of feuilletons, begins with this Groucho Marxian two-liner from Fechsung:

“There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.”

James briefly summarizes Altenberg’s centrality to Vienna’s café, after having already given us an Overture devoted to Vienna’s centrality to the 20th century, then proceeds to anatomize love in its sexual and romantic aspects. He drops Altenberg entirely for three or four pages, stops along the way for mentions of Ring Lardner, Lenny Bruce, three Roman poets, Dante and Petrarch, Donne, Marvell and Pope…You get the idea. Don’t confuse James with a self-serving name-dropper. He is a raconteur of culture, yes, but deeply serious. He tells us a story that in other hands might have been smutty and sniggering:

“One of Altenberg’s many young loves had tearfully protested that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction. Altenberg asked, `Was ist so nur?’ (What’s so only?)”

Here, five pages later, is how James concludes his essay:

“For men, the first and shamefully unthinking flood of worship is the opposite of casual. It is monumental, and Peter Altenberg got it in a phrase. What’s so only? He had self-knowledge. He could have added the lack of it to his long list of the two things that can ruin a man’s life.”

Key figures for this reader are absent from James’ core sample of culture. I wish he had taken on William James, Ford Madox Ford, Isaac Babel, Samuel Beckett and Zbigniew Herbert, among others. But I sound petty. James is no snob. With all the certified priests of high culture, James finds room for Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, W.C. Fields – and Tony Curtis. One could draw a commonplace book to sustain a lifetime from Cultural Amnesia.

`A Certain Lightness of Heart'

Since going to work for the university nine months ago I have enjoyed two extended literary conversations on campus – one with a professor of Slavic Studies, the other with my boss after she read, at my suggestion, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Offshore. My pleasure was rooted in the mutual pleasure we took in Zbigniew Herbert and Fitzgerald. Books can spawn enthusiastic kinship among people who otherwise are strangers.

The contrast when I have spoken with faculty or graduate students in the English Department has been, without exception, dramatic and discouraging. To them, reading seemed an odious obligation, like scrubbing the toilet. One grad student couldn’t get over her surprise when she learned that I, who work with engineers, had actually read a book from beginning to end. When I mentioned I had just reread Emerson’s essay on Montaigne, and that Montaigne was among my literary heroes, she delivered a lecture on Foucault’s dismissal of the great essayist. I countered that Foucault was a degenerate not to be taken seriously by intelligent people, and so another literary conversation foundered on the shoals of politics and fashionable theory. In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800, John Gross ably diagnosed the malady:

“Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds…Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”

This grad student and others I have met treated books as an annoyingly necessary addendum to the real subject, which was their favorite brand of politics masquerading as criticism. None displayed “spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure”-- much too bourgeois. None seemed happy to be studying what he or she had chosen to study. None seemed to have read very broadly or deeply. These unhappy thoughts came to me as I started reading Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James. Two-thousand and seven, little more than three months on, has seen publication of two necessary books – James’ and Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. Both fit the prescription James himself formulates in his introduction:

“If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.”

Literature is a long, rewarding, mutually sustaining conversation between writers and readers, writers and writers and, of course, readers and readers. What is needed to sustain the conversation is humility, imagination and a capacity for finding pleasure in the artful arrangement of words. In that way, we might remain human in an inhuman age.

`Living Toys'

In the week before Easter 1971, I was a college freshman living in a dormitory with hundreds of other drunken, drug-addled louts. Life was less a cabaret than a low-rent bacchanal, fueled by cheap beer, sweet wine, plentiful pot and testosterone, grudgingly interrupted by visits to the classroom or library. Late one night someone announced we ought to come to the community room at the end of the hall, a space usually reserved for family visits and roommates sequestered for reasons of dubious hygiene.

There, on the coffee table, was a large, ribboned Easter basket crammed with green plastic grass, jelly beans, chocolate eggs and, on top of the mound of sweets, a very real, very dead rabbit. It was fuzzy and white, the size of a tabby, and neatly arranged. I reacted with mingled horror and hilarity. Hours before, this creature had been alive. Now it was motionless and stiffening, its nose still pink. The dead bunny, without hope of resurrection, spoofed the secular, sentimental devolution of Easter. When I think of the dead rabbit, 36 years later, it still makes me laugh and cringe.

Are people still giving chicks and bunnies, some of them grotesquely dyed, to children for Easter? Here’s Philip Larkin’s “Take One Home for the Kiddies”:

“On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass –
Mam, get us one of them to keep.

“Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel –
Mam, we’re playing funeral now.”

`The Flicker, Not the Flame'

This week I have enjoyed reading Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson, so on Friday I checked out from the university library Robinson’s Collected Poems, a 1,018-page volume published by MacMillan in 1929. I realized how little of Robinson’s ample body of work I had actually read, and so, entirely by happenstance, I learned that Friday was the 72nd anniversary of the poet’s death.

Inside the front cover is inscribed “Katharine Keats Braithwaite, Christmas 1929.” The handwriting for the middle name is poetically ambiguous -- “Keats” might also read “Yeats.” Pasted on the front pages are four newspaper clips, brown and brittle but intact and legible, reporting Robinson’s death on April 6, 1935. Judging from fragments of stories and ads on the backs of the clips, they were cut from a Boston newspaper, probably the Herald. The main story, accompanied by a mug shot of Robinson, carries three headlines in a one-column format:

“EDWIN ROBINSON,
POET, DIES AT 65”

“Maine Native Thrice Won
Pulitzer Prize for
His Writing”

“FIRST WON FAME
AS N.Y. LABORER”

How long is it since you saw “thrice” in a headline? Here’s the lead of the Associated Press story:

“The living ranks of the great moderns of American poetry and literature, who achieved classic fame with the turn of the century, dwindled further today with the death of Edwin Arlington Robinson.”

One wonders how A.J. Liebling would have parsed this yearningly awkward sentence. Three paragraphs down we read:

“Only Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay are now left of the little group of ranking poets who won acclaim in the 1900’s.

“Amy Lowell and Vachel Lindsay, two others outstanding, are dead.

“They, with Robinson, first began to achieve real prominence in 1914. Harriet Monroe of Chicago, who published a magazine called `Poetry,’ early printed their works and the works of others of their contemporaries and played a large role in building up their popularity in the United States and England.”

I can visualize the guy on the wire desk cobbling together this fractured history of early 20th-century American poetry, throwing in “Harriet Monroe of Chicago” as though she were “Al Capone of Chicago,” and as a transition using the phrase “the works of others of their contemporaries,” which reads like the newspaper equivalent of sutures made of baling wire. Further on he writes:

“Robinson was shy, a shunner of publicity, but a poet who wrote in the simple language of the world.”

It’s easy to make fun of this, but the deaths of how many poets today would merit a sizable story and photo in your hometown paper? The newspaper also published a letter to the editor from Mrs. C.B. Porter of Old Town, Maine, complaining about an editorial devoted to the neglect supposedly suffered by Robinson in his home state. Mrs. Porter writes that she belongs to “a little group of women numbering 20, few very young, known as Our Neighborhood Club, who had an `Evening with Edwin A. Robinson’ several years ago. His poems were discussed and read, or read and discussed.”

All of this is precious – the A.P. guy’s muddled story, Mrs. Porter caring enough to write a lengthy letter, Ms. Braithwaite caring enough to preserve the clips and paste them in her copy of Robinson’s poems, and the book, last checked out in 1995, ending up in the Fondren Library at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. This is piecemeal immortality, the best we can hope for. Robinson, a shrewd man acquainted with failure and oblivion, wrote in his sonnet “George Crabbe” about another dimly remembered poet:

“Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.”

`Art Free of Obedience to Its Time'

On my way to work Thursday morning I listened, as usual, to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on KUHF, Houston’s public radio affiliate. I tend to enjoy the top of the show, the rundown of who was born and who died on this date in bookish history, like reading a small town newspaper in which the small town is literature. Yesterday, Thomas Hobbes and Charles Algernon Swinburne were born, and John Rolfe and Pocahontas got married. Keillor exercises little critical saavy. He almost invariably mentions a mediocre commercial writer, presumably because too elevated a critical standard would alienate the canaille, but I can forgive that so long as he throws us a Hobbes now and then.

It’s only when the final segment of the show begins, when Keillor reads the poem of the day, that I start tuning for Blue Öyster Cult. Years ago, I remember Keillor reading Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and I felt spiritually lifted for the seven or eight minutes before I arrived at my office, a veritable eternity. More often, Keillor draws from current American poets of a sensitive or political or sensitive/political pedigree – what James Wood, in a different context, described as “the usual contemporary verbal mixture of journalism-and-candy.” Most of the poems, in fact, are prose, and most can be effortlessly distilled to a nugget of “message.” August Kleinzahler performed the definitive demolition of Keillor a couple of years at Poetry Daily, and while I quibble with much of his essay I agree with its thrust. You’re not likely to hear Geoffrey Hill, Basil Bunting or John Berryman's Dream Songs on Writer’s Almanac.

Thursday’s selection was predictable: “Family Reunion,” by Jeredith Merrin -- 10 unrhymed quatrains that begin as social satire, morph into amorphous moralizing, and ascend into preachy, faux-naïve sentimentality. It was awful, and it reminded me of a warning Basil Bunting issued in 1966:

“Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s business.”

What I actually want to write about is not Merrin’s obvious failure as a poet, but her “message,” which we might reduce to what English teachers used to call a topic sentence: “We are alienated, and that’s a bad thing.” The last stanza and a half go like this:

“Caress your history – who else will?
Promise to come back later.

“Pay attention when it asks you
Simple questions: Where are we going?
Is it scary? What happened? Can
I have more now? Who is that?”

This reads like shopping-mall existentialism, cut with a dollop of self-help, and it doesn’t accurately describe how I, or the people I respect, relate to the world. I call it poverty of imagination. Dr. Johnson reminded his readers that to be bored of London was to be bored of life. Well, to be bored of the world early in the 21st century, when access to books, music and our fellow humans has never been so simple or rewarding, is a colossal act of ingratitude. Another great poet you probably won’t hear on Writer’s Almanac is Les Murray, whose “The Instrument” is an excellent antidote to Merrin and other noisy narcissists. Here’s a verse from the middle:

“Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh
to embody themselves. Only completed art
free of obedience to its time can pirouette you
through and athwart the larger poems you are in.
Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void.”

`A Gentleman from Sole to Crown'

Like many of my contemporaries I first heard of Edwin Arlington Robinson by way of Simon and Garfunkel. A solemnly earnest arrangement of his 1897 poem “Richard Cory” appeared on Sounds of Silence, the duo's second album, released in January 1966. I was 13 and ripe for earnestness, so the melodrama of the final line impressed me. It also left me with the unearned conviction that Robinson was a hack, a sort of O. Henry in verse. I was wrong about Robinson and O. Henry, and I was wrong about “Richard Cory.” Paul Simon rewrote the poem, laying on the reductive irony with a putty knife. In his newly published Edward Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, Scott Donaldson addresses Simon’s reworking:

“The character of Richard Cory is sketched impressionistically in the poem. Robinson furnishes no concrete information about his occupation or family. When Paul Simon rewrote the poem for his 1960s song, he decided to give Robinson’s shadowy character greater definition.

“`They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,
With political connections to spread his wealth around.
Born into society, a banker’s only child,
He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.’

“In two following verses, Simon further delineates Cory as a contradictory figure: a celebrity whose picture appears everywhere and who is rumored to have `orgies on his yacht,’ a philanthropist who gives to charity and has `the common touch.’”

In a qualified defense of Simon, Donaldson adds:

“Wisely, though, Simon followed Robinson in not supplying Cory with reasons for his despondency. Speculative readers, missing the point of the poem, have rushed to explain why Cory shot himself….The central irony has to do with the wrongheaded attitude of the Tillbury townspeople, the `we’ of the poem, who commodify Cory into the embodiment of their own avaricious dreams.”

Here’s Robinson’s “Richard Cory”:

“Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

“And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But he still fluttered pulses when he said,
`Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

“And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

“So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Robinson (1869-1935) was a modernist poet in spite of himself and the critics, a great one, and Donaldson performs a long-needed act of literary reclamation. I stayed up too late Wednesday reading his book, which begins beguilingly:

“This book derives from the conviction that Edward Arlington Robinson was a great American poet and an exceptionally fine human being. The story of his life deserves telling and has not been told.”

By the way, has any thesis-monger explored the E.A. Robinson/“Mrs. Robinson” nexus?

The Frozen Toad

On Monday, my brother suggested I read that day’s entry at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, drawn by Greg Perry from Thoreau’s Journal for April 2, 1857:

“A great change in the weather. I set out apple trees yesterday, but in the night it was very cold, with snow, which is now several inches deep. On the sidewalk in Cambridge I saw a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture. Carried it into Boston in my pocket, but could not thaw it into life.”

That’s what I miss most about living in the North – not frozen amphibians but demarcated seasons and the potential for volatility around the cusps. On the day I was born, Oct. 26, 1952, the temperature in Cleveland was 99 degrees. My mother was still in the hospital five days later, on Halloween, when the windows were open in those pre-air-conditioning days and she could hear kids outside trick-or-treating. A few years later, snow fell on my birthday.

In Houston, the seasons blur into sameness. Leaves are always falling but trees are never bare. Except for the odd hurricane, there’s an absence of drama in the cycle of the seasons. Winter in the North creates a sense of urgency about the coming of spring, which arrives on the vernal equinox only on the calendar. Mounds of black snow linger into May. Only then can we relax enough to feel virtuous about having survived another winter. We lust after green, and spring rewards us. Have scholars of climate and religion investigated the reasons for the rise of Protestantism in Northern lands?

The best description of the joy associated with spring in the North comes in the opening scene of My Home is Far Away, the 1944 novel by Dawn Powell, who was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio:

“This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day.”

This scene must be set early in June. The lilacs have passed, the fruit trees are heavy. I recognize details because my second newspaper job was in Bellevue, Ohio, about 80 miles north of Mount Gilead, and each June the town celebrated its Cherry Festival. The shift from spring to summer, rooted in humidity and angle of sunlight, is subtle but perceptible. I believe Thoreau when he boasts he could identity the day without resorting to a calendar, by reading wild flowers and the sun.

Wordsworth, too, conveys the excitement of sunshine and green leaves after six months or more of gray skies and fields. When I read the opening lines of the 1805 version of The Prelude, I remember the luxury of walking outside without a coat, and the giddy anticipation we felt as summer vacation approached:

“O there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.”

Poets and dullards alike, at least in the North, understand that winter is long, spring is short, and summer shorter – especially for kids in school. That rhythm, that expectation of long endurance and brief reward, becomes second nature and takes on an allegorical quality in our lives. We are not made to dwell in Paradise very long. This comes from the “Spring” chapter in Walden:

“The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon.”