`Wonderful Brilliance'

What little I know of Kenneth Fields’ poetry I like. His pedigree is first-class: He’s the sole survivor of the Stanford school, a student or friend of Yvor Winters, J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, Janet Lewis and Edgar Bowers. All I know of Fields, besides the wonderful anthology he co-edited with Winters, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), is Classic Rough News, a collection of sonnets and sonnet-like poems published in 2005 by the University of Chicago Press. The poems give the impression of autobiography and suggest Fields knows something about alcoholism. The intriguing title comes from the wonderfully named Jeremy Fickle’s A Treatise on the Phantastikal Understanding (1763). Fields uses this as one of his epigraphs:

“A poet, if he aspire to write the true Classic Rough Newes, must be Scholarly, Scattered, & Mad.”

The other epigraph, from The Winter’s Tale, picks up the drinking theme:

“I have drunk, and seen the spider.”

Here’s the fourth poem in the book, “Along the Watchtower”:

“`Mixing with the world is clarifying,’ thought
Montaigne, who found us much confined, pent up –
Fearing experience as if it were the plague –
Seeing our noses clearly, or a little more,
Perhaps the black on white beneath the walls,
Disdainful of the clamor beyond the moat.
Montaigne, the irrepressible, leaps up
Clean from the page – who’d want to keep him out?
Still there are others who require some losses
Before we can entertain them. Stiffening, we
Forget that ‘when reason fails us we make use
Of blessed experience.’ Aren’t we too much like
`Men squaring the circle, lying upon their wives?’ –
Locking the barndoor before the horse gets in?”

Fields draws the first Montaigne (“the irrepressible”) excerpt from “Of the Education of Children.” The second and third are from “Of Experience.” I’m using Donald Frame’s translation. The one Fields uses is not by Florio, Cotton or Frame. Perhaps it’s his.

“Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. Here, in Frame’s translation, is more of the first passage quoted and paraphrased by Fields:

“Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not `Athens,’ but `The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.”

Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably open-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man:

“Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.”

That’s good news, especially today as my middle son is turning eight. Happy birthday, Michael (Kurp, not Montaigne).