'Epigrams Must Be Curt'

One learns to love Walter Savage Landor. At first encounter he is not loveable. He is unpredictably cranky and has a Hazlitt-like temper. His diction is sometimes archaic. His love poems can be soupy and he was often foolish when it came to women. He presumes in the reader a wayward body of knowledge not suited to the twenty-first century. Gilbert Highet called him “the Greek Englishman,” meaning he was saturated with classical learning. But he is also sharp as Catullus, Martial and Swift are sharp – tart, concise, often memorable, as he is here:

“Pardon our enemies, we pray

Devoutly every Sabbath-day;

Ere the next morn we change our notes,

And blow them up or cut their throats.

Above us and below meanwhile

The Angels weep, the Devils smile.”

Landor was usually a realist when it came to human nature, perhaps because he understood his own capacity for ferocity and bile:

“Snap at me, Malice! snap; thy teeth are rotten

And hurt me not: all know thee misbegotten!

The cureless evil runs throughout thy race,

And from Cain downward thy descent we trace.”

His enthusiasms also were strong. Here he is on the author of Robinson Crusoe:

“Few will acknowledge what they owe

To persecuted, brave Defoe.

Achilles, in Homeric song,

May, or he may not, live so long

As Crusoe; few their strength had tried

Without so staunch and safe a guide.

What boy is there who never laid

Under his pillow, half afraid,

That precious volume, lest the morrow

For unlearnt lessons might bring sorrow?

But nobler lessons he has taught

Wide-awake scholars who fear’d naught:

A Rodney and a Nelson may

Without him not have won the day.”  

 And on Edward Gibbon:

   

“Gibbon has planted laurels long to bloom

Above the ruins of sepulchral Rome.

He sang no dirge, but mused upon the land

Where Freedom took his solitary stand.

To him Thucydides and Livius bow,

And Superstition veils her wrinkled brow.”

And Landor on his own favorite poetic form:

“Epigrams must be curt, nor seem

Tail-pieces to a poet’s dream.

If they should anywhere be found

Serious, or musical in sound

Turn into prose the two worst pages

And you will rank above the sages.”

Landor was born on this date, Jan. 30, in 1795, the same year as Keats, who died in 1821. Landor lived until 1864.

[I’m quoting from Poems, edited and introduced by Geoffrey Grigson and published by Centaur Press in 1964.]