‘Satisfy, or Silence, Our Reason'

“You could not call Nemesianus of Carthage, Tiberianus of the same place, Ausonius of Bordeaux, the Christian Prudentius of Calagurris in Spain, the unknown author of the Pervigilium, or Claudian of Alexandria, great poets.”

But all, in their day – fourth century A.D. – were as lavishly honored as any Guggenheim-ed, MacArthur-ed poet of our age. Unless your name is Homer or Horace, poetry is no guarantee of lasting celebrity or critical endorsement, as Ford Madox Ford suggests above in a passage from The March of Literature (1939). He continues:

“They all however flourished in the fourth century A.D. and were all distinguished by a cheerful and contented love of natural objects. That makes them, if they were not nightingales, at least something like the low-voiced linnet of the hedgerows.”

What an elegant and witty way to acknowledge the work of minor, largely forgotten poets. The name of interest here is Claudian of Alexandria. I came to him by way of Elizabeth Conquest quoting her late husband, Robert Conquest, who was quoting Edward Gibbon. The passage comes in her introduction to some of Conquest's previously unpublished poems:

“We would have agreed with no less a product of classicism than Gibbon himself, who spoke of the alternative aims of poetry being to ‘satisfy, or silence, our reason’. This seems a frightfully good account of what the poet should do.”

It does. Conquest was referring to the work of the poets associated in the nineteen-fifties with The Movement – himself, Larkin, Amis, Enright, Jennings, Gunn, Wain and others. But who was Gibbon writing about, and where? The answer can be found in Chap. 30 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“Claudian is read with pleasure in every country which has retained or acquired the knowledge of the Latin language. If we fairly balance his merits and his defects, we shall acknowledge that Claudian does not either satisfy or silence our reason. It would not be easy to produce a passage that deserves the epithet of sublime or pathetic; to select a verse that melts the heart or enlarges the imagination. We should vainly seek in the poems of Claudian the happy invention and artificial conduct of an interesting fable, or the just and lively representation of the characters and situations of real life.”

He might, indeed, be describing a low-voiced linnet of the hedgerows. I’m reminded of the poets-for-hire, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco, who shilled for President Obama during his inaugurations:

“For the service of his patron he published occasional panegyrics and invectives, and the design of these slavish compositions encouraged his propensity to exceed the limits of truth and nature.”