'Durable, Inexhaustible, Essential, Inadequate'

A friend has sent me an anthology, Joy: 100 Poems (Yale University Press, 2017), assembled by Christian Wiman, who defines his theme as “a flash of eternity that illuminates time, but the word ‘eternity’ does sit a bit lumpishly there on the page.” Joy is a word I would never presume to define with precision. As an emotional state it will always remain ineffable, as do so many human things. I’m not certain we can seek joy the way we seek food to assuage hunger, and unexpectedness seems to be a prerequisite. 

For my tenth birthday my grandparents gave me a chemistry set – the gift I most wanted and least expected. I remember trembling, not believing what I was seeing, as I tore away the wrapping paper and uncovered test tubes, Erlenmeyer flasks and a bottle of cobalt chloride. Was that joy? Less presumptuous words come to mind – greed, thrill, satiety – however briefly. “The one abundance you can count on in this life,” Wiman writes, “is lack.” I’m reluctant to use joy in any setting other than the spiritual. Otherwise we risk turning it into the new awesome, a word lost to us forever. Wiman is rightly reluctant to nail down the word, which he describes as “durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate.”

 

His selection of poems is also somewhat inadequate. Wiman limits himself to work written by poets born “during or after modernism.” That is, the twentieth century, the least joyful, most savage of centuries, and an era of diminishing returns in poetry. By leaving out the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Wiman eliminates Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne and the other poet laureates of joy in English. He does include some gems which may or may not express joy but are beautifully written: Louis MacNeice’s “Meeting Point,” A.E. Stallings’ “Blackbird Étude” and Les Murray’s “Once in a Lifetime, Snow,” among others.

 

An afterthought for some enterprising publisher: Why not continue the theme started by Wiman and devote subsequent volumes to other emotional states? Make it a series. I would pay good money for an anthology dedicated to, say, truculence. To give the future editor a head start, let me suggest he begin with Jonathan Swift, Philip Larkin and Turner Cassity.