'Cant! Cant! Cant!'

In a July 24, 1924 letter to the poet and translator Rolfe Humphries, Louise Bogan, in a throwaway line about a poem by Goethe, uses a favorite word (of hers and mine): “The stripped, still lyric moves me more, invariably, than any flummery ode ever written—although, of course, Keats and the Romantics were only partly flummery . . .” 

In a word association test for flummery, I would respond with bullshit, which is probably a little too emphatic. The OED defines it as “mere flattery or empty compliment; nonsense, humbug, empty trifling.” The Dictionary cites Scott, Thackeray and Hardy. For you poets out there, here are some promising rhymes: mummery, plumbery (the study of P.G. Wodehouse), summary and summery. For the original meaning, dating from the seventeenth century, the OED gives “a kind of food made by coagulation of wheatflour or oatmeal.” That’s the OED quoting Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary verbatim.

 

Nice to see things come full circle: In a July 11, 1818 letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats writes: “O the flummery of a birth place! Cant! Cant! Cant! It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache.” On that date, Keats and Charles Brown visited the birthplace of Robert Burns, in Ayrshire on the southwest coast of Scotland.