'The Soil Must Have Been Prepared'

Tom Disch took the title of his first collection of essays and reviews from “The Castle of Indolence” (1748), eighty-one Spenserian stanzas by the Scottish poet James Thomson. The poem is a sort of mock-epical hymn to the Protestant work ethic, a virtue ably represented by Thomson’s industriousness. The poet commends the “pleasing land of  drowsy-hed [sic]” and Disch in his title essay reminds us that “Thomson was being playful in these verses, but not sarcastic.” He continues: 

“All this praise of laziness and going with the flow comes with one large proviso: the soil must have been prepared, the harp tuned, the fingers schooled. Then careless raptures may sound more like Liszt than listlessness. It should also be noted that the laziness of genius may seem, at lower altitudes, a great deal like exertion. George Eliot, for entertainment in her declining years, liked to read aloud from Dante. Auden vacationed in Iceland and learned the language in the spirit of an intellectual alpinist. It was there, so why not climb it? For such spirits, schools are superfluous.”

 

Ever the critic of poetry workshops and other manifestations of the Poetry Industry, Disch, the most wayward, independent and amusing of poet-critics, writes:

 

“And truly, there is no other form of writing that feels so good as a lyric poem as it gushes forth in a steady flow. If that metaphor rubs you the wrong way; if you would at once insist that poetry is Hard Work and not a luxury product for intellectual sybarites; if poetry suggests to you the possibility of a Seriousness higher than prose rather than the possibility of sheer music--then nature did not intend you for a poet.”

 

Never have there been so many ways to write bad poetry and get it published. The awfulness of so much contemporary verse is reinforced by the ignorance of its practitioners of the poetic traditions that preceded them. “In this devaluation of the past,” Disch writes, “academic theorists offer aid and comfort to the indolence of the workshops, where the poetry that is studied is, by and large, the poetry that is written there--by fellow students, by their instructors, and by those with whom their instructors network, poets visiting to give a reading.”

 

Thomson was born on this date, September 11, in 1700 and died at age forty-seven in 1748. In his “Life of Thomson,” Dr. Johnson devotes two sentences to “The Castle of Indolence”: "The last piece that he lived to publish was the Castle of Indolence, which was many years under his hand, but was at last finished with great accuracy. The first canto opens a scene of lazy luxury, that fills the imagination.”

 

Disch writes in another review collected in The Castle of Indolence: “The cruel, Calvinist truth of the matter is that there is little relation between the effort exerted and the result achieved. . . . A mediocre novelist may still find readers; a mediocre poet has only his chagrin and, if he’s lucky, tenure.”