'To Make Her Smile and Keep Her in Their Game'

A friend called to chat while driving to Dallas to visit her mother. My friend is my age. Her mother is ninety-six years old. She lives on her own and only recently, after falling, did she agree to start using a cane. I’m not sure anyone is prepared to get old (or not get old). When young we’re oblivious. The elderly are easily ignored or, even better, made fun of. I didn’t know it then but as a kid I had little respect for my elders and shunned them when possible. 

My step-grandfather was an exception but he behaved like a kid. He shared with us one memory of service in Europe during World War I: having a turnip fight in a farmer’s field in France with other young soldiers. When I knew him he was perpetually, contentedly a little drunk. I never saw him angry – a rare accomplishment in my family. Kelly liked his beer and shared his heeltaps with us. He died alone in his apartment just weeks after I last visited him. He was a house painter by trade and I think he had a fairly happy life, as such things go.

 

Here's a sonnet, “The Way It Ended,” by the wonderful Louisiana poet Gail White:

 

“So time went by and they were middle-aged,

which seemed a cruel joke that time had played

on two young lovers. They were newly caged

canary birds – amused, not yet afraid.

A golden anniversary came around

where jokes were made and laughing stories told.

The lovers joined the laugh, although they found

the joke – though not themselves – was growing old.

She started losing and forgetting things.

Where had she left her keys, put down her comb?

Her thoughts were like balloons with broken strings.

Daily he visited the nursing home

to make her smile and keep her in their game.

Death came at last. But old age never came.”

 

A novel in fourteen lines. In the right hands, a poem can contain a lifetime. White comments on her poem: “Time is the strangest of the conditions we live in. Scientists, essayists, and poets can ring endless changes on this theme. Time has devastated the lives of the couple in this sonnet, but as Solomon told us long ago, love is as strong as death.”

'But They Are Very Bad Poems'

Eugenio Montale speaking with an interviewer, American poet W.S. Di Piero, in 1973: 

“Political ideas are best expressed in prose. Why should we express political ideas in such an abstruse language as poetry? If I were to write against the war in Viet Nam, I would write in prose, or I would do something else to oppose the war directly instead of just dressing up my poems with references to Viet Nam as if pouring a sauce over the poems to prepare them for public consumption. One cannot inject or force the Viet Nam War into poetry simply for effect. It serves no real purpose, and whoever does so finally fails in every way.”

 

The literary legacy left by the Vietnam War, both civilian and military, is modest. Compared to World War I, it is almost nonexistent. “Anti-war” poems that filled magazines, chapbooks, posters and broadsheets were simplistic, shrill and soon forgotten. Literary values were abandoned for the sake of self-righteousness. A rare exception was R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who sent me a recent poem, “Skating,” subtitled “Camp Reasoner”:

 

“It’s ninety-five degrees.

I’m just not running. Damn,

What’s Gunny gonna do,

Send me to Vietnam?”

 

Bob adds: “A good half the time, that line would have been capped by someone else saying, ‘There it is.’” The poem is written in the voice of a grunt, an enlisted man, not a purported deep thinker about war and geopolitics. Montale was not politically naïve. His early work was written while Mussolini was in power. The poet had no use for fascism. In the interview, Di Piero asks, “What about the poet's treatment of contemporary public events?” Montale replies:

 

“As to public events, I'm aware of the many poems which have been published about the war in Viet Nam. These poems have a very high moral value, but they are very bad poems.”

 

Montale explains an unpleasant and paradoxical fact, best represented by the fate of poetry in Poland during the Soviet occupation: “Poetry has everything to gain from persecution. If the state were to patronize or protect the arts, there would be such an abundance of pseudo-artists, pretenders to art, that you wouldn't know quite how to fend them off!”

 

[The Montale interview was published in the January/February 1974 issue of the American Poetry Review. Di Piero is “assisted” by Rose Maria Bosinelli.]

'Without One Wonder in the Sky!'

John Partridge (1677-1715) was an English shoemaker-turned-astrologer who claimed to have refined his “science.” Don’t smirk or pity our benighted forebears. Newspapers still publish astrology columns and dozens of astrological publications remain in print. See Modern Astrology Magazine and Stellar: The New Astrology Magazine. My maternal grandmother, not a stupid woman, subscribed to such things and sometimes made significant life decisions based on what she found in the stars. 

Partridge was a prolific writer in his field, a dedicated Whig and a harsh critic of “Popery” and James II. In the 1708 edition of his Merlinus liberatus, Partridge referred to the Church of England as the “infallible Church.” Jonathan Swift launched a protracted satirical assault on Partridge, using his pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff. It began with “Predictions for the Year 1708”:

 

“My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it, to show how ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns: It relates to Partridge the almanack-maker; I have consulted the stars of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.”

 

Swift then published a mock-obituary of Partridge’s death, “The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff's Predictions,” reporting that the prediction was correct. Except that Partridge died around 7 rather than 11 p.m. on March 29:

 

 “. . . Mr. Bickerstaff was mistaken almost four hours in his calculation. In the other circumstances he was exact enough. But whether he has not been the cause of this poor man's death, as well as the predictor, may be very reasonably disputed.”

 

This is a gag worthy of Evelyn Waugh. Scholars have viewed it as an April Fool prank. Swift subsequently published a poem on the affair, “An Elegy on the Supposed Death of Partridge, the Almanack-Maker.” It begins:

 

“Well, ’tis as Bickerstaff has guess’d,

Tho’ we all took it for a jest;

Partridge is dead, nay more, he dy’d

E’re he could prove the good Squire ly’d.

Strange, an Astrologer shou’d die,

Without one Wonder in the Sky!

Not one of all his Crony Stars

To pay their Duty at his Herse?

No Meteor, no Eclipse appear’d?

No Comet with a flaming Beard?

The Sun has rose, and gone to Bed,

Just as if Partridge were not dead:

Nor hid himself behind the Moon,

To make a dreadful Night at Noon.

He at fit Periods walks through Aries,

Howe’er our earthly Motion varies;

And twice a Year he’ll cut the Equator,

As if there had been no such Matter.”

'Read During Every Possible Free Moment'

A reader asks, “How did you learn to read so fast?” The answer is simple: I didn’t. I have always read slowly, often taking notes, which makes it even slower. This frustrated me when I was young, and I briefly contemplated enrolling in one of Evelyn Wood’s “speed-reading” courses. But reading for me has always been a deeply private and focused activity, and I don’t like it messed with. I’ve always been good at concentrating. I slip into a movie or book easily, and I’ve come to think of it as entering a sort of fugue state. It’s a pleasant immersion and blocks most distractions, and I’m not in competition with anyone, even myself. It’s not a race. 

If a book is good, why would I want to read it quickly? Wouldn’t I want to linger and prolong my pleasure? Imagine reading poetry quickly. That would be unfair to me and the author, assuming the poet was any good.  

 

Barton Swaim published a column in the Times Literary Supplment on June 27, 2014, in which he describes his own experience with slow reading. Swaim is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and one of the best in the business. He is erudite, well-read and a graceful writer. I recommend his book The Speechwriter (2015). He writes:

 

“The source of my impatience is slow reading. I just cannot read as fast as other people do. I was deeply self-conscious about it as a child. In school, I would have to read aloud in class and would halt over almost every word. ‘There are--more--things in--heaven and earth--Hora--Horat--Horatio.’ On aptitude tests, I would do well on the problems I answered, but I wouldn't answer many because it took me too long to read the questions.”

 

Swaim became a book reviewer, which would seem to be a risky way to earn a living for a slow reader. His way of dealing with it sounds familiar:

 

“The only thing to do was to read during every possible free moment. There weren’t many of those--I had a hectic job as a politician’s speech-writer at the time, and three young children at home. There were late nights and early mornings, and I always had a book any time I thought I'd have to wait for anything--the doctor’s office, the car line at my daughter’s school. But I had to take it far beyond that. I'd get a paragraph in waiting for a traffic light, and another while waiting in line at the post office. The half-hour I was allotted for lunch was strictly for reading, and on car trips I would get my wife to read aloud while I drove.”

 

Swaim adopted a practice I’ve seldom resorted to – reading while walking. There’s an added risk in my case – I use a cane. Holding it in my right hand and a book in my left would make me worryingly unsteady. I remain a sedentary reader.

 

To my reader who asked about fast or slow reading: slow works for me. It has never imperiled the pleasure I’ve always taken in good books.

'We Are Not So Full of Evil As of Inanity'

Montaigne devotes a brief essay to a pair of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus.” The former is reputed to have been a misanthrope, perhaps a melancholic. The latter was known as “the laughing philosopher.” 

The essayist begins by weighing the importance of judgment in life generally and in the composition of his essays: “If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank.” That’s an admirable custom, one too few of us practice. Typically, Montaigne proceeds by association, not rigorous, thesis-like adherence to logic. He describes his method for writing an essay, and sounds very much like a blogger:

 

“I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well.”

 

As usual, Montaigne sounds remarkably like one of our contemporaries. There’s nothing stuffy or cautious about the way he proceeds. He’s good at producing vivid metaphors drawn from real life (“sometimes only to lick it”). He handles serious subjects almost casually, sometime humorously. Two-thirds of the way through his essay he finally introduces the philosophers of his title. Democritus, he writes, “finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.”

 

You may think you know where he’s going with this but Montaigne is no Renaissance version of a virtue signaler. He endorses Democritus’ manner, “not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.”

 

Robert Burton attributes his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to his persona/pseudonym “Democritus Junior,” who writes of his Greek forebear:

 

“After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace, and was sent for thither to be their lawmaker, recorder, or town-clerk, as some will; or as others, he was there bred and born. Howsoever it was, there he lived at last in a garden in the suburbs, wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, ‘saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.’ Such a one was Democritus.”

 

[The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]

'Dust and Shadows'

Here I encounter yet again the bothersome issue of major vs. minor writers. When “minor” is used as a purely dismissive judgment, beware. There are minor writers who write beautifully and earn our respect and even love – Max Beerbohm is the first who comes to mind – and others who never transcend their triviality. Say, Carl Sandburg. No serious reader reads Shakespeare exclusively, and consider the poor soul who consumes a steady diet of Sandburg. 

I was surprised in 2023 when The European Conservative, of all journals, published an essay titled “A.E. Housman, Poet and Pessimist” by the American writer Thomas Banks. He makes his judgment clear in the first sentence: “[I]t is not likely that either the critic or the lay reader would represent him as a major poet.” To substantiate his conclusion, Banks cites the relatively small quantity of poems Housman produced and continues: “Additionally, the verse he wrote, though for quality it is one of the most even bodies of composition in the English language, is as slender in its themes as it is slight in its volume.”

 

Does “slender in its themes” mean Housman’s themes are small in number or trivial in substance? There’s no law obligating poets to address some phantom number of subjects, and it’s surely not the latter. Consider XL from A Shropshire Lad, a poem that has mysteriously charmed me since I was a teenager:

 

“Into my heart an air that kills 

  From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

  What spires, what farms are those? 

 

“That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

  And cannot come again.”

 

I’ve been reading Landor lately and was pleased to see Banks liken him to Housman:

 

“Housman was not a dry man, and he cast less peaceful and somber a shadow on the page than he probably thought. Something like Walter Savage Landor’s ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’ does not really get at the heart of the man, for in truth, Housman was professionally combative and none to suffer fools gladly. The same, ironically, could be said for the Romanesque Landor himself, whose notoriously acrimonious nature gives the lie to ‘The Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher.’”

 

Housman was Kingsley Amis’ favorite poet and Philip Larkin called him, with Larkin-esque authority, “the poet of unhappiness,” though he added provocatively that Housman “seems to have been a very nice man.” In more than his devotion to Juvenal, Housman reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson. Consider the hatred of cant they shared, the passionate, sometimes tortured inner lives they led, and their devotion to scholarship. Banks respects Housman enough to take him seriously and not trivialize his poems. Nothing is accomplished by labeling a writer “major” or “minor,” except perhaps discouraging future readers. Banks acknowledges that Housman left us “a few poems of exquisite perfectionism.” He writes well, never raises the subject of Housman’s homosexuality and proves he has a sense of humor:

 

“Creation was for him pulvis et umbrae [dust and shadows] and no more, in spite of any appearance to the contrary. The vision addresses itself to the reader in nearly everything he wrote, and never is it mitigated by even an occasional coloring of optimism. The narrator of quite a number of the Shropshire poems tenders the eternal consolation of the glum, that at least our lot now is no worse than anyone’s ever was, and the present is no blacker than the past or future. The Valley of the Shadow of Death has no sunny uplands at either end of it, so let us study perseverance at the expense of hope. Of all mature attitudes, this is one of the least enviable. So, concluding, he was not one for causes. An intensely private man, he is a monument to a time, long since lost to us, when not every man or woman of letters felt the urge to pester the editor about the evils of processed food or Big Tobacco.”

 

Housman was born on this date, March 26, in 1859 and died at age seventy-seven in 1936. Go here and here to read more by Thomas Banks, a first-rate writer.

'The Least Motion of Wonder in Himself'

In 1968, my high-school English teacher loaned me the anthology of short stories she had used at Kent State University just a few years earlier. Included were the usual suspects -- Maupassant, Hemingway, Chekhov, Eudora Welty – but I read them because I knew nothing. Among the unknowns was Flannery O’Connor and her “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a title I knew as a young blues fan from the Bessie Smith song. I stayed up late one school night and read the story in bed. I had never encountered anything so violent and disturbing that came under the heading of “literature” and was defiantly not pulp. It was more shocking than a vicious film noir like “Kiss of Death.” Hugh Kenner would call O’Connor’s story a “nice morbid little shocker.” 

To this day I’ve never read anything like O’Connor’s mingling of murderousness and what might be called applied theology – a combination I've seldom encountered outside Dante. As a non-Catholic, my understanding is not profound. At first I read it for the Misfit’s psychotic behavior – and the narcissistic grandmother’s comeuppance. Now it’s a permanent gloss on the human condition.

 

In her final short story, “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor has O.E. (Obadiah Elihue) Parker, at age fourteen, see a tattooed man at the county fair. The sight transforms his life:

 

“Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”

 

Self-absorbed and always self-seeking, Parker has never indulged in a self-reflective thought. He moves by instinct, following obscure impulses as they lead him. In his Rambler essay for July 9, 1751, Johnson writes:

 

"It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of inquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate inquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing; and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties."

 

Parker sleeps in “the gloomy quiescence of astonishment,” at least until he crashes a tractor into a tree and instinctively yells, “God above!” I’m not describing influence; more an elective affinity. O’Connor admired Johnson’s work, especially his Lives of the Poets. His name shows up five times in her published letters, The Habit of Being (1979), always with approval. We know from Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (ed. Arthur F. Kinney, 1985) that her personal library included Dr. Johnson’s Prayers (ed. Elton Trueblood, 1947) and a two-volume Lives of the Poets, as well as Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

 

Johnson and O’Connor would have agreed that evil is a mystery to be endured not a problem to be solved, and that self-delusion is endemic among humans. On April 14, 1750, Johnson wrote in The Rambler:

 

“When a man finds himself led, though by a train of honest sentiments, to wish for that which he has no right, he should start back as from a pitfall covered with flowers. He that fancies he should benefit the public more in a great station than the man that fills it will in time imagine it an act of virtue to supplant him; and as opposition readily kindles into hatred, his eagerness to do that good, to which he is not called, will betray him to crimes, which in his original scheme were never proposed.”

 

Today is O’Connor’s centenary. She was born on March 25, 1925, and died in 1964 at age thirty-nine from systemic lupus erythematosus.

 

[Kenner’s quip can be found in Vol. 1, p. 268 of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018).]

'The Earliest of My Friends Is Gone'

I often speak or exchange texts with my nephew. Soon he’ll turn thirty-six, but he lives in Cleveland, 1,200 miles away, and I seldom see him. Distance warps the sense of duration, so I think of him as frozen in his early twenties. We spoke on Sunday and for the first time since my brother’s death last August, we didn’t even mention his father. When I realized this afterwards I felt a pang of guilt, as though I were forgetting him. But attending to the living supersedes our obligations to the dead. They don’t constitute a cult to be worshipped. They live in memory and in that way we weigh their losses and honor them. On February 24, 1854, Walter Savage Land0r's sister Elizabeth died after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-seven. A month later he wrote a poem about her titled “March 24”: 

“Sharp crocus wakes the froward year;

In their old haunts birds reappear;

From yonder elm, yet black with rain,

The cushat looks deep down for grain

Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes

The redbreast to the sill for crumbs.

Fly off! fly off! I can not wait

To welcome ye, as she of late.

The earliest of my friends is gone.

Alas! almost my only one!

The few as dear, long wafted o’er,

Await me on a sunnier shore.”

 

Some glosses: “froward,” despite what my spell-check software tells me, is not a typo. Here is the OED definition, which is applicable to Landor himself -- “disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” "Cushat" is Scottish and northern England dialect for a wood pigeon or ring-dove.

In his 1954 biography of Landor, R.H. Super writes of him after Elizabeth's death: "He told [John] Forster [his friend and first biographer] that the loss of his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend had deprived him of sleep, appetite, digestion, everything."

'Better to Have a Distinct Word for Each Sense'

On Monday, March 23, [1772], I found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary.” 

Dr. Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary on April 15, 1755, two-hundred-seventy years ago. It contained some 42,000 entries and he had worked on it for seven years. It’s great innovation, the reason we still read it, are the 114,00 citations that accompany the entries. The Dictionary can be read as an anthology of English literature (the way Jefferson read it), with Johnson relying most heavily on Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Pope and Dryden. As a young man, Robert Browning read the Dictionary in order to “qualify” as an author. Samuel Beckett found words to recycle into his own work. Boswell continues in his Life:

 

“Mr. Peyton, one of his original amanuenses, was writing for him. I put him in mind of a meaning of the word side, which he had omitted, viz. relationship; as father’s side, mother’s side [see definition eight]. He inserted it.”

 

The Dictionary is a substantial volume, built to last. By “folio,” Boswell means the pages measured eighteen inches by twenty inches – larger than most books published today. I enjoy comparing Johnson's entries with those in the Oxford English Dictionary, which often cites Johnson. 

 

“I asked him if humiliating was a good word. He said, he had seen it frequently used, but he did not know it to be legitimate English. [Johnson omitted the word.] He would not admit civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses, which civility is, in his way of using it.”

 

A second edition followed a few weeks after the first. It was published in 165 weekly sections. The third edition followed in 1765. The fourth, which came out in 1773, included heavy revisions of the original work by Johnson, who identified himself as a lexicographer, defined as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

'What a Delight in Being a Discoverer!'

The library catalogue said Walter Savage Landor’s Poems, the 1964 Centaur Press edition selected and introduced by Geoffrey Grigson, had not been checked out by another patron (hardly surprising) and should be on the shelf. I couldn’t find it. Not a good sign. That could mean the volume had been stolen (not likely) or misshelved. In either case, it might be lost forever. 

While heading to the circulation desk on the first floor to report the missing book, I passed through the voluminous Dickens section, and there among the commentaries and biographies, with a dark blue cover and typography on the spine resembling an Oxford University Press volume, was the Landor Poems I had been looking for, hiding in plain sight. A clerk had likely misshelved it.

 

The error is partially understandable. Dickens based his character Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House on his friend Landor and named his fourth child Walter Savage Landor Dickens. I’ve come to almost expect such acts of happy serendipity, especially in libraries. I once found a twenty-dollar bill in a history of Argentina.

 

Recently I had read “Pericles and Aspasia” from Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Aspasia says to Cleone: “Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library. What a delight in being a discoverer! Among a loose accumulation of poetry, the greater part excessively bad, the verses I am about to transcribe are perhaps the least so.” The following poem is mediocre so I’ll transcribe only the opening stanza:

 

“Life passes not as some men say,

If you will only urge his stay,

And treat him kindly all the while

He flies the dizzy strife of towns,

Cowers before thunder-bearing frowns.

But freshens up again at song and smile.”

'Your Literary Judgments Are Not Interesting'

All of us when young – readers, I mean – fancy ourselves rebels and independent thinkers but most of us are afflicted to varying degrees with the superego of the age. That is, we are influenced, whether we know it or not, by the critical climate, by the judgments and fashions of critics and other readers, especially those among our contemporaries.

For decades starting in my early teens my model of a great writer, one worthy of rereading, study, annotation and – though I would have denied it – worship, was James Joyce. Now I know that much of my veneration for the Irishman was rooted in his reputation for difficulty. Dubliners and Ulysses remain among the supreme works of twentieth-century fiction, and one wonders what all the fuss was about regarding the purported obscurity of the latter. Today, any reasonably attentive reader can enjoy Ulysses without breaking a sweat, though I wouldn’t reread Finnegans Wake with a gun to my head.

Never underestimate the role of snobbery in human affairs, especially among readers, writers and anyone associated with the academic study of literature. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve generally lost interest in ranking writers and books – including deciding who is major and who is minor -- and gained interest in those who appeal to me and reward my efforts, regardless of pedigree. It’s not unlike friendship. At some point we decide who is worth spending time with, who is reliable, worthy of trust and who rewards our efforts.  

I’ve scratched some writers from my mental list of favorites but added many more, most of whom I ignored when young. A few examples, mostly English: Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter Savage Landor, E.A. Robinson, Rebecca West, Charles Doughty, Paul Valéry, Walter de la Mare. Another is Desmond MacCarthy, who collected the essay “Literary Snobs” in Criticism (1932). He speaks to the snobs:

“It is true that your literary judgments are not interesting, but you get a great deal of fun out of your rapid revulsions and temporary admirations – and fun is human. Moreover, if you are always ludicrously unfair, you are at any rate unstinting in praise while giving it, which is, in a way, amiable.”

[Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books has published Criticism and five other MacCarthy titles, along with links to dozens of other good books.]

'Gives to Airy Nothing a Local Habitation'

What attracted me was the anthologist’s audacity in titling his book: 100 Best Poems in the English Language (1952). In his introduction, Stephen Graham does little to impress us with his literary humility. His anthology is, he writes, “perhaps the only one of its kind, being exclusive, not inclusive.” The contents are arranged chronologically, from the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” to Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The most often represented poets, with five poems each, are Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Three Americans are here – Poe, Whitman and Lanier (“The Marshes of Glynn”). No Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot or Stevens. Graham includes two poets I had never heard of -- Arthur O’Shaughnessy (“Ode”) and John Davidson (“The Last Journey”). 

In other words, Graham’s anthology is rather predictable – in 1952 and in 2025 -- and stuffed with warhorses and no previously undiscovered treasures. “Of course,” the editor admits, magnanimously, “everyone is entitled to make his own selection of what he would consider the hundred best poems in the language.” A nice choice for the volume’s epigraph, unaccompanied by source, is spoken by Theseus in Act V, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

  

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.”

 

Best of all is the bookplate pasted to the front endpaper:

 

“From the Library of

Edgar Odell Lovett

First President of the Rice Institute”

 

Lovett (1871-1957) served as president of Rice University from 1912 until his retirement in 1946. He was educated and employed as a mathematician but I have borrowed dozens of books from his personal library, now in the collection of Rice’s Fondren Library, and all were belles lettres – poetry, essays, fiction, literary biography. Such university presidents have long been extinct.

'They Will Never Seem Boring'

“And my final advice is to try, every week or so, to learn something by heart. A surprising amount will remain in the memory, and more and more as you train it; and then, as you walk or work or sit in the subway, you will have something more than daily trivialities to occupy your mind.” 

One can’t imagine a university professor today making such a suggestion to anyone, let alone the public or even his own students. To make the advice seem even more exotic, consider that the speaker is a professor of classics at Columbia University who hosted a weekly radio show broadcast on Tuesday evenings at 9:05 p.m. on WQXR in New York City. His only stipulation from the station was that he confine himself to “books of a high standard or else open up some question of broad literary or social interest.”

 

Gilbert Highet’s show aired on hundreds of stations in the U.S. and Canada from 1952 to 1959 and was picked up by the Voice of America and BBC. Highet edited his radio talks into essays and published them in five volumes, including People, Places, and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), The Powers of Poetry (1960), and Explorations (1971). I’ve been reading Talents and Geniuses: The Pleasures of Appreciation (1957). Highet’s tone is not dry and academic but conversational, man-to-man. It must have been a pleasure to hear him on the radio. There’s no hint of condescension. He flatters us by assuming we are interested and able to follow him and appreciate what he’s saying. The essay quoted above is “Permanent Books.” Highet (1906-78) was a “small-d” democrat, a Jeffersonian:  

 

“For civilized people, reading is an essential activity. Those who do not read, in the middle of a literate society, are in danger of making themselves into half-savages. Now, reading is of two different kinds. Some reading is temporary; some reading is what might be called permanent.”

 

The “temporary” sort includes newspapers, popular magazines, detective stories, “light romances,” etc. “These are like modern motorcars and modern buildings,” he writes, “constructed to look bright and shiny and smart, to be worn out quickly, and to be replaced by something brighter and shinier in a few months or years.”

 

Highet is probably best known for writing The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), though the book I remember most fondly is Poets in a Landscape (1957). In “Permanent Books” he states the obvious: some books never become obsolete and are “built to last,” as he puts it. He cites obvious candidates: Dante’s Commedia, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare, Rabelais and Cervantes. “These books and others like them can be read by an intelligent man,” he writes, “not once, but many, many times at different periods throughout his life; they will never seem boring; they will always give him some new intellectual and emotional experience; they are versatile companions and tireless teachers.”

 

Such books are not to be confined to the classroom or otherwise segregated from life. Often in his essay, I feel Highet is rather eerily describing my experience with reading and books. He lived in a happier, healthier world in which scholars could reasonably assume substantial numbers of common readers sought pleasure and “self-improvement” in the books they read, and that they would find it. He concludes:

 

“That is part of the answer to the question ‘Why does one study and teach Greek and Latin?’ It is because the best books are lasting books; many Greek and Latin books are lasting; and only such books are truly worth teaching for a lifetime, and studying for a lifetime.”

'The Very Empire of Connotation'

“[T]he partisan of parsimony sees prose as a vehicle for meaning and nothing more, even if their feigned rhetoric-of-no-rhetoric is in reality one of the oldest rhetorical gambits there is.” 

I have a taste for two seemingly mutually exclusive schools of prose that may not be all that different after all. Naturally, I favor the aphoristic clarity represented by Jonathan Swift, as in a Tatler essay from 1709: “There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.” If a writer is most concerned with banishing ambiguity and making himself promptly understood, that's the way to go. Despite the just-the-facts,-ma’am approach, this too is rich prose, which has more to do with density of meaning simply stated than with subject-verb-object desiccation.

 

And then there’s the more obviously stylized prose we call baroque. In our post-literate literary world, this approach is sometimes dismissed as elitist, confusing and self-indulgent. Its exemplar is Sir Thomas Browne, as in Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658): “But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”

 

“Partisans of parsimony” will object that the language is stilted or inflated: “Nobody talks that way.” Yet, by Browne’s standards, the sentences are perfectly transparent, true to the era that gave us the King James Bible. Such prose, when matched to meaning and context, draws us in as co-authors and invites readerly collaboration. We linger and ponder. And remember that among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited nearly eight-hundred times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior and veterinarian.

 

Ed Simon in “Punic Encomium” talks up the latter approach to prose composition, and Browne is his object lesson. (I learned of Simon’s essay from Mike Juster.) “[T]he mavens of MFA programs and the nabobs of newsrooms,” Simon writes, “have long pushed the ornate out of style. Author Ben Masters explains that, ‘Embellished prose is treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent.’ And not just overwritten, pretentious, and self-indulgent, but in a word, purple.” The first example of a purple writer in the negative sense who comes to mind is William H. Gass, who is nobody’s idea of a collaborator with his readers. Gass is far from stupid but he’s strictly a showoff, regurgitating his Thesaurus. Counter examples are A.J. Liebling and Cynthia Ozick at their best.

 

There’s plenty in Simon’s essay to question but in the end he is celebrating our grand inheritance of English. This reader revels in his dismissal of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (1919; rev. 1959), and Orwell’s preaching about prose in “Politics and the English Language” (1946). Simon offers “a counter-manifesto, a new style-guide for those who’d choose the gnomic over the obvious, the esoteric over the mundane, the allegorical over the literal,” in the form of six proposed rules. All are worth considering. Style is so personal a matter, think about them and run them through your own blender before serving. These are not laws but suggestions. For instance, in Rule #2:

 

“Prefer not the short word for its brevity, but rather choose the appropriate word. Remember that every word with its etymology, its history both spoken and hidden, its network of correspondences both seen and unseen, its branching central nervous system of dendritic connection to the rest of language, is the very empire of connotation.”

 

Simon is an inspired moralist at heart, as in Rule #6: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” Any self-aware writer who works daily to write better, to be more interesting and less “barbarous,” can revitalize his love of words reading Simon.

'To Have the Heart Partially Erased'

“Hatred, suspicion, malice and madness seem to be reaching new highs everywhere. . . . Perhaps madness, like cancer, is a way of life trying to transcend itself.” 

This might be a template for next week’s column, a pundit’s lamentation ready for copying-and-pasting. In fact, Louise Bogan wrote it on St. Patrick’s Day 1939 in a letter to her friend Rolfe Humphries, the poet and translator.  

 

Nineteen-thirty-eight had been the year of the Moscow show trials, the Anschluss, the annexation of the Sudetenland, Munich and Kristallnacht. Louis MacNeice completed his masterpiece, Autumn Journal, a month before Bogan wrote her letter. His long poem documents, in part, the previous year’s cascade of disasters in Europe and would be published in May. The Second Sino-Japanese War continued. One day before Bogan wrote her letter, German troops marched into Prague. Three days later, the U.S. withdrew its ambassador to Germany and the Nazis burned more than 5,000 pieces of “degenerate art.” In less than six months, Germany would invade Poland and World War II would formally begin.

 

In the Fall 1938 issue of Partisan Review, Bogan had published one of her best-known poems, “Several Voices Out of a Cloud.” Among its themes is madness:   

 

“Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!

Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and

wherever deserved.

 

“Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,

Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless. And it isn't for you.”

 

In the same issue, in an unsigned column, the editors write: “Hitler is now the master of continental Europe. The ‘democracies’ stand exposed as his collaborators. On the wreck of the Versailles system arises the specter of a new Holy Alliance.”  

 

Bogan continues in her letter to Humphries: “We do not even know if it is better to have the heart partially erased—to be ‘normal’ and at peace—or whether the mad and damned who ‘howl away their hearts’ are not, after all, the highest manifestation of the life-force. . . .”

[For the Bogan letter quoted above, see A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]

'Pic-nic and Polka'

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) was an English theologian, a learned man who amassed a library of more than 12,000 volumes. In 1828, Walter Savage Landor published the third volume of his Imaginary Conversations and included one titled “Archdeacon Hare and Walter Landor.” The dialogue is less combative than others and the mood is friendly. I reread it the other day and enjoyed this exchange: 

Hare: “Regarding the occasional in poetry; is there less merit in taking and treating what is before us, than in seeking and wandering through an open field as we would for mushrooms?”

 

As the name suggests, occasional poetry commemorates a specific event, perhaps a wedding or birth. Landor has a knack for selecting a memorably homely image or word choice. The mushrooms are a pleasant surprise.

Landor: “I stand out a rude rock in the middle of a river, with no exotic or parasitical plant on it, and few others. Eddies and dimples and froth and bubbles pass rapidly by, without shaking me. Here indeed is little room for pic-nic [sic] and polka.”

 

Again, a wonderful surprise. For many readers, the Imaginary Conversations can be formidable. The language is sometimes antiquated and may seem stilted to a contemporary reader. But Landor rewards us with the occasional “pic-nic and polka.” Take this from Landor speaking in the same dialogue:

 

“But prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.”

'But Man Is Not Born for Happiness'

“[P]oets are a very worthless, wicked set of people.” 

How did William Cowper, himself a fine and neglected poet, come to this conclusion? In a letter to Rev. John Newton, written March 15, 1784, Cowper tells his friend he has just finished reading the eight volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). It includes critical/biographical profiles of fifty-two poets, most of whom lived in the eighteenth century, an age rich in “Mad Poets” – William Collins, Christopher Smart, Thomas Chatterton, William Blake and Cowper himself. Here is the context in his letter to Newton:

 

“In all that number I observe but one man—a poet of no great fame—of whom I did not know that he existed till I found him there, whose mind seems to have had the slightest tincture of religion; and he was hardly in his senses. His name was Collins. He sank into a state of melancholy, and died young. Not long before his death he was found at his lodgings in Islington, by his biographer, with the New Testament in his hand. He said to Johnson, ‘I have but one book, but it is the best.’ Of him, therefore, there are some hopes. But from the lives of all the rest there is but one inference to be drawn—that poets are a very worthless, wicked set of people.”

 

Cowper (1731-1800), a veteran of suicide attempts and multiple confinements to the mad house, takes a moralistic view of madness. He understands his depressive disorder and periodic abatement of it in terms of his relation to God. Madness meant he was being punished, condemned to hell. In his “Life of Collins,” Johnson is empathetic and forgiving:

 

“He designed many works, but his great fault was irresolution, or the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his schemes, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose. A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote enquiries.”

 

Johnson generalizes from Collins’ case: “But man is not born for happiness. Collins, who, while he ‘studied to live,’ felt no evil but poverty, no sooner ‘lived to study’ than his life was assailed by more dreadful calamities, disease and insanity.”

 

Johnson, of course, had his own “mental health issues.” In his Life, in a passage dated 1729, the year Johnson turned thirty, Boswell makes a distinction between melancholy and madness:

 

“The powers of his great mind might be troubled, and their full exercise suspended at times; but the mind itself was ever entire. As a proof of this, it is only necessary to consider, that, when he was at the very worst, he composed that state of his own case, which shewed an uncommon vigour, not only of fancy and taste, but of judgement. I am aware that he himself was too ready to call such a complaint by the name of madness; in conformity with which notion, he has traced its gradations, with exquisite nicety, in one of the chapters of his Rasselas [1759]. But there is surely a clear distinction between a disorder which affects only the imagination and spirits, while the judgement is sound, and a disorder by which the judgement itself is impaired.”

In those pre-psychiatric days, diagnoses were not medically rigorous, as we would understand it. It’s sufficient to say Collins, Cowper and the others were “troubled,” not given to buoyant vivacity. Saddest of all is Johnson’s judgment of Collins' poetry:

 

“His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants. As men are often esteemed who cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure.”

'Thanks for This Fancy, Insect King'

I once spent most of a day in an upstate New York marsh with a neuroethologist, a biologist who studies how an animal’s nervous system determines its behavior. His specialty was the order Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies. Like any journalist who’s paying attention, I got a free education. These elusive, jewel-like insects rank (with hawks and ladybugs) among nature’s most viciously efficient hunters. His research showed their kill rate topped ninety-seven percent. Eighty percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision, and their field of vision is 360 degrees. 

This is the time of year in Texas when we see the first seasonal return of various species, from dormancy during the winter cold or migration. The first monarch butterfly visited our front garden about two weeks ago. Every day I see anoles on the ground and among the leaves of various plants, mosquitoes and a male cardinal singing in a crepe myrtle, likely seeking a mate. Informally, out of admiration for their hunting prowess, I’ve collected a small anthology of dragonfly poems, including my favorite, “The Dragonfly” (1961) by Louise Bogan, and “The Dragon-Fly” (1833) by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Here is my latest discovery, “Lines to a Dragon Fly” (1806) by Walter Savage Landor:

 

“Life (priest and poet say) is but a dream;

I wish no happier one than to be laid

Beneath some cool syringa’s scented shade

Or wavy willow, by the running stream,

Brimful of Moral, where the Dragon Fly

Wanders as careless and content as I.

 

“Thanks for this fancy, insect king,

Of purple crest and filmy wing,

Who with indifference givest up

The water-lily’s golden cup,

To come again and overlook

What I am writing in my book.

Believe me, most who read the line

Will read with hornier eyes than thine;

And yet their souls shall live for ever,

And thine drop dead into the river!

God pardon them, O insect king,

Who fancy so unjust a thing!”

 

Less entomologically acute than Bogan’s poem, Landor’s is typically Romantic and not rigorously scientific. “Hornier” doesn’t mean what you think. The OED gives “callous or hardened so as to be horn-like in texture,” like a weapon.