'Poetry That Nobody Nowadays Reads'

Once I patronized a library book sale where volumes were sold not by age, condition, whether paperback or hard cover, and certainly not by literary worth but by weight. On the table by the exit was a scale, the flat-topped sort associated with butcher shops. The arrangement was a gimmick the librarians found endlessly amusing, with much joking about “adding another pork chop.” Most of the books on sale, as usual, were self-help and popular fiction, and I found nothing to buy, which disappointed me because I would have enjoyed owning a volume valued in so egalitarian a fashion.

Late in life, Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen) wrote the column “Bones of Contention” for The Nationalist and Leinster Times in Ireland, using yet another pseudonym, George Knowall. Earlier he had written the better-known and generally funnier column “Cruiskeen Lawn” for The Irish Times. O’Brien (1911-66) is one of the funniest writers in the language (see At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, et al.). In 2012, the Lilliput Press published Myles Away from Dublin, a selection of the later columns. Here is one titled “Weighty Volume”:

“At this sixpenny barrow I bought the autobiography, in two volumes, of Henry Taylor. When I got the books home, I weighed them on my wife’s balance in the kitchen and they weigh four and a quarter pounds. I have never heard of Henry Taylor but the books were published in 1885 Longmans, Green and Co. I have not read Mr Taylor’s account of himself but a furtive glance at one volume gives me the suspicion that this man was a poet, or thought he was. A frontpiece portrait shows him looking very old and sporting an enormous white wig. Why did he waste so much valuable time growing so very old and writing that poetry that nobody nowadays reads and probably never read?

“The subtitle of the first volume intrigues me. Just this modest phrase – ‘Vol. I: 1800-1844’. Forty-four years of abject futility, squeezed into one volume, weighing over two pounds avoirdupois.”

Yes, Henry Taylor (1800-86) was a genuine poet, dramatist and a clerk in England’s Colonial Office, and like O’Brien/Knowall I’ve never read a word of his work. O’Brien was a master of the blackest of Irish black humor and wrote authoritatively of “abject futility.”