'Indulgence in Pure Corn'

George Santayana is reduced to a single squib, frequently misquoted--“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”--from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-06). Herman Melville, of course, wrote “Call me Ishmael,” followed by some other stuff, and Andrew Marvell yearns for “world enough and time,” just like the rest of us. Literature comes in conveniently individual servings like the much-touted TV dinners of my youth. 

It's a left-handed tribute to a writer that he has composed a sentence or phrase detached from context and quoted by those who have never read his work and perhaps have never heard his name. The risk, of course, is misquotation, not to mention misunderstanding. Often the remembered passage is distorted when turned into an autonomous aphorism. Sometimes it’s sub-prime material, hardly worth quoting. Robert Conquest has a poem titled “Quando Dormitant” (“When They Sleep,” in Penultima, 2009), which begins:

 

“Among the century’s most quoted lines

Are some that don’t send shivers up our spines.

Either a good poet, briefly, has foresworn

His talent with indulgence in pure corn

Or, high-prestiged, demanding our respect

Slams down fool’s gold and dares us to object.

Examples that critic designates

Are Auden, Eliot, Lowell, Thomas, Yeats –”

 

Conquest then quotes well-known phrases from each poet and questions their worth. Auden, of course, famously and rather ridiculously wrote “We must love one another or dies.” Conquest credits Auden with giving “it a questioning look, and then he withdrew it.” With T.S. Eliot, he finds “April is the cruellest month” rather dubious and proposes February as a more appropriate choice. Conquest cites Robert Lowell’s “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will,” the closing line from “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” only to dismiss it. He’s especially good on that silly warhorse by Dylan Thomas:

 

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’

--But if it’s good, acceptance should be right,

So perhaps he’d better have reserved his rage

For his discomforts at an earlier age.”

 With Yeats’ “Easter, 1916,” Conquest is especially damning:

 

“’A terrible beauty is born.’—shocked thought

With partisan rhetoric overwrought

--Not used when his own Free State lot

Had seventy-odd republicans shot.”

 

Ultimately, Conquest is forgiving, sort of. His final stanza:

 

“But still, the bards are far less to be blamed

Than those who’ve kept the public spotlight aimed

Askew.—So amnesty’s hereby proclaimed.”

 

Conquest is careful to mix legitimately great poets – Auden, Eliot, Yeats – with their inferiors – Lowell and Thomas.

 

[“Quando Dormitant” is also included in Conquest’s Collected Poems (Waywiser Press, 2020).]