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 die.”
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).]
4 comments:
Have you seen the fake Shakespeare quotes all over the internet?
Or the actual quotes shared as though they were said by Shakespeare and opinions held by Shakespeare, when they're just something said by his characters? Like "Brevity is the soul of wit" or "To thine own self be true"?
Irritating.
Poor old Larkin has suffered this fate doubly: 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad' and 'What will survive of us is love'.
It's a mercy that "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" is the only line of Allen Ginsburg's that stuck to the wall.
To be fair to Thomas raging was the attitude of a young man and since he never lived to be an old one, having drunk himself early into the grave, he never reached the equanimity of age.
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