'These Ghosts Which Claim My Book'

Long ago, during a telephone conversation with the late poet and dear friend Helen Pinkerton, I asked about her friendship with another poet, Edgar Bowers, likewise a former student of Yvor Winters at Stanford. She remembered Bowers as good company, a friend who enjoyed social life and lively conversation with people he liked and trusted. Georgia-born Bowers could be crusty and disapproving of bad taste and bad manners. Here is Helen’s elegy “For Edgar Bowers” (Taken in Faith, 2002): 

“I heard that you were dead, Edgar, and wept.

I thought of times at Miramar we watched

The sun go down, the southern stars emerge,

Hearing the long roll and the crash of surf,

While we sat talking, laughing, drinking till dawn.

 

“Your ashes lie now by the western sea,

Quiet as those of Winters and Valéry.

 

“Your poems live, the spirit’s breath and seed.

Hades, who would take all, spare them his greed.”

 

Conversation, again. Helen adds, below the title, “After Callimachus,” a reference to the third-century-B.C. Greek poet. I hear an echo of lines from a Callimachus poem titled “On Himself” in The Greek Anthology (trans. Peter Jay, 1973). The Greek was born in Cyrene, in modern Libya, and sometimes called himself Battiades, “son of Battos,” after the mythical founder of Cyrene:

 

“You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,

Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy

Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.”

 

Helen asked me during that telephone conversation if I found the poems in Bowers’ first collection, The Form of Loss (1956), difficult. Indeed, I did. The lines are often so compressed that ready comprehension is delayed, at best. Here is “To the Reader,” the prologue to that debut collection:

 

“These poems are too much tangled with the error

And waste they would complete. My soul repays me,

Who fix it by a rhythm, with reason’s terror

Of hearing the swift motion that betrays me.

Mine be the life and failure. But do not look

Too closely for these ghosts which claim my book.”

 

I’ve lived with Bowers’ poems for years. The early one especially are inexhaustible and release their secrets slowly, across the years. The tone is at once melancholy, humble and reverent of the past. Among the ghosts one hears are Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville.

Among the participants in “How Shall a Generation Know Its Story: The Edgar Bowers Conference and Exhibition” in 2003, three years after Bowers’ death, was the poet and friend to Bowers,  Suzanne Doyle. Her contribution is a series of excerpts from Bowers’ emails to her: “My friendship with Edgar in the last few years of his life,” she writes, “was one long rendition of Ben Jonson’s poem, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper,’ and this happy state of affairs is documented in our email exchange:

 

From 1996: “[M]ost ‘philosophers’ write foolishly about art . . . if you find a copy of [Etienne] Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience, get that! It’s a wonderful book, fun as fiction, and always something to talk about. Also Eric Voegelin’s The Mind of the Polis . . . Another wonderful book for its own sake and philosophical in the true sense and full of learning and information and insight. . . . I’m off tonight to a class in Chinese Cooking that Heals!”

 

Bowers died twenty-five years ago today, on February 4, 2000, at age seventy-five.