'Rest and Have Ease'

William Wordsworth in anyone’s book is a major poet but I seldom read him any longer because I find much of his work dull as dishwater. There was a time when that sentiment could have consigned me to non-personhood in certain literary circles. His contemporary Walter Savage Landor is rightly judged a minor poet but I return with pleasure to his epigrams. Am I confused? Cutely paradoxical? Can we make such distinctions? The American poet Robert B. Shaw addresses these questions in “The Puzzle of Minor Poetry”: 

“Like many others, over the years I have been often bemused, and sometimes rankled, by the terms ‘minor poet’ and ‘minor poetry.’ The adjective ‘minor’ seems at once vague and peremptory. Vague: The suggestion is that such poetry is called minor because something is wrong with it, but since there are many ways in which poems can go wrong, this is not helpfully descriptive. Peremptory: The implication is that such poetry will not repay our expenditure of time and attention like the work of a major poet will—and yet anyone who reads poetry with more than cursory attention can attest that this is not the case.”

 

Shaw’s honesty is refreshing. He confirms my experience. I first encountered many, perhaps most, of the poets I enjoy and admire (and many whom I learned to ignore) in anthologies. Shaw argues the case for a writer whose work I hardly know, Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962), judging him a good minor poet, worthy of the reader’s attention:

 

“He is known exclusively for the handful of his poems that for much of the twentieth century appeared in anthologies. He is undoubtedly a minor poet, yet his work is more complex than his ‘anthology poems’ would suggest.”

 

A genre of essays I especially appreciate are those dedicated to obscure, neglected or utterly forgotten writers. Alexander Smith (1830-67), the Scottish essayist, is a good example. So are American essayist Agnes Repplier (1855-1950) and American poet Catherine Davis (1924-2002). No one would canonize these writers but to ignore them is foolish and to deny oneself honest pleasure. Too often, “major status” is the work of marketing or fashion, not a critical sense.

 

To put alongside Shaw’s Hodgson I would propose another minor English poet, Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940). His poems are wispy, often nostalgic and reminiscent of Walter de la Mare’s. Here is “In the Street of Lost Time” (The Unknown Goddess, 1925):

 

“Rest and have ease;

here are no more voyages;

fold, fold your narrow, pale hands;

and under the veil of night lie,

 

“as I have seen you

Lie in your deep hair;

but patiently now that new loves,

new days have gone their ways.”