Showing posts with label Robert Lowell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Lowell. Show all posts

Friday, January 13, 2023

Edgar Allan Poe and The Pale Blue Eye


Scott Cooper: The Pale Blue Eye (2022)


Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe

Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,
Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange !

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre oyant jadis l’ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.

Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief !
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s’orne,

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur,
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.


- Stéphane Mallarmé (1887)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Stéphane Mallarmé (2022)


I thought I'd start off my discussion of the recent Netflix movie The Pale Blue Eye - which I very much enjoyed, in case anyone's wondering - by quoting Mallarmé's immortal poem "The Tomb of Edgar Poe."

I was going to add a literal translation of it, but then I ran across the one below, by American poet Richard Wilbur, which it's hard to imagine improving on:
The Tomb of Edgar Poe

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven - O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.


Is it just me, or do you see some resemblance between the whiskery face of France's greatest symbolist poet and that of Christian Bale, above, in his role as "Landor" in the movie?

Mallarmé's implication that it is poets who are meant to give "a purer sense to the words of the tribe" [Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu] lies at the heart of Modernist aesthetics. It ranks with Baudelaire - another Poe fanatic - and his view of the poet as a wave-riding albatross, expounded in his verse of the same name:
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher
.
The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.
(The translation, this time, is by George Dillon, Edna St. Vincent Millay's collaborator in their joint 1936 version of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil)


Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)


Edgar Allan Poe ... yes, we know all about him (or think we do): the inventor of the detective story; the misunderstood genius, betrayed by the vindictive jealousy of his literary executor, Rufus Griswold, who almost single-handedly constructed the myth of his drunkenness and infamy; the visionary poet, first recognised by the French before the English-language world reluctantly followed their example; and - somewhat surprisingly - once, briefly, a cadet at West Point, where the film is quite correct in placing him.

What then of the Holmes to Poe's Watson, Augustus Landor? Well, the "Augustus" comes, presumably, from Poe's own prototypical detective Auguste Dupin, the protagonist of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", and the distinctly Borgesian "Purloined Letter".



As for "Landor", rather than English poet Walter Savage Landor, it seems probable that his surname is meant to refer to the little-known vignette "Landor's Cottage" - the last story Poe ever wrote, in fact - which describes the house he himself was living in at the time. The Landor of the film, too, inhabits a particularly picturesque and bookish cottage.


Louis Bayard: The Pale Blue Eye (2006)


Mind you, most of this inventiveness must be attributed, not so much to the film-makers as to the author of the novel the movie is based on, Louis Bayard. I'm guessing, like many of us, he found frustrating the inconclusiveness of "Landor's cottage": a long descriptive preamble to a promised story to be told in a next instalment which, alas, was never to appear.



All this trivia aside, I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised to find so lukewarm a response to the movie in a number of quarters. Most of them criticised the film's "implausibility" and "inaction", which struck me as a little perverse, given the prevalence of both factors in Poe's own published writings.

As critics then and now have often failed to grasp, with Romantic artists such as Poe, it's all or nothing: you're in or you're out. If you have a problem with orangutans committing murders or with the propensity of Poe's heroines to get themselves buried alive or have their teeth extracted post-mortem, then you'd better stick to realists like Dickens or Trollope.



Or, in this case, you'd better stick to bad parodies of Agatha Christie, such as the dreadfully tedious and poorly plotted recent whodunit above. I was interested to see that many of those who'd awarded The Pale Blue Eye two or three stars had given See How They Run four or five.

It's not, you understand, that I have a problem with Agatha Christie or the other luminaries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in their own right - just with the decision to replay them badly as farce. It does make me realise, though, that in detective films as well as in novels, I'm not really looking for the same things as most aficionados of the genre.



For me, it's all about atmosphere and character. I like the kinds of scenes - so abundant in The Pale Blue Eye - where characters wander around deserted graveyards, or sit in crowded taverns trading witty banter. Best of all are the occasions when large books are taken down from dust-laden shelves and opened to salient passages - translated impromptu, in this case, by Poe himself as Robert Duvall and Christian Bale look on approvingly.

Does any of this advance the plot, or assist us in unmasking the criminal? Not really, no. I don't care. Murders don't really interest me very much - but I do like a picturesque detective, with lots of hidden demons, and a taste for bamboozling even his closest collaborators.

All of this, of course, is anathema to the true devotees of detective fiction. They like an ingenious solution to the mystery, and such curlicues as believable characters or well-painted backdrops are largely irrelevant to them. Hence their preference for the pasteboard mechanics of See How They Run over the ice-bound dramatics of The Pale Blue Eye.


Rian Johnson, dir.: Knives Out (2019)


I suppose, in the end, it's best to have both. I did enjoy the original Knives Out, as well as its sequel Glass Onion, I suppose mainly because Daniel Craig was so obviously having the time of his life playing absurd anti-Bond chicken-fried Southerner Benoit Blanc.

There was, as I recall, some kind of a murder being investigated at the time, but I was more interested in watching the characters score points off one another as each of the superannuated stars tried to steal scenes with ever more outrageous business.


Rian Johnson, dir.: Glass Onion (2022)


Poe, too, could be ridiculous at times (some would say all the time). But he was, in the end, a very serious guy. He felt strongly about the need for rigorous critical judgements in the infancy of American literature, and the hatchet jobs he performed on many of his more celebrated contemporaries were legendary. Funnily enough, many of those authors are now known simply because Poe decided to critique them.

Harry Melling - perhaps better known as Harry Potter's spoilt cousin Dudley Dursley - does an excellent job of animating the touchy, emotional, fiercely intelligent contradiction that was Poe. Some viewers have commented on the incongruity of a Southern accent for someone born in Boston, but Poe did like to portray himself as a Virginian, so this is certainly an arguable quirk to impose on him.

After all, somewhat closer to our own time, Boston Brahmin poet Robert Lowell affected a Southern accent in his own poetry readings - presumably as a salute to his Southern Agrarian mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate - as you can hear in this recording of his 1964 poem "For the Union Dead".


Jane Bown: Robert Lowell


Talking of poetry, there's been a certain amount of discussion of the verses - allegedly dictated to him by his dead mother - Poe quotes halfway through the movie:
Down, down, down
Came the hot threshing flurry
Ill at heart, I beseeched her to hurry
Lenore
She forbore the reply
Endless night
Caught her then in its slurry
Shrouding all, but her pale blue eye
Darkest night, black with hell
Charneled fury
Leaving only
The deathly blue eye
Needless to say, these were not written by Poe - he may have used some dodgy rhymes at times, but I can't see him combining "hurry" with "flurry" and "slurry". Nor is the syntax precise enough for his almost over-controlled style. They do have a pleasing ring in context, though.

His own poem "Lenore", which presumably inspired these lines, is somewhat more conventional in form:
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair - the death upon her eyes
.
Presumably the flimmakers also had in mind the narrator's sorrow for "the lost Lenore" in "The Raven":
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore —
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore —

Nameless here for evermore.


Somewhat bewilderingly, Poe has more than one grave. The simple headstone above - with its appropriately superimposed raven - is in Baltimore, Maryland. His remains were, however, disinterred in 1875 to be shifted under the rather more pompous monument below - presumably the one which inspired Mallarmé's poem.

A somewhat less accomplished verse - by an equally distinguished admirer, Alfred, Lord Tennyson - was composed for the occasion:
Fate that once denied him,
And envy that once decried him,
And malice that belied him,
Now cenotaph his fame.


What more need one say? If you love the hothouse atmosphere of Gothic extravagance, thrill to the overblown prose of H. P. Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury's early collection Dark Carnival - why not return to their admitted master, the divinely gifted Mister Poe?

As his literary soulmate and principal French translator Charles Baudelaire put it in an 1864 letter to Théophile Thoré - with, perhaps, a mixture of admiration and chagrin:
The first time I opened a book he had written, I saw with equal measures of horror and fascination, not just the things that I had dreamed of, but actual phrases that I had designed and that he had penned twenty years earlier.
One thing's for certain, there will always be a certain region of the imagination identified with Poe's name. If you'd like to explore it further, I strongly recommend a viewing of The Pale Blue Eye.



Thursday, January 03, 2019

Robert Lowell Revisited



Kay Redfield Jamison: Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (2017)


Roughly seven years ago, I wrote a post detailing my views on the work of Robert Lowell's then two principal biographers, Ian Hamilton (1982) and Paul Mariani (1994).



Paul Mariani (1940- )


Now, however, there's a new book out, by psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, herself a sufferer from bipolar disorder, and therefore uniquely placed (one might think) to give us insights into the true nature of Lowell's mental illness - both its nature, that is, and the effects she alleges it had on his own creativity.



I remember when I first discovered Robert Lowell's writing, back in the early eighties, remarking to my then guru, Prof. D. I. B. [Don] Smith of Auckland University, that it sounded as if Lowell must have been a horrible man. This was based on my reading of Hamilton's biography, then freshly out, hence the major source of information on the subject.

"I'm sure that's quite untrue. Who wrote the biography?" responded Don.

"Ian Hamilton," I replied.

"Oh, the shit!"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we prescribed a selection of Robert Frost's poetry a few years ago with an introduction by Hamilton. Instead of talking about Frost's poetry, he went into lots of detail about what a terrible person he was: completely unnecessary! Even if it's true, it didn't need to be said."



Ian Hamilton (1938-2001)


Don generally had a new angle on virtually any topic one raised with him. Part of it came from his long years of study and teaching in the UK and Canada, which seemed to have resulted in his meeting virtually every significant literary figure of the time (he had some original views on Alan Bennett, whom he'd met at Oxford - on Auden, as well - but that's another story).

"Lowell was a delightful man," he went on to say.

"How do you know? Did you ever meet him?"

"No, but I've just been reading his essay on Ford Madox Ford, and the man who wrote that must have been a wonderful man."



Ever dutiful, I went off and duly read the essay on Ford, and started to see what Don was driving at. His point was, I think, that whatever the arc of one's biography - moving from misery to happiness to pain, or whatever pattern we impose on it from a distance (the diachronic view, if you prefer that terminology) - the actual experience of being that human being, or even meeting him or her - i.e., the synchronic section cut across that larger chronology - can be completely different.

The Lowell of the Ford essay came across as kindly, relaxed and wise (quite a lot like Don Smith, in fact, if the truth be told). I began to realise that a person only really exists as a series of moments, and the artificiality of any tragic arc - the largely malign one drawn by Hamilton, for instance - should always be taken with a grain of salt.

It's not, mind you, that people always come out better taken moment by moment, or (alternatively) that tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner [to understand all is to forgive all]. It's just that one should never take any biographical construct too seriously, particularly if it's been concocted by someone who never met - or met only fleetingly - their subject.

Meeting Lowell - just like being him - could clearly be hellish at times, but Lowell-on-paper does not come across like that. He reads like someone who found life, not death, an 'awfully big adventure,' and who never gave up on its possibilities, even in the extremes of despair.



Gerard Malanga: Lowell in London (1970)


Since Hamilton's book in the 80s, the only really significant biographical studies have been by Mariani (mentioned above), as well as the tireless Jeffrey Meyers, author of 25 or so biographies to date, among them books on Hemingway, Mansfield, and a host of others, including no fewer than three volumes on Robert Lowell and his circle.



Jeffrey Meyers (1939- )


The first two of these appeared in the late 80s, but his most recent effort is Robert Lowell in Love (2015):





Jeffrey Meyers, ed.: Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (1988)




Jeffrey Meyers: Robert Lowell in Love (2015)


It's safe to say, then, that the actual incidents of Lowell's life have had a fairly thorough airing in the various accounts above. Jamison begins wisely, then (in my opinion) by stressing that what she has written is "not a biography." Instead of that, she goes on to say:
I have written a psychological account of the life and mind of Robert Lowell; it is as well a narrative of the illness that so affected him, manic-depressive illness. ... My interest lies in the entanglement of art, character, mood and intellect. (5)
Quite a tall order, one would think. After all, when in doubt, a standard, common-or-garden biography can always take refuge in a bit more detail: a few more addresses, a few more laundry lists and bank receipts. Once one has thrown away that crutch, it's hard to know exactly what to fall back on.

Jamison (unfortunately) has a tendency to fold in pages of pretentious waffle about the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, or any other uplifting subject whenever she runs short of material. Mainly, one is forced to conclude, because she has to admit to knowing little about poetry, and is therefore at the mercy of the contradictory critical assessments of even Lowell's major works, let alone such late books as Day by Day (1976), which she alone seems to see as ranking with Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and Life Studies (1959) as one of the jewels in his diadem.

What expertise she does have lies elsewhere:
My academic and clinical field is psychology and, within that, the study and treatment of manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness, the illness from which Robert Lowell suffered most of his life. I have studied as well the beholdenness of creative work to fluctuations of mood and the changes in thinking that attend such fluctuations. Mood disorders, depression and bipolar illness, occur disproportionately often in writers, as well as in visual artists and composers. Studying the influence of both normal and pathological moods on creative work is critical to understanding how the mind imagines. (5) [my emphases]
I don't have a problem with this agenda per se. There's always something new to be learned from any new approach, and Jamison's close scrutiny of Lowell's psychological records - allowed here for the first time by kind permission of Lowell's daughter Harriet - might certainly be seen to justify a study on this scale (if, like me, you persist in seeing Lowell as one of the most significant twentieth century American poets, that is).

I have underlined out those two statements above, however, since I think they demand further attention. The first appears to posit a link between creativity and mania which one would have thought had long since fallen casualty to the romantic notion of the artist-creator.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
...
Jamison is careful to buttress it up with endless clinical details and citations, but she is, it appears, genuinely of the opinion that occasional bouts of mania were of assistance to Lowell in his writing, and provided "material" for him to work over later in the depressions that inevitably followed them.

As her strange saga proceeds, moreover, one begins to realise that its basic postulate is that Lowell can do no wrong (possibly because she too is a sufferer from the same debilitating condition, and therefore can't bear to think otherwise). Even though Lowell himself castigated himself profoundly after each period of madness for the verbal and physical cruelties he had inflicted on those dearest to him, this is - to Jamison - simply proof of his superior "character."



Luise Keller: Friedrich Hölderlin (1842)


And, of course, there's a certain truth in these ideas. One can't really assess Lowell (or, for that matter, Hölderlin, or John Clare, or Christopher Smart) without factoring the influence of their "madness" on the totality of their work (thus perhaps justifying the second bolded-out sentence above). But was it of genuine advantage to them? I think a very strong case could be made for the negative in each case, though of course a final decision on the matter is not really attainable.



It's all very perilous, however: I would see it as a profoundly dangerous way of thinking. It's the kind of stuff John Money spouted when he was trying to persuade the young Janet Frame to commit herself (voluntarily) for psychological treatment: Schumann, Van Gogh, Hugo Wolf were the examples he used to see madness as an essential part - almost as proof - of an artist's character.

That didn't work out so well, and I have to say that Lowell was probably better off with the doctors he had at the time than with one as starry-eyed as Jamison. While (fortunately) a strong believer in the virtues of lithium, she does seem to believe that "poets" are some kind of arcane race of superhumanly gifted beings. Even if that were so (and I don't believe it is), it's rather pointless to use that as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to charting their biographical progress.

There are many things to like and admire in her account. It's very interesting at times. However, with the best will in the world, I'm unable to award it, as a whole, even the qualified thumbs up I conceded in my earlier post to the Hamilton-Mariani double-act. One explanation for this lies in the immense amount of redundancy weighting down her book. As an example of the kind of padding she far too often permits herself, savour these parting words about Lowell's funeral:



A foot of snow lay on the ground outside the church and the wind blew to the bone; it was winter in Cambridge. Had the mourners looked up at the bell tower of the church as they left the service for Robert Lowell on that March day they would have seen the bell that tolled for him. But they would not have been able to see the words carved into the shoulder of the bell. Words for the dead, they had been chosen by Lowell's cousin nearly fifty years earlier, when, as president of Harvard, he donated the bell to the college church. In Memory of Voices That Are Hushed, the bell read. In memory of the dead.

The voices of the living could be hushed as well. Lowell's great-great-grandmother had lived a silent death in madness; her son had said that only as much of her remained as "the hum outliving the hushed bell." The poet's voice speaks for the dead, the hushed, the valorous. It signifies the hours, reminds of death. It gives depth and resonance to blithe times, solace in the dark.


The bells cry: "'Come, / Come home ...,' Robert Lowell wrote. "'Come; I bell thee home.' " (403-4)
Not, I think, since Carl Sandburg's six-volume hagiography of Abraham Lincoln has an American writer permitted herself to go quite so far as this into the realms of footling hyperbole. I remember once reading a long quote from The Prairie Years (1926) about the significance of Lincoln's rocking cradle which did indeed rival the above on the bullshit meter, but it was a pretty close call.

Unfortunately Jamison has failed to learn the distinction between poetry ("the best words in the best order" - S. T. Coleridge) and the poetic (vague, dirge-like words strung together for some kind of solemn - or somnolent - effect).



Robert Lowell: The Dolphin (1973)
[cover by Sidney Nolan]


I'm afraid, however, that where Jamison really falls down for me is in the ethical colour-blindness which continually undermines her version of Robert Lowell's life. Take, for example, her account of the controversy over Lowell's use (without permission) of extensive quotes from his then-wife Elizabeth Hardwick's letters in his 1973 collection The Dolphin, which, as a whole, chronicles the beginning of his new relationship with wife-number-three Caroline Blackwood.

The precise details of the argument to which this has given rise - over the limits of poetic "licence" (as it were) - are a bit niggly. I've chronicled the matter in rather more detail in a lecture originally given in a university course on Life Writing, so I won't bother to rehearse it all again here.



Suffice it to say that Lowell's close friend and poetic colleague Elizabeth Bishop took great exception to this act for the following reasons (as she explained to him in a long, fascinating letter):
One can use one's life as material - one does, anyway - but these letters, aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission - IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much. I keep remembering [Gerard Manley] Hopkins's marvelous letter to [Robert] Bridges about the idea of a "gentleman" being the highest thing ever conceived - higher than a "Christian," even, certainly than a poet. It is not being "gentle" to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way — it's cruel.
[Letter of March 21, 1972]
Not only had Lowell not received permission to quote from the letters; he'd even taken it upon himself to rewrite them substantially (all within quote marks, mind you), and thus put things she never actually wrote or said into his wife's mouth.



Elizabeth Hardwick: Sleepless Nights (1979)


When I mention this in class, along with various other examples of Lowell's playing fast and loose with other people's words, I've noticed that most students tend to take Bishop's side. Jamison doesn't see it that way at all, however. Her reasons for this are interesting, to say the least.

First, it was all a long time ago:
It has been more than forty years since the publication of The Dolphin, and the indignation over Lowell's taking lines from Hardwick's letters has lessened but not disappeared. Time has a blanketing effect on outrage. (344)
No doubt time does "have a blanketing effect on outrage," but that seems a particularly foolish extenuating cicumstance for a biographer to advance. If outrage wears so thin over time, how about our interest in the minutiae of Lowell's clinical diagnoses and treatment?

Second, it wasn't that bad in the first place:
In many respects, as literary and historical controversies go, the appropriation is not particularly egregious. The issue was an important one to many of those most involved, however, including critics, friends, and, of course, Elizabeth Hardwick, Caroline Blackwood, and Lowell himself. Elizabeth Bishop's burning words to Lowell ... "Art just isn't worth that much" - are repeated still. They raise general questions about the use of private observation in art; they also raise questions of hypocrisy. (344)
So if it's still being discussed, as well as having had the effect of galvanising everyone involved, even peripherally, at the time, then I'd have to say that still sounds pretty important: even, perhaps, "egregious" - to me, at any rate.

Like ex-NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani skating around the latest porkie from his client, the President of the United State, Jamison proceeds to pour even more fuel on the flame, with her admission that "for years he had taken bits of conversation and correspondence from his friends" [a long list of friends and other public sources follows].
Lowell [she informs us] had a poet's magpie eye and an imprinting ear: he spotted, snatched, rejected, revised, incorporated. Words of others became part of his available stock. But it was his imagination that picked, sorted and built. That created poetry. (345)
No doubt he did. But were any of the people she mentions the opposite party in an increasingly acrimonious marital dispute, soon to culminate in divorce? No, they weren't: he may have quoted from Eliot, Pound, Homer, Sophocles, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all on many occasions, to little controversy, but that was under completely different circumstances.

You might as well say that Lowell had written and published poems before - to no particular objections - so why were they all protesting now? It's deliberately misleading chicanery on Jamison's part, in other words.



Perhaps the most devastating attach on Lowell's behaviour over The Dolphin was expressed in a contemporary review by former friend and fellow-poet Adrienne Rich:
What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names [For Lizzie and Harriet - also 1973], and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife's letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? (346)
"The book," she went on to say, was "cruel and shallow," and the "inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry."

Ouch! That must have stung a bit. But not for Lowell, who never seems actually to have understood what all this controversy was about. In his reply to Bishop's letter (quoted above) he said only:
Lizzie's letters? I did not see them as slander, but as sympathetic, tho necessarily awful for her to read. She is the poignance of the book, tho that hardly makes it kinder to her. ... It's oddly enough a technical problem as well as a gentleman's problem. How can the story be told at all without the letters. I'll put my heart to it. I can't bear not to publish Dolphin in good form.
[Letter of March 28, 1972]
In other words, yes, it is a bit rough on her, but the alternative would probably be to scrap the book entirely, and that's just not going to happen. He enlarges on this a bit in another letter to his friend, the eventual editor of his Collected Poems, Frank Bidart:
I've read and long thought on Elizabeth's letter. It's a kind of masterpiece of criticism, though her extreme paranoia (For God's sake don't repeat this) about revelations gives it a wildness. Most people will feel something of her doubts. The terrible thing isn't the mixing of fact and fiction, but the wife pleading to her husband to return - this backed by "documents"
[Letter of April 10, 1972]


Frank Bidart (1939- )


And what is Jamison's response to all this? Rather than attempting to engage with them, she is content to call Adrienne Rich's strictures 'a stretch':
Whatever legitimate criticism of Lowell's including excerpts from Hardwick's letters, it is far from the one of the most vindictive acts in the history of poetry. There is too much competition. (346)
In other words, sure, it was bad, but it wasn't the worst - worse things happen at sea. And the culminating point of all this havering around the point is the following piece of pomposity: "Scandals blaze; they die down. Art lasts or it doesn't."
Two years after Lowell died, Elizabeth Hardwick told an interviewer that Lowell was "like no one else - unplaceable, unaccountable." Unplaceable, unaccountable. Perfect words: wife to husband, writer to writer. (348)
Do you see what I mean? The net result of 400 pages of this kind of thing is, unfortunately, to obscure all the paradoxes stated so starkly by Ian Hamilton (in particular), and to make one alternately yawn and gag as one turns the next page to ever more egregious excesses of Lowell-worship.

"Art lasts or it doesn't" - what a crock of shit. If anything in Lowell's art looks likely to last, it certainly isn't that mad rush of sonnets from 1967-1973, culminating in the weird biblioblitz - History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin - of 1973. And, in any case, how could that ever be the point?

The point for my Life Writing students is that they have to make their own decisions on what personal and family details they choose to reveal in their writing. There are precious few signposts on this particular road, and one of them is this particular controversy between Bishop and Lowell. How dare Jamison refer to it simply as some old, dead "scandal"!

True, that's pretty much the line taken by her hero Lowell, who clearly - in his letter to Frank Bidart, at any rate - sees it as more of a technical challenge than a moral one, and goes on to attributes the vehemence of her reaction more to Bishop's "paranoia" about revelations than to any real problems with his own behaviour.

There are no special rules for artists: no special code of conduct that excuses 'great' poets from the normal codes of conduct that apply to the rest of us. Do you hear that, Kay Redfield Jamison, through the blinkered spectacles of your Carlylean "great man" theory of history?

"How far can I go?" is a real, practical problem, which applies to writers - and not just ones in the fields of memoir, autobiography and confessional poetry - every day of their lives. Am I justified in letting the cat out of the bag when it comes to family skeletons - or only about my own misdeeds? Can I really write all those mean things about people without getting ostracised?

Lowell took it pretty far. That's one of the reasons he remains interesting, and still well worth reading (imho). Jamison thinks he's worth reading because he found interesting metaphors and descriptors for the particular madness he suffered from. That may well be true, also. But don't obscure that simple, basic point with a whole lot of palaver about "character" and "moral fibre," as if a self-indulgent, womanising drunk were really some kind of unsung Saint. If he had been he would be boring - it's his flaws that sell him, as he himself knew all along.

"In the kingdom of the dumb, the one-track mind is king." Jamison's hagiography has, it seems, reaped a certain amount of praise from those equally ignorant of the true nature of Lowell's work, but even the most sympathetic reviews acknowledge a certain failure to edit: to cut out all those long apostrophes about Captain Scott (another exemplar of moral heroism, it would appear - you know my views about that), bio-sketches of distant relatives who also ended up in asylums, and - really - just random blah.

The way she writes off Rich's and Bishop's concerns about playing fast and loose with other people's lives and reputations is terrifyingly slick, however - "Satan hath made thee mighty glib," as my old Dad used to say whenever anybody looked likely to best him in argument.

It sounds, in fact, uncomfortably like what we've become used to from PR spokespeople and other paid apologists for any unpalatable view: racism, genocide, fraud, or just plain old lies in general - there's nothing, really, you can't massage with those old cons about how "it was a long time ago and let's hope it never happened. And if it did happen it wasn't my fault. And if did happen and it was my fault then I'm sorry you feel that way about it - let's move on, what's the point of dwelling on it? You really are pathetic in still wanting to drag up that old stuff. Get a life!" I think you all know the kind of thing.

In short, then, I'd like to like Jamison's book, but I just can't. Nor can I really conscientiously recommend it as a valuable contribution to Lowell studies. For the moment, I'd say that those of you still curious about the poet would be far better off reading the fine, comprehensive editions of his poetry, prose and letters which continue to appear forty years after his death.



Saskia Hamilton, ed.: The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005)

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV
(1917-1977)

    Poetry:

  1. Land of Unlikeness. Massachusetts: The Cummington Press, 1944.

  2. Lord Weary's Castle. 1946. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947.

  3. Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of The Kavanaughs. 1946 & 1951. A Harvest / HBJ Book. San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1974.

  4. Poems 1938-1949. 1950. London: Faber, 1970.

  5. Life Studies. 1959. London: Faber, 1968.

  6. Life Studies and For the Union Dead. 1959 & 1964. The Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.

  7. Selected Poems. 1965. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1969.

  8. Near the Ocean. London: Faber, 1967.

  9. Notebook 1967-68. The Noonday Press N 402. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

  10. Notebook. 1970. London: Faber, 1971.

  11. History. The Noonday Press N 513. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

  12. For Lizzie and Harriet. London: Faber, 1973.

  13. The Dolphin. London: Faber, 1973.

  14. The Dolphin. 1973. The Noonday Press N513. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

  15. Raban, Jonathan, ed. Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection. 1973. London: Faber, 1974.

  16. Selected Poems: Revised Edition. 1976 & 1977. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981.

  17. Day by Day. 1977. London: Faber, 1978.

  18. Hofmann, Michael, ed. Poems. London: Faber, 2001.

  19. Bidart, Frank & David Gewanter, with DeSales Harrison, ed. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

  20. Plays:

  21. The Old Glory. London: Faber, 1966.

  22. Translation:

  23. Phaedra: A Verse Translation of Racine’s Phèdre. 1961. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1971.

  24. Imitations. 1961. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1971.

  25. ‘Poems by Osip Mandelstam.’ The Atlantic Monthly, 211 (June, 1963): 63-68.

  26. ‘Poems by Anna Akhmatova.’ The Atlantic Monthly, 214 (October, 1964): 60-65.

  27. The Voyage and other versions of poems by Baudelaire. Illustrated by Sidney Nolan. London: Faber, 1968.

  28. Prometheus Bound: Derived from Aeschylus. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

  29. Prometheus Bound: Derived from Aeschylus. 1969. London: Faber, 1970.

  30. The Oresteia of Aeschylus. 1978. London: Faber, 1979.

  31. Prose:

  32. Giroux, Robert, ed. Collected Prose. London: Faber, 1987.

  33. Letters:

  34. Hamilton, Saskia, ed. The Letters of Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005.

  35. Travisano, Thomas, & Saskia Hamilton, ed. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

  36. Secondary:

  37. Axelrod, Stephen Gould. Robert Lowell, Life and Art. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

  38. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. 1982. London: Faber, 1983.

  39. Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1994.

  40. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire - A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. 2017. Vintage Books. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2018.


Friday, January 20, 2017

Inauguration Day: January 2017



President Donald Trump (Rolling Stone: 20/1/17)


Trump said

... and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.

– Robert Lowell, "Inauguration Day: January 1953"

that he could stand
in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and shoot someone
and not lose any voters

it’s, like, incredible!
what he was touching on
was the phenomenon
of fandom

and it was no mirage
there really were
sufficient boneheads
dumb enough to vote

for that buffoon
no matter how outrageously
he talked
how stupid his ideas

we used to laugh
at countries where soap opera stars
could win a seat in parliament
because they loved them so

who’s laughing now?



Or, for a rather different take on the event, you could try "Pibroch of the Domhnall", composed by "celebrated" American poet Joseph Charles McKenzie of the (self-styled) "rhyming, rhythmic, and rapturous" Society of Classical Poets ...



Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Top Ten Favourite Poems



My colleague Bryan Walpert and I are co-supervising a couple of Doctorates in Creative Writing at Massey University, both focussing on poetry. It's not as easy as you might think to keep the critical portion of these projects in balance with the creative.

The other day, at one of our video conferences, he came up with what seemed to me a very intriguing idea for taking a kind of barometer reading of someone else's aesthetic: he asked our PhD student to send us ten of her favourite poems: or (at least) ten poems that seemed truly extraordinary and moving to her.

I've done a couple of "top twenty" posts before now: 20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels and 20 Favourite 20th-Century Long Poems, both back in 2008, but this seemed a little different somehow.

As I see it, the plan is to be as honest as possible about what you really like, as opposed to what you think you should like. It got me to thinking about what would be in my own "top ten" - with stress on the poems that I've actually tried to memorise and thus keep with me, rather than those I simply admire from a distance.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here - in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order - is my top ten (today, at any rate: next week the list might be completely different):


Jack’s Top Ten
    Alphabetical (by surname):

  1. W. H. Auden: “The Letter” [1927]
  2. Gavin Ewart: “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
  3. Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead” [1964]
  4. Marianne Moore: “Poetry” [1919]
  5. Ezra Pound: “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
  6. Kendrick Smithyman: “Colville” [1968]
  7. Stephen Spender: “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
  8. Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop” [1917]
  9. Ian Wedde: “Barbary Coast” [1988]
  10. W. B. Yeats: “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]

    Chronological (by date of publication):

  1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972):
    “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
  2. Edward Thomas (1878-1917):
    “Adlestrop” [1917]
  3. Marianne Moore (1887-1972):
    “Poetry” [1919]
  4. W. H. Auden (1907-1973):
    “The Letter” [1927]
  5. Stephen Spender (1909-1995):
    “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
  6. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939):
    “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]
  7. Robert Lowell (1917-1977):
    “For the Union Dead” [1964]
  8. Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995):
    “Colville” [1968]
  9. Gavin Ewart (1916-1995):
    “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
  10. Ian Wedde (1946- ):
    “Barbary Coast” [1988]




From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year’s arc a completed round
And love’s worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, spring’s green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through,
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question overmuch the nod
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent
Always afraid to say more than it meant.


[1927]


It's interesting that Auden never rewrote this poem, even in the complete overhaul of his canon he undertook for the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems (which appalled so many of the admirers of his early work). There's an incantatory quality about it which has always fascinated me, and which made me like it long before I had any real understanding of what it was about. It is, after all, the poem he chose to begin his Collected Poems with, despite the fact that there are some earlier ones reprinted later on in the text ...



When our son was a few weeks old he had bronchial trouble
and picked up a cross-infection in the hospital
(salmonella typhimurium) through sluttish feeding –
but a hospital never admits it’s responsible –
and was rushed away behind glass in an isolation ward,
at the point, it might be, of death. Our daughter,
eighteen months old, was just tall enough
to look into his empty cot and say: ‘Baby gone!’

A situation, an action and a speech
so tear-jerking that Dickens might have thought of them –
and indeed, in life, when we say ‘It couldn’t happen!’
almost at once it happens. And the word ‘sentimental’
has come to mean exaggerated feeling.
It would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then.


[1980]


I really like this poem. Ewart is more associated with light verse than serious poetry, but that's what gives it its sting, I think. That MC sitting beside him in the picture above and cracking up at what he's reading is actually the great Peter Reading ...




[Robert Lowell (1917-1977)]


"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."



The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die –
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year –
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.


[1964]


I talk a bit about this poem in my post on The Literature of the Civil War. I do think it's a great example of the "State of the Nation" poem, something I say more about in my Jacket2 column here...




[Marianne Moore (1887-1972)]



I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician –
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” – above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.


[1919]


Moore famously repudiated this poem, and cut it and cut it until it finally consisted of an abridged version of the first three lines (minus the "beyond all this fiddle"). Paul Celan translated the whole thing into German, though, which to me is pretty much a guarantee of its quality. Here it is in its complete, original form ...



By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.


[1915]


Those early poems from Cathay are some of Pound's finest, I think. I suppose one could argue that it's a translation rather than an original poem,, but given the complicated mode of transmission from Ernest Fenollosa's notes from the Japanese, it seems better to concentrate on how it superimposes a kind of World War One landscape on the original Chinese one ...



That sort of place where you stop
long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
while somebody local comes
in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
but does not like what he sees of you,

intangible as menace,
a monotone with a name, as place
it is an aspect of human spirit
(by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

as their hold on small repute,
good for dragging nets which men are doing
through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
of hot afternoon’s down-going
to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
upon the vague where time is distance?

It could be plainly simple
pleasure, but these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial
Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.


[1968]


I have a good deal to say about this poem in my post A Visit to Colville. It's one of Kendrick's finest, I think ...



Rolled over on Europe: the sharp dew frozen to stars
Below us; above our heads, the night
Frozen again to stars; the stars
In pools between our coats, and that charmed moon.
Ah, what supports? What cross draws out our arms,
Heaves up our bodies towards the wind
And hammers us between the mirrored lights?

Only my body is real; which wolves
Are free to oppress and gnaw. Only this rose
My friend laid on my breast, and these few lines
written from home, are real.


[1933]


This is kind of a weird choice, I suppose. Again, it might be my taste for incantatory eloquence which made it stand out for me among Spender's early poems. It wasn't till later that I realised it was made up of phrases culled from Rilke's impressionistic early short story "Cadet Cornelius Rilke". It's hard to say if that makes it a translation or an original poem. Can that be regarded as a real distinction anymore, in fact?




[Edward Thomas (1878-1917)]



Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


[1917]


This is the first poem I ever read by Edward Thomas, but I've loved his poetry ever since. I could easily have chosen any of a number of others, but this one still appeals to me deeply. He manages to get away with the poeticisms in stanza three and even gets them to work for him in a strange way, I'm not quite sure how ...




[Robert Cross: Ian Wedde (1946- )]



When the people emerge from the water
who can tell if it’s brine or tears
that streams from them, purple sea
or the bruises of their long immersion?

They seem to weep for the dreams they had
which now the light slices into buildings
of blinding concrete along the Corniche.
Is it music or news the dark windows utter?

Day-long dazzle of the shallows
and at night the moon trails her tipsy sleeves
past the windows of raffish diners.
The hectic brake-lights of lovers

jam the streets. My place or your place.
They lose the way again and again.
At dawn the birds leave the trees in clouds,
they petition the city for its crumbs.

The diners are cheap and the food is bad
but you’d sail a long way to find anything
as convenient. Pretty soon, sailor boy,
you’ll lose your bearings on language.

Language with no tongue
to lash it to the teller.
Stern-slither of dogfish guttings.
Sinbad’s sail swaying in the desert.

Only those given words can say what they want.
Out there the velvet lady runs her tongue
over them. And she is queen of the night –
her shadow flutters in the alleys.

And young sailors, speechless, lean
on the taffrail. They gaze at the queen’s amber
but see simple lamps their girls hang in sash windows.
Thud of drums. Beach-fires. Salt wind in the ratlines.

Takes more than one nice green kawakawa
leaf, chewed, to freshen the mouth
that’s kissed the wooden lips of the figurehead
above history’s cut-water

in the barbarous isles’
virgin harbours. That hulk shunned by rats
bursts into flames.
And now the smoky lattice of spars

casts upon the beach
the shadow-grid of your enlightened city.
And now I reach through them – I reach
through the eyes of dreaming sailors,

faces inches from the sweating bulkheads,
blankets drenched in brine and sperm.
Trailing blood across the moon’s wake
the ship bore out of Boka Bay.

Trailing sharks, she sailed
for Port Destruction. In Saint Van le Mar,
Jamaica, Bligh’s breadfruit trees grew tall.
In Callao on the coast of Peru

geraniums bloomed like sores
against whitewashed walls.
The dock tarts’ parrots jabbering
cut-rates in six tongues.

The eroding heartland, inland cordillera
flashing with snow – these the voyager forgets.
His briny eyes
flood with chimerical horizons.

‘I would tell you if I could – if I could
remember, I would tell you.
All around us the horizons
are turning air into water

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ended and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

What I remember are the beaches of that city
whose golden children dance
on broken glass. I remember cold beer
trickling between her breasts as she drank.

But my paper money burned
when she touched it. The ship
clanked up to its bower, the glass towers
of the city burned back there in the sunset glow.’

Cool star foundering in the west.
Coast the dusty colour of lions.
The story navigates by vectors
whose only connection is the story.

The story is told in words
whose only language is the story.
All night the fo’c’s’le lamp smokes above the words.
All day the sun counts the hours of the story.

Heave of dark water where something
else turns – the castaway’s tongue
clappers like a mission bell.
Unheard his end, and the story’s.

Raconteurs in smoky dives
recall his phosphorescent arm
waving in the ship’s wake.
Almost gaily. But the ship sailed on.


[1988]


One necessary constraint on this choice of poems was length. I was originally going to include Paul Muldoon's extraordinary elegy Incantata as one of my ten, but it's just too long to reprint or really take in at a sitting. This, too, is quite a long poem, but I felt that I had to include it even so. I say more about it here, but its true significance remains mysterious to me: mysterious, but somehow immensely alluring.




I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.


II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.


III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.


[1939]


Well, what can you say? The aging Yeats reinvents himself yet again, "Lion and woman and the Lord knows what" - how can you just keep on getting better and better and simpler and simpler over the course of a fifty-year career?




So there you are: that's my ten. They do say some slightly disqueting things about my taste, I suppose. Nine out of my ten poets are men; nine out of my ten poets are dead; all of them are white ...

Having ruled out straight translations, though - and also longer poems - I guess it's kind of inevitable that I should gravitate to the kinds of poems I loved when I was a kid: eloquent, even grandiloquent at times, but with the Modernist fetish for simplicity constantly undermining their verbal flourishes.

What would your list look like?



[Doug Savage: Savage Chickens (2005)]