A great deal of 19^th century verse is wretched—exposure to poorly written rhyme will naturally push the educated poetry lover from the vales of tortured song to the stairwells of sober speech.

Verse was abandoned by educated poets in the 20^th century because the versifiers fell out of tune—not because poetry evolved into something higher.   

Frazzled, goaded and tuckered out by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, with no more heart for Bret Harte, audiences everywhere cried Geez! and So Long! to George Santayana and the other thousand rhyming and chiming poetasters, tossing the simpering, milk & water verse out the window.   (Santayana was T.S. Eliot’s professor at Harvard).  

Throwing off rhyme was not a revolution. 

It was a revulsion.

The yellowish face of Imagism’s moon was not a sign of mystical glory; it was a sign of illness and disgust.

Music coming from instruments only a little out of tune will soon convince hearers to give up all music.

Imagism was a retreat, not an advance. 

Poetry in the 20^th century did not add image—it subtracted music. 

The great poets of verse featured imagery and music, skillfully blended into a natural, pleasing speech so that neither speech, imagery, nor music was perceived as such–the elements were blended and lost in the poetry. 

Lost so that no ‘close reading’ can get it out. 

Criticism finds the elements when they are not blended; if they are, criticism cannot see them, for the work succeeds and doesn’t require criticism. 

 The close reading of the New Critics was mistaken from the start, since it confused desultory, over-elaborated praise with criticism.  New Criticism finally ends in the Prozac Criticism of the Helen Vendlers and the Stephen Burts.

Too much focus on any part—image, language, irony, etc—is a sure sign poetry is in decline.

We’re not sure why–after the renaissance of verse in English from the 16^th century sonnet mastery to the 17^th century of Milton, Donne, Marvel, to the 18^th of Pope, and then Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, with writers like Poe bringing Baconic science (with a Platonic sheen) to the art, and Tennyson carrying the flame–why the whole art sickened and died sometime during the middle or latter part of the 19^th century. 

It may have been for a very simple reason. 

In the 19^th century more people began to write and publish poetry.

There was a glut, and gluts will destroy whatever style currently exists.   

Those who complain contemporary poetry is prosy and dull usually champion the 19^th century and its rhyme.  

But the issue is not a stylistic one.  It is simpler than that.   A glut destroyed poetry as it currently existed—first in the 19^th century, when poetry rhymed, and then in the 20^th century, when poetry didn’t.  The Quarterly didn’t kill Keats.  Sidney Lanier did. 

Those who could not write like Keats eventually decided no one should write like Keats—or none should try, because one more Sidney Lanier would be the death of poetry itself.   William Carlos Williams—when he reached middle-age and stopped rhyming—suddenly became vastly preferable to Sidney Lanier, at least among educated readers. 

Poetry–the art–could not handle one more failed Keats.  William Carlos Williams did not conquer Keats.   He was simply a sobering balm to the intoxicating pain of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman.  The 20^th century stopped rhyming, not out of evolution, but from embarrassment. 

Rather than fail at Keats, it was necessary for the pride of the poet in the 20^th century to partially succeed at haiku—and the whole history of modernism is nothing but extended haiku: even modern long poems are nothing but haiku patched together and embellished with flotsam and dialogue–breaking haiku’s rules, but not the rules of poetry—in any significant way. 

Our idea is supported by the following:  From the beginnings of poetry in English to the first confirmed glut in the early 19^th century, a good poem was never a theoretical specimen; it was good in a way that was socially recognized by everyone: A 16^th century Shakespeare song, a 19^th century Keats ballad.   Then came the glut, and millions of would-be Shakespeares and Keats’s made rhyme come to seem the playing of an out-of-tune violin.  

The public gradually fled from the poem–not because the novel took them away, but because the public ran from the art of poetry holding its ears.   The modern novel was not an improvement so much as a refuge, and fortunately for that genre, poetry, by mishandling verse, was at that very moment chasing away readers as it had never done before. 

And bad rhyme did not end after Modernism–one can find it in Richard Aldington’s 1941 anthology: Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams’ only poem represented is a rhyming poem; there’s bad rhyme galore.  

Fashions die hard, but when they die, it’s sometimes not the fashion that’s at fault, but the mediocrities practicing it.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Joan Shelley Rubin, author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, said the 1920s belonged as much to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as it did to Thomas Stearns Eliot—and this is true.

The anti-Victorian, Imagism revolution of Bloomsbury, which gradually changed poetry from an art of song to an art of image through the ’trickle-down’ effort of its elites, gained the overwhelming momentum of  great numbers when its ‘trickle-down’ effort became  normalized and taught in the academy–both in English departments and Creative Writing Workshops–during the second half of the 20th century.

Are there any prominent musicians who bother to set contemporary poetry to music?

The image in poetry became associated with art, while the music of poetry became associated with vulgarity.

Two brief examples, from last century, will suffice:

First: these lines from J.V. Cunningham, the anti-modernist poet, who is largely forgotten:

Second:  Bloomsbury author Aldous Huxley’s infamous slam against Poe’s verse as “vulgar.”  The prim Englishman’s distaste for musical Poe was quoted approvingly in Brooks & Penn Warren’s well-placed textbook, Understanding Poetry (first edition, 1938) which also solidified the reputations of Imagist classics, ‘At A Station In the Metro’ (Pound) and ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ (Williams) in its unalloyed praise for these two works.

Could poetry change radically today?  And, if it did, would the public even notice?    The answer to both quesitons is, ‘no,’ and the reason the first answer is ’no,’ is because the second answer is ‘no.’

How did poetry change so radically in the early part of the 20th century?

First, it did have a public, but not a particularly large or enthusiastic one, and secondly, poetry was understood by the public to have a certain definite identity: it looked like work by Longfellow and Tennyson.

An art whose practioners are disunited, who have no common expertise, will not be seen as an art at all.  Poetry had a common expertise: the ability to compose memorable music with mere words, like Longfellow and Tennsyon.

“Verse is not easy,” Cunningham wrote.    But the skill of verse is no longer a part of poetry; poetry no longer has a specific “skill.”

The Imagists never got beyond a very minor, little magazine existence, but they believed what they were offering would be very popular, like a portable camera; now you can just point and shoot!  Anyone can appreciate images–and put them into simple poems–like haiku.  Poetry for democracy!  Poetry that was selfless and natural!  It will be a phenomenon!  But the public didn’t buy it–they still wanted their Tennyson and their Longfellow with their gadgets and their telephones and their cars.  Imagism, like Futurism, Cubism and 12-Tone Music, failed to inspire anyone except the core of elites who were pushing them.  Imagism was a flop.

Or, was it?

People ‘on the street’ today define poetry as vaguely expressive, and the public’s perception of something, we have learned, should not be underestimated.  ‘Vaguely’ is the chief term here.  No longer does the public think of poetry as Longfellow.  They think of it as vaguely expressive.

100 years ago the American public had a more sharply defined view of poetry.  It was like what those fellows, Mr. Alfred Lord Tennyson and Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote.  That was what poetry was.

The zen joke of ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ and ‘The women come and go/talking of Michelangelo’ resonated once, but these jokes are no longer funny.  But Longfellow is gone, too.

Image truly belongs to other arts: painting, photography, and film;  further, these arts do not need to look to poetry at all as they wrestle with the image.

Song belongs to songwriters, and songwriters, the good ones, are poets, but they are known to the world as songwriters; poetry’s identity carries on in the sister art of songwriting, and unlike the filmmakers, photographers and painters, songwriters do consult poetry, not contemporary poetry, but old poetry, the art, for inspiration.

Since poetry has given up song for image as its current identity, poetry manifests no contemporary attachment with any other art.  No glory belongs to poetry, or is even reflected back on poetry.  Poetry is in the dark.

Poetry, with no public identity, is stuck: it has nowhere to go.

History affords countless examples of  technical changes which have improved music’s expressive qualities as a whole even as music, the art, remains, in its simplicity, recongizable to everyone.   When the piano replaced the harpsichord, all composers took notice, not just some.

The modernist revolution changed poetry so that everyone took notice,  but unfortunately in a way that made poetry no longer recognizable to everyone.  Nor is it easy to say if expressive qualities have increased–certainly not in the public’s perception.  As far as prose and how it perhaps opens things up, the problem poetry has, is that in prose, one would naturally think poetry could express itself with greater variety, but fiction owns prose, and poetry is expected to do something different than fiction; poetry as art has been developed in different ways than prose.   Yes, poetry should be as good as good prose, and all that, but how does poetry keep from disappearing into it?  And so poetry–sans the music that separates it from prose, as the art which the public knows as poetry–has been at sea for 100 years.

T.S. Eliot, an honorary Bloomsbury member, and the most respected critic of the 20th century, recommended minor poetry 300 years old as superior to major poetry composed  250, 200, 150, 100, and 50 years before his day.  This, in some ways, was counter to the whole modernist revolution.  John Donne?  Andrew Marvell?  Henry King, Bishop of Chichester?  What was Eliot thinking?  Eliot was thinking this: If my friends and I are to effect this modernist revolution of ours, we must not seem like mere brick-throwers; we need erudition, scholarship, appreciation of certain aspects of the past, and if we are to become professors and editors of modernist verse, it will be well to be able to make the past our clay, for revolutions must feed off the past; no revolution lives in the present day; Eliot knew he and Pound were not Bach, the master, at the keyboard, re-inventing music itself; he knew they were merely sullying a grand tradition with a little sleight-of-hand: Goodbye, Milton, Shelley, Poe, Shakespeare, Keats.  Hello, Kyd, King, Corbiere.  Eliot knew that when a revolution happens, the past will not disappear; a certain respect for the past must not only be feigned, but enthusiastically pursued, for every manifesto needs food; actual ’new’ material (Waste Lands, cantos, wheel barrow haiku,) will run out in a week, so the past has to be transformed.  Every revolution needs a professor; Mary Ann and Ginger alone will not do.

The image is free-standing and pre-verbal; it is not necessary for image to fit, or be coherent–it simply is. Why should such a thing be the essence of poetry?  Ask that Bloomsbury elite.  After a snort and a sigh and a sip of their very expensive wine, they will tell you.

Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprision proper; I take the word from Lucretius, where it means a "swerve" of the atoms so as to make change possible in the universe. A poet swerves away from his precursor, by so reading his precursor’s poem as to execute a clinamen in relation to it. This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves. . . .

. . . Shelley speculated that poets of all ages contributed to one Great Poem perpetually in progress. Borges remarks that poets create their precursors. If the dead poets, as Eliot insisted, constituted their successors’ particular advance in knowledge, that knowledge is still their successors’ creation, made by the living for the needs of the living.

But poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read. Poets are neither ideal nor common readers, neither Arnoldian nor ]ohnsonian. They tend not to think, as they read: "This is dead, this is living, in the poetry of X." Poets, by the time they have grown strong, do not read the poetry of X, for really strong poets can read only themselves. For them, to be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect. Milton’s Satan, archetype of the modern poet at his strongest, becomes weak when he reasons and compares, on Mount Niphates, and so commences that process of decline culminating in Paradise Regained, ending as the archetype of the modern critic at his weakest.

Let us attempt the experiment (apparently frivolous) of reading Paradise Lost as an allegory of the dilemma of the modern poet, at his strongest. Satan is that modern poet, while God is his dead but still embarrassingly potent and present ancestor, or rather, ancestral poet. Adam is the potentially strong modern poet, but at his weakest moment, when he has yet to find his own voice. God has no Muse, and needs none, since he is dead, his creativity being manifested only in the past time of the poem. Of the living poets in the poem, Satan has Sin, Adam has Eve, and Milton has only his Interior Paramour, an Emanation far within that weeps incessantly for his sin, and that is invoked magnificently four times in the poem. Milton has no name for her, though he invokes her under several; but, as he says, "the meaning, not the Name I call." Satan, a stronger poet even than Milton, has progressed beyond invoking his Muse.

Why call Satan a modern poet? Because he shadows forth gigantically a trouble at the core of Milton and of Pope, a sorrow that purifies by isolation in Collins and Gray, in Smart and in Cowper, emerging fully to stand clear in Wordsworth, who is the exemplary Modern Poet, the Poet proper. The incarnation of the Poetic Character in Satan begins when Milton’s story truly begins, with the Incarnation of God’s Son and Satan’s rejection of that incarnation. Modern poetry begins in two declarations of Satan: "We know no time when we were not as now" and "To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering."

Let us adopt Milton’s own sequence in the poem. Poetry begins with our awareness, not of a Fall, but that we are falling. The poet is our chosen man, and his consciousness of election comes as a curse; again, not "I am a fallen man," but "I am Man, and I am falling" — or rather, "I was God, I was Man (for to a poet they were the same), and I am falling, from myself." When this consciousness of self is raised to an absolute pitch, then the poet hits the floor of Hell, or rather, comes to the bottom of the abyss, and by his impact there creates Hell. He says, "I seem to have stopped falling; now I am fallen, consequently, I lie here in Hell."

There and then, in this bad, he finds his good; he chooses the heroic, to know damnation and to explore the limits of the possible within it. The alternative is to repent, to accept a God altogether other than the self, wholly external to the possible. This God is cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more. But we, to understand the strong poet. must go further still than he can go, back into the poise before the consciousness of falling came.

When Satan or the poet looks around him on the floor of fire his falling self had kindled, he sees first a face he only just recognizes, his best friend, Beelzebub, or the talented poet who never quite made it, and now never shall. And, like the truly strong poet he is, Satan is interested in the face of his best friend only to the extent that it reveals to him the condition of his owncountenance. Such limited interest mocks neither the poets we know, nor the truly heroic Satan. If Beelzebub is that scarred, if he looks that unlike the true form he left behind on the happy fields of light, then Satan himself is hideously bereft of beauty, doomed, like Walter Pater, to be a Caliban of Letters, trapped in essential poverty. in imaginative need, where once he was all but the wealthiest, and needed next to nothing. But Satan, in the accursed strength of the poet, refuses to brood upon this, and turns instead to his task, which is to rally everything that remains.

This task, comprehensive and profoundly imaginative, includes everything that we could ascribe as motivation for the writing of any poetry that is not strictly devotional in its purposes. For why do men write poems? To rally everything that remains, and not to sanctify nor propound. The heroism of endurance — of Milton’s post-lapsarian Adam, and of the Son in Paradise Regained — is a theme for Christian poetry, but only barely a heroism for poets. We hear Milton again, celebrating the strong poet’s natural virtue, when Samson taunts Harapha: "bring up thy van,/ My heels are fetter’d, but my fist is free." The poet’s final heroism, in Milton, is a spasm of self-destruction, glorious because it pulls down the temple of his enemies. Satan, organizing his chaos, imposing a discipline despite the visible darkness, calling his minions to emulate his refusal to mourn, becomes the hero as poet, finding what must suffice, while knowing that nothing can suffice.

This is a heroism that is exactly on the border of solipsism, neither within it, nor beyond it. Satan’s later decline in the poem, as arranged by the Idiot Questioner in Milton, is that the hero retreats from this border into solipsism, and so is degraded; ceases, during his soliloquy on Mount Niphates, to be a poet and, by intoning the formula: "Evil be thou my good," becomes a mere rebel, a childish inverter of conventional moral categories, another wearisome ancestor of student non-students, the perpetual New Left. For the modern poet, in the gladness of his sorrowing strength, stands always on the farther verge of solipsism, having just emerged from it. His difficult balance, from Wordsworth to Stevens, is to maintain a stance just there, where by his very presence he says: "What I see and hear come not but from myself" and yet also: "I have not but I am and as I am I am." The first, by itself, is perhaps the fine defiance of an overt solipsism, leading back to an equivalent of "I know no time when I was not as now." Yet the second is the modification that makes for poetry instead of idiocy: "There are no objects outside of me because I see into their life, which is one with my own, and so ‘I am that I am,’ which is to say, ‘I too will be present wherever and whenever I choose to be present.’ I am so much in process, that all possible movement is indeed possible, and if at present I explore only my own dens, at least I explore." Or, as Satan might have said: "In doing and in suffering, I shall be happy, for even in suffering I shall be strong."

It is sad to observe most modern critics observing Satan, because they never do observe him. The catalog of unseeing could hardly be more distinguished, from Eliot who speaks of "Milton’s curly haired Byronic hero" (one wants to reply, looking from side to side: "Who?") to the astonishing backsliding of Northrop Frye, who invokes, in urbane ridicule, a Wagnerian context (one wants to lament: "A true critic, and of God’s party without knowing it"). Fortunately we have had Empson, with his apt rallying cry: "Back to Shelley!" Whereto I go.

Contemplating Milton’s meanness towards Satan, towards his rival poet and dark brother, Shelley spoke of the "pernicious casuistry" set up in the mind of Milton’s reader, who would be tempted to weigh Satan’s flaws against God’s malice towards him, and to excuse Satan because God had been malicious beyond all measure. Shelley’s point has been twisted by the C. S. Lewis or Angelic School of Milton Criticism, who proceed to weigh up the flaws and God’s wrongs, and find Satan wanting in the balance. This pernicious casuistry, Shelley would have agreed, would not be less pernicious if we were to find (as I do) Milton’s God wanting. It would still be casuistry, and as discourse upon poetry it would still be moralizing, which is to say, pernicious.

Even the strongest poets were at first weak, for they started as prospective Adams, not as retrospective Satans. Blake names one state of being Adam, and calls it the Limit of Contraction, and another state Satan, and calls it the Limit of Opacity. Adam is given or natural man, beyond which our imaginations will not contract. Satan is the thwarted or restrained desire of natural man, or rather theshadow or Spectre of that desire. Beyond this spectral state, we will not harden against vision, but the Spectre squats in our repressiveness, and we are hardened enough, as we are contracted enough. Enough, our spirits lament, not to live our lives, enough to be frightened out of our creative potential by the Covering Cherub, Blake’s emblem (out of Milton, and Ezekiel, and Genesis) for that portion of creativity in us that has gone over to constriction and hardness. Blake precisely named this renegade part of Man. Before the Fall (which for Blake meant before the Creation, the two events for him being one and the same) the Covering Cherub was the pastoral genius Tharmas, a unifying process making for undivided consciousness; the innocence, pre-reflective, of a state without subjects and objects, yet in no danger of solipsism, for it lacked also a consciousness of self. Tharmas is a poet’s (or any man’s) power of realization, even as the Covering Cherub is the power that blocks realization. . . .

. . . I arrive at my argument’s central principle, which is not more true for its outrageousness, but merely true enough: Poetic Influence  — when it involves two strong, authentic poets,— always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist. . . .

. . . My own Idiot Questioner, happily curled up in the labyrinth of my own being, protests: "What is the use of such a principle, whether the argument it informs be true or not?" Is it useful to be told that poets are not common readers, and particularly are not critics, in the true sense of critics, common readers raised to the highest power? And what is Poetic Influence anyway? Can the study of it really be anything more than the wearisome industry of source-hunting, of allusion-counting, an industry that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers? Is there not the shibboleth bequeathed us by Eliot, that the good poet steals, while the poor poet betrays an influence, borrows a voice? And are there not all the great Idealists of literary criticism, the deniers of poetic influence, ranging from Emerson with his maxims: "Insist on yourself: never imitate" and" Not possibly will the soul deign to repeat itself" to the recent transformation of Northrop Frye into the Arnold of our day, with his insistence that the Myth of Concern prevents poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation?

Against such idealism one cheerfully cites Lichtenberg’s grand remark: "Yes, I too like to admire great men, but only those whose works I do not understand." Or again from Lichtenberg, who is one of the sages of Poetic Influence: "To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation, and the definition of imitation ought by rights to include both." What Lichtenberg implies is that Poetic Influence is itself an oxymoron, and he is right. But then, so is Romantic Love an oxymoron, and Romantic Love is the closest analogue of Poetic Influence, another splendid perversity of the spirit, though it moves precisely in the opposite direction. The poet confronting his Great Original must find the fault that is not there, and at the heart of all but the highest imaginative virtue. The lover is beguiled to the heart of loss, but is found, as he finds, within mutual illusion, the poem that is not there. "When two people fall in love," says Kierkegaard, "and begin to feel that they are made for one another, then it is time for them to break off, for by going on they have everything to lose and nothing to gain." When the ephebe, or figure of the youth as virile poet, is found by his Great Original, then it is time to go on, for he has everything to gain, and his precursor nothing to lose; if the fully written poets are indeed beyond loss.

But there is the state called Satan, and in that hardness poets must appropriate for themselves. For Satan is a pure or absolute consciousness of self compelled to have admitted its intimate alliance with opacity. The state of Satan is therefore a constant consciousness of dualism, of being trapped in the finite, not just in space (in the body) but in clock-time as well. To be pure spirit, yet to know in oneself the limit of opacity; to assert that one goes back before the Creation-Fall, yet be forced to yield to number, weight, and measure; this is the situation of the strong poet, the capable imagination, when he confronts the universe of poetry, the words that were and will be, the terrible splendor of cultural heritage. In our time, the situation becomes more desperate even than it was in the Milton-haunted eighteenth century, or the Wordsworth-haunted nineteenth, and our current and future poets have only the consolation that no certain Titanic figure has risen since Milton and Wordsworth, not even Yeats or Stevens.

If one examines the dozen or so major poetic influencers before this century, one discovers quickly who among them ranks as the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles: Milton. The motto to English poetry since Milton was stated by Keats: "Life to him would be Death to me." This deathly vitality in Milton is the state of Satan in him, and is shown us not so much by the character of Satan in Paradise Lost as by Milton’s editorializing relationship to his own Satan, and by his relationship to all the stronger poets of the eighteenth century and to most of those in the nineteenth. Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English . . .

. . . we can see the final irony of Poetic Influence, and come full circle to end where we began. This clinamen between the strong poet and the Poetic Father is made by the whole being of the later poet, and the true history of modern poetry would be the accurate recording of these revisionary swerves. To the pure ‘Pataphysician, the swerve is marvellously gratuitous; Jarry, after all, was capable of considering the Passion as an uphill bicycle race. The student of Poetic Influence is compelled to be an impure ‘Pataphysician; he must understand that the clinamen always must be considered as though it were simultaneously intentional and involuntary, the Spiritual Form of each poet and the gratuitous gesture each poet makes as his falling body hits the floor of the abyss. Poetic Influence is the passing of Individuals through States, in Blake’s language, but the passing is done ill when it is not a swerving. The strong poet indeed says: ..I seem to have stopped falling; now I am fallen, consequently, I lie here in Hell," but he is thinking, as he says this, "As I fell, I swerved, consequently I lie here in a Hell improved by my own making."

—from Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973)

Drugs like caffeine and  nicotine are wonderful stimulants for poetry.

Five packs a day, and you, too, could be a great poet.

In 1939, a transition year marking the start of WW II, the poet W.H. Auden was divided.

Auden was between jobs, homelands, faiths, political beliefs,  romances–as well as drags on his cigarette.

The English poet was about to settle in the U.S. (New York) say goodbye to friend Christopher Isherwood (who moved to California in April) meet and“marry” Chester Kallman–a devotee of anonymous men’s room sex, abandon his atheism for the Church of England, give up his Marxism for a belief in Western Democracy, and abandon travel reporting for college teaching.

In a Nation article in March 1939, Auden played prosecutor and defense—rhetorically dividing himself—in debating the poetic worth of W.B. Yeats–who had died in January of that year.

Yeats’ death surely made Auden,  famous and middle-aged in 1939,  reflect on his own worth as a poet, and, naturally on the worth of poetry itself in a brutal age approaching war.

Are we surprised, then, that poetry’s most divided and ambiguous statement about itself, emerged in March of 1939, in a poem by Auden on W.B. Yeats?

We really don’t need to puzzle over the meaning of “Poetry makes nothing happen,” for it is clearly the utterance of a helplessly divided and self-pitying man: “Poetry makes Auden happen” is closer to an accurate statement, for poetry makes a great deal happen.  Auden, the famous poet, felt sorry for himself as he contemplated the death of another well-known poet (Yeats) falling like a tiny droplet in the ocean, a day when a “few thousand”  were aware of something “slightly unusual.”

Or, if Auden wasn’t pitying himself, the phrase probably sprang from Auden’s sense–which one can detect in the Nation article–that Yeats was (and this is probably correct) a right-wing loon; ”poetry makes nothing happen“ was a description of Yeats’ poetry, not poetry.

Auden looked around at the world in 1939 and said, rather gruffly, after smoking a pack of cigarettes with a few Pinot Noirs, ’look, Yeats believed in fairies and Hitler is about to set the world on fire…

It was Yeats–Auden thought he was a freak.

Auden knew poetry–in general–made things happen.

After all, poetry created the poet, Auden, who made the ambiguous statement, ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ in the first place.

The idea that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ is…silly.

Auden married Kallman–and, to no one’s surprise, Chester broke Wystan’s heart.   Shall we say, then, “Marriage makes nothing happen?”

We should remember that poetry is much larger than W.H. Auden or W.B. Yeats, or any individual, and that sordid details and facts pale beside universals, and small facts can suddenly become universals, depending on the context.  We should remember what Percy Shelley, whose poetic treatment of the death of John Keats blows away Auden’s ditty on Yeats, said in his A Defense of Poetry:

“The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live.”   –Shelley, A Defense

A long poet does not exist.

Sure, a poem, or a poet, or poetry might–sometimes–make nothing happen.

Fairy dust and puffs of smoke make nothing happen.  Most of us know that.

But, again, Shelley:

“The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,  and their disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.”  –Shelley, A Defense

What was Shelley on, anyway?

Last week letters from Lord Byron sold for a tidy sum as the L.A. Times reports.

Today in London, a collection of letters from British poet Lord George Byron sold at auction for $459,110.67, exceeding the highest pre-sale estimates by more than $160,000 and selling for more than any other letters or manuscript by a British Romantic poet. Although the letters were written to a clergyman, they were — in keeping with Lord Byron’s reputation — somewhat scandalous.

In the letters — more than 71 handwritten pages — Byron mocks fellow Romantic poet Wordsworth, a rival, calling him “Turdsworth” and, according to the Guardian, pens “details of a squalid affair with a serving girl, fruity remarks about foreigners and literary vitriol.”

Byron’s mocking of Wordsworth wasn’t the only time he had an unflattering word about a contemporary.

Poisoned Pens, which traces such invective from Greek to modern times, illustrates how the Romantic poets could be particularly venomous. Writing to his publisher in 1820, Lord Byron declared: “No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

For good measure, he described Keats’s work as “neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium”.

In turn, Byron got it in the neck from Percy Bysshe Shelley, who described his fellow poet’s work as “mischievous insanity”.

Shelley blamed this on Byron’s taste for “disgusting” and “bigoted” Italian women who smelt “so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them”.

Lord Byron letters sell for a record $459,000 | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times

Writers flourish their poisoned pens with malice aforethought | The Australian

Amazon.com: Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola (9780711229297): Gary Dexter: Books

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), is an extraordinary instance of an atheist addressing—or speaking to—the shadowy side of the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) as if it possessed a human persona, or was even a god.

The poem has seven stanzas. Here’s the first one:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

      Floats though unseen among us,—visiting

      This various world with an inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

          It visits with inconstant glance

          Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

          Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

          Like memory of music fled,—

          Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Notice that, like a theist who might capitalize a reference to God, Shelley capitalizes his reference to the “unseen Power” that reveals itself “with an inconstant wing”—and yet unmistakably and directly—to each individual “As summer winds that creep from flower to flower”. A “Power” likened to a hovering cloud that “Floats”—or the flight of a bird or an unpredictable wind—oddly borrows Christian tropes for the Holy Spirit. This is curious poetic language for an atheist. It seems that Shelley, who professes to not believe in God, nevertheless, in this poem, finds himself addressing, as it were, an unknown god: the dark ontological mystery that is sometimes curiously present to the mind as a kind of unstable and elusive peak experience:

          It visits with inconstant glance

          Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

          Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

          Like memory of music fled,—

Then Shelley, again curiously, speaks of this “music” as grace. Grace. Absorb that. Why is an atheist turning elusive beauty into telos  distributing grace?:

Like memory of music fled,—

          Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

This is very strange language. It makes me wonder. When Shelley calls himself an atheist, does he mean merely that the conventional religious language used for talking about the ontological mystery strikes him as false—as a reduction of something completely mysterious—but that he nevertheless feels to be present—and that is in some sort of curious didactic relationship with him? Stanza 2 of this poem is startling for its religious longing and perplexity concerning suffering. This is hardly the way that you would expect an atheist to talk, and yet Shelley here sounds like the psalmist David:

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

    With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

    Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

          Ask why the sunlight not for ever

          Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,

          Why fear and dream and death and birth

          Cast on the daylight of this earth

          Such gloom,—why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

These questions of ultimate meaning are necessarily met by the elusive “Spirit of Beauty” with silence, and so in the third stanza Shelley offers a theory for the debasement of the ontological mystery by religion:

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

      To sage or poet these responses given—

      Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavor,

Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

          From all we hear and all we see,

          Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,

          Or music by the night-wind sent

          Through strings of some still instrument,

          Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Notice that Shelley insists that conventionally superstitious and religious language—”Demon, Ghost, and Heaven”—function as “Frail spells” that do not really tame “Doubt”, nor answer the deep questions that we address to the ontological mystery concerning “chance, and mutability”. The ontological mystery does not tell us why we exist, experience beauty, suffer, and die: “No voice from some sublimer world hath ever / To sage or poet these responses given—”. Only by periodic and direct heightened experience with the “Spirit of Beauty” is a kind of answer hinted at “to life’s unquiet dream”:

Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,

          Or music by the night-wind sent

          Through strings of some still instrument,

          Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

For Shelley, the apprehension of the “Spirit of Beauty” contains the kernel of an ontological secret. Like John Keats’s famous lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which Keats says that, in life, we should not “follow the money” but ”follow the beauty” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”), so Shelley gives beauty—albight intellectual beauty—first place in his soul’s quest. The apprehension of the “Spirit of Beauty” is the clue to the ontological mystery by which Shelley claims to navigate and investigate his existence. In stanza 5 he describes his dramatic youthful conversion to following this elusive mystery that he periodically perceives, this “shadow”:

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

    Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

    And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

          I was not heard—I saw them not—

          When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

          All vital things that wake to bring

          News of birds and blossoming,—

          Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

Notice that Shelley, in a youthful prophet-like wilderness experience, seeking the voices of the gods of traditional religion, and musing on life, was taken unawares, on the cusp of spring, by the direct apprehension of a “shadow” that  ”fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!” Here is Shelley describing a possession of his spirit that claims to have held him for life. And this from stanza 6:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

      To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?

And at the end of stanza 6 Shelley sounds like a Christian convert expressing eschatological longings:

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours . . .

They know that never joy illumed my brow

          Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free

          This world from its dark slavery,

          That thou—O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

Shelley, at least in this poem, seems not so much an atheist as one who has made the unseen mysterious power beneath things his “god.” And so Shelley ends his poem (stanza 7) with a kind of prayer that his youthful memories of the dark “Spirit of Beauty” will stay with him, and calmly sustain him in the future:

The day becomes more solemn and serene

      When noon is past—there is a harmony

      In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

          Thus let thy power, which like the truth

          Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

          Its calm—to one who worships thee,

          And every form containing thee,

          Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Shelley was an atheist. But the scaffoldings of religious impulses—of the need for worship, and to speak to, and enter into communion with, the ontological mystery and “love all human kind”—were present in him. He thought that there was an invisible, maybe intelligent, “shadow” undergirding things and occasionally revealing itself to our trembling apprehensions (as individual flowers tremble in separate gusts of wind). He thought that this “shadow”—which I’m calling the ontological mystery and which he called the “Spirit of Beauty”—gives “grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.” Odd that an atheist would express himself in such curiously religious language. Would a contemporary atheist like Daniel Dennett approve?

Shelley’s poem also recalls for me these words, attributed to Jesus, in the Gospel of St. John (3:8 KJV):

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

I think that Jesus might have recognized Shelley as a compadre, as someone who was also born of the Spirit. Shelley, in a calm moment, might even have agreed.

BAMA PANEL IV:  SURVIVAL OF THE DIMMEST?

The Alabama Panel 25 years ago this month was essentially a high-brow rumble: LangPo taking on Official Verse Culture.

Two heavyweights of LangPo, 53 year old USC Comparative Lit. professor Marjorie Perloff and 34 year old L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E editor Charles Bernstein took on U.K. poet Louis Simpson, 61,  former Nation poetry editor and Black Mountain associated poet, Denise Levertov, 60, David Ignatow, 70, poet and poetry editor of The Nation, Harvard professor Helen Vendler, 51, and Iowa Workshop poet Gerald Stern, 59.

Perloff and Bernstein were on friendly turf, however. 35 year old Hank Lazer, the ‘Bama professor host, was in Bernstein’s camp, as was 30 year old Gregory Jay, punk ‘Bama assistant professor.

Charles Altieri, 41,  professor at U. Washington and recent Fellow at Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, ostensibly had a foot in each camp, but you could tell his heart was with Perloff and Bernstein.  The match-up was actually 5-5, so LangPo should have counted itself fortunate.

Also at the table 25 years ago was the elder statesman, Kenneth Burke, 87, a coterie member of the original Modernists–winner of the annual Dial Magazine Award in 1928 (other winners of the Dial Award in the 1920s: T.S. Eliot in 1922 for ‘The Waste Land,’ Ezra Pound, WC Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore.)   Burke, chums with figures such as Malcolm Cowley and Allen Tate, was an editor at The New Republic 1929-1944, a radical Marxist, and a symbolism expert–if such a thing is possible.

The poet Donald Hall had been invited and could not attend–submitting in writing for the conference his famous ‘McPoem’ critque of the Workshop culture.

We already looked at how Gerald Stern embarrassed Bernstein by asking him to ‘name names’ when Bernstein raised the issue at the 25 year old panel discussion of ‘poet policemen’ enforcing the dictates of ‘official verse culture’ and Bernstein only coming up with one name: T.S. Eliot.

Then we looked at Vendler asserting the crucial modernist division between timeless criticism and “abrasive” reviewing–with Simpson retorting this was nothing but a status quo gesture on Vendler’s part, with Vendler weakly replying she was fighting the status quo in working to make Wallace Stevens more appreciated.   Then in Part III of this series, we saw how Levertov roared ‘you parochial fools are ignoring race/unprecedented crisis/human extinction.’

Levertov, taking a no-frills Leftist position, and Simpson, with his no-frills aesthetic of pre-interprative Vision, proved too much for the LangPo gang.

Levertov became incensed with professor Jay’s post-modern argument that human language and interpretation are at the heart of human experience: “Bullshit!” Levertov said.  Levertov and Simpson (with Ignatow) argued for universal feeling as primary.

Levertov argued for universal access as the very nature of language; Perloff countered that a small group of people might find meaning in something else.

Louis Simpson came in for the kill, asking Perloff:

“Suppose you found some people who were using bad money and thought it was good money.  Would you be mistaken to point out then it was all forged?”

The audience roared appreciatively with laughter.

Bernstein, with his training in analyitic philosophy, was shrewder, finally, than Perloff. 

Rather than confront the dinosaur Levertorous head-on, the furry little Bernstith sniffed around and devoured her giant eggs:

Bernstein: “We’re not going to to resolve philosophical & theosophical, religious differences among us.  Religious groups have these same disagreements.  I think the problem I have is not so much understanding that people have a different veiwpoint than I have–believe me, I’ve been told that many times (laughter) and I accept that.”

Here’s the insidious nature of Bernstein’s Cambridge University training–he seeks disagreement as a happy result; he embraces difference as a positive quality in itself.   Bernstein gives up on universals sought by pro and con argument.  Now he continues:

“What I do find a problem is that we say ‘poets’ think this and ‘poets’ think that–because by doing that we tend to exclude the practices of other people in our society of divergence.”

What are these “practices of other people?”  He doesn’t say.  But we can imply that these “practices” are radically different and reconciliation is impossible.    Now Bernstein goes on to make a stunning leap of logic:

“And I think it’s that practice that leads to the very deplorable situation that Denise Levertov raised: the exclusion of the many different types of communities and cultures from our multicultural diverse society, of which there is no encompassing center.  My argument against a common voice is based on my idea that the idea of a common voice seems to me exclusion.”

Bernstein’s Orwellian thesis is that the One does not include the Many; the One is merely a subset of the Many.   Bernstein rejects the universalizing social glue necessary for Levertov’s democratic commonwealth of social justice; Bernstein promotes inclusion while positing inclusion itself as exclusion(!).  Multiculturalism interests Bernstein for its severing qualities–Bernstein wants to break but not build.  Logically and politically, he is unsound, and later on in the discussion–after Vendler breaks from ‘official verse culture’ and goes over to Bernstein’s side (thus giving Langpo a numerical 6-4 victory) with her ‘poetry makes language opaque’ speech–Levertov strikes the following blow:

Bernstein:  My poetry resists the tendencies within the culture as a whole. What poetry can do is make an intervention within our language practice in society.

Levertov:  I disagree.  Language is not your private property. Language has a common life.

and my husband.

For Scarriet’s many  friends from the U.K. and Down-under,  Dancing with the Stars is a popular American TV show in which a dancing star partners with a celebrity who cannot dance, and the couples compete in front of judges.

HERE WE GO!

..

..Joan Houlihan …………..and …………….Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ready?

Dancers, take your places.

Both poems we are looking at by Houlihan and Shelley are songs.

In Shelley’s poem, the music supplies helpful adornment, pleasing the investigator of Shelley’s idea– as the music harmonizes with Shelley’s idea.

The purpose of poetic speech is NOT to make language “opaque,” or to make the reader aware of language’s “materiality,” or to “problematize language” by making it less “transparent.”   These are the words of Helen Vendler, who sought to agree with Charles Bernstein as she expressed this opinion at the October 1984 Alabama Poetry Conference, hosted by Hank Lazer.

Vendler’s analogy fails.

Language is NOT glass; transparency is the character of glass, and coloring it alters mood as well as vision, until too much darkening ends the function of the glass as glass.

Language, let us repeat, is NOT transparent like glass; even the simplest language is NOT simple, and Bernstein with his Cambridge Analytic philosophy background would be the first to understand this.  Language is NOT transparent; it is made transparent through the poet’s harmonizing skill.  Seeking opacity, as Vendler recommends to the poet, burdens the muse unnecessarily.

Rhyme, meter, metaphor, and assonance are not strategies in the direction of opacity, but are harmonizing elements in the direction of transparency.

Pater’s “hard, gem-like flame” has bewitched many an aesthete—but poetry has more to do with air and light than stone or concentrated flame.  The skill of the poet adds transparency to language, it does not take it away; “difficult,” muddy, opaque language brings out materiality in a way that might please a Valery, but thickness of tongue and poor handling of theme inevitably create an opacity that finally hinders poetry’s higher design.

As we compare the Houlihan and Shelley, note how Shelley’s theme is  transparent and rich with harmonic accompaniment.

Compare this to Houlihan’s poem: her theme lacks transparency; Houlihan’s theme is obscure, it lacks focus; thus her song-like attempts at opacity lack harmony.

As we see in the Shelley, harmony should be the end of language’s materiality, the materiality should never be an end in itself–unless we are writing pure nonsense poetry.

We can see in Houlihan’s poem the less than happy result of reaching after materiality or opacity as a capricious end in itself.

In her poem, “I Sing To You, Offering Human Sound,” words like “here,” “finger,” “hair,” and “weather” do present the reader with a powerful potential for harmony; the mere resemblance does please to a certain  degree, but the poem’s theme, as rich and mysterious and heart-felt as it is, is neither robustly presented, nor clear; it wanders too much, and thus the opacity is finally wasted, for the web of  the poem’s language is unable to contribute to the harmony of the poem as a whole.

Shelley’s “An Exhortation” is problematic, as well, and feels like a ‘throw-away’ by a young poet in some respects, but Shelley’s genius for harmony and transparency shines upon the reader in no small degree, despite his theme’s highly metaphoric and fanciful nature.

An Exhortation
…………………..by Percy Shelley

Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet’s free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!

~

I Sing to You, Offering Human Sound
…………………………..by Joan Houlihan

Come here. Let me finger your hair.
I like the way you imitate weather:
a white breath here and there
the rush and sting of pinkened air
a coven of crows talking briefly of home
and then the pelted tree.
By these shall I know ye,
bless yer little round mug.

Oh, my semi-precious, so much slow time
so much crawling and browsing
so much fascination with harmful insects
and corrosive sublimate.
As if you have as many eyes
as many eyes as the common fly,
and every one stuck open wide
to the wonderful, wonderful world.

So, I get up at 4 am, finally, to put on some tea—
a soothing explanation for steam.
Children grow into themselves, then away.
We musn’t worry when they’re gone—
or worse, not-quite-gone-yet.
The roots of things connect
where we can’t see.

When I was born, Mother began counting
to herself. Something in the middle
must have gone missing.
Fortunately, I have all my faculties.
In fact, I still remember to turn
every small thing until it gleams:
like your favorite airplane pin

there, riding on its own cotton wad.
Now come here so I can see
through your eyes to the sky within.
You are my only animal—
my animal of air.

This article builds directly on Thomas Brady’s last comments following the previous Delmore Schwartz post [click here], and indeed tries to pull all the pieces of Scarriet together. What it is not is negative, and certainly not toward Blog:Harriet which has given its authors such pleasure. It’s sole target is the very poor taste and mismanagement of Harriet’s editor, Travis Nichols, who we feel should be fired point blank.

Toward the underlying controversy itself, Scarriet is tolerant — we feel the issues involved are so close to us they are difficult to unscramble. Indeed, our position is like the two sides of our poetry’s coin, and denying one or the other would be fraudulent.

Our position is that having banned one side of the coin Harriet is now bankrupt.

Don Share wrote the original article called REAL LIFE [click here] with great sensitivity and insight, and we are sure gave everyone pleasure. Don Share is not being attacked in this post — he is simply a piece in a much larger puzzle that without him would not yield its whole picture. But his side is GREEN, lots and lots of it, and indeed in his person Don Share embodies the ‘ruling’ position — no blame, but there we are. What is undeniable is that that position gets all the votes — and of course, in less than a month from this very moment Thomas Brady will be banned from Blog:Harriet altogether.

Yvor Winters is a matter of taste, and he’s dead. He’s an important figure in the original article which draws him in here, but he doesn’t speak, and nobody is voting for or against him, or at least not directly. On the other hand, he’s a crux in Thomas Brady’s literary historical argument — a true eminence grise casting a shadow over all of us, and making it hard to read Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Some birthday — indeed, the only warm light comes from the poet’s funeral pyre!

Joan Houlihan is drawn in because she is Sheila Chambers in the penultimate comment, and another large piece of the puzzle. Not only does she get +14 GREEN votes for one very small offering, she expresses most starkly the attitude that lies behind the extraordinary ill-will that Thomas Brady gets buried in (look and see for yourself!). She’s the very Avatar of RED in her compulsion to demonize the opposition, and insists that hooligans like Brady are not to be tolerated anywhere within the pale. She’s angry, dismissive, and will stop at no limits.

Joan Houlihan attacks Thomas Brady specifically for his phrase, “the machinations of the grooming process,” and she should certainly know about that because she runs one of the most expensive “grooming” consultancies in the poetry business in America. Called the Colrain Manuscript Conferences, her outfit offers sophisticated weekends in white mansions in the Berkshires during which you get to meet hot editors and publishers like Jeffrey Levine — available to anyone with an unpublished book to be groomed and an extra arm and a leg. So she’s really passionately opposed to this discussion on Harriet, because Thomas Brady is threatening not only her purse but her cachet. She wants him stopped, in fact. Period. And ditto Christopher Woodman – as he was on Pw & Poets.org.

The comments that follow form an uninterrupted sequence from Thomas Brady’s initial thanks to Don Share for the REAL LIFE post to Joan Houlihan’s cat out of the bag. It’s a shambles, a shocker of the first order, a disgrace to The Poetry Foundation and to all poets and poetry. Indeed, it should make us all blush to read it (but you can’t really read it, of course,  because the whole opposition is closed down, like in Singapore!).

We have decided to post typescripts of the first 3 exchanges because they express the gist of the argument, and need to be read carefully (don’t forget that both of Thomas Brady’s comments are closed in the original — some dialogue!). We also provide a typescript of Joan Houlihan’s and Thomas Brady’s last comments at the end — and, of course, Thomas Brady is closed there too with -23 Dislikes!

Enjoy, we’d like to say. But that would be nasty.

CLICK HERE to read the most important part of this article.

“Blog” is a new word for a new thing, formed from a contraction of “Web Log”. Huge swathes of the internet are blog-land, and if we (optimistically) apply Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud”), the generous 10% of worthwhile blogs are an immense, insurmountable body of writing. Today we are writing more than ever, but we will be one of the least recorded generations in history – while paper lasts centuries and stone millennia, CDs might last 30 years if they avoid magnets – and volatile memory is exactly that.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

In Blogger’s words:

A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world.
Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.
(…) blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.

A feature of blogging that makes it a valuable platform for communication is immediacy.

All the reasons to write: relaxation and pleasure, reflection and refinement of thought, personal expression, and persuasion – all of these things can be done through blogging.  The accessibility and arguable transparency of the internet makes it a perfect host for persuasive writing.

Martin Luther’s The 95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences spread quickly throughout Germany in two weeks and Europe in two months – thanks to the printing press. A great potential exists for the same in blogging, though the signal-to-noise ratio in a virtual space filled with unstoppable spewing blogs and a world filled with the literate and information overloaded is a starkly different environment. Some well-meaning blogs wish to be the spark in the flour-mill that starts the inferno, but every speck is already a flying ember in a fire-storm of dubious causes. Very little will catch.

Twitter is a microblogging platform wherein users post <140 character text-only banalities, though it recently received a huge amount of positive coverage for its role in the unrest in Iran after their 2009 elections.

Tumblr is a multimedia blogging platform, where users post photos, videos, quotes, text, viewing their subscribed feeds in one stream.

Blogger and WordPress are two currently popular, customisable and free blog hosts, in the traditional mould.

All these services are platforms for the democratisation of information, enabling each person to be not just a consumer but a broadcaster – often a waste.  A newspaper at its best, says The Economist, holds governments and companies to account. There is no reason that a blog cannot do that.  Unlike a journalist, a blogger has not necessarily had any training, and thus language and reporting ability might be underdeveloped, and ideas of journalistic integrity might be foreign.

There are many different blogging communities, defined by host, by interests, locations, needs, languages, causes, and styles.

Blogs are a significant enough pop-cultural force to be reported in “conventional” media, such as the Sunday Herald Sun’s report on the blog Things Bogans Like (“The bogan has taken to the Melbourne Cup like an aspiring actress to a terminally ill oil magnate”).

The White House maintains a blog, as do many political figures and corporations around the world, who appreciate it as a medium to communicate to the specifically interested person. As an example of cause-centred communities, there are feminist bloggers of many persuasions, also atheist blogs, parenting blogs, and many others.

In short, the blog is  another way to communicate, with great potential and little prestige – both due to its inclusive nature.

Frankenstein does leave a little to be desired.  But that is not the point here.

Around the same time Mary Shelley started Frankenstein (although when she started it she was still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.. wait, why change your name to Shelley when you can keep Wollstonecraft and Godwin?) her husband (or lover, at the time) Percy Bysshe Shelley (are you kidding me?) was working on a play called Prometheus Unbound, a retelling of the Aeschylus play and somehow I made it through four years of theater studies without reading either.  The reason this interests me is because the full title of Frankenstein is in fact Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.  What was with the Promethean obsession in the Shelley household?

PBS: Is dinner ready?

MS: Almost, dear.

PBS: I’m famished.  I’ve been working all day on my new play about Prometheus!

MS: Your what?

PBS: My new play, epically titled Prometheus Unbound!

MS: You’ve got to be kidding me.

PBS: To dramatic?

MS throws down a copy of her first novel, titled, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.

PBS: Well… one of us has to change it.

I like this dramatization much more than what I assume the actuality of the situation to be.

But why that subtitle?  Why the Modern Prometheus?  Prometheus was awesome!  He brought us fire!  Literally took us out of the darkness and into the light.  And warmth.  And cooked food.  And what did he get in return?  An eternity of having his liver eaten by eagles, re-spawned and eaten again.  What parallel does this share with our “hero” Frankenstein?  Frankenstein is a despicable little man, weak and hell-bent on vengeance, trying to fix the mistakes that are nobody’s fault but his own.  Yes, Frankenstein suffers like Prometheus suffered but Frankenstein is hardly a hero or a champion of anything.

And one final note: What if Shelley had given Frankenstein a different name?  Something less “exotic” and more English, like, say, “Shelley”.  Would we therefore refer to this pop-culture monster as “Shelley”?  Would the word “Shelley” resonate to us the same way “Frankenstein” does?  Or is it simply because “Frankenstein” is such and uncommon name that it works?

and the sunlight clasps the earth
and the moonbeams kiss the sea;
what is all this sweet work worth
if thou kiss not me?

This past summer, for me at least, has been brutal, heat-wise. Just a scorcher, for the most part. But it’s been getting cooler for weeks now, and the fall is definitely starting to come upon us. But still, in these few seasonally transformative weeks, it’s not hard to remember the heat. So much so that in talking about it with someone the other day, they said to me, “Man, I’d kill for a year, just one year, without the summer heat, you know?”

That got me thinking about 1816, the actual year that’s been called “The Year Without A Summer.” The previous April, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, and caused not online one of the largest eruptions in something like 1,600 years but also lead to a volcanic winter type event, coupled with low solar activity. This lead to mostly continuous grim, ashy weather and continuous rainfall mostly in Europe but around the rest of the world too, which then lead to massive crop failures worldwide.

But where crops die, in the darkness, art is born.

Sunrise With Sea Monsters, 1845, Joseph Mallrod William Turner, an artist many believe was heavily inspired by the “year without a summer.”

I especially think about this because it’s the “The Year Without A Summer” and the nonstop rains that ruined the July vacation that year of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley (then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, I believe), Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Polidori, and Claire Claremont outside of Geneva. The group of excited young artists and being with too much time on their hands were mostly forced indoors and left with only their imaginations. And from their imaginations came a challenge: A contest to see who could write the scariest story? From that we got Polidori’s The Vampyre and, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness” as well, though it’s not a “scary story” exactly, but is definitely inspired by the weather events of that year) and history went to a whole other place.

And we’ll continue with more on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein soon…

from here.

“Autumn’s the mellow time. “ ~ William Allingham

“Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson, Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green. Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.” ~ William C. Bryant

“No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one Autumnal face.” ~ John Donne

“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. “ ~ Stanley Horowitz

“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” ~ P. D. James

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” ~ John Muir

“There is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been!” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

“All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it . . . bearing them all away to the green fields in the South. “
~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

“A few days ago I walked along the edge of the lake and was treated
to the crunch and rustle of leaves with each step I made.  The
acoustics of this season are different and all sounds, no matter
how hushed, are as crisp as autumn air.” Eric Sloane

“Once more the liberal year laughs out
O’er richer stores than gems or gold:
Once more with harvest song and shout
Is nature’s boldest triumph told.”
-   John Greenleaf Whittier

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly
changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”~Henry Beston, Northern Farm

“Listen!  the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!” ~ Humbert Wolfe

i WAS doing an english project just awhile ago. And here i am downstairs.

Got scared with those little ‘Doppelganger’ famous reports/stories or whatever you might want to call them. You know what a Doppelganger is? For sure at first you speak of it as, “Double Ganger”. No, it’s not Double Ganger but Doppelganger. Actually, it means the same either way but it’s not the word. “Doppelganger” comes from German. Doppel ~ double; ganger ~ goer. Double-goer. Scary deshou? HAHA.

Our english project is called, “author diaries”. In other words, we are to create by group on telling an author’s story like writing a diary as if we are the writer. Quite hard for me, because i use old words. Don’t know with the other groups. I see their works as fancy, a modern scrapbook instead of a diary. print computerized and colorful. Somehow i think if what me with my groups do something wrong. But no, it’s just that it’s too hard that other groups made a different way. Okay, so enough with the groupie thingssss.

Connecting it to the project, we chose Percy Bysshe Shelley among the four writers or authors that Ms. Isip gave. The truth is, we chose Shelley because i recommended it. I did because my twin sister told me his story. It was like —- O_o woooh Doppel Gangers~~~ Great story, Shelley’s death is great so we chose it. HAHA! betsuni ne, also he is an atheist, he doesn’t believe in God. My twin’s conclusion is that we cannot blame him for the reason that when he was still young, he was being bullied by students in his school. Though these days, myself i cannot take it as a valid reason. But before, there wasn’t much about God. Some religions were just starting to arise. Probably no one has got the chance to let Shelley approach God that time.

The Doppelganger story was gone!

Maa, figure it our yourself.  I might just make it complicated when i tell it here. At least i showed some ideas. I guess it’s more exciting when you read the info in Wikipedia. GOOD LUCK!

note: don’t try reading it at a dark place. you might get too scared.

because i got too, much, over, really, absolutely, definitely, truly, hontou, zettai, kitto kowai– SCARED!

Blog post: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert”

It’s so easy to fall into the black and white nostalgia of cliche laden photographs, thinking how much better everything must have been in the good ol´days. And I might be looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but seriously, why are the women in old pictures always beautiful? The men extremely handsome? The clothes, the cars, the buildings, everything looks so…well-made. Elegant and stylish. What happened?

And yeah, yeah, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times but look at these pictures from The Telegraph ‘London then and now: Photographs of London streets taken 60 years apart.’

Clearly it was much better 60 years ago.

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past.
A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last,
Was Time long past.

There were sweet dreams in the night
Of Time long past:
And, was it sadness or delight,
Each day a shadow onward cast
Which made us wish it yet might last–
That Time long past.

There is regret, almost remorse,
For Time long past.
‘Tis like a child’s belovèd corse
A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance, cast
From Time long past.

(Time Long Past by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats through unseen among us, — visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, –
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, –
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, –
Like memory of music fled, –
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, — where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, — why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given –
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells — whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone — like mist oe’er the mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messgenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes –
Thou — that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not — lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard — I saw them not –
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, –
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night –
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou – O awful Loveliness,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past — there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm — to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

~Percy Bysshe Shelley