Taking my leave
So now I go
And devil take the bloke
Who says I can’t (go)
Because I can —
And you go soak!
I mean it!
23 Tuesday Nov 2021
Taking my leave
So now I go
And devil take the bloke
Who says I can’t (go)
Because I can —
And you go soak!
I mean it!
31 Thursday Jan 2019
More from Yvor Winters . . .
This association-of-ideas idea — promoted by 18th-century philosophers Hobbes and Locke and fingered by Winters — seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.
Romantic poets — one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase “blithe spirit” — followed Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney and looked in their hearts and wrote. (And there’s something to be said for that.) Winters, however, favored “a logical, plain-spoken poetic,” as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the June 1997 New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century fellows, which is like preferring Truman to Roosevelt in political-style terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.
In his poem “Of Money,” Googe says he’d rather have money than friends because with the first he’d always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration: “Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;/ Come time of proof, fare well they must away.” The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric “to the minimum required by the subject,” as opposed to “rhetoric for its own sake” as practiced by other Elizabethans.
Another of Winters’ favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own “creeping genius” was “more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit” and thus wrote for “those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.” An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.
— more more more —
31 Thursday Jan 2019
The blind poet asked God what he could do for Him. The answer:
“God doth not need Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Seems that would go for the rest of us, physically blind or not. A reminder to hang loose while doing the best we can.
27 Sunday Jan 2019
Posted Day to day, Poems, Writing
inYou’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on the Ed Sullivan show. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine, or Milan (for its allying of Christianity with the ruling powers and thus allegedly weakening its prophetic function).
Well I have found one who blames it on the 18th-century philosopher Shaftesbury, a well-known apostle of sentimentalism — you feel and therefore you know — the state of mind that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.
Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine embraced by Hobbes and Locke: One idea leads to another? Pay attention: the two may be logically connected and you should take that very seriously, even as a guide in your pursuit of what’s true. Just go for it. It’s how we learn things.
The pin-pointer of these presumed seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary poet and critic who shook up his Stanford students from the ’30s on with his anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it in today’s climate of gut-thinking.
Winters’ problem would have been the primacy he assigns to reason — in poetry but one suspects therefore in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published in 1932, the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in the Gulf of Mexico without a life jacket.
Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism.
What do you expect? Winters asked about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and in his view scorned reason.
This notion was one “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously,” Winters wrote. One is reminded of other performers, he said, tragic spirits who gave their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as said of Hart Crane.
(to be continued)
27 Thursday Dec 2018
Posted Health and welfare-mine, Poems
inA cataract poem, yeah! What a nice surprise.
My cataracts invest the bright spring day
With extra glory, with a glow that stings.
etc. Read it.
05 Wednesday Mar 2014
Was on way back from Red Hen (mug of regular, a twist, looking out the window at the bus stop and Scoville Park) to St. Edmund’s, my usual port of call in matters of worship, when passing the Green Line station I had an Episcopal vision.
It was the ashes-to-go priest in long stole, hands free, and two burly fellows standing with back against the stone wall on the left as you enter, ready with ashes. “Ashes to go,” she said with a smile, and the two ashes-holders echoed that. I had to stop. Fellow Christians were honoring the day.
A moment of greeting with smile, then my inspired retort, pointing: “Remember, thou art dust.” And they got it, Mother Whoever especially, smiling agreement, recognizing the ages-old recommendation to the ashes-receiver, “Remember Man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”
As with Thomas Gray’s “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Or Shelley’s “Ozymandias, King of Kings,” whose gravestone warned, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
My second Episcopal moment came in the afternoon, walking past St. Christopher’s at Adams and East. It was their sign which I have passed many times but this time noticed with a certain leaping up of the heart, like Wordsworth: “8:00 a.m.: Holy Eucharist, Rite I.”
Rite I! It was a sort of Latin mass for the Episcopal Church, the old way of worship before the ’70s, when the church revised the Book of Common Prayer amidst great hand-wringing — but kept it for those who wanted it. Hence Rite I at 8;00 on Sunday, Rite II (the revised service) at 10:30.
My Roman Catholic church, on the other hand, at Vatican II a few years earlier instituted a new way, in English, but — and this was too bad — forbade the old and punished priests who resisted. (Much later restored it.) Was that not heavy-handed? Was it necessary?
22 Friday Jun 2012
For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Though meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.
They are supposed to guard and guide each other. But wit usually gets the better of it, I think
14 Saturday Apr 2012
Posted Newspapers, Poems, Religion
inTags
A poem criticizing The Tablet, UK’s Catholic newspaper of record:
For the people at The Tablet
Life seems very tough.
They publish, publish, publish,
But no one buys their stuff.On tables, shelves, old, yellowing
Unsold, the copies lie.
“What can be done to save our jobs?
What is there left to try?”
More more more at The Left Footer’s blog.
Not a regular reader of The Tablet, and this critique isn’t what would come to my mind, but I love how this urbane writer does it.
29 Sunday Jan 2012
PURITANS AND ROMANTICS: Religion was reduced by the Puritans “to mere morality,” the Puritan imagination was “thoroughly moralized,” said H.B. Parkes and H.W. Schneider respectively, both of them quoted by Yvor Winters in his 1930 book Maule’s Curse. The “highly stimulated” Puritan, said Winters, was “no longer guided by the flexible and sensitive ethical scholarship of the Roman tradition.” [italics mine] Highly stimulated but Calvinistically predestined, he was told by preachers he couldn’t repent even as he was told to repent, in some of the roughest, toughest preaching this side of Beelzebub.
This morality emphasis came to the fore when many years ago I profiled a Unitarian church I knew quite well, focusing on members’ common denominator, morality. The preacher was very good. But his game was morality, nothing but. Fellow Daily News man Bill Newman saw that and observed they would feel pretty good to be characterized that way. He was right. Morality sells. The doctrine that undergirds it does not.
Young romantics of the early 19th century did not feel as Puritans did. Love is free, said the poet Shelley at 19. Monogamy, he said, like religious faith “excludes us from all inquiry.”
Inquiry is it? I hadn’t heard that one. A learned senior Jesuit, asked about being married, or hearing someone wishing he was, observed, “Yes, it would be good to have someone to share your ideas with.” At 19 we young Jesuits laughed at that story, but I would quote it in refutation of Shelley.
But young romantics’ ideas were a bad deal for the women in their lives, being “illusory, naive, and damaging” especially to them. Several committed or tried to commit suicide, says Oliver Herford in his Times Literary Supplement 9/24/2010 review of Daisy Hay’s book Young Romantics and Richard Marrgraff Turley’s Bright Stars.
Keats was another story. He read Chapman’s translation of Homer until daybreak with his friend Cowden Clarke, then left for a two-mile walk to the next town, composing on the way. (No small use was made here of an early-morning walk.) He wrote out his poem when he reached the town and sent it back by courier to Clarke, who read “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” — “Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold . . .” — when he opened the envelope.
Keats’s “realms of gold” went beyond the written page. On the voyage to Rome, consumption-stricken, he went out of his way to cheer up a fellow traveler, a young woman also a consumptive, offering “golden jokes” and helping her to “laugh and be herself,” according to Joseph Severn, who was accompanying Keats and would nurse him in his fatal illness in Rome.
Not-so-young romantics were not so dismissive of religion. William Wordsworth, for instance, showed respect for the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in calling Mary “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” — which was not bad for a separated brother.
POLITICALLY SPEAKING: If I were to drop a bundle, I said in early December, commenting on Republican politics, it would be on Congr. Paul Ryan’s Prosperity PAC, which picks fiscally principled smarties in congressional primaries. As for the presidential race (I said then), Romney’s the man, Newt a comparative fly-by-night. In any case, congressional votes tell. Go Ryanistas. (I said.) I have veered Newt-ward since then, as here.
Right now, pre-Florida, I find Newt wanting in various ways which he has overcome time and again and could when faced with the Liar-in-Chief in November and Mitt wanting in willingness and/or ability to do more than clog the airwaves with anti-Newt stuff, including punch up and out a small-govt. tea-party-style message.
As for the Liar-in-Chief, just when I think he’s done the worst he can do, he comes up with another violation of all that’s good, true and beautiful. Now it’s Catholic hospitals and Obamacare’s birth control and abortion requirements. Phew.
TALKIE-TALK: AT&T woman, in re our longstanding two-line service: Why do you need two lines? Me: So two of us can talk at the same time in different conversations. (She asked a stupid question, got an obvious answer.) She was referring maybe to call-waiting as a way to catch a 2nd call. Or not. Maybe to some personal reason, which was not her business.
This was not typical of AT&T non-digital telephone service, by the way — which we must use because the radio station down the street spills into digital telephoning, in several languages. The telephone people follow an old tradition. The digital (U-verse) service is another matter. Comcast does immensely better.
* We hear someone’s bipolar. Clinically very bad, even condemnatory. We toss it about, hanging medical tags, which are much heavier than “he’s nuts” or “off his rocker,” or to roll one’s eyes. Same for Alzheimer’s, also clinical, vs. “losing it” or even “senile,” which we can wrap ourselves around. Not so a doc’s diagnosis, with its ring of finality.
* Heard in dentist office, from radio news lady doing traffic report: “Erections on the Jane Addams toll”! In broad daylight! What a gal!
19 Friday Feb 2010
Posted Poems
in≈ Comments Off on Trip down academic lane: Boccacio vs. Chaucer vs. church
At Dominican U in RF last night, Robert Hanning from Columbia U. on confession in the middle ages. Title led me to expect a socio-cultural explication but he was about close reading of Bocaccio and Chaucer.
I found the former heavy-handed in his slashing attack on church practice, producing cartoon characters — opera boffo? — none of them credible or noteworthy. The latter — dear Geoffrey — produced memorable people and made same points with relative understatement. Subtlety, thy name is not an Italian one.
Considered a q. during post-lecture q&a, where was holy mother church during all this? Besides indexing Bocaccio. But H. was not attuned to that, or seemed not to be, or had simply ruled that out a la monograph-style, not to mention journal-ready text with references and attributions right and left.
Appropriate, in that he was keynoting a joint meeting of the Illinois Medieval Assn. and the Midwest body of medievalists, this in DU’s near spanking-new Parmer Hall on west side of burgeoned if not still burgeoning campus.
From which I exited on Thatcher, by the way, using the easement much disputed by tree-huggers and forest preservers. The trees did not cry out at me as I hung a left and headed south.
A nice evening, for $10 that included a sip of wine and bite of something beforehand, sitting and watching medievalists chatter in clumps. A look at the ivory tower, you might say, without prejudice.
But I had to think about what Ezra Pound would say, he who moved ever in the mainstream of (literary and other) life and preferred jumping to (fascinating, engaging) conclusions. Takes all kinds.