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My middle son enjoys a genre of fiction known as “alternate history.” Among its practitioners is the American novelist Harry Turtledove. As I understand it, the premise is simple: change an event in the past and see what happens in subsequent history. Hitler, for instance, dies in infancy. Fleming never discovers penicillin, and his students Florey and Chain never use it to treat streptococcal meningitis. Lee Harvey Oswald is hit by a truck and killed in the Soviet Union. I no longer read science fiction but based on what I’ve been told, alternate history novels resemble the pot-fueled bull sessions I participated in as a university student.  A similar hypothesis is at work in the poem “Things That Might Have Been” (The History of the Night, 1977) by Jorge Luis Borges, translated into English by Hoyt Rogers:   “I think about things that might have been and never were. The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write. The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse. History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross. History without Helen’s face. Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon. Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South. The love we never shared. The vast empire the Vikings declined to found. The globe without the wheel, or without the rose. John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare. The Unicorn’s other horn. The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once. The child I never had.”   Borges saves the saddest for last. Another of his poems, “The Just” (The Limit, trans. Alistair Reid, 1981), is built around a similar structure, a series of responses to the title:   “A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished. He who is grateful for the existence of music. He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess. The potter, contemplating a color and a form. The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him. A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto. He who strokes a sleeping animal. He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him. He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson. He who prefers others to be right. These people, unaware, are saving the world.” [Rogers’ translations are collected in Borges’ Selected Poems (ed. Alexander Coleman, 1999). Hoyt Rogers has also translated work by Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Claude and André du Bouchet.]

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Sometimes disparate things almost announce their covert similarities and linkages, in a way Aristotle would have understood, and it makes good sense to combine them. I was looking for something in The Poet’s Tongue, the anthology compiled by W.H. Auden and the schoolmaster John Garrett, published in 1935. It’s a little eccentric. The poems are printed anonymously (until the index) and arranged alphabetically. My first thought was that the book is designed for young, inexperienced readers, not yet deeply read in the English poetic tradition, who can encounter the poems without the prejudice of chronology or name recognition. The focus is on the text. Now I think the anthologists’ arrangement is likewise a gift to veteran readers who can read Marvell or Tennyson outside the classroom and shed long-held biases. It recalls Downbeat magazine’s long-running feature, “Blindfold Test.”  Next, I got curious about the anthology’s critical reception ninety years ago and discovered it had been reviewed by one of my favorite critics, the poet Louise Bogan, in the April 1936 issue of Poetry. In “Poetry’s Genuine Fare,” Bogan begins by comparing the Auden/Garrett collection with Francis Palgrave’s famous Golden Treasury (1875):   “Where Palgrave was able to present selected poems in a straightforward chronological manner, as though the last thing to consider was the idea that readers might or might not be prepared for it, Auden and Garrett’s task involves devices: the ground must be cleared and then, as it were, disguised, in order that, in our day, poetry may be  approached, by youth, without scorn or fear.”   Bogan applauds the inclusion of “songs fresh from the tongue of simple people, songs which first saw light printed on broadsheets, songs from the primer and the nursery, from the music-hall, from the hymnal and the psalter.” She applauds the adjoining of, say, a ballad preceding Dryden’s Song for St. Cecilia's Day and followed by a nursery rhyme. By reading the poems-as-poems, students can develop their taste and critical sense. That leaves plenty of room for future literary history and scholarship. Late in her review Bogan cites a passage identified only as having been written by George Saintsbury (1845-1933):   “It would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciation which, while relishing things more exquisite, and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savor the simple genuine fare of poetry. . . . There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding ‘better bread than is made of wheat.’”   The quotation was new to me.A little hunting showed Bogan had drawn it from Saintsbury’s A History of Nineteenth Century Literature 1780-1895 (1896). “This is Saintsbury speaking in an eminently sane manner,” she writes, “words which should be taken to heart in this era of fashions, proselytizing and fear, when poetry might well bloat in the mephitic vapors bred from dismal insistence on ‘revolutions of the word,’ or wither into the disguised hymnals of propaganda.” His thoughts remain pertinent. They are drawn from the section in his book Saintsbury devotes to the historian and poet Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). He describes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) as “an honest household loaf that no healthy palate with reject.” Bogan concludes her review: “Auden and Garrett have endeavored to show that poetry would exist if not only the linotype, but also the pen, had never been invented, and that it rises from the throat of whatever class, in whatever century. They have brought our attention back to the voice speaking in a landscape where trees bear laurel at the same time that fields grow bread.”

Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” by Emily Dickinson appeared first on The American Scholar.