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.”

When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations. Some will try to find a third option to put on the table; they may or may not succeed, but they will still be sitting at the same table. The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate of its surface with options others… read article

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

...

I dreamed my late brother was here in Houston, a city he never visited. He was phobic about flying and traveled by air only twice in his life, when very young. We were seated across from each other, on the couches by the front window. What I remember of the dream is brief, little more than an image without duration. He looked as he always looked – plaid shirt, blue jeans, Whitmanesque beard. The atmosphere was mundane, free of revelations. We didn’t talk though I sensed I had unformed questions. He offered no reassurance or profound knowledge from beyond.  When I woke the dream mingled with Montaigne, the writer we often talked about during his final weeks last August in the hospital and hospice. Montaigne’s father became ill with kidney stones in 1561 and died seven years later. The essayist’s closest friend, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, died of dysentery in 1563 at age thirty-two. His brother Arnaud died in his twenties. His firstborn died at two months, the second survived but the subsequent four also died as infants. In “Of Judging the Death of Others,” Montaigne writes:   “When we judge of the assurance of other men in dying, which is without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life, we must be mindful of one thing: that people do not easily believe that they have reached that point. Few men die convinced that it is their last hour; and there is no place where the deception of hope deludes us more. It never stops trumpeting into our ears: ‘Others have certainly been sicker without dying; the case is not as desperate as they think; and at worst, God has certainly worked other miracles.’”   For almost a week preceding his death, my brother was unconscious. The only sound he made was softly moaning when the nurses moved him. Before that, he never seemed frightened. I’ll never know what he knew or when.   [The quotation is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]