The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times The post America the Beautiful appeared first on The American Scholar.

I can’t think of another poet who wrote so often or so amusingly about death as Thomas Disch. I once tried tallying his death-themed poems and lost count. Here’s a sample: “How to Behave When Dead,” “Symbols of Love and Death,” “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written a decade before her death) and “Death Wish IV.” And then there’s the suggestively named Endzone, an online "LiveJournal" Disch kept from April 26, 2006 until July 2, 2008, two days before his death by suicide. Look at these titles from his final month: “Letters to Dead Writers,” “Back from the Dead!” “In Memoriam,” “Why I Must Die: A Film Script,” “Tears the Bullet Wept,” “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead!” When it comes to death poems, here is my favorite, from ABCDEFG HIJKLM NOPQRST UVWXYZ (1981), “The Art of Dying”: “Mallarmé drowning Chatterton coughing up his lungs Auden frozen in a cottage Byron expiring at Missolonghi and Hart Crane visiting Missolonghi and dying there too   “The little boot of Sylvia Plath wedged in its fatal stirrup Tasso poisoned Crabbe poisoned T.S. Eliot raving for months in a Genoa hospital before he died Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs   “The execution of Marianne Moore Pablo Neruda spattered against the Mississippi Hofmannsthal's electrocution The quiet painless death of Robert Lowell Alvarez bashing his bicycle into an oak   “The Brownings lost at sea The premature burial of Thomas Gray The baffling murder of Stephen Vincent Benét Stevenson dying of dysentery and Catullus of a broken heart”   I never sense morbidity behind Disch’s lines. That may sound ridiculous but Disch deems death a worthy opponent, deserving of our laughter. True laughter suggests sanity. Try reading aloud “The execution of Marianne Moore” and “Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs” and not at least tittering. Read the following passage from Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) and see how Disch falls into his scheme: “The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! -- so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please -- at that which is unhappy.”   Disch’s laughter and much of the laughter he inspires is the mirthless sort. Only occasionally does he supply us with a jolly good time. Consider this thought: “. . . to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia . . .” That was written by the happiest, most mentally fit of writers, Max Beerbohm, in “Laughter,” the final essay in his final collection of essays, And Even Now (1920). The inability to laugh, or to laugh only as a gesture of social obligation (the robotic ha ha of the cocktail party or board meeting), is an ailment clinically associated with psychic constipation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders  in its most recent edition glosses the condition as “tight-ass to the max; a real bummer.” A related symptom, according to the DSM-5-TR, is habitual use of the acronym LOL and in more severe cases, LMAO. Sufferers are to be approached with the utmost caution. Seek professional assistance.   That Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008 -- Independence Day – has been interpreted by some as a gesture of contempt for the United States. I don’t agree. Some souls get worn out and tired earlier than others. For now, put aside Disch’s death and read his poems, novels and stories, and remember at least occasionally to laugh.

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My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.   FICTION The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasant misery.  Plague, starvation, abuse, and then the Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a number of places.  I had planned to breeze through this on the way to Xiao Hong’s more famous Tales of Hulan River (1942) but that will have to wait.  “For Mother Wang, her day of agony was all for naught.  A life of agony was all for naught” (p. 29 of the Howard Greenblatt translation). The Witch in the Wood (1939), T. H. White – By contrast, a marvelous piece of nonsense, a much sillier book than the preceding The Sword in the Stone.  Monty Python and the Holy Grail now seems somewhat less original. The Sheltering Sky (1949), Paul Bowles – An American couple tourist around Morocco after the war.  The husband seeks the sublime; the wife does not.  The husband is also a sociopath, and I at one point wondered how long I could stand his company, but after a crisis hits I was fine.  Existentialism can seem awfully adolescent when the only problem is ennui, but in the face of a real problem working through the ideas become interesting.  All this before the last section, the last 40 pages, as bleak a blast of despair as I have encountered in an American novel.  “She felt like saying: ‘Well, you’re crazy,’ but she confined herself to: ‘How strange.’” (Ch. XV, p. 91)  That’s how I felt! I, Robot (1950), Isaac Asimov – I have picked up the idea that people working or theorizing on computer programs that are for some reason called “artificial intelligence” take this collection of stories form the 1940s seriously.  See for example Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor of computer science (do not look at his list of publications!) who writes in or on the New Yorker that he was “struck by its [the book’s] new relevance.”  I was struck by how irrelevant the book was, or I guess how it was exactly as relevant as it has always been.  The first story is a little chemistry problem written by a 21-year-old working on an MA in chemistry, but Asimov soon switches to philosophy.  What I think is the most famous story, “Liar!” (1941) is a simple puzzle in Kantian ethics.  In the next story, “Little Lost Robot” (1947), the characters solve problems by pushing fat robots in front of trains.  I had not realized how young Asimov was when he wrote the first Robot and Foundation stories.  If they sometimes seem a little undergraduate, well. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Patricia Highsmith – A regular old murderous psychopath story, good fun compared to some of these other books. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), Anthony Powell – Another installment of the higher gossip. The narrator has gotten married and spends the book writing around his new wife, so that by the end I know as little about her as at the beginning, although I learn a lot about everyone else. ’I suppose she lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust.  I don’t think Charles’s father – “Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with.  He used to be very handsome, and so amusing.  He looked wonderful on a horse.  He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya.  Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’ (Ch. 2, 89) Neither Boffles, Amy, the Frenchwoman, or the horse are ever mentioned again in the novel. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Cynthia Ozick Suzanne and Gertrude (2019), Jeb Loy Nichols – A short, sad novel about an introverted English woman who adopts a stray donkey.  Expect more donkey content here over the next few months. When These Mountains Burn (2020), David Joy – A final miserable novel, compassionate this time, but unflinching in its look at the ongoing American narcotics epidemic, this time in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, so painful in places.  Joy has recently discovered that where he is lucky to get seven people to attend a free reading in North Carolina he can get seventy people to buy tickets to one in France.  He is joining a sadly well established American literary tradition.   HISTORY 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), Eric H. Cline – In a sense more misery, but at some distance.    POETRY The Far Field (1964) & Straw for the Fire (1943-63), Theodore Roethke Sunbelly (1973), Kenneth Fields Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1954-60), Richard Eberhart – the poems of the 1950s, really, not the whole thing. Foxglovewise (2025), Ange Mlinko – Possibly a major work.  I think I will revisit it next year when the paperback is published.  Recommended to fans of Marly Youmans.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Só (Alone, 1892), António Nobre – Since Portuguese literature is often imitative, I could call Nobre a Symbolist, and he sometimes sounds like the missing link between Romanticism and Pessoa, but I thought his voice was individual.  A long poem about a stay in a sanitarium (Nobre died young of tuberculosis) should be translated; it all should be translated.  I read a school edition that says the book is recommended to 8th graders.  I have no idea how, or how often, this book is actually taught, but I would be shocked if one percent of American 8th graders are assigned such a complex book of poems. Pierrot mon ami (My Pal Pierrot, 1942), Raymond Queneau – Pure jolly fun, but between the slang and wordplay and sudden shifts in register, hard as the devil.  Sometimes it felt like I was reading a Godard film. Roberte ce soir (1954) & La Révocation de l'Édict de Nantes (1959), Pierre Klossowski – Two odd novellas.  The wife sleeps with the houseguests and the husband theorizes about why this is a good idea.  Each novella has one long scene that might be pornographic if not written in such a comically formal register.  The second book turns the first inside out, which is interesting.  Perhaps those ridiculous sex scenes, for example, are just the art-loving husband’s painting-inspired fantasies.  One curious scene describes a painting that could easily be by Pierre’s older brother Balthus.  Utterly different style than Queneau but just as difficult.  I need to find an easy French book, a Simenon novel, something like that. Contos Exemplares (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Not as intricate, but often a bit like Isak Dinesen.

“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience — moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean’s edge, a lover’s kiss — to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible. It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution… read article