“You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends. I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away myself into a state that can feel none of this sort of losses.”  If Alexander Pope is read today, he’s read as a manufacturer of elegantly barbed witticisms, a crafter of technically perfect verse. What is The Dunciad but an assault on his sorry contemporaries, exemplars of “Dulness”? Pope himself  wrote “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth."   Pope writes above in a letter to Swift on April 2, 1733. John Gay, the poet and playwright, had died less than four months earlier. The letter continues:   “I wished vehemently to have seen [Gay] in a condition of living independent, and to have lived in perfect indolence the rest of our days together, the two most idle, most innocent, undesigning poets of our age. I now as vehemently wish you and I might walk into the grave together, by as slow steps as you please, but contentedly and cheerfully: whether that ever can be, or in what country, I know no more, than into what country we shall walk out of the grave.”   Pope would live another eleven years; Swift, another twelve. As a boy, tuberculosis of the spine left Pope stunted and in pain. He never grew taller than four feet, six inches. If his physical suffering accounts for his satirical gift, it also helps explain his love for and dependence on Swift and his other friends. They “help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” He also faced the English laws banning Roman Catholics from teaching, attending university, voting and holding public office. Pope to Swift on September 15, 1734:   “I have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew . . . When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you . . .”   My niece tells me she is reading Pope’s poetry and asked what I thought of him. In my private pantheon he is one of the supreme English poets and terribly unfashionable. Our age could use him. Hannah gave me a little hope.

Andrew Taylor on Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888): “He appealed instinctively to the past, against what he saw as the corruption of language, manners and morality of his own time, but Travels in Arabia Deserta is not backward-looking for its own sake. The achievement of the book lies in the way that language, style, rhythm and structure are all directed towards the end of accuracy in presenting landscape, characters, mood and atmosphere.” Timothy Fuller in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott on the Human Condition (Liberty Fund, 2024): “He had minimal regard for any features of modern life. The computer did not exist for him. He thought most modern inventions had done the human race little good. He wrote everything by hand. From his cottage one looked out on the country of Hardy. One felt oneself transported back before World War I, even to the nineteenth century, to a world where one might meet Jude the Obscure coming down the path. This is exactly how Oakeshott wanted to feel. Life was, to him, sweeter then.” The Taylor passage is taken from God’s Fugitive: The Life of C.M. Doughty (Dorset Press, 1999). During an electrical storm Wednesday morning we lost our internet connection and it hasn’t been restored. Possibly tonight. I wrote this on my phone. Try to ignore the irregularities. Blogger is even more intractable on a smartphone.

Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17:  “So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no, since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s tentative yellows, then the green and blue and bolder tones of flowering summer. So has this winter passed, as do all things— except the final absence. Without you, for instance, all of time is cut in two— before and after—seasons all the same, despite the beckoning lushness of the new, the living, rich in fur and fins and wings, intent on resurrection. But they go, our absent loves, and leave us stranded here, parted from all the changes of the year as by an endless fall of pallid snow.”   Turning gentle into a verb is a nice touch. Shakespeare’s poem, known as the last of the “procreation” sonnets, follows. The speaker fears that if he celebrates the “heavenly touches” of the “Fair Youth,” his comeliness, future readers will assume he is exaggerating or lying:   “Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’ So should my papers yellow’d with their age, Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage And stretched metre of an antique song:    But were some child of yours alive that time,    You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.”   Every writer asks, Will I be read in the future, after I am gone? How will I be read? Most writing, of course, is quickly forgotten, often during the writer’s lifetime. We remember Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” though his identity remains uncertain – a nice irony, given Shakespeare’s stated intention. He lives on, but anonymously. The final two lines are stirring: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” All of us hope to live on through our children, if only in memory. Espaillat reminds me John Shade’s investigation into the afterlife, prompted by the death of his daughter Hazel, in the poem that lends its title to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire:   “I'm reasonably sure that we survive And that my darling somewhere is alive . . .”   As Espaillat puts it, in regard to "the final absence": “But they go, / our absent loves, and leave us stranded here."

“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.”  “Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the radicals of existence”? I don’t know what that means. “Radicals” intended etymologically, meaning “roots”? As in chemistry or politics? All of the above? A similar “office” applies to prose as well, though “office” sounds a little high-falutin’.     “To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against opportunistic mendacity.”   The ethics of writing. As John Berryman puts it in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” An honest writer comes equipped with a bullshit detector that he applies first to himself, then others. Lies enter language through politics, fashion, self-aggrandizement and any effort to seek approval. The hardest part of writing is keeping it vital while remaining faithful to the truth.     “If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and ‘language.’ It will be a polymer mold of what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?”   W.S. Di Piero might be describing prose or poetry assembled by artificial intelligence. What I’ve read or seen of it, even when it’s a competent copy of a human creation, feels hollow, dead inside. Something is missing, something vital and as personal as DNA or the individual human sensibility. Something “sentient,” to use Di Piero’s word. Algorithms write like backward children eager to please teacher.   [The quoted passages, a single continuous entry, is drawn from Di Piero’s Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017).]

“Above the town of Frankfort, on the top of the steep bluff of the Kentucky River, is a burial-place where lie the bones of many heroes, sons the Commonwealth has lovingly gathered in one fold. It is a beautiful site for this simple Valhalla, with its wide outlook over the noble vale it crowns, to my eyes wondrously enriched by the sense of a people’s care for the fame of its illustrious dead.”  Each Memorial Day we walked to my grade school to watch the parade. Standing at the curb we waited for the marching bands, the dignitaries, pretty girls riding in convertibles, the veterans of three or four wars. The city handed out American flags on sticks and we waved them as the brass-heavy bands played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” We followed the parade for half a mile to the Parma Heights Cemetery where my mother is buried. Prayers, solemn speeches, the firing of bolt-action rifles in a three-gun salute. I was a dim kid and understood nothing I was seeing. Americans have always gathered to honor their war dead, even today.   The passage above is taken from The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1909). If Shaler (1841-1906) is remembered at all it is as a geologist and paleontologist. When the Civil War started, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was a student of the great Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. A year away from graduating, Shaler resolved to continue his studies while preparing for war. He joined the university’s drill club, studied infantry tactics, read Jomini’s Traité de grande tactique and each weekend visited Fort Independence in Boston Harbor to learn about artillery.   After graduating summa cum laude in 1862, Shaler returned to his native Kentucky, where he was commissioned to raise the Fifth Kentucky Battery on the Union side, despite coming from a slave-owning family. He detested the Republican Party and many of his Kentucky friends had already joined the Confederate cause, but Shaler believed in the Union, which he called “a most useful convenience for uniting like states for protection and interchange.”   Shaler served for two years until illness forced his resignation. For almost forty years he taught at Harvard, and late in life wrote the poems collected in From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. Shaler’s wife published the book posthumously. In 2004, R.L. Barth edited and introduced The Selected Civil War Poems of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Scienter Press). Bob is a poet, publisher, Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, and fellow Kentuckian. In his introduction he writes:   “Shaler was a Civil War combat veteran; he thought long and hard about combat, war, and soldiering; although a poetic amateur, he had certain poetic skills, chief among them narrative power, an ability to write fluid blank verse, and an eye for telling details, sharply perceived and rendered.”   Barth says Shaler’s best poems are “shrewdly observed and profoundly moving.” As the volume’s final selection, Bob includes “The Burial Place,” a poem that echoes the passage at the top taken from Shaler’s Autobiography. It begins:   “A hill-top that looked far above the throng Of brother hills, and into widening vales Wherein the brooks slip onward to the sea. A place for castle in old war-torn lands When might was master: here, the silent hold Where sleep the dead in earth that looks to sky For the brave trust in all that dwelleth there.”   Visiting the cemetery are an old man and a boy, “in ancient quest / Of place for one more grave . . .” The Civil War and its dead are alluded to obliquely:   “’T is not yet two-score years, yet ’t is as far As Trojan legend to the youth who hears How o’er this earth of peace tramped demon war, Treading its hills and vales with feet that scorched Their goodly life out; how of all that dwelt Out to the rim of sight, peace stayed alone With those who abided here in God’s strong arms, Unheeding Satan’s deeds.”   Shaler concludes his poem with a line as final as an epitaph: “’T is but the graves that stay.” As a coda, here is Bob’s “Meditations After Battle,” collected in Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). The first part is preceded by half of a Virgilian tag from Book I, line 462, of the Aeneid: “sunt lacrimae rerum . . .”:   “And all around, the dead! So many dead! So many ways to die it hurt the heart To look and feel sun burning overhead. We stacked the bodies on scorched grass, apart.”   Before the second part of the poem is the rest of Virgil’s line: “et mentem mortalia tangunt”:   “Death was the context and the only fact. Amidst the stench, I almost could believe There was a world of light where, if souls lacked Broken bodies awhile, they would retrieve Them, mended; where no one need longer grieve.”   The complete line from the Aeneid can be translated “There are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind.”