The American poet Len Krisak asks a question common to all serious readers, one that, if posed privately, serves as an honest way to reveal one’s deeper tastes without the social pressures of fashion and snobbery. Think of it as a variation on the “Desert Island” parlor game. It helps to pare down to essentials what we really value and cull the dross:  “What are the poems one returns to, always taking pleasure? Or to put it slightly differently, what poems would enjoy the place of honor in one's Absolute Anthology (no fair including warhorses, chestnuts, and poems one is supposed to like)?”   Let’s limit this to three English-language poems. My first nomination required no thought: “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), Samuel Johnson’s imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. There’s a sturdy elegance to Johnson’s lines. His biographer, W. Jackson Bate, describes the poem as “strangely powerful.” The title traces its lineage to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling Johnson’s abiding theme.   Next, “A Summer Commentary” (1943) by Yvor Winters. Return to the question posed in the second stanza: “Where is the meaning that I found?” The answer is the poem and the experiences it recalls. “A Summer Commentary,” like any great poem, defies glib paraphrase. It immerses us in sensory detail (auditory, visual, even olfactory and gustatory) while connoting emotional and intellectual maturity. It renders a life’s education in twenty lines.   Finally, “A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950) by Richard Wilbur. Selfishness, despair and ingratitude forever tempt us. In this poem, Wilbur embraces the sensory world. His is not the way of the Desert Fathers. The world has worth and should not be scorned. After all, the Incarnation occurred in this world, as Wilbur observes in the poem’s final stanza. His title is adapted from a passage in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, called by C.S. Lewis “almost the most beautiful book in English." What, no Larkin? No Shakespeare, Pope, Landor, Dickinson, Housman or Robinson? Wait for a second revised edition of the Absolute Anthology.

Spoken by a man after my own heart:  “You must grant me a dispensation for saying any thing, whether it be sense or nonsense, upon the subject of politics. It is truly a matter in which I am so little interested, that, were it not that it sometimes serves me for a theme when I can find no other, I should never mention it.”   I’ve come to think of politics as no more than a pretext people use for getting angry. They enjoy the illusion of self-righteous power it gives them. It’s a handy stand-in for religion, sports, musical tastes, anything enabling that rush of disapproving emotion and self-aggrandizement. A reader asks—neutrally, I think—for my assessment of President Trump’s second administration thus far. Because I don’t pay much attention to such things, my judgment is worthless, a waste of time. I’ve never defined myself with such categories and I don’t think my opinions are of any importance simply because they are mine. The author of the credo above is the English poet William Cowper, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton on July 5, 1784. He continues:   “I would forfeit a large sum, if, after advertising a month in the Gazette, the minister of the day, whoever he may be, could discover a man who cares about him or his measures so little as I do. When I say that I would forfeit a large sum, I mean to have it understood that I would forfeit such a sum if I had it.”   Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. He was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal to his friends but haunted by depression and suicidal thoughts. His sense of humor was subtle and often heavily disguised. He barely recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not meddling. Like me, I think he understood the role of government to be filling potholes and arresting bad guys, or the comparable obligations of his day. I’m reminded of Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Workers. Asked by a reporter why she didn’t vote, Day is supposed to have answered: “Because it only encourages them”

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.

“In spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us manage to honor stop signs, and we all honor the dollar sign, whether or not we are willing to admit it.”  In 1995, R.L. Barth published The Golden Calf: Poems of Money, edited by the poet Turner Cassity and Mary Ellen Templeton, a fellow librarian of Cassity’s in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. The subject is a rare one among poets – so crass, after all, and so bourgeois. Contrast that absence with the ubiquity of the quest for wealth in the novels of the nineteenth century, from Balzac to Henry James and beyond. Even crime novels, whether pulpy or sophisticated, are frequently driven by the desire for loot. The editors have found moolah poems by thirty-three American and English poets writing between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, without including Ezra Pound’s crackpot ravings in the Cantos.   The statement at the top is drawn from Cassity’s introduction. As ever, his tone is arch, erudite, almost campy and very amusing. “[W]hile it has been easy to find poems about begging, borrowing, and stealing, as well as gambling and privateering,” he writes, “it has been very difficult to find poems about simply earning or making money.”   Many of us spend half our lives earning money, and yet few poets show much interest in the subject. “Human envy being what it is,” Cassity writes, “Erato and Mammon will probably never lie down together in any degree of comfort, but no topics as central as avarice and ambition can fail to engage a really serious writer, as the Renaissance, the 17th, and the 18th centuries were well aware.” Several of the poets and poems in C&T’s anthology are new to this reader. Take “Worldly Wealth” by the Welsh poet Rowland Watkyns (1616?-64), with the subtitle “Natura paucis contenta” (“Nature is satisfied with little”):   “Wealth unto every man, I see, Is like the bark unto the tree: Take from the tree the bark away, The naked tree will soon decay. Lord, make me not too rich. Nor make me poor, To wait at rich mens’ tables, or their door.”   Given that money is often a pretext for comedy, some of the collected poems qualify as light verse. Take Ebenezer Elliott’s (1781-1849) “On Communists,” written while Karl Marx, who never held down a regular job and lived off the largesse of Friedrich Engels, was still alive:   “What is a Communist? One who has yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings; Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing To fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.”   Here you’ll find well-known names too: George Herbert, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling and E.A. Robinson. Here is another poem by yet another non-job-holder, though not a sponger like Marx, Emily Dickinson:   “Because ’twas Riches I could own, Myself had earned it -- Me, I knew the Dollars by their names -- It feels like Poverty   “An Earldom out of sight to hold, An Income in the Air, Possession -- has a sweeter chink Unto a Miser's Ear.”   Cassity provides an “Afterword,” his poem “A Dance Part Way Around the Veau d’Or, or, Rich Within the Dreams of Avarice.” It appears not to be available online but you can find it in Hurricane Lamp (1986) and The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998).

News of certain public deaths remains rooted in memory to an indelible time and place. Famously, millions of mundane lives intersected forever with the assassination of President Kennedy, which people recall in vivid detail more than sixty years later their reactions at that moment. While working on the city desks of several newspapers I learned that Glenn Gould, R. Buckminster Fuller, Sam Peckinpah and Zoot Sims had died. The news was carried by the wire. On a humid evening in Youngstown, Ohio, while riding around the city, I learned from the radio the unlikely news that Vladimir Nabokov had died--one of those deaths that leaves you numb and unbelieving. It was July 2, 1977, and the Russian-born American novelist was seventy-eight. I had been reading him for a decade and the notion that he might someday die had never occurred to me. Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory:   “Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”   I feel fortunate that my life overlapped with Nabokov’s, that I read his work early while his Russian books were being translated into English, that they took up residence in my imagination and that I return to his books regularly, with certainty of delight. I often measure other writers against the excellence of his achievement. His example confirms that themes of mortal significance in fiction can be composed in prose that John Updike once described as “ecstatic.” I’ve just finished rereading The Defense (1930; trans. by the author and Michael Scammell, 1964), where the imagery of vision and mist recur yet again:   “Any future is unknown–but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.”