Some books, including several of the best, defy conventional literary formulas and genres. Consider Moby-Dick. Is it a novel in the same inarguable sense as Middlemarch, another very big book? What about Tristram Shandy, with its endlessly deferred plot, digressions within digressions and passages “borrowed” from other writers and interpolated into Sterne’s text? Its oddness has stymied many readers, even Dr. Johnson. Montaigne’s Essays are wayward works having little in common with contemporary essayists claiming decent from the Frenchman. (Joan Didion, anyone?) What these works share, apart from eccentricity and vast learning, is elasticity. Anything, any subject or narrative whim, might have been stuffed into their already bursting forms.  The grandfather of such oddities is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with five subsequent editions, each longer than its predecessor, brought out during Burton’s lifetime. I remember discovering Burton as a freshman in the university library, and thinking I could read it for the rest of my life, which has proven true. It’s a wisdom book chock full of knowledge, much of it outdated but still fascinating. Gary Saul Morson calls it “a kind of patchwork interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its own.” Burton stitches together other men’s words into a quilt of quotations, and defends his method, saying he was   “. . . enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quicquid in buccum venit (whatever came uppermost) in an extemporean style, as I do comply all others, effudi quicquid dictavit genius meus (I poured out whatever came into my mind) out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak. . . . idem calamo quod in mente (what my mind thinks my pen writes).”   Burton’s method shouldn’t be confused with such literary cul de sacs as “automatic writing” or Jack Kerouac’s nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody.” While following a trail of associations spawned in a remarkable memory, Burton resembles a jazz musician who simultaneously improvises and follows a theme. In The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture (Yale University Press, 2011), Morson writes: “The Anatomy is like life, unrehearsed, and life is like the Anatomy, a first draft.”     Burton died on this day, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two. Less than twenty percent of the population of Elizabethan England lived past the age of sixty. One qualified as “old” at fifty. Shakespeare, Burton’s close contemporary, died at fifty-two.

The Irish poet Michael Longley died on Wednesday at the age of eighty-five. I’ve read him sparsely but recall a devotion to the natural world and to World War I, in which his father fought. Here is “Glossary” (The Candlelight Master, 2020):   “I meet my father in the glossary Who carried me on his shoulders, a leg Over each, hockerty-cockerty, who Would spend ages poking the kitchen fire, An old soldier remembering the trenches And telling me what he saw in the embers, Battlefields, bomb craters, firelight visions: A widden-dremer, yes, that’s my father.”   Longley adds some notes: hockerty-cockerty is to be “seated with one’s legs astride another’s shoulders”; widden-dremer is “one who sees visions in the firelight.” From the same volume is “Ors,” named for the French cemetery in which Wilfred Owen is buried. The English poet was killed a week before the Armistice while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal:   I “I am standing on the canal bank at Ors Willing Wilfred Owen to make it across To the other side where his parents wait. He and his men are constructing pontoons. The German sniper doesn’t know his poetry.   II “My daughter Rebecca lives in twenty-four Saint Bernard’s Crescent opposite the home Wilfred visited for “perfect little dinners” And “extraordinary fellowship in all the arts.” I can hear him on his way to Steinthals.   III “Last year I read my own poems at Craiglockhart And eavesdropped on Robert, Siegfried, Wilfred Whispering about poetry down the corridors. If Wilfred can concentrate a little longer, He might just make it to the other bank.”   This is “Poetry” (The Weather in Japan, 2000):   “When he was billeted in a ruined house in Arras And found a hole in the wall beside his bed And, rummaging inside, his hand rested on Keats By Edward Thomas, did Edmund Blunden unearth A volume which ‘the tall, Shelley-like figure’ Gathering up for the last time his latherbrush, Razor, towel, comb, cardigan, cap comforter, Water bottle, socks, gas mask, great coat, rifle And bayonet, hurrying out of the same building To join his men and march into battle, left Behind him like a gift, the author's own copy? When Thomas Hardy died his widow gave Blunden As a memento of many visits to Max Gate His treasured copy of Edward Thomas’s Poems.”   Longley’s wife Edna has edited two editions of Edward Thomas’ poems and one of his prose. Here is “Edward Thomas’s Poem” from Longley’s Snow Water (2004):   I “I couldn’t make out the miniscule handwriting In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem.”   II “From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left Fidgeting among the fallen branches, Then all the birds of the Western Front.”   III “The nature poet turned into a war poet as if He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.”

Francis Bacon’s death might have been scripted by Monty Python. It’s certainly the most unlikely in the history of English literature, at least as reported by the not-always-reliable John Aubrey. It’s absurd but if true it helps beatify the author of The Advancement of Learning (1605) as a martyred saint in the cause of science. In his Brief Lives, Aubrey tells us his source was Thomas Hobbes:  “[H]is lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the aire in a coach . . . towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings . . . but went to the earle of Arundell’s house at High-gate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes, as I remember he told me, he dyed of suffocation.”   In other words, pneumonia, contracted from a snow-stuffed chicken and exacerbated by sleeping in a wet bed. Exenterate means to remove entrails, to eviscerate or disembowel. Bacon died at age sixty-five on April 9, 1626. He had been a close friend of George Herbert. In his biography of Herbert, John Drury reproduces the six-line elegy Herbert wrote in Latin for Bacon, with Drury's own translation of “On the Death of Francis, Viscount St Albans”:   “While you groan under the weight of a long, slow illness, And life hangs on with a wavering, wasting foot, I understand at last what prudent Fate willed: Certainly you could only die in April, So that here Flora with her tears, there Philomena with her plaintive cries, Might lead the lonely funeral of your speech.”   In his two-page gloss on the poem, Drury writes of the final two lines: “Bacon had to hang on so that he could die in April, that wonderful month of flowers and birdsong for a keen gardener like him.” Of the poem as a whole he adds: “Herbert’s elegy for his old friend breathes tender personal affection.”   It was Bacon who wrote in his essay “Of Studies”: “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”   [See John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014).]

Houston’s terrain is geometrically flat, which is why most houses have no basements. From the warmth of my living room I watched a neighborhood kid try to defy gravity, seated on a plastic sled in the middle of the ice-covered street, holding the reins and achieving minimal locomotion with leg-and-butt power. This went on for thirty minutes. Native Texans have little understanding of snow, ice, a low temperature of 23°F and inertia. A native Northerner can feel quite pleased with himself.   In Ohio, we took sledding seriously. It was an all-day affair. Plenty of steep hills were available, one of which ended in a rock-filled creek. The trick was to steer to the right at the last moment to avoid what’s known as an “Ethan Frome.” In preparation for sledding, we had hauled buckets of creek water up the hill and poured them on the incline. The water froze and minimized inertia.   Slowly over the decades The Winter’s Tale has become one of my favorites among the plays, largely for the late, dense language Shakespeare had achieved. These lines are from Autoclytus’ song in Act IV, Scene 4:   “Lawn as white as driven snow, Cypress black as e’er was crow, Gloves as sweet as damask roses, Masks for faces and for noses, Bugle bracelet, necklace amber, Perfume for a lady’s chamber, Golden coifs and stomachers For my lads to give their dears, Pins and poking-sticks of steel, What maids lack from head to heel . . .”   The kid gave up sledding and built a three-tier, one-armed snowman in the circle at the end of our cul de sac, and next to it a section of wall made with snow bricks. The flag says “STH Eagles,” referring to the Saint Thomas High School Eagles. The snow is laced with leaves and sticks, a side effect of having to work with shallow snow. I remember that offending my aesthetic sense when I was a kid.