I often speak or exchange texts with my nephew. Soon he’ll turn thirty-six, but he lives in Cleveland, 1,200 miles away, and I seldom see him. Distance warps the sense of duration, so I think of him as frozen in his early twenties. We spoke on Sunday and for the first time since my brother’s death last August, we didn’t even mention his father. When I realized this I felt a pang of guilt, as though I were forgetting him. But attending to the living supersedes our obligations to the dead. They don’t constitute a cult to be worshipped. They live in memory and in that way we weigh their loss and honor them. On February 24, 1854, Walter Savage Land0r's sister Elizabeth died after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-seven. A month later he wrote a poem about her titled “March 24”:  “Sharp crocus wakes the froward year; In their old haunts birds reappear; From yonder elm, yet black with rain, The cushat looks deep down for grain Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes The redbreast to the sill for crumbs. Fly off! fly off! I can not wait To welcome ye, as she of late. The earliest of my friends is gone. Alas! almost my only one! The few as dear, long wafted o’er, Await me on a sunnier shore.”   Some glosses: “froward,” despite what my spell-check software tells me, is not a typo. Here is the OED definition, which is applicable to Landor himself -- “disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” "Cushat" is Scottish and northern England dialect for a wood pigeon or ring-dove. In his 1954 biography of Landor, R.H. Super writes of him after Elizabeth's death: "He told [John] Forster [his friend and first biographer] that the loss of his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend had deprived him of sleep, appetite, digestion, everything."

On Monday, March 23, [1772], I found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary.”  Dr. Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary on April 15, 1755, two-hundred-seventy years ago. It contained some 42,000 entries and he had worked on it for seven years. It’s great innovation, the reason we still read it, are the 114,00 citations that accompany the entries. The Dictionary can be read as an anthology of English literature (the way Jefferson read it), with Johnson relying most heavily on Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Pope and Dryden. As a young man, Robert Browning read the Dictionary in order to “qualify” as an author. Samuel Beckett found words to recycle into his own work. Boswell continues in his Life:   “Mr. Peyton, one of his original amanuenses, was writing for him. I put him in mind of a meaning of the word side, which he had omitted, viz. relationship; as father’s side, mother’s side [see definition eight]. He inserted it.”   The Dictionary is a substantial volume, built to last. By “folio,” Boswell means the pages measured eighteen inches by twenty inches – larger than most books published today. I enjoy comparing Johnson's entries with those in the Oxford English Dictionary, which often cites Johnson.    “I asked him if humiliating was a good word. He said, he had seen it frequently used, but he did not know it to be legitimate English. [Johnson omitted humiliating.] He would not admit civilization, but only civility [true]. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses, which civility is, in his way of using it.”   A second edition followed a few weeks after the first. It was published in 165 weekly sections. The third edition followed in 1765. The fourth, which came out in 1773, included heavy revisions of the original work by Johnson, who identified himself as a lexicographer, defined as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

The library catalogue said Walter Savage Landor’s Poems, the 1964 Centaur Press edition selected and introduced by Geoffrey Grigson, had not been checked out by another patron (hardly surprising) and should be on the shelf. I couldn’t find it. Not a good sign. That could mean the volume had been stolen (not likely) or misshelved. In either case, it might be lost forever.  While heading to the circulation desk on the first floor to report the missing book, I passed through the voluminous Dickens section, and there among the commentaries and biographies, with a dark blue cover and typography on the spine resembling an Oxford University Press volume, was the Landor Poems I had been looking for, hiding in plain sight. A clerk had likely misshelved it.   The error is partially understandable. Dickens based his character Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House on his friend Landor and named his fourth child Walter Savage Landor Dickens. I’ve come to almost expect such acts of happy serendipity, especially in libraries. I once found a twenty-dollar bill in a history of Argentina.   Recently I had read “Pericles and Aspasia” from Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Aspasia says to Cleone: “Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library. What a delight in being a discoverer! Among a loose accumulation of poetry, the greater part excessively bad, the verses I am about to transcribe are perhaps the least so.” The following poem is mediocre so I’ll transcribe only the opening stanza:   “Life passes not as some men say, If you will only urge his stay, And treat him kindly all the while He flies the dizzy strife of towns, Cowers before thunder-bearing frowns. But freshens up again at song and smile.”

All of us when young – readers, I mean – fancy ourselves rebels and independent thinkers but most of us are afflicted to varying degrees with the superego of the age. That is, we are influenced, whether we know it or not, by the critical climate, by the judgments and fashions of critics and other readers, especially those among our contemporaries. For decades starting in my early teens my model of a great writer, one worthy of rereading, study, annotation and – though I would have denied it – worship, was James Joyce. Now I know that much of my veneration for the Irishman was rooted in his reputation for difficulty. Dubliners and Ulysses remain among the supreme works of twentieth-century fiction, and one wonders what all the fuss was about regarding the purported obscurity of the latter. Today, any reasonably attentive reader can enjoy Ulysses without breaking a sweat, though I wouldn’t reread Finnegans Wake with a gun to my head. Never underestimate the role of snobbery in human affairs, especially among readers, writers and anyone associated with the academic study of literature. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve generally lost interest in ranking writers and books – including deciding who is major and who is minor -- and gained interest in those who appeal to me and reward my efforts, regardless of pedigree. It’s not unlike friendship. At some point we decide who is worth spending time with, who is reliable, worthy of trust and who rewards our efforts.   I’ve scratched some writers from my mental list of favorites but added many more, most of whom I ignored when young. A few examples, mostly English: Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter Savage Landor, E.A. Robinson, Rebecca West, Charles Doughty, Paul Valéry, Walter de la Mare. Another is Desmond MacCarthy, who collected the essay “Literary Snobs” in Criticism (1932). He speaks to the snobs: “It is true that your literary judgments are not interesting, but you get a great deal of fun out of your rapid revulsions and temporary admirations – and fun is human. Moreover, if you are always ludicrously unfair, you are at any rate unstinting in praise while giving it, which is, in a way, amiable.” [Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books has published Criticism and five other MacCarthy titles, along with links to dozens of other good books.]

What attracted me was the anthologist’s audacity in titling his book: 100 Best Poems in the English Language (1952). In his introduction, Stephen Graham does little to impress us with his literary humility. His anthology is, he writes, “perhaps the only one of its kind, being exclusive, not inclusive.” The contents are arranged chronologically, from the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” to Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The most represented poets, with five poems each, are Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Three Americans are are here – Poe, Whitman and Lanier (“The Marshes of Glynn”). No Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot or Stevens. Graham includes two poets I had never heard of -- Arthur O’Shaughnessy (“Ode”) and John Davidson (“The Last Journey”).  In other words, Graham’s anthology is rather predictable – in 1952 and in 2025 -- and stuffed with warhorses and no previously undiscovered treasures. “Of course,” the editor admits, magnanimously, “everyone is entitled to make his own selection of what he would consider the hundred best poems in the language.” A nice choice for the volume’s epigraph, unaccompanied by source, is spoken by Theseus in Act V, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream:    “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”   Best of all is the bookplate pasted to the front endpaper:   “From the Library of Edgar Odell Lovett First President of the Rice Institute”   Lovett (1871-1957) served as president of Rice University from 1912 until his retirement in 1946. He was educated and employed as a mathematician, but I have borrowed dozens of books from his personal library, now in the collection of Rice’s Fondren Library, and all were belles lettres – poetry, essays, fiction, literary biography. Such university presidents have long been extinct.