Eugenio Montale speaking with an interviewer, American poet W.S. Di Piero, in 1973:  “Political ideas are best expressed in prose. Why should we express political ideas in such an abstruse language as poetry? If I were to write against the war in Viet Nam, I would write in prose, or I would do something else to oppose the war directly instead of just dressing up my poems with references to Viet Nam as if pouring a sauce over the poems to prepare them for public consumption. One cannot inject or force the Viet Nam War into poetry simply for effect. It serves no real purpose, and whoever does so finally fails in every way.”   The literary legacy left by the Vietnam War, both civilian and military, is modest. Compared to World War I, it is almost nonexistent. “Anti-war” poems that filled magazines, chapbooks, posters and broadsheets were simplistic, shrill and soon forgotten. Literary values were abandoned for the sake of self-righteousness. A rare exception was R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who sent me a recent poem, “Skating,” subtitled “Camp Reasoner”:   “It’s ninety-five degrees. I’m just not running. Damn, What’s Gunny gonna do, Send me to Vietnam?”   Bob adds: “A good half the time, that line would have been capped by someone else saying, ‘There it is.’” The poem is written in the voice of a grunt, an enlisted man, not a purported deep thinker about war and geopolitics. Montale was not politically naïve. His early work was written while Mussolini was in power. The poet had no use for fascism. In the interview, Di Piero asks, “What about the poet's treatment of contemporary public events?” Montale replies:   “As to public events, I'm aware of the many poems which have been published about the war in Viet Nam. These poems have a very high moral value, but they are very bad poems.”   Montale explains an unpleasant and paradoxical fact, best represented by the fate of poetry in Poland during the Soviet occupation: “Poetry has everything to gain from persecution. If the state were to patronize or protect the arts, there would be such an abundance of pseudo-artists, pretenders to art, that you wouldn't know quite how to fend them off!”   [The Montale interview was published in the January/February 1974 issue of the American Poetry Review. Di Piero is “assisted” by Rose Maria Bosinelli.]

John Partridge (1677-1715) was an English shoemaker-turned-astrologer who claimed to have refined his “science.” Don’t smirk or pity our benighted forebears. Newspapers still publish astrology columns and dozens of astrological publications remain in print. See Modern Astrology Magazine and Stellar: The New Astrology Magazine. My maternal grandmother, not a stupid woman, subscribed to such things and sometimes made significant life decisions based on what she found in the stars.  Partridge was a prolific writer in his field, a dedicated Whig and a harsh critic of “Popery” and James II. In the 1708 edition of his Merlinus liberatus, Partridge referred to the Church of England as the “infallible Church.” Jonathan Swift launched a protracted satirical assault on Partridge, using his pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff. It began with “Predictions for the Year 1708”:   “My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it, to show how ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns: It relates to Partridge the almanack-maker; I have consulted the stars of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.”   Swift then published a mock-obituary of Partridge’s death, “The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff's Predictions,” reporting that the prediction was correct. Except that Partridge died around 7 rather than 11 p.m. on March 29:    “. . . Mr. Bickerstaff was mistaken almost four hours in his calculation. In the other circumstances he was exact enough. But whether he has not been the cause of this poor man's death, as well as the predictor, may be very reasonably disputed.”   This is a gag worthy of Evelyn Waugh. Scholars have viewed is as an April Fool prank. Swift subsequently published a poem on the affair, “An Elegy on the Supposed Death of Partridge, the Almanack-Maker.” It begins:   “Well, ’tis as Bickerstaff has guess’d, Tho’ we all took it for a jest; Partridge is dead, nay more, he dy’d E’re he could prove the good Squire ly’d. Strange, an Astrologer shou’d die, Without one Wonder in the Sky! Not one of all his Crony Stars To pay their Duty at his Herse? No Meteor, no Eclipse appear’d? No Comet with a flaming Beard? The Sun has rose, and gone to Bed, Just as if Partridge were not dead: Nor hid himself behind the Moon, To make a dreadful Night at Noon. He at fit Periods walks through Aries, Howe’er our earthly Motion varies; And twice a Year he’ll cut the Equator, As if there had been no such Matter.”

A reader asks, “How did you learn to read so fast?” The answer is simple: I didn’t. I have always read slowly, often taking notes, which makes it even slower. This frustrated me when I was young, and I briefly contemplated enrolling in one of Evelyn Wood’s “speed-reading” courses. But reading for me has always been a deeply private and focused activity, and I don’t like it messed with. I’ve always been good at concentrating. I slip into a movie or book easily, and I’ve come to think of it as entering a sort of fugue state. It’s a pleasant immersion and blocks most distractions, and I’m not in competition with anyone, even myself. It’s not a race.  If a book is good, why would I want to read it quickly? Wouldn’t I want to linger and prolong my pleasure? Imagine reading poetry quickly. That would be unfair to me and the author, assuming the poet was any good.     Barton Swaim published a column in the Times Literary Supplment on June 27, 2014, in which he describes his own experience with slow reading. Swaim is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and one of the best in the business. He is erudite, well-read and a graceful writer. I recommend his book The Speechwriter (2015). He writes:   “The source of my impatience is slow reading. I just cannot read as fast as other people do. I was deeply self-conscious about it as a child. In school, I would have to read aloud in class and would halt over almost every word. ‘There are--more--things in--heaven and earth--Hora--Horat--Horatio.’ On aptitude tests, I would do well on the problems I answered, but I wouldn't answer many because it took me too long to read the questions.”   Swaim became a book reviewer, which would seem to be a risky way to earn a living for a slow reader. His way of dealing with it sounds familiar:   “The only thing to do was to read during every possible free moment. There weren’t many of those--I had a hectic job as a politician’s speech-writer at the time, and three young children at home. There were late nights and early mornings, and I always had a book any time I thought I'd have to wait for anything--the doctor’s office, the car line at my daughter’s school. But I had to take it far beyond that. I'd get a paragraph in waiting for a traffic light, and another while waiting in line at the post office. The half-hour I was allotted for lunch was strictly for reading, and on car trips I would get my wife to read aloud while I drove.”   Swaim adopted a practice I’ve seldom resorted to – reading while walking. There’s an added risk in my case – I use a cane. Holding it in my right hand and a book in my left would make me worryingly unsteady. I remain a sedentary reader.   To my reader who asked about fat or slow reading: slow works for me. It has never imperiled the pleasure I’ve always taken in good books.

Montaigne devotes a brief essay to a pair of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus.” The former is reputed to have been a misanthrope, perhaps a melancholic. The latter was known as “the laughing philosopher.”  The essayist begins by weighing the importance of judgment in life generally and in the composition of his essays: “If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank.” That’s an admirable custom, one too few of us practice. Typically, Montaigne proceeds by association, not rigorous, thesis-like adherence to logic. He describes his method for writing an essay, and sounds very much like a blogger:   “I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well.”   As usual, Montaigne sounds remarkably like one of our contemporaries. There’s nothing stuffy or cautious about the way he proceeds. He’s good at producing vivid metaphors drawn from real life (“sometimes only to lick it”). He handles serious subjects almost casually, sometime humorously. Two-thirds of the way through his essay he finally introduces the philosophers of his title. Democritus, he writes, “finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.”   You may think you know where he’s going with this but Montaigne is no Renaissance version of a virtue signaler. He endorses Democritus’ manner, “not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.”   Robert Burton attributes his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to his persona/pseudonym “Democritus Junior,” who writes of his Greek forebear:   “After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace, and was sent for thither to be their lawmaker, recorder, or town-clerk, as some will; or as others, he was there bred and born. Howsoever it was, there he lived at last in a garden in the suburbs, wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, ‘saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.’ Such a one was Democritus.”   [The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]

Here I encounter yet again the bothersome issue of major vs. minor writers. When “minor” is used as a purely dismissive judgment, beware. There are minor writers who write beautifully and earn our respect and even love – Max Beerbohm is the first who comes to mind – and others who never transcend their triviality. Say, Carl Sandburg. No serious reader reads Shakespeare exclusively, and consider the poor soul who consumes a steady diet of Sandburg.  I was surprised in 2023 when The European Conservative, of all journals, published an essay titled “A.E. Housman, Poet and Pessimist” by the American writer Thomas Banks. He makes his judgment clear in the first sentence: “[I]t is not likely that either the critic or the lay reader would represent him as a major poet.” To substantiate his conclusion, Banks cites the relatively small quantity of poems Housman produced and continues: “Additionally, the verse he wrote, though for quality it is one of the most even bodies of composition in the English language, is as slender in its themes as it is slight in its volume.”   Does “slender in its themes” mean Housman’s themes are small in number or trivial in substance? There’s no law obligating poets to address some phantom number of subjects, and it’s surely not the latter. Consider XL from A Shropshire Lad, a poem that has mysteriously charmed me since I was a teenager:   “Into my heart an air that kills    From yon far country blows:  What are those blue remembered hills,    What spires, what farms are those?    “That is the land of lost content,   I see it shining plain,  The happy highways where I went    And cannot come again.”   I’ve been reading Landor lately and was pleased to see Banks liken him to Housman:   “Housman was not a dry man, and he cast less peaceful and somber a shadow on the page than he probably thought. Something like Walter Savage Landor’s ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’ does not really get at the heart of the man, for in truth, Housman was professionally combative and none to suffer fools gladly. The same, ironically, could be said for the Romanesque Landor himself, whose notoriously acrimonious nature gives the lie to ‘The Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher.’”   Housman was Kingsley Amis’ favorite poet and Philip Larkin called him, with Larkin-esque authority, “the poet of unhappiness,” though he added provocatively that Housman “seems to have been a very nice man.” In more than his devotion to Juvenal, Housman reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson. Consider the hatred of cant they shared, the passionate, sometimes tortured inner lives they led, and their devotion to scholarship. Banks respects Housman enough to take him seriously and not trivialize his poems. Nothing is accomplished by labeling a writer “major” or “minor,” except perhaps discouraging future readers. Banks acknowledges that Housman left us “a few poems of exquisite perfectionism.” He writes well, never raises the subject of Housman’s homosexuality and proves he has a sense of humor:   “Creation was for him pulvis et umbrae [dust and shadows] and no more, in spite of any appearance to the contrary. The vision addresses itself to the reader in nearly everything he wrote, and never is it mitigated by even an occasional coloring of optimism. The narrator of quite a number of the Shropshire poems tenders the eternal consolation of the glum, that at least our lot now is no worse than anyone’s ever was, and the present is no blacker than the past or future. The Valley of the Shadow of Death has no sunny uplands at either end of it, so let us study perseverance at the expense of hope. Of all mature attitudes, this is one of the least enviable. So, concluding, he was not one for causes. An intensely private man, he is a monument to a time, long since lost to us, when not every man or woman of letters felt the urge to pester the editor about the evils of processed food or Big Tobacco.”   Housman was born on this date, March 26, in 1859 and died at age seventy-seven in 1936. Go here and here to read more by Thomas Banks, a first-rate writer.