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In his critical works, Samuel Johnson respected tradition if not reputation or even physical appearance. He could be eloquently brutish and write of Jonathan Swift:  “The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.”   Today we would frown on mocking a writer’s looks. It would be judged “insensitive.” I associate Johnson’s description of Swift with one of the late John Simon’s more amusing assaults on Barbra Streisand: “Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun. Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas. Her speaking voice seems to have graduated with top honors from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism.” That Streisand is a mediocre singer/actress endowed with a surfeit of self-esteem eases potential offense. The difference between Johson’s judgment and Simon’s being that the former mingles admiration with distaste:   “It was from the time when [Swift] first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established.”   R.L. Barth has translated Martial’s epigram XI.99. As a satirist, Martial was no respecter of persons:   “Whenever you stand up, I see your gown Treat you indecently, flat let you down. You pluck it with your left hand then your right— You’re positively groaning!—it’s held tight In the Cyanean straits of your huge butt. What’s my advice? Don’t sit. Don’t stand. That’s what.”   Bob wrote to me on his approach to translation: “Translation can be a vexing problem if you let it be--or even if you don’t. For me, all that matters is that the translated poem makes a good English poem (or why bother) and that it stays as close to the original as this or that translator is able to keep it. However, I'm willing to vary, add, substitute, if it works for the poem and doesn’t violate the spirit of the original. I may not be as good a poet as Martial, but I’m pretty much his equal as a smart-ass, which helps my translations.”

A common phenomenon in the history of literature is couples writing together.

“The book of love is full of music,” sings Peter Gabriel. “In fact, that’s where music comes from.” The book of love is written in the language of wonder — our best means of loving life more deeply. To love anything — a person, a pond, the world — is to see the wonder in it, to hear the music in it. Both love and wonder are in mysterious conversation with the deepest substrate of us, the complete message of which is unintelligible to the analytical mind, inaccessible by any explanatory model. Both require a surrender to the musicality of… read article

The Louisiana poet Gail White published three poems in Peacock Journal, all freighted with serious thought and all skirting the charms of light verse. White avoids the failings of pretentiousness and mere silliness. Consider “Resemblances”:  “Somewhere along the primrose path That led to my seventies, I lost the blithe agility Of the young springbok’s knees,   “The swift gait of the wildebeest Running with its herd, And the keen eye of the crouching cat Under the nesting bird,   “Retaining only the stoic love Of the elephant for its kin And the fierce desire of the salmon For the stream it was nurtured in.”   Chronicling the losses and infirmities of aging can turn readily into a wallow in self-pity, which is ridiculous if you consider the alternative. Unspoiled youth is incompatible with longevity, and adults accept those inevitabilities with dignity and “stoic love.” White’s twelve-line, one-sentence poem reminds us that mortality is universal, what we share with the rest of the Earth’s fauna. We’re in the same boat (Noah’s ark) as nematodes and capybaras. White adds a prose statement to her poems:   “Aquinas, who had a gift for concise definition, once said that ‘We call that beautiful which pleases the eye.’ It’s hard to improve on the simplicity of that. Pleasing the eye, which includes reading, has always been my goal, and aesthetics my primary value. From this comes a love of art museums, travel, living next to running water, poetry, the Victorian novel, and cats. (Few things please the eye as much as a good cat). It might have been more noble if my highest value had been unconditional love, but if I’m honest, I admit I’m stuck with beauty.”   Not a bad place to be stuck. Beauty is one of the things that makes life worth enduring. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953) – one of my favorite books -- Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime: “Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.” It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:   “Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”   Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (trans. T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”