“Except for a certain saving humor, I should indeed have been a full monster.”  One definition of a friend is someone with whom you can share any joke or other comic effort without fear of offending him. It may not be funny – the only pertinent criterion for judging humorousness – but it’s not hateful (a word thrown around promiscuously these days). Friends understand us. They don’t necessarily approve but neither do they throw a tantrum, get uppity and admonish us.   The line at the top is by the poet Louise Bogan, writing a letter on January 28, 1954, to another poet, May Sarton. Bogan struggled with severe depression for more than forty years and was hospitalized for it several times. Bogan is one of our finest American poets, and that she was able to write so well under such conditions is heroic. The book to read is Elizabeth Frank’s biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986).   What most interests me about Bogan’s sentence is “a certain saving humor.” Never known as a humorist, Bogan was highly intelligent, thoughtful and witty. With close friends she could be herself. Bogan seems to be confirming a theory I’ve pondered for most of my life – that a well-exercised sense of humor is often symptomatic of mental health, if not always sanity.   I’ve been reading X.J. Kennedy again, including “More Foolish Things Remind Me of You,” published in the July/August 2006 “Humor Issue” of Poetry. It’s a laugh-out-loud poem (This is a test!), especially these lines: “Lines sliced to little bits by deconstruction, / Loose gobs of fat removed by liposuction.”   You may have noticed the subtitle: “With apologies to Eric Maschwitz.” He was the lyricist for the 1935 standard “These Foolish Things” under the pseudonym “Holt Marvell.” I suggest listening to at least one of these recordings of the song before reading Kenney’s parody, so you get the melody in your head: Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.

Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II.  One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”:   “There is a moment when contradictions cross, A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal And happiness could be impartial for once.”

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.”