Sometimes disparate things almost announce their covert similarities and linkages, in a way Aristotle would have understood, and it makes good sense to combine them. I was looking for something in The Poet’s Tongue, the anthology compiled by W.H. Auden and the schoolmaster John Garrett, published in 1935. It’s a little eccentric. The poems are printed anonymously (until the index) and arranged alphabetically. My first thought was that the book is designed for young, inexperienced readers, not yet deeply read in the English poetic tradition, who can encounter the poems without the prejudice of chronology or name recognition. The focus is on the text. Now I think the anthologists’ arrangement is likewise a gift to veteran readers who can read Marvell or Tennyson outside the classroom and shed long-held biases. It recalls Downbeat magazine’s long-running feature, “Blindfold Test.”  Next, I got curious about the anthology’s critical reception ninety years ago and discovered it had been reviewed by one of my favorite critics, the poet Louise Bogan, in the April 1936 issue of Poetry. In “Poetry’s Genuine Fare,” Bogan begins by comparing the Auden/Garrett collection with Francis Palgrave’s famous Golden Treasury (1875):   “Where Palgrave was able to present selected poems in a straightforward chronological manner, as though the last thing to consider was the idea that readers might or might not be prepared for it, Auden and Garrett’s task involves devices: the ground must be cleared and then, as it were, disguised, in order that, in our day, poetry may be  approached, by youth, without scorn or fear.”   Bogan applauds the inclusion of “songs fresh from the tongue of simple people, songs which first saw light printed on broadsheets, songs from the primer and the nursery, from the music-hall, from the hymnal and the psalter.” She applauds the adjoining of, say, a ballad preceding Dryden’s Song for St. Cecilia's Day and followed by a nursery rhyme. By reading the poems-as-poems, students can develop their taste and critical sense. That leaves plenty of room for future literary history and scholarship. Late in her review Bogan cites a passage identified only as having been written by George Saintsbury (1845-1933):   “It would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciation which, while relishing things more exquisite, and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savor the simple genuine fare of poetry. . . . There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding ‘better bread than is made of wheat.’”   The quotation was new to me.A little hunting showed Bogan had drawn it from Saintsbury’s A History of Nineteenth Century Literature 1780-1895 (1896). “This is Saintsbury speaking in an eminently sane manner,” she writes, “words which should be taken to heart in this era of fashions, proselytizing and fear, when poetry might well bloat in the mephitic vapors bred from dismal insistence on ‘revolutions of the word,’ or wither into the disguised hymnals of propaganda.” His thoughts remain pertinent. They are drawn from the section in his book Saintsbury devotes to the historian and poet Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). He describes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) as “an honest household loaf that no healthy palate with reject.” Bogan concludes her review: “Auden and Garrett have endeavored to show that poetry would exist if not only the linotype, but also the pen, had never been invented, and that it rises from the throat of whatever class, in whatever century. They have brought our attention back to the voice speaking in a landscape where trees bear laurel at the same time that fields grow bread.”

I dreamed my late brother was here in Houston, a city he never visited. He was phobic about flying and traveled by air only twice in his life, when very young. We were seated across from each other, on the couches by the front window. What I remember of the dream is brief, little more than an image without duration. He looked as he always looked – plaid shirt, blue jeans, Whitmanesque beard. The atmosphere was mundane, free of revelations. We didn’t talk though I sensed I had unformed questions. He offered no reassurance or profound knowledge from beyond.  When I woke the dream mingled with Montaigne, the writer we often talked about during his final weeks last August in the hospital and hospice. Montaigne’s father became ill with kidney stones in 1561 and died seven years later. The essayist’s closest friend, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, died of dysentery in 1563 at age thirty-two. His brother Arnaud died in his twenties. His firstborn died at two months, the second survived but the subsequent four also died as infants. In “Of Judging the Death of Others,” Montaigne writes:   “When we judge of the assurance of other men in dying, which is without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life, we must be mindful of one thing: that people do not easily believe that they have reached that point. Few men die convinced that it is their last hour; and there is no place where the deception of hope deludes us more. It never stops trumpeting into our ears: ‘Others have certainly been sicker without dying; the case is not as desperate as they think; and at worst, God has certainly worked other miracles.’”   For almost a week preceding his death, my brother was unconscious. The only sound he made was softly moaning when the nurses moved him. Before that, he never seemed frightened. I’ll never know what he knew or when.   [The quotation is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

A longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence has commented on my March 1 post:  “One of my worst apprehensions about my son’s college education came true in his freshman English class. The professor brought up Lamb only to highlight something he said that would strike modern progressives as racist. Such a great language stylist, and my son’s likely only exposure to him was in the villains’ gallery of his college’s CRT indoctrination. Grrr!”   By now, a familiar story. That Lamb of all writers should be Zhdanov-ized is a bitter joke. Yes, he is “a great language stylist,” but also one of the funniest writers in the language. His sense of humor, spanning the spectrum from nonsense to erudite wit, is distinctly modern. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” English profs tend today to be humorless and puritanical, at least about other people's beliefs, disapproving of the pleasure we are meant to take in literature.   In Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (2021), Robert Alter reflects on a visit he made to the Soviet Union in the final year of its existence. He was there to attend a Nabokov conference, contrasting it with “the never-never land that American academia has become.” He writes:   "Literature in our own academic circles is regularly dismissed, castigated as an instrument of ideologies of oppression, turned into a deconstructive plaything, preferentially segregated by the pigmentation and the sexual orientation of the writers, or entirely displaced by clinical case studies, metaphysical treatises, psychoanalytic theories, and artifacts of popular culture.”   Let’s ask the basic question: why do academics, some of whom are intelligent and well-educated, behave this way? It seems to boil down to two things: a hunger for power (always the highest value on campus), a withered aesthetic sense and and a peculiar form of laziness. You don’t have to bother reading a book if you know in advanced you want to disapprove of it. Such descendants of the kids in grade school who complained about reading a book are now in a position to get their way. Alter bluntly states the reality for many of us: “There is something irrepressibly celebratory about Nabokov’s writing . . .”

“Maurine Smith died March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three years. Nearly her whole life had been one of intense physical suffering, and she knew few of the usual felicities.”  Yvor Winters is introducing us to a poet whose name you likely have never encountered.  Smith and Winters were members of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago, along with Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a few others. Five of Smith’s poems were published in Poetry two and a half years after her death. After another two years, Monroe Wheeler published a chapbook, The Keen Edge, containing eighteen of Smith’s poems. Winters provided the brief introduction:   “Unless one speaks of the dead from a very complete knowledge, one speaks with diffidence, and my acquaintance with Miss Smith was slight. . . . Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn  she surveys the autumn morning through a window. And then the lines from an unpublished poem:   “‘I dust my open book, But there is no dust on the pages.’   “A hand as fine as the lines, and that is all.”   Winters’ closing line might almost be a poem. After publication of the chapbook, Smith evaporated from literary history for sixty years. She has no Wikipedia page – one's confirmation of existence in the digital age. In 1987, poet and publisher R.L. Barth returned The Keener Edge to print, and he later gave me a copy. The poet-novelist Janet Lewis, Winters’ widow and also a member of the Poetry Club, published a critical article, “The Poems of Maurine Smith,” in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review. Despite the growth in women’s studies and the revival of interest in many previously neglected female writers, Lewis’ piece remains the only substantial critical examination of Smith and her poetry I've been able to find. Lewis tells us she met Smith only once, in January 1919. I’m touched by Lewis using Smith’s first name after more than seventy years:     “I think of Maurine as having a mind well schooled in English verse. I can as easily relate her work to that of Christina Rossetti as to that of Adelaide Crapsey, who was almost her contemporary, and certainly an influence.”   Describing her sole meeting with Smith some 106 years ago, Lewis writes:   “I cannot remember if Maurine submitted any poems for discussion that evening. She was too ill to attend the next meeting, when Glenway Wescott read [Smith’s] “Ceremony.” He read it, as he read each of the poems which we dropped on the table, without giving the name of the writer. I remember, although not knowing whose poem it was, how deeply I was touched by it, the beauty of the control of both form and feeling. This is the poem. It may as well be introductory now, as it was then:   “The unpeopled conventional rose garden  Is where I shall take my heart  With this new pain.  Clipped hedge and winter-covered beds  Shall ease its hurt.  When it has grown quiet,  I shall mount the steps, slowly,  And put three sorrows in the terra-cotta urn  On that low gate-pillar,  And leave them there, to sleep,  Beneath the brooding stillness of a twisted pine.”   Lewis notes that the members of the Poetry Club were interested in free verse, the formless form then still something of a novelty: “It was not entirely respectable in 1918.” Another Smith poem reminds Lewis of Christina Rosetti’s “Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.” Here is “The Dead”:   “You, who were blind to beauty,  Unheedful of song, You have time now to remember In your quiet under the ground; And does the time seem long?   “Harken, in your silence; All things grow. Is not your heart importunate? You, too, must long again To feel the wind blow.”   As late as 1930, Winters was hoped to publish a more complete edition of Smith’s poems, with a biography supplied by her sister. He believed some forty poems were extant. In a letter to Glenway Wescott, Winters writes: “Maurine was one of our best poets, I am more and more certain.” See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.