On Sunday, a friend and I, after lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant, visited Kaboom Books here in Houston. He left with a stack of books. I found one: Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast, 2018). I know her thanks only to Yvor Winters, who championed her work and rightly called her “a minor poet of great distinction.” Crapsey (1878-1914) reminds us that reputation is fleeting and uncertain. Only dedicated readers keep a writer alive. Without the occasional reader, Crapsey would be doubly dead. She devised a homegrown poetic form, the American cinquain, much influenced by traditional Japanese verse, and reminiscent of the work of her contemporaries, the early Imagists.  The editors, Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, bring together a selection of Crapsey’s poems, excerpts from her study of metrics, letters and five essays by academics. Most of her poems are graceful and brief, feather-like in their delicacy yet often concluding with a sort of stinger at the end. Take “Triad”:   “These be Three silent things: The falling snow . . . the hour Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one Just dead.”   For Crapsey, who was ill for much of her life and died from tuberculosis at age thirty-six, death is a recurrent theme, as in “The Lonely Death”:   “In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In waters of ice; myself Will shiver, and shrive myself, Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; and myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin.”   During her lifetime, Crapsey edited only one volume of her work, Verse, published in 1915, shortly after her death. Her range of subjects is narrow – death, dying, illness -- and family difficulties limited her growth as a poet. Yvor Winters, who survived tuberculosis, as did his wife Janet Lewis, wrote of Crapsey: “[T]he only known cure, and this was known to only a few physicians, was absolute rest, often immobilized rest. The disease filled the body with a fatigue so heavy that it was an acute pain, pervasive and poisonous.” We see Crapsey’s resistance to “immobilized rest” in her poem “To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window”:   “Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: ‘Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest.’ I’ll not be patient! I will not lie still!”   Effective antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis wouldn’t become available until the nineteen-forties. A reader resists it, but there’s a pervasive sadness about Crapsey’s work, coupled with courage. It’s similar, though at a different level of accomplishment, to the what we experience when reading Keats and Chekhov. Tuberculosis killed both, at ages twenty-five and forty-four, respectively. “To the Dead . . .” concludes:     “And in ironic quietude who is The despot of our days and lord of dust Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop Grim casual comment on rebellion's end; ‘Yes, yes . . . Wilful and petulant but now As dead and quiet as the others are.’ And this each body and ghost of you hath heard That in your graves do therefore lie so still.”

Had I been more clever or alert I might have heard and recorded my brother’s last words before he died last August in hospice. A reader asks about this, and I admit I blew it. For the last week or so of his life, Ken was unconscious, occasionally moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed. It’s customary to focus on last words. Perhaps we expect wisdom, reassurance, a lifetime’s lesson pithily expressed. There is precedent. William Hazlitt, not the happiest of men, is reported to have said while dying, “Well, I've had a happy life.” Assuming its accuracy, I find that enormously touching. And there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, dying of typhoid fever: “I am so happy, so happy.” Delusion or gratitude? I prefer to avoid the cynical interpretation.  I’ve just finished reading Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth, 1993) by Theresa Whistler. I’ve grown deeply interested in de la Mare and his work in the last several years. The poet would die on June 22, 1956 at age eighty-three. He had been ailing for several years. On the evening of June 21, Whistler reports de la Mare told his nurse: “Oh, N [Sister Natalie Saxton], I do feel seedy!” To the end, interesting word choice. He had suffered another coronary thrombosis, was given oxygen and repeatedly pulled off the mask. He slept intermittently. Sir Russell Brain, the eminent neurologist and close friend of de la Mare, visited. “He was bright, even happy,” Whistler writes, “and joked: ‘I think we shall cheat them yet.’”   To a pretty nurse, de la Mare said, “It’s a long time since me met – you must have come out of a dream.” With prompting, de la Mare recited his poem “Fare Well.” Whistler writes:   “The longest day drew in quietly, and the short night fell. N had gone out of the room for a brief rest. The nurse who had taken her place tucked him in – it was 2 a.m. – and bent over him. She asked if he was quite comfortable. ‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right,’ he answered – then he caught his breath in one gasp and died. There was no time to fetch N or the others. The nurse could only wake them and tell them he was gone.”

Johnson, Boswell and friends met for dinner at the Crown and Anchor on April 12, 1776. Among the topics of conversation was the evergreen favorite “whether drinking improved conversation and benevolence.” Sir Joshua Reynolds maintained it did. Johnson replies:   “‘No, Sir: before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority, have the modesty not to talk. When they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous: but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.’”   My experience confirms this. In conversation, the only thing more insufferable than a know-it-all is a drunken know-it-all. Alcohol creates experts. Otherwise modest fellows suddenly start thinking they know what they’re talking about. When one or more meet, arguments ensue, fistfights, bail bondsmen. Reynolds disagrees and Johnson replies:      “‘No, Sir; wine gives not light, gay, ideal hilarity; but tumultuous, noisy, clamorous merriment. I have heard none of those drunken,—nay, drunken is a coarse word,—none of those VINOUS flights.’”   And Reynolds responds more personally: “‘Because you have sat by, quite sober, and felt an envy of the happiness of those who were drinking.’”   It was the late novelist Donald Newlove who first suggested to me that Johnson may have been in his earlier years an alcoholic or at least a “problem drinker” (that anxiety-easing euphemism). In Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981), a meditation on the writing/alcohol connection, Newlove writes:   “Great writing about alcohol is an ocean without shoreline and I have a thick notebook of excerpts from world literature to attest to it, a sheaf of quotations to help me keep sober. One of the most stirring recoveries from excessive drinking was made by Dr. Samuel Johnson two centuries ago.”   To clarify that he is not issuing a blanket condemnation of alcohol or its effects – basically, not wishing to sound like a moralistic wet blanket -- Johnson says:   “Sir, it is not necessary to be drunk one’s self, to relish the wit of drunkenness. Do we not judge of the drunken wit, of the dialogue between Iago and Cassio, the most excellent in its kind, when we are quite sober? Wit is wit, by whatever means it is produced; and, if good, will appear so at all times. I admit that the spirits are raised by drinking, as by the common participation of any pleasure: cock-fighting, or bear-baiting, will raise the spirits of a company, as drinking does, though surely they will not improve conversation. I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten.”   I knew guys who were diffident dullards when sober and sparkling entertainers when drunk, at least for a short time, until the demons took over. Some recognized their transformation, drank greater quantities and more often,  and turned into bums or wet brains. Fellow drinkers deemed them weaklings, failed drinkers. Alcoholics are hard on their own kind. Johnson describes my style of drinking: “‘Sir, I do not say it is wrong to produce self complacency by drinking; I only deny that it improves the mind. When I drank wine, I scorned to drink it when in company. I have drunk many a bottle by myself; in the first place, because I had need of it to raise my spirits; in the second place, because I would have nobody to witness its effects upon me.’”   I’m reminded of a wisecrack attributed to Dylan Thomas: “An alcoholic is someone who drinks as much as I do whom I don’t like.”

Here I pause to remember a forgotten poet who remembered a slightly less forgotten poet – a reminder that all of us are eminently forgettable, regardless of our purported virtues. Walter de la Mare died on June 22, 1956, at age eighty-three. The journal Poetry assigned William Burford to write a remembrance of the English writer, “Master of Silences,” which was published in the November 1957 issue.  Scrap that.   As I was reading “Burford’s” commemoration, it seemed familiar. I dug around and realized I had written about the same piece almost two years ago, under its true byline: William Jay Smith. In the same issue of Poetry, the piece after Smith’s remembrance is a review by Burford (I trust) of a Hart Crane biography. Someone at some time, whether in 1957 or last week, switched bylines -- which, of course, bolsters my observations above about forgettability. Smith’s piece on de la Mare remains definitive:   “When a poet of stature dies, a silence settles upon language. One becomes suddenly aware that words will never again be handled as they have been by this particular man. All that can be said or heard resides in his poems: the rest is silence.”   So, what about Burford? I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I see he died in Dallas in 2004 at age seventy-seven. He had a long academic career and published at least three collections of poems. His work appeared prolifically in Poetry, especially in the nineteen-fifties. In 1967, he translated and published with Christopher Middleton The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from Letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane. He translated minor work by Proust. I would love to say his poems are unforgettable, or even memorably funny and incisive, and that I have salvaged a forgotten genius. Here is “Local God,” published in the Summer 1953 issue of Southwest Review:   “There stands a man in Texas, can grab the rattlers by the tail and crack them like a whip, snapping the vertebrae. He is the curse of all the snakes; milks the venom out of their mouths and wraps them round his arms for bracelets. Strange to say how the little children all steal away from his loving fingers.”