Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding reincarnation. In the fourth chapter, “Calypso,” Molly Bloom is in bed reading a novel, Ruby: Pride of the Ring. She encounters metempsychosis in the text and asks Leopold, who has been serving her tea and toast, what it means. She fumbles the pronunciation and Joyce later puts a pun in her mouth: “met him pike hoses.” The word shows up in three other chapters and is a theme -- ever-changing forms -- in the novel.  In the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the poet, painter and translator Nicholas Kilmer published “Fragments from a Correspondence,” a selection from the letters written to him by Guy Davenport between 1978 and 1983. Davenport had died the previous year. Kilmer is the grandson of the poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Second Battle of the Marne. Davenport knew as much about Ulysses (among other things) as anyone I have known. In a letter dated Sept. 6, 1980, he writes to Kilmer:   “Your theory of metempsychosis through things. It explains so much. I know drab people who have been tenement sinks and public water fountains in Arkansas. I may well have been the Wright Brothers Flyer No. 1. You know my theory that I'm a janitor in all my activities? I janitor, for instance, the Kenyon Review; and my writing is all simply the tidying up of the Modern Period, a bit of string here neatly rolled up, scraps of notes thrown away by Joyce, things dropped by Ez Pound. So I must have been a janitor sometime.”   Davenport is joking, sort of, but the theme of forms changing and evolving across time is recurrent in his essays and fiction. Among the aphorisms of the pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos he translated is this: “Change alone is unchanging.” And this: “Everything flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]” He borrows the title of his 1987 essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays, from Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. In a footnote to the excerpt from Davenport’s letter, Kilmer explains: “My theory of metempsychosis is that, all things having souls, we shuttle back and forth between animal, vegetable and mineral.”   [The Herakleitos quotes come from Davenport’s Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995).

"The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions."

Why did my teachers devote more class time to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell – American exemplars of the Age of Thrice-Named Writers -- than to Lord Byron? After more than half a century, I can only speculate. Literary patriotism? We spent a lot of time reading such certified American products as Ralph Waldo Emerson (not Thoreau), William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and "The Man Without a Country." In retrospect I can see this reading list had likely been in place for nearly a century. We dabbled in the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Wordsworth, but no Byron. Was the taint of scandal still attached to his name? I’m not dismissing Whittier & Co. Most are minor writers in a young country. I want to address an imbalance.  My late father-in-law left me a small library of books, including those he had won as prizes while a student at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario. Among them is the Oxford edition of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, the 1952 reprint, which he was awarded four years later. I’m using it to sample Byron, reading among his poems experimentally. I did something similar a few years ago with Robert Browning, another void in my education.   I do love Don Juan (1819-24), especially for its wit, occasional vulgarity and inspired rhymes. He I the inheritor of Alexander Pope’s gift. Take Canto I, Stanza 22:   ‘T is pity learnéd virgins ever wed With persons of no sort of education, Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred, Grow tired of scientific conversation: I don’t choose to say much upon this head, I’m a plain man, and in a single station, But — Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?”   In Canto III, Stanza 88, Byron writes thoughtfully, colloquially, racily :   “But words are things; and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link      Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”   In a 2002 essay titled “My Roommate Lord Byron,” the Byronic poet Tom Disch writes:   “It would have pleased Lord Byron to know that, having been the most renowned, imitated, and execrated of the Major Romantic Poets, he is now, almost two centuries later, the least honored, the most ignored and deplored of that select few. For he thrived on giving offense. He was a sexy, swaggering contrarian whose wisecrack answer to the earnest inquiry of Concerned Virtue, ‘What are you rebelling against?,’ would have been the same as Marlon Brando’s: "What have ya got?’”   I should have read Byron decades ago but I wouldn’t have recognized him as a lineal descendent of Dryden and Pope.

A Guest Lecture with Even Armstrong on why he left Every to go independent.

Boys of my age grew up fighting Nazis and Japs. We inherited our fathers’ war and were too old to “play Army” – always the phrase – by the time Vietnam heated up. A German refugee, Mrs. Becker, lived next door and we were ordered to kill only Japs if we were playing near her house. Most of our weapons and tactics were taken not from our fathers but from movies and television (Combat! and The Gallant Men).  I remember only one “war story” told by my father from his four years (1942-46) in the Army Air Corps. He was severely sunburned while stationed in North Africa and made a hammock of a rubber sheet filled with olive oil to ease the burn. That’s it. He never spoke of combat, and I have no idea where he was on June 6, 1944. We understood that was terra nullius and never asked questions.   I read Howard Nemerov early, as part of that remarkable postwar generation of American poets who fought in World War II, including Karl Shapiro, Edgar Bowers and Anthony Hecht. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov flew fifty combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. He published “D-Day + All the Years,” first in The Sewanee Review in 1986 and collected it in War Stories the following year:   “What Daddy did on Opening Day? Yes, well,  He led the squadron out before first light  Over the Channel as far as Cap Gris Nez  And turned to port along the Frisian shores  Up past Den Helder and Terschelling where  We had lost a few, and so on up as far  As the Bight of Heligoland and distant Denmark  Where Hamlet and the others used to live,  And so wheeled homeward on a parallel track  To land at Manston in Kent for an early lunch.    “Pleasant and warm under the perspex canopy  Of the office fifty feet above a sea  Hammered and brazen as on the world’s first day,  A peaceable morning. And the sky was blue.    “And Daddy sitting there driving along  Under his silly hat with the stiffener out,  Wearing the leather gauntlets flared heroic  Over the white silk elbow-length debutante’s gloves  They used to wear then whatever the weather was,  And more or less the way you see him now.”   The poem’s addressees are likely Nemerov’s three children, including art historian Alexander Nemerov. What’s not stated is at the heart of the poem. Nemerov describes the mission in some detail without overtly mentioning the Normandy invasion taking place nearby on that day: “A peaceable morning.” No heroics, no war stories.       To put the Allies’ accomplishment on D-Day into historical context, here is Victor Davis Hanson writing in The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017):   “The D-Day invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC. It dwarfed all of history’s star-crossed beach landings from Marathon to Gallipoli (April 1915). Normandy would serve as a model for large subsequent American seaborne operations from Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April 1945) to Inchon (September 1950). It made all prior iconic cross-Channel invasions in either direction—Caesar’s (55 BC), William the Conqueror’s (1066), Henry V’s (1415) or the British landing in Flanders—seem minor amphibious operations in comparison.”