The Best American Poetry

Lear is Real: "Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are. . ."

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

--- King Lear, act III, scene 4

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

When Insults Had Class [by Terence Winch]

With thanks to Terence Winch, here are some well-turned insults from back in the day before the era of the ubiquitous four-letter word.

Lady Astor: "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it"
[Note: it has to be said that Churchill is the Yogi Berra of witty British repartee; when you're not sure who came up with the bon mot, Winston's your man.]

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or  of some unspeakable disease."
"That  depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your  mistress."

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.." -- Oscar Wilde

"I  am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend. . . if you have one."
-- George Bernard Shaw to Winston  Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second. . . if there is one." -- Winston Churchill, in response.
[This exchange has been attributed to Shaw and James Whistler.]

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John  Bright

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain
[A retort a philatelist has to love.]

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae  West
[In a fit of remorse, a convicted murderer said, "my father should have used a condom!"]

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar  Wilde

"He  uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts . . . for support rather  than illumination."
-- Andrew Lang  (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." -- Billy Wilder

"I've  had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

from the archive; September 16, 2009

The Great Paradox [by Lionel Trilling]

"Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."

-- Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination

Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons; wise men never try.

-- Oscar Hammerstein, "Some Enchanted Evening"

But Oscar was writing of love. Is the tendency Trilling describes as inevitable and as beyond reason?

Trilling also wrote, prophetically, "We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."

I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The esay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal. 

The picture on the top right is the cover of Saturday Review, February 12, 1955.-- DL

Spontaneous Aphorism: Hope

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent."

-- Mignon McLaughlin
The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

via The American Scholar (Summer, 2008)

The line (which has also been attributed to Jean Kerr) makes it easier to grasp why Emily Dickinson [pictured left] ends with "despair" when "hope" is expected at the end of her poem "It was not Death, because I stood up." Implicit is the image is of a shipwreck:

But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -
Without a Chance, or spar -
Or even a Report of Land -
To justify - Despair.

Said Disraeli to Gladstone. . .

 

At a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease."

Disraeli replied, "That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

T. S. Eliot: The More You Know, The More You Don't

Poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, circa 1920.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

From T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Perfect Critic” for the literary journal Athenaeum in 1920:

The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.

Saturday Surprise [by David Lehman]

Here are five sentences that I didn't write. I proffer them not only because of the formidable intellect behind them but also because of the insights into our culture and into human nature. Some, if we consider when they were written, are of prophetic power.

To play, identify the author (and name the specific source or publication) in the comments field. Or don't. Just think about these observations. I will identify the auithor before the weekend ends. The art illustrating this piece is a red herring with a red cape.

"Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it. "

"Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth."

“It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”

"We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us."

“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”

From "Sincerity and Authenticity" on July 4th, Lionel Trilling's Birthday

Here is the magnificent final paragraph of "The Authentic Unconscious," the final chapter of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), his last book, which originated as the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1970.

<<< Yet the doctrine that madness is health, and that madness is liberation, receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public. And when we have given due weight to the likelihood that those who respond positively to the doctrine don’t have it in mind to go mad, let alone insane—it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that, in radical psychology as in radical politics, it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence—we must yet take it to be significant of our circumstances that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. Perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring—the falsities of an alienated social reality rejected in favor of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ but with none of the inconveniences of interceding, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished. >>>

Notice the last phrase and how eloquently it concludes the allegorical identification of "each one of us" as "a Christ." Written to counter the idea that madness is a necessary component of genius, the graf concludes with a summary statement followed by a dash, not a typical Trilling ploy. What follows the dash reiterates the main point with a twist achieved by the strategic use of "psychopathic" to alter the common meaning of "upward mobility" -- as if a term usually associated with matters of money and social class could well apply to the case of madness as an ideal. And then follows the remarkable metaphor, with its understanding of what divinity entails, its definition of what it means to be "a Christ." In the Gospel According to St. John, Christ's last words on the cross are  "It is finished." These are the book's last words.-- DL

 

Why People Go To College [by W. Kirschberg]

"If the universities demolish the humanities by undermining their relevance or their validity, the immediate effect is to promote ignorance and laziness among students; the long term effect is to put into question the very idea of the centrality of college, which people attend for many reasons (alcoholic, athletic, sexual, psychopharmacological, fraternal) but not to learn about Western Civilization." -- W. Kirschberg, from his Salutatorian  Address (1972), Churchill College, Cambridge University, the first Cambridge college to admit women as undergraduates.

Thomas Mann:  " A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth." 

Albert Einstein on Compound Interest -- and Reality

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." 

Oscar's bon mots! (10 Favorites)

–I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

-- When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

-- A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.

-- The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.

-- There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

-- I can resist anything except temptation.

-- A good friend will always stab you in the front.

--  In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

-- Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

-- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

"Blue Poles" [by Jackson Pollock]

"On the canvas was not a picture, but an event."

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News (December 1952)

Headline of the Week: Oscar Wilde, Back in the News

<< New York Post

Metro Edition

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

OSCAR WILD

What you didn't see on TV after Awards' slap snap

Sources describe a backstage scene of chaos Sunday night after Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock, as everyone realized it wasn't a joke. The Academy says it's conducting a review and may punish Smith for his assault.

>>>

Dodger fans were relieved to hear that Will Smith, their outstanding young catcher, was not the fellow responsible for the bitch-slap that was all anyone could talk about after the Oscar awards ceremony on Sunday night.

Oscar Wilde commented: "True friends stab you in the front." While the line implied that Will Smith, the actor, was acting as Chris Rock's "true friend," Wilde complicated the message by adding that he favored "Everything in moderation, including moderation."

Today's back page of The New York Post offers this:

JUDGE ADVOCATES

<< Yanks teammates lobby for Aaron to get his long-term deal before opening day. >>

It reminds me of the day a British royal got married: "Windsor Ties Knot." Tabloid journalism at its cleverest. -- DL

Thom Gunn Summarizes Henry James in 2 Lines

Jamesian

Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.

--- Thom Gunn (pictured)

Poetry challenge: sum up a great author in eight words divided across two rhyming lines.

Nabokov on Chess

You wrote this marvellous novel The Luzhin Defence: are you a very good chess player? And what do you think of [Bobby] Fischer’s attitude?

Forty years ago I was a good enough player of chess, not a grandmaster, as the Germans say, but a club player sometimes able to set a trap for a heedless champion. What has always drawn me in chess is the trick move, the hidden combination, and that’s why I gave up live play to devote myself to composing chess problems. I don’t doubt that there exists an intimate link between certain mirages of my prose and the texture, at once brilliant and obscure, of enigmatic chess problems of which each one is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia. I especially like so-called suicide problems, where White forces Black to win.

Yes, Fischer is a strange being, but there’s nothing abnormal in the fact of a chess player’s not being normal. There was the case of the great player Rubinstein, at the start of the century: an ambulance would drive him each day from the insane asylum, his home, to the café room where the tournament was taking place, and then drive him back to his dark cell after the game. He didn’t like to see his opponent, but an empty chair across the chessboard also irritated him, so they put a mirror there, and he saw his own reflection.

See https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/

from the archive; first posted November 19, 2019

Ogden Nash's Advice to Husbands

A Word to Husbands

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

from Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash (1962).
Did you know that rhymester Nash wrote the lyrics for Kurt Weill's beautiful love song "Speak Low"? 

Quote of the Day: The one point of unity . . . [by Mark Twain]

Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897:  "As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this: the deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests, mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers,shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews." Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added that "This hatred of the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies." Still true.

-- DL

Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897:  "As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this: the deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests, mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers,shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews." Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added that "This hatred of the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies." Still true.

-- DL

All-Time Great Sentences

From Kissinger by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schyster, 2005), p. 131. This sentence appears after the author has presented several rival versions of an incident during the 1968 presidential election campaign:

“Where does the truth in fact lie?”

Beautiful. Where is the truth? Or where does the truth tell a lie?

What Paul de Man could do with this sentence! Professor Joel Cairo, a circuit judge of the Food Court, explains that it is “a perfect example of two antithetical meanings: ‘What is the truth [of the matter]?’ versus 'where [in what circumstances] does the truth become a lie thanks, perhaps, to the agency of fact, that seemingly hard but notably elastic thing [or word]?’ Caspar Gutmann wondered: ‘Are there invisible hyphens linking the words truth-in-fact? And what then?’"

You know what I think?
No, what do you think.
It ranks right up there with Kissinger's assessment of the Iraq war in 2003:
"It all depends on how it ends."
Perfect iambic tetrameter.

-- DL

Yeats on Friendship (for Paul Violi)

Last evening, when listening to the late Paul Violi's friends, colleagues, students and admirers read his poems, I thought of the last two lines of Yeats's "The Municipal Gallery Revisited." Here are the culminating lines of this multi-part poem. DL

 You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

From the archive; first posted December 2, 2011

The Most Underrated Poet in America

<<< 

I remember a poet's writing to me several years back, You are the most underrated poet in the country. But then, he added, that's better than being the most overrated poet in the country. I was and remain impressed by the short distance between the two extremes.

-- Howard Nemerov, Journal of the Fictive Life (1963)
>>>

On the other hand, keep in mind what R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1924:

". . . in art, a school once established normally deteriorates as it goes on. It achieves perfection in its kind with a startling burst of energy, a gesture too quick for the historian's eye to follow. He can never explain such a movement or tell us how exactly it happened. But once it is achieved, there is the melancholy certainty of a decline. The grasped perfection does not educated and purify the taste of posterity; it debauches it. The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting. So far as there is any observable law in collective art history it is, like the law of the individual artist's life, the law not of progress but of reaction. Whether in large or in little, the equilibrium of the aesthetic life is permanently unstable."

Didn't Paul Valéry say poetry was language beyond paraphrase, language so vital it is irreducible?

Therefore, I shall return to thee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "  poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”