The Best American Poetry

From Pity to Wisdom to Coercion [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.

from The Liberal Imagination 

>>>

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 essay 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.  -- DL

from the archive; first posted by The Best American Poetry on September 09, 2019 at 09:28 AM.

<<<

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.

from The Liberal Imagination 

>>>

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 essay 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.  -- DL

Bacon & Eggs [and 4 other poems by Howard Nemerov]

The God of This World

He smiles to see his children, born to sin,
Digging those foxholes there are no atheists in.

 

Because You Asked about the Difference Between Poetry and Prose

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

 

 

Bacon & Eggs

 

The chicken contributes, but the pig gives his all.

 

Mystery Story

Formal as minuet or sonnet,
It zeroes in on the guilty one;
But by the time I’m told who done it,
I can’t remember what he done.

Morning Sun

How many more this morning are there dead of
The peace I came to bring a sword instead of?

"Instant Freud" [by David Lehman]

Instant Freud

The holiest word in the language
is mother
and the nastiest
is motherfucker

-- David Lehman

Great Epigraphs

 

 

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

T. S. Eliot was terrific at the game.

 

Here is the epigraph Adous Huxley used for Point Counter Point:

‘Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws—
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?’

—Fulke Greville

Joseph Conrad chose these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faeire Queene for his epitaph:

"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"

Graham Greene on truth, fiction, journalism and "the Media"

Ask Graham Greene the difference between journalism and fiction, and he'll say that "novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

He will add that "Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

-- DL [from the archives; originally posted May 9, 2014)

He will add that "Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

-- DL [from the archives; originally posted May 9, 2014)

Kafka: It can always get worse. . .

"Let the bad remain bad, otherwise it will grow worse." 

T. S. Eliot Criticizes the Critics

<<<
Upon giving the matter a little attention, we percerive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.
>>> 

Here comes GBS

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

"“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”

"If at age 20 you're not a liberal you have no heart. If at age 40 you're not a conservative you don't have a brain."

“The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.”

"“Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation.”

“Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

Somerset Maugham: on Art, with Heart

“I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony.”

"There is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul. Then you see that no one is so trivial or debased but that in him is a spark of something to excite compassion.”

"There is in the heroic courage with which man confronts the irrationality of the world a beauty greater than the beauty of art.”

"“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

"I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man."

 

Ben Jonson, "A little winter-love in a dark corner"

 

Waste of Time.—What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend
the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, tendering visits,
gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making
a little winter-love in a dark corner.

-- Ben Jonson, (1572–1637)

 

My college roommate Ben cracked about History, specifically History 3001X , with professor (and ex-Senator) Walter Johnson: "it's a waste of time."  But then, and now,  you could argue that history with anyone is a waste of time -- certainly, for an American with technological know-how who believes in computers and artificial intelligence. Then you think you've found a definition of history: a waste of time. Then you read Ben Jonson, who believes that life itself is largely a waste of time. Then you think of the oceanic whispers, the gusts of wind that announce the changing of the guard, as fall loses its colors and winter arrives in white.  -- from Sal Ramada, "Hilton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour." See also Mark Gardner, The Dying Fall.

Trilling, Barzun, and the Colloquium on Important Books [by David Lehman]

Lionel Trilling, then an assistant professor at Columbia working on his thesis on Matthew Arnold, turned twenty-nine on July 4, 1934. That fall he and Jacques Barzun, 26, taught a seminar that convened on Wednesday evenings for the next twenty years. It was for seniors only and you had to have top grades to qualify. They called it "the Colloquium on Important Books." The name had changed by the time I took the seminar, in 1969, and the instructors were Rufus Mathewson and Edward Said. But the idea behind the class, the idea that there were great books that an educated person should read, remained strong - and needs desperately to be revived.

Think of it: Voltaire, The French Revolution (Burke, Carlyle), Schopenhauer, The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, Hard Times, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Mann, Proust, Conrad's "Under Western Eyes," Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents."

Of Barzun I have written elsewhere - here, for example, and there, on the subject of espionage. Of his amazing erudition reflected in his magnificent "From Dawn to Decadence," there can be no dispute. He taught me much, and I shared with him a particular interest in the literature of detection and intrigue. He gave me great pointers that were invaluable when I wrote my book "The Perfect Murder." Consider this observation of his:

<< <<< The spy is imperturbable not by temperament or by philosophy, but from expertise. He is the competent man. Whether the need of the moment is to play bridge like Culbertson, speak a Finnish dialect like a native, ski to safety over precipices or disable a funicular, he comforts us with his powers no less than with the pedantry of the subject. He makes mistakes, of course, to keep us in countenance, but they are errors of inattention, such as killing the wrong man. We respond to this agreeable image of our scientific world, where knowledge commands power, where facts are uniformly interesting, and where fatalities appear more and more as oversights, professional faux pas. These results constitute the romance of the age; why should they not be translated into stories -- spy stories especially, since what we know as science comes from ferreting and spying, and since we care so much for truth that we are willing to drug and torture for it? >>> 

And now, a few quotes from Trilling, more pertinent today than ever:

<< 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. >>

<< Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. >>

<< Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. >>

<< 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 objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. >>

<< It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. >>

See, too, these two poems of the day that quote Trilling.

And now, 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."

A Few of my Favorite Blurbs [by Alan Ziegler]

I told Alan that when I was general editor of the U of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series,
I offered to publish Richard Howard's Collected Blurbs. He liked the idea. Then we played
a game of comparative blurbs. Alan won.

<<< Here's one by James Tate that is better than any of the poems in the book:
"A Coney Island of the groin, Angkor Wat of the eyelash, So Much to Do pulls pranks
on itself, sets up daily monuments to Meaning and Emotion only to leap over them.
Alan Ziegler is full of it, Life, that is--and sprays his talent and love liberally on the faces
of somnambulists and lost Cultural Attachés." >>>

<<<  And while I'm self-dealing, here's one for the Richard Howard Blurb Book:
"these prose poems are strikingly Schubertian, indeed, in their economy, their easy
invocation of the pleasures of abjection, the Schadenfreude of stifling interiors
(Washington Heights Biedermeier) and equally murderous exteriors as well
— the street-smarts that turn so rapidly to superhighway pile-ups..." >>>

Epigraph III: Fulke Greville

Aldous Huxley chose these lines of the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome conditions of humanity!

Borne under one Law, to another bound,

Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

Proverbs

"Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions."

*

"Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions."

*

"He is base -- and that is the one base thing in the universe -- to receive favors and to render none."

*

"As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies."

-- Emerson, "Compensation"

The Square Root of Despair [by Kierkegaard & Walker Percy]

"The specific character of despair is that it is unaware of its despair''

— Kierkegaard

Epigraph to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer

--DL

"The Birth of Tragedy" [Nietzsche's opening shot]

<<

Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly -- rather than merely ascertaining -- that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian - Dionysian duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation.

>>

A great opening, the first sentence in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy states the thesis of the book, introduces a critical distinction ("apprehending directly" as superior to "merely ascertaining"), and illustrates the main point with a complex simile, ostensibly a subordinate clause but one that threatens to eclipse all that preceded it. Before you have quite begun to grasp the idea of the "duality" between Apollo and Dionysus, and its significance for understanding why Aeschylus is superior to Euripides, we're asked to accept the casual observation that the sexes are in constant conflict. No wonder a couple in the heat of love concludes its quarrels with nothing resolved but the force of sexual attraction triumphant.

-- DL

Lionel Trilling on Matthew Arnold (and on Mark Twain in Vienna in 1897)

The Secret

1.

Of Matthew Arnold’s habit
of meditating on the sayings
of great thinkers, a different one
each week, after writing them
down in his pocket diary,
Lionel Trilling wrote,
“It was as if he were obeying
as literally as he might
the commandment to fasten
the truth upon the door
of his house and upon his hand
and to set it as a frontlet
between his eyes.” Aha.
Welcome to the minyan, Matt.

2.

You ask what I like
about Trilling’s writing
and I pull out the Viking Portable Arnold
and turn to page twenty-five
of his introduction:
“He could join Goethe
in agreeing with Homer
that our life is a kind of Hell,
yet with Goethe he believed
that it must be lived
with as much pleasure as may
be dragged from it.”
It’s even better in prose. 

-- 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." 

Epigraph of the Month: Poe

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

Virginia Woolf explains why the English would rather live in ancient Greece

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

 

from the archive; first posted March 2018

. . .is the thing with feathers [by Stacey Lehman]

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)

-- sdh

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.