The Best American Poetry

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.”

The Spymaster as Vacuum-Cleaner Salesman [by DL]

<<<

And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

>>>

Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them by creating "purely notional spies" and killing them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement of the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

>>>

Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them by creating "purely notional spies" and killing them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement of the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

Maugham of the Day

From The Razor's Edge (1944):

"Have you never thought of divorcing Gray?"
"I've got no reason for divorcing him."
"That doesn't prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to."
She laughed.
'Why d'you suppose they do it?"
"Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

-- Somerset Maugham

Kierkegaard on systems

<<
In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by.
>> 

Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that people correspond to parts of speech. "How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc. . . .There are people whose position in life is that of the interjection, without influence in the sentence." Think about it.

From the archive. Posted on The Best American Poetry on July 02, 2011.

 

Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that people correspond to parts of speech. "How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc. . . .There are people whose position in life is that of the interjection, without influence in the sentence." Think about it.

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."

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

Eliot on Becket, and Beckett too

And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

--  Samuel Beckett in Watt, which Erica Cairo believes is a veiled reference to Thomas Becket and his king.

“They know and do not know, that acting is suffering
And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
To an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.”

― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

What is "The Longest Pleasure"? Lord Byron Knows

And is there not religion, and reform,

            Peace, war, the taxes, and what's call'd the "Nation"?

The struggle to be pilots in a storm?

            The landed and the monied speculation?

The joys of mutual hate to keep them warm,

            Instead of love, that mere hallucination?

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

      
                                                by Lord Byron from Don Juan, Canto the Thirteenth

--sdh

Emerson on Compensation

<<< And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.  >>>

<<< And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.  >>>

"Perhaps a Sentence": The Rationale for Creative Writing [by Irwin Shaw]

<<<
It is generally believed in literary cricles that everybody has at least one novel in him. I doubt that. I have found a few men and women who do have one novel in them, but the greatest number of people I have met have perhaps a sentence in them or at the very most a short story.
>>>

<<<
He'd written a very good review of a picture of yours, and you said, "That man writes so badly I get angry at him even when he gives me a rave."
>>>

<<<
How easy it was to make someone hate you for life. With one sentence.
>>>

from Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw -- DL