The Best American Poetry

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 W. 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 Mark Gardner, The Dying Fall

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."

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"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

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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

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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.

Aphorism of the Day: Anthony Trollope

"There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood.”                            
       -- Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm

Cri de Coeur [by Jim Cummins]

Oy vey, my country!  I would sob if it weren't such … an American crisis: goofy, headstrong, distracted, with a bunch of old men in dark suits running around looking for their mommies.  And we're poets: what do WE know?

-- Jim Cummins

from the archive; first posted October 3, 2008

In Praise of Non-Conformism

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson urged resistance to the conformism implicit in thought-control. It is possible that independence of mind, resistance to the mentality of a mob, is something that cannot be taught

To the extent that the poet is a public figure, Emerson’s belief in “the independence of solitude” retains its pertinence. “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Assignment: what would Emerson say about Twitter and "the twitter mob"?

Auden (an Aquarius, born Feb 21) on Psychoanalysis

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Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (6 November 1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by twenty for 2022 dollars. The devil count remains the same.-- DL

from the archive; first posted February 26, 2011. 

Eliot of Becket (Thomas a) and Beckett (Samuel)

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

"Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument. . ."

How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event,-
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward,- I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do,'
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

Freud on the problem of evil

Let us look away from the individual to the great war that is still devastating Europe. Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty, and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled place-hunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty? Will you venture, even in these circumstances, to break a lance for the exclusion of evil from the mental constitution of humanity?  -- Ninth Lecture, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Quote of the Day: David Sedaris's Advice to Oberlin College Grads

Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling.

Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.

-- sdl

Auden on critics

“There are people who are too intelligent

to become authors,

but they do not become critics."

"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