The Best American Poetry

William Holden tells it like it is in the "Executive Suite" [by David Lehman]

"Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?"

William Holden in Executive Suite (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck & Louis Calhern (pictured, left,enjoying a smoke off camera) & with Fredric March, June Allyson always bright and merry, Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number two man, Paul Douglas, dour Dean Jagger, long-suffering Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, elegant as ever, and playing a better hand than in "An American in  Paris." 

With screenplay by uncle Ernest Lehman. -- DL

Epigraph of the Month: James Baldwin, "Another Country"

from James Baldwin’s Another Country:

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. 

            -- Henry James

Epigraph of the Month: "Tremor of Intent"

Anthony Burgess's Tremor of Intent (1966), his satire of espionage novels, bears a double epigraph. The first is from W. H. Auden:

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But between the day and night
The choice is free to all, and light
Falls equally on black and white.
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The second, from T. S. Eliot (pictured, right):

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The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. >>

Epigraph of the Month: "Dusty Answer"

Rosamond Lehmann took the title of her novel Dusty Answer (1927) from George Meredith's "Modern Love." This quotation serves as the book's epigraph:

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Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!
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Hypothesis: a good epigraph makes you want to read not only the book it prefaces but also the work from which it is taken. -- DL

Hart Crane's Epigraph for "A Streetcar Named Desire" [Epigraph of the Month by DL]

Tennessee Williams chose these lines from Hart Crane's poem "The Broken Tower" as the epigraph for’ A Streetcar Named Desire:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

 -- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”

"The Monday morns, the Monday morns . . ."

"Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end. And yet, when I sat for Fellowship, but for the boil on my bottom . . . The rest, an ordure. The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps. And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father's and my mother's and my father's father's and my mother's mother's and my father's mother's and my mother's father's and my father's mother's father's and my mother's father's mother's and my father's mother's mother's and my mother's father's' father's and my father's father's mother's and my mother's mother's father's and my father's father's father's and my mother's mother's mother's and other people's fathers' and mothers' and fathers' fathers' and mothers' mothers' and fathers' mothers' and mothers' fathers' and fathers' mothers' fathers' and mothers' fathers' mothers' and fathers' mothers' mothers' and mothers' fathers' fathers' and fathers' fathers' mothers' and mothers' mothers' fathers' and fathers' fathers' fathers' and mothers' mothers' mothers'. An excrement . . . "

                                                -- from "Watt" by Samuel Beckett

-- sdl

Epigraph of the Month: JA quotes Pasternak on Mayakovsky

Here is the epigraph John Ashbery chose for his poem "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers":(in his first book, Some Trees):

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He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty.

-- Boris Pasternak (Safe Conduct)

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Ashbery adapted the title of his poem from Andrew Marvell ("The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers"). I believe he wrote the poem while waiting for Kenneth Koch, who arrived a half hour late for an appointment.

-- DL

Emerson on "Compensation"

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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.
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Why would the English love to live in ancient Greece? [by Virginia Woolf]

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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?

Epigraph of the Month: Why Art? [by David Lehman]

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                   We have Art
in order that we may not perish from Truth.

                                      -- F. W. Nietzsche
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The opposition of art to truth is vehement in this, the epigraph to Auden's essays in The Dyer's Hand (1962). -- DL

Epigraph of the Month: Felix Culpa wins the day [by Goethe, via Bulgakov]

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"Who art thou, then?"

"Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good."

-- Goethe, Faust

>>>

Epigraph to The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). Bulgakov began his novel in 1928 and worked on it for the next twelve years. It did not appear in print until the winter of 1966-67 when it was published in the Russian magazine Moskva. Mirra Ginsburg translated it into English in 1967. Bulgakov, who wrote plays as well as novels, said the he valued equally the dramatic and the narrative impulses just as a pianist needs both his right and his left hand.

-- DL

Balanchine on Dance

Balanchine is tremendously quotable – if only because so many of his bon mots are adapted from others. When he declared himself to be “not a man but a cloud in trousers,” for example, he lifted the line directly from one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems. Usually, however, the matchless choreographer offered not a straight quotation but an unacknowledged paraphrase. Here is a handful of Mr. B’s observations.

"God made men to sing the praises of women."

"When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, ‘What do you mean?  What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful.  We're like flowers.  A flower doesn't tell you a story.  It's in itself a beautiful thing."

"The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener. "

"Dance is music made visible." (Also, “See the music, hear the dance.”)

“There are no mothers-in-law in ballet” (also known as Balanchine’s Law).

“We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”

"Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time."

"In fact I disagree with everybody and I don't want to argue about it."

And when he received the Handel medallion, he said, "I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it."

See Arlene Croce's "Balanchine Said" in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009): “In later years, [Balanchine] waged a personal campaign against the twentieth-century fetish of originality. . . . He saw no harm in appropriating; and he stole and was stolen from – that was the way of art.”

Above: George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell rehearsing Don Quixote in 1968.

Epigraph of the Month: Weather Report for Costaguana [by David Lehman}

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"so foul a sky clears not without a storm."

-- Shakespeare
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Joseph Conrad's epigraph for Nostromo

Bonus epigraph:
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"Those that hold that all things are governed by Fortune had not erred, had they not persisted there."

-- Sir Thomas Browne
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Quiz: This quotation appears on the title page of which Conrad novel? Chances are you'll guess right if Marlow's your man.  - DL

Epigraph of the Month: Tennessee Williams pays homage to Hart Crane

Tennessee Williams chose these lines as the epigraph for A Streetcar Named Desire:

 

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

 

-- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower

Are two epigraphs better than one?

John Updike attaches two epigraphs to Rabbit as Rich (1981), the third in his tetralogy of novels centering on Rabbit Angstrom. The reader can more easily grasp the pertinence of the first epigraph than that of the second, but it is precisely the tension between the two that conveys Updike's complexity of feeling about his epic protagonist.

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"At night he lights up a good cigar, and climbs into the little old 'bus, and maybe cusses the carburetor, and shoots out home. He mows the lawn, or sneaks in some practice putting, and then he's ready for dinner."

                                 --- George Babbitt, of the Ideal Citizen

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur. . .

                                --- Wallace Stevens, "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"

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TIME magazine featured John Updike on its cover of April, 26, 1968, taking his novel Couples as a statement of the Zeitgeist.in the late 1960s. -- DL

Epigraph of the Month (1st place)

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. Examples will follow on the first of every month. 

-- David Lehman

On Hitchcock's Birthday [August 13]: His Cameo in "Marnie" [by David Lehman]

From Marnie (1964; screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, based on a novel by Winston Graham) is the second most Freudian of Hitchcock's movies, two quotes:

Marnie: "Men! You say 'no' to one of them, and bingo! you're a candidate for the funny farm."

*

Mark Rutland, to Marnie, re Mr. Strutt, the man who has threatened to blackmail her: "He's a businessman. That means he's in business to do business."  
"So?"
"So we try to do business with him." 

*

Quiz question: where does Hitchcock make his cameo in Marnie?

a) leaving one hotel room as Tippi Hedren enters another
b) walking across an elevated pedestrian bridge between two buildings
c) in New York, with a bus door slammed in his face
d) in a newspaper ad for a weight-reduction program
e) in the room where the pianist keeps playing the same theme

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Happy birthday to the "master of suspense," who observed astutely that "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out," a statement that justifies tagging this post under not only "Hitchcock quiz" but also "spontaneous aphorisms." When August 13 lands on a Friday, watch out --  a drunken poet may phone you at midnight while a couple of bats sneak in through the bathroom window.

-- DL

"O, wearisome condition of humanity!" [by Fulke Greville -- and Aldous Huxley]

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 cause.

    There is a special category of greatness for lines quoted by masters as epigraphs -- the way Poe used Sir Thomas Browne in "The Murders in the Re Morgue" or Eliot's borrowing from a major speech in Measure for Measure.

    The lines quoted above are by Fulke Greville, the Elizabethan poet, author of Mustapha and Caelica, and my candidate for the most underrated poet in English literature.

    Aldous Huxley quoted a variant of these lines from "Chorus Sacerdotum" as the epigraph for Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome conditions 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?.

    `Leave aside critical questions of punctuation and capitalization, and the most significant change is the transformation  of the last word in the passage, "cause," from verb to noun.

    Point Counter Point is a substantial novel of ideas and talk about ideas, with a character based on DH Lawrence among other recognizable literati,  though it is possible to regard the epigraph as the single best thing about it just as a Sinatra song over the closing credits ("It's Nice to Go Traveling," for example) may upstage the terrorist skyjacking thriller that ends with it.

-- DL

The Wisdom of Warren Buffett

"How do you become a millionaire? You start out as a billionaire and you buy an airline." -- Warren Buffett

Between the Acts [by James Agee]

Virginia Woolf was the unlikeliest artist on earth to stoop to propaganda, or to any form of public ingratiation. She did not do so here. Yet England and its people, its present, past, innocence and disease, are here summarized in much the way a night wind can summarize a continent.