POETS Day! The Surprising Alice Meynell

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Sketch of Alice Meynell by John Singer Sargent set on gel sheet made by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I found Alice Meynell in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. The Oxford verse series indexes by poem number, rather than page. So if you look in the back for Meynell’s “I am the Way,” you find it referenced as number 32, meaning the thirty-second poem in the volume rather than, as you’d expect from a lifetime of index use, that it is on page 32. But as it happens, “I am the Way” is both poem number 32 and found on page 32. I noticed that as I flipped though Yeats’s book and it fortunately struck me as portentous as portent gets on a sitting-around-reading afternoon. Otherwise, I might never have given Meynell the reading she deserves.

“I am the Way” is a fine introduction. She was a devout convert to Catholicism and known in her time as an enterprising publisher and renowned as an essayist. These days, she’s better known (only slightly better as few have ever heard or read her name) for her poetry. It is more likely that Yeats’s contemporary readers, even readers already drawn to the Oxford verse series, would know her prose. That speaks to the smashing power of her prose more than diminishes her verse; she was in the conversation as a possible Poet Laureate after the death of Tennyson and again after the death of Alfred Austin, though the position was never offered.

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POETS Day! WH Auden’s “Musée de Beaux Arts”

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A copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

I’ve never heard of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I’ve read about him. Until earlier this week I knew he was a Dutch painter of repute, but little more. But I’ve only read about him; never heard his name spoken, so I’ve no idea how his name is pronounced. Wikipedia tells me it’s “BROY-gɘl,” but it also says “also” and then “BROO- gɘl.” You got two, you got none. I doubt the man wandered Flanders mouse-like, answering to a handful of first syllable variations so long as the caller followed with a shwa’d “gel.” At some point he declared a preference.

I read it as rhyming with “frugal,” not that I come across the name that often. I don’t know how W.H. Auden pronounced the name in 1938. He was in Brussels touring a museum that was then known as the Palais des beaux arts. The poet was struck by at least three, so he thought, of Bruegel’s paintings—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census of Bethlehem, and The Massacre of the Innocents—then on display. Nearly sixty years after Auden’s visit, experts would determine that Icarus was in fact a copy by an unknown artist of a lost Bruegel, but Auden died thinking he’d seen the real deal and, given the man’s penchant for rewriting even some of his better works, thank goodness such knowledge didn’t set him to fiddling with the poem inspired by his visit: “Musée de Beaux Arts.”

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POETS Day! Elinor Wylie

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

Elinor Waylie, née Hoyt, was born in Sommerville, New Jersey. My experience with New Jersey folks tells me that she would have described herself as “From off Exit 17.” It’s possible she was closer to Exit 13 or, if you use I-78 instead of I-287, maybe Exit 29. Michigan folks do the hand thing and New Jersey-ites (Jersians?) have Exits.

She was born to a well-to-do and prominent family that was likely to look down on other prominent families when it came down to it because one of theirs, Elinor’s grandfather, was governor of Pennsylvania. Still more prominent families probably looked down on them in turn as politicians are vulgar and real wealth sees clear to control, rather than be, elected officials. Political success requires propriety. Her family had a history of courting public perception.

Her father moved the family to Washington, DC in 1897 when Elinor was twelve or thirteen. In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt would appoint him to the position of Solicitor General of the United States. He was an impressive figure and sent his oldest daughter, Elinor, to Holton Arms, a Bethesda, MD girls school where she studied and mingled with the daughters of other impressive people. Holton Arms counts Jaquiline Kennedy Onassis and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as alumnae. Elinor Wylie was, per the excellent unnamed biographers at Poetry Foundation, “trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife…”

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POETS Day! William Morris

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From the Kelmscott Chaucer, designed by William Morris and Illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Before JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf, there was William Morris’s King Gandolf. Before Tolkien wrote about the horse Shadowfax, Morris wrote about the horse Silverfax. Morris introduced both of the latters in his just-under-the-wire-not-posthumous 1896 novel, The Well at the World’s End. Tolkien didn’t steal. Theft in literature is generally more interesting than something that direct, but neither Gand-whatever nor whatever-fax were properly owned to begin with. Tolkien was doubtlessly inspired by Morris’s popular book, but both authors took names from Norse and Icelandic myth. They heard the same stories.

Plugged in fans and obsessives—I say that lovingly—of the genre credit Morris as one of the fathers of modern High Fantasy. Tolkien takes all the laurels, and deservedly so, for standing on earlier shoulders and leaping as high into the air as possible. Two of those shoulders were Morris’s; David Byrne shoulders.

These days, Morris is best known for textiles and design. He was an vocal socialist; important enough that those who take interest in the development of socialism, at least in England, have been at work on his Wikipedia page. Among the signs of ardents tinkering: his mother is described as “descended from a wealthy bourgeois family.” As an artist and artisan, he catered to what most outside of the struggle session green room call the middle and upper classes. His furniture was, and maybe still is, in St. James Palace and the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall. Per the biographer Fiona MacCarthy, he decried such work as “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.” But minister on he did, soldiering his way to increasing an already solid inherited fortune.

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POETS Day! Leonora Speyer

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

There’s a photograph of Leonora Speyer where she looks to be in her early twenties. She was born to some wealth. I can’t tell if her her family was idly comfortable or extravagantly rich. Her father, who died six months before her birth, was Count Ferdinand von Stosch originally of Monze, later of Washington, DC. There’s not much on her in the typical poet biography places and scant to zip on her father. He fought for the Union side in the Civil War, settled in Washington, and died at around forty years old; no information about rank or deeds or cause of death. He immigrated in the 1840s or 50s, so he was a kid when he came. That’s about it. Otherwise he’s an addendum to the bio of the daughter he never met.

An AI search–so take it or leave it–reports the photo is from some time in the 1890s, which I’d already assumed. Leonora showed an early proclivity for music and led a public life. She gave her first public performance in Washington at age ten: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. One source tells me she and her mother sailed for the continent in 1899, when Leonora was sixteen, to continue her musical studies in Brussels. Another tells me she debuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age seventeen. It’s possible they went back for a visit, but I can’t find record of it. As best I can tell, she and her mother stayed abroad, first in Brussels and then in Paris with another violin teacher, until 1891 or 92.

Maybe they went back and forth, maybe she was seventeen when they left, maybe she was sixteen in Boston. No matter the details of her precociousness, Leonora was talented. She was a force on the piano as well as the violin, but there came a time to specialize. Whether she had a preference or felt she had a greater talent for violin is unclear to me, but she chose pure string violin over string/percussion piano in the end. Encyclopedia.com tells me she’d played the violin since her “chin was firm enough to hold it.” Having seen the photograph of her in her early twenties, my first though: “That must have been very, very, very, very early.” It’s not a flattering picture.

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POETS Day! Edwin Arlington Robinson

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Why are you still at work? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

“We mourn, but with the qualification that, after all, his life was a revel in the felicities of language.”
– Robert Frost from his introduction to King Jasper by Edwin Arlington Robinson

When Edwin Arlington Robinson won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1922, I imagine it was a fine day of congratulations and warm feelings from all the other poets. For three years prior, there had been what we now call the Special Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but that’s retconning. That was then known as the Columbia Prize, and stood apart. Harriet Monroe, writing in celebration of Robinson’s laurels threw in, “Four years ago, when the Poetry Society of America gave its first annual five hundred dollars to Sara Teasdale’s Love Songs, the award, being made in conjunction with the Pulitzer prizes, was falsely attributed to the same origin.” The Columbia put five hundred dollars in the winner’s pocket. The Pulitzer was worth one thousand. Neither was chump change in 1922, but double is considered by most who make their living in verse to be better.

Not that a true poet would ever consider something so crass as money, but on those odd occasions when the subject came up in conversation, it must have been nice knowing, for those of a zero-sum view, that there was more to be contested than had been before. When the second Pulitzer was awarded to Edna St Vincent Millay in 1923 and the third to Robert Frost, I assume along with standard jealousies the warm feelings continued.

In 1925, Robinson won his second Pulitzer. In the audience of the poetry place where all the poets hang out, I imagine heartfelt applause on hearing, because EA, as he didn’t like the name Edwin, was a kinda dour guy but he wasn’t offensive. Maybe he was a little dark, but he was witty dark, not depressing dark. Still, as the crowd dispersed to cocktails and cliques coalesced, jocular between swigs, “You know, there are other poets out there.”

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POETS Day! Hendecasyllabics

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Happy 250. I don’t guess many need POETS Day encouragement, but Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s the Semiquincentennial. How blessed are we as a nation that this falls on a weekend?

They pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

***

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) tried to squish English poetry into Hellenic meter. He wasn’t alone. Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney eyed the same goal. The latter two gave it up for iambic pentameter. Campion beat onward in a doomed campaign.

Classical rhythms don’t work in English. Listen to a romance language speaker. They inherited cadence from the Romans, and they from the Greeks. Syllable to syllable, they’re even. For all the stereotypes about spicy Spaniards and hot Latin lovers, their pitch and speed may vary from sentence to sentence and god knows there are arms in motion, but the actual speech is flat, practically monotone. They have their accentual moments, but those are not the rule. They stretch syllables. There are drawn out and compact vowels, but not much happening on the Y axis. English is bouncy.

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POETS Day! Sir Philip Sidney Didn’t Get the Girl

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

In a 1579 letter from Edmund Spenser to Gabriel Harvey, Spenser brings up an organization he’d been invited to join by “Master Sidney and Master Dyer.” The Masters were Sir Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer, a pair of Elizabethan courtiers who acted as agents and soldiers abroad for Her Majesty. Sidney, at least, would be shocked that he’s remembered as a poet rather than envoy or governor. The organization was called The Areopagus, and it’s fairer to call it the proposed organization as it’s not known whether it ever made it past planning. No meetings are recorded.

Sydney may have been inspired in conceiving his literary club by the Wilton Circle, a literary circle of which Spenser is confirmed to have been a member, founded and led by Philip’s sister Mary Sydney and run by Sir Walter Ralegh’s half brother (possibly Humphrey Gilbert, though I haven’t found a site willing to lift whomever out of Ralegh’s shadow with more than “half-brother.”) The Wilton Circle is described by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as “the most important and influential literary circle in English history.” The Authorship Trust’s mission, depending on your disposition, is “just asking questions” regarding the authorship of plays ascribed to William Shakespeare, or they’re a bunch of conspiracy nuts on a snipe hunt. It’s also possible that Mary’s Wilton Circle postdated Sydney’s idea for the Areopagus. I can’t find minutes.

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POETS Day! Poems from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

TGIF is POETS for those without initiative. Make it happen. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Wallace Stevens started late. His first poetry collection held an impressive, by debut poetry collection standards, eighty five titles, but when the book, Harmonium, was published in 1923, its author was in his early forties. He’d had time to backlog.

I covered Stevens’s morning routine—composing in his head as he walked to his office at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company—in this space three years ago. In Harmonium, he wrestles with how he should see the world. Should he be grounded in the rational or loose in the imagination? The question is posed piecemeal and never resolved.

I remember when Donna Tartt’s A Secret History came out. My mother’s kitchen table review was that it’s a great book, but she put all she’s ever learned and considered into it and she won’t have anything else to say for five to ten years. That was in 1992. Tartt’s second book came out in 2002. Stevens spends a great deal of energy trying to sort himself. He wrote sparingly through the 20s, not writing regularly again until 1933 and not publishing another bound volume until Ideas of Order in 1936. Harmonium received harsh reviews. Mark Van Doren dismissed him from the genre by writing in The Nation, per Wikipedia, that Stevens’ wit “is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular.” There were nice things written too, but the negatives weighed on him. Maybe he, like Tartt in Mom’s pinning, spent his store. Maybe the critics brushed him back. Maybe he had to reconcile vers libre with actuary tables.

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POETS Day! The Present in TS Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”

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Illustration by Rene Sears of The Dry Salvages rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts where TS Eliot spent his boyhood summers.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

TS Eliot titled the third of his Four Quartets “The Dry Salvages” after a rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village and seaside retreat where the St. Louis based Eliot family spent their summers when the poet was a boy. Dry Salvages derives from an original French name for the formation transformed by time, mishearings, and local accent. Eliot tells us in a parenthetical preceding the poem, “presumably les trois sauvages,” Anglicized over time but, he instructs, “pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” so not as yet a fully English subject.

As with all of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” manages competing images presenting a theme. There’s a great deal going on and a great many ways to spend a thousand words on an aspect without touching on any number of other aspects. In this poem, the opening and recurrent image is that of water. The river is present, flowing, perceptible action. The sea is unknowable depths. Water rises from the sea, rains and forms oceans and back to the sea. The sea is the past and the future. We cannot know which or guess at more than the surface. The river is with us, changing in the moment. It is present. The idea permeates.

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