POETS Day! “Little Gidding” the Fourth of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets

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

“Poets do not rightly achieve their renown for saying anything new, however, or for saying anything that any reasonable thoughtful, feeling person should not already know by the time he or she has reached some measure of advanced adulthood. Rather, we expect poets to share the common experience in uncommon ways, so that simple truths emerge renewed and refreshed, or else to share uncommon experiences in common ways, so that the rare experience of a single individual becomes accessible to all. Surely, Eliot has been doing just that throughout the Quartets, so that a man visiting an English country home or riding a subway or watching for fires after an air raid or kneeling in an ancient chapel or pondering the flotsam on a river is not only the same man but the same as every other person if he or she, too, were followed through the rich varieties of experience that the typical individual may undergo in a lifetime.”

— Russell Elliot Murphy, T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

Charles I rode into Little Gidding on May 2, 1646, alone. Behind him rode Cromwell or Fairfax or some combination of their forces loyal to Parliament. The king knew the place. Sometime in the previous decade he came to admire a gospel concord owned by Nicholas Ferrar, a former courtier who, after suffering financial losses betting on the Virginia Company, retreated to his holdings at Little Gidding for a life of prayer and contemplation. Ferrar invited others. A small religious community flourished under his, and later his brother John’s, leadership. There was no reason for him to believe Little Gidding could offer lasting sanctuary from the Parliamentarians, but the king was desperate. Afraid for the safety of the residents of Little Gidding, John hid him in nearby Coppingford. The king would be captured three days later and the faithful disbursed by force, never to reform, under suspicion of having done exactly what they did to aid the fugitive royal. But, if only for a night, Charles slept.

TS Eliot published “Burnt Norton” in 1936, intending it as a standalone poem. In it he considers an infinite God and wonders at the limits of human perception. Can a temporal being conceive of an eternal one? Does time parcel out bits of understanding, save us from confronting a vision of God so terrible it would destroy us were we to experience him whole? Man is in motion through time while God is perfect stillness; no need for desire’s impetus or fear’s escape. God is love and contentment. Eliot settles on moments of ecstasy, timeless trance like clarity where understanding seems ours, as the best contact with that stillness we can hope for.

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POETS Day! William Barnes

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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. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

When last we saw the name Coventry Patmore in this space, he was getting inappropriate with a married and unreceptive Alice Meynell. There’s a Walter Stoneman photo of Alice’s mister, Wilfrid Meynell (rhymes with “fennel”), taken circa 1916, putting Wilfrid circa sixty-four years old. He’s a pretty robust looking sixty-four. Contrast that with an 1894 John Singer Sargent portrait of seventy-one year old Coventry Patmore. Old Coventry looks like Mark Twain on the tail end of a GLP-1 bender.

The most in-depth account of how the Meynells’ handled Patmore’s affections, and there’s between the lines stuff suggesting affections verged on obsession, is that Alice “ended their friendship.” For Patmore’s sake, I hope that’s all there was to it. I know the photo and painting capture the men as older, but regress them and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Meynell doesn’t put a pasting on slight Patmore.

In any case, I’m glad to run into Patmore again, this time catching him in a good light. He lent volumes of William Barnes poetry to Gerard Manley Hopkins. There’s no pinning down a single influence or spark that sent Hopkins to write so originally. Admiration for Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry came first. It’s hard not to notice similarities in what Barnes did and what Hopkins would go on to do. I’d throw Barnes’s work in a prominent spot among second tier influences. Everybody likes a redemption story, so remember Patmore as creepy only some of the time and give him credit for fueling Hopkins the rest.

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POETS Day! Poet-pourri

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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. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I read a lot of poetry that I like but don’t write about. There are a few that I like, want to write about, and set aside because I don’t have a fit for them yet; I imagine there are companion pieces and if I have patience and keep an eye out, I’ll find a tie-in for the set-aside, write about whatever thread links the works, and end up giddy for the convergence. That happened once, but mostly I have a bunch of tagged poems consigned to fester in the Rainbow app and torn-notepaper-bookmarked anthologies languishing on my shelves. Half the time I can’t remember which work called for the bookmark. Two sonnets on the even page, a villanelle on the odd; one of them caught my eye but the mood is gone, the association lost.

Today I’m sharing a few of the bookmarked poems I’ve been holding onto for a while. Fans of Jeopardy are familiar with the clue category “Potpourri,” filled with clues from a variety of categories that were left on the board, not called by players when time ran out. I thought of the stupid pun “Poet-pourri,” but before I made claim by saying it, I explained to my wife that I was writing about unrelated poems this week and asked if she could do a potpourri illustration. She jumped my stupid pun reveal with a blurted “You should call it “Poet-pourri.” Now I can’t prove authorship. At best, one of us plays Newton to the other’s Leibniz but I’m fine sharing the shame.

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POETS Day! The Scoundrel, Sir John Suckling

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

First, a little verse.

***

This week I turned cartwheels in the surf. I exuberated. One passer-by was heard to exclaim, “By Goodness! He’s filled with beans.” Another called upon me to have decency and quiet the ruckus.

What catalyst, you ask, set off such an uncharacteristic reaction? I found John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Vol I. I can’t share on these pages, intended, for the most part, for public readings and sharing with our less deviant peers, the extomysis I experienced when recalling the wise admonishments of Frank Thomas, my ninth grade English teacher in explaining how to properly structure arguments: “You cannot have an ‘A)’ without following it later with a ‘B)’ or you look like an idiot [In the 80s you could call students idiots.] Write ‘First’ to open a paragraph and one of the next better damn [You could also say “damn” at them] well begin with ‘Second.’”

To whit: If there is a Brief Lives, Vol. I, there must follow a Brief Lives, Vol II. And there does.

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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

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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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