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

I went on longer than I’d planned this week, so to the point without preamble: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work. Run and be free. You’ve done your part, slaved the workweek throroughly enough. Escape the office and hit a happy hour, still sunlit park, catch a ball game, or ring up that attractive someone you’ve had a mind towards.

It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.

But first, a little verse.

***

“I had thought of the Lycidas as a full-grown beauty—as springing up with all its parts absolute—till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of the author, in the library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the latter Cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again.”
– Charles Lamb, “Oxford in the Vacation”, kinda

I say “Kinda” because I’ve got lying eyes. I trust Cleanthe Brooks and Robert Penn Warren more than most. One of them wrote, in their coauthored classic Understanding Poetry, that Lamb wrote the above “in his essay ‘Oxford in the Vacation.’” The other one, no doubt, went over the final copy and approved. I read “Oxford in the Vacation,” and the quote was nowhere to be found. I ctrl F-ed it and tried to find “Lycides” on the page in case somehow a paragraph length distraction caused me to miss it. It wasn’t there.

Brooks or Warren was right, though, with the other also right but in an editorial capacity. I found an Atlantic article by Edmund Gosse in the May, 1900 issue, which the internet happened to have laying about. Gosse writes, “When Lamb came to read over these sentences, he was perhaps struck with their petulance, for they were omitted from the completed Essays of Elia [Lamb’s pen name] in 1823.” The original appeared in The London Magazine October 1820. It’s funny to me that a quotable quote about the mess of editing and rewriting was itself cut on consideration.

Were Lamb born a couple of centuries scant later, he’d wrestle with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I can’t say what opinion he’d have of the poem, only that he’d have one. The poem has been inescapable for those with poetic interests since its 1922 publication. What would he have made of The Waste Land, Centenary Edition in Full Color: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound from Liverwright, the original publisher of the poem in book form?

It’s one thing to read that Ezra Pound excised almost two thirds of Eliot’s manuscript, quite another to see reproductions of beige typewritten pages with pencil notes, slashes, suggestions sometimes themselves slashed and rewritten, and Pound’s querysome marginalia: “Vocative?” and “Vocative??”