Tag Archives: Byron

POETS Day! Leigh Hunt

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I think you call this a “study,” so this is a study on Louis Édouard Fournier’s “The Funeral of Shelley” as painted by Rene Sears. That’s Hunt in the middle of the trio.

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

My nephew’s twelve years old. He just started little league practice for the spring season. That sounds crazy to me because it’s not baseball weather. It’s not even Valentine’s Day. Now, kids’ sports require commitment that was never asked of me when I was young. Whether or not youth athletics are too structured or too demanding is an interesting question, but not one I’m planning on addressing right now.

I bring up my nephew because he’s frogspawn, blossoms, buzzing bees, and W-2s in the mail: a sign of coming spring. He’s at practice, the herald signaling greater things and right on cue, MLB pitchers and catchers started reporting. The Cubs were the first to get going on the 9th. By the 13th, every battery in the league is scheduled for post-workout ice baths; by the 18th, full squads.

POETS Day is never purposeless, but soon – maybe not soon, but in the foreseeable future – you’ll Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, and there’s a Friday afternoon game on. Thinnest line on the horizon. Barely in sight. It’s beginning though, and a little league shall lead them.

Take off, enjoy the anticipation and the afternoon. First some verse.

***

In 1844, Leigh Hunt published a collection of essays called Imagination and Fancy. I couldn’t find a copy of it online. It seems like something Project Gutenberg would have, but no. us.archive.org has Essays of Leigh Hunt: Selected and Edited by Reginald Brimley Johnson. It doesn’t contain the whole 1844 collection, but it has the essay “An Answer to the Question, What is Poetry?” I was after. That’s the one where, I’ve read, he famously lays out his philosophy of poetry. Reginald Brimley Johnson was kind enough to select and edit that one.

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POETS Day! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

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

I started POETS Day with the Idea that there’s a roguishness to poets that pairs well with the modern end of workweek encouragement to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I see them as day seizers.

They aren’t all outwardly roguish. It’s hard to imagine T.S. Eliot or Christina Rossetti so much as swiping a cookie, but I’m sure they had a mischievous side. Even poet by night and brisk morning walk to work/insurance agency vice president by day, Wallace Stevens, got rambunctious enough for Hemingway to punch, and he lived in Connecticut. They all have shades of misbehavior in them.

I think of them as blends, taking on, to degrees of little or lots depending on the poet, traits of three archetypes.

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POETS Day! George Gordon, Lord Byron

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Photo by Lord Byron in solitary isolation by David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

The wheel keeps on turning and turning and turning ‘round. Life’s disturbingly predictable if you let it continue unmolested. Shake things up. Break the expected routine. It’s POETS Day again (that “again” in no way indicates that POETS Day is included in the bourgeois and repetitive pattern of events alluded to in the metaphor of “the wheel” whose crushing lack of spontaneity are anathema to fun and apple pie just because weeks are cyclical and POETS Day arrives with weekly regularity) and that means it’s your time to be a disruptor. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of that Hellespont you call a workplace before you drown. Your work is a vampire. It’s your weekend and you shouldn’t have to explain your motivation for leaving the job early to get a jump on the only time when the proper director (you) is on set. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint for a happy hour priced beverage and a mid-major game, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park and people watch, or, God forbid, go for a light jog. Do what you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

“He may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know but Mary Shelley shut herself away for a weekend and wrote Frankenstein to avoid spending time with him. ‘I’m just going to go invent the whole genre of modern science fiction rather than have a conversation with that tedious jackass womanizer.’”
– My wife

That may not be the most factual accounting.

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