Category Archives: Articles/reviews

April 16, 2014 · 2:07 pm

Radclyffe Hall’s “The Unlit Lamp”–Anatomy of a Failure

I am imagining to myself as I begin this post that it will probably be one of the shortest I will write or have written, because I can think of very little to say about this book.  I didn’t enjoy reading it, but read it as a follow-up investigation of a book called The End of the Novel of Love, which was reviewed in a very interesting, informative, and vital post by Caroline on her site.  The theme of this novel is the living through of frustration and angst caused by the failure to achieve freedom of chosen lifestyle, and because it is the living through that is illustrated copiously, I call it an anatomy of a failure.  Once again, as occasionally happens, I feel the need to compare this book to Andy Warhol’s eight-hour movie on sleep, which is simply a movie of a person sleeping.  This book has no really strong climaxes or surprises, it’s simply a book about a woman’s failure to leave her mother and home and achieve a fresh life of her own, either with a man who wants to support her career and marry her, or another woman, who also wants to do much the same.  Instead, Joan Ogden (the main character) is too weak and indecisive to insist that her hypochondriacal mother release her to a life of independence, and the book instead traces every step of her failure to achieve a free life, and the consequences.

As Zoë Fairbairns says in her 1980 introduction to the Dial Press edition of the book, “It pre-dates by four years The Well of Loneliness, the lesbian love story for which [Radclyffe Hall] is best known and which was banned as obscene in 1928, but it is much better written:  both novels suffer, in their accounts of women’s love for each other, from purple passages, moments of overstatement, pedantry and authorial intrusion; but The Unlit Lamp is more powerful because more controlled.  It is also remarkable as a first novel for its management of three main characters as well as a number of important minor ones, only a few of whom degenerate into mouthpieces and devices.”  Frankly, the novel is so bad that a few more “purple passages” might even have made it more interesting; the “moments of overstatement” are ones about which the reader senses the writer nearly pulling her hair out in frustration with her own characters because there’s nothing else to be done with them, they simply won’t move and breathe on the page with any independence from the main theme; the “pedantry” is all of a piece with the turgidity and constipation of the prose; and the “authorial intrusion” isn’t nearly as obnoxious as the fact that the same message is being given over and over again, without variety or change.  It’s like being beaten over the head with a stick until one is dull and senseless.  In order to make it through the book, one has to remind oneself that the book was a new and different thing for its time, and thus the value in terms of which one is reading is that of pure historical interest in a form, a solely cerebral function which leaves the emotional catharsis of the reader unsatisfied with the torture the character goes through from beginning to end.

I guess I’m saying that it takes a certain amount of masochism on the reader’s part to get through this book, at least the kind of masochism which recites the mantra in the back of the reader’s head:  “My education won’t be complete unless I finish this book; my education won’t be complete unless I finish this book…” etc.  The best of authors sometimes torture their characters to make a point to the reader, and not every book can be a sunlit fantasy world of birds, trees, dappled clouds, and flowers, nor am I asking it to be.  But this book is like an unpleasant grimace or rictus on the author’s face as it is fronting the reader, and I have only limited patience for staring at a gargoyle.

Finally, this book is not an art work which flows as freely as song, hitting high notes, low notes, and some in-between:  rather it is like a long-drawn-out screech without variety, or a prolonged unpleasant discordant chord which won’t go away.  By all means, read it if you’re curious about Radclyffe Hall’s works or her first novel, if you’re interested in what used to be called “Boston marriages” between two women, if you are a psychologist in need of a case study of repression, manipulation, and misery:  but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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April 10, 2014 · 4:20 pm

Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much Is True,” Wayne Booth’s “types of literary interest,” and the fictional “memoir” form

Having within the month finished another huge book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and feeling nostalgia for the slow but steady pace of reading a long book and the satisfaction that comes from completing it and having a certain vision of the whole, I picked up next Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True, lured by the philosophical glamour of the title as much as by the heft of the book itself.  It wasn’t what I expected, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.  The idea of a bare minimum of knowledge that could be absolutely counted on, I figured (that title again) was something I or anyone might want to know about.  In its neatness, it reminded me of Paul Simon’s lyric from his Graceland album, which I dearly love:  “I know what I know/I’ll sing what I’ve said/We come and we go/It’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head….”  As we’re all aware who have even a smattering of Greek philosophy, Socrates is responsible for the notion that the wise man knows only that he knows nothing, and any time someone claims to know even a smidgen or a smattering, I want “to know” about it.

And as I said, I enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t what I expected, and the philosophical statement as such came only at the very end of the book, and didn’t really satisfy my curiosity, though it did represent fairly adequately the growth of knowledge in the primary narrator.  It’s a strangely uneven book, one which is too long perhaps, and which perhaps could’ve used another editing than the one it received, but I remain unsure of those conclusions because after all, I had been interested enough to follow it cover to cover, and to complain of the length or editing once one has “eaten the sweet” is perhaps a bit precious.  I Know This Much Is True uses matter-of-fact, work-a-day, rarely technical language thoughout most of the book except for the short philosophical lyrical passage at the very end which somehow seems insufficient for all the weight of the story as it’s told.  There is an interior story as well, the written narrative of the main character and primary narrator Domenick Birdsey’s grandfather Domenico Tempesta, full of grandeur and bombast and thoroughly unlikeable even to the primary narrator himself.  But it is by way of the past and this narrative, as well as through contemporary events and psychological analysis, that Domenick, the “sane” brother, learns to understand his twin brother Thomas (afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia), his family, and even his own place in the world.  And it is because of the closeness with which this narrative sticks to plain, ordinary, everyday (if sometimes harsh and brutal) events that I happened to recall what the renowned scholar Wayne Booth said about “types of literary interest (and distance)” in his famous work The Rhetoric of Fiction, and to see how it might be applied to this novel.

Wayne Booth said:  “The values which interest us, and which are thus available for technical manipulation in fiction, may be roughly divided into three kinds.  (1)  Intellectual or cognitive:  We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about ‘the facts,’ the true interpretation, the true reasons, the true origins, the true motives, or the truth about life itself.  (2)  Qualitative:  We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed, or to experience a further development of qualities of any kind.  We might call this kind ‘aesthetic,’ if to do so did not suggest that a literary form using this interest was necessarily of more artistic value than one based on other interests.  (3)  Practical:  We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate, admire or detest; or we can be made to hope for or fear a change in the quality of a character.  We might call this kind ‘human,’ if to do so did not imply that 1 and 2 were somehow less than human.  This hope or fear may be for an intellectual change in a character or for a change in his fortune; one finds this practical aspect even in the most uncompromising novel of ideas that might seem to fall entirely under 1.  Our desire may, second, be for a change of quality in a character; one finds this practical aspect even in the purely ‘aesthetic’ novel of sensibility that might seem to fall under entirely under 2.  Finally, our desire may for for a moral change in a character, or for a change in his fortune–that is, we can be made to hope for or to fear particular moral choices and their results” (p. 125).

In Lamb’s work, Booth’s categories 1 and 3 are strongly marked, category 2 not so much:  the burden of carrying the category 1 rhetoric falls fairly strongly on the interior narration of the grandfather’s handed-down manuscript, in which our curiosity and interest in “the facts” of the family history are satisfied.  Booth’s category 3 rhetoric is developed in the main narrative, which I would refer to as the “external frame story” were it not for the fact that it is much more voluminous than the average frame, yet that is in effect what it is.  Perhaps for those who have read or will read this book, the best way to understand the way in which the category 2 rhetoric is less significant herein is to place this book side by side for comparison and contrast purposes with some of the heavily “aesthetic” novels of Virginia Woolf, like The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway, in which the completion of pattern and form is of a sublimated, almost entirely thematic kind.

Finally, the shape that comes most strongly to mind in reference to this work is that of a memoir (albeit a fictional one) as I have come to understand it from the website of Richard Gilbert, an expert in the form.  The three elements which Gilbert mentions as essential to the development of the memoir in his reviews, interviews, and guest posts from other memoir writers and teachers are:  structure, scene, and persona.  This work of fiction reads very much like a memoir in its development because of the strength of the persona ( or since it is a work of fiction actually, the voice) of Domenick Birdsey and the tight structuring of scenes with flashbacks closely tied to each cautious step forward in the contemporary day action.  As well, as has been commented on in Gilbert’s site, a memoir is different from an autobiography in that an autobiography attempts a chronological development, whereas a memoir attempts a more “thematic” development.  In I Know This Much Is True, the overall theme is one of Domenick’s attempting to overcome the fear and anger he feels at his twin brother Thomas’s insanity.  That he manages to deal with his demons is clear from that last, atypical, lyrical passage, which I give here not only to prove my point, but because it will not be necessary to issue a “spoiler alert” for types 1 and 3 of literary interest, and I think it will encourage readers to pick up the book to see “how” the novel develops:  “I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths:  that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things./This much, at least, I’ve figured out.  I know this much is true.”

The beauty of that final passage points up the only real quarrel I have with this book, which is that I wish it had more such fine lyrical passages in the rest of the novel.  Putting this one in at the ultimate position does give it major emphasis, but I would feel more comfortable with the book as a whole if it were all of a piece, and did not leave that final summation to do for all the narration what needs to be done in the way of ending things with the correct emphasis.  Be that as it may, this is a good novel, and should be read by anyone who has an interest in the topics of mental illness, twins, the history of family generations, period history, feminism, in short, it covers a lot of ground.  And for its good qualities, I would recommend making it your next long read.

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March 30, 2014 · 1:09 am

Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help”–Better as a movie script than as a book?

After trying to purchase the audiobook and getting the book itself by mistake (a gift for my mother a year or so ago), I finally took it upon myself to read Kathryn Stockett’s book about an aspect of civil rights in the American South of the last mid-century, The Help.  I was curious as to why so many people, most of whom I knew had feelings and politics on the correct side of the civil rights question, seemed lukewarm about the book.  Why, hadn’t it been compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird by more than one of the reviewers?  Wasn’t it a genuine effort to capture the voices and sentiments of the women who worked as maids and nannies for the southern white supremacists?

Well, the voices weren’t the problem, as it turned out.  The voices, once one got over that rather ordinary reader’s annoyance with having to follow a dialect, a perplexing dilemma from Mark Twain on up, the voices, I say, were a delight.  They seemed genuine, and insightful, and heartfelt.  Once I hit my stride with following the dialect and spelling, it was far less troublesome than Mark Twain himself, and I got into the rhythm of it, eager to read more of what the women had to say.

But the truth is, since reading the book, I’ve realized that no, it isn’t like Harper Lee, who was writing more or less at the same time as some major civil rights changes were arduously making their way onto the scene.  Harper Lee’s book was courageous, whereas unfortunately, as popular and right as The Help is, it’s got a much larger choir to preach to, and by that much is the more run-of-the-mill.  As my brother put it, “It’s been done before, been done better, and I guess I have to say I’m just tired of seeing yet another privileged white slowly clue in to what’s at stake.”  He wasn’t talking about Kathryn Stockett herself, the author, I don’t think, but about the character of “Miss Skeeter,” who helps the maids publish their book so that the world will know what actually goes on from their point of view in the houses of their white employers.

This is why I think that the book quite possibly is better as a movie, though I never thought I would say that about any book.  I’m planning to see the movie to verify my impressions, but somehow I think that once the topic is as mainstream as this one is, a movie is the proper venue for it.  This is a form that allows people to congregate in a public space and share what they (by this time) almost certainly all agree about, which is the uncontestable opinion that civil rights is an important and valid endeavor with which to engage and something that has a continued reality and force whose ever rights we’re talking about.  And if there are some who don’t agree, in all likelihood they will be shamed into silence by the internal logic of the characters’ modest demands, though they may possibly continue to defy public opinion in private.

While I realize that this book has become the darling of book clubs all over the country, I would just ask this question about its literary quality:  is there that sense that the author had to pay the penalty of serious insight in order to write it, or is it a little flimsy, a little thin?  Though To Kill a Mockingbird is uplifting in the end, there is a sense of genuine penalty paid about it, a feeling of tragedy and at the same time a feeling of being borne aloft.  Though the intentions of The Help may not have been exactly the same, what penalty is actually paid by Miss Skeeter for what she does?  She goes to NYC and becomes a writer, at least that is what is predicted of her future.  She escapes the consequences of at least some of her actions, and though her mother is dying, for some reason this is not played upon in the same way we can imagine Harper Lee using it.  It’s instead a sort of “feel good” book.  So, maybe this is a good book-to-movie script, but after all, let’s not exaggerate and compare it to something it cannot reach to.  It’s a well-written, workmanlike bit of writing, which follows all the rules and touches most of the bases, but it’s not a great American novel.  It’s enjoyable seeing the white supremacists–particularly a real bitch named “Miss Hilly”–get their comeuppance, but it’s important to remember that the challenges that were there when Harper Lee was writing are far less now than they were then, and by that much exactly is The Help the lesser novel.

It’s still worth reading, however, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the period and in the stories and feelings of the ordinary people who stood in the shadows of the great integrationists and civil rights leaders, for they too have their stories, real or imagined, and this is a capable imagining of some things we know from other documents to be true.  I did enjoy the book, and we can all use some reinforcement of what we already believe to be true, as long as what we believe is on the fair side of things.  But we should also find books that enable us to be challenged in the fair things we have difficulty believing at first, in the things which provoke our imagination to allow us to grow closer and closer to the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.  It is only then that we can award the highest accolades to a work of art and place it in the pantheon of great works.

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March 24, 2014 · 7:23 pm

“The willing suspension of disbelief,” mimesis, and “Eat, Pray, Love”

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 text of the Biographia Literaria, he records that he and William Wordsworth, while neighbors, discussed often the “two cardinal points of poetry,” with Wordsworth more invested in the “faithful adherence to the truth of nature” and Coleridge more involved in the “interest of novelty…[introduced] by the modifying colours of imagination” in their mutual work, the Lyrical Ballads.  Whereas Wordsworth composed the poems of which the “subjects….[were] drawn from ordinary life,” Coleridge says “my endeavours…[were] directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief [italics mine] for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”  These words are among the most famous words in the English literary critical canon now, and yet so often it is easy to forget that this is that which we must practice when we meet up with something literary, whether in poetry, fiction, non-fiction even, a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  It is this which encourages us to keep reading at some of those inevitable points where our own feelings, thoughts, and personalities fail to click with that of our erstwhile authors.  Now, bookmark that series of thoughts while I pull up my second series, on mimesis, or to put it simply and complexly at once, “imitation,” as the mimicry of thoughts, feelings, actions, and characters is called in literary theory.

In Mimetic Reflections:  A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology, and Ethics, William Schweiker quotes Paul Ricoeur (from “Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling”) thus:  “‘To feel, in the emotional sense of the word, is to make ours what has been put at a distance by thought in its objectifying phase.  Feelings, therefore, have a very complex kind of intentionality.  [T]hey accompany and complete the work of the imagination as a schematizing, a synthetic operation:  they make the schematized thoughts our own'” (p. 107).  Though I may be interpreting this too facilely, at least one thing that this passage means to me is that it is the reader as well as the writer who “mimics” the emotions, “thinks” the ideas, and even “performs” the actions which the writer is putting in the text, because the reader, according to Schweiker and Ricoeur, is part creator of the text, in following it.

Now as to the particular text I have it in mind to consider in the light of these two rather heavyweight bits of literary theory–they are heavyweight, that is, by contrast with the rather more currently topical and popular (as of 2009) Eat, Pray, Love, which I am apparently one of the least topical in reading, as I have only just finished it yesterday, and I don’t plan to see the movie.  It’s necessary to say up front that I didn’t expect to find anything much in it for me, expected to be bored or annoyed or both by the topic as well as by the execution and writing style.  I had been warned that the writer herself said something about having gone off her medication, and having had visions of sorts, and of having bizarre religious (or pseudo-religious, so the story went) experiences, as well as being well-off by average standards and therefore more privileged than the rest of us to slide by with these sorts of shenanigans.  We all know that the wealthy do as they please.  But when I actually got into the book, I found it likeable rather than not, certainly not sensible in strict terms, perhaps, but touching, exploratory, sincere, and in short, I kept reading.  I read and read, and though I have to confess that the happily-ever-after ending gave me pause (as why wouldn’t it in this skeptical age), all in all I was glad, very glad, that I had read the book.  It opened up a window and gave me fresh air to breathe, which is where the whole involved tangle of “willing suspension of disbelief,” “poetic faith,” and “mimesis” comes in.  Because I was able to suspend judgement once I got even a little way into the book, I felt at least poetic faith in Elizabeth Gilbert’s claims and assertions about her experiences in Italy, India, and Bali, and it seemed to me afterwards that I had in a more intimate sense than usual taken the trip with her, “mimicked,” in fact, her escape from unhappiness.

Who can say what exactly brought this about?  Was the freedom to read something not strictly logical or praised for its literary quality granted by the warm weather that has come and gone and teased and gone again for the last week?  Did I just fall victim to all the early spring sunlight and fresh air, and therefore reach for a book that I wouldn’t normally have read without scoffing, and therefore gained a different kind, an internal kind, of “fresh air”?  Was I responding to some other hidden more mysterious personal impetus that drove me to keep reading?  All I can say is, though I will probably never again visit Italy even briefly (I was in Northern Italy for a day or so when I was seventeen), will never join an ashram in India (or practice serious yoga again), and will certainly never find myself in Bali teaching and learning from a Balinese medicine man and woman, the book brought me, by my “imitation” of its currents and prevailing winds as I read, permission to let myself out of some dark dungeon of the mind–though I haven’t truly been depressed or anxious in any specific sense.

It is for this reason that I recommend it to my readers, because if you can find sufficient “poetic faith” (that “willing suspension of disbelief”) to allow yourself to encounter some new thing, some fresh thing, something pleasantly unexpected (even if it’s another book entirely which you have been blocking yourself off from reading), and then “imitate” its patterns of feeling and thought as you read, there’s a good chance that eventually you may land upon some more hospitable shore than that of mere humdrum habit and routine.  True, Eat, Pray, Love is not what I would call a great work of art, or a monument to the ages–but everything worthwhile doesn’t have to be:  sometimes, a book can be simply a helping hand held out by an explorer of the fraught “human highway” (as Neil Young referred to it), and sometimes that is enough.

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March 18, 2014 · 5:33 pm

More than one side to every story–the dovetailing roles of reader and hero in a poem by W. H. Auden

I am a devout reader of fiction, poetry, sometimes plays, occasionally essays, even once in a while catching sight of the back of a cereal box that for some reason or other merits my attention.  And I’m always trying to situate or re-situate myself in relation to what I read, what I learn, and what I have learned to celebrate.  This is why, perhaps, a particular poem by W. H. Auden has so earned my allegiance, though whether or not he himself would think it one of his rhetorically best, I don’t know.  What I appreciate most about it is its imagistic succinctness and suggestive power, and its ability to use very conventional poetic and writerly tactics and techniques to tell a thematic story.

For, the story in this poem is less about the events and actions contained therein, and more about the opposed voices, each playing its role in the poem, with the hero’s voice speaking penultimately, which gives it a certain force.  As will be familiar to lots of readers, he (or she) speaks best who speaks last, or so many an argument would have us believe.  The only thing after the hero’s last speech is a “stage direction” in the quizzical, mysterious, external voice–external, that is, to the quarrel–and this leaves us wondering if in fact it is after all the hero who has won the argument, or if the poem itself encapsulates the constant back and forth of the hero’s actions and the reader who demands action of the hero, with the “he” in the final line being the reader of the poem itself.  But enough of my being mysterious–here’s the poem, with its rhyming, sing-song, alliterative and assonantal qualities in full swing:

“‘O where are you going?’ said reader to rider,/’That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,/Yonder’s the midden whose odors will madden,/That gap is the grave where the tall return.’/

‘O do you imagine,’ said fearer to farer,/’That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,/Your diligent looking discover the lacking/Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’/

‘O what was that bird,’ said horror to hearer,/’Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?/Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,/The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?’/

‘Out of this house’–said rider to reader/’Yours never will’–said farer to fearer/’They’re looking for you’–said hearer to horror/As he left them there, as he left them there.”

As should be apparent from perusing the poem carefully, the “reader,” “fearer,” and “horror” (or perhaps “feeler of horror”) are aligned in passive observation on one side of the situation, whereas the “rider,” “farer,” and “hearer” are aligned in action on the other.  The first voices, which occupy the first three stanzas, are cautionary and fearful, warning and pointing out dangers (real or imagined) of the hero’s destiny.  In the final stanza, the hero (or the “rider,” “farer,” and “hearer”) answers the previous stanzas one by one.  Where is he going?  “Out of this house.”  As to whether or not his “footsteps” will successfully fulfill their destiny by defying adversity, the “farer” is able to say at least to the apparently stay-at-home “fearer”:  “Yours never will.”  When the purveyor of “horror” in the third stanza attempts to scare either sense or timidity–whichever it is–into the “hearer,” to this the “hearer” retorts in the fourth stanza “They’re looking for you,” meaning something perhaps like what Shakespeare said in Julius Caesar, that “Cowards die many times before their deaths;/The valiant never taste of death but once,” or perhaps as in the lines of F. D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

There’s a final bit of mystery in the last line, as I indicated before, as to who exactly is speaking in the non-quotation mark enclosed last line.  One possibility, if one reads it as following directly from the tail end of the line before it, says that the “hearer” is the one who “left them there,” whoever “they” might be.  Does it mean that the “hearer” left the “horror” (or again, the horrified spectator, perhaps the aghast reader) to the not-so-tender mercies of the “bird,” “shape,” “figure,” and “shocking disease,” or is there some other person or speaker being identified who left the two interior voices alone with their quarrel?  Or is it both things at once, as can happen in literature in general, because it is a magical realm (and nothing more magical than a poem like this one, in which so many and various things are being hinted at once)?

Whatever readers may make of this poem’s hints and intimations, its arch and exaggerated playfulness with word sounds and rhythms, one thing is for sure:  it is a work of art, made by one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and has earned its place amid many another of Auden’s poems by its quality of an elevated teasing out of the special relationship obtaining between the reader (or spectator) and the writer (or actor).  It is the poem I think of every time I have trouble trying to understand another poem, whether or not of Auden’s, and a poem I find myself turning to again and again for the sheer love of its sound and the dance it leads my mind through the figures of.  I hope my readers have enjoyed exploring this poem with me, and have gained something from my suggestions, tentative though some of them must necessarily be.  Now if only it’s not necessary entirely to rid myself of that delicious readerly apprehension for the good of a hero or character which Auden seems to be joshing his own readers about!  But I don’t for a minute think that he would have gotten rid of that reaction in reality:  what else keeps readers coming back for more, if not for the traps and conundrums set them by writers and poets???

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March 10, 2014 · 4:02 pm

David Foster Wallace and the novel that escapes category–or, my experience reading “Infinite Jest”

There are books you read, books you quote, and books you live with.  Among the books I read, I would include lots of things I read merely out of curiosity and then was dissatisfied with later, dissatisfied enough to “diss” them publicly or just to ignore them completely when it came time to comment here on my site.  Then, there are the books you quote, those which speak to some inner part of you and which have certain resonances in some of their lines or chapters which you want to hug to you especially, and to let others know of your appreciation, you make a big production out of memorizing some of their parts.  Those are the books that stay with you the longest, even though later you may revise your notion of their importance and quit dragging them into every conversation at every cocktail party you go to.  Finally, there are the books you live with, and these form a special category of books, books which you find may not have been entirely sympathetic to your particular world view, but which you started and so feel you should finish, out of some obligation to some real or imaginary world court of opinion; these books are mostly long, long books, which take a long time to finish, and which you perhaps read only in small dribs and drabs on a regular basis, and which you therefore live with, willy-nilly.  Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time was such a book sequence for me, and now, having finished the much shorter but still very long book Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, I can safely say that it too is one of the books one lives with.  I read about 5-10 pages a night for several months until I had finished the 1079 pages (inclusive of notes), and just last night I finally finished reading, with that deflated feeling that you get when you realize that now you’re done and will have to get used to a new cast of characters.  You can’t help but feel that letdown, said to be mimetically similar to the letdown authors themselves often feel when they finish writing a book and must turn their attention to something else, some other project.

Infinite Jest, a book at least one critic insists defies category, was my nighttime reading propped up in my bed, and I laughed out loud in the still night many times while reading it, but resisted tearful behavior until the very end last night, when I wanted to say, in the words of the song, “Is That All There Is?”.  This was not only in response to having reached the end of the book and knowing that another book would have to take its place, however, but also in response to the expression of futility with which the book ends, or so it seemed to me.  I have no plans to discuss this in terms of what took place in the events of the book, not only to avoid having to issue a “spoiler alert,” but also because I feel everyone has the right to be disappointed in his or her own way, and I want those who are interested in this book to have their own experience of it.  Perhaps I’m mistaken, and the final vision is one of heavenly light on earth, and if so, I wouldn’t deprive anyone of that experience.  But the book ended too soon and with the wrong protagonist for my money, and left a lot of loose ends and too many balls still in motion to suit me.

It’s quite possible that I was looking for the wrong sort of reading experience, not a contemporary one at all, and one thing Wallace’s book is definitely is contemporary fiction.  It gets compared to Gaddis and Pynchon and even Beckett, though it’s different, very different, from all three, less literarially inclined than Gaddis, less technically inclined than Pynchon, and somehow younger and more hopeful than Beckett until the end at least.  But that younger quality with all its smarts and dreams lying disappointed while the rest of the action remains off-stage somewhere else (in another novel, perhaps) is so very sharp and beautiful and bright-minded throughout most of the novel that when the end of the novel came (set in a scene that’s a flashback) I wanted to scream “But what happens to —?” and “What about those —?”  “What’s going to happen when —?”  Yes, there’s no denying that Wallace did what every good entertainer does, and left his audience wanting more.  And as all the critics tell us, one of the main subjects of the book is the nature of entertainment in North America, particularly in the United States (though for some reason, possibly the very polite and inoffensive nature of our neighbor to the North, Wallace has made Canada the whipping-boy for some of his most cutting satirical lashes).  Then again, maybe I haven’t understood him correctly.  If the futility of our forms of entertainment is the true subject of his book, then tickling us up with the recurrent situational joke, or adolescent fart quip, or dose of black humor, or Feydeau scene and then deserting us where he does at the end is the way to make the point.  But then, this moves the entire novel, which seems sunny in parts, a youthful world in which someone is destined to be the hero, a lot closer to Beckett and farther away from Pynchon and perhaps even Gaddis, though those authors too have their portrayed moments of futility.

Basically, I lived with this book and was intrigued and amused enough to finish the whole thing, though I occasionally tired of the obsession with various drugs, recreational and abused-prescription, which was one of the necessary sub-topics of the given subjects of entertainment and pastime.  And I was sorry when it ended, and I had to tear myself away from at least two of the protagonists, if not more.  And, I found that it continued a tradition begun even as long ago as James Joyce, with the prose speaking the voices of the protagonists with stutters of bad English and negligent phrasing and incorrect vocabulary items when necessary and with perfectly groomed English phrasing when needed elsewhere.  That this book belongs to the contemporary world is nothing against it, in fact it reinforces the prerequisite quality of my recommendation of it as a vade mecum of what not to do if one wants to lead a placid, legal life (jest though one might term it).  It has passion, for a jest, and even its own kind of poetic justice and poetry, which I guarantee will keep the open-minded reader going (but generally in hopes of a resolution, I would think, which doesn’t come in easily recognizable terms).  The ending of the book, though apparently a flashback, is also possibly a simultaneous flash forward into the ending of a character, and has heightened language such as is used of enlightened states and sad upheavals, and which is the language of tragedy.

Be all this as it may, my post must be as seemingly inconclusive as the book is, though not nearly as long.  The book is a work of art, but like all works of art, it will have its admirers and its detractors.  As to my perspective vis- à-vis Infinite Jest, I think I understood it, I know I admire it, I lived with it for several months, but I don’t want to marry it: but that’s okay, it’s got many another critic vying for its attentions and willing to re-read over and over again in order to lock down what he or she feels is a definitive reading.  I’ll just be getting on with another long book at bedtime, and leaving my own readers to make up their minds to read it or not, love it or not, quote it or not.  And, of course, I hope anyone who has something to add to my knowledge or experience of reading the book will comment here:  I purposely did not attempt the gargantuan task of naming characters’ names and detailing their actions, but anyone who wants to do so is welcome, and I’ll do my best to respond.

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March 6, 2014 · 6:22 pm

Yvor Winters’s “A Song in Passing” and the “Undiscovered Country”

Yvor Winters, a modernist with a difference (and to some, one belonging to the New Critical movement, but not to others), wrote this short poem, “A Song in Passing,” about death, and dying, and the experience of mortality:

“Where am I now?  And what/Am I to say portends?/Death is but death, and not/The most obtuse of ends./No matter how one leans/One yet fears not to know./God knows what all this means!/The mortal mind is slow./Eternity is here./There is no other place./The only thing I fear/Is the Almighty Face.”

According to Wikipedia, Winters felt that even an poem about disintegration should not have a structure which imitates disintegration.  He referred to this form of writing, which he eschewed, as the “fallacy of imitative form.”  He felt that the Whitmanesque tendency to create sprawling style in order to write about the greatness and spread of the American continent was a mistake.  Instead, one’s structure in a poem should contain the meaning without imitating one’s subject.

In the poem quoted above, the frequent modernist tools of an irony of double-edged words and contradictory statements carry the weight of portraying the speaker’s fear of death and the hereafter.  For example, to begin with the title, “A Song in Passing” sounds light-hearted and lyrical until one realizes that “passing” has a more ominous meaning than the same sort of lyrical emotion generated by such a song in Robert Browning’s poem sequence, “Pippa Passes,” in which “God’s in his heaven–/All’s right with the world!”  In Winters’s short poem, “God knows what all this means!” is at first a casual non-religious expression of ignorance in which “God” signifies only mystery, and then when the capping line of the stanza comes, “The mortal mind is slow,” the notion of God begins to seem more like a real possibility.

This more serious “passing” contradicts the idea of a “song” to the extent that the  poem is about death and dying and thus the effort to “sing” is full of attempts to be conclusive.  But then there are those pesky moments of apparent bewilderment, then more definitive statements, and finally (in the last stanza) an outright reversal of rhetorical direction.

The one significant repeated word/concept, “fear,” is at the very heart of the poem.  If one were to discuss in Shakepearean terms the proposition contained in the abrupt about-face of the last stanza, “The only thing I fear/Is the Almighty Face,” one would look to Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, in which he speaks of the country of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourne/No traveler returns,” the country which “…makes us rather bear the ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of….”   Yet note how it’s the back and forth from attitude to attitude, from pose to pose, from concept to concept, which dictates the movement of the poem, and not an emotional outpouring, not even Wordworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”  This poem smiles wryly and nervously, like someone with a slight facial tic attempting to control his or her movements, and yet we see the cause of the repressed feeling just as clearly as if the poet had wept buckets of verbal tears over his topic, which on the whole would probably have struck us as cloying.

This is a poem whose wit is as evident as its statements are terse, and it seems obvious that Winters’s light touch is meant to convey neither a faith in God nor an atheist’s skepticism, but the average person’s quandary when confronted with the question of final things.  Though the situation may be average, however, the poem shows an outstanding and spectacular mastery of form, which helps the ordinary person in real life to cope with such overwhelming questions and the possibility of even more overwhelming answers in the end.  How fortunate we are to have a poet whose perspective is not so far from the average, yet whose means of expression is so extraordinarily lithe and graceful!

 

 

 

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March 4, 2014 · 5:29 pm

Tennyson, Swinburne, and the spirit of parody

In 1867 (and 1869), the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson published a poem attempting to reconcile pantheism with Christianity of the traditional “God the Father” variety.  The poem was entitled “The Higher Pantheism,” a title which itself indicates that plain pantheism was to Tennyson a “lower” sort of religious thing.  Due to the poem’s being already published elsewhere on the Internet, I am able to give you the whole of this contrarious and sometimes confused-seeming poem, and though it is long for my page, I will do so in order that you can see for yourself the “knots” Tennyson tied up his religious logic in to form a “basket” to hold his beliefs.  The Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria obviously had a duty to God and country which came above poetic quality, though his parody writer Swinburne (writing in 1880) had good things to say about the writing while finding the thought muddy (the version of Swinburne’s parody which is published online at the University of Toronto Press T-Space by Professor Ian Lancashire has notes about a letter of Swinburne’s containing some lines of the parody, though in order not to violate Professor Lancashire’s online copyright, I am reprinting Swinburne’s parody from an edition which occurs elsewhere on the Internet on free sites without the letter.  Those who are interested in reading the letter and comments can do so at T-Space ).  Here is Tennyson at his elevated and obfuscational best in “The Higher Pantheism”:

“The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains–/Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?/Is not the Vision He, though He be not that which he seems?/Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?/Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,/Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?/Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why,/For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel ‘I am I’?/Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,/Making him broken gleams and a stifled splendor and gloom./Speak to him, Thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet–/Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet./God is law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice,/For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice./Law is God, say some; no God at all, says the fool,/For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;/And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;/But if we could see and hear, this Vision–were it not he?”

Actually, the poem is rather fine in many respects, though its singsong quality can be an annoyance, and the tone is of one trying a bit too hard to make ends meet spiritually.  But his poetic successor Swinburne, who was also his occasional imitator (in metrical terms, though not in spirit) made much of Tennyson’s little weaknesses in “proving” God’s existence, and did so partly by tactical repetition of meter and rhyme in the same style of singsong, no mean feat for the average poetaster but probably quite easy for Swinburne, who had a gift of meter, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance on his side anyway, to name a few only of his poetical qualities.  Here’s his delightful parody of Tennyson, entitled “The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell”:

“One, who is not, we see; but one, whom we see not, is;/Surely this is not that; but that is assuredly this./What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under;/If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder./Doubt is faith in the main; but faith, on the whole, is doubt;/We cannot believe by proof; but could we believe without?/Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover;/Neither are straight lines curves; yet over is under and over./Two and two may be four; but four and four are not eight;/Fate and God may be twain; but God is the same thing as fate./Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels;/God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels./Body and spirit are twins; God only knows which is which;/The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch./More is the whole than a part; but half is more than  the whole;/Clearly, the soul is the body; but is not the body the soul?/One and two are not one; but one and nothing is two;/Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true./Once the mastadon was; pterodactyls were common as cocks;/Then the mammoth was God; now is He a prize ox./Parallels all things are; yet many of these are askew;/You are certainly I; but certainly I am not you./Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock;/Cocks exist for the hen; but hens exist for the cock./God, whom we see not, is, and God, who is not, we see;/Fiddle, we know, is diddle; and diddle, we take it, is dee.”

Aside from enjoying the beard-tugging going on in the parody, one of the first things one notices is that the parody is about one-fourth again as long as the original poem.  Clearly, Swinburne was enjoying himself, and the very forthright and yet absurd ridiculing going on is part and parcel of his own vision.  For example, it’s not so much only an exaggeration of Tennyson to say “The soul squats down in the the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch” as it is a combination of the two poets’ attitudes in their poems, Tennyson more or less an apologist for the “higher” view, that the body is a “sign and symbol” of the soul’s division from God, hence a sort of “dirtier” thing which must be excused or apologized for, Swinburne a celebratory poet of things earthly, who yet feels their transitory nature as an impetus to memorialize them in poetry.  And this, the exaggeration of what one can take away from another’s poetry added to one’s own ingenious inventions in a similar meter and rhyme, is the very spirit of parody.  One could perhaps say that the best way truly to understand a poet or writer is to attempt a substantial and stylistic parody–after all, one must get the gist of the thought and tempo in order to make fun of it:  one must know what both oneself and the other are about.

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February 28, 2014 · 3:30 pm

“My trade and my art is living” (Montaigne)–or, Francesco Marciuliano’s “I Could Pee on This (And Other Poems By Cats)”

In my lifetime, though you might not guess it to observe me now, I have had many friends, and many types of friends.  And during my life, I have also known and loved many a cat friend, both my own and other people’s.  So how does it come about only now that I finally happen across this excellent collection of “poems by cats” (sic), and am able to convey my heartfelt appreciation for such a fine and noble effort of “editing” as Francesco Marciuliano has done with the work of his feline artists?  The fact of the matter is, that no one else has thought to seek out the works of cats before now (the small, conveniently gift-packaged size volume only came out in 2012).  Up until now, they have been reduced to the meow, the miaow, the mew, the–but complete the list in your own favorite world language:  the fact of the matter is that they have been short-changed as to their place in the world’s pantheon of poets.  As the flyleaf of the book points out, “All cats are artists, as demonstrated by their abstract hairballs, expertly stripped curtains, and the precise way they arrange themselves on top of your pile of freshly cleaned clothes.”  There is a pdf of the book on Scribd, and I understand from at least one link that the book started as an online venture, and then grew to a full-scale published book, and now there is a second volume out, which I have not yet had the chance to peruse.

In this book, you will find the true meaning of many a thing your cat does and says to you, little though you have previously understood it.  There are even photographs of cats in the brief volume, just to prove that this effort met with their cautious approval (I say cautious, because caution is evident any time a cat chooses to try to communicate with us; he or she is clearly taking a risk with an obtuse listener, the human, who only thinks of owning him or her and doesn’t properly understand the true ownership equation).

This excerpt from the book (the title poem) is published on the Internet on the advertising site:  “Her new sweater doesn’t smell of me/I could pee on that/She’s gone out for the day and left her laptop on the counter/I could pee on that/Her new boyfriend just pushed my head away/I could pee on him/She’s ignoring me ignoring her/ I could pee everywhere/She’s making up for it by putting me on her lap/I could pee on this/I could pee on this”

Or, the more action-packed poem for those who like to hover uncomfortably at the edge of their seats wondering what will happen next:  “Nudge/Nudge nudge nudge/Nudge nudge nudge nudge nudge nudge/Nudge/Your glass just shattered on the floor”

Then again, perhaps a “dawn song” (a medieval form of poetry between two intimates) is more to your taste:  “I lick your nose/I lick your nose again/I drag my claws down your eyelids/Oh, you’re up?  Feed me”

There are other even more ingenious and humorous and heartfelt poems in the volume, but I can’t print them here because they haven’t yet been featured on a totally free site on the Internet, and I not only want to abide by copyright conventions, but also wish to pay proper tribute to this wonderful success at meeting a real need by encouraging you to buy the book, out at Amazon.com and other sites, and in fine bookstores everywhere, for only $12.95 (for all I know, Amazon.com has some used copies for even less, though you would probably not buy those for a gift, but for your own bookshelf).  So, what do you say?  How about a gift package for the next important occasion in a fellow cat lover’s life?  A small basket, a cushion, a few tins of pricey cat food or some expensive cat treats, and this book–even if you yourself are only a cat tolerator, surely you can rise above your odd prejudices and buy this book for a friend.  As the book blurb explains, “You’ll discover why cats do things like sit on your face before the sun comes up, help clean your bedside table with their tail, or confirm that there really are one thousand sheets in a toilet paper roll.”  And for this voyage of knowledge and discovery, you have only to visit online or in person at a bookseller’s.  Can anything be easier or more desirable than that?  Look deeply into the next set of bright cat eyes you happen to meet, and realize that they are only waiting for you to meet them halfway–and then the other half.  Well, what did you expect?  Ancient royalty and modern artistic genius have their privileges.

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February 23, 2014 · 6:30 pm

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling,” says Wallace Stevens, and Robert Browning speaks of “Lyric Love, half angel and half bird”–the difference between lyricism and sentimentality

As Wallace Stevens, never sentimental and occasionally even one of the most coldly obfuscational of poets, warned us at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the sentimentality of the Victorian Era was on the wane, “Sentimentality is the failure of feeling.”  No one could doubt that there was intense truth in his poetry and very little false feeling, though just what the poetry is about has often perplexed and frustrated other poets, literary critics, and scholars alike.  And though Robert Browning was a poet of the Victorian Era, and had ups and downs of sentiment himself, that’s not the same as saying that he was sentimental.  The two are different things, sentiment and sentimentality.  As he apostrophized in “The Ring and the Book,” “O Lyric Love, half angel and half bird,/And all a wonder and a wild desire.”  In a sense, the two capitalized words in his long poem are interchangeable, “Lyric Love” and “Love of Lyric.”  Even as long ago as the time of Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), Horace was enthusiastic enough to say in one of his odes, “But if you name me among the lyric bards, I shall strike the stars with my exalted head.”  That image, though comic perhaps to the ironically inclined, is still not guilty of the bathos–false inflated sentiment, unlike the true feeling of pathos–which I have singled out for part of my post topic today.

All of this background fluster and flurry is part of my setting for a discussion of a poem or two by a woman poet (“female” or “feminine” poet are terms of opprobrium to sexist men and terms of reduction to women themselves, used to ducking the charge of being too “gushy” and “touchy-feely” in their poems).  The poet herself is Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she has been charged by some with being a minor poet and participating in the sin (especially to our cynical, hard-minded times) of sentimentality.  But I would like to insist instead that her love poetry is both hard-minded, occasionally quite biting and ironic, and full of genuine feeling.  Her point of view on the question of the charge is quite clear.  As she said in one of her lyrics, entitled “To Those Without Pity,” “Cruel of heart, lay down my song/Your reading eyes have done me wrong./Not for you was the pen bitten,/And the mind wrung, and the song written.”  Note that she calls it a “song,” a synonym in a particular context for the word “lyric.”  There must be something which sings and moves and encourages rhythm in a poem, whether it rhymes or not, whether or not it has meter, and her poetry has all of this.  And often, critics’ objections against what they call “sentimentality” or “bathos” is in actuality an objection to being caused to have feeling themselves, to be drawn to emotion by the skilled words of another.  Love poetry is especially susceptible to this charge, because love is the one subject upon which we all are vulnerable, whatever kind of love it is, the one weakness that few of us can defend against at some time or other of our lives, and the particular thing we like being challenged upon the least, whether someone would say we feel too much or not enough.  Let’s look at one of her shorter lyrics, called “Never May the Fruit Be Plucked”:

“Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough/And gathered into barrels./He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs./Though the branches bend like reeds,/Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,/He that would eat of love may bear away with him/Only what his belly can hold,/Nothing in the apron,/Nothing in the pockets./Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough/And harvested in barrels./The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,/In an orchard soft with rot.”

That poem certainly contains a cynical enough view, and yet it is a love poem, and is full of image and feeling and sense and does not force the reader’s head down with overdone emotion.  The feeling communicated is sufficient to the subject itself.

Or this one, a rhyming and more “singing” poem this time, called “The Betrothal”:

“Oh, come, my lad, or go, my lad,/And love me if you like./I shall not hear the door shut/Nor the knocker strike./Oh, bring me gifts or beg me gifts,/And wed me if you will./I’d make a man a good wife,/Sensible and still./And why should I be cold, my lad,/And why should you repine,/Because I love a dark head/That never will be mine?/I might as well be easing you/As lie alone in bed/And waste the night in wanting/A cruel dark head./You might as well be calling yours/What never will be his,/And one of us be happy./There’s few enough as is./”

This poem has an especial effect which I really like, and it’s in the ungrammatical last line.  To be grammatically correct, the expression (referring to people in the plural) should read “There’re few enough as are.”  But by using a colloquial and idiomatic “sting” of a line as the last, which moreover rhymes, a more folkish wisdom emerges from the final portion, and seals off the entire experience of the foregoing lines with an almost gnomic feel.

Probably the most famous poem Millay ever wrote (which has been recorded musically and is reprinted on several sites) is the longer poem “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” which I don’t have space for here today, but which I strongly recommend as a marvelously lovely picture of mother love, full of emotion and caring and none of it false, of a length of about five printed pages, all of which will repay study and attention for their smooth flow and melodic development of the theme of how a child witnesses a parent’s love and concern without always knowing until it’s too late how much that care costs.  The fantasy element that is present from the beginning of the poem makes the life picture broad enough to cover a number of slightly different situations, all of them with the same emotional tenor, proving that certain conditions are worldwide, like impoverishment, generosity, worry, ingenuity, beauty, death, and even magic, of sorts.

Finally, Millay is a veteran composer of the sonnet form, and I would like to add one example of this to my discourse of today.  The sonnet is entitled “When I too long have looked upon your face”:

“When I too long have looked upon your face,/Wherein for me a brightness unobscured/Save by the mists of brightness has its place,/And terrible beauty not to be endured,/I turn away reluctant from your light,/And stand irresolute, a mind undone,/A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight/From having looked too long upon the sun./Then is my daily life a narrow room/In which a little while, uncertainly,/Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,/Among familiar things grown strange to me/Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,/Till I become accustomed to the dark.”

Millay is more modern in many ways than Christina Rossetti, but the domestic and natural imagery, the sometimes fantastic elements as in “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” and her book of poetry for children which is equally important to adults (as with Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”) make her Rossetti’s true inheritor poetically speaking.  Try this experiment:  read a number of Millay’s poems, both the rhyming and the metered and the blank and free verse and then read this famous poem of Rossetti’s, and see, barring a slightly more stiff-upper-lipped emotional resonance in Millay, if you don’t find them very similar in their styles, perhaps their world views, even.  This poem of Rossetti’s is called simply, “Song”:

“When I am dead, my dearest,/Sing no sad songs for me;/Plant thou no roses at my head,/Nor shady cypress tree./Be the green grass above me/With showers and dewdrops wet;/And if thou wilt, remember,/And if thou wilt, forget./I shall not see the shadows,/I shall not feel the rain;/I shall not hear the nightingale/Sing on as if in pain./And dreaming through the twilight/That doth not rise nor set,/Haply I may remember,/And haply may forget.”

Points proven if only in brief, I hope.  In an era in which we have a proliferation of mass literature with plenty of bathos and sentimentality, and a literary fiction pulling hard in the other direction, even to the point of sometimes seeming too callous and unfeeling, perhaps, as Richard Gilbert has recently posted on his site in reference to Wordsworth, we need to return to the middle ground via reading good lyric poetry which, while enshrining feeling in a key and secure spot at its heart, yet fends off the “bad” sentiment or the weak line (the two are often one) by the depth of its reaching into the human experience.

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