Andrew Marvell!

Our book today - the last in our batch of what turned out to be mostly very superannuated musty old biographies cleared out of church basements in Iowa (ah, the wonders of Stevereads) - is Andrew Marvell, a slim, sparkling 1929 volume by the great Vita Sackville-West. It was supposed to be the first volume in a new series called, somewhat unfortunately, "The Poets on the Poets," although I'm not sure the series ever really took off, poets being so notoriously awful about deadlines. The first curiosity of the thing today is the governing identification of Sackville-West as a poet at all: it would have been routine in her own day, but to the very limited extent she's known to the common reader today, it's as a novelist or even a biographer of her ancestral home, not as a poet.

Still, 90 years ago she was well enough known to kick off this "The Poets on the Poets" series (as far as I know, it petered out almost immediately), and she chose to write a very slim volume on Marvell by concentrating almost exclusively on reading through his poems rather than retailing the facts of his life and times. She states up front that she won't be indulging in more than a scraping of biography, intent instead on concentrating on the poems. In a brochure for next summer's series of seminars at the National Humanities Center, we're told: "Scholarship over the last fifteen years has made it plain that Andrew Marvell's poetry cannot be adequately studied apart from his life" - and it's safe to say Sackville-West knew that even in her own day (one of her cited sources, a life of Marvell by the great Edwardian critic Augustine Birrell, specifically makes that same National Humanities Center claim). Her pose of aesthetic purity - just the poems, not the tawdry life - is just that: a pose, an old and trusty trick to let a freelancer off the hook of doing a load of extra research. And at least she's eloquent about it:

The apparent facts of a man's life are rarely absolute, even to himself; he draws the strokes, one by one, and is surprised at the final design of the picture. What hope is there, then, for the reconstruction of the biographer? It is no reconstruction that he can hope for, but merely interpretation - a rather more well-intentioned form of fiction.

The reader - if this thin volume had any readers anymore, which I doubt - can more readily tolerate such stuff because a) it speeds us to Sackville-West's thoughts on the poetry, and b) she doesn't really ignore biography anyway - some of her comments are almost admonishing in their personal tone:

Two strange reflections her suggest themselves. The first, that Marvell should never have published any of these poems - did he not know how good they were? The second - which appears almost to grow out of the first - that so true a poet should have abandoned the writing of poetry and turned, as the old lady said, to writing sense instead. From first to last, it was certainly a cavalier way of treating so pretty a muse. Marvell's muse, indeed, if her spirit survives, has much to complain of. Not only did Marvell himself behave towards her with the utmost ingratitude and nonchalance, but posterity for well over a century did very little better.

Like many critics before her, Sackville-West locates the bulk of Marvell's first-rate poetry early in his life, during the usurpation of Oliver Cromwell, dismissing most of the later work and implying that most work of all poets should be likewise dismissed:

Poets vary, but most are more prolific than they should be; less fastidious than they might be, that is to say, in the chosen residue of their work that they expose to the judgment of the world. (Yes fecundity in itself is often a measure of a poet's greatness, provided the quality maintain a sufficient, even though intermittent, standard; and no poet, as experience proves, can be expected to act as his own editor. Wordsworth and Tennyson, not to mention Swinburne, were their own worst enemies.) Time and posterity, fortunately, act as sieves, and in the end it is often for a few pages of print, at most, that a poet is remembered; a few moments distilled out of all the years of his life.

It's hard not to read a note of personal experience into lines like those, but then, Andrew Marvell is a very personal essay, an informal and somewhat unstructured reflection of one writer on another - with perhaps more attendant ironies than Sackville-West herself ever saw. She tsk-tsks at how long it took the literary world to realize the worth of Marvell's work - and her own work is waiting for exactly that kind of realization. And we won't even hold our breath for poor Birrell.

(One last thing: my own much-battered copy of this particular book didn't come from a church basement in Iowa - it was a gift from an old friend, who formally bestowed it on me only after he noticed that I'd pinched it from his shelves without his knowledge)

 

The Book of the Duchess!

Our book today is the sad, sweet, utterly remarkable performance that is Geoffrey Chaucer's debut poem, "The Book of the Duchess," and I confess, it came back to my thoughts mainly because of all that recent chatter about Katherine Swynford, Chaucer's sister-in-law. She was the long-time mistress of John of Gaunt while he was married to Blanche of Lancaster, and she stayed his mistress while he was married to Constance of Castile, and then she finally became his wife in 1396. John of Gaunt was an extremely handsome young man with lithe muscles and an absolutely ruttish sex-drive. Women found him irresistible - even if he'd been a village blacksmith instead of the most powerful son of one of England's greatest kings, he'd still have fired the dreams of every woman (and, presumably, some men) in the village. From his teens on, he exercised this particular droit du seigneur whenever he fancied - but in his cousin Blanche he found mettle of an entirely refreshing kind. He married her when she was just a snippet of a young girl, and within weeks the combination of his deflowering prowess and his legendary generosity caused her to blossom into an absolutely gorgeous little termagant, a goblet-hurler of the first rank. She was wilful, headstrong, impossible - and irresistible. And John of Gaunt loved her.

They were married for almost ten years, and she was still in her beautiful early 20s when she contracted the plague, lingered for a heart-rippingly horrifying week, and finally died on 12 September 1368.

This was a young person's world - John of Gaunt himself was well shy of 30 when all this happened to him, and when he fell into a grief as stark and powerful as all the other emotions he felt, it was another twenty-something who became involved: the courtier Geoffrey Chaucer, hitherto untried poet. We'll never really know what was going on in his mind when he wrote the surreal dreamscape that is "The Book of the Duchess," but like all the most vivid dreams friends have told me about, it feels both obscure and incredibly pointed. In it, the bookish narrator is in despair over a lack of sleep, to the point where he's almost finding a very un-Christian polytheism attractive, because then there'd be a god specifically for his problem:

 Whan I had red this tale wel

And overlooked it everydel,

Me thoughte wonder if it were so,

For I had never herde speke er tho

Of no goddes that coude make

Men to slepe ne for to wake,

For I ne knewe never God but oon.

Flowing straight from his sleeplessness comes a dream in which a pretty little dog (in real life, the dog had a name - bestowed by her) leads our narrator to a grand hunt and a sorrowing young lord who talks about his lady love with an almost involuntary fervor:

Allas, myn herte is wonder wo

That I ne can decryven it!

Me lakketh bothe Englissh and wit

For to undo it at the fulle,

And eek my spirits be so dulle

So greet a thinge for to devyse.

I have no witte that can suffyse

To comprehende hir beautee;

But this moche dar I seyn, that she

Was whyte, rody, fressh, and lyvely hewed,

And every day hir beautee newed.

My lady, that is so fair and bright

The narrator is a bit dim-witted and eventually has to come right out and ask why his young companion seems so distraught. The answer he gets - and the rock-hard exchange that follows - is worthy of Shakespeare (or rather, Shakespeare is worthy of it):

"She is deed." "Nay!" "Yis, by my trouthe."

"Is that your los? By God, it is routhe."

The narrator quickly rouses from his dream, and maybe he wasn't so dim-witted after all: a powerful young man has been made to remember lovingly every great and trial-making detail of his lover, and then to admit baldly that she is dead. Who knows what kind-hearted purpose this might have served, in England 800 years ago?

The great poet and unjustly overlooked critic Bernard O'Donoghue has written that we do Chaucer a disservice when he arranged his Complete Works they way we always do, with a gigantic and problematic masterpiece like "The Canterbury Tales" placed first instead of last. It encourages readers to see glittering shorter works like "The Book of the Duchess" as addenda, almost not worth looking at. O'Donoghue is right as always, and I can further attest: you should read "The Book of the Duchess" on its own, in its own right, as a remarkably subtle psychological exercise that no other 25-year-old in the entire world of the 14th century could have written, an amazing performance that deserves a calm hour of your time.

Penguins on Parade: Victorian Verse!

Some Penguin Classics aren't really classics, no matter how attractively Penguin packages them. This is true of Western canon works mistakenly venerated (Joseph Conrad springs to mind, but oh, there are others), and it's also true of excellent modern volumes prematurely elevated. One such volume is The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse from 1997, edited and introduced by Daniel Karlin. It's an excellent anthology, perhaps even better than the last Victorian verse anthology we discussed here, but as an anthology, it's virtually newborn - it certainly hasn't withstood the tests of time long enough to claim the 'classic' distinction. Whereas there are plenty of poetry anthologies out there that have proven their 'classic' status but still haven't been given (or bought) a spot in the Penguin Classics lineup.

One of those - the first of those? - would surely be The Oxford Book of English Verse in the original Arthur Quiller-Couch edition, and that's actually relevant to our proceedings today, since the Quiller-Couch has got to rank as one of the all-time best Victorian verse anthologies (even though it was intending to be much more than that). Neither the Quiller-Couch nor the far more magisterial Helen Gardner edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse has been honored with a Penguin Classic (understandably enough, since it's a dog-eat-dog world out there in the land of publishing, and I'm the only one daft enough to think being a Penguin Classic should be a privilege other publishers would surrender copyrights to achieve), but here this Karlin concoction has my second-favorite colophon.

He's certainly done everything he can to earn it. His Introduction is a gem of learning and wit, and the highlight of it is his offer of a mock-amalgam of all Victorian verse and its typical crutches. This is hilarious stuff:

The purple shades of evening

Flit o'er the Angel child

Whose woeful mother's weeping

Resounds across the wild.

He joined the gallant Navy

And found a watery grave.

Ah, better far than being

An orphan factory slave!

Or worse, in evil city

A village lass to sink

And fall a prey to Mammon

And bestial vice, and drink.

She hears the thrush's singing

And cooing of the dove

And blesses the dispenser

Of goodness, peace, and love.

So back she goes contented

Towards her humble home

And curtseys to the Parson

Who's on his way to Rome.

And as the Squire passes

Like Lancelot of yore

She shrieks, swoons and expires

And is never heard of more.

And one of the strangest and most daring noteworthy things about his anthology is how much room he gives not to the expected greats of the period but to much lesser-known (today, anyway) poets who come perilously close to echoing that deadly parody - like Eugene Lee-Hamilton and "A Snail's Derby":

 Once, in this Tuscan garden, Noon's huge ball

So slowly crossed the sky above my head,

As I lay idle on my dull wheeled bed,

That, sick of Day's inexorable crawl,

I set some snails a-racing on the wall -

With their striped shells upon their backs, instead

Of motley jackets - black, white, yellow, red;

And watched them till the twilight's tardy fall.

And such my life, as years go one by one:

A garden where I lie beyond the flowers,

And where the snails outrace the creeping sun.

For me there are no pinions to the hours;

Compared with them, the snails like racers run:

Wait but Death's night; and, lo, the great ball lowers.

Of course, the bulk of the book is indeed commandeered by those great expected names. There's plenty here from Wordsworth, the Brownings, the Brontes, and Christina Rossetti, as well as generous selections from the greatest of all Victorian poets, Lord Tennyson, almost always pitched at his most fervid:

 

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro' the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look'd down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

'The curse is come upon me,' cried

The Lady of Shalott

Keen-eyed readers will know at once why I chose that particular verse - yes, because "The Lady of Shalott" is the subject of this anthology's opulent cover-illustration, a painting of the same name by the great William Holman Hunt, whose "The Awakening Conscience" may be the single dumbest pre-modern painting ever created (for sheer stupidity, it can't compete with blank white canvases hung in galleries and called art, but then, what can?). "The Lady of Shalott" gives a much more accurate demonstration of this artist's wonderful talent, even if you might not be able to make that out from the battered, much-reinforced cover of my paperback.

If you're at all a fan of poetry, your own copy of The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse will quickly become equally dog-eared. It's that good.

 

Poetry Anthologies!

I could hardly let National Poetry Month come to a close without paying some kind of tribute to the main venue where most readers encounter poetry, now could I? Once, ages ago, that venue would have been the bard in the hall, the singer on the portico, but for most readers since Gutenberg, the main place where they encounter poetry is in books - and not just any books, but poetry anthologies. Poet jostling against poet, centuries eliding into centuries, styles and movements recklessly colliding with their polar opposites. Most readers out there first read poetry in just such heterogeneous company ... it was only later, as a mature-feeling act of adulthood, that some of them began buying entire books of poetry written by only one person.

Since the poetry anthology is perfectly adapted to pedagogy, they proliferate in schools, and this forces us to specify our terms. In terms of sheer numbers in print and sheer numbers of eyeballs that have scanned its pages, by far the most important poetry anthology of all time is the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the various incarnations of which have been mainstays in schools for three or four generations. But there are two kinds of poetry anthologies: the itemized tour and the personal statement. The Norton Anthologies are very much the former - they have to be, if they're going to work in classrooms. And while I don't discount the viral vitality of all literature (you can get infected regardless of the vector), I'm concentrating today on the other kind of poetry anthology, the personal statement. These are usually no less scholarly, and in their hearts they'd certainly like to be as impartially inclusive ... but they're not boardroom-generated, so they end up being as much reflections of their creators as they are reflections of the state of the art when they're made.

The ground-breakers in (more or less!) modern times were Palgrave's Golden Treasury and Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Verse ... and the main thing we notice about their original versions today is how narrow and parochial they seem, how limiting their personal statements are. We know there's a bigger verse-world out there than all those syrupy pastorals, but you certainly can't tell that from the neat and well-tended confines of the volumes themselves. I've got three very different - one can't help but think "better" volumes in mind.

The first is one that might actually compete with the Norton Anthology for academic sales: Hayden Carruth's hugely popular 1970 book The Voice That Is Great Within Us. There was a time when I could walk into the ramshackle apartment of any young poet and find a dog-eared copy of this book with its signature white cover. Carruth was a rotten poet himself, but with the overseeing of this particular volume, he hit a fascinating balance - like all the best 'personal statement' poetry anthologies, this one can be very pleasurably read from front to back like a novel, rather than picked and pecked through. Although I'll peck for you now, since I'd like to share one poem I love from each of the three anthologies mentioned here. From Carruth's book it's got to be Countee Cullen's quick ditty "Incident":

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

The most august of the three volumes I'm writing about today - indeed, quite possibly the most august poetry anthology in English - is Helen Gardner's mighty successor to the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse. I prefer the Gardner even to its own successor, since that later version seems to me to be an Oxford Book that's finally more concerned with what it's not leaving out than with what it's including, if you follow the distinction. Any personal statement that even so much as acknowledges consensus is irredeemably craven, which is why I prefer the magisterial perfection of Gardner's version. Here are all the greatest names of English poetry, to an absolutely remarkable degree unmixed with baser matter, and here, unapologetically, are all the greatest poems by those great names, one after another in an astounding, uplifting fusillade. I'll again pick only one, well-known and well-loved by me: Tennyson's "Ulysses," which starts like this:

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

And that ends, wonderfully, like this:

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me -

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And naturally, in any post like this, we must come at last to simple personal favorites, and I have one: the magnificent 1998 soup-to-nuts update of Mark Van Doren's Anthology of World Poetry, this one edited by Katharine Washburn and John Major and full of 1300 pages of endless variety and wonder. Where the Gardner volume has one immortal standard after another, this volume is a steady stream of surprises, whole worlds of the unexpected on every page. It's broken down roughly chronologically and sprawls across the whole of recorded human history - African chants, Elizabethan madrigals, Chinese miniatures, Beat imponderables. This is my single favorite poetry anthology, the book I would hand to somebody if they stood next to me in the Poetry section of the Brattle and asked me "What one book should I get?" In part this is due to the elastic range of the contents, because more than anything poetry should be about not letting our aesthetics calcify - but mainly due to the sheer beauty of so much of what's in here. I could pick a dozen examples instantly, but I'll stick to just one: a very loose adaptation of Horace by J. D. McClatchy, a poem called "Late Night Ode" that I've loved for long enough so that some of its terms are already outdated (CNN, beepers...):

It's over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,

Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,

The piles and the boggy prostate, the crooked penis,

The sour taste of each day's first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling

A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,

Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark

along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good's my cut-glass conversation now,

Now I'm so effortlessly vulgar and sad?

You get from life what you can shake from it?

for me, it's g and t's all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level

At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,

Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,

And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There's your hound from heaven, with buccaneer

Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.

His answering machine always has room for one more

Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I've laughed so hard the tears

won't stop. Look at me now. Why now?

I long ago gave up pretending to believe

Anyone's memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? and why do I dream

Almost every night of holding you again,

Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,

Through the bruised unbalanced waves.

I can't recommend World Poetry eagerly enough - if you ever find a copy, snatch it up. And if you should have the option to spend a few warmly drunken nights exchanging favorite finds with a beautiful young poet, don't hesitate to do that too. It definitely adds to the experience.

The Collected Poetry of Thom Gunn!

Our book today is 1994's The Collected Poems of Thom Gunn, who was born in England and followed his lover to California at the height of the drug-soaked 'counter-culture' movement then cresting there. He dove into that movement with the same studied abandon he released on all the things that interested him, becoming at once its warden and its bard.

At Trinity College he'd absorbed phenomenal amounts of information and spent countless hours straining his way through what he called 'a thicket of forms.' He learned the names and measures of all poetic styles; he learned their limitations and their freedoms; he learned how to do them all, and how to make them do his bidding. In short, he learned what virtually no poets writing today bother to learn: the craft of poetry. Poets - especially young poets - today conceive of the status of 'poet' as something inborn, something cellular that they only need to proclaim in order to brandish. They call themselves 'poets' with the lazy arrogance endemic to work-shirkers, and they scurry from ill-lit reading to ill-lit reading with the bitter collegiality of people who've decided that as bad as 'the scene' is, it sure beats sitting down and studying quatrains. In the tangle of this misperception, "I'm a poet" is tortured into synonymity with sloth, or even disfunction. "I'm a poet" becomes the reason why "I don't write well," or even why "I don't write at all." Show me a 'poet' under the age of 25 today, and I'll show you someone who couldn't pick a sestina out of a police lineup and who thinks quintain is the crusty old shark-killer in "Jaws." And worse: if you confront them with this ignorance, you won't get shame - you'll get a sneer: "I'm a poet - I don't bother with those things."

In the bright new light of a paradise state, Thom Gunn explored all the loose verse-styles making the rounds, and I read all the results (because this is one of the 20th century's greatest poets) with interest and often pleasure, not because I like those looser styles but because I knew that with him they weren't the results of mere cowardice - only genuine craft has the right to abandon itself: poets who don't want to be charlatans learn poetry before they start crapping around with it.

Gunn paid his discipline the honor of knowing it in every quirk and detail, and his "Collected Poems" spans his whole working career, from his earliest volumes like Fighting Terms and My Sad Captains to the late masterworks he created when his fierce talents and fierce heart was confronted with the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

These styles and moods range from the urbanities of Catullus in "A Map of the City":

I stand upon a hill and see

A luminous country under me,

Through which at two the drunk must weave;

The transient's pause, the sailor's leave.

I notice, looking down the hill,

Arms braced upon a window sill;

And on the web of fire escapes

Move the potential, the grey shapes.

I hold the city here, complete:

And every shape defined by light

Is mine, or corresponds to mine,

Some flickering or some steady shine.

This map is ground of my delight.

Between the limits, night by night,

I watch a malady's advance,

I recognize my love of chance.

By the recurrent lights I see

Endless potentiality,

The crowded, broken, and unfinished!

I would not have the risk diminished.

To the deceptively delicate miniature-work of Basho, as in "Considering the Snail":

The snail pushes through a green

night, for the grass is heavy

with water and meets over

the bright path he makes, where rain

has darkened the earth's dark. He

moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring

as he hunts. I cannot tell

what power is at work, drenched there

with purpose, knowing nothing.

What is a snail's fury? All

I think is that it later

I parted the blades above

the tunnel and saw the thin

trail of broken white across

litter, I would never have

imagined the slow passion

to that deliberate process.

And all of it sadly culminates in the grey angers of his greatest book, The Man with Night Sweats, including what is for me one of the most true and agonized renditions of the sheer haplessness of surviving a loved one's death, here at the close of the poem "Lament":

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense

Of being ejected with some violence

From vigil in a white and distant spot

Where I was numb, into this garden plot

Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

I was delivered into time again.

- The variations that I live among

Where your long body too used to belong

And where the still bush is minutely active.

You never thought your body was attractive,

Though others did, and yet you trusted it

And must have loved its fickleness a bit

Since it was yours and gave you what it could,

Till near the end it let you down for good,

Its blood hospitable to those guests who

Took over by betraying it into

The greatest of its inconsistencies

This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.

Thom Gunn was a resolute explorer. He sought out drugs to learn their gifts (of course they addicted him in the end), he sought out all conversations, always, to learn their speakers, he disdained no 'pop culture' until he'd searched it for both strengths and bankruptcies, and while it's true that his open-mindedness stopped tragically short of appreciating the Legion of Super-Heroes ("there's just too many of them!"), it had few other limits. And his talent, strong and resourceful to the end, met the catastrophe of its age with the only weapons at its disposal. And they were enough.

The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick!

Our book today is the 1968 Norton printing of J. Max Patrick's 1963 edition of the complete poetry of Robert Herrick, if that isn't too derivational for you. Patrick's volume is a no-nonsense scholarly affair, the kind of thing that features very few concessions to the educated layman who has always been Norton's key audience. The notes are extensive but often recondite, although they wouldn't have seen themselves as such back fifty years ago. Herrick was steeped in the Greek and Roman classics in the very best way somebody can be: he loved them, he absorbed them through his very reading pores, and he breathed their air when he was singing his songs and composing his verse. Some critics have complained that his verses smell of the lamp, that he's at times merely showing off his pithy allusivity. I disagree: it's not the quotation-hunting fug of the study that fills his verses but instead the quiet joy of the reading-chair, the side-table crowded with much-read and much-beloved volumes, the marvellous feeling that classical world gives of being an actual place, a retreat into sanity from the chaotic modern world.

Herrick certainly knew his fair share of that chaos, although he devoted quite a bit of energy to avoiding it. He was born in London in 1591 to a prosperous goldsmith and banker who the following year died in a fall from one of his house's high windows. Suicide was suspected, and if it had been proven, the family would have lost everything. Herrick's mother - a thoroughly remarkable woman named Julian Stone - called in every favor she could think of and fought to prove accidental death ... and eventually she succeeded. The result was that young Robert could be apprenticed to his uncle, another prosperous goldsmith, and sent to Cambridge, where he got a B.A. in 1617 and an M.A. in 1620. He was ordained deacon and priest in 1623 and was the Vicar of Dean Prior in Devon by 1630.

So by age 38 he had a comfortable living (and a small inheritance from his mother when she died), no wife, no children, and no very pressing demands on his time - which was all good news, since he was an incurable reader and writer in the best English clerical tradition. He filled his days, his months, his years with Ovid and Juvenal and Virgil, and it's perhaps no surprise that by 1640 he was in the Stationer's Register as a writer of poems.

In a normal world, Herrick might have expected to go on like that, serenely serving his flock and filling his evenings with writing in his study. But when Cromwell and Parliament took up arms against King Charles I in 1642, the world stopped being normal. Like most people, Herrick kept his head down and hoped the turmoil wouldn't touch him. But if you believe in your bones that the king is the king and your country is taken over by men who believe otherwise, turmoil will find you - and it found Herrick. He was expelled from his vicarage in 1647.

For twelve long years, he was adrift. It happened to countless other men in the England of his time, and it arguably hit hardest the ones just like Herrick - the ones who for whatever reason found it next to impossible to shift with the times. Those twelve years have resisted detailed historical inquiry - probably his relatives supported him for part of it (despite his long apprenticeship to his uncle years before, it's permissible to believe he was never a very good goldsmith, and those contacts need to be scrupulously upkept anyway, not allowed to wither while you write sermons in Devon). It's possible he tried to be optimistic about the unwanted changes in his life, possible he sought a small re-invention of himself. 1648 was the year his big work, the Hesperides, was published, but we have very little historical indication of what that meant to him.

It should mean more to us today than it does. The Hesperides and the Noble Numbers contain a great many wonderful things. Patrick lays both works out alongside various other verses of various lengths, works that were almost certainly written by Herrick, and the resulting volume is probably the closest we'll ever come to a definitive collection of his work. Here we get our poet using all the voices at his command - never a great array, but all fully inhabited. He can quip:

I'll write, because I'll give

You Critics means to live;

For should I not supply

The Cause, th' effect would die.

And he's not afraid to echo the great authors who provided so many happy hours in his study, as in this salutation to his book as it journeys out into the world:

While thou didst keep thy Candor undefil'd,

Deerely I lov'd thee; as my first-borne child:

But when I saw thee wantonly to roame

From house to house, and never stay at home;

I brake my bonds of Love, and bad thee goe,

Regardless whether well thou sped'st, or no.

On with thy fortunes, then, what e'er they be;

If good I'le smile, if bad I'le sigh for Thee.

Or when he offers a pretty - and familiar - little note on a child who's died:

Here she lies, a pretty bud,

Lately made of flesh and blood:

Who, as soone, fell fast asleep,

As her little eyes did peep.

Give her strewings; but not stir

The earth, that lightly covers her.

The Restoration of course changed his stunned and rootless life back into something resembling its old shape: in 1660 he was returned to his vicarage, and there he lived in resumed peace and presumed happiness until 1674 when death took him at a ripe old age (and, we can hope, quickly and quietly, in his study, after a particularly good night of reading). He had to wait a while for critical reception to warm to his work, but there have been some wonderful recent books about him - most especially Floris Delattre's Robert Herrick from 1912 and S. Musgrove's The Universe of Robert Herrick from 1950 - but as always with poets, he epitomizes himself as well as anybody, including during one of his thrice-yearly melodramatic renunciations of his art:

Ile sing no more, nor will I longer write

Of that sweet Lady, or that gallant Knight:

Ile sing no more of Frosts, Snowes, Dews and Showers;

No more of Groves, Meades, Springs, and wreaths of Flowers:

Ile write no more, nor will I tell or sing

Of Cupid, and his wittie coozning:

Ile sing no more of death, or shall the grave

No more my Dirges, and my Trentalls have.

He kept right on singing about all of those things, naturally - probably right up to the end. Poets have very little choice about that, after all.

Penguins on Parade: Wordsworth!

Some Penguin Classics might almost fairly be said to overdo things, and if ever there were such a case, it's the two-volume edition of the poems of William Wordsworth that came out in the Penguin Classics line in 1990. These two volumes, called The Poems: Volume One and The Poems: Volume Two, are edited by John O. Hayden, and each is a brick of over 1000 pages. They run more or less chronologically for the entire ghastly length of time Wordsworth was churning out poetry, and even at their finished length, horrifyingly, they don't represent the whole of the man's catalogue: his epic, "The Prelude," isn't included here, nor are any of the five or six variant editions of that impenetrably dull work. So, believe it or not, the 2045 pages of these two volumes represent only about a working half of the extant verse. It boggles the mind - I don't know of any other Penguin Classic like it. There are many other 'complete poems' volumes, true, but the life's work in those cases is always that of an ordinary poet, not some dodderer caught in the grip of a logorrhoea mania as helpless as it was unsleeping.

In other words, apart from ruefully satisfying that bitter little rump of Wordsworth-fans that has existed in the world since their idol first decided, at age 15, to write a gaseous ode about something that happened to him five minutes ago (and then keep revising it for the next sixty years), there can't really be any good editorial reason for anybody - even Penguin Classics - to publish two volumes containing every single poem Wordsworth ever wrote. It goes beyond being zealous; it's just plain rude.

Nevertheless, here these two fat volumes sit on the shelf, offering the same mildly dyspeptic reprimand they always have to readers who glance at them, consider for half a second finally grappling with all the Wordsworth in the whole world, and then veer off and take a slim volume of Keats to the park. Being Penguin volumes, they're attractively made and beautifully researched. Hayden's end-notes are masterpieces of succinctness, including both his own glosses on Wordsworth's obscurities (a going business, that) and brief relevant extracts from the glosses of those glossers who've glossed before him. Those obscurities most certainly extend to whole poems, as anybody who's ever actually read "The Prelude" can attest. As noted, these two Penguin volumes don't include "The Prelude," but since they include everything else, there are still plenty of examples of poems that might have turned out sharper and more memorable if they'd been in less sententious hands. Think, for instance, how evocative this one might have been if its author hadn't been so hell-bent on thinly-veiled political commentary:

'Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high'

Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high

Travelling where she from time to time enshrouds

Her head, and nothing loth her Majesty

Renounces, till among the scattered clouds

One with its kindling edge declares that soon

Will reappear before the uplifted eye

A Form as bright, as beautiful a moon,

To glide in open prospect through clear sky.

Pity that such a promise e'er should prove

False in the issue, that yon seeming space

Of sky should be in truth the steadfast face

Of a cloud flat and dense, through which must move

(By transit not unlike man's frequent doom)

The Wanderer lost in more determined gloom.

Still, if you write 10,000 verses in your life, you're bound to write some that Steve will like, even if you do so sarcastically or accidentally. No matter how Wordsworth has bored me over the years (ironic, since I worked for a long time in a bookshop bearing his name), there are poems of his I still turn to every National Poetry Month. Two of those poems are intensely predictable of me, but here they are anyway:

'She dwelt among untrodden ways'

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the spring of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

And then there's this one, probably my favorite Wordsworth poem:

The Solitary Reaper

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon Solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands

Of travellers in some shady haunt,

Among Arabian sands:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain

That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending; -

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that those last two poems are frequently anthologized. And come to think of it, they're always included in the various "Selected Poems" Wordsworth volumes Penguin Classics has published over the years. If you take my meaning.

The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse!

Our book today is 1990's  The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse edited by Christopher Hicks, in keeping both with April being National Poetry Month and also with my own ongoing fascination with all things Victorian, which has been true since that little slip of a thing came to the throne and made all the left-hand front-page columns in the Boston papers. Of course, it's a frustrating thing to be fascinated with the Victorian era - more than any other relatively recent time (the ancient Romans surely win for all time), that era has been mischaracterized by subsequent eras, used by them to make points about the present, almost always at the expense of the past. 'Victorian' began appearing in dictionaries as a synonym for 'prissy,' 'moralizing,' and most of all 'repressed' almost before the old queen's corpse was cold, but that was always much more a function of what the Edwardians wanted to believe about themselves than it was ever about the Victorians themselves. Indeed, Victorians who were rude enough to live on into the 'modern' age were always surprised by how new generations described those vanished decades.

To the Victorians, they lived in a young age, one exploding with new and undreamt-of possibilities in science, culture, government - and art. They were far more likely to challenge the past than to venerate it mindlessly. And if they were often maudlin and sentimental, well, before modern societies - especially modern America - criticize them too stridently for that, they might want to look at the books currently topping their own bestseller charts. Any good anthology of Victorian verse will present the reader with an age he never met in school. And Ricks' anthology is quite possibly the best one ever compiled (despite rather too much Arthur Hugh Clough for anybody's well-being).

The fun starts, as it should be so seldom does, with the Introduction (uncredited, but presumably Hicks' own), which bemoans the necessity of all such Introductions and the temptations they provide for the unwary sod called upon to write them:

Then there is the anthologist's temptation to write a review, or at least to see that the reviewers have their work cut out for them; perhaps by covert self-congratulation on the choices and the finds (Remark how unknown are A and B! How hitherto misprized were X and Y!); perhaps, with sheer statistics, by implicit deprecation of the beknighted predecessor.

And further:

The anthologist ought at least not to preclude the chance of being truly surprised, and not just by an unexpected instance of something anticipated; and the trouble with narrowingly circular definitions is that they ensure that the unexpected becomes not only the unlooked-for (and therefore missed) but the uncalled-for (and therefore resisted and resented).

That sense of surprise carries the reader the whole way through this plump volume, even though its A-list roster is as familiar as it is impressive. There's Wordsworth here, and Tennyson, John Clare and both Brownings, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, a clutch of Brontes, all of "Goblin Market," Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, and refreshing amounts of George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson. But there are also plenty of lesser lights, shining all the brighter in this more luminous setting, including Digby Mackworth Dolben (1848-1867), whose little "Song"is about as Victorian as Victorian gets:

The world is young today:

Forget the gods are old,

Forget the years of gold

When all the months were May.

A little flower of Love

Is ours, without a root,

Without the end of fruit,

Yet - take the scent thereof.

There may be hope above,

There may be rest beneath;

We see them not, but Death

Is palpable - and Love.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is here in all his melodic glory, including this favorite bit from "The Garden of Proserpine":

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

And there's the aforementioned Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 - 1861), whose excerpt from Dipsychus isn't as well-known today as it should be:

As I sat in the cafe, I said to myself,

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,

They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,

But I cannot help it, I cannot help thinking

How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!

How pleasant it is to have money.

And of course there's sonorous Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892), without whom any Victorian anthology would be unthinkable. That witty Introduction does right by Tennyson too, correctly telling us that "Tennyson could do things that were entirely beyond the capabilities of Tennyson's apes." Certainly I could go on reading him all day, as in this excerpt from Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream

The ever-silent spaces of the East,

Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Of course, no anthology can be perfect, because we all make our own mental anthologies from all we read. My own favorite Christina Rossetti poem, for instance, isn't in Ricks' volume. But how could I do even so small a Victorian round-up as this without including it? After all, who knows when I'll get another chance?

Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

The New Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse!

Our book today is Alastair Fowler's 1991 New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, and it's as volatile and tremendous a tribute to National Poetry Month as could be imagined. Opinion among those I've quizzed is decidedly mixed as to the merit of even having a National Poetry Month (one poet of my acquaintance summed things up by saying "it can't possibly have any widespread effect other than to further marginalize the most marginalized literature in America"), but that's surely a debate about browbeating the public, not about the worth of poetry itself. And no other period of human history can rival the 'long' 17th century for verse, that glorious epoch from roughly the final years of Queen Elizabeth I to the advent of the Glorious Revolution. As Fowler here reckons that time, it stretches from George Chapman all the way to Alexander Pope, with stops along the way for Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, and Dryden.

There are lots and lots of other names in this updated version of the Oxford classic, including quite a few names that don't deserve to be here. Fowler is typically British in his diffidence:

A representative selection has meant more Drayton; more Cowley and Marvell; more Oldham and Strode; and many more female poets. It has meant including marginal figures such as the waterman Taylor, the alcoholic Brathwait, and the lunatic Carkesse. It has meant, in fact, including some 'subliterary' verse, and some very minor poets. If literature is the nation's memory, forgotten verse may contain things we need to know.

Or it may not. It's hard to imagine what even mercifully brief extracts from the life-outpourings of Emilia Lanier, John Chalkhill, or John Digby, the Earl of Bristol could teach us about much of anything, but if they and their ilk are the price of admission to the rest of this mighty host, you won't hear me complaining.

There's our old friend Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, writing about the cruelties of mankind and meaning, as she so often does, men, in this excerpt from 1653's "The Hunting of the Hare":

As if that God made creatures for man's meat,

And gave them life and sense, for man to eat;

Or else for sport, or recreation's sake,

Destroy those lives that God saw good to make;

Making their stomachs graves, which full they fill

With murthered bodies that in sport they kill.

Yet man doth think himself so gentle, mild,

When of all creatures he's most cruel wild;

And is so proud, thinks only he shall live,

That God a godlike nature did him give,

And that all creatures for his sake alone

Was made for him to tyrannize upon.

And there's Will Davenant, that weak-willed wit and wannabe wastrel who got his start in literary London while serving in the household of our old friend Fulke Greville and who, amidst stacks and stacks of intensely conventional writing, could occasionally produce something puckish and original, like this from 1673:

O Thou that sleepest like pig in straw,

Thou lady dear, arise:

Open, to keep the sun in awe,

Thy pretty pinking eyes;

And having stretched each leg and arm,

Put on your clean white smock,

And then, I pray, to keep you warm,

A petticoat on dock.

Arise, arise! Why should you sleep,

When you have slept enough?

Long since French boys cried 'Chimney-sweep',

And damsels 'Kitchen-stuff'.

The shops were opened long before,

And youngest prentice goes

To lay at his mistress' chamber door

His master's shining shoes.

Arise, arise; your breakfast stays:

Good water gruel warm,

Or sugar sops, which Galen says

With mace will do no harm.

Arise, arise; when you are up,

You'll find more to your cost,

For morning's draught in caudle cup,

Good nutbrown ale and toast.

And what of William Drummond of Hawthornden, the able poet and late-life friend of Ben Jonson? Drummond let a long and very active literary life, but in less inclusive anthologies than this one he might nevertheless get crowded right off the stage - either in favor of demographically advisable nonentities or to make room for more Shakespeare. Not so here, where we can read bittersweet little ditties like this bit fro Madrigal II.i, written in the first decade of the new century:

This life which seems so fair

Is like a bubble blown up in the air

By sporting children's breath,

Who chase it everywhere,

And strive who can most motion it bequeath:

And though it sometime seem of its own might,

Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,

And firm to hover in that empty height,

That only is because it is so light.

But in that pomp it doth not long appear;

For even when most admired, it in a thought,

A swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.

I've praised these wonderful Oxford Books here before, but when it comes to anthologies this wide-ranging and thought-provoking, I don't mind repeating myself. And when I'm delighting in the acuity of Fowler's choices, I don't even mind all the makeweight names he was forced to mix in amongst them.

Poetry Class!

Well, our Nine Lives (of the Poets) is over for now, and so many of you have emailed me that I thought a brief coda was in order. This series got three times the emails most Stevereads posts do - just as the Nine Lives (of the Composers) did last summer, so it's safe to say you can count on seeing more. And several of you have written to, ahem, politely suggest directions that 'more' might take! For what it's worth, I am aware that what was originally intended to be a feature spanning the ages got stuck in the long sixteenth century and just sort of wallowed there ... a slight failing to which I claim only the custom of the country: if we can't indulge ourselves on our own book-blogs, what has Western Civilization achieved, finally? Nevetheless, the lack shall be rectified! Contrary to the impression given this time around, my awareness of poetry extends all the way to the 21st century - and includes both genders - and with any luck, more of that will be expressed next time.

For now, thank you for all the emails, and what better grace-note on which to end our poetry-fest than another instalment of Poetry Class, featuring a work so new the ink is hardly dry on the page! I liked it, so of course I'm hoping you do too:

Very similar, very simile -

a smile, a gesture,  a mark on the air

to wave hello, goodbye, to throw a kiss

across the rainbow distances. "The word love,"

writes syphilitic Paul Gauguin, in his journal in Tahiti,

"I'd like to kick whoever invented it in the teeth."

Gauguin the realist in paradise, painting

cinnamon women in native floral outlines

in real two-dimension, beautiful flat faces.

Then the counterargument: Plato's homely metaphor

of how, in our first life, we were whole,

male and female, but cut in half

by gods no less fearful than Gauguin,

the way we cut eggs in half with a hair,

the eggs hard-boiled, the hair the thread of a tailor.

When is a thing not like another thing,

like the split sweet heart of an apple?

We're so filled with absence,

or as Yeats, after Porphyry, puts it,

the "honey of generation," no wonder we stand

in the street at night, half or wholly drunk, shouting.

That's called "Verisimilitude" and it's by Stanley Plumly, and I found it in the new Atlantic.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Donne!

Our book today - the final instalment in this latest, surprisingly popular "Nine Lives" segment - is John Carey's elegant, humorous, and joyously insightful 1981 book John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. Donne can be about as difficult and abstruse a poet as ever put quill-pen to paper, and one unfortunate result of this has been that most of the books written about him have been at least equally difficult and ever so much less rewardingly abstruse. Born in 1572 to a prosperous London merchant family, Donne was a full-blooded courtier and man of action before he was a Doctor of Divinity, and although he himself came to draw a too-neat distinction between those two halves of his life - begging friends of "Dr. Donne" to forget they ever knew "Jack Donne" - they blended exuberantly in his work, as Carey is quick to point out in his study. He's also quick to locate faith - whether the Catholic faith into which he was born or the Protestant faith to which he converted - at the heart of Donne's story:

The disadvantage of being a Catholic in Elizabethan England are difficult to generalize about. On the one hand, as the careers of Donne's father and stepfather suggest, it was possible, if you were sufficiently circumspect or well-connected, to prosper. On the other hand, you might end up having your intestines torn out.

... and also at the heart of his psychology, by describing the mental aftershocks of growing up on such a knife-edge:

Donne's fastidious withdrawal from the great mass of English people is reflected, too, in the style of his poems. Superior, difficult, designed for circulation among a few kindred spirits, they make no concessions to the barbarous clods and half-wits he had the ill luck to be living among.

But the deepest pleasure of Carey's book comes in the way he continually grapples with this most problematic and rewarding of English poets (who's the subject of one of the single most intellectually thrilling essays Open Letters has ever published, which you can read here). Page after page is filled with happy discoveries:

He handles holy things so as to cauterize himself. Elaborate blasphemies are also incorporated into the love poems, as if it were not merely Catholicism but Christianity that Donne had to cure himself of. When he proclaims that his love can be expressed only by negatives, or compares the naked woman in 'Going to Bed' with 'soules unbodied', he is ingeniously perverting what St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica had written about God's nature and the joys of the blessed.

Carey is also excellent in his poem-by-poem defense of the man's genius. Take for example his comments about 'A Hymne to Christ at the Authors last going into Germany' a poem Donne wrote about accompanying Lord Doncaster on an official embassy from James I to the German princes. After noting that some scholars have criticized Donne's veracity (he was travelling in splendor and relative ease, not roughing it in an open boat), Carey is appropriately tart: "... we have only to read the poem," he tells us, "to see that Donne's self-dramatizing urge has produced something so fraught with power that it would be absurd to demand, in its stead, a more realistic estimate of the risks involved." What's going on here is far deeper:

Donne does not so much falsify as master reality, taking one or two fragments as his stage set, and discarding the rest. All the actual circumstances of the embassy are obliterated. The rich coachloads, and the ambassador to whose suite Donne was a relatively minor appendage, vanish without a trace. We are left with Donne looming tragic and solitary above a vessel which seems on the point of disappearing as well. ... The struggle between the ambitious careerist and the lofty scorner of the world's rewards is, in this poem, quite naked.

As in so much of Donne's verse, no matter how clear the ultimate victory in such a struggle might be, there's a pausing, darker note of ambiguity pulling at the strings of its pattern:

In what torne ship soever I embarke,

That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;

What sea soever swallow me, that flood

Shall be to mee an embleme of thy blood;

Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise

Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,

Which, though they turn away sometimes,

They never will despise.

Seale then this bill of my Divorce to All

On whom those fainter beames of love did fall;

Marry those loves, which in youth scattered bee

On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.

Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:

To see God only, I goe out of sight:

And to scape stormy dayes, I chuse

An everlasting light.

Many straightforward biographies of Donne have been written (some more effective than others, as I've had occasion to learn over and over again), but to my mind, the best kind of such work will be something like what Carey does here, an aesthetic study that grounds itself in life-details, rather than a life-study that occasionally indulges in aesthetic digressions. Carey's approach works best in the end because that's the kind of life John Donne chose for himself in the end. It's certainly the only kind of life of himself he'd have been interested in reading - and it'll interest you too, without fail, so find a copy (mine, as you can see, is already spoken for).

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Jonson!

Our book today is Marchette Chute's warm and winning 1960 biography Ben Jonson of Westminster (which she dedicates, the dear thing, to the New York Public Library). Chute did similar books on Chaucer and Shakespeare, but her Jonson book is my favorite - and I'd be willing to bet it was her favorite too. Sometimes you can just tell from the spirited tenor of the writing that an author is enjoying herself especially well.

Certainly Jonson's life lends itself to that kind of enjoyment. Here is a man in full: he's not a ghost like Shakespeare, nor is he merely a few fugitive mentions in his own verses like Pindar. We cannot suspect him of being a suave court fop like Sidney, and he certainly couldn't possibly have been the thwarted sad-sack we wonder if Spenser was. Instead, he's everything rolled together that they separately were not: family man, branded felon, industrious man-of-work, fierce entrepreneur, and indomitable survivor.

Chute is alive to all these different sides of her subject, and one of the many charms of her book is how that very liveliness of her narrative spills over to include virtually every larger-than-life character she encounters - and almost all of them draw into some kind of parallel with Jonson, whom she clearly likes more than the rest of them put together:

Among Jonson's many acquaintances in London was Sir Walter Raleigh. It was almost inevitable that the two men should know each other, since Raleigh was not only a scholar and an omnivorous reader but was currently engaged on a book of so monumental a nature that he welcomed the assistance of every man of letters who knew anything about the subject.

Raleigh, like Jonson, was incapable of admitting defeat. He was not in his fifties and had been a prisoner in the Tower since 1603 on a charge of conspiracy. But he refused to admit that his mind could be in prison, and it would seem quite reasonable to him to embark on a history of the world, beginning with the Creation and continuing down through the ages.

Her admiration isn't blind, however: she's perfectly willing to relate Jonson's bad moods, enormous errors in judgement, and even the rare occasional critical slip-up:

Donne was one of the few writers for whom Jonson had a profound admiration. He regretted the obscurity of Donne's style, which he feared would make him unreadable in future generations, and he deplored his experimentation with rhythm. But he considered him "the first poet in the world in some things" and in spite of Jonson's independence as a writer he paid Donne the complement of sending him hi own work for criticism.

And what of that most famous of Jonson's contemporaries, that demm'd elusive Bard of Avon? Chute, obviously a first-rank Shakespeare fan, finds a way to like them both almost equally:

Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson could not accept things as they were and settle down to write for ordinary people. His theoretical temperament demanded an audience consisting of select and dedicated spirits, and of course he never found them. Instead, he did most of his work for a stupid, self-indulgent and greedy Court, and searched earnestly for the great men he felt must be in it somewhere.

The Ben Jonson who emerges from these pages is a big, three-dimensional person, a warm, living man of infinite contradictions and the unfailing willingness to confront those contradictions in his own verses, which ring with more plains-spoken truth than almost any other poetry I know of, partly because the author has no qualms about his own mutability:

Let me be what I am, as Vergil cold,

As Horace fat, or as Anacreon old ....

Who shall forbid me then in rime to be

As light and active as the youngest he?

In these benighted days, Marchette Chute's trio of popular biographies may well be out of print, but even so, I urge you to find and read them all - especially since all three subjects have now had the Stevereads seal of approval!

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Sidney!

Our book today was written quite some time ago: it's Fulke Greville's biographical sketch of his friend Philip Sidney. As every English major in the Western world once knew, Sidney died while fighting Spanish forces in the Netherlands in 1586 ("thy need is yet greater than mine" he reportedly told a fellow wounded man, handing him his water canteen) at the age of 32. Fulke Greville, his devoted friend since childhood ("Fulke Greville is a good boy" the boy Sidney scrawled in one of his friend's schoolroom copy-books), probably wrote his The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney around 1611 or 1612. On 1 September 1628, Greville - Lord Brooke by then, and fairly wealthy from a lifetime spent at court - was stabbed in the back by his servant, Ralph Haywood (who then killed himself), allegedly because Haywood was irritated that Greville hadn't mentioned him in his will. In 1652, Greville's Life of Sidney was finally printed.

Unlike the case of poor Spenser, the ensuing centuries have seen many, many excellent biographies of Sidney - they could hardly resist such a tempting subject, now could they? Sidney was everything a young courtier should be - well-educated, widely-travelled, well-spoken, much-respected, only picturesquely reckless, personally brave, artistically gifted, and physically beautiful. His father, Henry Sidney, had been much the same - plain-spoken, handsome in his youth, non-ostentatiously honest and as sharp as a well-wrought weathervane. Henry Sidney did much that deserves censure while pursuing the Tudor oppression of Ireland, but it was also he who held the shivering, pain-wracked Edward VI in his arms in the last hour of his life and, his rough lips touching the boy's brow, whispered "Rest now, dearest one; fine to rest now" - greater comfort than which no servant has ever given a king. Henry's son Philip never got a chance to grow into the hale middle-aged statesman and writer he would have become - but he dazzled all the same, dazzled like the sun for the time he had.

Greville was as dazzled as the rest, and his portrait of Sidney - an intensely, almost joyfully strange little book, as passionate and distractible as its author - unapologetically displays that fact:

Indeed he was a true model of Worth; a man fit for Conquest, Plantation, Reformation, or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest among men: Withall, such a lover of Mankind, and Goodness, and that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power ...

Perhaps some readers will take these tones of outright worship, link them with that business of old Lord Brooke being stabbed to death in a fit of pique by a manservant, perhaps mix in the many happy, laughing, sweaty days when Greville would join Sidney and the other lusty courtiers of Elizabeth's court in elaborate jousts and contests and pantomimes, and derive a picture, a reality, that has familiar names and taxonomies here in the 21st century. In the Elizabethan Age, open and strenuous protestations of friendship between men was the highest fashion, so such a picture might be too presumptuous - or too easy. Safer just to say Greville was completely devoted to his handsome friend - and that he received in return the passionate reciprocation Sidney (the son, just like the father) gave to everybody he found worthy. Certainly Greville could never really believe in a world where Sidney was so abruptly taken away - like most of Sidney's friends, he more or less refused to live in that world. "For my own part," he writes, "I observed, honoured, and loved him so much; as with what caution soever I have passed through my days hitherto among the living, yet in him I challenge a kind of freedom even among the dead."

At one point while his brief biography is thumping along, Greville pauses for the most unaffectedly touching line in his whole book. He's relating some anecdote from long ago when he stops and admits, "Besides, I do ingenuously confess, that it delights me to keep company with him, even after death."

Although he himself assesses Sidney's work with a severity of judgement we might not expect of an acolyte (to be fair, Sidney himself set the example in this, referring but casually to the ultimate worth of any of his own works), Greville has nothing but offhand scorn for those uncomprehending readers - "our four-eyed Criticks" - who might come along later. And come along they did, in their legions! They annotated his works, wrote his many biographies - and annotated Greville's biography. Our particular version of that biography today is the 1906 edition by Nowell Smith, whose work is superb - and whose assessment of the four-eyed Critick who came before him, Dr. Grossart, thunders with Edwardian excess:

Lovers of literature, who happen to have scholarly instincts and training, can never speak of enthusiastic antiquaries like Dr. Grossart without compunction. On the one hand they admire the generous expenditure of time and money which Dr. Grossart gave to his many 'labours of love.' On the other hand they can only look aghast at on the mass of inaccurate statements and worthless judgements which swell the undigested bulk of his editions. The gratitude which they are anxious to feel as they enter into the fruits of his labour is thwarted by the double labour which they have to expend in correcting his mistakes and verifying the rest of his statements.

As mentioned, many, many worthy biographies have appeared since this one. In recent years, the scholarly volume by Alan Stewart and the lively one by Katherine Duncan-Jones stand out as equally good and pleasantly different from each other, for instance. But there's something about Greville's haphazard devotion and lovable garrulity that take the palm for charm even in their fallibility. There's devotion here, as might be expected of a man who ordered that his grave's inscription read: "Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, conceller to King James, friend to Sir Philip Sidney."

No real doubt which of those he considered the greatest honor.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Chaucer!

[caption id="attachment_2405" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="not my copy - a lovely image I found online"][/caption]

Our book today is John Gardner's 1977 The Life and Times of Chaucer, the savory, spirited foray into biography by an author I consider to be one of the 20th century's greatest American novelists. Gardner is currently languishing in obscurity (except for Grendel, one of the only novels he wrote that's short enough to appeal to high school students and their teachers, and also a book fortuitously positioned to complement any teaching of 'Beowulf'), and that's a shame - he's responsible for one of the strongest and most interesting bodies of work in contemporary letters. In addition to his novels - each one of which received lavish, even obsessive, amounts of care and attention before it was even sent to the author's little coterie of 'first readers' - and which all contain more erudition, allusions, and just plain fooling around than are ever likely to be fully annotated - he also wrote lots of nonfiction. He wrote copious book reviews on deadline for ready money, and although he used to comment that his reviews were all raw reactions, not really considered assessments, a reading of the pieces in question (not so easy a thing to do, considering that they've never been collected in a book) disproves such modesty. He wrote longer essays and 'think pieces' for the those journals willing to wait for them. He wrote two great, rabble-rousing books on the art and craft of writing books (he held the view - unfashionable when he wrote it forty years ago and utterly unspeakable now - that novels should do more than wallow in knee-jerk cynicism and trenchcoat pornography, that they should attempt to grapple with ideas and ideals, most of all that they should aspire). He wrote an epic poem, God bless him. And he wrote this life of his beloved Chaucer.

And it caused a brief, forgotten controversy. A thoughtful writer caught many echoes in The Life and Times of Chaucer - echoes of earlier lives of the poet, echoes of earlier histories of the period, and that thoughtful writer made some diplomatic comments about fast-looming deadlines and inattentive line-editing. Then a few months later a thoughtless writer took those echoes and ran with them - making accusations of full-blown plagiarism, stopping just short of demanding the author's head on a pike outside the Tower of London, preferably with his face turned away from the direction of Iowa City.

Since there was nothing substantial in the accusations, nothing substantial came of them - Gardner's life of Chaucer has been reprinted a few times since it first appeared, and perhaps the full details of the incident will come to light when the first full-length scholarly biography of the man is finally written (a major publisher doing a pretty reprint-set of all his works would certainly go a long way toward reviving interest in that long-dormant biography). And in the meantime, the work defends itself.

This was never going to be a customary scholarly biography, as Gardner himself confesses at every opportunity throughout the book. But neither is it an unanchored flight of fantasy - a lifetime of reading and teaching Chaucer tilled the ground for this text, and several intensive months of research put solid bones underneath its flesh.

But this is still a novelist writing biography, and it shows, wonderfully. At every stage of Chaucer's life and times, Gardner dutifully lays out the facts as we know them (in pre-Internet days, 20 well-chosen books in your study would give you all those facts; what you subsequently did with them was up to you) - but then he's always compelled to sniff around those facts for the stories at which they sometimes only hint. He has that compulsion in common with other novelists turned 'amateur' historians (Louis Auchincloss' book on the court of Queen Victoria comes to mind, as does Nancy Mitford's book on Frederick the Great), and many a professional, accredited historian has profited from imitating it. It's an impulse as old as Herodotus, and it does Gardner a lot of credit even when he's enlisting it in the causes of some very, very bad people. His novels are full of sympathy for seedy underdogs, and that misguided humanity creeps into his biography as well, as when he tries his best to like Edward III's lying, thieving, thoroughly evil son Prince Lionel, one of the worst oppressors of Ireland in that island's oft-oppressed history:

When Chaucer first knew him, Prince Lionel had not yet left for Ireland. He was a mother's boy, certainly, though not necessarily in an ugly sense. He had no overwhelming love of athletics, but he was proud of his older brother, the Black Prince (King Edward's family, even in times of disagreement, was close), and in many respects Prince Lionel aped his elder brother: the extravagant dress, the arrogance, the flirtations, Lionel was shy, more comfortable with his mother and her intellectual friends than with his heroic father - more sure of his ground when talking about poetry or painting than when talking about war. He was a depressive, an evader. He ate too much, drank too much, avoided responsibility by humor or deep glooms. What Chaucer thought of him is impossible to say, except for this: he was loyal to King Edward's family all his life, as they were, for the most part, to each other (as all the chronicles remark). Whether or not Chaucer liked Prince Lionel, the problem is that like Queen Philippa, he could easily excuse him.

Likewise he does his best to exercise a novelist's power of understanding (in all of 20th century American fiction, I don't think there's a more understanding writer than Gardner - he used to sit in his chair and work at just that faculty, until it was as sharp as a paring knife) when trying to explain the phenomenon of Alice Perrers, the buck-toothed, stringy-haired, monstrously selfish, utterly deplorable mistress who played Grima Wormtongue to Edward's Theoden for the last decade of his life. Gardner isn't so chivalrous that he can make himself ignore what a miserable blot on humanity she was, but he can't help himself - he can't let it go at that:

And in any case, her freedom was limited: she loved her husband, as royal mistresses seem frequently to have done; yet, as any medieval subject should have done, she returned the king's love and did everything in her power to make him happy. To Chaucer, in short, she was a study for art - a brilliantly entertaining wit, a good, gentle woman, a thief, a harlot; she was, as a child of the poet's own merchant class, an astonishing success, and at the same time a woman dissatisfied, as firmly locked out of the aristocracy as Chaucer was himself - a kind of pet, a failure. Chaucer watched, forgiving and fascinated, hands behind his back, prepared to trade lightning fast puns with Dame Alice, discuss biblical exegesis or astronomy or, if she liked, perform some recent poem for the dazzling company she'd assembled for King Edward's amusement.

And his book is balanced with equally great pen-portraits of good people too - of course most of all our good poet, who rose to prominence in Edward's court, conducted a busy life of official duties, and forced himself, in long sleepless hours late at night, to bequeath to posterity some of the finest, most enjoyable poetry in the English language. Like Horace (but unlike Shakespeare and Milton, the two titans who were to follow), Chaucer thinks it natural to give his readers plenty of himself the man mixed in with his verses - we read him and see him, pouring over his books by the late-night taper, hurrying to appointments with the mighty, slyly provoking the laughter of powerful ladies at court. This portrait of Chaucer - a portrait as far beyond scurrying accusations of factual plagiarism as Heaven is beyond the reach of a cathedral spire - is Gardner's great gift to his readers, and it culminates in his singing final paragraph, a little gem of prose I'm fond of quoting:

When he finished he handed the quill to Lewis. He could see the boy's features clearly now, could see everything clearly, his "whole soul in his eyes" - another line out of some old poem, he thought sadly, and then, ironically, more sadly yet, "Farewell my bok and my devocioun!" Then in panic he realized, but only for an instant, that he was dead, falling violently toward Christ.

I long for the day when I'll read those words in a nice hefty Library of America volume - perhaps one

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big volume for nonfiction, one big volume for the longer, major novels (and that epic poem), and one big volume for Grendel and the two writing-books. Maybe one day I'll see that volume - after all, Philip Roth's juvenilia has got to run out eventually, right?

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Pindar!

Our book today is Anne Pippin Burnett's 2008 entry in the great Bristol Classical Press "Ancients in Action" series, Pindar. As might be guessed, the book deals with the Theban poet Pindar, who achieved massive success in the first half of the 5th century BC. A great many books have been written about Pindar, and as Burnett points out, a great many verdicts about Pindar have been handed down by scholars, historians, and especially other poets. He's always been more discussed than known, due at least in part to how difficult it is to know him.

Part of the problem is that we know so little about him. In the centuries since his heyday, biographical accretions have crusted around his name, but very few actual facts have come down to us, and most of those can only be derived from his verses themselves (always a perilous attempt). We know he was a master of virtually every kind of public poetry in existence in his day. His fame eventually reached a point where commissions were coming in from all directions, from Thessaly and North Africa and Sicily and all of Greece. He wrote great choral odes for public occasions like temple dedications; he wrote virginal hymns designed for virtuoso solo vocals; he wrote laments, in which pure, non-bathetic sadness was wrought like fine-spun gold until the purity of it was almost unbearable; he wrote lover-songs, praise-works often done in multiple, mutually complexifying voices ... he had, in other words, a vast repertoire of work, much of it designed to encourage improvisation, much of it as polychromatic as jazz.

He also wrote hymns of praise for victorious athletes - for boys back from local or inter-city games, for men back from pan-Hellenic great games and festivals, for various rulers, celebrating their rules by holding a mirror to some corresponding physical glories. These would have been works for hire, as Burnett takes pains to make clear:

Every Pindaric ode was a bought product. Distinguished achievements were paid a 'wage' of praise, and he who made that praise likewise received a wage, as Pindar was more than willing to note. One group of singers suggested that their Muse's 'whispering songs, faces painted with silver', went out as prostitutes into the world where 'money makes the man' (Isthmian 2.6-11.) This was said in an ode made for an old acquaintance from Akragas ... who presumably delighted in the savoury metaphor, but the sense is generally applicable, for the victory performance was designed to provide a client with exactly the pleasures he wanted.

It's permissible to suspect that bought products may not have elicited the poet's highest and mightiest achievements; any study of Pindar must in part be a longing to have more of his work than we do. What were those other kinds of poetries like, when handled by this master from Thebes? Barring some miraculous discovery in some dusty basement of some Coptic monastery, we'll never know except in fragments - the vast majority of what we have from him, and about him, comes in the form of these bought products, these written remnants of an institutionalized kind of performance poetry that all subsequent ages have found very strange - alien, off-putting. These victory-odes, most of them, were intended to be performed as if they were extemporized - a group of the victor's young friends, maybe a little flushed with wine, bursting into vivid, rambling song in celebration of him. But how can spontaneity be so carefully planned, so metrically perfect? How can fraternal intimacy be achieved by a group of young hired singers, most of whom will never have clapped eyes on the victor before? It all requires a phenomenal amount of imaginative participation from the audience. Ancient Greek audiences were always willing to do that, but more phlegmatic modern ones seldom are. In a tradition started by Petrarch and so indelibly stamped by Wordsworth, Pindar can't help but seem incredibly odd.

Aristophanes and Horace politely disparaged him; Dryden and Tennyson grudgingly admitted that something poetic was going on in the victory odes but grumbled at the work necessary to unearth it; T. S. Eliot, in one of the 20th century's most noted instances of a pot calling a kettle black, called him "the prize wind-bag of all ages." We sense his consummate skill, but it's such a foreign skill we're often left, as Dryden put it, "at a gaze." It can lead to wayward interpretations, and throughout her slim book, Burnett does what she can to correct the ones she catches, as when she runs up against a common misreading of the 7th Nemean ode, in which an invocation of Achilles' lethal warrior-son Neoptolemus crops up at the conclusion of a victory-song to a young athlete named Sogenes:

Ignoring the magnificence of the hero's final resting place, critics of the present day see this episode as a deliberate outrage that Pindar has wrought, for one reason or another, upon his own victory song. Neoptolemos, they say, was the Greeks' first great war-criminal, guilty of sacrilegious cruelty at the fall of Troy, and justly punished for his atrocities by the god Apollo. Consequently he can have no function in the praise of young Sogenes, and must appear here because the poet is pursuing some misplaced purpose of his own. This view, however, while it honours the gossip of Hellenic scholars, forgets the perfect warrior and ideal son that Odysseus describes in the Odyssey (11.505-37). What is worse, it further ignores the dynamic of Pindar's actual song and also the fact that, to be preserved, the piece must have pleased Thearion, the host and father who set this performance before his friends for their entertainment.

We will likely never read anything close to the full range of this poet, and we're equally unlikely to come across any firmer biographical basis than we already have. What we have instead is perhaps more pure: the man's work, and dynamic examinations of that work by scholars like Burnett, who chooses to use a prose style that's direct and evocative:

A layer of the population not only admired, but also scrutinised itself through private rituals of this sort, saying, this is what we are - let us continue to be so! Such was the function of the traditional ode with its invocations, its lists of victory locations, its revival of ancestral achievements, its prayers, and its bits of gnomic wisdom sprinkled everywhere like salt.

There's gnomic wisdom aplenty in this book as well, as fine an introduction to this enigmatic poet as a modern reader can hope for. Granted, an almost totally unknown life is an off-kilter place to start a string of biographies, but there's an appeal, too, in taking a person on the strength of his work alone. We've been doing that with Homer even longer than we've been doing it with Pindar, and it hasn't hurt him any.