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Poetry and Freedom
- Discoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Anthem Press
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020
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This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of poetic freedom. The range is broad, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Revealing questions about the elusiveness of poetic freedom–what does the term actually mean?–are repeatedly tested against the accomplishments of major poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Dante and Virgil, and their public yet intensely private originality. The result is a fresh, and well-nigh revolutionary, way of seeing literary and modern history, or an initiation into the more striking gift of aesthetic freedom.
19 - Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 131-134
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Summary
William Stafford began his career as a poet on an unpopular note. He concluded his public life with an unlikely act of independence. During the Second World War, he announced that he was a conscientious objector. It was not then as fashionable to protest against mass violence as it later became during the Vietnam War. Stafford spent four years in an internment camp. This experience reinforced his pacifist convictions, together with his innate rebelliousness against establishments and governments. Nearly five decades after his confinement and postwar release, in 1989, when he had won accolades enough to be appointed Oregon's poet laureate, he announced that he would resign the position. Few poets, one may imagine, would have done anything like that, but Stafford felt uncomfortable with the idea of poets as government officials. “I’ll just keep on writing,” he said, “get it published and get it rejected.” Integrity counted more than tax- supported flattery.
What sort of integrity? This question matters, because while other poets might have had no problem with killing America's authoritarian- minded enemies and retaining at least a semblance of ethics, Stafford found any sort of violence morally revolting. Becoming an official poet was barely preferable to braining acts of self- defense. Emerson's individualist- minded muse (though Emerson was no pacifist) sang out in Stafford's best lyrics, and poetic precedents for an opposed, more bellicose view of human affairs made no impression on him. If Homer, Aristophanes and Siegfried Sassoon had taken to the battlefields of earlier wars with reluctant willingness, Stafford could more happily “bow and cross my fork and spoon” in rejection of any sort of murder. His reason, as he puts it in “Objector,” was that he wished “never to kill and call it fate.”
This idea, as moving as it is courageous and irksome (is that what soldiers actually do, call it fate?), contains some deeper ones, which lead into the heart of Stafford's poetry. There is, for instance, his idea of a universal silence, or the darkness of the title of this posthumously published collection (Stafford, who was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914, died in 1993).
13 - Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 105-108
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Summary
Josephine Jacobsen has published five volumes of poems since her first, Let Each Man Remember, in l940. This is her sixth, with selections of previous ones. It maintains her splendid high standards of seriousness, grace and wit, and above all provides the reader with a plateau from which to view the state of the art generally these days. If the excellences here are infrequently matched elsewhere, it may be essential to those of us passionate about poetry to note the differences, between accomplishment and failure, or simply between Jacobsen's fine work and a general failure of most others to think through the grand questions of poetry for this generation. One is instantly struck, for example, by Jacobsen's love of the English language, of its music, precision and wonderful expressiveness. This love is rare enough now. False theories of language are all the rage. The most pernicious of these— it goes by several fashionable names— is that when meanings are unclear, the fault must lie with the syntax and words, with language itself, rather than with the poet or writer, as if one were to berate the violin for the incompetence of the violinist. Other dismal trends also abound. So- called Language poetry, a fetish of the deliberately incoherent, is busy trying to massacre sense, logic and imagination at one fell swoop. The poetry of political propaganda again offers its fumbling self- righteous roars in bars and coffee houses. Nature poetry has staged a fearsome comeback. The pages of innumerable literary journals resound with sentimental anthems to cows and sheep, with arias celebrating the growth of lawns, with solemn hymns to insects and bushes. The cities are largely forgotten. Ordinary humanity is neglected. Hope, cleverness and insight are treated as musty antiques. A number of our better known poets have skittered into inaesthetic cynicism. Burdened with the great “weight” of these paradoxical times, they publish lyrics sweating with self- pity. This useless emotionalism is often accompanied by an abandonment of technique, a rejection of meaning, arbitrary images that lack development and squads of clichés.
There is not one cliché in this volume. Jacobsen presents no facile victories. Her techniques are usually solid. One knows why her lines end where they end, never sensing that the poet simply ran out of breath.
8 - Scaling the Wall
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 65-72
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The Soviet Union, like autocracies since the time of Nero, who burned books and asked that histories be rewritten in his favor, remains a society in which the penalties for the wrong opinions, the wrong words, are often ostracism, torture, imprisonment, exile and execution. Paradoxically, the USSR is a society in which the pen is far mightier than the sword. Leaders rise and fall, achieve the immortality of gods or slip into oblivion, according to the manipulations of an official and venerated state language. Power lurks behind jargon. Slaughter disappears into euphemism. Wickedness skulks behind the vocabulary of a sacred theory of history and economics. Ordinary words assume extraordinary meanings. “Democracy” means “oligarchy.” “Mental hospital” means “prison for political dissenters.” “Freedom” means “conformity.” The authors of this book, themselves ex- Soviet correspondents for Izvestia who were forced to flee their country for expressing “dangerous” opinions, have written a valuable report that amounts to a background intelligence analysis of how the Kremlin actually functions.
From the point of view of Kremlin politics, therefore, their book has real value. Much of what they have to say— about the machinations of members of the Politburo and its Machiavellian inner struggles— will be new to readers in the West, is presently unavailable to their countrymen and was smuggled out as prohibited and secretly gathered information. These chapters thus become a lens through which to look at recent developments, such as glasnost and perestroika, and by which to sight the terrain for appropriate Western responses. Intelligence analysts may wish to take heed.
The facts, as Solovyov and Klepikova present them, are hardly encouraging. Concentrating on the activities of Politburo members from the death of Stalin, in 1953, through the reformist reign of Khrushchev, who was removed from his position as party leader in 1964, through the stupefying dullness of the reign of Brezhnev, who died under questionable circumstances in 1982, and working in detail through the brief tenures of his successors, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev, the authors describe a melancholy incompetent leadership trying vainly to cheer itself up with useless slogans and vapid ideas. The portrait they paint is one of obsolescent rulers drowsing their way to death.
List of Publications
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 31 March 2020, pp 203-204
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Index
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 31 March 2020, pp 205-213
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23 - Is There Sex after Sappho?
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 31 March 2020, pp 147-150
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Summary
A literary companion to sex? Surely one wants more than that. A fleshly one, for instance. A lively one. A sassy, compassionate, flirtatious, even— heaven forbid— a witty one. But a literary one? Sounds a bit, or a smack, stuffy, yet in an age capable of producing anthologies of such trivia as excitingly shaped ice cubes and Berlin aphorisms (“Doof bleibt doof, da helfen keine Pillen” [Dumb is dumb, and pills won't help]), this one at least weighs in as dealing with what matters.
Or what matters to quite a few people. Probably not everyone— one hesitates to say everybody— cares about sex. Anti- pornography fanatics and the extremely young, boys especially, still turn gloomy or look piqued when it is mentioned. The ascetics among us of course care more about sex than most people, if only because they devote their entire lives to avoiding it, a signal, surely, of a senseless obsession, like struggling to sidestep summer breezes, or trying not to think about elephants. Sir Isaac Newton was apparently more impressed with geometry than sex. Goethe liked sex, but picked up his actual experience of it only in his late thirties or early forties, after which he wrote about it with enthusiasm and brilliance in his “Roman Elegies” and “The Diary,” neither of which is included in Pitt- Kethley's anthology. Montaigne, who is also not included, spoke about sex at length, but regarded it with urbanity as “nothing but the thirst for enjoying the desired object,” and a “ridiculous titillation.” The ancient Romans and Greeks— Sappho, Ovid, Catullus and Petronius aside— found it less important than war, politics (which they did not confuse with sex), food, furniture and the weather. Love dallies temptingly through the pages of the few ancient Roman novels that have survived, such as Daphnis and Chloe, but love is not sex, at least as Pitt- Kethley wants us to think about sex, and sex itself merely peeks into Longus's final scenes. Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, offers a bit more than this, a frolicsome get- together between an ass and a beautiful woman, but startling though the ass finds this encounter, it fascinates him less than the chance to regain his human form (lost through a combination of lechery and witchcraft) and his vigilant if dull hope of piety.
24 - Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 151-154
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The news has long been out: behind the serene facades of medieval churches in the streets and taverns of high- medieval European towns, cities and villages consecrated to Christian prayers and ideals, there daily erupted among scholars and poets— in the thirteenth century the two were often the same— such a spate of drinking, wenching, fucking, dicing, pummeling, singing, battering, shrieking, moaning and celebrating as has seldom been seen anywhere on earth. Scholarship incited clarity rather than murk. It in turn provoked lyrics as brash as clerical hypocrisy, as refreshing as cheer in winter. Golias, the “Archpoet,” himself of the twelfth century, may have proclaimed his “fierce indignation” over his poverty, but he also rejoiced in his “levity,” his love of Venus, or “a young girl's beauty” and his determination, now that “the soul in me is dead,” to “save [my] skin.”
Among medieval poet- scholars, saving one's skin was the grand theme. A churchly post would do. It guaranteed fine food and a dry bed. Often, though, the singer had already achieved his plummy appointment. His selfpromotion was a pose to elicit sympathy for his persona. Impoverishment was a medal. What is more, not all of the “Goliard” carousers in Latin— for most of their poetry was composed to be sung on the exquisite instrument of succinct and rhyming medieval Latin— were wandering rogues, despite their interesting notoriety which over a century of modern scholarship has failed to disturb.
Their drinking and wenching were real enough. Bacchus and promiscuity, satire and mild bawdiness, coupled with an effusive praise of springtime flowers, might camouflage the universal damp. They might brighten the candle- dim long tables on which the steins of mead and ale clashed in merriment against official primness. They might even open one's mind to liberal ideas of sin. “To drink and wench and play at dice/ Seem to me no such mighty sins,” writes one poet (they were nearly all anonymous), tossing his insolence into his Credo, or death- bed confession, to shock his attending priest.
Rooting in the pagan past was no vice. Horace had coaxed the fragrance of peonies and the white Euganean hills clad in robes of roses into his odes. Ovid's Art of Love was known to all educated people. Its sexual candor was overlooked on the grounds of its superior style.
7 - Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 55-64
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Does knowledge force people into guilty acts? Are ethical disasters, as well as material, emotional and spiritual benefits, its inevitable result? Unstated but implicit, tacit yet as frightful and alluring as a beautiful serpent coiling about a tree, these questions haunt three Western myths that have attracted fresh, considerable and increasing attention over the past couple of centuries, those of Adam and Eve, Prometheus and Faust. The questions themselves are as old as Western philosophy. They animate Western theology. Plato, in his fourthcentury BC Protagoras, condemns the Promethean brand of technological knowledge, if unaccompanied by political savvy, as sloshing into a social mess. St. Augustine, in his sixth- century Confessions, describes all men and women as the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, whose gobbling at the tree of knowledge of good and evil doomed them to banishment from paradise. Disobedient munching led to inescapable sinning. The Faust myth looks trickier along these lines, chiefly because its versions disagree. The sixteenthcentury Faust book is not Marlowe, is not Goethe, who had not read Marlowe when he wrote Faust: Part One. Their attitudes toward “forbidden” knowledge do not match up, though some penalty seems required in each case for prying into the divine cupboard: one suffers, or causes others to suffer, for sneaking a peek at God's secret stash.
Crucial to each case is the premise that knowledge is a pivotal advance over merely knowing things. One may know information and grasp facts, however these are defined, without feeling an irresistible compulsion to act. Knowing about an in- progress genocide, for instance, may no more affect one's natural indolence than observing that an afternoon is bright and sunny. Knowledge, however, impels one beyond informational lassitude. It seems to be a state of understanding or misunderstanding, rather than of rote recall. It insists that one take action, or abstain from action, or appreciate a situation— with the impulse often equally powerful in each direction— on the basis of information and facts, and even misinformation, a not quite begging- the- question definition because it presupposes a developing ethical outlook: the information and facts or even false data at one's disposal have come to be perceived as good or bad or beautiful or ghastly, and something must be done, or not done, about them.
16 - Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 117-122
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The individual, even the concept of the individual, the notion that individuals even exist, has been under fresh attack for at least the past 20 years. Psychologists worshipping at the shrines of Lacan and Derrida, and deconstructionists attempting to argue that literature is simply an expression of ideology, dispute the existence of authors as well. Shakespeare is not really Shakespeare. He is a collection of social forces. The old wrangle over whether Shakespeare's plays were not in fact written by Christopher Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth is thus resolved with delicious perversity: no one wrote Shakespeare's plays at all. Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth could not have written them because they too did not exist. In fact Shakespeare's plays are not plays. They are texts, or artifacts, or discourses— social impulses mysteriously articulated through ghostly human figures that merely called themselves Shakespeare or Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth. Sitting at shaky, candlelit desks, these shivering apparitions allowed the ideologies of their day, and occasional critiques of them, to distill their ghostly powers through their nonexistent shimmering bones.
Genius too is denied. All men and women are presumed to be equal, not only before the law but in all possible abilities, with the differences that clearly arise among them described as purely social in origin. To maintain this bizarre idea, a great many facts are conveniently ignored. When it is claimed, for instance, that both Darwin and Wallace discovered evolution, it is forgotten or ignored that only Darwin offered the proof of evolution and laid bare its actual process— a scientifically crucial point. When it is urged that had not Newton discovered the law of gravity and the presence of colors in beams of light, someone else would have done so, it is blithely ignored that no one but Newton did so, and this after millions of years of human development. Einstein's and Max Planck's discoveries of the relations of mass to energy and of quantum mechanics are ignored as unique contributions to human knowledge, with no evidence to show that without these two scientists others would have made the same discoveries. But could anyone but Joseph Conrad have written Joseph Conrad's novels? Could anyone but Langston Hughes have written Langston Hughes's poetry? Could anyone but Sylvia Plath have written Sylvia Plath's poems? Do we not all have different fingerprints? Or voiceprints? Or genetic “fingerprints”?
4 - Does Time Exist?
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 33-38
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Who could have predicted the decline of empiricism? Or is the decline itself an illusion? At the start of the twentieth century, the fractious disputes of Bergsonian intuitionists and sundry utopian metaphysicians fell into what seemed to many to be a 40- year- long sweet swoon. Empiricism blossomed in triumph. The prosperous flowers of empirical science, freshly arrayed in pleasant gardens by the logical positivists, perfumed the latest intellectual air. The richness of these new flowers cast its fragrance beyond Britain and America, where commonsensical traditions in philosophy had recently been fertilized by Charles Peirce, William James, Thomas Huxley and Bertrand Russell. It was inhaled, agreeably, on the Continent as well. The result was a deception, or a self- deception. Empiricism seemed far better established than in fact it was. The flowers were often regarded as deathless. If in 1917 Russell could define metaphysics as “the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought” and describe it as leading into both science and mysticism, he could also, with the confidence of wide agreement, airily dismiss mystical metaphysicians on the grounds of their “denial of the reality of Time.” He could add, rather archly, “This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have seen this doctrine prominent in Parnenides; and among the moderns it is fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.” Russell's belief in the permanence of the modern empirical garden was premature, and this after tortured centuries of experimental seeding and cultivation. In the late twentieth century, mystical metaphysics, and other linguistically opaque types of Utopian metaphysical thought, have in fact returned— awakened from their swoon— with an icy vengeance. A vicious pruning of all sorts of empirical flowers has been in process for the past 30 years.
To the historian this comes as no surprise. The development of any form of empiricism has never been easy. Modern expressions of it, in science, philosophy and the arts, have in fact always struggled into growth between the contempt of the religious and the scorn of often fanatical philosophical idealists.
31 - Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 179-182
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The chief problem with writing and translating epic poetry in modern times is that of avoiding bombast. This is the problem with translating ancient tragedy too, and so- called “modern tragedy” aside— what is often termed the tragedy of ordinary people— it remains the reason that successful new tragedies are not often written. Bombast drives audiences out of the theater faster than literary mediocrity, poor acting and bathos: it is not itself literary mediocrity so much as antiquarianism, treating a fossilized and long dead emotion as if alive, resuscitating it in the manner of a Hollywood zombie and forcing it to parade about the stage or some other epic arena, strutting and fretting and, because evacuated of life, participating in a tale told by an idiot that seems to mean nothing.
The chief reason for this is that a whole complex of epic emotions, like those evoked by ancient tragedy— what Aristotle thought were released by catharsis— remains unfamiliar to modern audiences. It is unsettling, if not humiliating, to realize that a vibrant emotional reality may now be lost to us, that people may be less complicated, even less visceral and free, than their literary forebears, but such seems to be the case.
At issue here are not just those old chestnuts of fear and pity with regard to tragedy, whatever Aristotle may have meant by obscure terms that remain controversial, or even a glorious defiance of the gods by the exiled hero of an epic poem, but the gods themselves, along with a venerable view of war as a divine enterprise, no matter how ugly, bloodthirsty and catastrophic it might be as well. The mysterious divine– human relations of classical epic and tragedy, with all their rich dimensions, have turned alien if not off- putting. Their ossification, traceable at least as far back as Hamlet, a play that buckles against itself as tragedy, seems to dissolve only on rare occasions in recent years, as with T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, which succeeds because it centers on vital religious convictions.
11 - Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 95-100
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The desire to escape illusion, to create a poetry free of the magician's falsely beautiful flowers and falsely horrid passions, enjoys a desperate popularity in America. Illusion is dismissed as corruption. Artifice is condemned as dishonesty. The evocation of delectable possibilities, rather than the presentation of prison- like “realities,” is viewed as absurd. “Life itself “ must permeate poetic art. The mundane must appear as mundane, in bland lines that echo and mimic only “real” speech. The invention of other worlds, along with the idea that language itself can paint stunning if illusionary universes of its own, full of pointed and revealing suggestiveness, is regarded as an inane anachronism. Fiction too is inappropriate, and best left to the fiction writers. The jetty- bright soul whose passions are evil, as well as the magenta rose of the soul whose passions are saintly, pales to extinction in an American poetic idiom that lacks the range to limn all but the sensate, the social, the domestic. Significance, especially spiritual significance, is scorned as a rancid effusiveness. Poetry must explore only the dreams and miseries of the new petit bourgeois imagination.
These attitudes are common among American writers of so- called free verse, but not limited to them. The same narrow and torpid mental formulae may be discovered— they are seldom stated outright— in the poetry of many of the recent formalists. To be sure, a poet's attitudes should form the subject matter of criticism only when they affect the poet's art, emboldening his techniques or crippling them. The antidemocratic sentiments of Baudelaire scarcely influence the craft and compassion of his poems, and are unimportant to reading him with delight. The superstitious paganism of Lucretius is no hindrance to his creating a spectacular cosmic imagery, or to understanding his genius as a poet. The poetry of Ronsard is neither improved nor harmed by his advocacy of monarchical government. His limpid grace and candor shine through. The same cannot be said of the anti- illusionism of many contemporary poets, including in various ways the four poets to be considered here, whose similarities of limitations are at once typical and frustrating, far surpassing their peculiar achievements.
10 - Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 31 March 2020, pp 81-94
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In 1904, when Rilke wrote his poem “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” he could have been but dimly aware that he was abetting a major revolution of consciousness. This had been in process for at least 10 years, and was making itself felt, albeit known only to a few initiates, in Einstein's physics and Freud's psychology. It was to affect the ideas and attitudes of masses of people, educated and uneducated alike, worldwide, rippling over the next century into virtually all fields of human endeavor. It was also to prove decisive in separating the past from the present, or in creating the modern illusion that they might have less to do with each other than most people wished to believe.
This first modernist revolution, so remarkable for its influence, had to do with concepts of energy, time, space and those who observe them, or with any human observer of motion. While arguments about the temperament of an era run serious risks of absurdity, few will object to the notion that fashions in ideas prevail at particular moments. Ectoplasmic and even ghostly as it then seemed, this was one of them, a fortuitous change, a tendril, perhaps, of a divine breath of inspiration. An arrow of insight had been loosed, and a number of daring artists and scientists were drawn to parallel speculations. It is only sensible to imagine that more than coincidence, an atmosphere of permission and acceptance, or at the very least a temperamental similarity stimulated by social and intellectual conditions, led to their success.
What these facts suggest is what is indeed the case, that Rilke's poem is far more than an eccentric and riveting recreation of the tragic Orpheus myth. This quickly becomes evident as one realizes that both the dullish egotism and recklessness of earlier versions have been eliminated. No doubt they were distractions from the poet's interest. Traditional dramatic aspects of the story as well have been deliberately collapsed into a special tone that may be described as coolish, while a deterministic fixity replaces the earlier versions’ histrionics and conflicts. Orpheus's legendary music is also crumpled, bizarrely, into a heightened silence. Communication between characters seems almost completely to vanish.
6 - Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 47-54
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On January 18, 1882, Oscar Wilde interrupted his exhausting lecture tour of America, donned his favorite brown felt suit and visited Walt Whitman at his home in Camden, New Jersey. There the future author of The Importance of Being Ernest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, who was at the time known chiefly for his pink buttonholes and his odd philosophy that every house should be made beautiful through the installation of imitation Renaissance statuary, managed a splendid self- abasement. He drank a milk punch prepared by Whitman's sister, quivered for a pleasant hour at the poet's feet, and rested the hand that was to pen The Ballad of Reading Gaol on the elderly American's withered knee. It is apparently the case that Wilde spent most of his one- hour attendance in Whitman's hushed study listening with vibrant awe. On the other hand, what he heard is unknown, as no trace of Whitman's monologue has survived. He was 63, and busy adding suitably touching details to his reputation as the grand old prophet, complete with tangly, biblical beard, of a new- world poetry. As for himself, the ex- journalist- turned- poet reported that he had experienced a “happy time” with England's genuine, manly, honest aesthete. Wilde seemed to him a splendid boy, and made a flattering impression by announcing that “We in England think there are only two [American poets]— Walt Whitman and Emerson.”
Puffery though it was, Wilde's remark did not quite hit home. It may have lacked sufficient reverence. The mention of Emerson, whom Whitman admired, may have touched a raw nerve. In a letter written just a week later, Whitman remarked that he had heard from Wilde, who was now off swanning about Niagara Falls, and who had sent him a photograph. “It is a photograph of himself,” scribbled America's prophet gleefully, “and is one fool tall— lifesize.” This spirited if somewhat ungrateful skewering of his recent visitor accompanied even more buoyant, if not boyish, self- congratulations, these blossoming forth in another letter, to Harry Stafford on January 25, in which he noted with satisfaction that “[Wilde] is a fine large handsome youngster— [and that he] had the good sense to take a great fancy to me.”
22 - Peskily Written (on Sade)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 31 March 2020, pp 143-146
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The story goes that when, after doing a stint of 11 years behind bars (in Vincennes, the Bastille, and Charenton), the Marquis de Sade was appointed a judge at La Coste in 1793, he was asked by local révolutionnaires to serve on a tribunal that would shortly be remitting large numbers of aristocrats to the guillotine. As an aristocrat himself, Sade would supply the right sort of cachet. The already notorious libertine, however, is said to have declined this peculiar honor by remarking with aplomb, “I have killed many times for pleasure, but never for principle.”
If true, and the story certainly has the witty Sadean ring, the story is also quite false. Sade was no part- time assassin. Despite a couple of justifiable accusations that he beat various women, including his wife, who continued to visit him weekly in the Bastille during his incarceration, and despite a probably trumped- up conviction on charges of “libertinage,” there is but a single recorded instance of his having killed anyone at all. This occurred when he threw a man through the window of a whorehouse. Some would say that this athletic atrocity was quite enough— in fact too much. A monster need not emphasize his monstrousness through repetition: a solitary act will make his case. Yet with Sade, as with Machiavelli, there persists a bizarre discrepancy between facts such as these and an unparalleled reputation for personal barbarism, between a relatively placid life, mostly devoted to writing plays, and an infamy as colossal as Dracula’s. Indeed Sade's infamy is far worse than that of Dracula, whose name has failed to make its way into common parlance as an eponym, one in Sade's case synonymous with taking pleasure in sexual cruelty or more generally, in punishments and tortures.
While one may be tempted to believe that the world simply needs its blamable monsters, and so quickly lit on de Sade as a convenient target, a much more likely cause is to be found in his surviving books, which are not only awash in tides of sexual sadism, as well as eddies of sexual mockery and pools of spankings, but also flooded with such tidal waves of sexual murders and slaughters as clearly to mark the tranquil marquis as the most aesthetically bloodthirsty author who ever lived.
14 - Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Poetry and Freedom
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- 30 April 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 109-112
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Summary
Marie Ponsot's third volume of poems is full of sensible philosophical speculations. She considers how “Time threads the random,” the relations of freedom to commitment, revolution, experimentation and the nature of fiction. Typically, in “The Problem of Gratified Desire,” her method is allegorical. A physical situation illustrates an abstract title:
If she puts honey in her tea
and praises prudence in the stirring cup
she drinks, finally,
a drop of perfect sweetness
hot at the bottom of the cup.
There will be
pleasures more complex than it
(pleasure exchanged were infinite)
but none so cheap
more neat or definite.
The pleasure of this poem is that of a well- done miniature. One is reminded of the superb initial capitals of medieval manuscripts. With her lighterhearted poems, one is reminded of the delightful doodles to be found in the margins of medieval French breviaries. The “drop of perfect sweetness / hot at the bottom of the cup” is a salubrious footnote. One is happy to have it. One admires it. If one is unmoved, and a bit dubious of a technique that seems too mechanical and strained to allow for much brilliance and passion, one enjoys the tendency to wit and the active intelligence. If the line “pleasure exchanged were infinite” is quite meaningless, one is tempted to overlook it. The smoothness and harmony are compelling.
This is a minor poetry of minor excellences. Marie Ponsot, who was born in New York, is the translator of 32 children's books as well as the author of two previous volumes of poetry and the recipient of a creative writing award from the National Endowment for the Arts. One cannot quibble either with this award or with the laudatory comments her poetry has elicited from such fellow poets as Philip Booth and Darcy Hall (printed on the jacket). In a time when poetry criticism seems to consist of the puffery of nonexistent genius, or worse, nonexistent poetic abilities, it is pleasant to attempt to mark out a healthy, fertile garden spot, and to note that poets such as Marie Ponsot occupy it. Trained in the art, they neither hinder its progress nor carry it forward. Instead, they do the unpretentious and necessary work of maintaining standards, often high standards. Ponsot describes this role best herself in “Wearing the Gaze of an Archaic Statue”: “and her small touching skill is: / holding nothing.”
29 - Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Book:
- Poetry and Freedom
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 30 April 2020
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2020, pp 171-174
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Summary
The Burnt Island of D. Nurkse's eighth collection is not the Burnt Norton of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Some such comparison seems inevitable, though, not least because Nurkse's island shows up as an eponymous poem at the center of a book that he divides into three “suites,” thereby more than suggesting an echo of Eliot's famed four- part musical opus, and also that this linked group of poems may be meant, in Ezra Pound's useful summons, to “make it new.”
But is it new, and if it is, what is it renewing? A number of contrasts between these two linchpin poems, and between both of the longer works in which they appear, seem self- evident as well as intriguing. If Eliot's “Burnt Norton” takes us “Into our first world” and moves through “The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery” whose “leaves [are] full of children/ Hidden excitedly, containing laughter,” Nurkse's “Burnt Island”— with its title that refers to an island off the coast of Maine, whether “burnt” or not— presents us with “two villages, Baker and Chester; two industries,/ lobster and watercolor; two churches,/ Baptist and Universalist,” and a single child who
followed
at a fixed distance
kicking a smooth white stone
that veered toward Canada,
mumbling names of burweed,
hiding so well we never knew,
or climbing a scrub oak
to find a thrush egg, an acorn lid,
the tight ring of the ocean.
In Eliot and Nurkse's primal visions, an early- feeling garden rises into spiritual possibilities and then slips free of them, with just a hint in Nurkse's “Burnt Island” of Eliot's quietly menacing territory in which “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.”
Despite these similarities and discrepancies, a measure of “Burnt Norton’s” cruel and unbearable reality, but transposed and transformed, appears in Nurske's other poems. It develops as a ghostly negative even as his new poems keep returning us to the book's heart, its “Burnt Island,” or lead us away from it— or to cite Eliot once more, as they “Point to one end, which is always present.” Like Eliot's Four Quartets, Nurkse's book seems to be centered on that old, tantalizing puzzle whether secure meanings can be found or said to exist.
34 - How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Book:
- Poetry and Freedom
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 30 April 2020
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2020, pp 193-202
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Summary
It is fashionable these days to denigrate as misleading the conventional terms for historical periods, and in particular “Renaissance,” substituting for them with reckless abandon the far more misleading “early modern period.” This implies that the events of, say, the twelfth century glide along a magnetic wire either into Modernism or the Wright brothers or computer programming. In fact “Renaissance,” with its clear imputation of rebirth, á la the Swiss journalist- turned- historian Jacob Burckhardt, who first popularized it in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), retains an accuracy hard to beat. Nor is it much of an achievement to replace clarity with smog.
Clarity amounts to insight, and granted that “Renaissance,” like other period terms such as “Middle Ages,” represents more a state of mind than a span of time, it also retains a potent whiff of pithiness for its seminal events, whose dates are well established. Few painters, sculptors and architects in the know in fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Italy had any doubt that they were living through a time that as the mathematician- philosopher Marsilio Ficino noted in 1492, “like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts.” Nor, like Ficino, were they less than certain that “the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic lyre,” along with “grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, music,” was “almost extinct,” and that their revival, like that of astronomy, “has recalled the Platonic teaching from darkness into light.” Nor were educated sixteenth- century Italians confused about style. They understood that the discovery in Rome in 1504 of the statue of Laokoön and his sons, perhaps an original Greek depiction of the legendary priest who warned the Trojans of their impending doom, or a Roman copy dating from the first or second century BC, had inspired Michelangelo and other Italian sculptors and painters with the lost perfections of Classicism. Educated Europeans knew that in philosophy and belles lettres a rebirth, later to be dubbed the Renaissance, had arrived with equivalent calendrical precision. Here the long- abiding darkness had lifted three centuries earlier, and they enjoyed the lights of liberation that continued to stream through the history of ideas and literature following important twelfth- century translations into Latin of Plato and Aristotle.
26 - Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- Paul Oppenheimer
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- Book:
- Poetry and Freedom
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 30 April 2020
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2020, pp 159-162
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Summary
Nineteen fourteen was a hot year for European militarism and Minoan art. The triumphal delusions of the imperial powers, which were shortly to lead into the deaths of tens of millions, had developed out of an unsupported yet firm conviction of European historical continuity: the ancient, civilized past glided into the technologically sophisticated present.
In its latest form, this fantasy had been expanding for about 200 years. It now arrived at an about- to- burst phase, and this bizarrely, with the small, impressive “discovery” of a modern- looking Minoan Snake Goddess on Crete. While the connection between this probable fraud and the start of the First World War may look a tad gratuitous to the uninitiated, in fact it seems to have contributed in subtle ways to the atmosphere of nationalistic arrogance sweeping the European landscape in the early decades of the last century— to a European and later American patriotic fatalism that proved as adept at justifying international slaughter as in stimulating questionable aesthetic pleasures.
The Snake Goddess itself was an ivory and gold statuette unearthed at Knossos, or, as is far more likely, fabricated in a twentieth- century Cretan restorers’ workshop. It swiftly made its way to England on board the ominously named Minotaur, whence it almost immediately— and with perhaps a touch more grimness— left Europe altogether and crossed the Atlantic to come to rest at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, arriving on July 28, or one month after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and on the same day as the Austro- Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia.
An international yet nationalistic tocsin might as well have sounded. In Boston, a fine- tuned publicity machine began humming away, primed by over a decade's worth of other less magnificent “discoveries” of millennia- old “Snake Goddesses” in the ruins of the Minoan capital. Articles and photographs hailed this newest Cretan find in The Times (of London and New York), the Illustrated London News and mass- circulation magazines in England, America and Europe.