Trollope on the Critical Class

In the opening chapters of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, Lady Carbury, who, it is important to note, is not known as an exemplar of literary taste, sends the following letter to a periodical editor:

Dear Mr Alf,

Do tell me who wrote the review on Fitzgerald Barker's last poem. Only I know you won't. I remember nothing done so well. I should think the poor wretch will hardly hold his head up again before the autumn. But it was fully deserved. I have no patience with the pretensions of would-be poets who contrive by toadying and underground influences to get their volumes placed on every drawing-room table. I know no one to whom the world has been so good-natured in this way as to Fitzgerald Barker, but I have heard of no one who has extended the good nature to the length of reading his poetry.

I share it here because I am convinced that this is his commentary on the critical controversy surrounding Philip James Bailey’s Festus, which lasted from roughly 1840-1874 as new editions were printed that required comment.

Here are a few reasons.

• Bailey was known as “Festus Bailey” for most of his life, since the work was first offered anonymously, so Trollope is likely signaling a coincidence with the F-B of “Fitzgerald Barker.”

• With the rest of the Spasmodics, Bailey was routinely attacked by anonymous critics, such as wrote for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review. Authors often raged to find out what critic had made such sometimes slanderous claims, but had no way of finding out.

• The specificity of the the phrase “on every drawing room table,” I think is unique to criticism of Festus. In any case, I’ve never encountered it elsewhere. The reviewer who used it IRL means it as a compliment: that Bailey’s work was so popular, people read it who didn’t usually read poetry; it was everywhere, but in this exchange Carbury is using its ubiquity as a negative.

• Finally, since Festus is an epic, there were probably a great many people who bought the book and didn’t quite finish it. There were even cribbed versions floating around that gave the most important extracts of Festus so that non-readers could still roam confidently with the cultured class, so this is probably a comment on that.

I don’t know where it will go from here. I just picked up the book in a charity shop in Oxford for something to read, but already I’m feeling the bite of Trollope’s satire against figures either he or Carbury fails to appreciate.

How to Like J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve just heard the first word breathed against the lordly mythologist. I’m sure plenty have failed to appreciate his particular brand of fantasy; I’ve just never met them. Today, however, right on my phone, someone appeared who claimed to be “allergic to Tolkien,” and then, and then (!) someone agreed, saying he just didn’t get him, as though encountering greatness were something one trained for, like developing a taste for modern orchestral compositions or post-bop jazz.

Anyway, it seems to me that if one wants to develop such a taste, wants to see, actually, what all the hype is about, it helps to know what one is looking for. I mean, if one opens up Wodehouse looking for plot, one is bound to be disappointed, though she will be rewarded in literally every other regard. So, if one wants to like Tolkien, here are some tips.

1. Abandon any appreciation for or dependence on sentences. Whatever else he is good at—making whole worlds, for one—Tolkien is a workman-like writer. Crack the formidable tomes looking either for beauty of the Dickension, Proustian, of Beuchnerian sort, all filigree and twist, and the flatness will astonish you. On the other hand, look for concision and wit a la Austen or C.S. Lewis and you are just as likely to grieve. In Tolkien, words are a medium for telling the big story, not music themselves. A key to appreciating Tolkien is to get over it.

2. Similarly, lose your expectations regarding structure. Some writers will spend more time on more important parts of the story, giving detail where it is wanted and slides gracefully over it when it would disrupt the flow of the narrative. Tolkien will dash off 30 pages about the history of tobacco like nothing, and he’ll do it, not as an aside once we have established some trust, but right at the beginning of the book , when we don’t know who is smoking it or why. Sometimes the characters will just walk for the length of 2 or 3 Chekov short stories. Doze off for a few hundred pages and they’re just still walking. So, these books are great, but they’re so great that they establish their own genre. If you think you’re going to get a novelist’s care and temper, no.

3. Finally—and this is a trait Tolkien shares with his friend Lewis—you’ll need to look past the names. Master of many languages, Tolkien must simply have lost touch with the tones, nuances, and implications of phonemes in English. “Sauran” and “Saruman” are the names of two different characters in this book. Who could possibly think that a wise move, making the reader hunt out a single letter to differentiate characters who are, in addition to sharing, practically, a name, also share, practically, all their characteristics. There are dozens of examples. Some names are hard to pronounce like “Eowyn,” some simply ugly, like “Took,” and others silly, like “Merry.” It is difficult to get behind these adventures for some people because so many of them suffer from the “Boy Named Sue” syndrome. Lewis does it too: one of the most fierce-some battle chargers in Narnia—one specifically obsessed with dignity—is called “Bree.” Ugh. Behold the powerful demon-seed, wrecker of cities, Molly!! Eventually, the names wear into the consciousness and you begin to take Strider simply as Strider, but for those just starting out, these absurdities are likely to get in the way. Press on!

It may seem from the previous that I’m not a Tolkien fan. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think he’s a great magician, and the first time I read through the books, I began planning when I could do so again. I think the movies are hideous, but then, I think that about all movies. The Lord of the Rings is a miracle of talent and imagination, but that doesn’t mean I need to accept uncritically all parts thereof.

So what are you looking for, if we take the caveats above? When people say things like they’re allergic to Tolkien, I sense that one of Tolkien’s manifest weaknesses has set the reader off. That would be a shame though because that reader would then miss the goods that reading Tolkien really offers, the first of which is dignity. There’s something colossal, almost Wagnerian, about these stories. Reading them feels like reading The Iliad; the roots of culture are exposed and the statuesque otherness calls one up into a rarefied air. But also: joy. The Lord of the Rings is one of those books--are three of those books?--where the empathetic risk really pays off. One manages to care about all these absurd characters and all these invented realms. Something happened with a dude and a sword in a forest at one point and I literally cried real tears. I just couldn't believe it was happening. Of course, it wasn't happening, but the artist had made the world so compelling--if not so real--that my emotional register didn't care about “really.” There's more to say about Tolkien of course and his relative achievements in these and other books, but these notes are offered for that Twitter fellow and others like him who see all these tome-totting travelers and wonder how so many can spent so long in middle-earth: it's not perfect, but 1) there is enough there there to make a world and 2) they’re ripping good fun.

Teaching Cenci

 I recently taught Shelley’s play The Cenci for this course at the University of Washington. It struck me as “unstageable” for the same reasons it did so for the play’s early readers: the sexual episodes are too extreme for the (especially late-Romantic) stage, and the characters deliver exhausting monologues that would bore any live audience. Besides, the language is to full, so intellectual, that hearing it spoken by an actor, one loses half of the meaning. I know, Shakespeare managed to write just as rewardingly for the page and for the stage, but then, he was Shakespeare, wasn’t he? 

But what a relevant play. The Cenci is a play about a corrupt Pope and bishopric turning a blind eye to sexual abuse in the parish. It’s about the powerlessness of victims and uneven appointments of justice based on gender and age: young people not able to stand up to their elders. So far, so applicable. It’s also a play about paintings, having been inspired by Guido Reni’s portrait. In that, it’s a play about ekphrastica, and historical reconstruction, which are at least as relevant (if less exciting). A recent debate about the painting’s provenancegave the class a kind of detective function, assembling the opposing arguments and adjudicating a real contemporary dispute. 

Thank God, it seems like the Catholic church is coming out at last from a dark period in her history. For awhile there, the news had it that the church’s main business was settling abuse claims from 30 years ago. One hears less of that now, and more about the humble, graceful actions of Pope Francis. 

The Cenci isn’t read much these days, I fear, neglected even among Shelleyan’s in favor of the weightier Prometheus Unbound, but short, provocative, and immensely rewarding, it should be.

Hardly Hedgerows

“After Life-Writing: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal in the Memoirs of William Wordsworth.” by Mary Ellen Bellanca. European Romantic Review 25:2, 201-218.

Digging through early biographies of the Wordsworth, M.E. Bellanca uncovers one by the poet’s nephew Christopher called Memoirs of William Wordsworth, published in 1851. It features, as she notes, heavy quotation (about 45 pgs) from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Scotland journals. So, it should be considered an early publication of Dorothy’s, refuting years of scholarship that had claimed that Wordsworth’s talented sister remained unpublished during her life.

Except scholars made no such claim. In the examples Bellanca herself gives, both William Knight and Ernest de Selincourt mention the excerpted passages. For Bellanca, the credit they give diminishes Dorothy’s contribution, by calling them “a few fragments,” and “short extracts.” From there, Bellanca builds a case for Dorothy’s talent, and her womanly victimization at the hands of a masculine society that didn’t appreciate her intellect.

Bollocks. Dorothy was reverenced by her brother, enshrined in his best poems, noted constantly as an inspiration (even a crutch), and respected for her observation and quick wit by his friends. History has treated her very well indeed. Though she was meddlesome, and eventually lost her mind, she is probably the most respected female figure of the Romantic era, apart from Mary Shelley. I can conjure no image of sibling affection stronger than William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Editions of her work abound. College seminars and graduate dissertations interpreting it flourish.

Bellanca’s reading is ideologically driven, but it isn’t a screed. It’s well-written, especially examples from the Memoirs, and command of the Wordsworth’s reception history. But as ideologies do, the feminism blinds her to more logical interpretive possibilities. “Invested in a gender ideology that exalts Dorothy’s devotion to her brother, the Memoirs…casts her in relation to William,” she chirps (204). See the problem? There’s no reason to think that Christopher Wordsworth exalts familial devotion as a consequence of his investment in a gender ideology. We’re talking about his aunt and uncle. The degree to which they are devoted to one another, or are represented as devoted to one another reflects on his immediate heritage and values. “My aunt and uncle were very close,” reads more convincingly as “I come from a good, moral family” than “women are worthless apart from their servile attachment to powerful males.”

Other overstatements diminish the paper’s real import. Recall that Christopher didn’t likely possess the literary trove a modern biographer might, but certainly had access to family papers, such as Dorothy’s journals. Bellanca claims “the extracts reveal [Dorothy’s] centrality to the poet’s work,” which is saying too much by half. (24). “Centrality” is wrong. No matter how important she was for William—and she was quite important— she was in no way central. It isn’t as though he writes exclusively, or even mainly about his sister, though she plays ancillary roles in a few poems. One might claim that she was central to his life, although that would exaggerate too, but that she was central to his work is insupportable. Also, such overstatements cast her in relation to William: exactly the sin of which Bellanca accuses Christopher Wordsworth. Dorothy’s writing is good and worthy of study; she was also a good and helpful sister, even a sometime muse for her more-talented (or simply more productive?) brother. More than this need not be assumed.

Two more points. The paper concludes with the conjecture-cum-accusation that Dorothy may not have been consulted regarding the publication of journal extracts for her brother’s Memoirs. “One must wonder," the article wonders, " whether she consented to, or was even aware of, the printing of…her writing for strangers to read” (214). Bellanca calls this “troubling,” or, since like most of her claims, this one vacillates, “potentially troubling” (214). How so? The first ¾ of the essay contends that Dorothy is an important author in her own right who ought to be respected as such. The last quarter suggests that she may have been scandalized by publication. Which is it? Bellanca doesn’t seem to know, referring to “her desire or non-desire to be read” (214). In what way would it be “troubling,” for her relatives to publish works she intended for publication? Especially a publication that honors her brother’s memory, whom she had spent so much of her own life honoring and encouraging? The conjecture is unhelpful, particularly the air of grievous offense cast over the proceedings, as though the poor woman were taken advantage of.

Worse still, Dorothy may just as well have been consulted and consented to the publication. At the time, Dorothy was 80 years old, and, as Bellanca notes, “often incoherent” (214). Even at that, her family may have asked her, and may have had a positive, coherent response. We simply don’t know. Bellanca doesn’t know. That doesn’t stop her from implying wrongdoing, alas. “It would be highly ironic if this very private writer…had been conscripted into the public visibility of the print market without her knowledge, or permission” (214-5). That’s a big “if.” And if she were senile, it wouldn’t even be that, but due course: we have no moral qualms about publishing good writing, whether intended for publication or not, by persons deceased or otherwise incapacitated, who occupy important roles or historical perspective.

In a last jab, Bellanca wonders in the footnotes (but of course she never wonders; she accuses), “how did literary history forget…that Dorothy Wordsworth was a writer to be taken seriously,” between the publication of the Memoirs in 1851 and the 1970’s, when she was “recovered”? Predictably, and offensively, Bellanca suspects “such factors as…the rise of professional literary studies with a predominately male professorate” (216). That’s absolutely unfounded, and juvenile. It’s small-minded to imagine that no one acts apart from the interests of their group, especially professional scholars, concerned with aesthetics, influence, history, data, among much else. False historically too, since Austen, Sappho, Aphra Behn, the Bronte’s, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Mary Shelley and other women to numerous to name enjoyed ample (if not equal) attention during the same period of Dorothy’s "neglect."

But she wasn’t even neglected during the interim Bellanca outlines. First, the 1851 Memoirs didn’t vault Dorothy to prominence; they introduced her as an important figure to people who already knew and liked William. Dorothy’s work didn’t achieve prominence will 1884-1902, as Bellanca notes elsewhere. So we’re not talking about a 100+ year gap in attention for whose obvious error we need a scapegoat. If she’s prominent in 1902 and we imagine a gradual, rather than a sudden descent, let’s say interest tapers till the mid-1930’s (counting the number of dissertations and books). That leaves only 40 years till her “revival” in the 1970’s, or not quite half a human life. Assigning that gap a negative valuation, seeking someone to blame for it, and finding that blame in sexism all seem to me intellectually irresponsible. If an explanation were required (again, it is not) more likely culprits emerge.

Genre, for one. What is Dorothy’s writing? They’re not poems (as I see it, and importantly, as most literary scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries saw it, the most important things a person can study), not fiction, not even memoir, quite, but journals whose author may or may not have assented to publication. That’s pretty rarified air. Does one teach them in a History of Poetry class? If there is any sense in which Dorothy’s reputation suffered for a short span in the middle of the twentieth century, it is as likely due to circular needs as anything so nefarious as Bellanca’s Black Shirt New Critics, or Gang of Six, or the Great Satan himself: men.

On Writing Writing Books

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Watching a prose performance (which is to say, reading) I sometimes wonder how long the author can keep it up. A biographer of Hart Crane (about which book I wrote here) said of his sentences, “we watch with mingled horror and embarrassment as he flings himself form another syntactic precipice,” and its something like that for me. When I began reading Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, I thought the same. It’s so graceful, so winsome, so wise; when will it crash into a tragic heap? 

Sometimes a book doesn’t and I walk back into the world mouth agape, sun-struck. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is this way. Smart on the topic of writing, observation, nature, and human living, it is also spun out like filament, like one of those long-held notes on a violin one expects to end at the bow’s edge but doesn’t. We’re just sent off into space, stupefied. Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic felt likewise. After the introduction’s linguistic bite, I thought: okay, that’s a good idea. Load all the ore up front and readers will be so dazzled, so drunk, they’ll sing through anything else you throw at them. But it didn’t stop. Line after line, Image after image of prismatic, gem-like perfection shone out, page after page until I stopped wondering. It’s one of the most incredible demonstrations of what’s possible in English prose I know. 

In the case of V. K., which is still the most useful book about writing I’ve seen, the answer is: he can keep up the high-wire act until page 150. It is unalloyed gold until that point, and then, the bow’s edge, the alloy, the filler, the frame. 

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I had the same thing happen to me recently with a book about writing poems. Glynn Maxwell’s On Poetry struck me like none of the many I’ve read in that genre. His examples about what poetry is, what it does, what it does not do are both convincing and authoritative. He puts down so compellingly and completely all arguments about slam poetry and song lyrics (over which I wandered into dust-up with Michael Robbins, who now sends me hate mail, thanks to this post) with a finality that stopped me cold. “It would be nice,” he writes, knowing he’s right, “never to be asked about this again.” Maxwell had me entirely in his trust. And then, (having grown tired of theorizing? Having come up against a deadline?) he stopped talking about poetry, what it is and what it does, and started talking about a particular section of his creative writing workshop. The students’ names, their lusts, their contributions to the course are writ out like we were suddenly in a novel about graduate school. He gives away lesson plans and it turns into a teaching manual. I was distressed, seeing it. Like an athlete who stays in the game too long, the late, sad images struck out the glowing, golden prime. I was left not with a lasting artwork about the discipline, but with something messy, and unappealing, and a bunch of broken promises, like life…

Klinkenborg got me going again. Made a believer of me. But the p. 150 disaster is total. There, he stops writing his engaging, lovely notes on writing. Instead, he quotes long paragraphs of writers he admires. Gone is his whiskey-smooth, Hemingway-esque advice. In its place, a scan of his commonplace book. They’re good scans, mind you. It’s nice he admires Ruskin, and Joan Didion as stylists, but I was busy admiring Klinkenborg as a stylist. I have my own Valhalla and I was just putting up the bunting to induce him therein when we parted company: he to go make a cup of coffee, and I to piss and moan here. It turned his thoughtful book on writing into some very thoughtful observations about writing, and an anthology of neat-o paragraphs. That would be fine except I was just (weren’t we all?) disappointed by Stanely Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, which purported to be about, um, how to write a sentence, but was actually a collection of his favorite sentences from English Literature, followed by interjections like “wasn’t that great?” and “did you see what she did there?” 

Some things I’d like to remember from VK’s miscellany though, which again, is marvelous and worth it. 

Revision Strategies

Revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them.
Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic.
Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice.
Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity.
Toward rythym—where its lacking.
…
Toward variation—always. 
Toward silence—leave some. 
Toward presence—the quiet authority of your prose.

or this:

Here’s another way to make your prose less familiar. Turn every sentence into its own paragraph. What happens? A sudden, graphic display of the length of your sentences and, better yet, their relative length—how it varies, or doesn’t vary, from one to the next. Variation is the life of prose, in length and in structure. 

or this:

How many sentences begin with the subject?
How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject? Or with a word like “when” or “since”or “while” or “because”?
How many begin with “there” or “it”? How many of the verbs are variants of “to be”? 

Many people assume there’s an inherent conflict between creativity and a critical, analytical awareness of the medium you work in. This is nonsense. 

and perhaps most valuable:

There is no such thing as writers’ block.
There’s loss of confidence
And forgetting to think
And failing to prepare
And not reading enough
And giving up on patience
And hastening to write
And fearing your audience
And never really trying to understand how sentences work.
Above all, there never learning to trust yourself or your capacity to learn or think or perceive. 

I can’t copy out any more. Go buy this book. I have some writing to do. 

Poetry of the Crimean War

With world attention fixed once again on the Crimean Peninsula, again due to provocation from Russia, let’s remember, as U.S. Congressional Republicans use the occasion to heckle from the sidelines—if only we’d been more belligerent, aggressive, if only more foot-stamping from across the ocean, then maybe 4-500 years of Russian foreign policy would’ve been reversed, and they’d act against type—that a similar affair happened some years ago. What started as a territorial dispute eventuated in a World War in which America was very nearly embroiled. 

Televised busts will probably be walking the public through much of that history in the coming weeks. Perhaps they already are. I wouldn’t know, having killed my television 15 years ago on the advice of some bumper stickers. It will be flash-summary, of course, full of posturing and bravado, and little in the way of scholarship. I want here only to point out that whatever else the Crimean War gave us (and it gave us a few things including the first tactical use of both railroads and telegraphs) it also gave us much of our finest war poetry. 

Not that I don’t appreciate Melville’s and Whitman’s civl war verse. I do. I think that conflict’s literary contribution, however,  (still largely unsung) took the form of hymnody, private correspondence, and political speech.  And I appreciate Winifred Owen’s work on WWI, especially Dolce et Decorum Est, which I regularly teach in my History of Poetry classes at UW. And Yeats on Ireland and Auden of WWII, and even, weirdly, much of the Taliban poetry on the War of American Aggression or Operation Iraqi Freedom, depending on whose branding you prefer. One needn’t agree with their politics or methods, but their rebellious, anti-Western verse is stirring stuff.
None of it has anything on the Crimean War. I don’t mean to march through it all here. Most readers know Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, an account of a military disaster (due apparently to a misheard order) rendered as a heroic act of pure bravery and self-sacrifice.  For nearly 100 years, it was the most memorized poem in the language. 

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.

Much of the Crimean War poetry has been analyzed and collected by Stefanie Markovits and Orlando Figes. Both mention, though neither of them dwell on, my favorite Crimean War poems: Sonnets on the War, by Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell. Smith and Dobell are two of my favorite poets anyway, members of the Spasmodic School, writing in Britain in the 1850’s. After each writing astonishingly successful first books, they turned to this little collaborative book of sonnets, neither taking credit for whose sonnet is whose, or whether they were all written together somehow. 

Sonnets on the War covers British positions on Sebastopol, Hungary, the infamous cavalry charge, on whether America should enter the war, on Florence Nightengale, and much else besides. Here’s one called “Self.”

The War rolls on. Dark failure, brave success
Deafen our ears. But little power to touch
Our deeper human nature lies in such.
Doth victory make an infant’s smile the less?
Each man hath his own personal happiness,
In which--as creep the cold-enfeebled flies
In the late beam--he warm and basking lies.
Each hath his separate rack of sore distress.
No hand can give an alms, no power consoles;
We only have our true hearts and our souls.
In leaguered forts, water with patient arts,
They draw from their own court or garden-plot;
So from the deep-sunk wells within our hearts
We draw refreshment when the fight is hot.

I think that’s just great. The poems are patriotic, but not boosters, inspiring, but not hawkish. More importantly, they’re honest. Tennyson’s poem asks “When can their glory fade?” The answer is: it fades as soon as one finds out that 600 wasted their lives because a general was ineffectively in command of them, and/or their testosterone charge short-circuited their hearing and broke the chain of command. “Honour the Light Brigade,” we are therein commanded. It’s all one-sided.

Smith and Dobell’s poem acknowledges both “brave success” and “dark failure,” which is necessarily the sum of any military engagement. It acknowledges too the uselessness of language as a cure for pain (brave for poets, but again: honest). “Each hath his separate rack of sore distress./ No hand can give an alms, no power consoles,” the poem admits. How much better if we responded to the pain of other’s more often with that kind of realism? 

Here’s the opening of one called “Meditative.”

We could not turn from that colossal foe,
The morning shadow of whose hideous head
Darkened the furthest West, and who did throw
His evening shade on Ind. The polar bow
Behind him flamed and paled, and through the red
Uncertain dark his vasty shape did grow
Upon the sleepless nations…

I write here and there about the Spasmodic poets, and how, though sometimes studied for their jarring popularity in the mid-Victorian era, they deserve a broader audience for the sheer quality of their writing. Sonnets is a good place to start. Read the whole collection here. 

John Keats: A New Life by Nicholas Roe

Notes Toward a Review

John Keats

By Nicholas Roe

I thought Really? Another Keats biography? I'd just finished Stanley Plumley's Posthumous Keats, and Daisy Hay's Young Romantics, and what with Jane Campion's "Bright Star" (Apparition LLC 2010), I felt the moss'd cottage trees bent with apples, the gourds all swollen, and hazel shells plumped, if you take my meaning. I liked all these, mind you (though Plumley's less after I saw him read from it without force or elaboration as part of the Seattle Arts and Lectures program). Plus, I've written a chapter about Keats in this book, and recently published another article about him here. When I heard about Nicholas Roe's new Keats bio, I thought I would safely pass. 

But then I mentioned it to my friend Frederick Burwick, who claimed it on the spot "required reading." "No negotiating," he continued, "it's just stunning." And he was right--now that I've got my hands on it (thanks, SPU library for my pre-move copy, and Douglas County Libraries for my post-) I see just what he meant. 

I don't much appreciate the phrase "tour-de-force," since it is used indiscriminately to describe everything from blockbuster films to meals, but this book really is a tour of forcefulness: one never settles in, grows comfortable in the intellectual pressure. Three hundred pages in, it's still startling. There are also aspects of the Keats story that I never quite understood that this biography marks and lights.

To name just a few:

Twittery Politico

Keats is an aesthete: perhaps he is the aesthete (pre-Wilde, obviously). But Roe brings out just how political the work is, and was taken, in the poet's life, to be. He's no Shelley, but the choices of his friend group, his places of first publication, his identification with Leigh Hunt, even his grammar school marks him as a liberal, if not quite a radical. 

Incision

Everyone knows that Keats was a trained surgeon, but I hadn't processed fully a) how far along he was, and b) how much mileage he got out of medical vocabulary. No mere student of anatomy, according to Roe, Keats would've seen patients, removed limbs, dissected rotting corpses. The thought of that makes him less a wilting flower than he is often cast as. Moreover, his poetry becomes, as Roe shows, markedly more muscular (more sanguine, especially) during the period of his apprenticeship. 

Hunting

Leigh Hunt is a giant. Now, he's an easy sort to make fun of: less talented than everyone around him, treated less well by history, and fawning. But during Keats' life, he was huge. As a cultural figure, and emblem of resistance, and a taste-maker, and especially as an idol for a young poet like Keats. Hunt published Keats' first poem, introduced him to others who would be seminal for his life and aesthetic, and guided his early work toward the epic and historical.  We have much for which to thank Leigh Hunt, if not for his own work, then for much of Keats'.  

I'm not writing a full review, since I'm doing so much else just now, but for anyone who reads Romanticism, this is a second to Burwick's claim: Roe's book is required reading. 

My Brief Affair with the Criticism of Michael Robbins

Well, that was quick. On Wednesday, I received my copy of this month's Poetry Magazine, and read the criticism first, as is my custom. There, I found a blistering--not for its spirit, but for its force--critique of a new anthology called Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, edited by Paul Hoover. It was authored by one Michael Robbins, whose poem book, "Aliens vs. Predator," I ordered immediately. It hasn't yet arrived, so I don't know if it's any good, but the essay is so smart, so broadly associative, so powerful in its judgement, that I tweeted this, right away. 

And with that article in @poetrymagazine, @alienvsrobbins became not only my favorite critic, but my favorite PERSON. (Sorry Wife)

— Mischa Willett (@PoemsforPeople) July 5, 2013

You can read the essay here. I was convinced that we had another Randall Jarrell in the making, combining sound judgement with elegant prose, and the kind of energy and good humor you might expect from someone who would name his book after Arnold Schwarzenegger franchises. I shoved the essay into anyone's hands who had ever expressed a passing interest in verse-making. "Excited" doesn't begin to cover it; for whatever reason, well-written criticism lights me right up. 

Alien vs. Predator (Poets, Penguin)

By Michael Robbins

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Our affair was beautiful and passionate, and has now burned itself out. A few days following the Poetry Magazine piece, Robbins published another article in the Chicago Tribune (read here)  which is defensive and under-theorized, and frankly, juvenile.  In it, Robbins defends song-lyrics as poetry, which people who know nothing about either song-writing or poetry, do all the time. That's one of the problems: that there isn't anything original about the claim; people (usually rappers and their vociferous following) are always claiming that there is no difference between what Kanye West does and what Anne Carson does, as though to deny the rich, famous, aggressive and universally-admired TOTAL control over every provenance their enterprise touches amounted to a kind of snobbery. The other problem with the article is that Robbins' argument comes down basically to a) song lyrics=poetry because Bob Dylan is super awesome, and b) because why not? Quote: 'What would be the point of denying these lyricists the honorific of "poet"?'

For one, "poet" isn't an honorific; it's a job title. It's a job title for people who make real the inherent music in words, and not one for people who make music, and then add words to it. If that seems like a small difference to you, consider the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle. Two wheels, seats, vehicles of transport. But, if the motorcycle is "cooler" somehow, it relies on an external source of power to get where it's going. The same is true of song lyrics: without the music, they're just a bunch of metal sitting in a garage. Stay with the metaphor for a moment. A bicycle is powered by whoever happens to be riding it. Some will be better than others, some can do tricks on it, but bikes work (or don't) in large part based on the training, practice, talent of the rider. So too the poems on the readers'. 

There are far more arguments against this tired position than I feel like trotting out here; a well-written version of them can be read in this essay by William Logan, which came out in this month's New Criterion. Logan isn't really arguing the point, he just takes the distinction as a given that educated (or grown-up) people maintain. Here's some of it though: 

Song lyrics can be entirely artless or devilishly contrived, composed by some magician of the word or just some putz; but whatever they are they need music to make them art, and without music they’re just love without money. “Sha-na-na-na, sha-na-na-na-na” and “Do-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-do” and “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da” make perfectly wonderful lyrics, but on the page they look like gibberish. Cut out the tune, and lyrics are just words that look annoyed.

Logan is right en pointe here. One of my favorite differences is that poems are in their truest, most authentic possible performance in every individual reading. If Yeats came back to read "Adam's Curse," there would be no reason to take his choices of inflection as more correct than mine; if Tennyson read "Ulysses" like he were on helium, he wouldn't--he couldn't--damage the poem, because a poem re-incarnates in between every set of lips that shape it. Obviously, the same is not true of lyrics. Dylan has to be there for a Dylan song to work. When he's dead, there can be no more authentic Dylan performances, while Keats performances will continue, in all possible originary power, as long as we have breath and books (or memory).

...which is all to say that I should have listened when Robbins tweeted me:  

.@PoemsforPeople @poetrymagazine I'll just disappoint you

— Michael Robbins (@alienvsrobbins) July 5, 2013