Southern Bookman

Keats' "To Autumn" followed Peterloo Massacre

John Keats wrote "To Autumn," his last great poem, inspired by a walk along the River Itchen near Winchester on Sept. 19, 1819.

"How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it [...] I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now [...] Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my sunday's walk that I composed upon it," Keats said about the poem's origins, writing to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds.

"To Autumn" was the last of Keats' breakthrough of great odes, begun in the spring of 1819. Foreshadowing his death in Rome from tuberculosis a little over a year later, the poem on one level is a farewell.

Keats composed "To Autumn" a little over a month after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, in which 18 people where killed and 400 to 700 injured when the British Army's 15th Hussars led a cavalry charge into a crowd of 60,000 gathered at St. Peter's Field to protest economic devastation.

Britain's agricultural economy slumped after the Napoleonic Wars, and conditions worsened because of failed harvests and soaring bread prices caused by the Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on grain imports. The protesters demanded an expansion of the right to vote, then held by just 11 percent of adult males.

The cavalry attack followed the arrest of radical orator Henry Hunt before his scheduled address to the protesters. Manchester Observer editor James Wroe invented the Peterloo Massacre label in a headline, comparing the carnage to the Battle of Waterloo four years before.

Keats read newspaper accounts about the massacre and witnessed the arrested Hunt's triumphant entry into London on Sept. 13, 1819. Yet, outside of a reference in a letter to his fiance Fanny Brawne, he never overtly mentioned the event, in contrast to fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who responded to Peterloo in "The Mask of Anarchy" and "England in 1819."

Critic Tom Paulin believes Keats made coded references to Peterloo in "To Autumn," a view disputed by most readers.

The poem expresses joy and sorrow at the arrival of autumn, with its natural bounty shadowed by the awareness of death. It describes the stubble fields at the end of the harvest, not the pastures full of grain.

Keats mourns the loss of Britain's agricultural past, the wrenching change that caused the Peterloo tragedy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rosanna Warren looks back on sunny Breton summers with her parents, Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark

Poet, biographer and literary critic Rosanna Warren in an article in the current Harper's magazine recalls two idyllic childhood summers in France's Brittany region.

Warren and her brother Gabriel lived in local homes with their famous parents, the poet, novelist and critic Robert Penn Warren and the writer Eleanor Clark.

"My Mother's Oysters: Recollections of Breton Summers" gives an intimate glimpse of her family's life, portraying her illustrious father and mother as warm and loving parents.

The family came to the village of Locmariaquer in the summer of 1961 so that Clark could do research on the rustic village's oyster-based economy. The next year, the family lived in the Basque region in the south of France before returning to Brittany.

Rosanna celebrated her eighth birthday and Gabriel his sixth during their first year's sojourn. She remembers receiving a birthday gift of a small plastic carriage drawn by eight miniature horses.

Brittany, unlike other parts of France, was settled by Celtic tribes who migrated from Britain in ancient times and lived among the region's original inhabitants. The region was separate from France until 1532.

Rosanna Warren, interviewed by Southern Bookman in 2009, remembers going to school in Locmariaquer with oyster workers' children. She and Gabriel were taught by nuns who conducted their lessons in French, although she and her brother didn't speak the language.

The trips weren't always blissful: Rosanna broke an arm in a beach accident, and the entire family caught the mumps. When they left France in 1962, they found themselves thrust into the French-Algerian war. Clark tensely drove the family to the airport through Paris streets lined with machine gun-bearing soldiers.

In the article, Rosanna Warren examines Brittany's rich history and special geography. She recalls ancient churches with martyr's bones, and viewing in astonishment the ancient stone monuments known as dolmens and menhirs.

Clark's immersion with the rustic oyster workers resulted in her 1964 book "The Oysters of Locmariaquer," which won the National Book Award.

Rosanna Warren, now 71, says at the end that the region's people, history and oceanic geography remain real to her. Her fondest memory is of her parents, who allowed her to explore childhood wonder.

 

 

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock" first appeared in June 2015

A new poetic voice arrived 109 years ago this month.

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock" was published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine, Eliot's first professional publication.

Poet Ezra Pound persuaded Poetry editor Harriet Monroe to print "Prufock," which like Wordsworth and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads" 100 years before heralded a revolutionary change in poetic language.

Disturbing for such a young poet, Eliot captures the middle-aged disillusion of Prufock, whose first-person narration gives a 20th century echo of Dante's "The Inferno." The poem contains several allusions to Dante's masterwork, as well as to poems by Eliot's beloved English metaphysical poets.

Pound later edited Eliot's epic poem "The Wasteland," published in 1922. While "The Wasteland" is regarded as one of the essential works of modernism, "Profock" set the stage with its evocative language expressing a generation's loss of faith.

The poem's epigraph comes from Canto 27 of Dante's "Inferno," in which the poet asks prominent Florentine citizen Guido da Montefeltro what crimes he'd committed to be condemned to hell.

Montefeltro replies, "If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy."

This is an ironic reflection of Prufock's expression of his alienation from the world. 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

 

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

 

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

 

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

               And should I then presume?

               And how should I begin?

 

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

 

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

 

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

 

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

               “That is not it at all,

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

 

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

 

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

 

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

 

I do not think that they will sing to me.

 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

 

 

 

 

Lord Byron receives new attention marking 200th anniversary of his death

It's springtime for Lord Byron.

On April 19, the small coterie of Byron followers venerated the 200th anniversary of the Romantic poet's death. The event sparked an outpouring of books and articles on the author notorious for his sexual exploits and revered for his heroism in fighting for Greek independence. 

Then one of the most famous celebrities in Europe, the swashbuckling author of the epics "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" died on April 19, 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece, where he'd been fighting for Greek freedom from the Ottoman Empire.

Just 36, the poet caught pneumonia while riding in chilly weather. His physicians decided to treat him by drawing blood, causing his death. 

Educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron was exiled from England because of his sexual misconduct. He spent his last years traveling across Europe and engaging in abusive affairs with a number of women and men.

One of the new books, "Byron's Travels," edited by Fiona Stafford, traces his journeys through poems, letters and journals. Excerpts from "Don Juan" match his real-life adventures.

Andrew Stauffer also draws on Lord Byron's work in his new biography, "Byron: A Life in 10 Letters." Stauffer's selection from the 3,000 letters Byron wrote during his lifetime illustrates the major events of the poet's life. 

A letter written in 1819 to his friend and publisher John Murray, who also published Jane Austen and John Keats, gives scandalous details of Byron's romantic affair in Venice with the young married woman Margarita Cogni.

The letter blazes with intimate revelations and shocking misogynistic descriptions of Cogni, according to a review in the Times Literary Supplement.

Byron might be best known today for sharing a home with fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's finance, Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin, at Lake Geneva during the cold and rainy summer of 1816.

One stormy evening, Byron suggested that he and his friends compose ghost stories. The soon to be Mary Shelley's story formed the basis of her famous novel "Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus."

Along with reviews of the new books on Byron, the Times Literary Supplement in a special issue April 12 published an essay about the 1924 ceremonies in Greece honoring Lord Byron on the 100th anniversary of his death. The article is accompanied by John Drinkwater's poem "Ode to Byron," recited during the event.

The TLS also published for the first time two recently discovered letters from Byron to Cambridge friends John Cam Hobhouse and Francis Hodgson.

In his letter to his close friend Hobhouse, sent from Athens, Greece on April 28th 1811, Lord Byron announces "I am here with a party of Englishmen mostly your acquaintances & during the winter we have had balls, feasting, masquerading (during the carnival) & of course intriguing in all directions."

Byron's flamboyant life anticipated that of modern rock stars. Let the Byron revival flourish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Helen Vendler, Harvard professor and influential poetry critic

The eminent poetry critic Helen Vendler stood in a soft glow of light, her face radiant.

Vendler's Boston-flavored voice enraptured her audience gathered at Emory University, where she delivered the annual Richard Ellmann Lectures, named for the former Emory professor and acclaimed biographer of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde.

Looking back at her 1994 lectures, titled "The Breaking of Style," I remember the warmth of her personality, how she made her listeners feel part of a larger community of poetry.

Vendler, professor of Harvard from 1985 through 2018 and the author of 23 books, died Tuesday at age 90 at her home in Laguna Niguel, Calif., after suffering from cancer.

The Ellmann lectures displayed the amazing breadth of Vendler's criticism, comparing the careers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham, three poets of divergent eras and techniques. She found that each of them reached new heights in their work by changing styles in midcareer.

Vendler, the poetry critic at the New Yorker from 1978-1996 and frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the New Republic and the New York Review of Books, championed the careers of contemporary poets like Graham and Rita Dove. 

She also re-evaluated the work of 20th century American poet Wallace Stevens and the 17th century British poet George Herbert, concluding that Herbert's achievements excelled that of his contemporary, John Donne.

Vendler's "Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire" promoted his longer poems as major accomplishments, countering the prevailing judgment that they were pretentious and monotonous.

Her book, "The Odes of John Keats," set the standard for modern criticism of the Romantic poet's astounding outpouring of major poetry in the spring and summer of 1819.

Vendler edited "The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry," one of my favorite books. The anthology gives an expansive, canon-defining offering of 20th century American poetry.

In Vendler's eyes, poetry from different eras shared a common seeking for emotional truth through memorable language.

 

 

 

William Shakespeare's plays still excite us

William Shakespeare's plays still enthrall audiences, 460 years after his birth.

Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford on Avon and died on the same date 52 years later in his hometown.

Sometimes I imagine Shakespeare's amazement at our technology, transportation, buildings, mass media and hygienic and health improvements if he were to come back to life today.

Although the English language has changed immensely since Shakespeare's Elizabethan era, and science and commerce have transformed the world, his characters remain relevant. His insights into the human heart, with its passions and foibles, are unsurpassed.

His sonnets also express universal emotions that remain true for us.

Artificial intelligence will never match his poetry and understanding of humanity. 

Generations to come will no longer understand his language, critic Amit Majmudar laments in the April New Criterion.

I believe "Hamlet," "King Lear," "The Tempest," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "As You Like It" will keep astonishing those yet unborn.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry blossoms as National Poetry Month arrives

Poetry's popularity has risen, as other arts decline.

Once poetry's readership had fallen so low that the American Academy of Poets in 1996 declared April National Poetry Month to promote the genre.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led many grieving readers to seek solace in poetry.

While the Internet has devastated newspapers, magazines and publishing, it's spurred the poetry revival. Poets publish their work online without needing to go through literary journals or book publishers. Readers have easier access to poets' work. 

Poetry books are now regularly reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review and elsewhere. Print publications like the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Atlantic and Harper's publish more poetry.

Several poets have written best-sellers, receiving the attention once given to novelists and non-fiction writers. New poets keep appearing who write exciting, inspiring work. 

While the theater, classical music, jazz and novels lose followers, poetry thrives.

 

Revisting Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"

April arrives with another visit to Geoffrey Chaucer's Tabard Inn.

In the General Prologue of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales,", the pilgrims are gathered for their journey from London to Canterbury, to seek healing at the shrine of the murdered martyr St. Thomas Becket.

Written 600 years ago, the epic poem's opening hymn to April and introduction of characters possess an enduring immediacy. I imagine myself among the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Squire and the others.

Viewing Chaucer's small tomb at Westminster Abbey, I thought about how alive the poem is.

In 1400, London was a small city, with a high mortality rate. Disease, famine, fire and violence were constant threats.

The poem, written in the city's Middle English dialect of the time, established English as a literary language, much as Dante's "Divine Comedy" did for Italian.

Chaucer and his characters glow with the love of life, the beauty of nature.

They speak to us, through the years.

Rediscovering the Norton Anthology of English Literature on Good Friday

On Good Friday, I return to one of my most beloved books, "The Norton Anthology of English Literature."

As I do each year on this beautiful day, I read John Donne's"Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward" and George Herbert's "Easter Wings." I also revisit some of the other riches of the anthology's first volume.

Under the general editorship of the great scholar M.H. Abrams, the anthology's first volume brings together the foundational works of English literature, from "Caedmon's Hymn" and "Beowulf" to generous offerings from Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvel, Milton, Samuel Butler, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith and others.

I particularly love a chapter of popular ballads like "Lord Randall," "Barbara Allen," "The Three Ravens," and "Robin Hood and the Three Squires."

Volume 2, which I also revere, covers the 18th century, the Romantics, the Victorians and the modern era of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

The Norton Anthology opened the world of English literature for me in my college days. Through the years, I reread  the anthology with the same sense of wonder, discovery and joy. 

 

John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" still calls to us

I've been contemplating John Donne's meditation "No Man Is an Island."

The prose poem, published 400 years ago as part of Donne's "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in My Sickness," tells us that we are part of humanity, and must care for each other.

Donne famously warns us "never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

The metaphysical poet and Anglican cleric wrote the meditations in December 1623 after recovering from a near fatal illness. The composition was published in January 1624, one of only seven works attributed to Donne published during his lifetime, according to Wikipedia.

"Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions" is divided into 23 parts, consisting of "the meditation," "the expostulation" and a prayer. Chronologically ordered, each chapter covers Donne's thoughts and reflections on a single day of his illness. "No Man Is An Island" is the 17th devotion.

Donne's message rings through the years. The soaring death toll in Gaza and Ukraine, alarming climate change news and threats to American democracy make his words even more urgent. 

Here is a modern version of the devotion:

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
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