[A]n emotional life that never had a chance of achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent especially among women, the system in which “So-and-so is my type but I’m not his,” or “I’m his but he’s not mine,” or in which “We’re made for each other” or “can’t stand the sight of each other” —in which clichés are taken as binding rules and any individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation. For instance, my mother would say of my father: “Actually, he wasn’t my type.” And so this typology became a guide to life; it gave you a pleasantly objective feeling about yourself; you stopped worrying about your origins, your possibly dandruff-ridden, sweaty-footed individuality, or the daily renewed problem of how to go on living; being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was somebody, if only briefly.

Once you became a type, you floated through the streets, buoyed up by all the things you could pass with indifference, repelled by everything which, in forcing you to stop, brought you back bothersomely to yourself: the lines outside the shops, a high bridge across the Spree, a shop window with baby carriages in it. (She had given herself another secret abortion.) Always on the move to get away from yourself and keep your peace of mind. Motto: “Today I won’t think of anything; today I’ll enjoy myself.”

But my mother had not been crushed for good. She began to assert herself. No longer obliged to work her fingers to the bone, she became herself again. She got over her skittishness. She showed people the face with which she felt more or less at ease.

She read newspapers, but preferred books with stories that she could compare with her own life. She read the books I was reading, first Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, then Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. What she said about books could not have been put into print; she merely told me what had particularly caught her attention. “I’m not like that,” she sometimes said, as though the author had written about her. To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something more about her.

The striking thing about the city population as we know it is the lack of a middle class. The sons of freedmen and the countrymen who had not lost everything may have provided a small group of men of moderate means, but in general Rome was inhabited by the rich and the poor, with very few men in the middle group. Yet, as we shall see, it was the vote of the middle income group which counted particularly in the elections of consuls and praetors. Such men had to come mainly from outside the city, and since in our period the immediate vicinity of Rome, which once supplied the voters, was now almost denuded of freeborn men, most of them had to come a considerable distance. A representative system might have been the solution, but no one seems to have proposed that, though such a system existed in Macedonia. Augustus later devised a plan for absentee ballots, but by that time votes had ceased to have any real validity. In our period voters had to go to Rome and they made the journey not as representatives of their communities but on their own initiative or because someone arranged to bring them.

The consular and praetorian elections, for which considerable numbers of men in the first class must have come to Rome from all Italy south of the Po, were normally scheduled in the latter part of July immediately following the games for Apollo, an attraction that doubtless aided in getting out the voters. The curule aediles, the quaestors, and the military tribunes were elected by the tribal assembly, usually just after the praetors had been chosen; and the officers of the plebs, the plebeian aediles and the tribunes, were ordinarily chosen in the same period. The crowd that had assembled for the consular and the praetorian elections was likely to be in the city still for these minor elections, but in the more democratic assembly, where the richer men counted less, the outcome was much less predictable. Cicero points this out in his defense of Plancius, who was prosecuted after his successful contest for the curule aedileship. Cicero’s own election to the aedileship had proved this, for he won the office in spite of the machinations of Verres, who had been able with his bribes to control the consular and the praetorian elections.

The commendation of nobles was probably painted on signs along the roads leading to Rome and all over the city and the municipal towns. On tombs along the roadside there are inscribed warnings to candidates not to use the monument for sign posting. And all over the town of Pompeii are painted notices of candidates still canvassing for local offices when elections in Rome had either been discontinued or were little more than a sham. The form of recommendation accords with the personal character of the endorsement as we know it in republican politics. Many of them are painted on the walls of houses or shops and give the recommendation of the owner. He asks for votes (rogare, orare) and recommends his candidate in rather vague terms as a good man or one worthy of the republic, terms so conventional that they could be abbreviated. A little variation is supplied by the statements “this man will preserve the treasury,” or “ make so and so aedile and he will make you one.” [...] The inscriptions of Pompeii also include endorsement from groups such as teamsters, muleteers, hucksters of every type, dyers, barbers, and also from certain districts of the town.

Powys's first published works were poetry: Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), collections which have "echoes […] of Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, among contemporaries, and of John Milton and Wordsworth and Keats".... In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem "modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson" that was published as Lucifer in 1956. There were three further volumes of poetry[.]

Poetry, considered as an art, is the expression of a certain aspect of life, which for the moment I must content myself by defining simply as the poetical element. The deliberate heightening of one’s life by the aid of this mysterious and fluctuating quality in things seems to be an inevitable impulse in the mentality of any nature worthy of the title “cultured.” But what precisely is this quality? What is this floating element in life that the human race by an overtone of universal agreement has come to name the poetical? We can at least narrow down its field by indicating what it is not. It is not the ideal. It is not the beautiful. It is not the artistic. It is not the noble. It is not the moral. So much at least we can say. But, approaching the thing itself more closely, can we not, by means of concrete examples, arrive at some notion of what constitutes its essence?

To realize this difference between beauty and poetry one need only visualize for a moment the illuminated body of some swiftly moving aeroplane, an aeroplane engaged in advertising, let us suppose, some toilet-necessity or some new brand of cigarettes, upon a city sky. Such a spectacle might easily be conceived as a genuine revelation, in the spheres of form and colour, of beauty considered as a non-human absolute. But with that peculiar quality in things I am trying to indicate as belonging to the essence of poetry such a spectacle would have nothing to do. In fact it would exercise a destructive influence upon the natural poetry of the particular night or twilight when such an occurrence took place.

The chosen material both of modern mechanics and of modern aesthetics is bound to appear to the spirit of poetry as something alien and troubling; a discord, a menace. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that any manifestation of beauty may be completely unsympathetic to traditional emotion, feeling, sentiment; whereas it is of the very essence of poetry to remain saturated with all the historic human reactions, with every sort of old-world sentiment. Poetry is in fact a thing so totally different, in both its substance and its entelechy, from beauty that the two revelations appeal to different types of mind. We must remember that an object can be beautiful without being in the least poetical; just as it can be poetical without being in the least beautiful. Poetry is composed of a certain traditional body of feelings about life; a body which has gathered by slow adhesions into a presence of values, nuances, discriminations to which must conform what every nation and every age may add as an indigenous quota of its own.

...

Would it seem a too narrow doctrine if we were to take for granted that the art of poetry will be most sui generis, most entirely itself, when it expresses in words the purely poetic view of life? From the viewpoint of this doctrine, if we do accept it, most modern poetry falls short of the earlier kind. If any characteristic more than another stamps as modern the poetical experiments of our day it is the invasion of the peculiar terrain of the art of poetry by the more purely aesthetic values of the arts of painting and music. Poetry hovers over everything that has been a background to human life, over everything that has been a permanent accessory, a daily tool, long enough for a certain organic identification to have grown up between the diurnal usages of our race and this or that fragment of material substance. Thus it is not surprising that the most deeply satisfying poetry, and that which stirs the imagination most strongly, is the poetry of old times wherein this animism or vitalization of the inanimate is most marked. Homer is thus greater than Aeschylus, Aeschylus than Dante, Dante than Milton, Milton than Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold than W.B. Yeats!

But though this historic lapse and lamentable subsidence of high human feeling, this gradual sinking down of poetic values from the simplicities of Homer to the sophistries of our contemporaries, cannot be gainsaid, there are epochs in English poetry that possess a magic of their own unlike anything else in the world. Such for example are those honey-breathing purlieus of enchantment, those green vistas and richly receding margins of romance, that we enjoy in the poetry of Keats or in the poetry of Walter de la Mare.

The best way to appreciate Dante is to lay hold upon an edition where, as in Dent’s “Temple Classics,” a literal prose translation is placed opposite the text. Incidentally we must submit that it is well worth it—however unscholarly we are—to learn at least enough Greek and Latin and Italian to be able to read these old poets aloud, if it be only to ourselves. [Of course one remembers Eliot’s grotesque self-descriptions in “What Dante Means to Me.”]

And when it comes to reading the “Inferno,” wise indeed will the reader be who reads for imaginative and emotional pleasure and not as a student. One has to be a student in youth in order to get the clue to culture. But the perpetual student is seldom a cultivated person. Slide lightly, therefore, over the historical allusions. Dodge the theological problems. Fight shy of such abominable passages as reveal a vein of unmistakable sadism in the great poet. But with these exceptions there are things that one can well read in the “Inferno” over and over again, till rarer passages, memorized by love and repetition, come to be like chain-armour for our human spirit against the insolent intrusions of the vulgar present. Then it will prove true how possible it is, by a kind of empathy or nerve-transference, to share a great poet’s most intimate life-illusion. For your feelings will actually grow Dantesque in their concentration so that as you drag your legs in weariness along your river-side or stare at water-flies in the ditch by the tow-path, or tilt your head back to gaze at the flying swallows, you will actually come to share that curious realistic awareness of the stark physiognomy of life which it is this poet’s especial gift to express.

[Consider] the peculiar atmosphere of the poetry of Keats. One instinctively feels that its basic appeal is essentially poetical rather than aesthetic. That is why one can enjoy to the full fragments and morsels of Keats’s poetry such as occur, like wild-flowers dropped on a foot-path, in the midst of so much that is littered and pointless and puerile.

Not one of our fellow-creators in this vast congeries of personal lives that we call Nature is devoid of some sort of instinct, corresponding to the accumulated weight of habitual consciousness which it is the purpose of our culture to supply with selected memories out of the past out of our own existence and the existence of our race. Animals and even birds and fish have a continuity of accumulated habits which answers to the sort of culture I am trying to define in this book.

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is subtitled: “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” Wilde, despite a certain loucheness among his epigrams, was never trivial...

Prince Sattva and the Lions