David X Novak
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To Jesus on His Birthday: a Sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay

12/25/2015

 
For this your mother sweated in the cold,
For this you bled upon the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon bought and sold;
A paper wreath; a day at home for me.
The merry bells ring out, the people kneel;
Up goes the man of God before the crowd;
With voice of honey and with eyes of steel
He drones your humble gospel to the proud.
Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows
Are all your words to us you died to save.
O Prince of Peace! O Sharon’s dewy Rose!
How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.
The stone the angel rolled away with tears
Is back upon your mouth these thousand years.

December Passing: M— M— 

12/20/2015

 
The story's done. That cobbled path you trod
Has reached its termination—even thus
Your spirit is relinquished unto God
But part of you remains behind with us.

The perils of the body you well knew,
An heir to mortal shock like any other,
Survived by many friends, your brother too,
And by your faithful wife and loving mother.

You grew into your manhood, facing steady
Travails portentous few have had to bear,
And, bearing them, were always at the ready
To make a graceful joke, and shun despair.

​Like as the radiant sun casts constant rays
On various quarters, your grace was effulgent,
And felt by many. It is this allays
Our sorrow when in grief we are indulgent.

If I had ten years to bestow you, Mike,
That you might live beyond this terminus,
I would not hesitate, cut short my pike
Which wearies me aplenty even thus— 

Yet such determinations owned by God,
I only might, in memory of you,
Try to live better, scrambling on the sod,
This mortal coil, which you so lately knew.

God, we had fun! Our friends—and then you married,
All went their separate ways, save for intent
"To get together soon," but plans miscarried,
And, well-intending, oft-awry they went.

No matter. To have known you was a gift,
If sorely prized, a gift which keeps on giving,
For, in despair, I hear your words' uplift,
Encouragement, to help me keep on living.

F.R. Leavis on William Blake and the Romantic Attitude

12/13/2015

 
In The Common Pursuit F.R. Leavis mentions Blake: in his work,
again and again one comes on the thing that seems to be neither wholly private nor wholly a poem. It seems not to know what it is or where it belongs, and one suspects that Blake didn't know. What he did know—and know deep down in himself—was that he had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. One obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble. The uncertainty I have just referred to is a more radical and significant form of the same kind of disability. In the absence, we may put it, of adequate social collaboration (the sense, or confident prospect, of a responsive community of minds was the minimum he needed) his powers of attaining in achieved creation to that peculiar impersonal realm to which the work of art belongs and in which minds can meet—it is as little a world of purely private experience as it is the public world of the laboratory—failed to develop as, his native endowment being what it was, they ought to have done.
​

The inevitable way in which serious literary interest develops towards the sociological is suggested well enough here. What better conditions, one asks, can one imagine for a Blake? Can one imagine him in a tradition that should have nurtured his genius rather than have been something to escape from, and in a society that should have provided him with the best conceivable public? And so one is led on to inquire into the nature and conditions of cultural health and prosperity.
Even without "genius" it is easy to identify with Leavis's description. Is this the "audience" Whitman talked about? And is Leavis right?

Leavis goes on to say: "Harking back from Blake one notes that the establishment of the Augustan tradition was associated with—indeed, it involved—a separation, new and abrupt, between sophisticated culture and popular."

My grasp on literary history is not firm enough to know if this is true; but—unless proven otherwise—I find it always good policy to give Leavis the benefit of the doubt. He always brings insight into whichever poet he happens to be discussing, even if one does not agree with every proposition. Earlier in the essay, which is titled "Literature and Society," he states clearly and precisely exactly a thing I have fumbled to say numerous times:

I have spoken of the 'Romantic' attitude, and the phrase might be called misleading, since the actual poets of the Romantic period—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats—differ widely among themselves. No general description worth offering will cover them. Though as influences they merge later in a Romantic tradition, they themselves do not exemplify any common Romanticism. What they have in common is that they belong to the same age; and in belonging to the same age they have in common something negative: the absence of anything to replace the very positive tradition (literary, and more than literary—hence its strength) that had prevailed till towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Donmar Warehouse/National Theatre Live Coriolanus

12/12/2015

 
After liking the Royal Shakespeare Company's broadcast versions of Love's Labours Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, I thought I might give the National Theatre a try with its televised plays. Coriolanus, which played here a few nights ago, was staged not by the National Theatre but by The Donmar Warehouse. To say great expectations were not met is to put it mildly; but I am glad that I went.

​What did I learn? Shakespeare at the Donmar is about on par with what you would find in a similar Chicago production—certainly better than something directed by Barbara Gaines but nothing outstanding. I had hoped, as with the RSC productions, to find (at least) superior articulation (for that The Hollow Crown seems excellent). I doubt if anything can match up to my idealized Coriolanus; that was supplied by Richard Rose's magisterial modern-dress interpretation several years back in Stratford, ON (paired with the equally excellent Taming of the Shrew).

With the theatrical imagination, film may suffice; though I have never found televised opera nearly a match for the live thing (the best way to view opera is backstage from the wings over an extended run). Theater, being textual, adapts better; yet I would never espouse film adaptation for paragon. How much my response to the Stratford production lies with Rose and how much with my needs at the time is impossible to determine—I was just starting out as a playwright and so may have been searching for other things than I would be now. In either case, the delight of live theater is that no definitive version can possibly exist in perpetuity. (Circumstances have never permitted me to see other of Rose's directorial work to know if it is as good as I would imagine it to be—his Tarragon Theatre having been dark while I was in Toronto.)​

F.R. Leavis and The Common Pursuit

12/10/2015

 
I took my stab at The Great Tradition, but did not find Leavis as compelling as in Revaluation and New Bearings, largely because I have not read those authors, am less inclined to the novel (than to poetry), but also because his argument felt weaker.

So now I have embarked on The Common Pursuit, of which Leavis notes:
I take the title of this book from The Function of Criticism, one of those essays of Mr Eliot's which I most admire....—'The common pursuit of true judgment': that is how the critic should see his business, and what it should be for him. His perceptions and judgments are his, or they are nothing; but, whether or not he has consciously addressed himself to cooperative labour, they are inevitably collaborative. Collaboration may take the form of disagreement, and one is grateful to the critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with.
The book is less cohesive than the other two, but is more recent. With, as a friend points out, irony on a variety of levels, he writes:
To-day, when the quality of the literary studies encouraged or permitted at the academic places of education has an obviously important bearing on the prospects of literary culture (that is, of humane culture generally), it is correspondingly important, and certainly not less important than it has been in less desperate times, to defend literature—to defend the classics and the literary tradition—against the academic mind.
I am not—ever—entirely in agreement with his point of view (though often enough so), but often, even when not invested in his subject, find his thinking to be refreshing, as in this excerpt from "In Defense of Milton":
[T]he essay in which [Tillyard] undertakes to confute my account of Milton's Grand Style by showing (with the support of Lascelles Abercrombie, William James, A.E. Housman, Gilbert Murray and Miss Maud Bodkin) that Milton is, or may be plausibly argued to be, remarkable for 'primitive feeling', or 'a richer share than Donne of those fundamental qualities of mind that appear to have immediate contact with the forces of life'—this essay begins: 'If you judged Shakespeare and Milton by the standards of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, there is no doubt that Shakespeare would fare the better.'

What does this mean? Perhaps by dint of questioning and suggestion some discussible proposition could be elicited from Dr Tillyard. But such a sentence (and the formula is repeated more than once in the book) couldn't have been written and left standing if the author hadn't been more concerned with the response he was relying on than the thought he supposed himself to be expressing.
On Gerard Manley Hopkins he writes:
The age in poetry was Tennyson's; and an age for which the ambition 'to bring English as near the Italian as possible' seems a natural and essentially poetic one, is an age in which the genius conscious enough to form a contrary ambition is likely to be very conscious and very contrary.
Leavis is much in sympathy with Hopkins, and faults his friend, Robert Bridges, with having been antipathetic (though not maliciously):
Bridges is a superb example of what education will do for one; his expectations—his taste, his sense of Form and his love of a 'continuous literary decorum'—were uncompromising, incorruptible and completely self-confident.... Decorum for Bridges had nothing like the Augustan correlations; it was a prim donnish conventionality. What, in fact, Bridges represents is essentially the academic mind, though with such confidence, completeness and conviction of authority as to constitute a truly memorable distinction.
While Bridges was no slouch as a poet—witness this favorite of mine—Leavis paints him a prisoner to the Victorian mindset. (He criticises Dante Gabriel Rosetti's sonnet, Soul's Beauty, for being a "shamelessly cheap evocation of a romantic and bogus Platonism"—a charge which I find hard to accept albeit not understanding.)

It has been a long time since I read any of Gerard Manley Hopkins' prose. Leavis excerpts from the Letters. Hopkins writes to Bridges, "I always think however that your mind towards my verse is like mine towards Browning's: I greatly admire the touches and the details, but the general effect, the whole, offends me, I think it repulsive." And:  "I do not like your calling Matthew Arnold Mr Kidglove Cocksure. I have more reason than you for disagreeing with him and thinking him very wrong, but nevertheless I am sure he is a rare genius and a great critic."

Perhaps anticipating Ezra Pound, Hopkins gives voice to the operating ethos of poets of our own day, capturing it entirely and precisely:
So also I cut myself off from the use of ere, o’er, wellnigh, what time, say not (for do not say), because, though dignified, they neither belong to nor could arise from, or be the elevation of, ordinary modern speech. For it seems to me that the poetical language of the age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike it, but not (I mean normally: passing freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one.
Following the "cult of Spenser" (apparently) I do not subscribe to it, if to the detriment of my own verse. To Canon Dixon he writes, "A purpose may look smooth from without but be frayed and faltering from within. I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it." I have felt something similar in recent days with the completion of the new book,

The Common Pursuit is a mixed bag: essays on poetry and prose intermixed. It culminates, purposefully, in an essay on poesy. I am into Swift now; as my whimsy takes me I may report further....

[Update December 11th: I posted this last quote of Hopkins on social media, saying "Hopkins (much in advance) nails the prevailing ethos of poets today exactly" and was promptly corrected: "It's a rare writer in verse in the US today that attempts to write 'the current language heightened.' Most of what is written today is either straight prose, really bad prose, or sillinesses." Touché. Point taken.]

Footnote to Agamemnon (at Court)

12/6/2015

 
I had the good fortune to see Charles Newell's Agamemnon for a second night before it closed. The reviews were not entirely positive, but my take flies contrary to that—Newell could not have done it better.

I have come down rather hard on Newell for his overall performance as Artistic Director of Court Theater. But from hearing reports of friends who attended (at my behest), talking with theater staff, and personal observation this last occasion, I gather that attendance has not been packed. The audience does not support classical theater, however much people may like to pretend that they do, or seriously desire to.

Had there been enthusiastic audience support, I expect the run might have been extended. It did not materialize. 

F.R. Leavis New Bearings in Retrospect

12/2/2015

 
Recently I read Revaluation and then New Bearings by F. R. Leavis. Throughout I found myself underlining sentences or paragraphs that struck me—virtually, at any rate (I am averse to marking up books). The former focuses on English poetry from, say, Milton, Dryden, Pope on through Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats as they had become "revalued" in relation to each other and in relation to tradition particularly in the wake of Eliot's criticism. The latter focuses on three poets primarily, Eliot, Pound, and then Hopkins (whose impact had belatedly begun to be felt), through which to identify the age; and Leavis almost as much as predicted, in their wake, a grand flourishing.

​Two decades later, his addendum "Retrospect 1950" reveals Leavis's disappointment that his forecast failed, and what happened instead. He tells how the poetry world arrived to its present dynamic, bolstered by the death of criticism and coterie-ization of poetry into the university, a transition epitomized by one renowned figure:
​
“Auden[‘s]... career is worth pondering because it is the representative career of the nineteen-thirties.... He entered the literary world with a reputation made at the university....[T]he Auden who conquered the literary world with such ease was the undergraduate intellectual. The undergraduate coterie has always had its part in the formation of talent; but the coterie in the ancient seats of learning has tended, in other days, to bring its members into touch with adult standards. That which formed Auden seems to have been able to remain utterly unaware of them.... His admirers spoke of him having superseded T.S. Eliot.

“It was ridiculous; but not, for that, the less disastrous. Greater gifts than Auden’s might have lost, in such a success, their chance of coming to anything. His misfortune, in fact, brings vividly before us the conditions that, in our time, work against the maturation and development of young talent. They may be seen, simply, as the failure of the function of criticism, though tat, of course, is only one aspect of a very large and complex fact. This may be seen, again, as the disintegration of the educated reading public. It is only in such a public that critical standards have their effective existence. Where there _is_ one, the critic, even when advancing judgements that challenge the most generally accepted valuations, may hope, if he expresses his judgements cogently and aims them with sufficient address at the critical conscience, to get the weight of corroborative response with him, and so to tell. But where no such public exists to be appealed to, the critic’s unpopular judgements’s, even if he can get them printed, remain mere arbitrary assertions and offensive attitudes.

“These are truisms, but they are truisms that, for one engaged in such a retrospect as the present, have a lively relevance. And here are two others: a coterie naturally protects itself and its members, as far as it can, from the severities of criticism: where the whole literary world, so far as current critical expression is concerned, falls virtually under the control of something in the nature of a coterie, then the conditions for the development of creative talent are very bad indeed.”

“It is not in terms of the triumph of any coterie that one would describe the essence of the situation today. The lapsed function [of criticism] has slipped out of memory, and the literary world that makes the reputations gleaned by dons, dons’ wives, university-educated school teachers, and the educated classes in general, from the review pages of the Sunday papers can follow its natural promptings without embarrassment. It is natural, and not necessarily unamiable, to like kudos, and to see the point of pleasing a friend. The lengths to which the process of turning the social values into the distinctions and glories of contemporary literature can be carried (the context, I think, makes the force of ‘social’ plain) has been strikingly demonstrated in the recent elevation of a whole family to the status of living classics.

“It is significant that New York should have added its homage so readily and so unanimously. The system is, in fact, international. At home, it makes the ancient universities, or the relevant elements in them, a part of the literary world.”
    Picture

    News?

    A new poem is always news to the poet.
    ​Or whatever.

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