Inspiration

Prior to publication of To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960, Harper Lee moved to New York, took menial jobs to support herself, and all in all, worked on her manuscript for about eight years. After putting it into the hands of an editor, she re-wrote for an additional couple of years. That’s ten years of writing and re-writing: enough struggle to frustrate anyone... I mean can you even imagine?!

One of the most well-known stories about Ms. Lee and her book comes from the early days of the editing process. One night in the winter of 1958, as she sat in her New York apartment surrounded by drifts of paper which mostly were drafts of the same material, she’d suddenly had enough. Flinging open a window, she tossed her manuscript out into the wind, and watched years of work tumble down into the snow-filled streets. I’ve searched, but I can’t find any report of what Harper Lee said as she flung her life’s work out that window, but I suspect it was neither well-crafted nor particularly literary. A phrase like, “Goddammit!” is what comes to mind.

Whether Lee intended to destroy To Kill a Mockingbird we’ll never know. Fortunately, she called her editor at Lippincott immediately, and Tay Hohoff sent her outside to gather up the pages. The cold air and exercise probably did her good, and the gathered pages, which came together quite nicely in the end, have done all of us good through the years.

Hearing the story, I was reminded of some wonderful passages in Flannery O’Connor’s letters, collected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published under the title The Habit of Being. Writing to Ms. Fitzgerald about her novel Wise Blood, she says, “Enclosed is Opus Nauseous No. 1. I had to read it over after it came from the typist’s and that was like spending the day eating a horse blanket. It seems mighty sorry to me but better than it was before.”

Later, there were references to Opus Nauseous No. 2, her novel entitled The Violent Bear It Away. In a letter to Cecil Dawkins, dated 17 July 1959 she celebrates in her typically understated way: “ Well, my novel is finished and on its way courtesy the US Postal Service to the publisher. Catharine Carver’s final verdict was that it is the best thing I’ve done. The most I am willing to say is that it has taken more doing than anything else I’ve done.”

And, in a September, 1959 letter to Maryat Lee she adds, “Been working on that book for seven years with time off occasionally to write a story. The relief of finishing it was extreme, but I haven’t spit up or anything…”

It’s often said that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but apathy. If Harper Lee had allowed her manuscript to disappear in her apartment beneath drifts of junk mail, bills, and old National Geographic magazines, that would have been one thing. If Flannery O’Connor had said, “Well, I believe three years is long enough. We’ll just call this one done and stick it in the mail”, that would have been another. But both authors were bound to their vision of the truth and the integrity of their work by varying degrees of love, disdain, revulsion and amazement. If they were given to dramatic gestures and sardonic humor from time to time--well, so be it. In the end, their gritty, obsessive, and completely unsentimental view of their life’s work allowed them to persevere.

I know this. After a week of surviving off of three hours of sleep a night, when the coffee’s boiled down and the process of putting words to page is like putting my parent's cat outside during a thunderstorm, I want nothing to do with insipid paragraphs about the dignity of the writer’s vocation. Let me contemplate Flannery O’Connor eating a horseblanket, or Nelle Harper Lee crawling around in the snow on all fours, grabbing her manuscript pages.

Now, that’s inspiration.

The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland

This poem by Yeats is a masterpiece of the "parallel" style. Four stanzas of repeated syntax, words, and images, with rhyme and meter as well. It's as tightly patterned as Celtic knot-work.

The Man Who Dreamed Of Faeryland
W.B. Yeats

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;
His mind ran all on money cares and fears,
And he had known at last some prudent years
Before they heaped his grave under the hill;
But while he passed before a plashy place,
A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth
Sang that somewhere to north or west or south
There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race
Under the golden or the silver skies;
That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot
It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:
And at that singing he was no more wise.

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,
He mused upon his mockers: without fail
His sudden vengeance were a country tale,
When earthy night had drunk his body in;
But one small knot-grass growing by the pool
Sang where -- unnecessary cruel voice --
Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,
Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall
Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,
And midnight there enfold them like a fleece
And lover there by lover be at peace.
The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;
And might have known at last unhaunted sleep
Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,
Now that the earth had taken man and all:
Did not the worms that spired about his bones
proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry
That God has laid His fingers on the sky,
That from those fingers glittering summer runs
Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.
Why should those lovers that no lovers miss
Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?
The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Yeats wrote this in 1891, when he was 26 years old. I wonder if Tolkien ever read it? It reminds me of Tolkien, anyway--the "gay, exulting, gentle race" on their "woven world-forgotten isle"; the golden and silver light that could be from the Two Trees of Valinor. The man in the poem is afflicted by something like Tolkien's "longing for elves." Every time he tries to get back to his mortal affairs--love, money, revenge, and finally death-- he is baffled by a dream of immortality, first elvish and finally heavenly.

What goes into a "perfect" line?

Sometimes you come across a single line of poetry that is so striking that it has a life of its own. It would still be powerful even if it were ripped from its context, blowing around in the Sahara on a scrap of papyrus. If you like poetry, you have a lot of them drifting through your mind:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon

I knew a woman lovely in her bones

Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold

After finishing a paper (one more to go!) I began to think about the rather old and murky question of what makes a line "perfect." Well, I probably thought about it way longer than I should have. It was easy to pick out lines that I thought were perfect, and less easy to say why they were perfect. First off, I decided that perfect is not the same thing as best. Some "perfect" lines I like better than others, but each one seems to inhabit its own little world. After looking closely at some of them, I put together some characteristics of the "perfect line":

1. It has to be complete. The root sense of "perfect" is "finished" (Latin, perfectus), as in "the perfect tense." There can't be bits of syntax intruding from the lines before or after. Look at this line:

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

It comes from a great poem ("The Windhover"), but it is not a perfect line. As a part of the whole, it is flawless; but it can never stand alone. Though a perfect line doesn't need to be a complete sentence. It isn't often a subordinate clause, but very often it's part of a clause: "Or stormy silver fret the gold of day"-- Yeats. Usually the perfect line is either a main clause ("The wintry haw is burning out of season"--Heaney) or a single image--that is, a noun with all its pomps and accouterments, but without the slightest hint of a verb. And no need for one. These single image lines seem framed by a contemplative eye, and they don't have to justify their existence:

A rose-red city, half as old as time

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone

These things are sufficient in their own way. They can summon an image in your mind without any help from the rest of the poem. And such images!

2. It has to be strange. A perfect line stands out vividly from the other lines, like a hologram. It is unique; it pops off the page. The idea must be strange, or the words used must be strange. Look at the last two lines I gave: "rose-red" is an unusual foil for "city," and bracelets are made of many things, but usually not of hair. "Half as old as time"--none of the words are unusual, but the idea is strange. The first line is strange in both ways: its first half uses strange diction; its second half uses a strange concept. The second line, one of John Donne's, takes three pairs of words, each perfectly normal, and then mixes them up. "Bright" and "bracelet"--connected by alliteration and association. "Bright" and "hair"--a commonplace. "Hair" and "bone"--definitely on the same page here. But combine them, and see how the bright beginning slopes down and becomes increasingly macabre, while the entire line retains an overlay of brightness, even at the gruesome ending...

3. It has to be familiar. Mere strangeness isn't enough. What I'm trying to get at is the idea of balance. The line has to strike a golden mean between... well, a lot of things - some of them obvious, many of them elusive. It should feel right somehow. It should have a bit of the primitive, a bit of the artless, to balance its strangeness. It should make you a bit homesick. Look at the Seamus Heaney line again: The wintry haw is burning out of season. It feels like a nursery rhyme or a song. I think of Tolkien: "In Western lands beneath the sun / The flowers may rise in spring..." or this:

When winter first begins to bite
And stones crack in the frosty night -
When pools are black and trees are bare,
Tis evil in the wild to fare.

The line feels like other simple lines that we've enjoyed before, but it stands apart from them with its elegant rhythm and highly tuned language.

4. It's usually iambic pentameter. If it's in English, that is. Why is this? Because I.P. is so widely used. Because iambic tetrameter doesn't finish a thought in one line so often. Because of that balance thing: there's something about those five feet that sounds complete. A four-foot line feels like it wants to keep on going. But here are some that aren't iambic pentameter:

She walks in beauty like the night

Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

Now, a whole poem composed of perfect lines is not the ideal. It would be over-intense, as well as disjointed. There is this poem by Theodore Roethke that has an unusual number of perfect lines, and by the last stanza every line is syntactically complete and only vaguely connected to the other lines:

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Lovely lines, but the lack of cohesion is slightly irritating.

In the end, of course, it's personal opinion that deems a line "perfect." The same line can give one person a charge and leave another cold. I happen to like these:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

Low-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Truth and beauty buried be.

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

Leisure

Silent Spain, slumbering Spain, solitary Spain. Max Picard, that great writer of thin thick books, loved old Spain. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Picard noted that Spain is considered backward because it did not “join in the universal noise and mobility of the modern age by industrializing its economy.”

Much of the same held true for other traditionally-Catholic countries: Portugal, Ireland, Mexico, large swaths of Italy, pockets of peasant France. It led the sociologist Max Weber to conclude that capitalism and modern industry is a fruit of Protestantism and the grim Calvinistic work ethic that eschews everything pleasurable for everything sweaty. Such a view gains credibility when combined with the general Protestant worldview that sharply distinguishes the secular world from the religious world, thereby carving out a huge space in the modern world for nose-to-the-grindstone effort detached from holiness.

Weber was wrong about the advent of capitalism. The beginnings of the modern free market can be found in the High Middle Ages, the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when trade and finance flourished, living standards rose quickly, and the foundations of commercial capitalism developed. The Renaissance Italian city-states were capitalistic. In fact, they started the financial techniques such as double-entry bookkeeping that became the egg-headed two-by-fours of the Industrial Revolution. The Catholic city of Antwerp was the premier financial and commercial center in the sixteenth century as well.

Still, Weber had a point. There is a stark difference in the mentality of the Catholic and the mentality of the Calvinist when it comes to work. Protestants have tended to glorify the mere exertion of labor. Their view of human depravity and Original Sin have made them distrustful of our natural inclination to enjoy pleasant things...and trustful of things not so pleasant, like hard work.

Contrast this with the traditional Catholic worldview. In the words of economist Emil Kauder, in his book A History of Marginal Utility Theory:

"Instead of work, moderate pleasure-seeking and happiness form the center of economic actions, according to Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. A certain balanced hedonism is an integrated part of the Aristotelian theory of the good life. If pleasure in a moderate form is the purpose of economics, then following the Aristotelian concept of the final cause, all principles of economics including valuation must be derived from this goal. In this pattern of Aristotelian and Thomistic thinking, valuation has the function of showing how much pleasure can be derived from economic goods."

This fundamental difference between the traditional Catholic and traditional Protestant worldview can be summed up by each side’s emphasis: Catholics emphasize leisure first. Protestants emphasize work first. Neither denies the other part, but the entire mental landscape of the two camps tilts differently. And the resulting worldly landscape tilts significantly differently. The landscape differences are seen in the office or the library for me. But perhaps more troubling, the difference is seen in the American response to our free time.

Too often, Americans use free time for grim self-improvement: working out, more classes, etc. Some of that is good, even great, no doubt, but self-improvement all the time is no self-improvement at all. As Americans, we often lack a proper understanding of leisure. Leisure is good because it does nothing, it’s something higher because it’s not focused on anything lower, it’s something noble because it’s not filled with self-importance. In America, leisure is dedicated to resting us up for work, and that’s perverse. That’s like dedicating drinking to sobriety (“I’m drinking now, so I can be a better sober person later”).

In a Catholic understanding, or if you don't wish to call it that, a view distinctly different from what I would call traditionally Protestant or Calvinist, leisure would come first and work would be leavened with the ultimate goal of life: sanctity and enjoyment of God’s gift of life. Just a thought.

The Tax Road to Serfdom

I listened to a great podcast at Lew Rockwell this week: Tax Resistance, Then and Now. It was a speech by Charles Adams, a tax practitioner and history buff who says direct taxation (like our income tax) has brought all sorts of evils, including serfdom. According to Adams, Roman people were migrating all over the place in order to escape the tax rolls, so Diocletian mandated that all persons be tied to the land and to their jobs. The result was serfdom.

"Yet in the 4th century A.D., liberty and freedom for the Roman people was taken away by the Emperor Diocletian in order to protect the emperor’s revenue. In one fell swoop, Diocletian ordered all Romans to remain on their jobs, to not change their places of abode. That way, no one could escape from the tax rolls. Prior to his decree, Roman taxation was founded upon a census taken every five years, but overly taxed citizens — after taxes had been doubled and then doubled again — would quickly move away to a new tax district where they weren’t on the rolls, and until the next census they were outside the tax system. There was a saying at that time, that “a man was free if his name was not on the tax rolls.” So like all governments before and since, they took the necessary steps, even if it meant taking away the freedom of the people, to ensure full compliance with the tax law. There is evidence to support and justify what Diocletian did to prevent the empire from collapse. But the great Roman historian, M. Rostovtzeff, saw this as no justification for the evil that was done:

The emperors of the fourth century, and above all Diocletian…took their duties seriously, and they were animated by the sincerest love of their country. Their aim was to save the Roman Empire, and they achieved it…. They never asked whether it was worth while to save the Roman Empire in order to make a vast prison for scores of millions of men."

Will Durant, in Caesar and Christ, supports Adams. After spending a page explaining the direct tax Diocletian instituted and the draconian measures he took to stop evasion (”torture was used upon wives, children, and slaves to make them reveal the hidden wealth or earnings of the household”), he concluded:

"It was probably to check this costly mobility, to ensure a proper flow of food to armies and cities, and of taxes to the state, that Diocletian resorted to measures that in effect established serfdom in the fields, factories, and guilds. . . . In this and other ways agriculture passed in the third century from slavery through freedom to serfdom, and entered the Middle Ages." (Will Durant, Caesar and Christ), p. 644.

Monstrous Grace in the Songs of Tom Waits

I think it’s fitting to describe the American singer-songwriter Tom Waits as a 'theologian'--but we must immediately add that he’s a theologian of the dys-angelion. His songs conjure up a swirling chaos of monsters and madness, devils and despair – and on the horizon of this dark world we glimpse the startling first glow of dawn, the surprising appearance of grace 'out of the depths'.

God suddenly breaks into Tom Waits’ songs as a strange, threatening, even monstrous presence, as an unaccountable interruption of the world’s (dis-)order. One of Waits’ most astonishing theological pronouncements, for example, is the gleeful hiss:

Don’t you know there ain’t no devil
That’s just God when he’s drunk.

Or on another occasion he wonders: 'Did the devil make the world while God was sleeping?' In such songs, God bursts onto the stage not as the benevolent projection of our own wishes and desires, but as the one who overturns our expectations and shatters our projections of what 'God' should be like. God appears not as a supreme being who calmly completes and perfects nature, but as the one who interrupts nature in the apocalyptic newness of grace. Divine grace, for Waits, is thus a kind of unnatural incursion, a perversity, a disruption of the way things are. There is a lot of grace in Wait’s catalogue of songs. Unmerited mercy; undeserved kindness and forgiveness emerge out of dark places. Grace interrupts, it shatters and strips things bare to the bone. And so Waits portrays God’s grace in a way that is uncompromisingly – often shockingly – menacing and grotesque.

Even in his more 'orthodox' gospel songs--and there are many, such as 'Way Down in the Hole', 'All Stripped Down', 'Down There by the Train', 'Never Let Go', 'Make It Rain', 'Take Care of All of My Children', 'Come on Up to the House' – even here, grace appears as a perverse interruption of a world of murder and brutality and Satanic seduction. Grace breaks into this world like a nightmare or an earthquake or a house fire – wholly unexpected, unconditional, presuppositionless; impossible to be tamed or assimilated. As Rowan Williams remarks in his study of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, 'the actuality of grace is uncovered in the moment of excess--which may be in a deliberately intensified gracelessness.' A 'deliberately intensified gracelessness'--this is the world of Tom Waits’ lyrical theology. And it’s in this way that Waits articulates the 'good news' (euangelion) through a startlingly violent and brutal declaration of the 'bad news' (dysangelion).

Grace shines from the abyss. It appears in the mode of the grotesque. And if grace is itself 'bad news,' it’s bad news only for those of us who are already complacent in our own religion and our own righteousness (our own ready-made 'Chocolate Jesus', to quote one of Waits’ most hilarious religious songs). It is 'bad news' because tax collectors (still relevant in our culture) and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of us, because (as Waits puts it) those who 'never asked forgiveness, never said a prayer' are nevertheless grasped and held by grace. It is 'bad news' because God--if he is really the God of grace--is not the God we want, not the God we think we need. He is the God who does not 'fit', but interrupts. He is the God whose ‘Yes’ is hidden in a shattering ‘No.’

But this 'bad news' is indeed 'good news' for the undeserving, the criminals, those riddled and rotten with shame and doubt. Thus in 'Down There by the Train', one of Waits’ most profound gospel songs, we are presented with an unsettling catalogue of history’s most notorious criminals, from Judas Iscariot to the school shooter Charles Whitman. The whistle of the train of salvation is heard 'From the halls of heaven to the gates of hell'--it’s heard by the 'shameful' and the 'whores,' by the criminals whom the world forsakes, by those who take the 'low road' through life, and even by the blatantly irreligious who have 'never said a prayer.' On this train, all the lonely outcasts are finally gathered into community; all sins and crimes are pardoned. On this train, God’s judgment is pronounced as the judgment of 'the lamb,' and so as the judgment of grace. For this reason, there is here 'no eye for an eye, no tooth for a tooth'--you’ll never get your just deserts on this train.

With their shockingly grotesque world, Waits’ songs convey what the British novelist Graham Greene called 'the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God'. At the world’s dark end, all that remains is grace--the grace of God, which is always grace for the ungodly, grace for us all. As Waits puts it in one of his gospel songs:

Does life seem nasty, brutish and short?
Come on up to the house.
The seas are stormy
And you can’t find no port;
Come on up to the house.

Glitter and Doom: Live Concert Recorded at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta (thanks to NPR!)

Photo Gallery of the show

Love's as Warm as Tears

Love's as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love's as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts--infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love's as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering 'Dare! Dare!'
To sap, to blood,
Telling 'Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.'

Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.

-C.S. Lewis

I didn't forget...

Today is the feast of St. George. Let us sit at the feet of Professor Chesterton (who didn't believe in paragraphs apparently :) as he explains the importance of this great saint for our time:

Thus, to take the historical St. George; if all we know about him is that he was killed for his opinions, that fact is, properly considered, so staggering that it might send us all singing into battle. Or take rather the legendary St. George, who is (I need hardly say) very much more important than the real one. As it is, St. George the dragon-slayer stands to us simply and sufficiently as the symbol of courage. He does not stand in our minds connected with any of those silly epigrams which great men in their old age utter to misguided youth. St. George never told anybody what was his "method" or what was "the secret of his power." He made no remarks; he merely killed the dragon. He did not say that the dragon was killed on Eton playing-fields. He did not say that the dragon was killed on the anniversary of Majuba. He did not say that he had never met a dragon with whom he couldn't do a deal. He never called the death of the dragon inevitable: while he was fighting the dragon he had thoroughly discovered that it was not. He never said that the way to kill a dragon was to work hard in early youth, or to start with twopence a day, or to avoid tobacco, or to know your own mind, or any of those inane tips. For St. George knew very well what all real soldiers know; that the only way to be even approximately likely to kill a dragon is to give the dragon a heavy chance of killing you. And this method, which is the only one, is much too unpleasant to be talked about. You see, I am making a character of St. George at my own will and fancy. That is the whole point and advantage of the unknown saint. That is why saint-worship is so much more free than hero-worship. (ILN, May 12, 1906)

One sentence in that bears repeating: "For St. George knew very well what all real soldiers know; that the only way to be even approximately likely to kill a dragon is to give the dragon a heavy chance of killing you."

To arms, friends, a sword in one hand and a glass of muscadine wine (I don't like beer so much) in the other. There are many dragons about, especially with Finals coming up!

I forgot...

Yesterday was Earth Day fellow citizens. It's never too late to show your love for Gaia though: Fire up the grill. Cook red meat. Open the windows of your house and run the AC or the heater, as temperatures dictate. Let the car idle in the driveway. Is it hunting season where you live? Shoot something. Chop down a tree (Old growth if possible). Burn your trash. Burn your recycling bin too. Have your roommate flush stuff down the toilet.

To Read and to Live

I.

In 1956, W.H. Auden returned to an Oxford University from which he had graduated almost thirty years earlier. He was now the University’s Professor of Poetry, and in his Inaugural Lecture he spoke of an old concern of his-one that h had addressed in very different terms in 1939. In that distant age, in his famous elegy on Yeats, he had asserted that

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper.

Is it good or bad that “poetry makes nothing happen”? Though it may be regrettable that Yeats’ poetry could not change Ireland, Auden’s sneer at “executives” suggests that poetry’s disconnection from things that happen can be a mark of distinction, a badge of honor. But by the time he got back to Oxford Auden had stopped sneering and had become rather mournful about the uselessness of poetry—though that mournfulness could often be masked by humor. At the beginning of his Inaugural Lecture he said,

"I should be feeling less uneasy at this moment than I do, if the duties of the Professor of Poetry were to produce, as occasion should demand, an epithalamium for the nuptials of a Reader in Romance Languages, an elegy on a deceased Canon of Christ Church, a May-day Masque for Somerville [College], or an election ballad for his successor."

Most of Auden’s listeners no doubt thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. By this point in his career Auden had so thoroughly repudiated the splendid isolation of poetry advocated by Romantic and modern writers alike that he had developed a genuine longing for a conception of the writer as a public servant or as an artisan: the fabricator of objects not only for pleasure but also for use.

I should note that Auden’s argument with the Romantic tradition is not the same as that of his modernist predecessors like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Whereas those writers chastised Romanticism for its relentless celebration of the self, its “cult of personality,” Auden frowns upon both Romantic and modern poetics for their acceptance of the autonomy of the literary imagination: for him such autonomy may more accurately be described as an enervating and ultimately deadly detachment. In the 1930s another writer, the Polish poet Oscar Milosz (older cousin of the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz), described this isolating and aestheticizing tendency as an “unfortunate deviation” in the long history of poetry, which has “produced a schism and a misunderstanding between the poet and the great human family which has continued to the present.”

Once such a diagnosis has been made, the next question is, how may this “schism” be healed, the family restored to wholeness? What can bring the prodigal poets back into the fold? Such a task is not, we must recognize, only a matter of encouraging writers to renew their ties with their society; it also involves getting readers to unlearn the lessons of literary autonomy which they have learned better perhaps than the writers themselves. Oscar Milosz argues that such a restoration can occur only through the arrival on the scene of a great author, “a modern Homer, Shakespeare, or Dante” who will renounce “his paltry ego” and reestablish a viable connection with the people. But even a possibility as remote as that is beyond Auden’s imagination:

"The so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility value as a mnemonic, a device by which knowledge and culture were handed on from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the draughtsman and the painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation; they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is, gratuitous activities. . . . In the purely gratuitous arts . . . our century has no need, I believe, to be ashamed of its achievements, and in its production of purely utile and functional articles . . . it surpasses every previous age. But whenever it attempts to combine the gratuitous and the utile, to fabricate something which shall be both functional and beautiful, it fails utterly."

Thus Auden has a diagnosis but no prescription for cure: he cannot envision any changes in our world that would restore the arts to the usefulness he believes they once had.

People who nowadays study literature, especially those doing it for a living as either students or teachers seem to be prone to the same kind of uneasiness that afflicted Auden and Milosz, and the doctrines of literary autonomy have had consequences not only for writers and readers, but also for teachers and students. The current ideological ferment in literary studies--the heated arguments about the political effects of literature and literary study, the increasing skepticism about the validity of purely aesthetic categories, and so on, has been generated by the same social and cultural forces that caused Auden’s nostalgia for a poetic World That Time Forgot.

But the arguments prompted by this admirable desire to reconnect the teaching, as well as the writing, of literature with “the great human family” have so far been fruitless for the most part, dominated by rhetorical posturing, name-calling, claiming of the moral high ground, and other tactics that contribute little to the potential resolution of the debate, or even to mutual comprehension by the antagonists. This fruitlessness, moreover, is inevitable--if for no other reason, because the vocabulary is so shallow and inflexible, and thus in need of replacement, or at least supplementation, by a language that is better able to account for what literature says to us and how we receive it. In short, we have been talking too much about politics and far too little about ethics.

Marcus Pound Interview

I came across this interview with Marcus Pound a while back and have since read both of his books; he is the author of Zizek: A (Very) Critical Introduction and Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma.

The University of Nottingham's Theology and Philosophy Department is putting out very creative and engaging work, with John Milbank and Connor Cunningham joining Pound in scholarship--I especially want to read Transcendence and Phenomenology. Here's a snippet from the interview with Marcus Pound:

TOJ: Also central to your book is the Eucharist and the theology of transubstantiation. For the Eucharist to work, you argue, God must and does break into time every time we partake in the bread and the wine. God breaking into time, the infinite breaking into the finite, is trauma. Can you elaborate on the therapeutic function of God breaking into time, how God offers in this way an analytic intervention?

MP: Before directly answering your question I should point out the obvious problem regarding this language about God breaking into time. It lends itself toward an extrinsic theology of nature and grace as if prior to the event, God was somehow distanced. Yet as Henri de Lubac puts it, God did not create the world only to disappear. De Lubac, and those associated with nouvelle thèologie spearheaded a return to the sources (i.e. the patristic sources of theology) from which they recovered a more paradoxical understanding of the relation between nature and grace according to which humans were already graced with a natural desire for the supernatural (paradoxical because the end exceeds its beginning). God was not distanced from creation. God is, as Augustine put it: Deus interior intimo meo, the God who is more interior to me than I am myself. That is to say, the realm of the supernatural is not some extra appendage which occasionally bursts through in a punctilios fashion—the predominant model underpinning Evangelism and populist forms of Islam—the world and matter are given as already supernatural in ways which transcend the sphere of a natural order.

There is much in this paradoxical understanding that accords with Lacan’s approach to subjectivity. Augustine’s claim that God is more internal to man than man is to himself easily translates into Lacan’s neologism “exitmacy”, the exterior that is more interior. In fact, in my forthcoming book on Žižek I take seriously the direct historical impact these theological debates had upon Lacan. For example, he cites his conversations with Father Teilhard de Chardin (a close friend of de Lubac), he made de Lubac’s star pupil Michele de Certeau one of his inner circle, and openly spoke out on issues such as Ecumenism and Vatican II. Moreover, what was the return-to-Freud if not a return to the patristic sources of psychoanalysis, a renewed interpretation predicated upon close translations of the original texts, and attentiveness to the historical context which yielded a richer and more paradoxical view of subjectivity?

So, to return to the question: God breaking into time. It is not an extrinsic theology that underpins Lacan but an intrinsic one. The unconscious is not hidden, out of view, distanced from the subject in the manner of an extrinsic God. The unconscious works by hiding the truth in full view, like the thief who hides a diamond in a chandelier. So the trauma is not so much about something new bursting in as it is about seeing what is already there.

And herein lies the point about trauma and Eucharist. The Eucharist is traumatic not because it is a special instance of God’s grace breaking in, as if it were some hidden force behind the material support of life; rather it is traumatic because it shows God in the absolute mundane, the simple subsistence of life, directly identifying the two. As Catherine Pickstock has put it, in the Eucharist—the repetition of Christ’s own passion through the breaking (trauma) of the bread—we face both the greatest dereliction of meaning, Christ abandoned on the cross, yet equally the greatest promise of plenitude through that giving.

* * * * *

The Old New Criticism

In the formulations of Stanley Fish, the literary critic does not seek to elucidate the vision of reality represented by a work of literature, but instead sets out to bend a “text” (so much plastic verbiage) to his own version of things, and to manipulate an audience in the process. Of course as Fish’s language reveals, this interpretive license only operates “within the constraints embedded in the literary institution,” or, as he has taken to calling it, the “interpretive community.” It turns out that maximum freedom is maximum bondage, the critic being as much a product of his socioeconomic situation as a book.

I have come to learn that this state of affairs was anticipated by Cleanth Brooks, the famous progenitor of "New Criticism." In the preface to The Well Wrought Urn, perhaps the single most important work of the "movement," he observed, “The temper of our times is strongly relativistic,” and in the face of this, he affirms the propriety, indeed the necessity, of seeing “what residuum, if any, is left after we have referred the poem to its cultural matrix.” Brooks explicitly affirms the importance of literary history, and anyone familiar with his own critical practice will be aware of his profound knowledge of the historical context of the literary works he treats. “Yet,” he continues, “if poetry exists as poetry in any meaningful sense, the attempt must be made [to view it sub specie aeternitatis]. Otherwise the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument.” The state of affairs about which Brooks offered this caution fifty-odd years ago is now cheerfully flaunted as the New Historicism.

The first chapter of The Well Wrought Urn, titled “The Language of Paradox,” provides perhaps the most vivid clue to both the implications of the New Criticism and of ideological theories that have arisen to challenge it. It is this chapter, for instance, that has been singled out for “deconstruction” by Jonathan Culler. In it Brooks sets out to show that the language of poetry is inherently paradoxical--a blend of “irony and wonder”; that is, what distinguishes a genuine poem is that its verbal pattern, especially its various figures of speech, cannot be reduced to any set of plain prose statements—or at least that any such paraphrase is not the same as, or interchangeable with, the poem. In the language of economics, poetry is not fungible. Precisely this irreducibility is what constitutes a poem’s independent existence according to Brooks.

The poem that Brooks cites to illustrate this view is “The Canonization” by John Donne, a brilliant, if extravagant and sometimes risque, deployment of religious language in defense of human sexual love. The poem is by turns outrageously and defiantly witty, tender, and impassioned. What is more, there are numerous features of the poem that seem to reflect Donne’s own life--he destroyed his hopes for preferment at Court and fell into disgrace and financial ruin by eloping with a very young woman staying in his employer’s household.

The poem, however, was not published until after the poet’s death, and its actual relation to events in his life is finally a matter of speculation. Brooks’ central thesis is that the seemingly contradictory tensions in “The Canonization”—the ironic, even bawdy, references to sexual intercourse jostling against the assertions of human love’s transcendence—finally converge in a unified vision of our experience of love which cannot be expressed in our ordinary, commonsense statements about it. The vision that is verbally manifest in the poem may or may not have been inspired or provoked by this or that incident or preoccupation in the life of the man John Donne, but the poem itself is distinct from the aims and experiences of the poet, and accessible to the experience of readers in a way that the actual life experience of another is not.

Consider, for example, the central stanza of “The Canonization” (also see the wikipedia link:

Call us what you will, wee’are made such by love;
Call her one, mee another flye,
We’are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die,
And wee in us finde the’Eagle and the dove.
The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
Wee dye and rise the same,
and prove Mysterious by this love.

There are more puzzles and obscurities and complex tonal layers than I can begin to unravel here (that, after all, is the point), but I do wish to call attention to the closing couplet. Christ’s Resurrection from death, one of the mysteries of the Christian faith, is evoked here at the same time and in the same words as a bawdy Renaissance pun on “dying” as the attainment of sexual climax. One could choose to regard this as mere blasphemy, but the tone of the poem as a whole seems to preclude such a simplification; yet the lines do gain much of their force from the suggestion of blasphemy. This passage, and finally the poem as a whole, sets out to acknowledge, and so far as possible embrace, our entire equivocal experience of human sexuality, which is funny, embarrassing, obscene, “dirty”; exciting and pleasurable and yet repugnant; tender, exalted, sacred. Marriage is, after all, regarded by some Christian communions as a sacrament and by all as a holy and honorable estate, and it is only consummated by sexual intercourse. Brooks’ comment on the passage is instructive: “The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere lust. This is their title to canonization. Their love is like the phoenix. . . . Most important of all, the sexual submeaning of ‘die’ does not contradict the other meanings.”

It is not my purpose here to defend every aspect of Brooks’ reading of “The Canonization” (I myself find the poem less solemn and more boisterous than he); what is at stake, however, is his view of this poem-—or any effective poem-—as a triumph over the inadequacies of our ordinary language. The heart of the New Critical account of poetry, of literature generally, is the discovery of how the work of imaginative writers pushes back the limitations of human language, yet at the same time, in the very act of challenging them, reminds us of the ineluctable presence of such limitations by the extraordinary literary devices required for the confrontation.

The enemies Brooks and his generation were accustomed to were likely to attack from the direction of positivism or a quasi-scientific rationalism: literature was dismissed as merely “emotive,” inaccurate, not “empirically verifiable.” Hence the New Critics were at pains to stress that the language of imaginative literature and of proper literary criticism was, in its own way, as precise as the language of science, that if the knowledge embodied in literature lacked the mathematical certitude of physics, it was nevertheless objective.

From the deconstructivist perspective, however, no discourse can boast precision or objectivity; no signifier can make the signified fully present or available to the mind. Everything, then, is “literature,” but this is not an honorific term. Scientific and philosophic discourse, legal documents, and pastoral elegies are all chains of signifiers that never terminate in the signified: textuality is our prison from which there is no escape.

The typical procedure of deconstruction is to grasp a loose thread in the textual weave of a discourse and to proceed with the unraveling. Jonathan Culler seizes upon Brooks’ comment on the fourth stanza of “The Canonization,” where the “sonnets” and “hymnes” celebrating the passion of the lovers are compared to a “well wrought urne.” “The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts,” Brooks says; “it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince’s ‘halfe-acre tombe.’“

According to Culler, in On Deconstruction, Brooks is attributing to the poem a “self-reference”—a “self-reflexivity . . . seen as self-knowledge, self-possession, a self-understanding or presence of the poem to itself.” But, he assures us, “Under exegetical pressure, self-reference demonstrates the impossibility of self-possession.” Culler proceeds to insist that “The Canonization” is “not so much a self-contained urn as a chain of discourses and representations”; for “if the poem is the urn, then one of the principal features of the urn is that it portrays people responding to the urn.” It turns out that Cleanth Brooks himself becomes part of the poem “he thought he was analyzing from the outside”:

"This self-referential element in Donne’s poem does not produce or induce a closure in which the poem harmoniously is the thing it describes. In celebrating itself as urn the poem incorporates a celebration of the urn and thus becomes something other than the urn; and if the urn is taken to include the response to the urn, then the responses it anticipates, such as Brooks’, become a part of it and prevent it from closing. Self-reference does not close it in upon itself but leads to a proliferation of representations, a series of invocations and urns, including Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn."

There are two important points to notice here. First, “self-referentiality” is not Brooks’ term, nor his concept; Culler imposes it with no justification. For a poem to be “both the assertion and the realization of the assertion” does not entail “self-reference” or “self-reflexivity.” “The Canonization” refers not to itself, but to what it represents: the speech of a fictive character, whose attitudes and ideas doubtless had their origin in the consciousness of John Donne, but who is certainly not identical with that poet. (The “speaker” or “persona” is as “present” as he ever was; Donne is long since dead.) Second, when Brooks says, “The poem itself is the well wrought urn,” this is a statement of a different order than, say, “The poem comprises forty-five lines.” Brooks uses “well wrought urn” metaphorically, much as Donne does; and so the urn was “something other than an urn” long before Culler noticed. He might as well require Brooks to produce an enameled clay vessel decorated with “Countries, Townes, Courts”; or Keats to account for the deserted village on his “Grecian Urn.” The deconstructionists are quite the cleverest people around the English department these days, but occasionally they resemble the dullest undergraduates in their inability to distinguish between figurative and literal language—or between poetry and pottery.

To be sure, a major goal of the deconstructive project is to put in question such binary oppositions as literal/figurative and literary/scientific; but as the example of Jonathan Culler suggests, we usually get question-begging rather than argument. His deconstruction of Brooks’ reading of “The Canonization” begins by assuming that the notion of self-referentiality applies to a poem in the same fashion as it applies to, say, a legal document that defines itself. Likewise, he assumes that the nature of signification renders nugatory any real distinction between fact and fiction, between literal statement and metaphor. Of course these are the very points that the deconstructionist is supposed to prove. But in fact deconstruction can, finally, prove nothing, for by denying the efficacy of discourse it undermines the significance of proof. Deconstruction is typical of contemporary literary theory in hating the word as an embodiment or manifestation of truth. Hence it attacks the integrity of the fictive world of imaginative literature precisely because literature defines itself in terms of the truth which it is not, but which it represents.

A poem cannot exhaust reality, but it can arrest it: by manifesting a vision of experience available in no other way. This is only possible because, like a physical urn, it is a distinct substantial object: only by its difference from human experience can a poem represent that experience, even as the urn can be a metaphor for a poem only if it is not itself a poem. The alternative to “crystalline closure” is not, then, an endless and chaotic “repetition and proliferation,” but a structured relationship of significance.

Literature helps us to know life precisely in the way that many now deny: literature dramatizes experience by establishing a vantage point outside it. It is just because “The Canonization” occupies a different existential space from John Donne, Cleanth Brooks, and flesh-and-blood love affairs that we are able to learn so much from it about Donne, Brooks, and love--and ourselves.

The Ballad of the White Horse

Most of G.K. Chesterton's poems haven't held up very well; they're too topical, dashed off in the service of some polemic or another.

There are poems of his, though, that ought to be remembered for ever and ever. His religious poems will never become outdated: Think A Christmas Carol and The House of Christmas. Lepanto is his second greatest poem, wonderful in so many ways... Its long, divinely energetic lines, its stirring snare-drum beat, its sudden, cinematic shifts in location and perspective, its stunning color and unforgettable rhetoric.

But the Ballad of the White Horse is on a whole other level.

It is an epic poem, but it draws you in like an exciting novel. The emotional power and weight of the imagery are so far above Chesterton's usual poetic practice that the poem becomes Yeatsian in places. It is all about the war between paganism and Christianity, with the action usually focused on King Alfred. The verses insinuate themselves easily into your memory: they bristle with phrases that have the solid ring of proverb, or prophecy.

The Ballad is rhymed, but to avoid monotony, Chesterton uses three different stanza forms. Here is a passage that uses all three:

A: Her face was like an open word
B: When brave men speak and choose,
C: The very colours of her coat
B: Were better than good news.

A: She spoke not, nor turned not,
B: Nor any sign she cast,
C: Only she stood up straight and free,
C: Between the flowers in Athelney,
B: And the river running past.

A: One dim ancestral jewel hung
B: On his ruined armour grey,
C: He rent and cast it at her feet:
C: Where, after centuries, with slow feet,
C: Men came from hall and school and street
B: And found it where it lay.

The different rhyme schemes have an emotional effect as well. There is the sing-song simplicity of ABCB, then the more lively effect when a second C rhyme is added, and then the triple rhyme CCC which has a more mysterious power. Compare the stanzas:

And right to the red torchlight,
From the trouble of morning grey,
They stripped the White Horse of the grass
As they strip it to this day.

And under the red torchlight
He went dreaming as though dull,
Of his old companions slain like kings,
And the rich irrevocable things
Of a heart that hath not openings,
But is shut fast, being full.

This passage shows another important technique of GKC's: describing the same scene more than once, to get a richer sense of it. This same tactic is used in the Chanson de Roland - when something important happens, it is described three or four times from different angles, just to try and capture its full significance. Very effective. (Stevens uses it in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.")

And then there are the characters! Chesterton introduces each of Alfred's allies with a long, brilliant descripive passage. This is part of Colan's description, which contains one of GKC's most famous stanzas:

His harp was carved and cunning,
His sword prompt and sharp,
And he was gay when he held the sword,
Sad when he held the harp.

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.

And then there is this beautiful passage, which illustrates Colan's double allegiance so well:

He kept the Roman order,
He made the Christian sign;
But his eyes grew often blind and bright,
And the sea that rose in the rocks at night
Rose to his head like wine.

He made the sign of the cross of God,
He knew the Roman prayer,
But he had unreason in his heart
Because of the gods that were.

Even they that walked on the high cliffs,
High as the clouds were then,
Gods of unbearable beauty,
That broke the hearts of men.

And whether in seat or saddle,
Whether with frown or smile,
Whether at feast or fight was he,
He heard the noise of a nameless sea
On an undiscovered isle.

Much later in the poem, GKC gives Colan a speech that is unusually ambivalent for the rollicking Catholic journalist (I mean GKC, not Colan! Funny thought, anyway.):

"The tall trees of Britain
We worshipped and were wise,
But you shall raid the whole land through
And never a tree shall talk to you,
Though every leaf is a tongue taught true
And the forest is full of eyes.

....

"O'er a few round hills forgotten
The trees grow tall in rings,
And the trees talk together
Of many pagan things.

"Yet I could lie and listen
With a cross upon my clay,
And hear unhurt for ever
What the trees of Britain say."

There are signs of poetic laziness here and there (GKC's predilection for splashing purple moons and peacock skies about and calling it scenery :), but most of the poem is as tightly constructed as the harp contest between the the four pagans--Harold, Elf, Ogier, and King Guthrum--and Alfred. In that book of the poem, each facet of paganism is shown, and then answered by Alfred.

Thus Harold:

And he cried of the ships as eagles
That circle fiercely and fly,
And sweep the seas and strike the towns
From Cyprus round to Skye.

How swiftly and with peril
They gather all good things,
The high horns of the forest beasts,
Or the secret stones of kings.

"For Rome was given to rule the world,
And gat of it little joy--
But we, but we shall enjoy the world,
The whole huge world a toy.

"Great wine like blood from Burgundy,
Cloaks like the clouds from Tyre,
And marble like solid moonlight,
And gold like frozen fire.

"Smells that a man might swill in a cup,
Stones that a man might eat,
And the great smooth women like ivory
That the Turks sell in the street."

He sang the song of the thief of the world,
And the gods that love the thief;
And he yelled aloud at the cloister-yards,
Where men go gathering grief.

Then Elf:

...As he sang of Balder beautiful,
Whom the heavens could not save,
Till the world was like a sea of tears
And every soul a wave.

"There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago,
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.

"The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure."

Then Ogier:

"You sing of the young gods easily
In the days when you are young;
But I go smelling yew and sods,
And I know there are gods behind the gods,
Gods that are best unsung.

"And a man grows ugly for women,
And a man grows dull with ale,
Well if he find in his soul at last
Fury, that does not fail.

"The wrath of the gods behind the gods
Who would rend all gods and men,
Well if the old man's heart hath still
Wheels sped of rage and roaring will,
Like cataracts to break down and kill,
Well for the old man then--

"While there is one tall shrine to shake,
Or one live man to rend;
For the wrath of the gods behind the gods
Who are weary to make an end.

"There lives one moment for a man
When the door at his shoulder shakes,
When the taut rope parts under the pull,
And the barest branch is beautiful
One moment, while it breaks.

"So rides my soul upon the sea
That drinks the howling ships,
Though in black jest it bows and nods
Under the moons with silver rods,
I know it is roaring at the gods,
Waiting the last eclipse.

Then Guthrum:

He said, "I am older than you, Ogier;
Not all things would I rend,
For whether life be bad or good
It is best to abide the end."

He took the great harp wearily,
Even Guthrum of the Danes,
With wide eyes bright as the one long day
On the long polar plains.

For he sang of a wheel returning,
And the mire trod back to mire,
And how red hells and golden heavens
Are castles in the fire.

"It is good to sit where the good tales go,
To sit as our fathers sat;
But the hour shall come after his youth,
When a man shall know not tales but truth,
And his heart fail thereat.

"When he shall read what is written
So plain in clouds and clods,
When he shall hunger without hope
Even for evil gods.

"For this is a heavy matter,
And the truth is cold to tell;
Do we not know, have we not heard,
The soul is like a lost bird,
The body a broken shell.

"And a man hopes, being ignorant,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead:
And a man may still lift up his head
But never more his heart.

"There comes no noise but weeping
Out of the ancient sky,
And a tear is in the tiniest flower
Because the gods must die.

"The little brooks are very sweet,
Like a girl's ribbons curled,
But the great sea is bitter
That washes all the world.

"Strong are the Roman roses,
Or the free flowers of the heath,
But every flower, like a flower of the sea,
Smelleth with the salt of death.

"And the heart of the locked battle
Is the happiest place for men;
When shrieking souls as shafts go by
And many have died and all may die;
Though this word be a mystery,
Death is most distant then.

"Death blazes bright above the cup,
And clear above the crown;
But in that dream of battle
We seem to tread it down.

"Wherefore I am a great king,
And waste the world in vain,
Because man hath not other power,
Save that in dealing death for dower,
He may forget it for an hour
To remember it again."

And Alfred answers furiously:

"When God put man in a garden
He girt him with a sword,
And sent him forth a free knight
That might betray his lord;

"He brake Him and betrayed Him,
And fast and far he fell,
Till you and I may stretch our necks
And burn our beards in hell.

"But though I lie on the floor of the world,
With the seven sins for rods,
I would rather fall with Adam
Than rise with all your gods.

"What have the strong gods given?
Where have the glad gods led?
When Guthrum sits on a hero's throne
And asks if he is dead?

....

"Ere the sad gods that made your gods
Saw their sad sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,
That you have left to darken and fail,
Was cut out of the grass.

"Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.

"For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow."

Which doesn't convey the impact of everything I cut out. I guess you'll just have to read the whole thing. (Insert shameless plug for Ignatius Press edition here.)

The end of the poem is shamelessly didactic - or "applicable," whichever you prefer.

"Though I give this land to Our Lady,
That helped me in Athelney,
Though lordlier trees and lustier sod
And happier hills hath no flesh trod
Than the garden of the Mother of God
Between Thames side and the sea,

"I know that weeds shall grow in it
Faster than men can burn;
And though they scatter now and go,
In some far century, sad and slow,
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.

"They shall not come with warships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.

"Not with the humour of hunters
Or savage skill in war,
But ordering all things with dead words,
Strings shall they make of beasts and birds,
And wheels of wind and star.

"They shall come mild as monkish clerks,
With many a scroll and pen;
And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
Desiring one of Alfred's days,
When pagans still were men.

....

"But though they bridge St. Mary's sea,
Or steal St. Michael's wing--
Though they rear marvels over us,
Greater than great Vergilius
Wrought for the Roman king;

"By this sign you shall know them,
The breaking of the sword,
And man no more a free knight,
That loves or hates his lord.

"Yea, this shall be the sign of them,
The sign of the dying fire;
And Man made like a half-wit,
That knows not of his sire.

"What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign you shall know them,
That they ruin and make dark;

"By all men bond to Nothing,
Being slaves without a lord,
By one blind idiot world obeyed,
Too blind to be abhorred;

"By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin;

"By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire;

"By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again--

"When is great talk of trend and tide,
And wisdom and destiny,
Hail that undying heathen
That is sadder than the sea.

What a glorious torrent of talismanic curses! It's a sort of catharsis, just encountering such certainty: furious certainty of rhythm, certainty of definition that leaves the dark, nebulous spirit of neopaganism "formulated, sprawling on a pin." It is meant to be a war poem, to rouse and encourage resistance. But it is tempered with caution: the White Horse must be patiently and continuously tended, or the grass will cover it. Evil is like the grass - it cannot be conquered "once and for all" (until the end of the world, anyway). There is no earthly "end to evil." Complacency is death. In this Chesterton is very close to Tolkien (the points of overlap between the two have become more apparent to me lately), as in several other places in the poem. It is interesting to see how Tolkien quotes Chesterton in his lectures and letters. Tolkien didn't care for The Ballad of the White Horse; he thought that Chesterton didn't know anything about "Northernness" and that the ending (where the King retakes London) was ridiculous. (He didn't explain this last judgement.) Of course, Tolkien and GKC were very far apart in style and vocation and temperament. Still... both of them understood the "tree" of tradition, the power of "fairy-stories," the need for humility--and the savour of eucatastrophe:

"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!
As a tide turns on the tall grey seas,
See how they waver in the trees,
How stray their spears, how knock their knees,
How wild their watchfires burn!

"The Mother of God goes over them,
Walking on wind and flame,
And the storm-cloud drifts from city and dale,
And the White Horse stamps in the White Horse Vale,
And we all shall yet drink Christian ale
In the village of our name."

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Has anyone else read Tom Shippey's study of Tolkien? It's wonderfully unique as books about Tolkien go: most of them are biographies, which are bound to repeat the same familiar facts, or religious looks at Tolkien, like Joseph Pearce's Tolkien: Man and Myth and the anthology of essays he collected. But Shippey's book examines Tolkien's work in its philological, literary AND philosophical aspects. It's also really, really fun to read. Especially the parts where he slices and dices Tolkien's irrational critics. Bwa ha ha ha ha!!! "Come, my songs,/ Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities and all the Bulmenian literati," or whatever it was Pound was saying.

Here are some quotes from his book:


"The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic."

"Tolkien's approach to the ideas or the devices accepted as modernist is radically different because they are on principle not literary. He used 'mythical method' not because it was an interesting method but because he believed that the myths were true. He showed his characters wandering in the wilderness and entirely mistaken in their guesses not because he wanted to shatter the 'realist illusion' of fiction, but because he thought all our views of reality were illusuions, and that everyone is in a way wandering in a 'bewilderment', lost in the star-occluding forest of Middle Earth. He experimented with language not to see what interesting effects could be produced but because he thought all forms of human language were already an experiment. One might say that he took the ideals of modernism seriously instead of playing around with them."

"However Tolkien did not just copy the 'Tally of the Dwarves', or quarry it for names. He must rather have looked at it, refused to see it, as most scholars do, as a meaningless or no longer comprehensible rigmarole, and instead asked himself a string of questions about it. What, for instance, is 'Gandálfr' doing in the list, when the second element is quite clearly álfr, 'elf', a creature in all tradition quite distinct from a dwarf? And why is 'Eikinskjaldi' there, when unlike the others it does not seem to be a possible name, but looks like a nickname, 'Oakenshield'? In Tolkien, of course, it is a nickname(...)"

"Inside The Lord of the Rings, the horn of Rohan stands for a rejection of the despair which is Sauron's chief weapon, and which hangs persistently on the edges of the story, in the barrow, in the Dead Marshes, in Fangorn Forest, in Mordor, and even in the Shire. Outside The Lord of the Rings, it stands maybe for The Lord of the Rings. If Tolkien chose a symbol for his story and his message, it would be, I think, the horn of Eorl. He would have liked to blow it in his own country, and disperse the cloud of post-war and post-faith disillusionment, depression, acquiescence, which so strangely (and twice in his lifetime) followed on victory. And perhaps he did."

* * * * *

These examples are chosen nearly at random. I could give others: his considerations of Bombadil and the English countryside, Tolkien's "stars and trees" motif, the contrast between Faramir and Éomer (and what it says about Gondor and Rohan), the presence in LotR of both Manichean and Boethian conceptions of evil, Tolkien's phenomenal control over the level of his diction, the significance of the birch in Smith of Wootton Major...

Anyway, it's a very insightful and many-sided book, and entirely worth your time.

In Evening Air (Another Cento)

In my free time, between writing papers for Flannery O'Connor and English Romanticism and doing P90x, I tried my hand a another cento--I think I like this one the best! The lines are from a long hidden gem (at least for me) in Theodore Roethke (pronounced RET-keh).

In Evening Air

Under a southern wind,
Hidden in my own heart,
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.

A suddenness of trees
Turned by revolving air:
You will find no comfort here.
All waters waver, and all fires fail.

The dark heart of some ancient thing
And the sheen of ravens:
Flutter of wings and seeds quaking --
Such stretchings of the spirit make no sound
(I'm martyr to a motion not my own).

Once I transcended time
And came to a dark ravine --
Our small souls hid from their small agonies.

I receive! I have been received!
What speech abides?
How high is have?
The dew draws near
And loves the living ground.

What do they tell us, sound and silence?
The bushes and the stones danced on and on;
I walk as if my face would kiss the wind.

* * * * *

I think what I like most about writing centos is that they force you to suggest rather than say. You should try it. I've decided that for my next poem, and it'll have to be over the summer, I'm going to attempt a villanelle! They are insanely difficult, but it's going to be fun! An example is "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.


Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

* * * * *

*To hear Thomas reading this aloud, see this link. The contrast between the form which is strict, regular and controlled, and its message, which incites the man to "rage against the dying of the light" is striking. It was written about his dying father.

The actions of each small man are placed in contrast to the vastness of universe. The light shed on the world by the wise man is pale in comparison with lightning, and waves produced by the good man disappear in a green bay. Similarly, we are subtly reminded throughout, an old man's rage will be ineffectual in the face of death.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum
I smell the blood of a British man.

"King Lear," Act 3, scene 4

Robert Browning is an artist. A designer of many bold poems, every one of which taken separately might have founded an artistic school...okay, I'm just being silly. In "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" he insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, like Jason Statham's perpetual five o'clock shadow, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before him.

"If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents."

This is a perfect realization of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us walking down some mean street--the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it again amongst the Victorian poets. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thorns mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything means nothing.

And so, for your enjoyment (and mine, after watching The Return of the King extended edition--read it and see Tolkien's possible influence!):

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning

I.

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

II.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

III.

If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

IV.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

V.

As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside, (``since all is o'er,'' he saith,
``And the blow falIen no grieving can amend;'')

VI.

While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves:
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.

VII.

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among ``The Band''---to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed
Their steps---that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now---should I be fit?

VIII.

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.

IX.

For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.

X.

So, on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers---as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You'd think; a burr had been a treasure-trove.

XI.

No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land's portion. ``See
``Or shut your eyes,'' said nature peevishly,
``It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
``'Tis the Last judgment's fire must cure this place,
``Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.''

XII.

If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness?'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents.

XIII.

As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

XIV.

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

XV.

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards---the soldier's art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

XVI.

Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place,
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!
Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

XVII.

Giles then, the soul of honour---there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.
Good---but the scene shifts---faugh! what hangman hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

XVIII.

Better this present than a past like that;
Back therefore to my darkening path again!
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

XIX.

A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof---to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

XX.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of route despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

XXI.

Which, while I forded,---good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
---It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

XXII.

Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage---

XXIII.

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

XXIV.

And more than that---a furlong on---why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel---that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

XXV.

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood---
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

XXVI.

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

XXVII.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap---perchance the guide I sought.

XXVIII.

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains---with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me,---solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.

XXIX.

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when---
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts---you're inside the den!

XXX.

Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain... Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

XXXI.

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counter-part
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

XXXII.

Not see? because of night perhaps?---why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,---
``Now stab and end the creature---to the heft!''

XXXIII.

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,---
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet, each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

XXXIV.

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. ``Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.''

Chesterton, Zizek, and "Christian Atheism"

This past fall, I had hoped to present a paper on a Chesterton panel at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Niagara Falls, but was unable to wrap up my paper in time. However, I have had the opportunity to correspond with many of the professors and graduate students who were presenting and have had the privilege to read their papers. One that was particularly fascinating was by Professor Aron Dunlap of Temple University, entitled "Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek."

This paper was very interesting because it shed light one of the most renowned philosophers of today, Slavoj Zizek, and explained the main connection he has with G.K. Chesterton (whom he quotes frequently). It also included a concise and arresting presentation of what I consider to be one of Chesterton's most provocative statements. You do not see it quoted often in evangelical writings, but Zizek loves it, and Dunlap explains why. What follows is an excerpt. You can read this paper in full at The Land of Unlikeness, where the conclusion is especially wonderful:

"To get right to the point, it seems that what Zizek really gets from Chesterton is the idea that, in the arsenal of human language and thought, paradox is the best weapon we have, the most effective way of getting at the truth of human existence. Chesterton's description [from Orthodoxy] of Christ’s cry from the cross is a good example of how he employs paradox:

'When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.'

Zizek quotes these words in a book of his entitled On Belief, and when he calls himself a “Christian atheist” as I heard him do once at a talk in Philadelphia he is agreeing with Chesterton that Xity, by revealing God to have been abandoned by God, places a certain value on the atheist, as when Chesterton notes that 'The next best thing to really being inside Christendom is to be really outside of it.'

For Zizek, and I think for Cheseterton as well, this brutally honest cry given by the dying Christ, is an example not only of a unique kind of God, but also sets the groundwork for a certain type of thinking, for a certain type of philosophizing. In reading Zizek a quote from Chesterton is often followed by one from Hegel, for it was Hegel, according to Zizek, who gave philosophical voice to paradox, who even constructed his entire system around it.

An all powerful God, for Hegel, is revealed most truly in the moment of greatest weakness and desolation, which is a necessary moment in the revelation of that God. For Hegel the all powerful God of the Jews, inasmuch as he communicates with his creation, does so most authentically not through a revelation of words, of sacred texts, but through a revelation of Word, that is, incarnation."

* * * * *

Like I said, the conclusion is excellent, and explains why, in the end, Zizek is really more atheist than Christian. I thought this an intriguing and insightful point, and so it was awesome to see this paper not only broach the issue, something I think about quite a bit, but also deal with it so eloquently. Thanks Aron!

The Elements of Style

Audible.com has The Elements of Style in their catalog.

For those looking for a definitive and classic manual on the technical side of writing with rules of usage in literature, grammar, and composition, I highly suggest looking into The Elements of Style (William Strunk). By the way, Strunk was a professor to E.B. White (Charlotte's Web) who later edited and updated the "little book."

Exiles and the Real Hopkins

I have been fascinated with Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry since I was 15 or so. So naturally I ordered Exiles by Ron Hansen before it was even published, but wasn't able to read it until just recently. I wasn't sure what to expect, but as I read, I began to understand that Exiles is a novelized biography, not quite a novel. Hansen imposed some very strict limits on his invention, which he summarizes here:

"Tackling the subject, various boundaries and limits were ethically imposed. I would never be at variance with the history, insofar as I could determine it. I sought to give life and personality to Gerard M. Hopkins, S.J., while avoiding the harmful and presumptuous conclusion that I had figured him out, which is something I cannot claim for either my family or friends."

This is admirable. There are so many people who love to fill in the blanks in Hopkins' biography with homosexual crushes on the one hand and the dark night of the soul on the other, things which no one really knows and probably never will. Hansen succeeds as a biographer in areas where Norman White and Robert Martin fall short. He refuses to interpret what is ambiguous and unsaid, but he takes the known events of Hopkins' life and discerns an order to them where other biographies find a dull and disorderly progression of largely wasted years, crowned by a meaningless death. Hansen uses the story of the five nuns on the Deutschland to bring out the hidden shape of Hopkins' life.

And yet this wasn't the only road he could have taken. He could have fashioned a character called "Hopkins" who would fit within the limits of the primary sources, and yet be created from all the imaginative resources at a novelist's command. Just as there is the real Virgil, so mysterious with his reticent biography, and then the "Virgil" of Dante or Hermann Broch--so Hansen could have created his own Hopkins and represented a fascinating inner life, from the inside. In some ways he can't help doing this already. "Why pray?" asks Hopkins when asked why he is writing a poem that he thinks few will want to read. These are not Hopkins' own words.

And then there is Hopkins' imagined last confession, where he confesses shutting off the grace of poetic inspiration. Both of these invented scenes reconcile prayer and poetry to a degree which the real Hopkins probably didn't. It's difficult to call them "inaccurate," but they do go a little beyond the explicit facts. In an interview on NPR, Hansen was asked how he reconciles his own belief that writing can be a form of prayer with Hopkins' conflicting and conflicted beliefs on the matter. His answer: "I think Hopkins was wrong." And he says that he thinks Hopkins came to see that he had been wrong... but there it is, an interpretation based on the author's desires. I don't think that this is a bad thing necessarily, but it hints at a different kind of novel, a more novelistic novel, and one that I would actually rather read. (Though as I said, Exiles is a good way to learn about Hopkins' life.)

But who in their right mind would feel able to write something like "The Death of Virgil" about Hopkins? The problem for anyone who would write a novel about Hopkins is that he is "Hopkins noster." He is one of those people who can go from historical character to beloved friend and guide once you make his acquaintance. And as attractive as a more interior novel about Hopkins would be to me, I think that I would be overcome by shyness and protectiveness, just as I would if someone wrote such a novel about one of my friends. And so Exiles succeeds as a biography. It is the best introduction to Hopkins' life for someone who has been dazzled or bewildered by his poetry, while knowing relatively little about him.

One could argue that I read Exiles at the wrong time, as I have been working on an independent study that I hope to turn into course credit next semester. Hansen explains the style of his book like this: "[F]or those familiar with Hopkins, I scattered lines from his poetry, letters, and journals throughout the book as a sort of treasure hunt, while hoping that my own prose would provide the gingerbread base for his candies." These scattered lines are indeed as pervasive as gumdrops on a gingerbread house. And I am too familiar with Hopkins, having immersed myself (and nearly capsized myself like the Deutschland) in the same sources that Hansen consulted. When reading the novel, I could see every borrowing with my research-crazed x-ray vision (a fascinating phenomenon I am slowly growing accustomed to the more I study). My knowledge of these "scattered lines" suggested some fascinating possibilities, though. The landscapes that Hopkins sees are described in his own words, but so are the landscapes that the nuns see. Sister Henrica writes a poem of her own for Mother Superior, and it's dreadful, treacly stuff, but later Hansen puts one of Hopkins' aesthetic judgments in her mouth:

Under each curl [of wave] shone a bright juice of beautiful green. Sister Barbara asked Sister Henrica how she would describe that color, and she gave it thorough consideration before saying, "Chrysoprase."
Sister Norberta scowled. "What on earth is that?"
Sister Henrica gently told her, "A mineral used for gems. The green of leeks mixed with gold."

Even though Sister Henrica is no poet, she sees exactly what Hopkins sees. Why? This is just one of the many subtle mysteries of Exiles, which are also the mysteries of the still triumphantly mysterious Hopkins.

Learn More:

NPR Interview

Image Interview with Paul Mariani, Catholic Hopkins scholar and friend of Ron Hansen whose biography of Hopkins will be published this October.

Reviews:

A tortured Victorian and his art, reimagined

God's cold, dark waters

A novel reason for rapture