Poetry

It’s October and Halloween is almost here, so it’s time to read something spooky. Last year we took our trick-or-treating rather far afield, to Pu Songling’s Chinese studio, but this time, let’s spend the season closer to home and head over to the Van Tassels’ Autumn festivities, over by Sleep Hollow. We’ll check out both Washington Irving’s original “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Disney’s 1949 adaptation.

Oh, but Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is a double feature, and it would be rude to pass by Toad Hall without stopping to at least say “Hello.” To modern audiences, the adaptation of The Wind in the Willows seems like an odd pairing with “Sleepy Hollow,” but double features were common at the time and there wasn’t really an expectation that each feature would be similar to the other. If anything, contrast was good because it cast a wider net among potential audiences. People have found common themes between the two movies, but really, one can find some commonality between any two works of fiction.

Today, we’ll meet Mr. Thomas Carew, born in Kent in 1594 or ‘95, the youngest of three children. His early life had its ups and downs - as a young man, he meant to follow his father’s career path into law, but he studied little and that was a dead-end. He was hired into secretarial roles to diplomats in Italy and France, but shot himself in the foot by writing too frankly of a patron’s faults.

Did you forget this series? It’s only been, well, a long while since we met our last friend, but I’m going to reintroduce it now. You needn’t worry about it quickly falling off again, either, because the next few posts have already been written. How’s that for planning ahead?

Anyway, today we’ll meet Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was born in 1844, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism as a young man, joined the Jesuit order, and worked as a Classics teacher and parish priest around England, Wales, and Ireland. Unsurprisingly, given that he was an old-school Jesuit, his work is a mainstay in Catholic literature curricula.

Library booksales are wildly hit-and-miss affairs, usually more of a miss. Once in a while, though, you can catch a break - like us at a sale earlier this year, where we walked out with several dozen books for $20. Of course, mere quantity means little if every book is rotten, but we were able to find a lot of good stuff. What helped, I think, is that staff gradually restocked the tables over the course of the morning, so the early birds weren’t able to pick out absolutely everything worth having (often to sell on eBay later, not even to enjoy for themselves!). Among those was a book I wasn’t familiar with, but might be the best of all: Treasury of Children’s Poetry, first published in 1998, edited by Alison Sage and with an introduction by Michael Rosen, author of the picture book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and a poet with a few selections included here.

As a person who likes Japan, likes literature, and likes what he’s read of the combination of those two, I want to like haiku. However, it’s never really appealed to me. In my experience, five-line tanka are about as short as a poem can be and still feel like it has some substance to it, and even that takes a patient sort of reading to appreciate. I also hadn’t read all that many of them though and didn’t know much about the context in which they were written, so I hoped that reading The Penguin Book of Haiku, with its large sample size accompanied by an extensive introduction and some commentary, would help me to at least appreciate if not enjoy the form.

For the sake of both practising my French and reading something I’m interested in, I’ve started reading through a book straightforwardly titled French Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Elliott M. Grant and first published in 1932 (my copy is a 1950 reprint). I haven’t worked through much of it yet, but I have a learned a few things about French poetry generally and now know a couple fine poets I hadn’t previously even been aware of.

Philip H. Young’s The Printed Homer: A 3000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an odd book to recommend to laymen because about half of it will be useful only to a very focused class of specialists. The other half, though, is of interest to any Classicist, professional or amateur, and is enough to justify buying the whole package.

The specialist half can be dealt with very briefly. Young has compiled a comprehensive list of every known printing of Homer’s works (including those spuriously attributed to him, such as the Hymns) from the first example in 1470 to 2000. It’s an impressive undertaking and I’m sure it’s very helpful for historians who specifically study historical interest in and treatment of the Homeric texts. For laymen such as myself, though, I find it hard to imagine a plausible scenario where this part of the book might be useful.

In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound wrote that a man can’t fully understand poetry if he reads only one language. Later on, when listing authors important to the development of English poetry he also included a few Frenchman. With both those points in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to include a few French poets even though the focus of this list is on English authors. So, today we’ll meet M. François Villon.

Dans ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound a écrit qu’un homme ne peut pas comprendre la poésie s’il ne lit qu’une seule langue. Il a énuméré des auteurs importants pour le développement de la poésie anglaise et il a inclus quelques Français. En gardant ce point à l’esprit, j’ai pensé qu’il serait approprié de discuter d’un des poètes mentionnés par Pound comme étant importants pour la poésie anglaise. Nous allons donc rencontrer aujourd’hui François Villon.

Our next friend is another one of our good ol’ Cavalier buddies. Sir John Denham was born in Dublin in 1615 and lived to 1669, a lawyer and the son of the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in Ireland. That sounds like an impressive title, and when his father died Sir John did inherit a great deal of property. During the English Civil War he was sheriff of Surrey and made a brief attempt to defend Farnham Castle against Parliamentary forces; after the war his estates were confiscated and he lived abroad with Charles II, though Cromwell did give him permission to live in Suffolk in 1658.