I stared at myself and knew that this me was real

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! For the new year, we seem to have gained upstairs neighbors. They are not yet fully in residence, but as of this afternoon could be seen and heard moving in. I still don't have a cardigan, but I can tell that I am officially middle-aged because they look so young that I have found myself saying to my parents that they must be college students because as far as I know high school students are not allowed to rent two-thirds of a house independently. Given that the contractors only quit the premises the day before yesterday, I am trying to talk myself down from the terror that I will never sleep again.

Courtesy of moon_custafer: identified in notes as a photograph from Harriet Walter's Other People's Shoes: Thoughts on Acting (1999), "Edward and I swap props as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane."

A terrible op-ed about the death of poetry directly inspired one of the best reviews As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022) has so far garnered, by which I feel honored and for which I refuse to be grateful to the author of the op-ed because it really is that terrible. It is terrible on the level of "how is he published in the New York Times and I am still poor." His assertion that T.S. Eliot existentially destroyed English poetry by doing it better in the form he uniquely originated than anyone who could ever come after him renders itself a hard call between the author's ignorance of the last century of English poetry and his ignorance of English poetry before 1922. I assume some qualified person has already beaten him to a flapjack with Hope Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919), but just in case:

The ghost of Père Lachaise
Is walking the streets;
He is draped in a black curtain embroidered with the letter H,
He is hung with paper wreaths,
He is beautiful and horrible and the close friend of Rousseau, the official of the Douane.
The unities are smashed,
The stage is thick with corpses. . . .
Kind clever gaillards
Their eidola in hideous frames inset with the brass motto
MORT AU CHAMP D'HONNEUR;
And little widows moaning
Le pauvre grand!
Le pauvre grand!
And petites bourgeoises with tight lips and strident voices are counting out the change and saying Messieursetdames and their hearts are the ruined province of Picardie. . . .
They are not like us, who, ghoul-like, bury our friends a score of times before they're dead but—
Never never again will the Marne
Flow between happy banks.

(Eliot never included two staves of sheet music in any of his collages, did he?)

ETA: It is such a terrible op-ed that I found myself still ranting about it to spatch in the shower, whence this abbreviated reconstruction of my complaints. It is riddled with factual inaccuracies about the definition and practice of poetry which a person could spend all night swatting if they felt like self-harm, but its mere premise that the human spirit was ticking along in transcendent consonance with the natural world until modernity destroyed our relationship with nature and Eliot confirmed this state by destroying our relationship with poetry—assumed to have existed itself in some natural form on which artificial techniques like the quotation of pop culture were violently perpetrated—is exactly the kind of curdled conservative myth that gives nostalgia a bad name, presuming the existence of a golden age from which we have all been cast down to wander sadly in a post-lapsarian wilderness of allusions and blank verse. It's so sloppily Christian. O that we had never had that war to end all wars, would that we but lived in those Edwardian days of Eden, how happy and iambic we all should be. Take no notice of those Imagists behind the curtain. (To counter the claim that the default register of all poetry in the last hundred years is Eliot manqué, one could also flatten the author with H.D. The Norton Collected Poems 1912–1944 is decently phone-book-sized and would make a satisfying splat.) See also Cubism, Gertrude Stein. The Russian Futurists and Victory Over the Sun, which for God's sake was written in zaum, if the author considers a nine-syllable line of English to be rupturingly radical, please let me see his face when he tries to read a transrational language. Any of the cauldron of related movements in philosophy, the arts, and even the sciences in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century that all crashed as hard as Eliot personally into history with the shattering results of which he was one fragment and not the entire ruin, not to mention the movements that formed out of and did not survive World War One. (Pour one out for the Vorticists. We'll always have dazzle camouflage.) The author opens his op-ed with a sort of self-deprecating brag about his lack of formal education in English-language poetry. I too rate a near-autodidact in that department. All of my training in prosody, diction, genre and so forth was gained in Latin, Greek, and ephemerally Akkadian and I can still tell that his argument is a bunch of bushwah on toast. I have half-assed my rebuttal, but I am not sure it deserves more, certainly not of my brain at this hour. In conclusion, Eliot was enormously influential on me in that exposure to his collected juvenilia over the winter break of my freshman year of college was one of the factors that jumpstarted my adult writing of poetry, as far as I can tell because it reassured me that one could write a cornerstone of modern literature and have come to it by the hard road of sucking that much. I am going to bed.

Comments

[ethelmay]

Harriet Walter wore a monocle for Ballet Shoes in 2007. https://dearharrietwalter.blogspot.com/2011/03/ballet-shoes-2007.html has several pictures (although not from my favorite scene, which also has her playing cricket).

[mrissa]

It's amazing how many of my reactions to the world are Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster saying, "Good Lord. I mean to say--good Lord." And that is where I am with that editorial about poetry. I didn't click on it originally because I felt instinctively that I did not want to know, but now that I do know--good Lord.

Off-topic comment is off-topic

[rydra_wong]

But I saw this Leslie Howard magazine cover and thought of you:

https://waxjism.tumblr.com/post/704999653637242880

Slightly on-topic:

which for God's sake was written in zaum, if the author considers a nine-syllable line of English to be rupturingly radical, please let me see his face when he tries to read a transrational language.

You may be pleased to know that zaum was honoured in the naming of ZA/UM, the group of weird Estonian creatives who made Disco Elysium.

[lauradi7dw]

I haven't bothered to go back to your Patreon page to check your parameters, but maybe include poetry writing (ranting) as well as movie writing in your brief? It's valuable work. I read a large chunk of this aloud to Arthur, who has himself opined many times that opinion pieces in the NYT should be an entirely separate (ignored) publication from the news reporting paper.

[larryhammer]

:slow clap:

Nicely ranted.

[gwynnega]

I have not read the op-ed, but wow, it sounds ridiculous.

[pameladean]

This is a magnificent rant, but I am sorry for the occasion of it, which, I cannot even.

"The kind of curdled conservative myth that gives nostalgia a bad name." JUST SO.

And such weird notions of poetic purity.

P.

[a_reasonable_man]

Thank you for this rant. I caviled at this op-ed, too, but you articulated objections that I could not. You are so much better "versed" than I! One little thing that occurred to me is that this hundredth anniversary of the publication of "The Waste Land," which is what the op-ed commemorates, coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the writing of "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." This in and of itself suggests that poetry beyond Eliot was not exhausted in 1922.

[selkie]

One does in fact have most of the terminal degree in this stuff, can/used to could do it in French too, kind of want a hoodie with Prosody Slut on it, and have encountered a great deal of Eliot, but your rant was quite the superior one, old chap. Tally-ho.

(also BRO, DO YOU EVEN ANNE SEXTON?)

[wendylove]

I read that op-ed and regretted it (I should really have known better based on my reaction to the author's other work, but honestly "really enjoyed reciting bits from _The Waste Land_ as a kid" may be one of the few things he and I have in common that are not covered by a species designation). Anyway, it was crap and I am thankfully not paying for my Times access or I'd regret it even more. But I enjoyed your rant! Thanks for the Mirrlees poem, which I in fact did not know - I would have beaten him over the head with Hopkins, it being the sort of poetry he had actually heard of.

[radiantfracture]

That
was
magnificent

[asakiyume]

What a happy outcome from such an ignorant op ed!

[ashlyme]

I only glimpsed a bit of the op-ed before the paywall came down - but good God. I don't know nearly enough about poetry myself, but that guy revels in ignorance. You rant splendidly.

(How are you finding Chanctonbury Rings?)

[ranalore]

That sounds like a dreadful op-ed, and I'm once again grateful to the paywall for protecting me from my own worst instincts to try to read things I know aren't good for me.

Your rant, on the other hand, was very good, and I hadn't read the Mirrlees poem before.