Prufrock: Anthony Hecht’s Nobility, the Many Problems with Free College, and Hieronymus Bosch in Madrid

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Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Life is excellent. Not only does it contain new facts and impeccable scholarship, it remembers “what many biographies forget: that this is a terrific story. Brimming with indomitable personalities, trials and ordeals, passions and disappointments, it has all the elements of a traditional romance. At the same time, its protagonist, a restless, dissatisfied heroine struggling to make and remake the world in her quest for growth and recognition, is the quintessential modern subject: the subject of the modern novel.”

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Paul A. Cantor on Hieronymus Bosch in Madrid: “Madrid is presenting one of the greatest art exhibitions of all time. It offers an opportunity to see simultaneously almost all of Bosch’s authentic paintings, and all but one of the greatest of them (it lacks The Last Judgment from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts). If you’re seeking the very definition of a mind-blowing visual experience, make every effort to get to Madrid before this exhibition closes.”

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William H. Pritchard on Anthony Hecht: “Hecht may be grouped with Richard Wilbur and James Merrill as the most repaying “formal” American poets from the last century’s second half. His fifty years of published lyrics are impressively backed up with a longish book on Auden’s poetry and with three volumes of essays that show everywhere the highest critical inquiry into the history and present conditions of English and American verse. Like Wilbur, he spent decades in the classroom: Wilbur at Wellesley, Wesleyan, Smith, and Amherst; Hecht at Bard, Smith, the University of Rochester, and Georgetown University. (Merrill’s stints in the classroom were occa­sional.) Hecht didn’t teach “creative writing” merely; neither did Wilbur, who gave a Milton course at Wesleyan for many years. But although I can’t prove it, of the three poets Hecht is the closest to a professional academic, more participant in the day to day professorial routine, both illuminating and frustrating. (In his final years at Georgetown he grew increasingly dismayed at certain theoretical and feminist approaches to the teaching of literature.) As for shared admirations, the three poets were one in their devotion to Elizabeth Bishop, whom each wrote about with penetration and warmth.

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Hillary Clinton’s free college plan could easily do “significant harm and questionable good.”

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Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest notes on friction.

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Essay of the Day:

In National Affairs, Tevi Troy looks at how party conventions have changed over the years:

“In this period, before the existence of our current system of primaries selecting bound delegates, conventions were often raucous and uncertain affairs in which the eventual winners were far from predetermined. In fact, it wouldn’t take long for the first “surprise” winner to emerge from a national political convention. Again in Baltimore, this time in 1844, the year in which the first telegraph message was sent, James Polk won the Democratic nomination on the ninth ballot. Polk’s selection was a shock, as former president Martin Van Buren was the favorite going in, and indeed was the leader after the first ballot. Yet Van Buren, a wizened political machine operator, was nonetheless done in by the controversial but eventually agreed upon requirement that the nominee receive two-thirds of the delegates. With Van Buren unable to overcome the two-thirds hurdle, former House speaker and Tennessee governor Polk eventually emerged as the winner.

“A Polk supporter telegraphed the new nominee the reaction to the news that he had secured the prize on the ninth ballot: ‘The Convn. Is shouting. The people in the streets are shouting. The news went to Washington and back by Telegraph whilst the votes were counting and the Congress is shouting. There is one general Shout throughout the whole land, and I can’t write any more for Shouting…I am yours shouting.’

“The era’s newest technology played a role in the proceedings themselves as well. The convention overwhelmingly chose New York senator Silas Wright to be Polk’s vice presidential nominee. But Wright, a friend of the defeated Van Buren, rejected the call of the delegates, and notified the convention of his decision via the newly available telegraph technology. The convention refused to believe his rejections — even though he sent four telegraphic messages to that effect — and Wright had to dispatch messengers by wagon from New York to Baltimore to convey the news by letter. With Wright out of the picture, Pennsylvania senator George Dallas was selected by the delegates and ended up serving as the nation’s 11th vice president when Polk won that fall. And the 1844 convention was not just shaped by the telegraph; it was also the first convention in which the technology was used to report the final result.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Nautilimo

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Poem: Rhina P. Espaillat, “After the Rally”

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