Prufrock: Cheese, English Medieval Embroidery, and Philip Larkin at Westminster Abbey

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Everything you ever wanted to know about cheese: Ireland’s Queen Maeve of Connaught was supposedly killed by tanag (a hard cheese), “hurled from her nephew’s slingshot.” A cheese from reindeer milk produces “a distinctive squeak against the teeth.”

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“English medieval embroidery might seem an odd subject for a book, but this is no ordinary volume. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the V&A (which runs until 5 February 2017), it is not only a catalogue and scholarly monograph but also a visual feast, with magnificent colour plates on virtually every page, bursting at the seams with titbits of fascinating information. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to hug yourself with glee: revelatory and as exquisitely produced as the medieval embroidery it celebrates.”

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An “essential” Goethe that is anything but: “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) has the kind of unquestioned preeminence in the German-speaking world that Shakespeare has among English speakers. And yet a number of German-language authors are more widely read outside Germany: Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, for example. That’s because Goethe’s standing as the colossus of German literature rests above all on his lyric poetry and his poetic drama Faust. A great lyric poet is a master of a particular language, deploying all of its resources with consummate skill—rhythms, forms, sounds, syntax, lexicon. From which it follows that the greater the poetry, the more it resists translation into another language…The Essential Goethe omits most of even the most famous poems. Twice as much space is devoted to the scientific writings, three times as much to Goethe’s account of his journey to Italy. The Princeton series made a brave attempt to deal with the problem: for the poetry volume only, it gave the German original together with the translation. That was sensible. An English speaker armed with only a rudimentary grasp of German grammar and a translation can still get some sense of the impact of the original poem. Bell ignores that solution, and in his introduction does nothing to correct the impression he has created that Goethe’s poetry is the least important part of his output.”

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Stephen Miller on the battle with Scotland that made England a world power: “In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, on a moor near Inverness. The battle lasted about an hour and engaged only 15,000 troops, but Murray Pittock persuasively argues that Culloden was ‘one of the decisive battles of the world.’ The last pitched battle fought on British soil, Culloden was decisive, Pittock argues, because the British Army’s victory over forces commanded by Prince Charles Edward Stuart (now popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie) helped propel Great Britain into becoming the dominant world power for 150 years.”

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The rise of the Euroskeptic.

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Essay of the Day:

In Poetry, Ange Mlinko takes stock of Delmore Schwartz on the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death:

“Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) lay dying of a heart attack in the hallway of a sleazy midtown Manhattan hotel for at least an hour before an ambulance was called around 4:00 a.m.; his body then lay in the morgue unclaimed for two days. The judgment of his contemporaries and students on this early casualty of the confessional 
generation could serve as a snapshot of blighted promise. ‘The American Auden,’ boasted James Laughlin. Or, no, ‘the new Hart Crane,’ proposed Dwight MacDonald. ‘He was tortured, beyond what a man might be,’ avowed John Berryman. ‘The two sides of his face were different one from the other and reflected, he thought, a split in his personality,’ reported Eileen Simpson. ‘One vowel bedevilled by seven consonants,’ quoth Lowell. ‘You were the greatest man I ever met,’ Lou Reed effused.

“John Ashbery was neither contemporary nor student of Schwartz, but ‘admired his poetry even before coming to the university’ where Schwartz occasionally taught — Harvard — and writes now, in his introduction to this newest selection: ‘The bulk of his work is unpublished and probably unpublishable.’ Between his Partisan Review debut in 1937 and winning the Bollingen Prize in 1959, Delmore Schwartz wrote poems, stories, criticism, and verse plays. His attempted epic, Genesis, might have been the longest American poem in existence if he had finished it; after two hundred pages, the
protagonist Hershey Green had only reached the age of seven. Hefty volumes of letters and notebooks were published posthumously. In his last days, according to his biographer James Atlas, ‘he sat in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library filling one notebook after another with incomprehensible novels.’

“A friend half-jokes to me: ‘For that generation, it wasn’t that you couldn’t write poetry after Auschwitz, but that you couldn’t write poetry after T.S. Eliot.’ If Eliot encapsulated the spirit of the 1910s and twenties, the shift that occurred in the thirties (Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’) would have to be accounted for by a new voice — and, ambitiously, Delmore Schwartz wanted to be it. But Schwartz basically had one story in him — his own — and he was 
setting himself against a towering figure who championed “impersonality” as the way to enter into the Tradition…Both men had studied philosophy at Harvard and left without 
taking a degree, but there the similarities ended. Schwartz was a first-generation Jew whose parents came to Brooklyn from Romania. Eliot was from St. Louis gentry, migrating back to the Mother Country and high Anglicanism.

“Schwartz’s idealism about literature was such that these provincial distinctions weren’t supposed to matter deeply. Schwartz loved Joyce too, and Yeats, and Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and believed in High Modernism’s cosmopolitan vision. Yet over the years, he felt the
 immigrant Jewish experience was his subject matter, and his preoccupation with his parents’ story was nourished by his discovery of   Freud. According to friend and editor William Barrett, ‘Freud was a disaster for Delmore.’ The ‘family romance’ explained everything, and his work became increasingly indebted to working out this schema in his own upbringing. Meanwhile, it also gave sanction to his competitive instincts toward his literary fathers; his obsession with being the next Eliot soured into a plan to unmask the man’s high-minded poems and expose their sexual secrets. It is only one of Schwartz’s unfinished projects, like his abandoned translations of Heinrich Heine, of which there was a reputed fifteen hundred pages once, and a biography of 
F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he may not have begun at all. But he was capable of writing many versions of his own origin story, beginning with his first published fiction — now we would call it autofiction — 
’In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ (a title cribbed from Yeats). In this story, he narrates, in present tense, the story of his parents’ 
courtship as it unfolds on an imaginary movie screen. As his father tearfully proposes, his son stands up in the darkened theater and shouts at his parents: ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.’

“The mismatched couple casts its shadow over the poet’s life, recounted also in the failed epic, Genesis, and the verse play, Shenandoah, and the stories of The World Is a Wedding. Rose Schwartz impulsively used a windfall to fund an operation to reverse her infertility, betting that a child would rope in her straying husband. The arrival of the infant, though, only served to prolong a humiliating union. The curse that began in the womb was cemented in the social covenant of his very name — Delmore, a clumsy attempt at assimilationism. The poet would continually parody it in such alter egos as ‘Hershey Green’ and ‘Shenandoah Fish.’ Between the injury of his birth and the insult of his name, the stage was set for infinite grievance.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Shahrud

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Poem: Morri Creech, “Magpies at the Sea”

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