Posts Tagged book review

Today’s posting marks the 300th post on MontanaWriter, a nice round number.

Round numbers are hard to resist. There is a something complete and satisfying in their shape… in what they symbolize: the 20th reunion, the 50th wedding anniversary, the centennial, the bi-centenial.

Round numbers invite reminiscences and memories. They invite self-reflection and nostalgia. They make us reflect upon the very nature of time and the passing of time.

20 months and 300 posts down the line and I am still thinking about what I have been thinking about most of my life: words and poems and books.

In honor of today’s milestone, I am posting a list of 300 books that matter to me. They run the gamut of genres and weight, but in the end they have one thing in common, I am very glad I read them. I enjoyed each and every one of them!

300 books I am glad I’ve read (in no particular order)

1. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
2. Roughing It, by Mark Twain
3. Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, by W. B. Yeats
4. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
5. Karpov on Karpov, by Anatoly Karpov
6. Poems, by William Wordsworth
7. Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James
8. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
9. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
10. Omar N. Bradley a Soldiers Story, by Omar N. Bradley
11. Life Work, by Donald Hall
12. Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn
13. A Sportman’s Sketches, by Ivan Turgenev
14. Parades End, by Ford Madox Ford
15. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
16. The Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway
17. Dyer’s Hand, by W.H. Auden
18. Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas, by Dylan Thomas
19. Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan
20. On Poetry and Poets, by T.S. Eliot
21. I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane
22. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
23. This House of Sky, by Ivan Doig
24. Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
25. The Source, by James Michener
26. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Homage to Robert Frost, by Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott
28. All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
29. Essays and Introductions, by W.B. Yeats
30. Autobiographies, by W.B. Yeats
31. Night, by Elie Wiesel
32. The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton
33. The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg
34. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
35. The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
36. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
37. Sweeney Astray, by Seamus Heaney
38. Poetry and Ambition, by Donald Hall
39. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
40. Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
41. .44, by H.A. DeRosso
42. Can Poetry Matter?, by Dana Gioia
43. For Whom the Bells Toll, by Ernest Hemingway
44. Complete Poems, Marianne Moore
45. 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
46. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solhenitsyn
47. Idle Days in Patagonia, by W.H. Hudson
48. The Fabulous Clip Joint, by Frederic Brown
49. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
51. At the Earth’s Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
52. On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder
53. Gulag Achipelego,  by Alexander Solhenitsyn
54. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
55. Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
56. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, by W.B. Yeats
57. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul
58. A Day in the Bleachers, by Arnold Hano
59. The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter
60. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. The Complete Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton
62. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
63. My Turn at Bat, by Ted Williams
64. The Plague, Albert Camus
65. Travels with Charly by John Steinbeck
66. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
67. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe
68. Bible
69. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
70. Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges
71. Collected Poems of John Milton, by John Milton
72. The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski
73. Collected Poems, by W.H. Auden
74. The Pitch that Killed, by Mike Sowell
75. Black Elk Speaks, by John John Neihardt
76. Citizen Soldiers, by Stephen E. Ambrose
77. Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
78. Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis
79. Portrait of Picasso, by Norman Mailer
80. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, by Hugh MacDiarmid
81. Dispatches, by Michael Herr
82. Chiricahua, by Will Henry
83. Conan, Robert E. Howard
84. Selected Poems, John Donne
85. Riders of the Shadowlands: Western Stories, by H.A. DeRosso
86. Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
87. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
88. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carre
89. A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean
90. The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanaugh
91. Poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley, by Elliott Coleman, ed.
92. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
93. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
94. The Empty Copper Sea, by John D. MacDonald
95. Collected Poems 1917-1982, By Archibald MacLeish
96. Night Squad, by David Goodis
97. My Favorite Year, Mickey Mantle
98. Deeper,  by Jeff Long
99. Life of Tom Horn, by Tom Horn
100. Eye of the Storm,  by Jack Higgins
101. Valdez is Coming, by Elmore Leornard
102. The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler
103. Collected Stories, by William Faulkner
104. Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy
105. Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, by Paul Klee
106. Mythologies, by W.B. Yeats
107. Damanation Alley, by Roger Zelazny
108.  Weather Central, by Ted Kooser
109. Aran Islands by John M. Synge
110. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
111. Savage Range, by Luke Short
112. Let Me Tell You a Story, by Red Auerbach
113. Field Work, by Seamus Heaney
114. The Complete Angler, by Izzak Walton
115. Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, by T.S. Eliot
116. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche
117. The Celebrated Case of Judge Dee, by Robert Van Gulik
118. The Curious Case of Syd Finch, by George Plimpton
119. Iceberg, by Clive Cussler
120. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
121. The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka
122. Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niebuhr
123.  Native Tongue, by Carl Hiaasen
124. The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, by Ed Gorman, ed.
125. Collected Poems, by  Patrick Kavanaugh
126. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, by Robert Penn Warren
127. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
128. Hockey Heroes & Me, by Red Fischer
129. The River Why, by David Duncan
130. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
131. Shadow Prey, by John Sanford
132.  Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Billy Collins
133. The Goodbye Look, by Ross MacDonald
134.  The Haw Lantern, by Seamus Heaney
135. Three Plays, by Sean O’Casey
136. Collected Poems, by Austin Clarke
137. War and Peace, by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
138. El Borak, by Robert E. Howard
139. Black Diamonds, John Holloway
140. Letters to a Young Poet, by Ranier Maria Rilke
141. Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig and His Time, by Ray Robinson
142. Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis
143. The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert Parker
144. Open Net, by George Plimpton
145. Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard
146. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
147. Selected Poems, by Robert Browning
148. Ted Williams Reader, by Lawrence Baldassaro
149.  The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
150.  The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
151. Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
152. The Stanglers, by Loren Estleman
153. The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst
154.  Winter Morning Walks, by Ted Kooser
155. Father’s and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
156. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
157. Writers of the Purple Sage: Anthology, by Russell Martin ed.
158. Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
159. The Mooring of Starting Out, by John Ashbery
160. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
161. The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
162.  Far Away and Long Ago, by W.H. Hudson
163.  The Nine Tailors, by Dorthy Sayers
164. New & Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill
165. Exodus, by Leon Uris
166. Collected Poems of William Blake, by William Blake
167. Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella
168. Gorky Park, by Martin Cruz Smith
169. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney trans.
170. Savage Night, by Jim Thompson
171. Plays of John M. Synge, by John M. Synge
172.  Battle of the Bulge, by Charles Whiting
173. Tal-Botvinnik, 1960, by Mikhail Tal
174. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
175.  The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst
176. Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block
177. Selected Poems, by Galway Kinnell
178. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
179. Christianity and Culture, by T.S. Eliot
180.  Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
181. Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam
182.  A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
183.  War of the Rats, by David L. Robbins
184. In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead, by James Lee Burke
185. Sacred Hoops, by Phil Jackson
186. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
187. The Blizzard Voices, by Ted Kooser
188. The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich
189.  Plays of Henrik Ibsen, by Henrik Ibsen
190.  Penquin Book of Irish Verse, by various
191.  The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King
192. The Flying Frenchman, by Maurice “Rocket” Richard
193. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
194. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, by Ezra Pound
195. Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, by Bill James
196.  Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon
197.  Mr. Samler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow
198. The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler
199. A Continuing Journey, by Archibald MacLeish
200. Indemnity Only, by Sara Paretsky
201. Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, by Satchel Paige
202.  Together We Kill, by Mickey Spillane
203. Preoccupations, by Seamus Heaney
204.  All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
205.  Lions in Winter, by Allan Turowetz
206. Walking Down the Stairs, by Galway Kinnell
207. My Greatest Game, by Ralph L. Finn ed.
208.  Dune, by Frank Herbert
209. The Moving Target, by Ross MacDonald
210. In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, by Jack Henry Abbott
211. Eight Million Ways to Die, by Lawrence Block
212. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
213. The Inner Room, by James Merrill
214. Cancer Ward, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
215. The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
216.  Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41, by Michael Seidel
217. Selected Letters, by Ernest Hemingway
218. Thief of Time, Tony Hillerman
219. Complete Plays, by W.B. Yeats
220. End Game: Kasparov vs. Short, by Dominic Lawson
221.  The Castle, by Franz Kafka
222. Selected Poems, by John Ashbery
223. Cobb: A Biography, by Al Stump
224. Trinity, by Leon Uris
225. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
226. Selected Poems, by Tomas McGrath
227.  Washington Square, by Henry James
228. Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by W.P. Kinsella
229.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
230. The Second Coming, by Walker Percy
231. Selected Poems, by Derek Walcott
232. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee
233. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
234.  Gustavo Gutierrez: Liberation Theology, by Robert McAfee Brown
235. Letters and Papers from Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
236. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
237. Undaunted Courage, by Stephen E. Ambrose
238.  A Fine Red Rain, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
239. Dubliners, by James Joyce
240. The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
241. The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, by Elmore Leonard
242.  St. Francis, by G.K. Chesterton
243. Poetry and the World, by Robert Pinsky
244. The Zebra-Stripped Hearse, by Ross MacDonald
245. Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
246. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, by John Paul II
247. The Black Company, by Glen Cook
248. Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
249.  Jesse James, by T.J. Stiles
250.  Sez Who? Sez Me, by Mike Royko
251. A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, by Lawrence Block
252.  The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
253. Timbered Choir, by Wendell Berry
254. Poems, by Wallace Stevens
255. Paper Lion, by George Plimpton
256.  Theology of Culture, by Paul Tillich
257. My Life in Hockey, by John Beliveau
258.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
259.  D-Day June 6, 1944, by Stephen E. Ambrose
260. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
261. Selected Poems, by Ranier Maria Rilke
262.  Here at Eagle Pond, by Donald Hall
263. Collected Poems, by Robert Frost
264. The Long Walk, by Stephen King
265.  Theology in a New Key, by Robert McAfee Brown
266. Under the Burning Sun, by H.A. DeRosso
267.  Leaping Poetry, by Robert Bly
268.  Slick, by Whitey Ford
269.  A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan
270. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carre
271. First & Only, by Dan Abnett
272.  Selected Poems, by William Carlos Williams
273. Farewell My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
274. The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
275. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery
276. The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth
277. August 1914, by Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn
278. Brand, by Henrik Ibsen
279. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
280. Bunts, by George Will
281. Daily Horoscope, by Dana Gioia
282. Out of My League, by George Plimpton
283. The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson
284.  Selected Poems, by Mark Van Doren
285. Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, by Donald Hall
286. The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
287. Either / or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, by Carl  E. Braaten, ed.
288. Washing of the Spears, by Donald R. Morris
289. The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle
290.  Love and Responsibilty, by John Paul II
291.  High Priest of Califorina, by Charles Willeford
292.  Explorations, by W.B. Yeats
293.  West of Honor, by Jerry Pournelle
294.  Some Imagist Poets, by Richard Aldington and various
295.  The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie
296. The Boat of Quiet Hours, by Jane Kenyon
297.  The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
298.  Robert Browning, by G.K. Chesterton
299.  Short Stories of Henry James, by Henry James
300.  Complete Poems, by e.e. cummings

This is the seventh book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. At nights, after everyone else went to sleep, I would lay in my sleeping bag with a flashlight balanced on my shoulder and read his poems long into the cool, clear night.

Later I read this book, Dyer’s Hand – which I think I picked up at a used bookstore near the Toledo Art Museum – when I was living briefly back in Montana after I had decided to no longer be a Lutheran pastor. I read it while I was studying Irish Literature and fly tying.

As a poet, Auden is one of a handful of 20th century poets that can truly be called great. As a critic, Auden is inspiring, insightful, imaginative, and quotable as hell. There is no critic of poetry that I would recommend above Auden.

Opening now the battered paperback book I first read more than 25 years ago, I look at lines I underlined and margin notes I made in those long-gone mountain days. Flipping pages, I recognize themes and trajectories that have guided my reading and writing life. Themes quite familiar to regular readers of MontanaWriter.

There are so many fine quotes, I do not know where to stop. In the end, I include quotes from just a few essays here. Another time, down the road perhaps, I will look at a few more.

In the North Country, it is full Autumn now. The trees we see every day are turning or have already turned. The days are dry and the sky that vivid blue that only those of us who live in the land of four seasons will ever truly know. I sit on my deck reading Auden… and the long years melt away…. and the flat country I inhabit now melts away. I am in the mountains again.

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (cf. “Foreword”)

“To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct….” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgements as he reads are of this kind: My God! My Great Grandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid. Moreover, unlike a scientist, he is usually even more ignorant of what his colleagues are doing than is the general public. A poet over thirty may still be a voracious reader, but it is unlikely much of what he reads is modern poetry.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgement he respects.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because their medium, language, is not, like the paint of the painter or the notes of the composer, reserved for their use but is the common property of the linguistic group to which they belong.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“The degree of excitement which a writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be, but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a short while whether something he has written is authentic….” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“… whenever English poets have felt that the gap between poetic and ordinary speech was growing to wide, there has been a stylistic revolution to bring them closer again.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Nothing is worse than a bad poem which was intended to be great.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“A young poet may be conceited about his good taste, but he is under no illusion about his ignorance. He is well aware of how much poetry there is that he would like but of which he has never heard, and that there are learned men who have read it. His problem is knowing which learned man to ask, for it is not just more good poetry that he wants to read, but more of the kind he likes. He judges a scholarly or critical book less by the text than by the quotations, and all his life, I think, when he reads a work of criticism, he will find himself trying to guess what taste lies behind the critic’s judgement.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it….” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“…it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“… unless the poet sacrifices his feelings completely to the poem so that they are no longer his but the poem’s, he fails.” (cf. essay “The Virgin & The Dynamo”)

“A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn a living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“… every artist feels himself at odds with modern civilization.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“…every artist who happens also to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“To the imagination, the sacred is self-evident.” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“A poet who calls himself a Christian cannot but feel uncomfortable when he realizes that the New Testament contains no verse (except in the apocryphal, and gnostic, Acts of John), no prose….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“As Rudolf Kassner has pointed out: ‘The difficulty about the God-man for the poet lies in the Word being made Flesh. This means that reason and imagination are one. But does not Poetry, as such, live from their being a gulf between them?” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

_____

This is the sixth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

According to an article at Wikipedia, Eliot is “arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.” I do know if this is true, but I do know that his two most famous poems, “Wasteland” and “Prufrock,” were unarguably the most dissected-and-discussed-to-death poems of the 20th century English Major classroom. If that is the case in the 21st century, I do not know. I hope it is not. Eliot is too good a poet to be left in pieces on university classroom floors.

Eliot as critic is as thorough as you would expect a former banker to be. “On Poetry and Poets” shows Eliot as critic at his best… and at his best he is one of the best critics of the 20th century or any century for that matter.

According to the usual note on the inside front cover, I first read this in December 1987. In the winter of 1987-88 I was living in a very small studio apartment near downtown St. Paul just a half a block from the cathedral and working in downtown Minneapolis. I would have read this book then on the bus to and from work and in the evenings in a battered and crooked lazy-boy recliner I still count as one of my all-time favorite reading chairs.

The paperback volume is beginning to fall apart. Turning pages I hear the cracking of glue long gone brittle. A corner of the cover is missing and the pages are brown with age. Purchased almost 25 years ago at a used-bookstore it shows its age and its heavy use.

I look now at the lines I highlighted and underlined all those years ago and I am reminded of why Eliot matters.

“… I think it is important that every people should have its own poetry, not simply for those who enjoy poetry… but because it actually makes a difference to the society as a whole.” (cf. essay “The Social Function of Poetry”)

“…poetry has primarily to do with the expression of feeling and emotion… feeling and emotion are particular, whereas thought is general. It is easier to think in a foreign language than to feel it it. Therefore no are is more stubbornly national than poetry.” (cf. essay “The Social Function of Poetry”)

“We may say that the duty of the poet, as poet, is only indirectly to his people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve.” (cf. essay “The Social Function of Poetry”)

“…the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind he wants to write.” (cf. essay “The Music of Poetry”)

“No poetry, of course, is ever exactly the same speech that the poet talks and hears: but it has to be in such relation to the speech of his time that the listener or reader can say ‘that is how I should talk if I could talk poetry’.” (cf. essay “The Music of Poetry”)

“[The practicing poet] is concerned less with the author than with the poem;and with the poem in relation to his own age. He asks: Of what use is the poetry of this poet to poets writing today.” (cf. essay “Milton II”)

“…it is [Milton’s] ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every paragraph, such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context, and his ability to work in larger musical units than any other poet – that is to me the most conclusive evidence of Milton’s supreme mastery.” (cf. essay “Milton II”)

“When we see exactly what [Byron] was doing, we can see that he did it as well as it can be done.” (cf. essay “Byron”)

“As a tale-teller we must rate Byron very high indeed: I can think of none other since Chaucer who has greater readability, with the exception of Coleridge who Byron abused and from who Byron learned a great deal.” (cf. essay “Byron”)

“Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning of individual words. I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing English.” (cf. essay “Byron”)

“… unlike many writers, [Yeats] cared more for poetry than for his own reputation as a poet or his picture of himself as a poet.” (cf. essay “Yeats”)

“The point is, that in becoming more Irish, not in subject-matter but in expression, [Yeats] became at the same time universal.” (cf. essay “Yeats”)

“For the young can see [Yeats] as a poet who in his work remained in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged. But the old, unless they are stirred to something of the honesty with oneself expressed in the poetry, will be shocked by such a revelation of what a man really is an remains.” (cf. essay “Yeats”)

____

This is the fifth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

Dana Gioia began his literary career as an outsider. Like two poets he admires – Wallace Steven and Ted Kooser – Gioia did not follow the usual route into poetry. He did not get an MFA. He did not get a university job teaching writing.  Rather got an MBA from business school and headed out into corporate America.

This different road-taken influences his poetry and his critical eye. It gives him ever the soul, ear, and eye of the literary outsider. It is his great strength as a critic and the place he stands in his poetry.

The advantages of the establishment poet are obvious – a network of friends and colleagues to promote your work, more direct avenues into publishing, an outwardly intellectual and literary milieu – and yet there is a sense by many of us that poetry has become increasingly a hollow thing without real substance. Gioia points to an alternative to the literary establishment, which like all establishments inevitably rots from the center outward. Poetry has become marginalized in our culture because it has largely been removed from our true public squares into the ivy-covered courtyards and sterile classrooms of universities where it is dissected and studied and taught… a lifeless, soulless body now in pieces on a slab.

According to my usual notes on the inside front cover, I first read Can Poetry Matter? in the spring of 1997. In 1997, I was still a young man in my mid 30s and still doing the at-home dad thing and freelancing. I still remember the joy of finding someone else thinking of poetry in the same way I was. Saying things that I was saying and writing. It was like finding a kindred soul

I open the volume and look at lines I highlighted and underlined almost 15 years ago :

“We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, “I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself,”…but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.” (cf. quote from Robert Bly from book introduction)

“The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” (cf. quote from Wallace Stevens from book introduction)

“Poetry teachers, especially at the high-school and under-graduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized.” (cf. book introduction)

“Ultimately the mission of the university has little to do with the mission of the arts, and this long cohabitation has had an enervating effect on all the arts but especially on poetry and music.” (cf. essay “Notes on the New Formalism”)

“Jeffers wrote about ideas – not teasing epistemologies, learned allusions, or fictive paradoxes – but big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss.” (cf. essay “Strong Counsel”)

“[Weldon] Kee’s work demands a critic who shares his belief in the desperate importance of poetry, and most critics – both in and outside of the universities – don’t believe that poetry matters all that much to anyone’s life.” (cf. essay “The Loneliness of Weldon Kees)

“The challenge for a young poet is to reconcile the world with the imagination.” (cf. essay “The Loneliness of Weldon Kees)

“Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently.” (cf. essay on Ted Kooser called “The Anonymity of the Regional Poet”)

“A poet’s sense of his own direction might sharpen best if he is not forced to defend or discuss it every day in a classroom or café.” (cf. essay “Business and Poetry”)

“For some poets at least, long silences are an essential stage in their creative growth.” (cf. essay “Business and Poetry”)

“…working in nonliterary careers taught them [Stevens, Eliot, Kooser,...] a lesson too few American writers learn – that poetry is only one part of life, that there are some things more important than writing poetry.” (cf. essay “Business and Poetry”)

“There are only two ways in which a writer can become important… to write a great deal, and have his writing appear everywhere, or to write very little… I write very little.” (cf. Eliot quote from essay “Bourgeois in Bohemia”)

“Bly’s weaknesses as a translator underscore his central failings as a poet. He is simplistic, monotonous, insensitive to sound, enslaved by literary diction, and pompously sentimental.” (cf. essay “The Successful Career of Robert Bly”)

“In poetry sentimentality represents the failure of language to carry the emotional weight an author intends.” (cf. essay “The Successful Career of Robert Bly”)

“If one is prepared to approach [John Ashbery] uncritically, he is very entertaining, but his work must not be read so much as overheard – like an attractive voice talking at another table.” (cf. essay “Short Views”)

“[Jared Carter] who waited forty-two years to publish his first book must have often wondered if it was worthwhile to bide his time and perfect his craft. The answer in [his] case is an unqualified yes.” (cf. essay “Short Views”)

“…for most real poets above the age of thirty-five the strongest influence comes from their own previous work.” (cf. essay “The Difficult Case of Howard Moss”)

“A poet will be judged by his best poems because posterity will forget the others. Their power, range, freshness, and – there is no way of avoiding it – their word-for-word-perfection will determine the author’s reputation.” (cf. essay “The Difficult Case of Howard Moss”)

“‘True poetic history,’ Bloom has asserted, ‘is the story of how poets as poets have suffered from other poets.’” (cf. essay “Tradition and an Individual Talent”)

“Perhaps a poet can never know too much, but a poem can.” (cf. essay “Tradition and an Individual Talent”)

“Young writers not only need to learn their craft well. They must also shape their values and aspirations to resist the manifold temptations to write cheaply or dishonestly in the fashionable ways. They need to develop a character strong enough to withstand both failure and success.” (cf. essay “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop”)

“If poetry hoped to get at the heart of things, it needed more subtlety and precision, more openness to experience and less reliance on gross generalities…. This utilitarian aesthetic transformed poetry into a secular version of devotional verse.” (cf. essay “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop”)

“Ultimately Bishop reminded one of the poet’s duty to be true to his or her own sensibilty and experience, no matter how deeply at odds they might be with pervailing fashions.” (cf. essay “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop”)

Regular readers of MontanaWriter will recognize in these lines themes and ideas that I return to often. Looking back it is easy to see why this book resonated with me so much then… and why it still does.

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This is the fourth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus.

That is what makes this volume of essays by three great, non-American poets, so interesting. For American poets, Frost resides in our very bones, like the sounds of  rivers, and highways, and wind in trees, and the voices of American birds and American words spoken in coffee shops and local bars and across fences at harvest time.

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott are three of the finest contemporary world poets. The essays that form Homage to Robert Frost have their root in a seminar that was done on Frost at College International de Philosophie in Paris. In Paris – the most self-consciously unAmerican of all cities – three non-American poets discussed Frost and his poetry. The result is wonderful.

While American readers and poets always approach Frost from the inside… Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott, by necessity, come to Frost from without. This enables them to hear him in a way an American reader cannot. This, ultimately, is the greatest value of Homage to Robert Frost.

According to my usual note on the inside front cover of the book, I first read Homage to Robert Frost in late fall of 1996. In the fall of 1996, we were no longer living in our little house in St. Paul but would have just moved into suburban Bloomington. I would still have been freelancing as a writer and editor of training materials and bible studies. During the days I would have been doing the at-home dad thing, and on some evenings I would have been working at a telemarketing job. I would have been reading Homage to Robert Frost during toddler nap times and while sitting in a cube waiting for inbound-sales calls to come in. As I have said elsewhere, the words of Brodsky, Heany and Walcott – and the the lines of Robert Frost – would have been helping me to keep my sanity, as poetry has always done for me.

Opening now the book, I read some lines I underlined and highlighted 15 years ago.

“When a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which its’ been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, lay down this or that law – something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed bu unchanged by that encounter, returns to his in or cottage, finds his friends and family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Wheras when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up…. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason” paraphrasing Auden’s essay on Frost)

“With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason”)

“Frost believed… that individual venture and vision arose as a creative defense against emptiness, and that it was therefore possible that a relapse into emptiness would be the ultimate destiny of consciousness.” (cf. Heaney’s essay “Above the Brim”)

“Why is the favorite figure of American patriotism not paternal but avuncular? Because uncles are wiser than fathers.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“Frost is an autocratic poet rather than a democratic poet.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“… Yeats told Pound that A Boy’s Will was “the best poetry written in America for a long time.’ The judgement seems right.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“For interior recitation, usually of complete poems, not only of lines or stanzas, Frost and Yeats, for their rhythms and design, are the most memorable poets of the century.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“The poem does not obey linear time; it is, by its beligerance or its surrender, the enemy of time; and it is, when it is true, time’s conqueror, not time’s servant.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

As so often happens, Frost’s stature in American literature has diminished over time. It is more a “taking for granted” I think than a re-assessment. It is easy to take Frost for granted in the same way that it is easy to take for granted Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Sometimes it takes outsiders to remind us of what is most essential and best about America. Homage to Robert Frost accomplishes this beautifully,

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This is the third book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

In my mid-twenties, I spent a year reading all of Yeats books that I could at the time find in print. In my mind, I refer to it as my Yeats Year... though in reality it may have been closer to a year and a half.

I began by reading his Complete Poems cover to cover, then read volumes of his plays and prose works as I could find them: Essays and Introductions; Autobiographies; Mythologies; Explorations; Irish Myth, Legend and Folk Lore; Selected Plays; Complete Plays; A Vision; and volumes I have forgotten or lost over time. At the end of the year, I bought a newer used-copy of Complete Poems and read that again, cover to cover.

Since I was so immersed in Yeats and all things Yeatsian, that second read-through of the Complete Poems was simply magical. If there were “world enough and time,” that is the way I would read every important poet. In heaven – if there truly is a heaven and it is the way I like to think about it and I get to it – I will have “world enough and time” to read poetry that way… to do many things in a mindful and unhurried way.

According to my usual note on the inside front cover, I started reading Essays and Introductions in March of 1985. At that time I was living in Saginaw, Michigan. I spent my days as pastor of a small inner-city congregation, running an after-school program at a community center, and providing extra pastoral help for a large downtown congregation. I was busy… but I was single and filled with energy. I worked and I read.

By March of 1985, I knew I was going to leave the ministry. I probably also knew that I was going to stay at that congregation until at least August, or until they found a replacement (I ended up being there until October). I had no idea, though… as I still have no idea… of what I was going to do next.

I would have been reading Essays and Introductions then in my small congregation-provided apartment with borrowed furniture in an old Victorian home on the “white-side” of the river (my congregation was on the “black-side’). The copy I read, and still own, I purchased in a used-book store in Ann Arbor. The previous owner… a student at the University of Michigan I have always assumed, an obviously a male by the handwriting… made a few notes on the inside front cover and underlined or highlighted a just few lines in the first essay only.

I open now the volume that has sat on my bookshelves now for 26 years and read again lines I underlined and highlighted what now seems like a life time ago. The spine is cracked, and pages falling loose. As I turn pages I hear and feel more glue giving way. A great treasure in an earthen vessel.

I read now the words I see. Lines written by one of greatest of all poets about poetry and art, about other poets and other artists, about Ireland and language.

“Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we all could listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.” (cf. essay “Speaking the Psaltery”)

“What was the good of writing a love song if the singer pronounced love ‘lo-0-o-o-o-ve,’ or even if he said ‘love,’ but did not give it the exact  place and weight in the rhythm?” (cf. essay “Speaking the Psaltery”)

“I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.” (cf. essay “Magic”)

“[William Morris'] vision is true because it is poetical, because we are a little happier when looking at it….” (cf. essay “The Happiest of the Poets”)

“[Shelley] believed imagination a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.” (cf. essay “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”)

“… there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household where the undying gods await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp.” (cf. essay “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”)

“There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men…. He announced the religion of art…” (cf. essay “William Blake and the Imagination”)

“I care not whether a man is good or bad, all I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off holiness and put on intellect.” (cf. essay “Blake’s Illustrations to Dante”)

“Religious and visionary people, monks and nuns, medicine-men and opium-eaters, see symbols in their trances; for religious and visionary thought is about perfection and the way to perfection; and symbols are the only things free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection.” (cf. essay (“Symbolism in Painting”)

“… I doubt indeed… that love itself would be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and his shadow the priest….” (cf. essay (“Symbolism in Painting”)

“The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation….” (cf. essay (“Symbolism in Painting”)

“Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for time, but with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said, ‘These things that I touch and see and hear are alone real,’ for he saw them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy. The arts arts, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things.” (cf. essay “The Autumn of the Body”)

“Three types of men have made all beautiful things, Aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above the fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear, and the artists have made all the rest, because Providence has filled them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleased them.” (cf. essay “Poetry and Tradition”)

“We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about seeking the Kingdom of Heaven.” (cf. essay “Discoveries”)

“No playwright ever has made or ever will make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote follows us out of the book….” (cf. essay “Discoveries”)

“The imaginative writer differs from the saint in that he identifies himself – to the neglect of his own soul, alas! – with the soul of the world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers.” (cf. essay “Discoveries”)

“I think that before the religious change that followed on the Renaissance men were greatly preoccupied with their sins, and that to-day they are troubled by other men’s sins.” (cf essay “Art and Ideas”)

“Religion had denied the sacredness of an earth that commerce was about to corrupt and ravish, but when Spenser lived the earth had still its sheltering sacredness.” (cf. essay “Edmund Spenser”)

“A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness….” (cf. “A General Introduction for my Work”)

“Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done.” (cf. “A General Introduction for my Work”)

“I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung…. I have spent my life clearing from poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear alone.” (cf. “A General Introduction for my Work”)

The last quote above sums up Yeats as a poet better than all the many volumes of critical study that have been written about him and his poetry. I close the volume again and place it reverently back upon the shelf. For a long time I sit looking outside… into the beautiful summer day.

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This is the second book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” The first book reviewed in this series was Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88 by Donald Hall. 

Seamus Heaney’s strength as a critic is his ear… his remarkable ear. It is what makes him our greatest living poet. Where Donald Hall (in Poetry and Ambition, and all his prose work for that matter) excels at explaining the writing life and how poems are written, Heaney in The Government of the Tongue (and all his essay work) excels… better than any poet I know other than Brodsky… at telling us how a poem works and which poems and poets do it best. Ultimately, you read Heaney’s essays because you want to know who and what you should be reading next.

According to my usual notes on the inside front cover, I first read The Government of the Tongue in the spring of 1989. That spring I was still a year away from turning 30 and a just a summer away from getting married. In those days, I lived in the Midway area of St. Paul and worked as an editor in downtown Minneapolis. I would have been reading The Government of the Tongue then on the 16A bus that follows the long course of University Ave. from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis. I would have been reading it on sleepy mornings on my way to work and hot afternoons on my way back. I would have been reading it on long weekends with Sue and quiet Sunday afternoons. Heaney and his ideas about poetry and poets would have bookended my days and my weeks.

Opening now the volume, I look at lines I highlighted and notes I made all those years ago about poets like Mandelstam, Lowell, Kavanaugh, Plath, Yeats, Auden, and Brodsky. I realize reading the lines and notes how much Heaney has influenced me: the poets I have read, the poems I most admire, my way of looking at how poems work… or should work.

“We might say that Kavanaugh is pervious to this world’s spirit more than it is pervious to his spirit.” (cf. essay “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanaugh”)

“He assumes that art is a power and to be visited by it is to be endangered, but also he knows that works of art endanger nobody else, that they are benign.” (cf. essay “The Murmur of Malvern”)

“…annihilation is certain and therefore all human endeavour is futile – annihillation is certain and therefore all human endeavour is victorious.” (cf. essay “The Fully Exposed Poem”)

“Richard Ellmann’s statement of the Yeatsian case finally applicable…’If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do conciously, and all men do in their degree.’” (cf. the title essay “The Government of the Tongue”)

“Here is the great paradox of poetry and the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless…. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited.” (cf. the title essay “The Government of the Tongue”)

“A new rhythm, after all, is a new life given to the world, a resuscitation not just of the ear but of the springs of being… Auden’s lines… are wakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault he intuited in the life of his times.” (cf. essay “Sounding Auden”)

“[Lowell’s] mentors were… New Critics driven by a passion to pluck out the last secret of any poem by unearthing, if necessary, its seventh ambiguity.” (cf. essay “Lowell’s Command”)

“I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry. But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained, or a least a fullness of self-possession denied Sylvia Plath.” (cf. essay “The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath”)

Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue contains the usual variety of occasional essays, book introductions, and book reviews you would expect a famous poet to write. Most of the book, however, consists of essay adaptations from a series of lectures Heaney originally gave to university students and faculty. Heaney’s prose fits that venue quite well. His is not the lyrical prose of Hall. Not the kind of prose you would immediately associate with the writer of Field Work and Station Island. It is the careful and considered work of one who has seriously studied poetry and poets… of one who truly knows and understands poetry from the inside out.

Heaney has a remarkable ear and a remarkable intellect. Because of that, The Government of the Tongue is a remarkable book.

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A poor scan of a great cover

There remain hundreds of books on my reading “to do” list, yet sometimes I find myself re-reading an old favorite. With poetry this is a fairly straight forward venture. I browse through the volume looking at notes I have made, lines I have underlined or otherwise marked in some way. It is interesting to see where my tastes have changed, to be reminded of lines, to see again poetic influences I may even have forgotten about on anything but a sub-conscious level.

With a novel or book of non-fiction this is a different experience altogether by definition. Re-reading a novel or full length non-fiction work is more of commitment. And since it is more of a commitment, it needs to be a real special book.

Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa is such a book for me.  It is special for me because it was the book, more than any other, that introduced me to real writing and real literature. It was the book that made me want to read something more than comic books and sports biographies.

I spend a part of every working day in and out of a middle school media center (library). In middle school, juvenile fiction is king. It has also become huge business. In the early 1970s, there was not a lot of juvenile fiction… and what there was did not interest me in the least.

In 1972-73, I was in 7th grade and 12 years old. I did not want to read about kids like me, I wanted to read about men. I knew about the kid world… what I wanted to know about was the world of adults… the real world.

One day I pulled down a copy of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa from the library that was in our English teacher’s classroom. I suppose I liked the cover and that it was about Africa and hunting. Who knows why we choose some of the books we do?

Whatever the reason, that moment changed my life. Until that moment, when I had to read something I always chose non-fiction (and that is probably another reason I chose it). As soon as I finished Green Hills of Africa, I started The Sun Also Rises and after that… book after book, novel after novel, poetry book after poetry book until this day.

I am pleased to say that The Green Hills of Africa holds up well. It is Hemingway. It is memoir in muscular prose. Ostensibly it is about a safari he and wife, Pauline, took to Africa in 1933. It is more than mere travelogue though, for Hemingway intersperses with details of his hunting, discussions of writers and literature: Twain, Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. All these writers I began reading within a few years of having first read The Green Hills of Africa, precisely because Hemingway recommended them.

When I am in the middle school media center, I will often look at the books that are there. There is no Hemingway. There are plenty of books about boys and girls, and many of these are very well written… but there are few about men and women doing the kind of things that many middle schoolers want to know about. There are no books that would have appealed to me.

My life was changed because I picked up The Green Hills of Africa and discovered great writing and great literature, because I found out about Tolstoy and Stendahl and Dostoyevsky. I am forever grateful for that serendipitous moment. I am forever grateful that I had access to adult-level books like this in my classroom when I was just 12 years old.

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A high school classmate posted the following on Facebook: 15 Authors in 30 seconds.

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

My Quick List:
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Travels with Charly by John Steinbeck
Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Collected Poems of John Milton
Selected Poems by W.H. Auden
No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford
Black Elk Speaks by John John Neihardt
Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Maltese Falcon by Raymond Chandler
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Life Work by Donald Hall
I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane
The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanaugh
Aran Islands by John M. Synge

An interesting exercise. Try it sometime.

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“…there are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.”  ~W.H. Auden

When I was in college, I had to make a choice one semester between taking Romantic Literature or Victorian Literature. Knowing just enough about everything to get myself into trouble, I chose to take Victorian Literature. Romantic poetry did not sound like something a Montana kid grown up on Hemingway would want to read. Only much later, years and states away, would I discover how wrong I was….

The Victorian sensibility that pervades Arnold and Browning – the interest in the ordinary and common day, the moral purposefulness, the unmooring clash with science, the search for the Victorian ideal – seemed cloyingly myopic and dark. I admired much but was never able to get my sea legs.

Years later on a whim, walking through a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan,  I picked up a copy of Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. The big paperback caught my eye because of the size and the price, $1.00.

By then, I knew a little about Ford: his relationship with Conrad, his literary influence, his reputation for untruth (though hardly a vice in a writer), his bad relationship with Hemingway. I knew of, but had not read, The Good Soldier, his most celebrated and read work. I think, but cannot be sure, that I may have read by that time some of his literary reminiscences, which (whether “embellished” or not) remain in my mind some of the best of that genre ever written.

I put the book on a shelf and carried it for a few moves. Through years of reading the once neglected Romantics, through expanding my familiarity with Irish poetry beyond Yeats. [In those days, before kids and domestic distractions, I created, as I continue to do, my own courses of study but, of course, had much more time to concentrate and ruminate.] Finally, one dark winter day in my little studio on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul I picked up the big book and began to read.

Parades End has been called the last Victorian novel. And I suppose it is. So much that is Victorian is in this book, and yet… there is something of the lost generation in here also. It is in my mind a transitional novel, the last hurrah of the Victorian and a first tentative peek at the modern. Or more properly perhaps, the first description of the Modern by a Victorian: “No more hope, no more glory, not for the nation, not for the world I dare say, no more parades.”

Ford, always an admirer of Henry James, lived by the credo: why say it in 4 words when 24 will do better. His is the anti-Hemingway style. His sentences and paragraphs go on for pages… and yet, I found myself enthralled in the same way that James enthralls me. So exotic does their language usage seem that I feel I am reading another tongue altogether. A language at once more ornate and expressive and beautiful than I could even dare to imagine – the term baroque comes to mind (although unlike baroque music, James and Ford are almost always satisfying).

The four separate novels that make up Parade’s End (Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post) tell the story of Christopher Tietjens, a man struggling to survive personally and publicly. His  wife is unfaithful to him, he is betrayed by friends and colleagues, and the modern, post-war world is changing everything he once thought he knew.

Those who have read The Good Soldier will recognize some familiar themes, but in Parade’ End will enjoy Ford at his most expansive. Why Ford has fallen so out of favor, and this novel in particular has been all but forgotten, is one of those peculiarities of taste and time.

Ford himself once said, “Only two classes of books are of universal appeal; the very best and the very worst.” It is certain that Parade’s End belongs in the former class. Certainly it will again be “rediscovered” by some generation of writers. It’s quality and execution demand it.

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