In John F. Dean’s poem “The Paltry Ego,” time teaches that experience impinges upon us and eludes comprehension. As children, we can build and “pilot” a boat; as we grow older, we encounter the unexpected, jolts to mind and nerve that alienate us from ourselves. Life is a long journey with twists and turns and complications, as is this poem, which is a single sentence we move through, negotiate, and seek to apprehend.
George Dardess’s recent post, “Imagining Mutability,” prompted me to turn to other poems about mutability. That’s one of the rewards of a good close reading: it begins a dialogue and guides us from one literary work to others. I remembered Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Mutability,” included in 1914 and Other Poems, published in May 1915, a month after he passed away from blood poisoning aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.
In the art museum on the Wellesley College campus, there’s a painting by Paul Cezanne that I’d like to tell you about, titled “Portrait Romantique.” It’s 19 ½ by 17 ½ inches, from early in his career, sometime in 1868-70. Like everything he painted, it rewards careful study, an approach similar to the close reading we bring to literary works.
Today we’re more Emersonian than ever. We maintain that everyone is unique, that the primary task of life is to discover and give expression to the singular self each of us is meant to become. But can we define and understand ourselves in isolation, illuminated as though we existed alone? We’re social from the beginning, in networks of relationships, dependencies, affections, and obligations.
My previous post, keyed to Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, was about the making of decisions, and this new one is related to it. Through examples from Shakespeare and Frederick Douglass, I’ll try to explain what the relationship is.
This post is about the decisions we’ve made that led to the full and complex stories our lives have told. We made these decisions, or so we believe. But maybe we didn’t. It could be that they were made by some other force or agency and occurred beyond or outside us, fatefully, through no conscious choice-making of our own. There are literary examples that help to explain what I’m getting at, one from Ernest Hemingway, the other from Henry James.
Along with Richard Wright, many other African American writers have spoken about the awakening they received from books. Ralph Ellison recalled that he “read voraciously,” that “the act of reading” was “an apprenticeship in freedom.” James Baldwin read “every single book I could get my hands on.… Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.”
There’s a five-stanza poem by Wallace Stevens that I return to often. I’ve never seen it reprinted in a selection of his poems or in an anthology, but its story intrigues and absorbs me, and I’m mesmerized by its sounds and images. It has been on my mind recently as I’ve been thinking about close reading, what it is and the terms we use to describe it.
I’ve been making my way through books of photographs on the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly always, he’s dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. It’s the consistency of this visual record that by contrast makes John Wilson’s portrait of King (1985) so mesmerizing. Wilson (1922–2015) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and muralist known for powerful paintings, illustrations, and other works of art that honor Black dignity, racial justice, and equality.
Nearby on my desk is a thick textbook, 10 inches high, 7½ inches wide, battered, edges stained from sweat and dirt, with the word LITERATURE in white letters on the faded brownish-orange cover. Just above this word, in smaller letters, is the phrase “An Approach” to. The book’s full title, AN APPROACH TO LITERATURE, is printed horizontally in white block caps on the binding, a dark gray-green color that curls an inch onto the front and back.
Recently I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see an exhibition that focused on Salvador Dalí. I tried to be receptive to the paintings by Dalí, but nothing called out to me. I devoted some time to four Dutch engravings from the sixteenth century and a few other things. I then rounded a corner, and, twenty feet away, I saw a portrait. My response was immediate: “That’s a great painting.”
Hassan reads these books in Arabic translations but wants to read them in German, “the original they were written in.” He prefers to read slowly, thinking carefully about each sentence before moving to the next one. He looks forward to sections where it’s difficult to figure out the meaning. This pleases him, he explained, “it’s fun, stretching my mind.”
Do you know Wallace Stevens’s poem, with its strange title, “A Postcard from the Volcano”? It’s included in Ideas of Order, published first in a limited edition in July 1935 and then in a trade edition in October 1936. I reread it recently, and I was spellbound by its first stanza, macabre and sweet, the beginning of a story about memory and imagination.
On the front cover, against a mostly red background, was the white image of a seamed baseball, with the words “The Babe Ruth Story” inscribed on it. In a black box underneath it: “By Babe Ruth as Told to Bob Considine.” To the left, in vertical layout, were four small black and white photographs, showing in sequence the Babe’s mighty swing.
In this post, I’d like to share with you the story of my career as a close reader. I wonder whether your experience is anything like it. I wonder, too, whether this kind of career is possible today, in an era dominated by social media and full of suspicion and doubt about the value of the humanities.
“I have never started a poem whose end I knew,” Robert Frost said, because “writing a poem is discovering.” But how do writers know when they’ve discovered the end? How do we know when a piece of writing is done, is the way we want it, the way it must be? Perhaps that’s why the Internet teems with advice for poets seeking counsel and support for dealing with this problem. I recall a thread that had the caption, “How the hell do I end a poem?”
Othello’s love for Desdemona is intense and exhilarating to him, but it’s fragile, for it has come at a cost. This warrior, an older man, different in race and background, celebrates his passion for his beloved even as he wonders whether the sacrifice of his freedom was worth it. Has he given up too much, lost more than he gained? That’s Othello’s fear, the vulnerability Iago exploits.
I’ve come to realize that when I read poems, sometimes I focus too much on myself. In a way, that’s inevitable, and there’s nothing inherently bad or wrong about it. We read a poem and ask: How do I respond to this line, image, voice, poem? Does it speak to me? But the risk, the mistake, is neglecting also to ask: What’s this poem doing for the person who wrote it?
I’ve taught and written about Thoreau; and much of his work, especially his beautiful and captivating Journals, greatly interests and stimulates me. But my response to him is highly conflicted, ambivalent, divided. I’m in a perpetual argument with him.
Here’s the first stanza of a poem by Wilfrid Owen, titled “Exposure,” that I highlight when my Introduction to the Lyric course moves into the modern era. Owen was killed in action, age twenty-five, on November 4, 1918, a week before World War I came to a halt. It’s grim, tormented, and tragic, but I think students should learn about the literature of war and hear the expressive power of Owen’s voice in his writing.