From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Feb 20 00:00:33 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id AAA08716 for ; Sun, 20 Feb 2000 00:00:32 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id AAA20924 for ; Sun, 20 Feb 2000 00:00:32 -0800 Received: from [10.80.1.53] (howarthdhcp53.ups.edu [10.80.1.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id AAA12071 for ; Sun, 20 Feb 2000 00:00:32 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200002200500.OAA18667@hma.att.ne.jp> References: <000b01bf7b56$ac827d20$5d509318@ne.mediaone.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 00:02:41 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: Hey, I'm two for two! Steven Willett wrote: >Nope, you're absolutely right. Mandel'shtam, like >Wordsworth, composed on the hoof mouthing his verses. I seem to recall that Wallace Stevens did the same--- scribbling away on his way to work, whereupon he would hand his scratchings to his obviously very talented secretary. And did not the Henry James of the late phase dictate while pacing up and down? >Even Goethe, whom I'm presently reading over in Karl Eibl's >wonderful two-volume "Saemtliche Gedichte," sometimes >did the same. Occasionally, though, Goethe composed while engaged in another kind of physical exercise. In the fifth of his "Ro"mische Elegien" (not yet possessing Eibl's edition, I must cite this without precise line numbers), he writes of his Roman squeeze: Oftmals hab ich auch schon in ihren Armen gedichtet Und des Hexameters Mass leise mit fingernder Hand Ihr auf den Ru"cken geza"hlt. I'm surprised that he didn't end up writing these poems in the ithyphallic meter. > Like Auden (and indeed Wordsworth), >Goethe was constantly revising, and his revisions are >nearly always vast improvements. Just curious: did you intend the phrase "like Auden (and indeed Wordsworth)" to apply also to the last phrase "and his [i.e. their] revisions are nearly always vast improvements"? David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .