From dlupher@ups.edu Tue Mar 7 11:46:08 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA45910 for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 11:46:07 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA32366 for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 11:46:07 -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 LAA12068 for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 11:46:06 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200003070816.RAA04882@ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp> References: <200003062236.RAA09620@darwin.helios.nd.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 11:47:48 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: beautiful language I share Steve Willett's low opinion of Golding's Ovid. I wonder what he thinks of Edward Sandys' Ovid, most of which was composed in winters at the Jamestown Colony, thus making it perhaps the first piece of English verse written in the New World. >"Beauty," of course, is a nearly useless term in aesthetics. Many >English speakers (myself included) think that Spenser's refrain, >"Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song" is the most beautiful >line in English. Come, come. The most beautiful line in English is without a doubt "And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin." It's the end of the second quatrain of a beautiful sonnet by Mark Alexander Boyd (1563-1601). It begins "Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin," and it can be found in the old Quiller-Couch "Oxford Book of English Verse." Uncle Ez, with whom I am happy to agree this time around, printed it in his "ABC of Reading" with the comment: "I suppose this is the most beautiful sonnet in the language; at any rate it has one nomination." Lest you suspect that only Pound groupies admire it, I'll add that Yvor Winters called it "one of the most extraordinary poems in our language," and he hailed the description of Venus, from which my line comes, as "one of the greatest moments in our poetry." He concluded: "The poem is one of the best poems of the sixteenth century; I would call it unforgettable except that few people notice it." ("Forms of Discovery," pp. 325-6) >The attempt, in almost most Western lyric poetry, to grasp at and >gorge on prominent beauty led Gombrowicz to launch his attack >"Against Poets" in the _Diary_. [snip] But it isn't just "prominent beauty" that Gombrowicz dumps on there. I'm surprised that our list's most erudite and sensitive metrical expert would be so taken with a critic who declared that "rhythm and rhyme put me to sleep." Steve quotes a provocative passage from Gombrowicz containing the following sentence: > [snip] What was supposed to have > been a momentary flight of prose became a program, a system, > a profession--and today one is a Poet, the way one is an > engineer or a doctor. [snip] I don't have the Polish text within reach, and in any case I suspect that my Polish is rather rustier than Steve's, but I wonder if the translator of this passage (Lillian Vallee, "Diary," vol. 1, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988, p. 217) might have been composing her English version under the increasingly common delusion that the word "prose" means the exact opposite of what it really means. I recall drawing the list's attention to this phenomenon back when Fagles' "Odysssey" first appeared, and a New York Times article referred to "Fagle's prose." Later in his posting Steve remarks: >The job of the artist is, as Gombrowicz sees it, to express himself >with absolute honesty and sensitivity to the concrete human >condition. And he proceeds to cite with approval Gombrowicz's characterization of >Broch's _Death of Virgil_ and _Ulysses_ and some of Kafka as >examples of a prose "born of the very same spirit which illuminates >poets; it is essentially a 'poetic prose.'" Steve may dismiss me as one of the list's "Joycedolators" (a word whose formation strikes me as a bit odd), but I must say that I find Gombrowicz's inclusion of "Ulysses" here very surprising indeed, for there are surely few books which show the "sensitivity to the concrete human condition" as vividly and memorably as does "Ulysses." When Gombrowicz calls it "remote, inaccessible, and cold," I simply don't know what he is talking about, any more than I know what Steve means when he lambastes "the experiential sterility" of Joyce's prose. Ironically, "Ulysses" has been coming under postmodernist fire lately for being *too* respectful of "the concrete human condition" and for pandering to our bourgeois hunger to find in literature "real" characters who seem to become part of the texture of our own lives. See Leo Bersani's remarkable polemic "Against Ulysses" in "The Culture of Redemption" (Harvard UP, 1990, pp. 155-78). Gombrowicz manifestly preferred Sienkiewicz to Joyce---see the essay on the former printed right after "On Poets" in the edition cited above. Does Steve share this preference? (I hasten to add that when I was 13 "With Fire and Sword" was my favorite novel, and my son Antonio, no dope, has avidly read that and also its sequels "The Deluge" and "Pan Michael.") Steve concludes his thought-provoking posting with the comment that there is much in Gombrowicz's essay to anger "the whole mob of contemporary American and English poets almost without exception." But the targets of Gombrowicz's essay appear to be poets who are extraordinarily finicky about the style of their poetry---and sticklers for rhythm and rhyme to boot. Somehow, this doesn't sound much like most members of the "mob" to which Steve refers. David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .