From dlupher@ups.edu Thu Mar 9 11:34:58 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 LAA54572 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:34:57 -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 LAA18482 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:34:56 -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 LAA27788 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:34:56 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:36:42 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: The Prisoners' Anthology (was: beautiful language) Recent postings by Diana Wright and Mark Williams on poetry recalled by prisoners, when conflated with Peter Green's project (which I hope he pursues) of issuing an anthology of the poems he knows by heart, suggest an interesting project: an anthology of poetry which, lodged in the minds of prisoners, sustained them through the long haul. Surely the chapter on Canto 26 of the "Inferno" in Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz" will come to mind. But there is, alas, also Jean Amery's bitter recollecton that a recollection of Ho"lderlin's "Ha"lfe des Lebens" brought him no solace at all in Auschwitz. (See "At the Mind's Limits.") A companion volume might be "Death's Door Poems." This could have two parts: 1) poems composed on death-beds, or the night before execution (Ralegh, Chiddiock Tichbourne, et al.); 2) poems read on death beds. (I recall some lines in Auden about how "even a limerick ought to be something / which a man facing death by firing squad or cancer / can read without contempt"---I've probably mangled the phrasing there--- it's in his wonderful elegy on the death of Louis MacNeice in "About the House," which I don't have within immediate reach.) Max Beerbohm on his deathbed recited Swinburne's lines: From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods there be That no man lives forever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. (I'm quoting from memory again---as is appropriate in such a posting, no?--- and I may have botched it. It's from "The Garden of Proserpina." I've outgrown Swinburne, but I do like those lines.) P.S. on a different matter. The popularity of the words "cellar door" is manifestly derived from the name of character Celidora in Mozart's fragmentary opera "L'oca del Cairo" ("The Goose of Cairo"). David Luhper Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .