From dlupher@ups.edu Sat Mar 11 16:58:38 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 QAA21920 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 16:58:38 -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 QAA15252 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 16:58:37 -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 QAA03545 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 16:58:37 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: <005201bf8aab$078a2d40$46140dd0@t9q0o0> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 17:00:25 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: JLPB's "So wert thou loved" (Was No Subject) Peter Green writes: >Just as a matter of curiosity, does anyone else find >this sample of Tuckerman's verse, the topic of >several earlier communications, as stupefyingly >and mind-numbingly awful as I do? [snip] Yes, and I suspect that this might have been Prof. Butrica's sly intention in quoting it. It is the most evenly awful section of an uneven poem. While I do not share Winters' hyperbolic opinion of "The Cricket" ("the greatest poem in English of the century, and one of the greatest in English [sc. ever]"), I do think the poem has a number of fine passages. Sect. IV is just not one of them. In his analysis of the poem in the introduction to Momaday's 1965 edition (incorporated into the 1967 "Forms of Discovery") he passes over this section pretty quickly. And in the only other bit of Tuckerman criticism I happen to own, Samuel Golden's pioneering "Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: An American Sonneteer" (Orono, 1952), these lines are dismissed as "a conventional recitation of the noble and classical heritage of the cricket" (p. 59). Myself, I tend to prefer Tuckerman's sonnets, in five series. They have many remarakable and memorable passages, though they too are uneven. I've long been amused by Winters' confession about the ending of the haunting 10th sonnet of the first series: "There have been a few occasions when I almost thought that I understood the grammar and syntax of this passage, but I do not understand them now." But I will not retreat from my endorsement of Winters' declaration that Tuckerman was one of the two greatest American poets of the 19th century, Emily Dickinson being the other. Yet I have to admit that the competition was not exactly stiff, apart from Melville in a few passages in "Clarel." (Barbaric yawpsters need not apply.) > "Thou" presumably is the cricket (pace earlier commentators, >NOT a cicada, which is what T. really means). No, he was aware of the difference between cicadas and crickets (on which there has, of course, been a thread on the Classics list). In the first section of the poem he distinguished between the "locust" and the cricket. By "locust," he surely meant the "17-year locust" of the Eastern U.S., and that is a cicada. >Anyway, cricket or cicada, it doesn't >chime, not being a grandfather clock. Fair enough. Nor does it coo like a dove, even though the last line of the first part is, alas, "A little cooing cricket." Peter also wants to know "what a Nereid was doing grieving for Pan." I doubt he'll be terribly impressed by my suggestion that Tuckerman was thinking of the *naiads* who mourn for Pan in stanza 6 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Dead Pan." There is perhaps a general point of interest to classicists here. Loath though we might be to admit it, sometimes classical imagery and themes have proved detrimental to later poetry, inspiring the poet to go on automatic pilot, as I fear Tuckerman was doing in the offending lines. Recall Dr. Johnson's notorious---but not entirely unjust---attack on "Lycidas" (and see, too, the fine lines he wrote--- or revised so heavily that he might as well have written---at the beginning of Crabbe's "The Village"). There are bleak moments when I am tempted to agree with Philip Larkin when he complained that classical allusions "fill poems full of dead spots." Look at what the fatal allure of classical themes did to Keats and Eugene O'Neill. (Steve Willett will probably add: "and James Joyce.") Look at the prominence of classical themes in the dullest American poems of the 1950's. David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .