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Sunday, December 1, 2024

Index

The index has grown to the point of becoming unwieldy, leading me to offer first a brief sketch of its contents.

For the most part the site contains literary criticism with topics ranging around the globe and through the centuries. There are also other essays, translations, travel stories, a few memoirs, a few political comments. With rare exceptions (mostly early) I do not post my poetry here.

In the literary essays I am willing to discuss virtually anything. This site is strong on literary theory, the idea of the avant-garde, ancient Greek, medieval European, and Asian literatures, and includes a series of treatments of blues songs as poetry.

Some of the essays are technical and include academic jargon, probably indigestible to a lay reader. Others are directed toward a general audience. Perhaps the most accessible are those in the Every Reader’s Poets series (section 5G below) which assume no background knowledge. 


The index now features hypertext connections. Simply click on any title below to read it.

Though this listing serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:

1. speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays

2. literary theory

3. Greek texts (and a few Latin)

4. medieval European texts

5. other criticism
A. 16th-19th century
B. 20th century to the present 
C. Asian texts
D. songs
E. Notes on Recent Reading
F. Rereading the Classics
G. Every Reader's Poets

6. translation

7. poetry

8. politics

9. memoirs

10. travel


1. Speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays
Agnostic Credo and Vita (October 2015)
Confidence Games (August 2022)
Contronyms (March 2019)
Cookbooks (April 2014)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Deer (December 2012)
Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret (March 2012)
Documents of the second Surreal Cabaret (June 2012)
Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret (October 2013)
Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret (July 2014)
Documents of the fifth Surreal Cabaret (February 2015)
Notes on Pan (June 2014)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber (December 2022)
"The Three Ravens" (August 2013)
Trinidadian Smut (April 2016)
Truckin' (November 2014)
The Verbal Dance of the Blues (September 2020) 
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

E. Notes on Recent Reading
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe] (February 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga] (April 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown] (May 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams](June 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden](July 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert] (August 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen](September 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 13 [Mirabai, Wood, Trocchi] (November 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle] (January 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 15 [Hemingway, Orwell, Gaskell]{February 2013}
Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann] (April 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 17 [McCarthy, Chang, Snorri](July 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus](October 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song] (February 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa] (May 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts] (August 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura] (October 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane] (January 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 24 [Fielding; Izumo , Shōraku, and Senryū; Plath] (June 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote] (July 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 26 [Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau] (November 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 27 [Forster, Sackville-West, Capote] (January 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 28 [Verne, Waley, Hurston] (March 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 29 [Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam] (October 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 30 [Bradford, Scott, Marquand] (April 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek] (August 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 32 [Morrison, Cary, Kawabata] (October 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 33 [Tourneur, Peacock, Greene] (December 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 34 [Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley] (January 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 35 [Scott, Norris, Jacobs] (August 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 36 [Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand] (November 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 37 [Waley, Wharton, London] (January 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 38 [London, Vonnegut, Cather] (June 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 39 [Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon] (September 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 40 [Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan] (January 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 41 [McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim] (July 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 42 [Bulgakov, Tedlock, Wlliams] (October 2020) 
Notes on Recent Reading 48 [Huxley, Cossery, de Maupassant] (November 2023)

Menus (August 2021)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Pestering Allen [Ginsberg] (March 2012)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
A Scholar's Debut (October 2012)
Sherman Paul (August 2016)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
Tim West (March 2013)
Vignettes of the Sixties (October 2019)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel 
Arrival in Nigeria (August 2015)
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
An Armenian Family in Bordeaux (December 2014)
Carnival [Portugal] (May 2012)
Cookie Man [Morocco] (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Dame Fortuna in Portugal (May 2012)
Dinner with Mrs. Pea [Thailand] (April 2013)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Favored Places (July 2019)
Festival in Ogwa [Nigeria](January 2011)
Fictional Destinations (April 2020)
On the Ganges' Shore (August 2013)
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Transformations of a Pot of Basil

  

     Numbers in parentheses refer to line numbers of Keats’ poem; those in brackets refer to endnotes.  The Italian text of “La canzone del basilico” is appended.

 

     With its strong appeal to those most powerful of human tastes, those for love and for violence, the bizarre story of a lover’s head buried in a pot of basil has endured through many forms from mythic origins through an Italian folk song, Boccaccio’s short story, Keats’ narrative poem, a remarkable series of mostly pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a film by Pasolini. 

     Ultimately, the roots of the gruesome motif go back to archaic practices like the burying of offerings of human flesh to ensure fertility of which Frazer had so much to report, but here the sacrifice is futile, pathetic, hostile to the lovers’ vitality (though it does benefit the basil).  The song is thus sentimental, a very human cri de coeur from a woman whose lover is gone, a reveling in loss with no vestige remaining of a faith in the magical regeneration of nature.  The song, in keeping with its lyric genre, is first-person and passionate.  Like narration in many old English ballads, the story is only obliquely referenced; it must be independently known to the listener or in part inferred. 

     Boccaccio's version in the Decameron in which the narrative of the pot of basil is story five of day four, is naturally expanded.  While the song is mentioned at the end to conclude the story on a poignant emotional note, Boccaccio’s prose account, though only a few pages in length, includes sociological details, including the class distinction that exacerbates the brothers' anger at the affair between Lorenzo and Isabella and such psychological information as the cruel laughter as they feigned friendship with Lorenzo shortly before killing him.  The brothers’ flight to Naples when they fear they will be found out reinforces their villainy.  What had been primarily emotional expression in the song becomes here a drama.  Isabella’s vision of her dead lover is a sensational addition, and the gruesome details of her fondling and kissing the decapitated head contribute a macabre horror movie frisson.  Here the emphasis is not so much on defining a single strong emotion as in telling an entertaining story that will hold the interest of the party assembled outside Florence to wait out the pestilence.  Like the aristocratic audience in the Decameron’s frame, the modern reader takes pleasure in the turns of plot, in motivation and character, whereas the song expressed a pure emotion and little else.

     These two focusses – the expression of passion and the telling of a good story – are combined and extended in Keats’ narrative poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.”  Keats had taken a hint from Hazlitt’s remark that poetic versions of stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio “as that of Isabella” “if executed with taste and talent, could not fail to succeed in the present day” [1].  What is new in Keats’ version is the construction of image systems that add both aesthetic appeal and sharpen the thematic implications.  The tragedy of the lovers is here cast into a dialectical structural pattern with an attractive symmetry of balancing bipolar oppositions, while their fate is recast as a part of larger patterns of nature.  Joy and sadness are the warp and weft of life and thus of all action, all stories.

     The doubling begins in the first line when Isabella is called “fair” only to have “poor” and “simple” added, creating a tension the entire poem seeks not to resolve, but to make into a harmony.  Love is a “malady” (4), a “sick longing” (23), a “sad plight” (25).  “Love and misery” (50) coexist.  This is, of course, an ancient trope, found in Ovid, Catullus, and a thousand medieval courtly love lyrics, but Keats makes the additional move of linking the ambivalence of love to the turning of the seasons in nature, and, indeed, the whole narrative proceeds with the course of the year, from a hopeful spring and a glad summer to the ominous autumn and in the end the lethal grasp of winter.  In this way, when their love is young, it leads Lorenzo “from wintry cold” (65) to the “ripe warmth this gracious morning time” (68).  Their love is “like a lusty flower in June’s caress” (72).  Yet mythological references to Ariadne (95) and Dido (99) remind the reader that the wheel will turn and that there is “richest juice in poison-flowers” (104).

     With “the mid days of autumn,” the “breath of Winter comes” (249-250) and “plays a roundelay/ Of death” (from 249-252) until “quick Winter chill its dying hour!” (450)  Yet the cycle continues: “Love never dies, but lives” (397); the basil flourishes fed by tears and rotting flesh (LIV).  The tragic muse Melpomene (442) emerges and, in an image that combines death and healing, Isabella “withers” like a palm/ Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm” (447-448).

     Thus the reader has a perspective in which all things are turning and churning.  If one has a high position on the wheel of fortune this will surely mean that one will soon be descending, only to rise again as the vegetation does annually.  Isabella’s mourning for Lorenzo is balanced by the thriving plants in the pot.

     A surprising aspect of this dialectical view of nature and human life is the denunciation of capitalism and imperialism in stanzas XIV-XVI.  Isabella’s brothers are not only heartless toward her and murderous toward Lorenzo, their comfort is the product of countless workers’ suffering. 

  

for them alone did seethe

  A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:

Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,

That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.        (117-120)

 

Thus wealth for one depends on exploitation of another, just as sorrow follows joy and heat follows cold.  What had been a linear story of a particular couple becomes in Keats’ hands an exemplum of the instability of circumstance and the inevitable link of bipolar oppositions.  There are countless further antinomies, from the class distinction that prejudices the brothers to Keats’ desire both to write the purest poetry and to be popular.  Keats was probably hoping that Isabella would sell well, as the story about Hazlitt’s suggesting using the Decameron as a source suggests, just as van Gogh painted flowers with the idea that they would be marketable, and one need not believe Shelley’s suggestion that “savage criticism” had caused “a rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs” [2] to recognize that the poet sought recognition and was troubled by attacks like Lockhart’s in Blackwood’s Magazine.    

     In the following generations, his poem was very widely-read and reprinted, as well as inspiring an extraordinary number of works of visual art.  A favorite topic of the pre-Raphaelites and associated schools, representations of the story of the pot of basil were made by a good many artists,, among them William Holman Hunt (1868), Joseph Severn (1877), Meacci Isabella (1890), John White Alexander (1897), John William Waterhouse (1907). Edward Reginald Frampton (1912), John Melhuish Strudwick (1886), , Arthur Nowel (1904), Henrietta Rae (1905), W. J. Neatby (1913), and George Henry Grenville Manton (1919), among others.  These visual works are the epigones of the pot of basil tradition, more sentimental, faux-Romantic, faux-medieval and self-consciously aesthetic than the earlier versions. 

 

 


William Holman Hunt The Pot of Basil (1868)

 

In Hunt’s painting the elaborate decorative motifs almost overwhelm the subject matter.  Her embrace of the pot with its gruesome contents is sensual and erotic in an implicit blending of love and death.  Isabella’s features are those of Hunt’s recently deceased wife.    

     The tale has continued to attract interest in the later twentieth century, most notably [4] in Pasolini’s film version as the penultimate story in his 1971 The Decameron.  The erotic and, indeed, the perverse elements as well as the social criticism doubtless attracted Pasolini.  He makes Lorenzo a Sicilian, and considered of lower social status, though in Boccaccio he was a Pisan.  Thus the narrative continues to survive, in different media, styles, and themes.

     The narrative of the tragic lovers and the pot of basil has been repeatedly transformed, from archaic roots into a melancholy folk song, expressing the poignance of lost love, like fado or blues or, indeed, a good share of all popular music.  In Boccaccio’s hands it becomes an engaging narrative to pass an idle evening, while Keats used it as the basis to imply a sort of cosmic dialectical pulse in which what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity” [3] is heard inevitably again and again.  By the late Victorian era people were using the story as the stimulus for exercising refined taste (appreciating the luxurious patterns in Hunt’s painting) and similarly cultivated emotions (recall Poe’s declaration of the death of a beautiful woman as “the most poetical” of all subjects) [5].  Pasolini relished the raciness and gruesome weirdness of the old story when he brought it to the screen.  As each genre is aiming at a distinct effect, each must be judged by different standards.  The plot line itself is clearly only one element of an ensemble that together shape the impact of each new iteration of the pot of basil. 

 

 

    

1.  Vol 5 p. 82 The Complete Works of Wiliam Hazlitt vol. 5, p. 82

2. Preface to Adonais.

3.  “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

4.  I know of no other feature film retelling.  Shorts have been made by Michael Groom (2004),  Cara  Lawson (2017), and Madeleine Haslam (2017). 

5.  “The Philosophy of Composition.”

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