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Tuesday, August 1, 2017

The Mule in Blues Imagery



     Poetry typically contains a far greater concentration of rhetorical figures than prose. Figures of speech, thought, and sound regularly heighten the reader’s pleasure as well as refining the theme and tone. Each metaphor is a tiny riddle, the sudden solution of which provides a pleasure similar to that of many jokes. A sense of an exhilarated dance of ideas may be created by systematic image systems. But such figures are not mere ornamental decoration. They also allow the expression of new ideas and subtle shades of familiar ones. Rather than obscuring content, they render it precise.
     Since the Romantic era, critics have celebrated “innovation” to the disadvantage of tradition. The use of such conventional images has been criticized as unimaginative, but a close study indicates that even when frequently used, a good poet will find the potential in such convention not only for considerable latitude, but even for eloquence.
      One rhetorical device is allusion. Within every body of poetry, be it ancient Greek epic, troubadour lyric, or Elizabethan sonnets, certain poetic figures recur, building an ever-greater matrix of meaning. In the country blues tradition, one of the most beautiful and powerful bodies of American lyric in the first half of the twentieth century, a good many metaphors reflect the rural setting in which the songs were composed. With loving affection women are sometimes described as cows, while men may be compared to roosters. Another beast that occurs in a substantial number of early blues songs is the mule, the common work animal of the South. In a broad, though not inclusive, sample mules, which the listener might expect to be something of a cliché with a set, decodable meaning, in fact occupy a broad semantic field with a variety of implications. [1] Sometimes, indeed, they are the basis for set formulae which correspond more closely to popular ideas of a literary convention, while other uses are anomalous or unique.
     In general the image of a mule is employed by the musician-poets of the genre with rich flexibility. One finds characteristics associated with the animal that are familiar to even contemporary urbanites such as stubbornness, industriousness, and a powerful kick, but even these are far from identical in context.
     One dramatic evidence for the image’s versatility is its near equal use to describe men and women. [2] In the songs in which the mule is identified with a man, the singer may refer to the mule's stubbornness as when Barefoot Bill in “From Now On” sings “I’m going to “act just like a doggone mule.” A number of songs note the mule’s untiring capacity for labor. For instance, Blind Blake in his “Good-Bye Mama Moan” claims to his credit that ““I been your hard-working mule,” and Washboard Sam promises “I’ll work like a doggone mule” in “Save It for Me.”
     In the regular structure of the poetic transformation of convention, [3] any association can be inverted, denied, or altered in a variety of other ways. For instance, whereas the two references just cited are positive, asserting the speaker’s qualifications as a partner, others are negative. Big Bill Broonzy in “Big Bill Blues” refuses to take orders from his beloved, saying, “cinch I ain’t going to be your mule,” and Sonny Boy Williamson indignantly objects, “You want Sonny Boy to be your mule.” (“Low Down Ways“). [4]
     But the changes the poet can ring on the theme of the mule do not cease there. With a phrase very little different from those already cited, the physical power of the animal can also exemplify the singer’s sexual energy and endurance as in Will Weldon’s enthusiastic “Hitch Me to your Buggy and Drive Me Like a Mule.”
     The mules may equally suggest the woman’s sexual energy as in Huddie Ledbetter’s “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” with its unmistakably erotic lines: “Wouldn't mind a jug : honey on the mule's behind/Yes a brownskin woman : make a preacher lay his Bible down.” In Texas Alexander’s “Levee Camp Moan Blues” the mule is simply decodable as a lover: “Lord I couldn't find a mule” and the virtues of a country girl are said to make her a “jewel brown mule” (Walter Vincon and the Mississippi Sheiks, “She Ain’t No Good”). Her mule-like power is praised by Ed Bell whose lover is “strong as a mule” in “She’s a Fool Gal.”
     The mule’s connotations may, however, be negative for women as well as men. For instance, Blind Lemon Jefferson says his beloved was acting “just like a balky mule.” (“Balky Mule Blues“ ) and Willie Baker in “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” says “Mama you been just like : says a farmer's mule/longer I live with you : harder you is to rule.” [5]
     A good share of the references to women as mules employ the set formula familiar to all blues lovers in a long list of variations all including the phrase “left me a mule to ride.” [6] In each of these songs, the singer notes the departure of his lover, often on a train, leaving him only a mule to ride. Ride, of course, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse, so the formula simply states the love-longing of the singer, though sometimes including such subtle variations as David King’s lament in his “Sweet Potato Blues” that “the mule laid down and died.”
     The other most common set formula is one in which the mule is again male: the complaint that the lover has been two-timed, that there is “another mule kicking in my stall.” Here the mule is again masculine with the stall representing the feminine. Very often the formula is simple as in Tampa Red’s “It’s Tight Like That”: “Found another mule : kicking in my stall.” [7] Variations include Kokomo Arnold’s reversal in “Your Ways and Actions”: “my mule is kicking in your stall” and the inclusion of the phrase in the old song “Seven Drunken Nights” [8] by Coley Jones in his “Drunkard’s Special” which includes the lines “I went home drunk as I could be/There's another mule in the stable : where my mule ought to be.”
     There remain a number of usages of mule imagery that fit none of the patterns I have described. Several singers refer to actual mules with no apparent other meaning. For instance, Robert Wilkins’ “New Stock Yard Blues” speaks of actual stockyards and livestock purchasing and Sleepy John Estes’ “Tell Me About It” complains about a rural boss insisting that sharecroppers share a mule. [9] The effects of hard liquor are associated with the kick of a mule by Kid Prince Moore in “Bug Juice Blues” and by Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) in “Blind Pig Blues.” Blind Lemon Jefferson in “Long Lonesome Blues” declares “Well the blues come to Texas : loping like a mule,” though he might as well have said a rabbit or a deer. The endless variety of other potential uses for mule imagery is suggested by the miscellany of lines I have not yet mentioned. [10]
     The use of poetic conventions, such as the mule image in American blues, is, like all figures of speech, not a code in which one word is simply substituted for another. It is a complex system of association and connotation that generates an ever-widening semantic field. Both through the calculated imprecision of the correspondence between tenor and vehicle and the additional enrichment of meaning through allusion, image clusters and other figures distinguish poetic from non-aesthetic uses of language. They enable the writer to express precise shades of thought as well as inviting delight from the receptive consumer.





1. My database is the excellent “Michael Taft’s Pre=War Blues Lyrics Concordance” available at http://dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm. I have appended a complete list of songs from his catalogue that mention mules. In my essay songs and artists are cited by name, making them simple to locate on the list, whereas in endnotes I use sometimes the titles and sometimes only the numbers assigned to each. In the few cases in which several versions of a song were released in the same year, the texts differ enough that the reader may have to check each to find the relevant material.

2. In fourteen songs the mule is identified with a man and in seventeen with a woman. References to men occur is 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21, 24, 26, 30, 43, 44, and 47. Those to women are in 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 20, 27, 28, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 48

3. For the general concept see my “Transformation of Convention” on this site. For specific applications in practical criticism, see, among other essays available here “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Early English Carol,” or “William IX.”

4. See also the similar complaint in Richard Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues”: “she want to drive me like a mule.”

5. Similarly Roosevelt Sykes in “No Good Woman Blues” says, “I won't try no mule : that don't know gee from haw/I don't want no woman : she just soon as say yes as to say no”

6. The formula appears in 13, 20, 34, 39, and 48.

7. The formula appears also in 4, 11, 16, 18, 32, 33, 41, and 49.

8. “Seven Drunken Nights” is the usual Irish title. This popular, slightly ribald song is a variation of the Scottish one collected by Child “Our Goodman.” It is related as well to the English broadside "The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife."

9. In a similar vein Sleepy John Estes in “Working Man Blues” inveighs against automation, saying “white folks you ought to work/ More mules and men.”

10. For Blind Willie McTell a mule’s tail suggests public hair. (“Kind Mama”) In Blind Bogus Ben Covington’s “Boodle-Um-Bum Bum” “scared my mule away” refers to the singer’s dope selling being disturbed. For Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim) “son just don't lead a doggone mule” means to look out for number one. (“Me, Myself, and I”) In Big Bill Broonzy’s “Grandma’s Farm” “got a note my black mule died” means a change of lovers. Finally Charlie Bozo Nickerson’s line in “Move that Thing,” while obscure, is doubtless obscene: “The mules backed up : in my face.”


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”



1. Texas Alexander “Awful Moaning Blues. Pt. 2” 1929
2. Texas Alexander “Levee Camp Moan Blues 1927 (two versions)
3. Kokomo Arnold “Front Door Blues” 1925
4. Kokomo Arnold “Front Door Blues” 1935
5. Kokomo Arnold “Your Ways and Actions” 1938
6. Willie Baker “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” 1929
7. Barefoot Bill (Ed Bell) “From Now On” 1929
8. Ed Bell “She’s a Fool Gal” 1930
9. Blind Blake “Bootleg Rum Dum Blues” 1928
10. Blind Blake “Goodbye Mama Moan” 1928
11. Big Bill (Broonzy) “Big Bill Blues” 1932 (two versions)
12. Big Bill (Broonzy) “Grandma’s Farm” (two versions) 1920
13. Richard Rabbit Brown “James Alley Blues” 1927
14. Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown) “Lowland Blues” 1937
15. Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown) “Save It for Me” 1938
16. Charlie Campbell “Goin’ Away Blues” 1937
17. Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim) “Me, Myself, and I” 1941
18. Kid Cole “Niagara Fall Blues” 1928
19. Blind Bogus Ben Covington “Boodle-Um-Bum Bum” 1928
20. Walter Davis “Travelin’ this Lonesome Road” 1935
21. Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas) “He’s in the Ring” 1935
22. Sleepy John Estes “Tell Me About It” 1940
23. Sleepy John Estes “Working Man Blues” 1941
24. Hound Head Henry “Low Down Hound Blues” 1928
25. Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) “Blind Pig Blues” 1928
26. Son House “My Black Mama, Part 1” 1930
27. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Balky Mule Blues“ 1929
28. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Lemon’s Worried Blues” 1928
29. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Long Lonesome Blues” 1926
30. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Rabbit Foot Blues” 1926
31. Coley Jones “Drunkard’s Special” 1929 (five recordings)
32. Maggie Jones “You May Go But You’ll Come Back Some Day” 1924
33. Stovepipe No. 1 (Sam Jones) “Bed Slats” 1927
34. David King “Sweet Potato Blues” 1930 (two versions)
35. Huddie Ledbetter “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” 1925
36. Blind Willie McTell “Kind Mama” 1929
37. Kid Prince Moore “Bug Juice Blues” 1936
38. Charlie Bozo Nickerson “Move that Thing” 1920
39. Bessie Smith “J.C. Holmes Blues” 1925
40. Roosevelt Sykes “No Good Woman Blues” 1930 (two versions)
41. Henry Thomas “Texas Easy Street Blues” 1928
42. Walter Vincon (Mississippi Sheiks) “She Ain’t No Good” 1930
43. Will Weldon (Casey Bill) “Hitch Me to your Buggy and Drive Me Like a Mule” 1927
44. Peetie Wheatstraw “When a Man Gets Down” 1936
45. Tampa Red (Hudson Whitaker) “It’s Tight Like That” 1928
46. Robert Wilkins “New Stock Yard Blues” 1935
47. Sonny Boy Williamson “Low Down Ways“ 1938
48. Sonny Boy Williamson “Shotgun Blues” 1941 (two versions)
49. Leola B. Wilson “Back-Biting Bee Blues” 1926


Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek]



The Jew of Malta (Marlowe)

     The Jew of Malta is as full of plot turns as a Hitchcock film and consistently supported by Marlowe’s marvelous swinging pentameters. Its dark and cynical world is signaled by the initial appearance of the Senecan ghost of Machiavelli (called Machiavel, surely in part to sound like “make-evil”) who boasts in the prologue:

Admired I am of those that hate me most.
Though some speak openly against my books,
Yet they will read me and thereby attain
To Peter’s chair.

     As Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, it is unlikely that many in Marlowe’s audience had ever seen one. Still, anti-Semitic stereotypes were sufficiently persistent that the play includes a reference to ritual murder of children and the title character is not only rapaciously greedy and amoral, but also has a large nose (apparently an artificial one for the stage). It seems likely that Marlowe, notoriously an unbeliever in an age when atheism or even heterodoxy could be most severely punished, was himself little concerned with the issue of Jewishness except as a sign of outsider status. There are several unnamed minor Jewish characters who do not seem monstrous; Ithamore, the Muslim slave, is fully as vicious as his Hebrew master, and the Christian Governor of Malta shrinks from no deceit in pursuit of his interests. When the two friars are competing for Barabas’ patronage, they fall to blows. Surely, then, the Jew is a Jew symbolically, employing conventions already centuries old, and the slur, if slur it be, is against humanity itself..


The Prime Minister (Trollope)

     I have elsewhere discussed the slightly guilt-tinged pleasure I find in Trollope. The Prime Minister, for all its thousand pages, is little different from others. It possesses, indeed, boasts of, the same placid confidence in things as we find them and people as they are with the exception of a few unmanly scoundrels (and with gaze averted from the lower orders except for an occasional comic or pathetic turn). The faults of those who are not scoundrels derive always from weakness or simple-mindedness and are thus treated with considerable indulgence. This volume ends in a celebratory wedding and thus may claim the name of comedy, though a good deal of the sentimental is folded in along the way. Perhaps the clearest indicator of Trollope’s tone is the sort of names he tosses off, especially for lesser characters. In The Prime Minister himself plays a considerable role, for how could a Duke of Omnium do otherwise, and along the way the reader encounters such characters as Sir Orlando Drought, Lord Cantrip, Sir Timothy Beeswax, the Earl of Earlybird, Sir Damask Monogram, the Marquis of Mount Fidgett, Mr. Rattler, and Sir Omicron Pie.


Song of Lawino (Okot p’Bitek)

     This poem, by the Ugandan Okot p’Bitek was originally written in the middle 1950s in metered and rhymed lines in the Luo language of the author’s Acholi people. Its free verse translation by the author a decade later was widely read, the first long African poem to enjoy global attention. The work shares with p’Bitek’s first novel, Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo (1953, later translated into English as White Teeth) the theme of conflict between tradition and modernity, between African custom and European practice. The poem, subtitled “An African Lament,” details the grievances of a first wife whose husband has taken to Western tastes including a citified second wife. Using what the reader can only assume to be the literary devices of Luo poetry and employing some arresting figures of speech, the neglected wife praises the value of customary mores and calls her husband a dog of the whites, though ready to turn tp praising him as the son of a chief if he will only himself take pride in his African culture. The book’s success brought some knowledge of African practices to curious American and European readers. As in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the footnotes are conveniently edited into the story. The author deserves credit for trying to employ indigenous language in a work of modern literature, but the worthy experiment yielded a disappointing result. It is enough to see the woodcut illustrations by Frank Horley which look as though they belong is a child’s storybook.

Thomas Love Peacock and the End of Poetry



     Thomas Love Peacock’s satiric essay “The Four Ages of Poetry” is far less well-known than the essay it inspired in response, Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.” While the popular disparity is adequately explained by the second author’s far greater eminence, it is also true that Peacock’s ideas have little currency today while the exalted notions of the poet’s role set forth by Shelley remain widely accepted. The first appeal of the text to a contemporary reader is likely Peacock’s acerbic wit; he refers, for instance, to the Lake poets as an “egregious confraternity of rhymesters” and to Wordsworth in particular as “a morbid dreamer.” [1] 
      The essay like the conversations in Peacock’s entertaining romans à clef, can scarcely be taken at face value [2]. Indeed, one of the principles set forth in the essay is that poetry, which is to say, imaginative writing in general, is designed only to entertain and not to embody truth. Nonetheless, the radical objections Peacock makes are not peculiar to him or to his age, but rather are similar to points made by earlier critics. To cite only two examples, Plato condemned poetry in the Republic as an inadequate imitation of reality and as an exciter of unruly and uncontrollable passions that weakens rationality, and Bacon considered poetry to be merely “a dream of learning,” a sort of “feigned history” without a role in the advancement of knowledge. A response (reasoned, perhaps, as well as passionate) is therefore appropriate to the essay, though the critic of Peacock the critic will find himself seriously answering claims which to the writer may have been primarily facilitators of a most enviable wit.
     Peacock maintains that poetry has value as entertainment only, lacking any capacity for expressing truth. Its prestige in the past was, he argues, due to the primitive state of more effective forms of investigation by the likes of “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists.” From a point of view shaped by eighteenth century rationalism, he likewise condemns the aesthetic emphasis on emotions and pleasure.
     Unsympathetic as the contemporary reader may be to these conclusions, certain of Peacock’s points are compelling. The fact is that Peacock’s concluding claim that poetry’s downward slip is bound to continue, its weaknesses making Parnassus appear “far beneath” the eminence occupied by scientific, factual, and technological thinkers, might seem to have been substantially confirmed. No one could deny that poetry has been far further marginalized in the nearly two hundred years since the essay appeared in the Literary Miscellany. [3]
     In addition, despite the limited information available in Peacock’s day about ancient (and modern oral) poetry, his survey of the history of poetry is in part consistent with more recent researches. The trajectory with which he predicts poetry’s diminished future arises from his accurate observation of its central role in earlier ages, though here his raillery begins to interfere with his facts. He notes that poets had been in archaic times “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators” engaged in “delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity.” His satiric vein intrudes to the detriment of his argument when he claims that the result of the poets’ “reputation of inspiration” is their “faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.” Though “the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age,” their “knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths.”
     His selective view is apparent in his characterization of “iron age” poetry as wholly sycophantic, serving primarily “to disseminate the fame of [a chieftains’] achievements and the extent of his possessions.” He sounds very nearly like a vulgar Marxist before the time of Marx when he states categorically, “This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.” According to Peacock this was a period of undisguised selfishness and raw power in which poets serve to gratify the egos of the strong, their business being “to disseminate the fame of [the local nobleman’s] achievements and the extent of his possessions.”
     Here he mistakes the part for the whole more than promulgating outright error. Surely the professional role of the early poet -shaman-priest-legislator cannot be justifiably reduced to that of a pure mountebank, the epithet Peacock uses for poets. If the intellectual leadership of the species had been an utter humbug, the scientific progress Peacock admired could never have occurred. He writes in the same vein that primitive religion, apart from serving the vanity of rulers, was nothing but “ignorance and fear.” a more balanced view of the facts would recognize that oral poetry engages many themes other than praise of the ruling house, and that early religion embodies considerable subtle symbolic figuration of the order of the world having little to do with ruling class propaganda.
     It is certainly true that one function of literature is to confirm received ideas, to reassure readers of what they have always thought was true. A portion of this reinforcement of socially accepted views is undoubtedly to confirm the nobility and excellence of the powers that be, and thus to encourage peace and social order. However, only a portion of art is conservative in this sense. Poetry may also cause its consumers to conceive new ideas, to question assumptions, and to perceive contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries. Some works tend more toward the one end of this spectrum; some toward another, but in neglecting the critical potential of poetry, Peacock is guilty of distortion. (For him, this may be no error, but merely the set-up of a clever line. He notes that the bards of old times were always pleased to celebrate the strength of their lord, “being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.”)
     In any event he considers poetry an inappropriate tool for investigating reality. Poets such as Wordsworth who “had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was” instead can see only what “she was not,” “a sort of fairy- land which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras.” In his enlightened modern times, Peacock confidently declares, “with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction,” making poetry obsolete.
     Apart from complaining that poetry cannot lead to truth, Peacock objects as well to its association with pleasure and emotion. To him the beauty of poetry’s melody is for the naïve and simple, “pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound.” He dismisses the harmony of metrical patterns as nothing but “language on the rack of Procrustes.” The reader realizes that in Peacock’s semi-utilitarian view, all pleasure is necessarily trivial and child-like.
     Similarly, to judge by this essay emotion for Peacock amounts to little more than “puling sentimentality.” He ridicules “sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.” Far from praising the cultivated sensibility of the poet’s audience, he considers them vulgar, “that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted.” They are nothing but “a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty.”
     Overstated (and amusing) as this may be, it is misleading as well in this context. All organisms seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; the principle is fundamental to our species no less than to other animals. Further the world, even in modern times, is hardly as clear and simple as Peacock’s argument would imply. However clever our rationalizations may be, we are governed by emotion and by irrational motives, and we are beset by ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, especially when contemplating the chief concerns of our lives: love, death, and the divine. These are specifically the areas in which factual, “scientific” discourse fails, and poetic discourse excels. What Peacock repeatedly calls “chimaeras” is in fact the daily stuff of our consciousness.
     Toward the end of his piece, almost like a punch line, Peacock says that, as so many excellent poems are already in existence, no more need be written. But this provocative claim is undercut by the fact that its author has seen fit to compose a highly literary essay using all the devices of rhetoric to present it. In very much the same manner as a lyric or a short story, Peacock is inviting his readers to imagine, “What if one were to say this . . .?” If the result is Bacon would call “feigned history” few would wish to substitute unimaginative prose, however transparent. The significant objects of contemplation are never emptied out by analysis; there is always a further word to be added. There is no end of poems and there is no end of essays.




1. The entire passage following is worthy of quotation.
“”While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would reject.”

2. Shelley wrote to Peacock on March 21, 1821, calling his own essay “an antidote” to Peacock’s, but minimizing their differences, saying “ You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched.” It has been suggested, for instance by P. M. Yarker in the introduction to the Everyman edition of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, that Peacock conceived the “Four Ages” intentionally playing straight man to Shelley’s vatic poet.

3. In this twenty-first century, it seems that any politician’s appeal for support for schools must insist that education is centered in what is today called the STEM curriculum. Not poetry alone, but the very ideal of a liberal education has withered.