Every Reader's Coleridge

      This is the eighteenth in a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. Consult the Index for the current month under Blog Archive on the right.  An introduction called “Why Read Poetry?” is available at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-read-poetry.html. 

     In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The poems discussed are all readily available on the internet. 

 

      Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known to most readers through a few poems so widely anthologized and reprinted in textbooks that students often encounter them in classrooms.   Then, too, he has a reputation both as a poetic innovator, the founder with Wordsworth of the theory and practice of English Romanticism, and as a drug addict.  Lyrical Ballads, the ground-breaking book that proclaimed the new style in 1798 included poems by both writers.  In the introduction Wordsworth, the nature poet who was said by his friend De Quincey to be addicted not to drugs or alcohol but to hiking, declared his aim “to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.”  They agreed that Coleridge would adopt the complementary technique: to write about the supernatural “yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief [the first use of this term] for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”  Wordsworth meant to defamiliarize commonplace experience by seeing deeply into it, while Coleridge would indicate the symbolic relevance of the exotic and extraordinary.

     Times may have changed, but in my day at least, it was all but impossible to avoid getting “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” in school.  Its emphatic, if somewhat muddy, moral theme and its archaizing trappings (including the spelling of the title and the marginal notes) made it popular among pedagogues and its narrative ballad-like stanzas seemed more approachable than odes.  Folksong, which had been dismissed as sub-literary, was embraced by the Romantics such as Bishop Percy and Robert Burns in Britain and  Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Germany.  The form particularly suited Coleridge’s project because the supernatural often plays a role in English ballads, though his own story is recognizably in the "gathic" style of the late eighteenth century and has little in common with the Middle Ages. 

     This passage includes perhaps the poem’s most well-known lines (“Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink”) before indulging in horror movie scares in which “slimy things” dance about in lurid special effects.

 

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

 

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white. (115-130)

 

The poem invokes a kind of Calvinist divine judgement in which the mariner is punished for his violence against the albatross, though, of course, the crew also perishes in collateral damage, while the protagonist goes on to work out his cursed destiny rather like the Wandering Jew.  The moral, when it arrives, seems facile:

 

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

                                    (614-617)

 

     A careful reader is likely to find this an inadequate theme.  Surely the story suggests not only a deep love for the entire creation, hence pacifism and vegetarianism and true Christian nonresistance, but also the unknown impact of casual choices, a sort of tragic fate or ἀνάγκη..  When the mariner shoots the albatross, no motive is given.  The act is as gratuitous as Meursault’s  killing in The Stranger, yet, once done, it determines his entire destiny.  There is as much of the absurd as there is of retributive justice in the story.

     In fact the supernatural element, not the theme, is the heart of the poem’s appeal.  The “special effects” quoted above are expanded to cover a prolonged agony in which the crews’ souls go whizzing by as they die one by one, apparently having become mere aspects of the mariner’s punishment.  (The image reminds me of the skeleton sent over the heads of his audiences for showings of House on Haunted Hill [1959]).  Yet in spite of the mariner’s repentance, he must ever wander on, cautioning others to have compassion.  Very like William Castle’s modern horror movie, the creepy and mysterious thrills are the principal point. 

     The supernatural is replaced by the fabulous and exotic in “Kubla Khan,” all the more fascinating when the author notes that its origin was “a sort of Reverie brought on, by two grains of Opium.”  Here Kubla Khan’s “pleasure-dome” is not just a luxury resort with its gardens and “many an incense-bearing tree”; it is at the same time “a savage place,” “haunted” and “filled with wails,” where tumultuous movements of the earth occur.  He hears then the melody of the “Abyssinian maid” whose song, if he could but remember, would allow him to “build that dome in air,/ That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”  Yet the music is not purely pleasurable; the sublime insights of art are menacing as well, even those from the most profound source.  The fruits of divine inspiration here seem dangerous, wrought about with magical protective ritual (“Weave a circle round him thrice”).  Yet, just as in  the “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” the primary significance is not in theme at all, but rather in the creation of a tone, a mood of dramatic portent, and the writer’s providing a strange and marvelous setting, a second-hand account of an obscure passage brought to life in a drug dream.  The “person from Porlock” who interrupts his reverie is in fact oneself, the reader, for whom the poem was set down, the spectator who may experience the weird at second-hand.  Again, the poem’s primary appeal is like that of science fiction or fantasy, the appeal of the strange.

     Though “Dejection: An Ode” deals with the natural phenomenon of depression, it associates the author’s low spirits with storms and opens with an archaizing, folk prognostication of impending severe weather from a stanza of an old ballad.  In his earlier poem “The Eolian Harp” (1796) the device (a passive musical instrument like wind chimes) had produced “a soft floating witchery of sound” which suggested. to him a magnificent song of the whole creation “Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all.”  Here, however, the strains of the harp “better far were mute,” since, like the ominous moon, they presage disaster and thus “better far were mute.” 

     The poem proceeds to specify the sensations of a mind sunk in depression with vivid imagery.

 

          A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

         A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

         Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

                In word, or sigh, or tear—    (21-24)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

                My genial spirits fail;

                And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

                                          (39-41)

 Coleridge is very much the modern neurotic, a member of the “poor loveless ever-anxious crowd.” (52) Though he gazes at nature, it is with “how blank an eye” (30) and his mood is unrelieved.  He can only “see, not feel” (38) the charms of the creation.  He come then to realize that he “may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” (45-46)  The appreciation of the world is a reciprocal affair, “we receive but what we give,” (47)  In the end

 

from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

           Enveloping the Earth—

                                        (53-55)

  

To regain access to the divine “Joy” love provides a route.  “This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,/

     This beautiful and beauty-making power” (62-63) arrives with a spiritual “wedding” (68).

 

 

  We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

      All melodies the echoes of that voice,

All colours a suffusion from that light.

                                        (72-75)

 

 The poet finds refuge in love from the “viper thoughts, that coil around my mind/ Reality's dark dream!” (94-5), though these may arise from real conditions, the “groans” of “trampled men, with smarting wounds” that suffer “pain, and shudder with the cold.” (112-113)  He is thus able to conclude with a victorious wish for the high spirits of his beloved; in the warmth of human love he finds melancholy’s remedy.

 

           With light heart may she rise,

           Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

      Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,

Their life the eddying of her living soul!

      O simple spirit, guided from above,

Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,

Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

                                              (132-139)

 

     This conclusion in felicity is often lacking in Coleridge, a man of decidedly depressive tendencies who served an addiction for much if his life.  His somber and intellectual vision is not to everyone’s taste.  Yet Coleridge contributed to the modern style by his objections to neo-Classicism including his insistence that poetry should not stray too far from the ordinary spoken language.  His fondness for the both the quaint and the tumultuous have aged less well.  Much of his work is too philosophical for many sensibilities.  A hostile critic once accused him of over-emotionalism, labeling him a member of "the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes," but his poetic descendants have been only more self-interested and neurotic.   

     What the reader may make of his poetry, Coleridge is undeniably a substantial critic.  Though philosophers may differ on his significance in the history of ideas, in literature his Lectures on Shakespeare, Biographica Literaria, and  other criticism offer many influential ideas, not least the concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief" and the distinction between "imagination" and "fancy."  His adaptation of Schelling’s notion of Ineinsbildung for which he devised the ungainly term "esemplastic power" exemplifies at once the somewhat opaque vulnerability of his ratiocination and its accurate reflection of the poetic mind.

     If Coleridge is quite certain to be read in the future for his role in literary history, he is surely no less certain to impress new readers every year, even some who encounter him in classrooms, with his fondness for the strange fey quality he found provided  bit of the sublime, and for his pronounced rhythms that render his work always cadenced even when irregular. 

     The curious may visit Coleridge’s grave in  St. Michael’s Church in London to read the poet’s epitaph.  The verses are at first glance entirely conventional with the request for passers-by to pray for the departed and the author’s own hopes for salvation.

 

Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,

And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod

A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.

O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;

That he who many a year with toil of breath

Found death in life, may here find life in death!

Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame

He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

 

     First of all, the reader is likely to be struck by the fact that Coleridge has here adopted the role of the Ancient Mariner, accosting others to awake them to truths more easily avoided.  Here the equivalent of the Mariner’s curse is life-long depression (“death in life”).  He expresses also a radical skepticism over his career and even his identity (“or that which once seemed he”).  The close inquirer will observe that the initials in the fourth line are not used solely for the convenient rhyme they allow.  The three English letters sound very much like the Greek word ἐστηση, “he has stood” and the same sounds echo repeatedly throughout the verses beginning with the first line (“Stop, Christian” and “Stop, child”) and continuing to the end ( “through Christ . . .same”).  The given name and the proximity to death suggest the book of Samuel in which David says (as part of the affecting story of his relationship with Jonathan) “there is but a step between me and death” (1 Samuel 20:3).  Later David laments his beloved friend, saying “How are the mighty fallen!” (II Samuel 1, 23-27).  David’s grief is ameliorated, however, by his Biblical confidence in the order of things, a certainty Coleridge may have desired, but never attained.  And so the poet elaborated his simple expression of desire, not so much for everlasting life as for a purchase on a certain truth, with elaborate flights of thought, sound patterns, word-play, and allusion, as though with art he could lift himself into the sublime.  In his weaknesses perhaps even more than in his strengths Coleridge was a harbinger of our belated age.

Art as Play

 

     A dramatic performance is aptly called a play, though a sonnet or a sonata might deserve the name no less.  All art is a form of play, though not all play is art.  When goat kids tussle and cats knock a ball around, they are playing.  Their end is amusement, just as opera-goers and sonnet-readers are pleasantly passing the time, though art aficionados might call what they are seeking beauty.  All are enjoying recreation in a diversion from the pursuit of practical goals.  The dog slavering while pursuing a stick and the gallery visitor cocking a discerning eye have a good deal in common. 

     Play might be defined as activity done for its own sake without any function other than the satisfaction arising from the act itself.  Throughout the centuries those defending the arts from moralists who regarded aesthetic pursuits as frivolous or hedonistic have maintained that exposure to aesthetic objects makes the consumer more noble and more moral, but, should it ever happen, this effect is incidental.  The same is true of more modest claims that art increases sympathy or sensitivity, or, indeed, that its study benefits general intelligence.  While it is true that art encodes and transmits cultural values and spiritual convictions, this function, too, is nonessential.  Pleasure is the chief and essential end of art, though critics yet today, in an odd vestige of moralism, shrink from admitting it.

     This week’s New York Times Opinion section, for instance, includes the promise that the study of art will “improve your taste, your judgements, your conduct.” [1]  The notion that culture will sharpen both cognitive and moral discernment, while broad and unqualified, seems modest when juxtaposed to the article’s extravagant title “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,”  Such claims are likely to be in part defensive, reacting to today’s educational stress on science and devaluation of humanities.

     For centuries of European criticism had accepted a compromise in the authoritative formula “delight and instruct,” with the second term justifying and diluting the first.  Yet recognition of people’s fondness for symbolic  representation goes back to Aristotle who recognized this distinctive human taste, saying “from childhood to imitate is inborn in people and in  this they differ from other animals,” since “by nature we have an instinct for representation.”  The contemplation of such symbols or representations or “imitations” in Aristotle’s term, brings us “pleasure.”  [2]  in the Politics Aristotle is quite clear about the uselessness of art, saying that the young must not be taught skills that are merely functional (he uses the term χρήσιμος, useful or serviceable), as his activities should not be corrupted by what is “not free” (ἀνελεύθερος),  This is, of course the basis for the value long placed on the “liberal arts,” those of free men, unbound by compulsion, wages, or practical ends. [3]  This sort of disinterested pastime is a self-justifying activity, the highest human occupation.  For the ancients this noble purposelessness characterized not art alone, but all intellectual activities. 

     For Schiller more than two millennia later human beings are motivated by both a constantly mutating sensuous drive (sinnliche Trieb) arising from physical stimuli and an unchanging structural drive (Formtrieb) which, like mathematics, leads toward the rational. [4]  For him the dialectic of these opposing tendencies is resolved through the play drive (der Spieltrieb), which mediates between the world of phenomena and that of ideas. 

     The sensuous drive excludes all independent activity and freedom from its subject, the passive receiver of sense data, while the structural drive, situated in the conceptual realm, excludes all dependence and all pain from its purely formal values.  The exclusion of freedom reflects a physical reality, while the exclusion of suffering is a spiritual inspiration. Both drives therefore involve the mind, the one through natural laws, the other through cognitive operations.  In the play instinct both work together, and, when one is led both by inclination and by reason to love another individual (or, likewise, an objet d’art) the synthesis generates a playful attachment in which coercion has no part.

     Building on these conclusions in the twentieth century Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens derives art from play while accepting the biological origins of a play instinct in “the habitual tendency of every living creature to leap; and the human creature, by acquiring, as we said, a sense of rhythm, generated and brought forth dancing ; and since the rhythm is suggested and awakened by the tune, the union of these.” For Huizinga “rhythm and harmony,” surely mathematical elements Schiller would have considered “formal,” are “invariably accompanied by pleasure.” (263)  

     He usefully defines the nature of play, listing five distinguishing characteristics.

 

1.  “Play is free, it is in fact freedom.” (8)

2.  Play is separated from the rest of experience.  It is a wholly voluntary activity.

3.  Play is isolated from other activities both in duration and location.

4.  Play “creates order; it is order.”  “It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.” (10)  “All play has its rules.” (11)

5.  Play is connected with no functional end whatsoever beyond recreation.  “It interrupts the appetitive process.” (9)

 

     On this basis he concludes that  Poetry “is born in and as play – sacred play, no doubt, but always, even in its sanctity, verging on gay abandon, mirth and jollity.”  (122)  He proceeds to provide anthropological data to support the conclusion that myth, art, and religion are all founded in play.   While “Poiesis is, in fact, a play function,” (119), he notes that poetry sometimes rises to the level of  “ideation and judgment,” but “music never leaves the play sphere.” (158)

     Though the similarity is profound, distinctions remain between the frisking lamb and the balletomane, the Superbowl fan and the cinemaphile.  All may be said to be playing, but only the film and dance aficionados are engaged with art.  The unique aspect of art is that its play involves manipulating symbols and patterns rather than objects or other creatures.  In this way art is distinguished from such human activities with no end other than pleasure, such as travel, gourmet dining, and certain sexual encounters, each of which depends on stimuli more substantial than the play of images and ideas in the mind.  In most music and much dance and abstract painting the gap is even greater, as the formal design of the work dominates while reference to the world of lived reality is absent or slight.

     Further, whereas in play one amuses oneself and only possibly fellow players or perhaps a bemused parent, art is typically made by one individual (in a process that may or may not be subjectively pleasant) and then consumed  by others.  Play is open-ended while art aims at a coherent unified object, finished in some sense and an artifact thereafter whereas non-aesthetic play is generally forgotten after it is enacted.  Finally, the rules for art are remade with every work, while those of chess or a game of catch are unchanging. 

     Art, then, is a recreational amusement, a way to pass the time while waiting to die.  Its primary end is always pleasure.  In this a play by Sophocles and the “playing” of a violin resemble the “play” of bridge players or that of frisking kids in a meadow of sweet grass. The painter may wish to make money and the gallery goer may consider his purchase an investment, but art is in its essence free of motive outside itself.  It is born of the exhilarating exercise of the human expertise at the manipulation of symbols when done for its own sake, or rather purely for fun and, with the more sublime works, perhaps some moments of that satisfying (if mysterious) sort of fun experienced as mental equipoise. 

     Artists build symbolic structures in the chambers of the imagination.  Beyond giving pleasure the works they create can, though their beauty and their order, serve as a “supreme fiction” (in Stevens’ term) redeeming a world known imperfectly, in fragments, and too often laden with suffering.  Art may realize that grand ambition or it may simply serve as diversion (doubtless itself a useful goal).  In a dark theater members of the audience amuse themselves with the play of entering another consciousness.  In an easy chair one reads a sonnet of Shakespeare and enjoys playing that, one day someone may spoken such lines direct from the heart, though the reader knows it is all make-believe.  The universality of both play and the entire spectrum of art – poetry, drama, music, sculpture, dance, and painting – throughout the world and in all ages, among hunter-gatherers and among urbanites, demonstrates the critical value of such activities in making human life livable.

 

 

 

1.  David Brooks, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” New York Times January 28, 2024.  Note the.  Brooks, a Yale professor but not a literary scholar, would have agreed for the most part with James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism (2016), the most compelling exposition of the humanistic value of literature in recent years.

2.  Poetics 1448b μιμεῖσθαι σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ἐκ παίδων  ἐστὶ καὶ τούτῳ διαφέρουσι τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων and “κατὰ φύσιν δὲ ὄντος ἡμῖν τοῦ μιμεῖσθαι.” The word for pleasure, which appears in this passage in several forms, is “ἡδύς.”

3.  Politics 1337b.  Note also the origin of school in σχολή, meaning “leisure” or “that in which leisure is employed.”  Such men could, of course, attain freedom only by depending on slaves to perform the labor to support them.

4. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), letters twelve through Fourteen.  The quoted lines are in letter fourteen.

The Golden Age of Paperbacks

     Surely the nineteen-fifties, when I was setting out with the ambition of reading everything, was the golden age of paperback books, when most of the world’s classics were available for pocket change.  The first books I acquired, toward the latter end of elementary school, were all in soft covers: Walt Kelly’s Pogo collections, The Pocket Trashery of Ogden Nashery, Subways are for Sleeping which appealed to my taste for eccentricity, as did Auntie Mame.  I loved Čapek’s War with the Newts long before I knew who the author was, and read On the Beach before seeing Stanley Kramer’s movie.  I was a devotee of Judith Merrill’s annual collections of well-written science fiction.  By sixth grade my shelf held Hendrik Willem van Loon’s History of Mankind, an exemplary book for children which offers distinctive style, amusing drawings, and (in memory at least) no condescension whatever.  Fledgling literary interests were emerging, and I read and reread my volume of Poe’s stories and poems, or a little collection of American short stories, or one of the Untermeyer poetry anthologies --  each of these sold for 25 or 35 cents.  I had been entranced by my parent’s purchase of the Life book of The World’s Great Religions and considered my Mentor copy of The Way of Life: Lao Tzu translated by R. B. Blakney a revelation.  (Its rhythms run still in my mind, doubtless to my benefit.)

    But when I became somewhat older and able to go to Chicago by myself, my middle-class parents, though frugal about nearly everything else, let me buy paperbacks freely in the interest of education.  I could indulge myself with reckless intemperance and my paperback library mushroomed.  When I would visit the Loop over sixty years ago, I had several regular routes.  One of them culminated in a visit to “the world’s largest bookstore,” Kroch’s and Brentano’s.  But I would not go there directly.  First I would stop by the Rose Discount Record store on South Wabash to pick up classical sides and then proceed a few blocks further south to Seymour’s Record store  where Seymour Schwartz sold jazz and blues from a decidedly unglamorous (and thereby hip) shop.  He had heaps of old 78s in the back for maybe 25 cents each.   I would then stop by a few favorite dusty old used bookshops and, I confess, toward the end, I would also patronize also the Iwan Ries tobacconist (conveniently on Wabash as well) to pick up a pack of smokes from some exotic and thus sophisticated country, transforming me instantly from a callow youth to a cosmopolite.  Though the tobacco was foolish, in the books lay the very foundations of my education.  Through my teen-age years I was never without a pile of paperbacks on the floor by the head of the WWII army surplus cot on which I slept. (The stack persists all these years later, though now, as I share my bed, it rests on the table by the parlor sofa.).

     Most had been purchased at the climactic stop on my urban excursion when I entered the precincts of Kroch's, also on Wabash.  It was there that I spent by far the largest sums I spent anywhere in those days (modest as they were).  With the exception of a few volumes in German, I never bought books on the main floor.  Passing the carefully curated record selection at the top of the stairs, mainly folk music and blues but offering the old Caedmon spoken word albums as well, I would head down to the basement where the paperbacks were kept, arranged in shelves by publisher. 

     What a glorious new-found-land it was in which every region offered substantial rewards. From every side authors beckoned: Dante, Camus, Ben Jonson, Lady Murasaki, among hundreds of other worthies, a magnificent company! To this day I recall in which corner I would find the austere Penguins without cover art featuring reliable translations from a variety of languages, the cheap little Mentors and often rather ugly Signets for the general run of classics, the Doubleday Anchor books with their marvelous designs by the likes of Edward Gorey and Leo Lionni, the larger format grey-jacketed Scribner’s books for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the wondrous old reprints in hardy well-bound Dover editions (including many of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East), the New Directions with their black and white covers and avant-garde edge, even the Catholic Image books for Aquinas and Cardinal Newman.

     The bookstore staff seemed mostly composed of young men, perhaps working a while between undergraduate and graduate school or else ABDs too educated to find any other employment. At any rate, they seemed very knowledgeable about the arts, and were rather intriguing to an adolescent shopper from the suburbs, still living with his parents.  They had opinions.  I recall when my brother bought a copy of Naked Lunch against the advice of the clerk, who told him, “Don’t waste your money. For ten minutes you’ll be shocked, but it’ll be nothing but boredom after that.”

     It was surely due to the influence of these young workers that Kroch’s had a decent selection of small press books, not just City Lights, but Piet Hein’s Grooks and Botteghe Oscura, and many more obscure titles.  For years it seems they were trying to move the plain black copies of Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies, which, though I was an enthusiastic admirer of the author, struck me as aggressively off-hand.

     I may have lived in an insular little haut bourgeois suburb, but here was an entrance to a far greater realm, providing access to people of all times and places.  What could be more exhilarating than to read one’s way through the world’s greatest texts for the first time? I was quite serious, making systematic surveys or movement and periods, noting marginal comments, sometimes in German once I started learning the language. My granddaughter hears such things and affectionately says, “You were such a nerd,” but to me it was the epitome of cool. I wanted to read everything, though, of course, I had my favorites.

     Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 was a revelation and a delight. I wrote to many of the small presses listed in the back to obtain books Kroch’s didn’t offer. During high school I ostentatiously carried the book around — I did the same with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene because I had read that he was “a poet’s poet” — and got my reward when some prankster put chewing gum in my anthology when I was away from my seat.  I became a missionary for Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems, translations of Han Shan, which I photocopied and gave to friends.  Apart from the Beats I tried to keep up with contemporary poetry, picking up paperbound volumes of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, and John Ashbery. 

     In fat Mentor editions I worked my way through the turgid Russians – Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though I preferred Gogol’s Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka published by political refugee Frederick Ungar whose company was strong in German translations (I had Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Werther from them) but also included such odd works as Gladkov’s socialist realist novel with the dramatically uncompromising title of Cement.  Kleist’s stories fascinated me with their precise exacting weirdness in a Signet book.  I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Collier translated by Sir John Harington, the Elizabethan inventor of the water closet, and it never occurred to me to wonder how such a book could possibly be issued in a popular edition.  My Washington Square Press copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Songs, and Poems is dated 1960, cost thirty-five cents, and is yet today in serviceable condition.  I very nearly wore out my Muse’s Library edition of Thomas Wyatt’s poems while the Everyman’s paperback of Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century added Surrey, Ralegh, and Davies.  I had, of course, Howl and Kaddish (as well as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology) from City Lights, while among my New Directions volumes from my high school days were a half shelf of Henry Miller, Pound’s Selected Poems, Williams’ Paterson and Pictures from Breughel, and novels by Louis Fernand Céline.  And, of course, I had Evergreens from Grove Press  as well.  I just reread Melville’s The Confidence Man (their first title), Lorca, Beckett, Aphra Behn and Crashaw as well as essays by D. T. Suzuki.  When I set out from home for university, I brought my Modern Library College edition paperback of Plato as a talisman.

*          *          *          *          *

     If the golden age I am celebrating has passed, the change may be due less to changes in the publishing industry than to a decay in the public’s taste.  In my youth not only the professoriate but people in general (especially, but not exclusively, those with some bit of education), recognized the value of the liberal arts.  To many it was obvious that to glimpse the world through Plato’s eyes, even briefly, must surely broaden and enrich even a banker’s view of the present day.  Nor was this belief entirely a class attitude.  The Little Blue Books (an essay on the Blue Book phenomenon will soon be posted to this site) indicate that the American autodidact, exemplified by figures from Benjamin Franklin through Jack London and Malcom X, was a sociological fact in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties when workingmen might read Shelley’s poems or Will Durant on Aristotle in little booklets costing a nickel or a dime.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom Penguin began selling quality books for two and a half (old) pence, advertised as “the price of ten cigarettes.”

     During World War II when the American government printed over a hundred million Armed Services Edition books to distribute to troops, a project headed by former Pocket Books executive Philip Van Doren Stern, the titles included bestsellers like Anthony Adverse and the Hornblower novels, but Shelley, Poe, Conrad, Maugham, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald as well.  By the nineteen-fifties there were plenty of trashy exploitation titles like those from Gold Medal on the racks in bus stations and drugstores, the descendants of the pulp magazine of the ‘thirties, but they were often accompanied by a few classier titles.  (Sometimes a French classic, Zola, say, or D. H. Lawrence, received a cover as though it were a potboiler, resulting, perhaps, in a mix of disappointed and delighted purchasers.) 

     What has become of these books, at once so good and so cheap?  Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the first Pocket Books in the, now sells for over thirty times its ‘fifties price, and inflation accounts for only a third of the increase.  Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, which had been a good seller in its Pocket Book form is presently available in editions costing between thirty and sixty times that price.  The price growth reflects the fact that these books are today bought almost entirely by students to whom they are a classroom assignment.  The casual purchaser has all but vanished; very little remains of what had been a cherished common cultural patrimony.  The allusions of filmmakers, poets, and composers alike are lost to those unfamiliar with the artists’ predecessors.     

     I fancy that there was then a lesser gap between low and high art, that the two could rub shoulders in the marketplace, but the mass base for the classics, such as it ever was, has largely evanesced as even most university students, even the cleverer ones, choose to focus solely on vocational training rather than the general intellectual practice – absorbing information, analyzing it, and generating new ideas – that provided the center of the old curriculum in which literature was essential and central.  The change has affected more than just reading.  A glance over a symphony audience will show a sea of white hair, and the classical percentage of recorded music sales has been declining for decades (as has the share of jazz).  Even theater attracts elders for the most part.  What was once a shared body of cultural information has become a territory visited primarily by specialist academics. 

     The younger generations has not, however, abandoned art by any means.  They listen to hours of mostly digitalized music, watch great amounts of television and a good number of movies and never feel as though confining themselves to popular forms is any constriction at all.  Critics will discuss a new pop album or Netflix series, on NPR and PBS, mind you, as though the potential of art had any scope in such productions, virtually none of which have proven other than forgettable.  The decline of the paperback, which played an important role in the democratization of learning, inevitably accompanies the abandonment of the liberal arts.

     When he founded Penguin in 1935 Sir Allen Lane declared that he “believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”  His intuition proved true (and profitable) both in the United Kingdom and the United States, but decades, now, of devotion to iPhones and iPads, to Roku and Hulu, Spotify and Apple Music, has eroded that market to insignificance.  People today can be educated through the graduate level while never acquiring cultural literacy and never, indeed, missing it. 

     If I rue the end of such cheap books of the very highest quality, still that loss is trivial compared to the loss of the readership that once welcomed those old paperbacks and with them came to take possession of their own literature, including poetry so beautiful as to make the reader weak in the knees, drama so sublime as to refresh the soul, and stories truer than the truth of everyday lived reality.  People who settle for an episode of Breaking Bad or a tune from Taylor Swift will never, I am afraid, know what they are missing.