Sins Against Love in Horace Odes 3.11

 

 

 

 

A new translation of Horace Odes 3.11:

 

 

 

O Mercury, from whom Amphion learned his skill

to build Thebes’ walls with stones by music moved,

from lyre of tortoise shell let songs sound forth

through strumming well-tuned strings.

 

Once silent and unwanted but now dear

to holy shrines and rich men’s groaning boards –

sing forth your song till Lyde’s stubborn ear

will turn this way and hear

 

who like a mare of three years old will play

and frisk on open plains and take no part

in mating, up to now she boldly thinks

herself too young for love.

 

You lead the tiger and the woods themselves.

swift rivers halt their flow for you,

Cerberus, monstrous Underworld guard,

will yield to your sweet song.

 

Tityos and Ixion brightened then.

The urns of the Danaean girls

stood dry, their watery load had had drained away,

their holders held by verse.

 

May Lyde contemplate the virgins’ crime,

their guilt there marked by all their urns,

whose water drained as fast as it went in.

This was their punishment

 

and thus the guilty after death still pay.

Those sinners (how could they have been more vile?)

who with sharp iron blades did take

the lives of their own mates.

 

Just one of many honored marriage vows,

proved false to her own father’s treachery

and won acclaim, a faithful bride renowned

for ages yet to come.

 

“Get up!” she told her youthful mate,

“Get up or else you’ll sleep a lengthy sleep

you don’t see coming.  Flee my sire

and sisters who mean ill,

 

and who like lions seizing calves – alas! –

one at a time while I, more mild in heart,

will neither wound you nor will I aim

to hold you in durance.

 

My father may confine me with cruel chains

for mercifully having spared my mate

or he may banish me and make my home

remote Numidia.

 

Run off as far as feet and winds can carry you

while night and Venus aid your flight.  Run off

while still you can and see my sorry fate’s

recorded on my tomb."

 

 

 

     Reading certain Horatian odes resembles contemplating a box by Joseph Cornell.  One sees in his Ode 3.11, for example, a meticulously constructed elegant little arrangement of objects or images attractive in itself but elusive in meaning with the context enhancing the connotative tendency of each element.  Part of what lends Horace’s references their rich suggestiveness is the fact that, apart from the mentions of Lyde, apparently a friend of the poet, the ode takes place entirely in the mythic realm.

    The poem is curiously doubled and self-reflexive.  The author seems to have intentionally introduced obscurities and contradictions.  To begin with, the poem has two themes, each accorded roughly equal space.  The first is self-reflective, the enchanting power of song, illustrated by Amphion’s music with which he razed the walls of Thebes, by the social prestige of poetry in religion and symposia, and by mythic references to the power of Orpheus’ playing to charm not only nature but even Cerberus and the sufferers in the underworld.  In a form of sympathetic magic, by claiming supernatural power for poetry the writer thereby predicts the success of this particular verse. 

     The claim of art’s persuasiveness provides a bridge to the second theme, the proper management of erotic energy.  The poet condemns mythic figures that offended against love –Ixion, and Tityos and, most prominently, the Danaean women who killed their spouses, all toward the end of convincing Lyde of the value of marriage and a conventional family life.  Horace provides a little horror show to reinforce poetry’s teaching by indicating the penalties for spurning the natural destiny of maturation in married love.  Stanza five, which would be a digitally animated sequence in a film, presents a luridly threatening Cerberus, a shocker itself, but also a reinforcement of the poet’s admonitions later.  The reader then is introduced to the theme of proper love relations with glimpses of the punishment in Hades of two others who had offended against marriage, Ixion by attempting adultery with the worst of all possible choices, the wife of the king of the gods, and Tityos for having attempted to rape Leto at the behest of that same goddess. 

     This theme is supported as well by the story of the Danaïdes and of Hypermnestra’s saving her husband Lynceus.  There could scarcely be a less dutiful wife than one who murders her mate, and the reference seem overdone for the speaker’s message to the young Lyde.  The poem, though a sort of love advice, is more concerned with propriety than with eros, but even in this simple normative recommendation of marriage, it is hardly straightforward.  To begin with, the name of Lyde, the woman to whom the ode is addressed, has confused some readers.  The name is used for a ἑταίρα by several poets.  It is the name of Antimachos’ mistress and the title of his elegiac poem upon her death.  Athenaeus 13.597 mentions another courtesan of the same name and Horace himself mentions a ἑταίρα of the name in 2.11.  (Another reference in 1.23 is less certainly a courtesan, but there Lyde’s characterization in part resembles that in 3.11.)  Considering that the lesson the poet implores her to hear is to prepare for a respectable marriage and the role of a dutiful wife, this could hardly be a message for a courtesan.  The use of Hypermnestra as his exemplum is problematic in any event, though she was a spouse to Lynceus and with him founded the Danaid line that led to Perseus.  Having been coerced unwillingly  into marriage, she is inappropriate as a model bride, however loyal a wife she proved to be.    

     Horace’s Lyde is said to behave like a young filly playing in a field, active and healthy, while resisting the subjugation to a husband that would come with marriage.  This characterization makes inevitable the picture of her as a teen-aged girl, wholly inexperienced in love and dubious about relationships, perhaps the daughter of a friend.  She sounds very like Daphne in Ovid who (in Golding’s translation) hated “as a haynous crime the bonde of bridely bed,” but instead enjoyed sporting about the wild mountains: “unwedded Phebe doth she haunt and follow as hir guide,” but, of course, her lack of interest in men is there caused by Cupid’s intervention.  Daphne has been struck by his anaphrodisiac iron arrow, while Apollo’s desire has been enflamed by a golden one.

    For all the structural play, irony, and semantic disjunctions, the thematics of the ode persist.  Horace’s boasts about the power of poetry resemble the claims of poets from the revelations of shamans in archaic times to Wallace Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” but here they are hobbled as it were by the incongruities of the poetic argument.  Lyde is a misleading name and Hypermnestra an ill-fitting example of ideal marriage.  Such slippage renders the poet’s claims faintly ironic, while the hellish horrors seem exaggerated and out of place.  Naive and shy, Lyde is even less likely than the average wife to commit murder as the Danaïdes had done  

     Still at base the ode does represent a social consensus endorsing monogamous marriage as the fundamental building block of society.  Without such stabilizing institutions, violence and force would prevail, suggested by the multiple murders of Aegyptus’ sons  and the apparition of Cerberus.  Attitudes in support of marriage include the notions of respectability and propriety added to the age-old advice govern by an elder generation to the younger one just coming of age, “It is time to grow up now and act like an adult.”  The frightening pictures of the hellish dog and the torments of the condemned are nothing but the superego of a patriarchal system enforcing order through terror.

     These meanings are present in the ode, but they jostle one another uneasily.  Self-questioning, they feature cracks and flaws.  Yet the structure of the whole, the arrangement of symbolic objects from the world of myth, placed precisely to react against one another, is well-balanced so that all the elements of the problem of married love are included: not just the young woman’s reluctance to form a household, but also coercion from parents (Danaus and Aegyptus) and uncontrolled lust (in the figures of Ixion and Tityos).  The entire system of the universe, it is suggested, supports the marriage institution, assuring a sorry fate for those who defy their proper role and destiny.  Horace’s essentially poetic gifts are fully displayed as he renders what amounts to an admonition to behave in a dynamic field of competing demands of the ego: Amphion’s drive for power, Lyde’s desire to cling to childhood, the destructive lust of Ixion and Tityos, the coercive parental demands, the murderous potential of the reluctant wives, and the fidelity of Hypermnestra.  All these passions are on full display, while the reader hears nothing whatever of the joys of either nuptial or illicit love-making.  Who but Horace could build such a dynamic semantic field while simply recommending the most ordinary behavior?

What is Literature?

 

 

What follows is an attempt to distill my own theory of literature, portions of which are expressed in dozens of critical essays on individual works.  Doubtless my formulations may preserve traces of the vocabularies of critical schools from New Criticism to Deconstruction, but my own categories have, I think, taken shape a posteriori.   

 

     When I was an undergraduate in the middle sixties in a Midwestern state university, a professor asked his American Literature class to prepare a succinct definition of literature, and the exercise had the desired initial effect. Many of us, like Socrates’ interlocutors, were quite surprised to find that we were less sure of a definition than we had thought. Though many of us were English majors, we had neglected theoretical consideration of the object of our study. Most literary critics took a nearer view, focusing on individual works or authors; with a few exceptions, most notably Northrup Frye, the speculations of philosophers seemed distant from critics’ concerns.  Casebooks for students might include a contribution from a Freudian or Marxist or a hunter after archetypes, but these were understood by most readers as incomplete readings, even if revealing. 

     During the early eighties, my graduate Comparative Literature program might most conveniently be described as Post-Structuralist.  People wrote criticism of criticisms of critics and, in contrast to my earlier experience, rarely descended sufficiently from the airy heights to comment on a specific poem.  It seemed as though the focus had gone in the interval from too close to too distant. 

     While academia may be susceptible to (sometimes salutary) vogues, it is consistently true that every critic operates in certain recurring ways that might be formulated as theoretical assumptions.  Those who claim to have no “theory” are like historians who pretend to an unachievable “objectivity” rather than candidly acknowledging and defending the bases for their judgments.  

     After fifty-five years, I am better prepared to offer an answer to my professor’s question, though I am afraid that the eminent scholar who posed it has departed.  Literature is the symbolic representation of reality, but this description is in itself insufficient, since other writings -- scientific studies, for example -- do the same, and all language is symbolic.  The composer of aesthetic texts explicitly aims to record patterns of consciousness, however, while those who were once called natural philosophers seek to record the phenomena of nature.  The inadequacy of language to represent lived experience and the gap between subjective human experience and some sort of Truth would be defects for other discourses.  However, semantic slippage, imprecision, ambiguity, and reader’s misprision all of which would weaken a laboratory report, become for literature the source of not only beauty, but the only way to capture the play of consciousness in every mind. 

     One of the commonest cliches in criticism is useful to further define literature: good poetry will “delight and instruct,” a goal most identified with Horace, though shared in varying degrees with Aristotle and Boileau and countless others.  As literature is far from alone in these goals, further definition is required. 

     Many things might delight – a good dinner, a sexual experience, or a nap.  Sometimes one derives pleasure from non-literary verbal sources: a pleasing work evaluation, for instance, or a loving letter, yet these are not ordinarily poetry.  

     Unlike the reinforcement of social support signaled by supportive words, the pleasure of art arises from the contemplation of the object in isolation and not from any source outside the page.  People’s minds naturally seek to perceive patterns whether of sound or form or meaning and everyone relishes certain patterns as pure forms without regard for realism or truth.  This is most evident in such genres as instrumental music and abstract painting, but it is present in all reception of art.

     In poetry and, to a lesser extent, in prose, literature employs musical sound patterns based on syllabic stress or vowel quantity or pitch accent, while other devices — among them alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition — fill out the music like the elements of a symphony orchestra.

     Meanwhile, aesthetic texts typically add verbal play resembling riddles and puns and the creation of readers’ expectations which may then be satisfied or not, as well as a rich substratum of allusion and association. All these rhetorical figures are specifically designed to delight and surprise.

     Such symbolic play amuses people.  Surely the most distinctive characteristic of our species is our facility in the manipulation of symbols. A person composing or consuming literature is then to the highest degree realizing human potential in the same way a soaring skylark is enacting a specific bird essence. One derives a certain exhilaration from doing what one does well, what one’s species does well.  Whatever else it may be, reading a poem is glorying in being human to the fullest extent, free from functional ends, enjoying one’s own nature like a happy dog.

     Unlike a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bach fugue, though, poetry virtually always refers to lived experience. Yet words are not capable of a direct reflection of reality. They always mediate and refract or include wish fulfillment or in some way convey no universal and objective vision but rather an individual and personal one. Though for science this imperfect representation would be an obstacle, for art it allows the expression of the irrational, the appetitive, the mysterious, the ambiguous, and the ambivalent. Though most of psychic life occurs in these realms, they are rarely explicit in people’s daily transactions, which are consciously felt by many to be largely rational.

     The fact is that we know nothing beyond our own subjectivity. Thus literature, or rather, art is general, is the closest we can approach to truth. The fact that every individual’s experience differs from every other’s, while it complicates matters considerably, in fact renders the view of literature as a whole more comprehensive, more precise, more accurate than other discourses such as history or science. The artist has no special purchase on truth, though claims of inspiration direct from the gods or muses are common. The reader of a broad variety of texts will, however, find in their combination enlightenment absent from any in isolation. In a process like an increasingly sophisticated triangulation the reader who knows several visions will have a view enriched beyond the one who knows but one.  In this way literature exponentially increases experience, allowing access to visions ancient and modern from the myriad cultures of this teeming planet.

     The genres of literature are universal, though not all occur in every setting, and each has a role. Proverbs preserve the prudential wisdom of the group, made memorable by turn of phrase or figure of speech. Folk stories provide nightly amusement as well as reinforcing (and sometimes questioning) social norms. Epics allow for an encyclopedic inclusion of history, religion, and social codes in the course of a stirring tale. Theater presents stories with characters drawn from myth or from familiar society for the reception of the entire community. Meanwhile, all these forms are used by religion to establish itself as a unique source of guidance and by leaders to consolidate and authenticate power. Lyric poetry typically voices the subjectivity of passionate individuals.

     The criteria of literature may be consciously present in a work’s production or its consumption, but neither is necessary. Many works written with other goals in mind have been appreciated as art: Herodotus, St. John of the Cross, Marx, and Freud, to cite a few random examples. On the other hand scholars have utilized literary texts as a source of data to investigate history, philology, comparative botany, or countless other fields. A witty turn of phrase by a physics professor delivering a scientific paper creates a moment of literature, while a linguist searching Homer for a rare grammatical form may see no poetry at all.

     In making such distinctions the only probative elements are found within the work itself, not in any intention of the creator. Some works are directed primarily at their audience, often with didactic aims. A paraliterary example is advertising which uses all the devices of literature with sales as the sole goal. Other works arise from their makers’ interest in self-expression. Such solipsism is extreme in outsider artists, but is present to one degree or another in all. Some writing is directed at the artifact itself, for instance, for those who espouse art for art’s sake.

     Thus determining value must be grounded in the success of individual works as well as genres in achieving specific goals. One poem may foreground description as in Pope’s “Windsor Forest” while for another psychology assumes greatest importance as in the Spoon River Anthology.  Narrative is central to epic and lapidary craft to Symbolism. Paradise Lost aims to instruct perhaps and Canterbury Tales to entertain, though each, of course, does both. Swinburne does his best to get by on sound while early Bly is all about images.

     In fact nearly every poem is a complex structure of a good many of these considerations, each weighted precisely to the requirements of the specific project. Thus in Hopkins melody will take the lead, with theme following behind, and images in third position.

     Then there is the imponderable element of beauty. One can prescribe symmetry and harmony and yet an asymmetrical and discordant work may prove to have many admirers. Taste may be explained but not proven. One may praise the taste of oysters without persuading a reluctant diner to share your plate, and in the same way, I may think Keats a greater poet than Shelley and make enlightening comments on both, but I will not convince Shelley’s partisans of my preference. 

     The moment of a reader’s reception provides the measure of every work.  An unprepared student may scan the lines of Shakespeare in vain, while a skilled critic may find much fascinating meaning and considerable symbolic imagery in a television game show.  Those works which have been read and reread accumulate significance.  Scriptures such as the Vedas and the Hebrew Testament illustrate this principle, but so, in a different way, does Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.  There is no way to prove the greatness of a poem or a novel, but the critic who has experienced literary beauty can seek to characterize the experience with sufficient clarity to convey to others the source and character of that experience, much as the poet or novelist has sought to do.     

     Literature is sufficiently essential to human life that it is found in every society and likely has been at least since the development of language. People with the most limited material culture invariably possess rich stores of verbal technology, useful for encoding their world, providing entertainment as well as preserving knowledge and constructing avenues of spiritual access, all while sitting around a glowing campfire or perhaps a glowing iPad, passing the time.

Poems from Planetary Motions

  

 I post primarily prose here, but this month I mark the publication of Planetary Motions by offering a poem from each of the book’s sections along with a few brief and, I trust, superfluous, comments.  For further information, see the listing on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Planetary-Motions-William-Seaton/dp/B08MS5KNJB/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ASZSKJYZS5VG&dchild=1&keywords=planetary+motions&qid=1606054981&sprefix=planetary+mo%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1

 

 

• 1.      Other Scenes

 

 

                        Dia de los Muertos

          On Dia de los Muertos some here choose

          to picnic with their loved ones by their graves,

          and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill

          mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood.

          Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt

          and dares the other men to come and fight.

          In corners of red eyes I see bright tears.

          Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth.

          Their glance tells me there's nothing more to say.

 

 

This is Guatemala where Gallo is best-known as a beer (not wine) brand.  The nervous scroungy free-running dogs of developing countries well suggest the tone of life in poor neighborhoods.  In this setting the universal theme of mortality is colored by the traveler’s knowledge of pre-Columbian human sacrifice, brutal colonialism, and the barbaric violence of decades-long civil unrest. 

 

 

 

• 2.      Divagations

 

 

I hurtle through the light and dark by trees

that reach and strive indifferent to my course,

by rocks with memories back before the flood,

each facet marking some old painful break,

eruption, gash, reshuffle. Read there, see

tomorrow far more live and clear

than ever sortilege, astrology,

or hepatoscopy could claim: beat grass

and withered weeds, a sudden bird, and wind

that envies leaves of shrubs and, homeless, sighs. 

 

 

I meant to suggest that the most common sights are surely more beautiful, remarkable, and significant than divination or magic.  The scene before the eyes is always a gaze at the morphing flow of phenomena.  Sometimes even the wise wind sounds sad.

 

 

 

• 3.      Appetites

 

Feast

 

O be for me an oyster raw,

unfathomable: inside the shell

a lopped but answering tongue,

and be for me an onion soup,

so thick and savory-sweet.

O be for me a leg of lamb,

as rich and strong as scrubby hills,

and be for me a Brussels sprout,

compact and layered like a late quartet.

O surely you’re my bread

and fit me like inhaled air.

Do be for me tonight a custard flan

so melting to the tongue

               with caramel atop

it brings an end to words.

 

 

Or as Bessie Smith sang, “Give me lots of candy, honey, love is grand.”

 

 

• 4.      Songs

 

 

Yearly the killer bees yaw and romp

through the golden filigree of printemps.

Like opals and carbuncles dewy and light

that ravish the soul at the very first sight,

confusing their victims, occluding their might.

Soon their prey will sink in a swoon.

These oligolectic bees buzz up a tune

of garnet greens and things unseen,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes.

 

 

My goal in these songs is to turn the focus from content to the melody of words, a quality often neglected in contemporary poetry.  I think of Keats describing Negative Capability, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  In another letter he spoke of “the 'burden of the Mystery.'”  Just listen; no understanding needed.

 

 

 

• 5.      Momento Mori

 

 

Dead trees in the forked arms

of their fellows that followed,

knot-eyes wide with utter unbelief

like comrades in war unable

to believe their trench-mates gone.

The forest floor has generations

layered like old Troy, but back and back

to time’s get-go and each supports

the next till in the ultimate sub-basement

the elevator operator lifts one wry eye,

the door slides, the secret’s out

and all distinctions fade.

Then everything relaxes, all lets go,

no longer any gap from one to one,

the manic dance may pause --

so brief! -- between exhale/inhale,

before time’s arrow like

some god of locomotives,

blows a lonely whistle

and speeds on down the line

as though the terminus

               must hold that counter

where one can sit

               and ask one’s heart’s desire --

so well worth racing toward!

 

 

In what I like to think is a reinforcement of theme, several of the images here are fading from the general imagination.  The locomotive had more powerful associations in the era of steam, and elevator operators are now rare birds, building a muted strain of nostalgia into the story. 

 

 

• 6.      Lama Swine Toil

 

 

The Lama’s Parable of the Not-OK Corral              

              

He walked the dusty, sun-baked streets of a town

on the far frontier of metaphysics.

His faithful Indian companion whispered sutras in his ear.

The townspeople hustled off to shelter behind the nearest

received ideas.

The tumbleweeds blew, and the buzzards cried out wise

suggestions,

but he never heard and just stared straight ahead.

At the street’s opposite end, walking slowly toward him, was his

enemy,

his brother, his mirror-image.

(And the town’s pretty schoolmarm walked an identical street

at that very moment, facing a Doppelgänger of her own,

her foot like his poised seeking the next step,

and neither could help it at all.)

The sweat dripped down his cheek.

The Avidya Boys, he knew, were crouching in doorways,

leaning from second-story windows,

and the gang from the Hungry Ghost Ranch,

covered him from every angle.

The clock ticked on toward the highest of high noons

when time, that old codger, will expire, as did Gabby Hayes in

1969. 

Suddenly he heard from behind the voice of the cosmos, deep

and unmistakable,

“Drop your ego on the ground right there, I’ve got you

covered.”

And he knew the jig was finally up.

 

 

 

Another apocalyptic anticipation like the last, here employing the “Old West” set that once proved hospitable to many of this country’s myths, a redeemed Spahn Movie Ranch of the mind, maybe, artificial, playful and beneficent. 

 

 

• 7.      Translations

 

 

Horace, Odes I, 11

 

Don’t ask, Leukonoe, it is taboo to know

what fate I’ve got and what’s awaiting you.

Forget the Tarot reader. It is best to tough

it out. Know Jupiter may give us many years

or this may be the last we see the Tuscan sea

come break against the rocks. Be wise; strain wine;

don’t hold great long-term hopes. We talk and jealous time

runs on. Just seize this day, think nothing of the next.

 

It is almost the last shred of the once-sizable fund of Horatian maxims that all educated European people used to carry about – carpe diem.  Ecclesiastes said the same.  Horace is one of the greatest of poets, though I fear he loses a very great deal in translation.

 

 

On the Intrusion of Non-aesthetic Criteria in Value Judgements about Art

For thousands of years most people have believed a proposition that seems to me absurd on its face: the idea that art should inculcate good behavior, that good literature teaches morality, often accompanied by the fear that exposure to bad art can encourage unethical actions. This belief is widespread in spite of the fact that artists have no greater access to truth than others and lack even training in philosophy or religion. Few, I think, would suspect that poets, painters, or professors of literature have any more orderly lives than philistines, yet the idea of the value of art as moral instruction has persisted through the centuries. The fact is that poets are distinguished by their ability to manipulate words, visual artists for their facility with form, composers with patterns of sound, and for nothing else at all. Creativity has no correlation with morality.

It is no surprise that such non-aesthetic criteria are advanced by governments and churches, institutions that know nothing of beauty, but they also appear in critics who should know better. In fact the theoretical association between art and ethics descends from archaic times. Oral cultures transmit their myths and mores through song, drama, sculpture, and story which often embody largely unquestioned “truths” about prudential or god-pleasing behavior. Poetry for such people is the most effective coding of all sorts of knowledge including moral judgements and political theory. Early writers saw teaching people how to behave as one of their most important functions. Plato’s doubts about the moral reliability of poetry led him to advocate censorship (he was blind to the similar unreliability of philosophy). The didactic role of literature was eventually enshrined in a dictum so influential it has been called “the Horatian platitude”: poetry should “teach and delight.” [1] This notion was then maintained by Augustine’s tempered acceptance of poetry as a possible aid toward salvation. Sidney continued the notion that poets work “to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.” Shelley, too, thought “the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue” (though some of his contemporaries would have been skeptical of his right to that description).

This assumption persisted until the age of Romanticism when an exalted view of imagination allowed beauty to displace truth altogether in the old formula. Strengthened by the proponents of “art for art’s sake” in the late Victorian era, by the mid-twentieth century, one of the most prominent critics could flatly declare “Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality is intolerably vulgar.” Many critics would now agree that “Our very idea of art precludes adherence” to the association of poetry with morality. [2] Yet a considerable revanchment has occurred as well, primarily associated with feminism and soi-disant progressivism and associated with the critical schools labeled new historicism, cultural criticism, gender studies, and the like which too often fired with self-righteous indignation employ the crudest instruments of Marxism to reduce art to mere social data. In practice the moral responsibility of art has been extended to the maker as well. An immoral poet has been thought to produce necessarily unworthy work, while, by the same erroneous principle, the virtues of an upright writer may seem to enhance the value of what he writes. The entire framework is repeated in the realm of social, not personal, morality, which is to say politics. An ethically motivated critics would find a defender of slavery, say, sinful and therefore capable of producing only flawed poetry, while a progressive or revolutionary writer is likely to be celebrated.

These days we hear little about people being led astray by licentious literature, but this was the cry of philistines and bluenoses for centuries. Socrates, after all, was executed for corrupting the youth. Those who closed the theaters (not just in the U. K. in 1642, and in the United States at the time of its birth in 1774 and 1778) regularly maintained that attending plays fosters licentious behavior. In recent American culture the same impulse is evident in censorship of Joyce, Henry Miller [3], and Allen Ginsberg.

Sometimes the political and personal are so mingled they can hardly be separated. When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)

More recently, in a development disturbing to progressive aesthetes, those claiming to oppose racism and other oppression have turned against the easier opponent of art. Thus would-be critics in a popular and influential critical edition of Jane Austen’s Emma criticize the author for her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” and for her refusal to admit that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.” [4] Only a singularly obtuse reader would use such irrelevant and anachronistic language to speak of the novel.

Rulers wreak more havoc than obtuse critics, though, when they conflate of art and morality. Apart from its centrality in literary theory until recent times this confusion in its political form has, not surprisingly, been an assumption of authoritarian regimes of all sorts. The very same erroneous standards appeared in the hunt for heretics by the medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church, Nazi condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art, the Stalinist imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932, and fundamentalist Islam’s disapproval of images and music. Each of these represents an attempt by the rulers to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values. Such misguided and reductive judgements take place in somewhat democratic societies as well. Last year San Francisco was asked to remove the WPA murals by Communist painter Victor Arnautoff in George Washington High School with the excuse that they should be replaced by “more positive” images. These pictures were targeted specifically because they did include representation of the genocidal attacks of native people and the viciousness of slavery.

All such critics cannot be condemned as know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.

Should the work of a poet or painter lose stature because its creator beats his wife? No more than one would refuse the attendance of a celebrated surgeon if one found he supported Generalissimo Trump. Clearly a person may excel in one arena of life, in a profession, for example, while misbehaving badly in others. Skill does not excuse a vicious person, but neither does the creator’s immoral behavior invalidate or weaken the work.

Of course, ethics and politics have an important role to play in making human life livable, even sometimes civilized. I by no means discount the importance of morality in evaluating societies and individual character, but these have nothing to do with aesthetic value. Government and non-profit agencies may naturally make social betterment a goal, but they should not then pretend that their decisions are determined by artistic considerations. Without exception, every one of the most recent recipients of NEA grants, announced in January of 2020, was associated with a social group identified as oppressed or underserved. [5] Just as in higher education admissions and hiring, diversity is a worthy goal which might be well-served by affirmative action, but academic or artistic strength must remain the primary criterion for judgement.

In evaluating art, politics and morality are irrelevant, popularity should play no role, nor should historical influence. An author’s colorful notoriety or exemplary propriety should never lead the reader either toward or away from his work. Each poem, song, or picture must earn attention through its beauty, broadly understood as reflecting elements of both form and content. Questions of ethics are most assuredly central to our shared humanity, and there are better and worse systems of government and virtuous and vicious forms of behavior, but that is because our political and social practices impact on our well-being. In general, an immoral person is one who causes suffering to others while a moral one displays benevolence. An exploitative social system likewise increases human pain and a more just one relieves it. These effects are evident in lived experience. In contrast, the effects of art occur in the consciousness of the consumer and the unique reward art may offer is beauty, a quality which would be wholly amoral were it not that some acts are attractive and some repellent. A few words in the air, a curving line, a succession of musical tones, how could these be morally good or bad? A work of art can do no more than to offer amusement and distraction and glimpses of beauty. If a work fails, we will not be so harsh as to call tiresomeness a sin.



1. The Epistula ad Pisonem (or Ars Poetica) repeats the idea in several forms: "Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae" (The poet aims to benefit or delight, or to be both pleasing and serviceable in life at once), "miscuit utile dulci" (a mix of useful and sweet), and "delectando pariterque monendo" (delighting and warning).

2. The first quotation is from Fearful Symmetry A Study of William Blake (p. 121) and the next from Tzvetan Todorov and John Anzalone, “Poetry and Morality,” Salmagundi, No. 111 (Summer 1996).

3. Tropic of Cancer was not legally published in the United States until 1964.

4. See the devastating and detailed critique in James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, p. 63-4. 5. The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.

5.  The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues. 

The Uses of the Monstrous: Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite”

     Horace begins his “Ars Poetica” [1] by recommending propriety and adherence to convention, suggesting that works with ill-fitting parts lack unity and must be monstrous, similar to a human with a horse’s neck or a feathered mammal. He says a beautiful woman above the waist whose body is that of a fish below is unsightly and, at best, comic.
     Yet that last example might imply that even monsters have their uses. What struck Horace as a hideous freak was to Tennyson an ideal of beauty: “I would be a mermaid fair.” [2] Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite” is generally slighted by critics, largely because of its discordances. A recent critic characterizes the poem’s reputation in short by describing it as “one of Chaucer’s most abused poems.” [3]
     The poet himself may have shared this dismissive attitude. The work is unfinished, which certainly could suggest a failed experiment, though many of Chaucer’s other works, including, of course, the monumental Canterbury Tales, is similarly incomplete. Despite its well-accepted place in his canon from contemporary scholars, Chaucer himself did not mention it when cataloguing his works. To many it is an ungainly compound of the third person narration in uniform stanzas and the metrically elaborate first person complaint. The combination of sources -- from Boccaccio in the story and Machaut in the stanzas given to Anelida [4] -- has better pleased scholars tracing Chaucer’s career than those looking for coherence, unity, and organic form. Chaucer himself mentions neither influence directly, but claims Statius as his source, going to the length of including a few lines from the Thebaid as a sort of guarantee. Having dodged acknowledging his French and Italian sources, he compounds the question by mentioning a certain “Corynne,” generally identified with the female Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. He further confuses the issue of sources by using the name of a figure in Boccaccio to tell a story that seems to be original with him. His elusiveness about the issue of authority may be taken as an emblem that well represents the ambiguities the poem presents as a whole.
     The fact that the poem is unfinished marks it for some as inferior, an aborted experiment, perhaps, unworthy even in the eyes of its creator. However, one might as well view its truncated form as exemplary of lived experience, for is not every one cut off in life rudely before one is sufficiently prepared? One can lend cast one’s autobiography in a comely form, but the result is artful and not inevitable. The lack of an ending then might be regarded as rendering the poem more adequate to represent life as lived.
     The double invocation must strike the reader as odd. It seems epic in ambition, though the poem lacks such a grand scale. What follows is anything but an epic; the story is primarily a frame for the complaint. The second invocation, to the Muses, might pass as a throw-away convention, but the first to Mars is more surprising. War is only in the background of what plot there is, but the mention of the god of war, the lover of Venus, though here immediately doubled by a female counterpart Bellona, reminds the reader of the countless poems -- Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated, for one -- in which male/female relations are represented in terms of battles. Chaucer here lightly evokes that immense field of associations which reinforces the suggestion of peril and vulnerability that accompanies love. In an echo of this martial opening, “The Story” does open with the aftermath of military action and, in fact, the “ymage of Mars” carried in the field, (31) the public suffering of war preceding the private suffering of love-longing.
     It is as though Chaucer is playing a game with his reader’s expectations. Writing at a time when convention and its play were centrally important to poetry, he yet managed to twist the tropes round to make something new. One of the conventions he honors by refracting in unpredictable ways is the appeal to authority. Chaucer claims value for his work by attributing it to imitation of a Classical model. “First folowe I Stace” (l. 21) implies that he derives his poem from Statius’ Thebaid. The manuscripts even open “The Story” with a few lines of Statius’ Latin. Yet in fact Boccaccio’s Teseida is his most significant source for the narrative and Machaut for the complaint. Unsatisfied with this shell game, he realizes he can do as he pleases because his story is basically an original one, after all, and he tosses off another source: “Corynne” (21), generally identified with the Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. This suggestion, apart from the satisfaction of its providing another male/female doubling, is entirely a playful red herring. As Chaucer comments, time has a way of devouring all things. (12 ff.)
     The implications of this complex attribution of authority are clear: every work is original and no work is original. Where one thinks a notion arose may be altogether different from where it in fact did. The Classics provide a rich field for training readers in the fabulous potential of poetic language, but they are not the last word. Experimentation seems to assert itself in one aspect after another of “Anelida and Arcite”
     The combination of narrative and complaint might be considered as a representation of the duality of objective/subjective in everyday life. Instead of constituting an aesthetic failing it may be a bold move to record life as it is experienced. The continual check of one’s sense of what seems true to the observer on the individual subjectivity is one of the consistent rhythms of consciousness.
     While apparently Chaucer’s own invention, the story is in part quite traditional. Anelida suggests the archetype of the faithful woman like Constance in the “Man of Law’s Tale” or Griselda in “The Clerk’s Tale.” Her loyalty is contrasted with Arcite’s faithlessness which is not portrayed as the failing of an individual but rather as a typical male characteristic since the time of the first polygamist: “he were fals, for hit is kynde of man/ Sith Lamek was.” (149-150) [6] Men’s pursuit of novelty in love is said to be inherent: “The kynde of mannes herteis to delyte/ In thing that straunge is.” (201-202)
     Arcite is said to have used the conventions of love poetry with exactly the same rhetorical competence that Anelida displays, but toward his own false and treacherous ends. To him the “ful mykel besynesse” (99) of the seduction includes declaring that his is like to go mad or to “dyen for distresse.” (101) Thus the plot arises from the capacity of language to represent either truth or lies, positioning even the text itself balanced on a ridgepole of doubt. Whereas compliance with readers’ conventional expectations will in general reaffirm received ideas, Chaucer’s innovative manipulation of familiar literary usages must cultivate critical questioning.
     Almost in order to wink at the twenty-first century critic, the author specifically refers to his “slye wey” of writing. (48) [7] Whether that be a mirage or not, with its fragmentary character, its wild wrenching of convention, and its “sly” self-questioning, “Anelida and Arcite” may be read as an early predecessor of modernism. Horace’s rule covers in fact only half the house of literature: those texts which reinforce (or refine or further develop) preconception. It is through the violation of convention that authors question assumptions and introduce new ideas and forms.


1. More properly the Epistula ad Pisones.

2. From “The Mermaid.” Of course, in general the mermaid’s beauty is balanced against her destructive potential exemplified by the Sirens of the Odyssey or the Lorelei. Many other tropes exist such as the frightening and serious mermaids of Neruda “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks” and Yeats “The Man Young and Old: iii “The Mermaid.”

3. T. S. Miller, “Chaucer's Sources and Chaucer's Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 114, No. 3 (July 2015), pp. 373-400. To Manly it was “purely an experiment in versification.” (Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, 98).

4. The debt to Boccaccio is evident throughout the narrative; that to Machaut is exhaustively demonstrated by Madeleine Fabin in “On Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite,” Modern Language Notes , Vol. 34, No. 5 (May, 1919), 266-272).

5. Compare the use in the “Friar’s Tale” to describe the summoner’s system of spies. “A slyer boye nas noon in Engelond.” (Canterbury Tales 1322)

6. “Kind,” of course, or “kynde” meant nature or natural in Middle English. In the University of Michigan MED: “inherent qualities or properties of persons, animals, plants, elements, medicines, etc.; essential character.”

7. Lines 162-164 question whether any poet might be able to do justice to the story, asking “what man hath the cunnyng or the wit?” Though “cunning” at the time meant only competence, it already by the late 16th century suggested trickery, implying the same duality of truth and lie. This association must surely have been taking shape for some time.