While recognizing that these artists are best consumed through the medium of their recordings, I am here concerned only with the portion of their published work presented in two books. Some of these texts are much later than others and some of the poets on early Last Poets recordings are not included. On a Mission contains considerable prose material including an introduction by Amiri Baraka and lengthy essays from Abiodun Oyewole and Bin Hassan, while The Last Poets Vibes from the Scribes has author’s headnotes for each poem. I concern myself here with nothing but the poetry.
On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan with Kim Green, forward by Amiri Baraka
The Last Poets Vibes from the Scribes, London: Pluto Press, 1985 featuring Jalal Nuriddin and Suliaman El Hadi.
I recall in the early seventies reading in a black neighborhood bar on San Francisco’s Divisadero Street in which I was the anomaly. Most of the poets wrote highly melodic revolutionary race-conscious verse with insistent rhythm and rhyme. The same was true of the residents of a halfway house for ex-convicts who frequently showed up at the open readings at the Starry Plough in Berkeley at Shattuck and Prince during the same era. Their poetic technique was surely in part descended from the style of “toasts” such as “The Signifying Monkey,” but doubtless owed a debt as well to popular music and advertising jingles. Readers were often backed by musicians and recordings of such experimentation includes pioneering work by Langston Hughes in the thirties, Kenneth Patchen in the forties, and Beat poets in the fifties. [1]
I thought of that experience recently upon reading two books of the Last Poets, the celebrated and, briefly, even popular writers whom I am sure those Bay Area poets knew well. Their thematic preoccupations were shaped by the history specific to that era. There is certainly no doubt that the ensemble arose in a highly specific political context, two years after the proclamation of Black Power by Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) in June of 1966. [2] The Last Poets ceremoniously conceived themselves as self-consciously radical cultural nationalists on May 19, the birthday both of Malcom X (Malik el Shabazz) and Ho Chi Minh at Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. They were perhaps the most prominent poetic expression of the Black Arts Movement that arose from Black Power and Black Nationalist ideologies. Among the Last Poets’ immediate predecessors in this tradition were the On Guard and Umbra groups including Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Harold Cruse, Steve Cannon, Ishmael Reed, and the Uptown Writers Movement.
One of those involved in this last formation was South African Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile, an African Nationalist Congress activist in exile. [3] In an apocalyptic anticipation of a bloody upheaval Kgositsile had declared an end to “art talk.” “The only poem you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain.” David Nelson (Dahveed ben Israel) added, “Therefore we are the last poets of the world.”
Various writers and musicians constituted the Last Poets group in books and recordings. Their albums [4] attracted considerable attention, even attaining a spot on the top ten list, after which they faded from public notice after the early seventies (though most members continued recording albums and writing). Today, In spite of their unquestionable historic role in American politics, the Black Arts Movement, and the renaissance of performance poetry, the Last Poets are virtually unread. Their work is very difficult to obtain. On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets has long been out of print and my own local library had to borrow a British edition of Vibes from the Scribes from the Library of Congress for me.
Considering their present obscurity, I think it wise to avoid evaluation and interpretation. I shall not consider the history either of America’s troubled relation to race or to the conflicts among the ever-changing roster of bickering writers that were at different times presented under the Last Poets name. I mean to offer here only a descriptive sketch of the work of some of their number with the hope that they will gain new readers in a later era in which their poetry and their politics remain powerful and provocative.
Themes common to all the Last Poets include portrayal of American racism and exploitation of blacks and two reactions, which seem altogether opposed, but which are sometimes articulated in more subtle ways. The first is the self-destructive turn by some to drugs, reckless self-indulgence, and crime, but this is balanced by the profound redemptive quality of black art, represented by the poets’ own words on the page but also by jazz.
Each, of course, has an individual vision and a unique style. Jalal Nuriddin is sometimes called “grandfather of rap” for his work in the spoken word, called in the sixties spieling. He himself referred to his style as "spoagraphics" or "spoken pictures." His usual style is poised between conversation and declamation with three or four beats to the line, occasionally expanding to underline a point. A reserved manipulation of typeface reproduces, or at least implies, the performative aspect of the poem, and the rolling rhymes propel the verses forward. In “Jazzoetry” the poet suggests that his manner can lead to enlightenment, to “dig bop” can lead to a “new birth.” “Dig the sound of our love inside our pride.” [5] In “Bird’s Word” the recitation of a catalogue of names of great artists serves as a charm to uplift the oppressed.
The confrontation between white and black in “On the Subway” (the setting as well of Dutchman) might seem exaggerated to those who did not experience the peculiar character of American race relations a few generations ago. Setting the problem out in words well served both parties. In Nuriddin’s “Wake Up Niggers” “the cock crows” to bring the listener to full consciousness (the image appears as well in medieval Christian poetry). Here the racial epithet of the title is used neither in its racist meaning nor with the neutral or positive associations it bears sometimes in more modern rap, but to condemn those who fail to recognize the need for change. To the poet complacency can only arise in those who have been taken in by “lies” and “alibis” of “spies” (“Surprises”) but art (here represented by Miles Davis) can bring the truth. The negative consequences of slavery a hundred years after abolition are highlighted in “Jones Coming Down” and “O.D.” (which juxtaposes a “Bird Lives” graffito with a sign admonishing “PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR HALL.”
Suliaman El Hadi writes in the same middle-length lines but with fewer rhymes, more repetition and freer use of anaphora. In his themes he has a predilection the mythic. He quite realistically admires “Ho Chi Minh” for his (eventually successful) resistance to imperialism but also indulges in an imagined Edenic pre-Columbian era in America (“Before the White Man came”). Similarly “Hands Off” presents a mythic Afrocentric view of history and “Blessed Are Those Who Struggle” reads almost like an early 20th century labor anthem with its singable quatrains, listing heroes of the struggle including Drew Ali and Marus Garvey with Dubois and the Panthers. To El Hadi oppression is caused by deceitful Jinn (see “It’s a Trip”) while “Delights of the Garden” provides a description of paradise.
In his view birth control is an “evil design” and “it is better to use self-control.” (“The Pill”) In fact according to “This is Your Life” science itself is enwrapped in the arms race, the colonization of space, and future rule by “a mechanical race” of robots. “Get Moving” is a call to seek “freedom” in ways little defined but which include “keep your obligations to your Lord.” Here he echoes Nuriddin’s call for people to “wake up, wakeup.”
Abiodun Oyewole employs short to mid-length lines with much repetition and irregular use of rhyme. Perhaps his line in “When the Revolution Comes” noting that “some of us will catch it on TV” is in part responsible for the erroneous association of Gil Scott-Heron and his poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" [6] with the Last Poets. Oyewole’s “Run Nigger,” like Nuriddin’s “Wake Up Niggers” and and Bin Hadi’s “Niggers R Scared of Revolution” condemns those who fail to move toward liberation. [7] He writes love poems as well (such as “Black Rose” and “Brown Sugar”) while condemning exploitation of women in “Gash Man.”
“Invocation” provides an identity and history of the Last Poets as a group. Telling the tale of the ritual of their founding and naming, Oyewole describes their truth-telling “mission,” noting that they aimed to be “sassy and funky and sincere,” which is to say stylishly beautiful, yet down and dirty in the realities of everyday life, with a primary loyalty to truth. “Last Rites” is a magic griot charm insisting that the group will survive and grow and be “the light to show them the way” to the apocalyptic change when “the last shall be first,/ and the first shall be last.”
In the twenty-first century, in the era of Black Lives Matter and the prison-industrial complex and widespread Islamophobia, we might do well to reread the Last Poets. At their best they incarnated what Amiri Baraka called for:
what is needed is what the Griot/Djali provided, information,
inspiration, reformation, and self determination! Mama Sky,
we cried, hook us up with the Electricity. Turn us ON. That city
of our deep desire. [8]
1. I find the performances on Fantasy of the Cellar Jazz ensemble with Rexroth and Ferlinghetti compelling.
2. Ironically Frederick Douglass had used the same phrase in the 1850s referring to the exaggerated political influence of slave-owners. Douglass optimistically predicted that “the days of Black Power are numbered. . . Liberty must triumph.” See Winston A. Van Horne, "Sustaining Black Studies," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, (January 2007).
3. Kgositsile later returned to Africa and in 2005 was named poet laureate of South Africa. His son is a hip-hop artist.
4. Right On from Gylan Kain, David Nelson, and Felipe Luciano was released in 1967 and The Last Poets with Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole, Alafia Pudim (a.k.a. Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin) and Nilja in 1969. (The Supremes released an album titled Right On in 1970. The same phrase is the title of a 1971 film using these poets on the soundtrack.)
5. Many will recall the posters with Che Guevara’s words “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”
6. On his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.
7. In his headnote to the poem Oyewole credits fellow Last Poet Gylan Kain for defining nigger for him in another poem: “Niggers Are Untogether People.” He also credits their colleague David Nelson for documenting the futility of niggers, writing “Die, Nigga, Die.”
8. “Griot/Jali Poetry, Music, History, Message” from Jali Kunda: Griots of West Africa and Beyond ed. By Matthew Kopka and Iris Brooks (Roslyn NY: Ellipsis Arts, 1996), 78-82.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Notes from Recent Reading 28 (Verne, Waley, Hurston)
Master of the World (Verne)
This late and hasty story suffers from a number of defects: stiff, lifeless diction, a sudden unmotivated denouement, the inclusion of odd geographical data, and a pronounced tendency toward repetition that makes the reader suspect the author was paid by the word. A sequel to Robur the Conqueror in which the antagonist had been better-intentioned, the would-be Master of the World appears here as a standard mad scientist, threatening somehow that he can enslave the world with his combo car-boat-submarine-airplane constructed on his remote island. A faint foreshadowing of the fear of insane authority Kracauer saw in Caligari does little to animate the character.
At the conclusion, the hero is a captive of Robur, sailing aloft in his marvelous machine when suddenly, in an event altogether without prior trace or present significance, the craft crashes, the villain dies, and Inspector Brock (of the American “national police”) is cast unconscious into the sea from which his “helpless body” is rescued.
Incidentally the story has some quaint aspects perhaps worth mentioning. Though written the year after the Wright brothers’ actual flight at Kitty Hawk, Verne imagines an airship with wings that beat like a bird’s. The book is set in the United States motivating side comments by Verne confirming the American scene such as the sighting of possums and plenty of gamblers.
This one I will not include even among the titles I mean to read to my granddaughter.
The Poetry and Career of Li Po (Waley)
The poet (whose name is also transliterated as Li Bai and Li Bo or Ri Haku from the Japanese form) has proven the most popular Chinese poet in the West, perhaps the only one generally educated people could have named fifty years ago. His reputation is certainly due in part to the accessibility of his extravagant romanticism, his celebrations of drinking, and his general Bohemianism. Yet Waley’s book, which was published in 1950, may also have played a role at a time when Li Po could strike the common reader as something of an Asian Dylan Thomas.
Waley’s book includes a good many first-rate translations of the sort one expects from the mn who did more than any other individual to spread knowledge of East Asian culture in Europe and the United States. (How important to me were his Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, his version of the Tao Te Ching (Dàodéjīng), his Monkey!) He also tells the poet’s story well, in a way that is wholly understandable to those who know little of Chinese literature and history while including sufficient references to indicate his own scholarly responsibility. The book is a delight and an entertainment.
And just as Waley was a magnificent popularizer in the best sense, the series in which the book appeared from George Allen & Unwin, the Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West, represents a cosmopolitan faith in culture and truly liberal education almost lost today. The series, “which originated among a group of Oxford men and their friends,” following the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, sought to encourage “a deeper understanding and appreciation of other peoples and their civilizations.” They aimed their series specifically at “the ex-Service man who is interested in the East, the undergraduate, the adult student, the intelligent public generally.” Yet the works are all by experts, Archer on Krishna, Arberry on Sufism, Conze on Buddhism. These writers delivered the real thing, no condescending simplification, no New Age mush, but the wholesome nourishment of some of the most sublime thinking our species has attained.
Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston)
Zora Neale Hurston would likely have been annoyed though not surprised that the first thing everyone must say about Seraph on the Suwanee is that it centers on white people. Hurston was notoriously dismissive of racial politics – a Republican, she opposed integration and even Roosevelt’s New Deal – in in this book race seems to matter little. The increasingly affluent Jim Meserve seems to wholly accept personal and working relations with a black family, and his son becomes a jazz musician who plays in such a way that he says “you could almost think it was colored folks playing that music.” The society of the shrimpers with whom he works likewise seems strangely egalitarian for the period. Most powerfully, the tensions of the plot are entirely unrelated to issues of race, and the language used by Arvay and others, while looking quite authentic (she was of course a trained anthropologist) is virtually identical, word for word in some cases, with the vernacular used by her black characters.
Hurston also goes against the grain on gender issues. Though her Their Eyes Were Watching God readily accepts a simple feminist reading, Seraph on the Suwanee ends with its heroine apparently finding peace and fulfilment by accepting the absolute authority of her husband. In fact Arvay is so agonized by anxiety, depression, and feelings of worthlessness that she is an unlikely candidate for a resolute action heroine.
The book is beautifully written, the colloquial dialect alone makes the volume worth reading. Powerful image systems at work as well.
This late and hasty story suffers from a number of defects: stiff, lifeless diction, a sudden unmotivated denouement, the inclusion of odd geographical data, and a pronounced tendency toward repetition that makes the reader suspect the author was paid by the word. A sequel to Robur the Conqueror in which the antagonist had been better-intentioned, the would-be Master of the World appears here as a standard mad scientist, threatening somehow that he can enslave the world with his combo car-boat-submarine-airplane constructed on his remote island. A faint foreshadowing of the fear of insane authority Kracauer saw in Caligari does little to animate the character.
At the conclusion, the hero is a captive of Robur, sailing aloft in his marvelous machine when suddenly, in an event altogether without prior trace or present significance, the craft crashes, the villain dies, and Inspector Brock (of the American “national police”) is cast unconscious into the sea from which his “helpless body” is rescued.
Incidentally the story has some quaint aspects perhaps worth mentioning. Though written the year after the Wright brothers’ actual flight at Kitty Hawk, Verne imagines an airship with wings that beat like a bird’s. The book is set in the United States motivating side comments by Verne confirming the American scene such as the sighting of possums and plenty of gamblers.
This one I will not include even among the titles I mean to read to my granddaughter.
The Poetry and Career of Li Po (Waley)
The poet (whose name is also transliterated as Li Bai and Li Bo or Ri Haku from the Japanese form) has proven the most popular Chinese poet in the West, perhaps the only one generally educated people could have named fifty years ago. His reputation is certainly due in part to the accessibility of his extravagant romanticism, his celebrations of drinking, and his general Bohemianism. Yet Waley’s book, which was published in 1950, may also have played a role at a time when Li Po could strike the common reader as something of an Asian Dylan Thomas.
Waley’s book includes a good many first-rate translations of the sort one expects from the mn who did more than any other individual to spread knowledge of East Asian culture in Europe and the United States. (How important to me were his Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, his version of the Tao Te Ching (Dàodéjīng), his Monkey!) He also tells the poet’s story well, in a way that is wholly understandable to those who know little of Chinese literature and history while including sufficient references to indicate his own scholarly responsibility. The book is a delight and an entertainment.
And just as Waley was a magnificent popularizer in the best sense, the series in which the book appeared from George Allen & Unwin, the Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West, represents a cosmopolitan faith in culture and truly liberal education almost lost today. The series, “which originated among a group of Oxford men and their friends,” following the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, sought to encourage “a deeper understanding and appreciation of other peoples and their civilizations.” They aimed their series specifically at “the ex-Service man who is interested in the East, the undergraduate, the adult student, the intelligent public generally.” Yet the works are all by experts, Archer on Krishna, Arberry on Sufism, Conze on Buddhism. These writers delivered the real thing, no condescending simplification, no New Age mush, but the wholesome nourishment of some of the most sublime thinking our species has attained.
Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston)
Zora Neale Hurston would likely have been annoyed though not surprised that the first thing everyone must say about Seraph on the Suwanee is that it centers on white people. Hurston was notoriously dismissive of racial politics – a Republican, she opposed integration and even Roosevelt’s New Deal – in in this book race seems to matter little. The increasingly affluent Jim Meserve seems to wholly accept personal and working relations with a black family, and his son becomes a jazz musician who plays in such a way that he says “you could almost think it was colored folks playing that music.” The society of the shrimpers with whom he works likewise seems strangely egalitarian for the period. Most powerfully, the tensions of the plot are entirely unrelated to issues of race, and the language used by Arvay and others, while looking quite authentic (she was of course a trained anthropologist) is virtually identical, word for word in some cases, with the vernacular used by her black characters.
Hurston also goes against the grain on gender issues. Though her Their Eyes Were Watching God readily accepts a simple feminist reading, Seraph on the Suwanee ends with its heroine apparently finding peace and fulfilment by accepting the absolute authority of her husband. In fact Arvay is so agonized by anxiety, depression, and feelings of worthlessness that she is an unlikely candidate for a resolute action heroine.
The book is beautifully written, the colloquial dialect alone makes the volume worth reading. Powerful image systems at work as well.
Every Reader's Skelton
Who can resist the anecdote told of John Skelton’s presentation of his new-born son to his congregation at Diss in the waning days of Roman Catholicism’s hegemony in Britain? Understanding that some parishioners had complained about him to the Bishop of Norwich that “he kept a fair wench” who had just borne a child, he told his wife to bring the baby forward. Displaying it naked, he asked, “How say you, neighbors all? Is not this child as fair as is the best of yours? It hath nose, eyes, hands, feet, as well as any of yours: it is not like a pig, nor a calf nor like no fowl nor no monstrous beast. If I had brought forth this child without arms or legs, or that it were deformed, being a monstrous thing, I would never have blamed you to have complained to the bishop of me; but, to complain without a cause, I say, as I said before in my anthem, vos estis, you be, and have been, and will and shall be knaves, to complain of me without a cause reasonable.”
Whether it is true or not, this story expresses the poet’s qualities of wit, his broad humanity, and his sense of the dramatic. Skelton was a scholar; a number of his Latin poems are extant. He was made “laureate” through his rhetorical degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge and he tutored Prince Henry (later Henry VIII). “Regius orator” and poet-laureate to the court, he knew his Greek and Latin and was adept at the fashionably elaborate ornamentation that later came to be called Euphuism. His translation of Diodorus Siculus is called by its editors “the most extravagant specimen of aureation in our language.”
Yet he is remembered less for his for his classicism and his artifice than for poems notably vulgar in theme, unconventional in form, and colloquial in diction, with short lines and rhymes tumbling over each other in a way that seems akin to some of today’s performance poetry. The sound of a Skelton poem is unmistakable. Here are the opening lines of “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng,” a portrait of the slattern who runs a public house. Skelton opens with paean to her ugliness, an inversion of the courtly blazon of the beloved.
TELL you I chyll,
If that ye wyll
A whyle be styll,
Of a comely gyll
That dwelt on a hyll :
But she is not gryll,
For she is somwhat sage
And well worne in age ;
For her vysage
It would aswage
A mannes courage.
Her lothely lere
Is nothynge clere,
But vgly of chere,
Droupy and drowsy,
Scuruy and lowsy ;
Her face all bowsy, . . .
There is a good deal more. Her patrons are of a piece with the good landlady in their inattention to grooming.
Some wenches come vnlased,
Some huswyues come vnbrased,
Wyth theyr naked pappes,
That flyppes and flappes ;
It wygges and it wagges,
Lyke tawny saffron bagges ;
A sorte of foule drabbes
All scuruy with scabbes :
Some be flybytten,
Some skewed as a kytten ;
Some wyth a sho clout
Bynde theyr heddes about ;
Some haue no herelace,
Theyr lockes about theyr face,
Theyr tresses vntrust,
All full of vnlust ;
Some loke strawry,
Some cawry mawry ;
Full vntydy tegges.
In another of Skelton’s poems one witnesses a micro-drama on a stage of twenty-eight lines. “Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale” looks a clever male female dialogue like Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson” or Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” until one pays attention to its dark scenario. In this reworking of the pastourelle it is a cleric rather than a knight who importunes the country girl who prudently tries to send him on his way. In the chorus lines one hears the lady indignantly prodding her horses onward, but the last verse makes it clear that he has had his way and afterwards expresses only contempt for her.
Ay, beshrew you! by my fay,
These wanton clerks be nice alway!
Avaunt, avaunt, my popinjay!
What, will ye do nothing but play?
Tilly, vally, straw, let be I say!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
By God, ye be a pretty pode,
And I love you an whole cart-load.
Straw, James Foder, ye play the fode,
I am no hackney for your rod:
Go watch a bull, your back is broad!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Ywis ye deal uncourteously;
What, would ye frumple me? now fy!
What, and ye shall be my pigesnye?
By Christ, ye shall not, no hardely:
I will not be japèd bodily!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Walk forth your way, ye cost me nought;
Now have I found that I have sought:
The best cheap flesh that I ever bought.
Yet, for his love that all hath wrought,
Wed me, or else I die for thought.
Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!
Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Such vigorous vernacular serves well not only for the genre portrait of Elynour, “woundersly wrynkled,/ Lyke a rost pygges eare.” In “Mannerly Margery” the lady’s words sound like transcriptions of cries from the street: “Ay, beshrew you,” “Gup,” “now fy.” It is as real and immediate as can be, though written in imitation of centuries of literary models.
Skelton was capable of other tones: the awe-struck tremendum of “woefully Arrayed” or the richly fanciful yet fiercely satirical allegory of “The Bowge of Court.” While others were as capable of solemnity, classicizing periods and high artificiality, Skelton distinguishes himself with a jumping, squirming, sneering, joking, speedy popular rhetoric that insists on being read out loud. He was not always highly regarded. To Pope, for instance, he was “beastly,” a writers with work “consisting almost wholly of Ribaldry, Obscenity, and Billingsgate Language.” Yet today’s readers are likely to receive more kindly the style for which In Colin Clout he offers a sort of defense.
For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain beaten,
Rusty and moth eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.
Whether it is true or not, this story expresses the poet’s qualities of wit, his broad humanity, and his sense of the dramatic. Skelton was a scholar; a number of his Latin poems are extant. He was made “laureate” through his rhetorical degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge and he tutored Prince Henry (later Henry VIII). “Regius orator” and poet-laureate to the court, he knew his Greek and Latin and was adept at the fashionably elaborate ornamentation that later came to be called Euphuism. His translation of Diodorus Siculus is called by its editors “the most extravagant specimen of aureation in our language.”
Yet he is remembered less for his for his classicism and his artifice than for poems notably vulgar in theme, unconventional in form, and colloquial in diction, with short lines and rhymes tumbling over each other in a way that seems akin to some of today’s performance poetry. The sound of a Skelton poem is unmistakable. Here are the opening lines of “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng,” a portrait of the slattern who runs a public house. Skelton opens with paean to her ugliness, an inversion of the courtly blazon of the beloved.
TELL you I chyll,
If that ye wyll
A whyle be styll,
Of a comely gyll
That dwelt on a hyll :
But she is not gryll,
For she is somwhat sage
And well worne in age ;
For her vysage
It would aswage
A mannes courage.
Her lothely lere
Is nothynge clere,
But vgly of chere,
Droupy and drowsy,
Scuruy and lowsy ;
Her face all bowsy, . . .
There is a good deal more. Her patrons are of a piece with the good landlady in their inattention to grooming.
Some wenches come vnlased,
Some huswyues come vnbrased,
Wyth theyr naked pappes,
That flyppes and flappes ;
It wygges and it wagges,
Lyke tawny saffron bagges ;
A sorte of foule drabbes
All scuruy with scabbes :
Some be flybytten,
Some skewed as a kytten ;
Some wyth a sho clout
Bynde theyr heddes about ;
Some haue no herelace,
Theyr lockes about theyr face,
Theyr tresses vntrust,
All full of vnlust ;
Some loke strawry,
Some cawry mawry ;
Full vntydy tegges.
In another of Skelton’s poems one witnesses a micro-drama on a stage of twenty-eight lines. “Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale” looks a clever male female dialogue like Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson” or Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” until one pays attention to its dark scenario. In this reworking of the pastourelle it is a cleric rather than a knight who importunes the country girl who prudently tries to send him on his way. In the chorus lines one hears the lady indignantly prodding her horses onward, but the last verse makes it clear that he has had his way and afterwards expresses only contempt for her.
Ay, beshrew you! by my fay,
These wanton clerks be nice alway!
Avaunt, avaunt, my popinjay!
What, will ye do nothing but play?
Tilly, vally, straw, let be I say!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
By God, ye be a pretty pode,
And I love you an whole cart-load.
Straw, James Foder, ye play the fode,
I am no hackney for your rod:
Go watch a bull, your back is broad!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Ywis ye deal uncourteously;
What, would ye frumple me? now fy!
What, and ye shall be my pigesnye?
By Christ, ye shall not, no hardely:
I will not be japèd bodily!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Walk forth your way, ye cost me nought;
Now have I found that I have sought:
The best cheap flesh that I ever bought.
Yet, for his love that all hath wrought,
Wed me, or else I die for thought.
Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!
Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!
Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!
With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Such vigorous vernacular serves well not only for the genre portrait of Elynour, “woundersly wrynkled,/ Lyke a rost pygges eare.” In “Mannerly Margery” the lady’s words sound like transcriptions of cries from the street: “Ay, beshrew you,” “Gup,” “now fy.” It is as real and immediate as can be, though written in imitation of centuries of literary models.
Skelton was capable of other tones: the awe-struck tremendum of “woefully Arrayed” or the richly fanciful yet fiercely satirical allegory of “The Bowge of Court.” While others were as capable of solemnity, classicizing periods and high artificiality, Skelton distinguishes himself with a jumping, squirming, sneering, joking, speedy popular rhetoric that insists on being read out loud. He was not always highly regarded. To Pope, for instance, he was “beastly,” a writers with work “consisting almost wholly of Ribaldry, Obscenity, and Billingsgate Language.” Yet today’s readers are likely to receive more kindly the style for which In Colin Clout he offers a sort of defense.
For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain beaten,
Rusty and moth eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.
Monday, February 1, 2016
The Role of Wine in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca
I have here used the same forms of Greek names as Rouse’s Loeb Library edition of the Dionysiaca (thus Nonnus. Dionysus, etc., but Ampelos).
The sprawling and ornately decorated hexameters of what is perhaps the greatest little-read book of antiquity, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, [1] detail the adventures of Dionysus with many narrations of sexuality and violence (sometimes violent sexuality) as well as ecstasy and intoxication. In the first third of the over 20,000 line poem one encounters monsters like Typhon and Ares’ dragon, murders such as Zagreus’ death, the derangement of Ino, Themisto, and Athamas, while numerous characters are bewitched by love. At the outset the author invokes not only the Muses but also Proteus of many turns (polytropon) to guide the poem’s composition as a manifold or richly-wrought song (poikilon hymnon). (I, 14) Some find it difficult to reconcile this massive and disorderly work which goes far to define “decadent” to the same author’s grave paraphrase of the gospel of John. [2] Their styles may differ widely, but there is little in the epic celebration of the unruly god that would ill-fit a Christian believer.
Dizzyingly extravagant in content and style, Nonnus’ poem concerns the deity known in antiquity for his followers’ transports of enthusiasm and specifically identified with the grape, with wine, and drunkenness. It is true that the verse gains some stability with its quite regular clopping hexameters (written when quantitative verse was already being abandoned) and its archaic Homeric dialect (itself freshened with a great many neologisms), but the themes themselves are ultimately a safe distance from the transgressive.
The role of wine itself is a case in point. Though used in small quantities ritually by many groups including ancient Chinese, Jews, and Christians and more generously in observances by groups including ancient Egyptians, old Norsemen, and, surprisingly, early Mormons, alcohol has proven a far poorer alternative than many other psychoactive drugs for religious inspiration. Even the Greek Dionysia is distinguished more by the dithyrambic (and later theatrical) contests and by the processions of phalluses than by drunkenness. (If one believes Livy, the Roman Bacchanalia was a far more licentious festival, in need of civic regulation since 186 C.E.)
Surprisingly, wine appears in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca not as a gateway to altered consciousness but only as an amelioration of suffering, a simple anodyne. Indeed, the poem’s Book VII prophesies that Dionysus’ advent will ease the trials of human life as Semele is told “You have conceived a son who will make mortals forget their troubles.” (367) Her offspring will not cause their suffering to vanish nor will she grant a transcendental wisdom from the height of which suffering will seem trivial; rather, he will allow them to temporarily escape the woes inevitable in life.
Dionysus, who was often depicted as a beardless youth and was ridiculed as effeminate by Pentheus, falls in love with “the rosy form of a young comrade” Ampelos (X, 175) and takes him as his “playmate” (homepsion). (X, 193) Like many Greek men the god delights in the boy’s dancing (X, 240) and fears rivals of his beloved’s own age. (X, 248) Indeed Ampelos inspires the love of a satyr (X, 278). Dionysus begs Zeus to be allowed to possess Ampelos’ love exclusively, saying that his favorite outshines even Zeus’ choice Ganymede. (X, 317) Ampelos and his divine lover enjoy each other’s company, joining, for instance, in “honey-sweet wrestling” (X, 345) and other athletic contests.
Ate interferes then in their idyllic relationship, suggesting to Ampelos that he has received insufficient favors from his lover (XI, 113) and raising again the comparison to Ganymede: “The Trojan wine-pourer had the better of you -- he is at home in the court of Zeus.” (XI, 138) Ampelos allows himself to be persuaded to ride a bull, presumably to impress Dionysus, but he is thrown from the animal’s back, breaking his neck. (XI, 217)
Thrown into uncharacteristic mourning, Dionysus hears Atropos telling him that Ampelos lives yet in the wine (XII, 142) in which form he will be worshiped with song and dance and the triumphant cries of the Muses. (XII, 152) Wine is called “the heavenly nectar, comfort of the human race.” (XII, 152) Wine is contrasted with war, its red juice a pleasure utterly unlike the blood of battle. (XII, 164) [3] Dionysus’ suffering is nearly Christ-like, though his wounds are those of the lovelorn rather than the victim of judicial torture: “Lord Bacchus has wept tears, that he may wipe away tears.” (XII, 171)
The virtue of this ability of wine to overcome suffering is sufficient that the grape becomes the chief plant of all, receiving the homage of lesser greenery. [4] Its divine qualities betray the fact that it grew from ichor. (XII, 295) But is it not expecting very little of god to provide some temporary surcease of sorrow and grief? Drunkenness is a modest compensation for mortality, more like the psalmist noting that wine “gladdens men’s hearts,” Christ’s miracle at Cana, [5] or the wine promised in Paradise in the Koran [6 ] than like Jesus Christ, "the true vine" or the grapes borne on a staff later identified with the savior. [7] On the Greek tragic stage Euripedes declared in The Bacchae “When we pour libations out, it is the god himself we pour out, and by this bring blessings on mankind.”
If there is less of the tremendum of the Grail symbols, there is more of the usable in everyday life. In Nonnus wine is well represented in the repeated image of Ganymede offering a glass. (XII, 40; XII 105) That convivial drink promises no enlightenment or even transport, but it does provide a reliable anaesthetic, an insulation against the harsher of life’s blows as well as a positive source of pleasure in better times (though neither use would be sanctioned by modern psychologists). If one thinks with the Living Theatre that Dionysus should be in a more ambitious business, at least this more modest one possesses the convenience of remaining still within reach.
1. The 1940 Loeb Library edition was translated by W. H. D. Rouse. The entire text of Northrup Frye’s copy with his marginalia is conveniently available at archive.org.
2. Though some readers choose to think the apparently pagan work was written before the writer’s conversion, I prefer to think of Nonnus as a figure like Snorri Sturluson, a good Christian but an antiquarian as well who saw value in the old beliefs and the art to which they had given rise.
3. See also line 252 which again contrasts the blood offered to Ares to the grape juice which is Dionysus’.
4. XII, 273 ff.
5. See Psalm 104:15 and John II, 1-11.
6. Surah XLVII, 15 promises wine in paradise Quran, XVI, 67 recommends it.
7. See John 15:1 and Numbers 13:23.
The Socialist Martin Luther King
Last month’s Martin Luther King holiday is significant for all Americans, but the Rev. King’s elevation to the status of a national icon (with the accompanying grumbling by a few hard-core racists) risks losing the man’s central message. His celebration in elementary schools, churches, and civic plazas always omits any mention of the antipathy he provoked in the ruling class of his own era or the controversies about his ideas and methods in the Movement itself. Least likely to receive any attention is his lifelong socialist ideology.
I had myself believed that King came to socialism only as the sixties wore on and a left alternative became more widely discussed in these United States. I recall being cheered by the critiques of capitalism that I heard with increasing frequency in his speeches. Yet a bit of study revealed to me that his politics were decades-old, though he kept prudentially mum about his radicalism until opposition to an imperialist war and the rise of a strengthened American left emboldened him to publically state the convictions he had long held. J. Edgar Hoover’s grumpy rumblings referring to King as “the most dangerous Negro” and “the most notorious liar in the country,” and his attempt to blackmail King while suggesting suicide as an escape, while bizarre and extreme, are also part of the repressive anticommunist hysteria of the era.
The socialist movement had had long ties to the struggle against racism. Early revolutionary unionists such as the I.W.W. welcomed immigrants and non-whites as fellow-workers. Many of the founders of the N. A. A. C. P. such as suffragist Mary Ovington White, journalists William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell, and W. E. B. Dubois were explicit radicals. In the early twentieth century such prominent black ministers as the Rev. George Washington Woodbey, the Rev. Richard Euell, and the Rev. George Slater Jr. were socialist activists as well as Christian ministers. During King’s youth the left, including the Communist Party, other anti-capitalist formations, and progressive elements of the labor movement, stood virtually alone in white America in their opposition to racism.
In his university training, King was heir to the particularly pointed social justice teaching of the African-American church [1] as well as being influenced by leftist thinkers such as Walter Rauschenbusch, the religious thinker most often cited by King throughout his career. Rauschenbusch explicitly supported what he in 1907 called communism. [2] In 1950 as a young divinity student King himself described his views as “anti-capitalistic.” [3]
King wrote in a letter to his fiancée Coretta Scott before their marriage “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.” [4]
Many if King’s allies, especially in the earlier days of the modern Movement were committed socialists, among them planners of the August 1963 March on Washington such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.
He had always known that oppression was at its base a class issue, though it often manifested in association with race, religion, or national origin, yet he tread very carefully. Due to the unique conditions of American anti-communism for many years King was careful to obscure his economic views. Even as late as 1968, while speaking to members of Operation Breadbasket he said of his socialist ideology “I can’t say this publicly and if you say I said it I’m not gonna admit it.” [5] Several years earlier he had warned his staff about the hazards of challenging the fat cats, “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.” [6]
Yet he continued to clearly identify the necessary linkage of the political, the economic, and the social struggles for equality. “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” [7]
Thus, King realized that, while reforms might bring amelioration of injustice, the definitive way to combat racism, war, and exploitation was through radical change – the end of capitalism. Reluctant, unable to quite speak the truth without two opening qualifiers, he admitted to a reporter, “In a sense, you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.” [8] He realized that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism. [9] For this reason he called himself a socialist and even a Marxist [10], declaring that “something is wrong with capitalism” and that “America must move toward democratic socialism.” [11] Thus he died supporting a labor struggle in the midst of planning the Poor People’s Campaign, a fight based in economics rather than race.
King’s socialism is part of the hidden history of America, the story of how nineteenth century communards sought to formulate a new society, radical abolitionists fought slavery, left-wing trade unionists brought better conditions to all, and progressive students helped end the war in Vietnam. Every step forward socially has come from the left. King was one of those people who concluded that social justice and an end to racism and other forms of bigotry, peace and a more reasonable deployment of the planet’s resources, responsibilities, and rewards can only come through the end of production for private profit. The commonwealth of the future he envisioned remains the goal of many around the world, and the struggle that continues today is the truest tribute, the living legacy of Martin Luther King.
1. Even before his university years, his family numbered among their friends the Baptist minister and activist J. Pius Barbour who cited Marx with approval.
2. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 398. Among numerous other influences from this era, his undergraduate advisor was sociologist Walter Chivers who believed capitalism gave birth to racism.
3. Douglas Sturm, “Martin Luther King, Jr., as Democratic Socialist,” The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall, 1990), p. 80. This article is perhaps the best general survey of King’s socialism. Apart from this reference, it has provided me with many useful sources. See also Cornel West’s annotated anthology The Radical King.
4. Letter to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952.
5. See Sturm who notes that King was afraid that his radicalism could alienate liberals and perhaps confuse his followers.” Sturm also relates C. L. R. James’ recollection that during their 1964 meeting King agreed entirely with his Marxist analysis, but was unable to make his ideas known because of “anti-communist hysteria” in the United States.
6. Speech to staff, November 14, 1966. See also Michael Harrington, Fragments of a Century: A Social Biography, p. 114-5 and David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis, p. 213-214.
7. Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.
8. New York Times, October 16, 1968, story by José Iglesias.
9. Speech to SCLC Board, March 30, 1967.
10. DaGarrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, p. 537.
Does Crabbe Look Forward or Back?
I read the Penguin Classics Selected Poems volume edited by Gavin Edwards. Page numbers in parentheses are references to this edition. Endnotes are in brackets.
A typical characterization of George Crabbe concludes “The characteristics of his expression single him out as the last of the classical writers; but there is also in his poetry the suggestion of a virtual Romanticism.” The author finds him “a suffering sensibility,” “an imagination resolutely bent under the yoke of the real.” [1] This sense of Crabbe as a sort of Janus, pointing at once toward the past and the future, has become something of a received idea. Just what he is glancing toward, in views both beyond and back, is not always detailed. To exploit this notion in understanding Crabbe, it remains to specify more precisely just what are the old-fashioned and innovative elements within his unique body of work.
Though he published largely in the nineteenth century and socialized with the Lake Poets, George Crabbe with his heroic couplets and sententiae seems to many the last of the Augustans, and he was applauded by Doctor Johnson (in a letter to Reynolds) as “original, vigorous, and elegant.” [2] On the other hand his content focusing on lower-class figures and village life is more consistent with Romantic predilections. His reputation for focusing on realistic portrayals of recognizable life casts him as a herald of realism and naturalism in fiction. Yet his falling between these literary various models, each of which continues to have enthusiastic readers, is perhaps less a reason for his present lack of popularity as his status as one of the last poets to use a metrical line as the natural medium for uses that after his time were more commonly treated in prose: narrative, description, and moralizing. His poetry is less dense and, closer to everyday speech than that of many of his contemporaries. The recent popularity of “poetry” which is colloquial to a fault has not benefited the writer whom the great Hazlitt called the most prosaic of poets whose work resembled “a dull leaden cloud” hanging over the earth. Worse, to Hazlitt his work is even “repulsive.” Yet Hazlitt also called this surgeon, entomologist, priest, and addict “one of the most popular and admired of our living authors.” [3]
As fond of artificial conventions as any poet, Crabbe was, however, notoriously innovative in his inclusion of the middle class and the poor in stories relating what he calls “the follies and crimes of persons in lower life.” [4] In Book I of “The Village” he ridicules earlier pastoralists for idealizing rural life, insisting “I will paint the cot./ As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.” The novelty of such subject matter is difficult for moderns to understand, but the fact is that most literature had once been concerned primarily with the ruling class, including workers as villainous or comic figures. Fiction began early to include those in lower social strata with Nashe and then Defoe and picaresques in the following centuries, but drama and poetry were slower to follow suit. It is not until Büchner and, much later, Hauptmann that dramatists (who had paid attention to bourgeois life earlier) used proletarians.
Still Crabbe was not alone in his use of the lower reaches of the social scale, especially as the nineteenth century dawned. In poetry Burns was “the ploughman poet” and the milkmaid Ann Yearsley wrote “the touch of Ecstasy, which strikes/ Most pow'rful on defenceless, untaught Minds.” [5] Among those who defined Romanticism, Wordsworth had favored focusing on the lowly, saying that among the humble “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil” and thus the feelings common to all may “be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.” [6]
There is little, in fact, in Crabbe’s stories that recalls his anti-pastoral prefaced to “The Village” (I, 63-78) with its catalogue of weeds and picture of privation, “the village life a life of pain.” (II, 1-2) The inherent hardships of working life occupy him far less than love-relations and religious questions. To some extent Crabbe recognizes the gap between lived experience and his narrations when he speaks of the persona as an “ideal” friend. [7]
Elsewhere Crabbe himself seems defensive about his practice. In the Preface to his “Tales” Crabbe notes that realism is an admired end in painting and should be in poetry as well, only to instantly concede with the decisive witness of Shakespeare the sublimity of idealizing verse with the ability to “body forth” “the forms of things unknown.” [8] Agreeing on the lofty value of such work, he then asks that room be allowed the more modest work of “those who address their productions to the plain sense and sober judgment of their Readers, rather than on their fancy and imagination.” (469) He bases a good share of his claim on the fact that his stories “are founded on real events,” (470) that they represent “a faithful delineation of those painful realities, those every-day concerns, and those perpetually-occurring vexations” which the reader is likely to have personally experienced. (471)
Many critics have taken him at his word, ever since the perspicacious Hazlitt, despite his having so little taste for Crabbe, allowed that “individuality is, in his theory, the only definition of poetry. Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever makes an exact image of any thing on the earth, however deformed or insignificant, according to him, must succeed — and he himself has succeeded.” [9]
But it is hardly an “exact image” that one finds in the poet’s verse. Far from realistically depicting the life of the poor, Crabbe specialized in dramatizing the retributive justice visited on those who stray from the straight and narrow in belief and behavior. Though writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his work harks back to the seventeenth, to Everyman in the fifteenth and to even earlier saints’ lives and medieval allegories, and to Piers Ploughman. Though his characters resemble those of the everyday world in their ordinariness, even the ordinariness of their sins (with the exception of some lurid, if sordid, cases), their fates are far more predictable and the cause and effect of their lives more lucid than what we observe in our lived experience.
The narratives of “The Poor of the Borough” pass for realistic simply because they largely ignore the upper class. Still, most modern readers will experience them not as slices of life but rather as straightforwardly moralistic tales in which deviation from conventional piety and behavior proves not only ruinous but regretted in a way far from consistently observed in lived experience. Crabbe’s language is not only close to Pope’s in its significant rhymes and its personifications, it harks back to the Bible in many of the names and to Chaucer in the use of obsolete words such as “hight” and “churl.”
The life of each is measured in a rather medieval way by death. Thus the parish clerk, Abel Keene, and Peter Grimes end their lives in wretched despair, while Ellen Orford, who has all along been more a victim than a sinner, enters a penitential redemptive life of service.
Prior to the retributive justice of their ends, though, each manifests faults more banal than demonic. The parish clerk who steals from the offerings resembles those one reads of in the morning newspaper who have helped themselves to funds of scouts or volunteer fire outfits or local political campaigns. Ellen Orford’s cruel stepfather, her unfortunate seduction and later mésalliance are unfortunately too commonplace even to make the paper.
Crabbe did employ Romantic aesthetic values in, for instance, his admiration of picturesque ruins, [10] his cultivation of a sort of mean antihero such as Peter Grimes, [11] and his interest in dreams and in mental illness (still in his day often called melancholy). Both “The World of Dreams” and “Sir Eustace Grey” exploit the opportunity these themes offer to fly above the notoriously prosaic ground he had marked out for himself. Yet both poems very likely owe their visions not to Romantic conceptions of Genius than to his involvement in another proclivity of the Romantics, the use of psychoactive drugs.
The extreme joys and woes in “The World of Dreams” have little in common with an ordinary night’s sleep and are likely to represent a coded way of describing the poet’s experience of opium addiction. Indeed, the persona specifically contrasts himself to the reader and calls his own dream-state an “ideal World.” (l. 16) He is the unsleeping one. (l. 96)
The deranged visions of the mad protagonist of “Sir Eustace Grey” include a frozen landscape of Grey’s imagination is reminiscent of both the arctic scene in Frankenstein and Burroughs’ passage beginning “Junkies always beef about The Cold. . . life in The Old Ice House.” [12] But even in this sensational piece which is set in a madhouse and in which Crabbe allows himself unusually disjointed syntax, the verse form is a fast-moving tetrameter and the linked rhyme scheme unforgiving.
Further, in this poem built in the boundary-land between neo-classicism and Romanticism, madness is no grand Romantic frenzy implying greater insight akin to the poetic. Grey is not magnificently mad but rather the victim of the gathering force of his initial religious doubts that lead him to neglect his soul’s tending (92 ff.) combined with his wife’s infidelity and the shock of killing her lover, [13] once his best friend. The insane anti-hero’s fate is softened at the end when he accepts a “methodistic call” and finds some peace. The story’s arc is determined by his divine punishment for apostasy, though then his affliction is lessened with his relative improvement in theology, though his pathology leads to his selecting a nonconforming sect.
It is a telling index of Crabbe’s conservatism both in style and in theme that “The Family of Love,” the lengthy tale which is very likely his last opus, looks clearly backward. The title may well recall Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison where the phrase is used straightforwardly in praise of the title character and his two sisters. [14] Although contemporary history is acknowledged in some of the details of the poem, this final work, with its leisurely exposition, in a sense the same plot as the story of Roger Cuff from “The Parish Register”, seems to assert all the more aggressively the practices Crabbe had established in early work.
“The Family of Love” could very nearly be a medieval exemplum illustrating hypocrisy were it not wrapped in a comforting sort of belittlement of the sin. After he has penetrated the façade of familial harmony and caught out his relatives for greedy self-interest, the returned Captain Elliot graciously allows, “If as frail mortals you, my Friends appear,/ I looked for no angelic beings here.” (1035-6) Presumably everyone will gladly decide to try to do better next time and that will, it seems, settle the matter.
In fact in many ways, Crabbe is less an anticipation of Romantic trends and tastes than he is a reminiscence of an immensely popular 17th century writer John Bunyan. In his bourgeois vision, his decorous plain style rooted in familiar objects, his moralistic themes, and his allegorical figures Crabbe is a sort of Bunyan redivivus. For all Crabbe’s Anglicanism and service to aristocrats, his poetic lines are prosaic in the way that a Friends’ meeting housed is plain, with a sort of wholesome elegance, implying that things themselves are sufficient marvels needing no elaboration from the fancy. As fiction writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and poets like Edgar Lee Masters were to recognize in the century following Crabbe the ordinary struggles of villagers contain drama as moving as the fortunes of princes and magnates, but Bunyan too had a bourgeois hero. The comparison is all the more compelling when the reader considers the many plots in which orthodox belief is critical, such works as “The Dumb Orators,” “The Gentleman Farmer,” “Edward Shore,” “The Struggles of Conscience,” “The Convert,” and “The Leaned Boy.” In each of these free-thinking or heterodox ideas lead to moral and worldly disaster while conventional piety provides the likeliest route to peace and satisfaction, if not happiness.
Crabbe’s immense popularity, his reputation with Byron and others, arose more from his being a throwback than an innovator. What strikes the contemporary reader as most modern in Crabbe is his neurotic complex, his tendency to depression, his fascination with wrong-doing, guilt, and madness, and – in style -- his pared-down rhetoric, even when expressed in the previous century’s heroic couplets. Though just when the reader feels he has adequately characterized Crabbe’s Protestant gravitas, his assumptions are tossed by the conclusion to his preface to “Tales of the Hall” in which he self-deprecatingly offers a defense of his work as the product of otherwise idle hours that might have been “lost in the indulgence of unregistered thoughts and fancies, that melt away in the instant they are conceived, and ‘leave not a wreck behind.’” (478) [15] Though he escapes the accusation of the “indulgence” of doing nothing, he substitutes the construction of durable specters in words and accounts as a more worthy pastime on this earth, forever regreening as we age and grow ever more justly anxious. Suddenly he sounds less like a purveyor of pious dogma than like a dilettante or a lost modern.
1. Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, p. 970. I find this old book translated from French in the 1920s peerless, the best guide to the whole range of its subject I have encountered.
2. T. E. Kebble, Life of Crabbe, p. 45.
3. William Hazlitt, in "Mr. Campbell and Mr. Crabbe," The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825), 194-205.
4. P. 461 in Crabbe’s preface to "The Borough."
5. “To Mr. — — — , an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved.”
6. Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
7. Preface to “The Borough,” 460.
8. Quoting Midsummer Night’s Dream V, i.
9. “Mr. Campbell and Mr. Crabbe.”
10. “Sir Eustace Grey,” 209.
11. In the Preface to “The Borough” Crabbe describes Grimes, with simultaneous fascination and apology, as “the victim of a distempered and horror-stricken fancy.” Just as with Sir Eustace the madness is in no sense associated with access to a higher truth. It is instead purely a curiosity with the appeal of exotic horror. The reader recalls the 18th century vogue for touristic visits to the psychiatric wards of Bethlem Royal Hospital.
12. Crabbe used opium habitually, having begun as a treatment for indigestion under a doctor’s care. See Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter and M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise. The poet Edward Fitzgerald, a good friend of Crabbe’s son, originally suggested the connection between "Sir Eustace Grey" and opium. Apart from his yen for opium, Crabbe was an active participant in Sir Humphry Davy’s experiments with nitrous oxide and other psychoactive substances. The Burroughs reference is to the introduction of Naked Lunch.
13. A modern analogue of this scenario occurs In Bobby Marchan’s “There’s Something on Your Mind.” When the persona discovers his beloved having an affair with his “very best friend,” he shoots him only to find “here come another one of your best friends through the door” which “really makes you blows your top.”
14. Richardson aimed in this book to feature a moral leading man and, in particular, to counter the pernicious influence of writers like Fielding with his Tom Jones, virtually a libertine.
15. This phrase from The Tempest is carved on Shakespeare’s Westminster Abbey memorial.
Friday, January 1, 2016
Moby Dick and the Density of the Aesthetic Text
with a note of parallel passages
and a final note on the endlessness of interpretation
Chapters are named in the text and numbered in parentheses while numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.
Poetry in the old broad sense, referring to all aesthetic or literary texts, shares with other works of art the distinction of being the densest information-bearing codes humans have devised. Other sorts of writing aim at transparency, allowing the reader to efficiently grasp the content without being distracted by sound or form or associations or paradoxes. The fact that poetry uses these resources and more allows it to embody simulacra of any variety of the immensely complex human consciousness and to convey not only information and ideas and opinions but also emotional states, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries far more precisely than other forms of discourse. The poet’s use of rhetorical figures of all sorts, connotations, verbal texture, melody, etymology, and a host of other elements which are not exploited in non-aesthetic writing allows the expression of subtle shades of thought and feeling that would be impossible for the author who aims at direct statement. In fact there is no end to the interpretation of a piece of writing as each image, sound, and theme generates an ever-expanding semantic field in which waves of signification react with other waves in patterns of subtle accuracy and, in the end, fabulous complexity. The critic must decide without prescription where to begin and end a reading of any poetic passage, for, just as in a larger philosophical sense all phenomena are interlinked and ultimately one, all writing is part of one immense book. The whole is deducible from every part. With the use of the resources of figures of speech and other literary devices, what passes for rationality expressed in the sort of unequivocal exposition freshmen learn to use for practical purposes is left far behind, stalled on the ground, while poetry mounts to the sublime and strives more or less successfully to embrace the cosmos.
Melville’s Moby Dick has always seemed to me the one novel that might challenge Huckleberry Finn as the single greatest work of American fiction. Like Emerson and Thoreau Melville is a master stylist and rhetorician, a poetic thinker ideal for demonstrating the density of the aesthetic text. Rereading Moby Dick on a trip to India I focused on a single brief passage chosen very nearly at random as I trundled along on a bus from Jaipur to Jodhpur from the beginning of the “Sunset” chapter (37).
I leave a white and turbid wake, pale waters, paler cheeks, wheree'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong well to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
In my mind Melville excels as a philosophical writer, more an allegorist led by theme like a super-sophisticated Bunyan rather than a poet marking concrete particulars like Keats or constructing enigmatic symbols like Mallarmé. Melville’s indeterminancies are indeed present -- Pierre is rightly subtitled The Ambiguities – but intellectual, and thought takes the lead in the subtle yet sensual delight in the Confidence Man's playing hide-and-seek with the reader's consciousness. His rhetoric, the palpable syntactical architecture of his sentences, their music and design, I have always admired, and the dance of his phrases is as worthy of attention as the quality of his thoughts.
The first thing the reader notices about this passage from the beginning of the "Sunset" chapter is the perfectly regular iambic pentameter. [1] The first "and" is semantically unnecessary but required for the meter and not distracting. This cadence forms the regular background beat, the rhythm section of the composition against which melodic and harmonic elements play. The ocean waves are embodied sonically and graphically in the repetition of the letter w in the first sentence. Before that pattern has faded the word "pale" is repeated, making a sort of ghostly whitecap on the sea. The phrase "where'er I sail" so liquid with vowels for eight of its twelve letters and its only consonants the smooth sounds of wh, r, s, and a concluding l, lacking a single plosive, further the replication of the ocean on the printed page. The rhyme of sail and pail brings the clause to an end like a couplet at the end of a scene of Shakespeare.
The decisive monosyllables of the final two clauses with less differentiation in accent provide the steady footsteps along time's lane. A disturbance is signaled by the compression of "envious" to two syllables and the b sound, rougher than what had preceded it, and this is then resolved when it is succeeded by the alliteration in s, as the sea’s surface becomes smooth once more after the speaking subject moves on.
In tone these lines suggest an elegiac and vulnerable resignation, a sort of soft lament for the human condition. The speaker proceeds through time without expectations or hopes, but also without hesitation, never slowed though always defeated. The final words “but first I pass” suggest a sort of self-assertion or, at any rate, a heroic existential acceptance.
I approach theme with this characterization, since for Melville as for each of us in lived experience, ideas are less logical conclusions based on evidence than moods and subjective impressions, subject always to the flickering alteration of the moment, for which we then invent adequate reasons. Melville is by temperament a thinker, and I have often qualified his literary standing by thinking him more a philosopher than a poet. In this intellectual realm he is great indeed, primarily after the manner of Plato and Nietzsche, not for the rigor of his reasoning but for the resonant chords he sets to vibrating within the reader. He is not one to settle on a thought made attractive by succinctness or clarity, much less by authority or tradition. Rather one finds near as many enigmas, contradictions, and mysteries in him as in one's own observations, should one be in the mood to look closely enough and not to scant a telling detail for the sake of ease. In this way his ideas remain as fresh as the reader’s own morning musings.
Among the reductive formulations of the thoughts set to mingle and struggle with each other in these twenty-nine words are the following.
1. Life is a process, a pilgrimage, a journey, though one with neither destination or reward.
2. The human being must contend constantly with everything else, an effort signaled by turbidity yet followed by the blankness of entropy that erases all events. The pale seas are the source of the paler human cheeks because sailing (which is to say living) is so inevitably rigorous and our tender human perspective sees ourselves as unique sufferers. Nature is not merely indifferent. It is actively hostile.
3. Nonetheless, one somehow goes on regardless, suggesting parallels with Camus and Sartre.
4. A further heroic response to the recognition of the human predicament is evident in the
In my mind Melville excels as a philosophical writer, more an allegorist led by theme like a super-sophisticated Bunyan rather than a poet marking concrete particulars like Keats or constructing enigmatic symbols like Mallarmé. Melville’s indeterminancies are indeed present -- Pierre is rightly subtitled The Ambiguities – but intellectual, and thought takes the lead in the subtle yet sensual delight in the Confidence Man's playing hide-and-seek with the reader's consciousness. His rhetoric, the palpable syntactical architecture of his sentences, their music and design, I have always admired, and the dance of his phrases is as worthy of attention as the quality of his thoughts.
The first thing the reader notices about this passage from the beginning of the "Sunset" chapter is the perfectly regular iambic pentameter. [1] The first "and" is semantically unnecessary but required for the meter and not distracting. This cadence forms the regular background beat, the rhythm section of the composition against which melodic and harmonic elements play. The ocean waves are embodied sonically and graphically in the repetition of the letter w in the first sentence. Before that pattern has faded the word "pale" is repeated, making a sort of ghostly whitecap on the sea. The phrase "where'er I sail" so liquid with vowels for eight of its twelve letters and its only consonants the smooth sounds of wh, r, s, and a concluding l, lacking a single plosive, further the replication of the ocean on the printed page. The rhyme of sail and pail brings the clause to an end like a couplet at the end of a scene of Shakespeare.
The decisive monosyllables of the final two clauses with less differentiation in accent provide the steady footsteps along time's lane. A disturbance is signaled by the compression of "envious" to two syllables and the b sound, rougher than what had preceded it, and this is then resolved when it is succeeded by the alliteration in s, as the sea’s surface becomes smooth once more after the speaking subject moves on.
In tone these lines suggest an elegiac and vulnerable resignation, a sort of soft lament for the human condition. The speaker proceeds through time without expectations or hopes, but also without hesitation, never slowed though always defeated. The final words “but first I pass” suggest a sort of self-assertion or, at any rate, a heroic existential acceptance.
I approach theme with this characterization, since for Melville as for each of us in lived experience, ideas are less logical conclusions based on evidence than moods and subjective impressions, subject always to the flickering alteration of the moment, for which we then invent adequate reasons. Melville is by temperament a thinker, and I have often qualified his literary standing by thinking him more a philosopher than a poet. In this intellectual realm he is great indeed, primarily after the manner of Plato and Nietzsche, not for the rigor of his reasoning but for the resonant chords he sets to vibrating within the reader. He is not one to settle on a thought made attractive by succinctness or clarity, much less by authority or tradition. Rather one finds near as many enigmas, contradictions, and mysteries in him as in one's own observations, should one be in the mood to look closely enough and not to scant a telling detail for the sake of ease. In this way his ideas remain as fresh as the reader’s own morning musings.
Among the reductive formulations of the thoughts set to mingle and struggle with each other in these twenty-nine words are the following.
1. Life is a process, a pilgrimage, a journey, though one with neither destination or reward.
2. The human being must contend constantly with everything else, an effort signaled by turbidity yet followed by the blankness of entropy that erases all events. The pale seas are the source of the paler human cheeks because sailing (which is to say living) is so inevitably rigorous and our tender human perspective sees ourselves as unique sufferers. Nature is not merely indifferent. It is actively hostile.
3. Nonetheless, one somehow goes on regardless, suggesting parallels with Camus and Sartre.
4. A further heroic response to the recognition of the human predicament is evident in the
construction of lovely verbal patterns expressing our woe. Such artifacts prove in part
redemptive, in part an all-too-human way of passing the time while awaiting death.
I have not begun to explore the passage in terms of its associations within the novel, Melville’s other work, or links to earlier or later literature. I can only here offer a few signposts for fruitful exploration. Paleness, of course, is central to the book. Even before the first chapter the “pale Usher” associated with mortality opens the book. His “queer handkerchief queer, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world” signifies the veil of maya that obscures the appalling emptiness of Ultimate Reality.
And who can forget the similar pattern of deceptive surface over terrifying whiteness in the magnificent crescendo that closes the chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale” (42)?
All deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Moby Dick is a classic because it reproduces a convincing projection of human consciousness, complete with affect, taste and sensibility, Weltanschauung, and experience in the most densely significant symbolic code available to our species. One might continue its interpretation as endlessly onward as the sea-waves themselves, and, like the waves, such readings are dynamic and ever-evolving. I have treated only the tiniest fraction of the great novel. Fortunately, the consideration of the text can be at any moment truncated and whatever work has been done on it may result in a rich and satisfying share, leaving always appetite for more, but no necessity to say another word.
A Note on Verbal Parallels
Even confining one’s attention to Moby Dick, there is no end to these internal clusters of images. For example, “envious goblins” appear in “The Funeral” (69), and the billows are “destroying” as the denouement approaches in “The Chase – Third Day” (135). Related images appear in Melville’s other works. Paleness is linked to whiteness and the word “whelm” and the entire complex to mortality as a green plant dies with the coming of cold in Pierre: “the drifting winter snows shall whelm it” and, in the same chapter the reader finds a reference to “pale cheeks” (Ch. 23). Life itself is “nobly envious” in Pierre, Chapter 12. “Evil- minded, envious goblins” emerge from the sea in Mardi, Chapter 69. But there is no point in cataloguing such associations without making something of the verbal recurrences. I mean only to suggest the unlimited process of semeiosis.
The semantic field expands immensely when one considers works by other authors. Given the fact that Melville explicitly refers to his story as a tragedy and consciously models elements of it on Shakespeare the critic might pursue parallel usage in that writer such as Pistol’s curse “ocean whelm them all!” (Merry Wives of Windsor, II, 2) or Andromache’s vision of “bloody turbulence” (Troilus and Cressida, V, 3), not to mention the hundred and forty-eight occurrences of the term “pale” in his plays.
Had Melville ever come across Robert English’s 1777 “Elegy” for Sir Charles Saunders that includes the line “in vain the envious billows round him beat”? (Note here that unlike in Melville the hero is stronger than the billows.) Or perhaps the line “The envious billows choak’d my struggling breath” in Charles Lloyd’s 1819 collection Nugæ Canoræ in which, on the other hand, the sea is altogether triumphant. He may even have happened upon Miss E. M. Allison’s poem on Columbus “The Genoese Immigrant” which includes a reference to “envious billows angry play” published in New York eight years before Moby Dick. Whether or not any of these played a role as a source, they cause Melville’s own usage to stand out in higher relief.
Among the most obvious relevant routes for further analysis are image systems of whiteness, water, ships, and life as a journey. Nor have I touched on etymology or connotation. Nor on parallels with epic which Melville explicitly had in mind in his use, for instance, of Homeric similes or the Biblical references suggested by names such as Ishmael and Ahab. The reading of the few lines I have selected illustrates the rich stores of meaning borne by literary texts.
A Final Note on the Endlessness of Interpretation
What is the meaning of Moby Dick? What Eco called “unlimited semiosis” (in A Theory of Semiotics) can be traced in all writing, but especially in poetry. Though generally applicable, some limited version of the idea is a commonplace in Melville commentaries. Thus Van Doren says “Ahab has a hundred symbolical or allegorical interpretations.” [2] Author David Gilbert notes, “It's been called a whaling yarn, a theodicy, a Shakespeare-styled political tragedy, an anatomy, a queer confessional, an environmentalist epic; because this novel seems to hold all the world, all these readings are compatible and true.” [3] In her introduction to an edition of the novel Elizabeth Renker observes “ascertaining the whale’s ultimate meaning is a project [one] could pursue forever.” To John Bryant readings of Moby Dick include an extraordinary range of “seemingly flat contradictions and simultaneously co-existing divergences.” [4]
To D. H. Lawrence, speaking of the whale:
Of course he is a symbol.
Of what?
I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it. [5]
The catalogue of such responses could be extended indefinitely.
The fact is that literary texts are peculiarly polysemous; it is one of their foremost characteristics in contradistinction to all other sorts of writing. The best of them are often the most underdetermined. Yet they not only bear multiple meanings, their decoding goes on and on indefinitely just as our experience of time, but, like a life, or like these remarks, it is initiated and terminated suddenly and arbitrarily.
1. Carl Van Doren found Melville’s tendency to fall into blank verse “irritating.” See his essay “Mr. Melville’s Moby Dick” in The Bookman for April 1924, pages 154-6.
2. Ibid.
3. “The Endless Depths of Moby Dick Symbolism,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2013.
4. in “The Versions of Moby Dick” in The Book as Artefact, Text and Border, edited by Anne Mette Hansen. p. 258.
5. In Studies in Classic American Literature. Among Lawrence’s other comments are the identification of Moby Dick with “the deepest blood-being of the [doomed] white race.” He found the book brilliant, though its author was “hopelessly au grand serieux.”
I have not begun to explore the passage in terms of its associations within the novel, Melville’s other work, or links to earlier or later literature. I can only here offer a few signposts for fruitful exploration. Paleness, of course, is central to the book. Even before the first chapter the “pale Usher” associated with mortality opens the book. His “queer handkerchief queer, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world” signifies the veil of maya that obscures the appalling emptiness of Ultimate Reality.
And who can forget the similar pattern of deceptive surface over terrifying whiteness in the magnificent crescendo that closes the chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale” (42)?
All deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Moby Dick is a classic because it reproduces a convincing projection of human consciousness, complete with affect, taste and sensibility, Weltanschauung, and experience in the most densely significant symbolic code available to our species. One might continue its interpretation as endlessly onward as the sea-waves themselves, and, like the waves, such readings are dynamic and ever-evolving. I have treated only the tiniest fraction of the great novel. Fortunately, the consideration of the text can be at any moment truncated and whatever work has been done on it may result in a rich and satisfying share, leaving always appetite for more, but no necessity to say another word.
A Note on Verbal Parallels
Even confining one’s attention to Moby Dick, there is no end to these internal clusters of images. For example, “envious goblins” appear in “The Funeral” (69), and the billows are “destroying” as the denouement approaches in “The Chase – Third Day” (135). Related images appear in Melville’s other works. Paleness is linked to whiteness and the word “whelm” and the entire complex to mortality as a green plant dies with the coming of cold in Pierre: “the drifting winter snows shall whelm it” and, in the same chapter the reader finds a reference to “pale cheeks” (Ch. 23). Life itself is “nobly envious” in Pierre, Chapter 12. “Evil- minded, envious goblins” emerge from the sea in Mardi, Chapter 69. But there is no point in cataloguing such associations without making something of the verbal recurrences. I mean only to suggest the unlimited process of semeiosis.
The semantic field expands immensely when one considers works by other authors. Given the fact that Melville explicitly refers to his story as a tragedy and consciously models elements of it on Shakespeare the critic might pursue parallel usage in that writer such as Pistol’s curse “ocean whelm them all!” (Merry Wives of Windsor, II, 2) or Andromache’s vision of “bloody turbulence” (Troilus and Cressida, V, 3), not to mention the hundred and forty-eight occurrences of the term “pale” in his plays.
Had Melville ever come across Robert English’s 1777 “Elegy” for Sir Charles Saunders that includes the line “in vain the envious billows round him beat”? (Note here that unlike in Melville the hero is stronger than the billows.) Or perhaps the line “The envious billows choak’d my struggling breath” in Charles Lloyd’s 1819 collection Nugæ Canoræ in which, on the other hand, the sea is altogether triumphant. He may even have happened upon Miss E. M. Allison’s poem on Columbus “The Genoese Immigrant” which includes a reference to “envious billows angry play” published in New York eight years before Moby Dick. Whether or not any of these played a role as a source, they cause Melville’s own usage to stand out in higher relief.
Among the most obvious relevant routes for further analysis are image systems of whiteness, water, ships, and life as a journey. Nor have I touched on etymology or connotation. Nor on parallels with epic which Melville explicitly had in mind in his use, for instance, of Homeric similes or the Biblical references suggested by names such as Ishmael and Ahab. The reading of the few lines I have selected illustrates the rich stores of meaning borne by literary texts.
A Final Note on the Endlessness of Interpretation
What is the meaning of Moby Dick? What Eco called “unlimited semiosis” (in A Theory of Semiotics) can be traced in all writing, but especially in poetry. Though generally applicable, some limited version of the idea is a commonplace in Melville commentaries. Thus Van Doren says “Ahab has a hundred symbolical or allegorical interpretations.” [2] Author David Gilbert notes, “It's been called a whaling yarn, a theodicy, a Shakespeare-styled political tragedy, an anatomy, a queer confessional, an environmentalist epic; because this novel seems to hold all the world, all these readings are compatible and true.” [3] In her introduction to an edition of the novel Elizabeth Renker observes “ascertaining the whale’s ultimate meaning is a project [one] could pursue forever.” To John Bryant readings of Moby Dick include an extraordinary range of “seemingly flat contradictions and simultaneously co-existing divergences.” [4]
To D. H. Lawrence, speaking of the whale:
Of course he is a symbol.
Of what?
I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it. [5]
The catalogue of such responses could be extended indefinitely.
The fact is that literary texts are peculiarly polysemous; it is one of their foremost characteristics in contradistinction to all other sorts of writing. The best of them are often the most underdetermined. Yet they not only bear multiple meanings, their decoding goes on and on indefinitely just as our experience of time, but, like a life, or like these remarks, it is initiated and terminated suddenly and arbitrarily.
1. Carl Van Doren found Melville’s tendency to fall into blank verse “irritating.” See his essay “Mr. Melville’s Moby Dick” in The Bookman for April 1924, pages 154-6.
2. Ibid.
3. “The Endless Depths of Moby Dick Symbolism,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2013.
4. in “The Versions of Moby Dick” in The Book as Artefact, Text and Border, edited by Anne Mette Hansen. p. 258.
5. In Studies in Classic American Literature. Among Lawrence’s other comments are the identification of Moby Dick with “the deepest blood-being of the [doomed] white race.” He found the book brilliant, though its author was “hopelessly au grand serieux.”
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