When I ask friends how they are, the response is often something like, “Fine, aside from the madness of [insert name of Trump Administration policy or official].” Recently, a friend said, “Every day seems like, ‘Well, aside from that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’” There appears to be no end to the profound disappointment, or outrage, over the actual or proposed actions of the federal government.

This has been compounded for me because I am Twin Cities-adjacent. My mother was from St. Paul and my father was from Minneapolis where I still have relatives.

What, then, is to be done? While not an immediate cure-all, there are valuable lessons in how poets have dealt with periods of catastrophic political leadership. W.H. Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Even so, poetry crystalizes how we think, feel and cope. The actions to be taken as a result are up to us.

There is a long tradition of resistance poetry. Examples include works by poets of the Harlem Renaissance, antiwar poets who responded to armed conflict in every era, and poets who speak for oppressed populations.

Resistance poems are also accessible. Even poetry-wary high school students (I’ve known some) can appreciate the way resistance poems articulate our shared concerns about negative and harmful political dynamics.

Here are two resistance poems from 1991 and 2001 by American poets. The poems anticipate current events and resonate accurately and powerfully with them.

What Kind of Times Are These

by Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows,
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be
    fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else, but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
it's own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light--
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

Baltimore native Adrienne Rich was a respected poet, essayist, and feminist. Rich received numerous literary awards over a long career. More about Rich and her politically charged life can be seen

here.

The speaker in Rich’s 1991 poem, “What Kind of Times Are These,” confides in us in an intimate and low-key way. The poem establishes a grave tone without lecturing or hyperbole when the speaker describes the existence, but not the location, of the “place between two stands of trees.” It is in this place that the speaker has walked, picking mushrooms “at the edge of dread.” Rich’s alliterative metaphor is acutely current. Where are we today, if not at “the edge of dread”?

The poem is a model of concision. In three stanzas of one sentence each and a fourth stanza consisting of a rhetorical question (“…why do I tell you anything?”) and an answer (“…because in times like these to have you listen at all, it’s necessary/to talk about trees.”)

The speaker affirms that “this isn’t a Russian poem,” but rather it is America that is “moving closer to its own truth and dread/its own ways of making people disappear.” When governments establish their “own truth” as part of the process of “making people disappear”—whether immigrants, or the unhoused, or just general noncompliers—things are dire.

The enjambment, or continuation of sentences beyond the end of the line, emphasizes the dark work of “making people disappear” in the final words of each line. This is particularly true in the first (“uphill,” shadows,” “persecuted,” “shadows”) and second (“fooled,” “here,” “dread,” “disappear”) stanzas.

The speaker’s concern about the nation’s future (“this is not somewhere else but here”) is communicated personally and incompletely (the repeated “I won’t tell you” in the third and fourth stanzas.)

Critics have argued that “What Kind of Times Are These” responds to a 1939 poem by German writer Berthold Brecht that argued that the catastrophes of his era—Nazism and World War II—made it “almost a crime” to “talk about trees.”

More fundamentally, Rich’s poem asserts that talking about trees is required to make people pay attention to poetry or and to address the fundamental question, “What Kind of Times are These.”

In other words, no matter how many disappointments or shocks we endure because of the way America is being lead, we cannot focus on them to the exclusion of everything else in life, for example trees and other people.

As Rich writes, “…to have you listen at all, it’s necessary/to talk about trees.”

We are Not Responsible

by Harryette Mullen

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.
We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.
We do not endorse the causes of or claims of people begging for handouts.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.
In the event of a loss, you'd better look out for yourself.
Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle
your frightful claims.  Our handlers lost your luggage and we
are unable to find the key to your legal case.

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.
You are not presumed to be innocent if the police
have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.
It's not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.
It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

Step aside, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.
You have no rights we are bound to respect.
Please remain calm, or we can't be held responsible
for what happens to you.

Harryette Mullen, an Alabama native, is a poet, short story writer, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. More about Mullen’s life and works can be found

here.

“We Are Not Responsible” appeared in Mullen’s 2002 poetry collection, Sleeping With the Dictionary.

The poem’s short, staccato sentences, many of which end on a single line, mimic the directive language of bureaucratic control to confirm that the individual (the “you” in the poem) is subservient to a central authority. The speaker’s repeated descriptions of what “we” cannot or will not do (“We are not…” “We cannot…” “We do not…”) make the command-and-control relationship very clear.

The poem’s wordplay and puns (“…please extinguish all smoldering resentments”) and (…”we are unable to find the key to your legal case”) are compelling. They emphasize that the institution that supposedly provides a service, be it an airline or a government, does so on its own terms and for its own purposes, and not for the benefit of constituents.

“We Are Not Responsible” is poetry as announcement: a faceless and oppressive authority announces how things will be and what conduct by individuals will be, or not be, acceptable. The authoritarian directives come from the top.

The inverse of “We Are Not Responsible” might be Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 poem and song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The poem is a Civil Rights era protest against institutional norms and the influence of the media.

In contrast to the top down messages of “We Are Not Responsible,” “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” speaks for oppressed people seeking to change the status quo. Each poem has a compelling urgency.

You can hear Gil Scott-Heron recite “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” here.

Your comments are very welcome.

Special thanks to Emmet Rosenfeld and Charlie Baxter for assistance with this post.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading About Alexandria!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

English teachers, active or retired, are sometimes asked: “What books do you use (or did you use) in class?” and “Do you ever re-read a book”? The first question seems to be asked out of simple curiosity; the second seems to seek assurance that re-reading a book is an acceptable thing to do.

In 15 years of teaching high school English, I was fortunate to work in schools with well-stocked book rooms. I benefited from the shift from heavy and expensive textbook anthologies to single copies, usually in paperback. The curriculum included classics (Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, The Awakening) and works by modern masters (Native Son, Beloved, Atonement) plays (Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Fences) and poetry. Students were much more receptive to Shakespeare’s plays than I thought might be the case

As to re-reading books, “Why not?” If a book moves us on the first reading, it is probably worth rereading. Re-reading a work of fiction may reveal more than re-reading nonfiction, but there are people who do both.

Recently-published annotated editions of two novels that are mainstays of high school English, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, offer re-reading opportunities, and additional understanding and enjoyment.

The Public Domain: New Life for Old Favorites

On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925, notably Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway, entered the United States public domain.

A copyright protects an author’s intellectual property rights in his or her work. A novel often takes on new life when its copyright protection ends. For example, a book inevitably becomes more widely available on services such as Google Books.

Generally, the copyright of a work created after January 1, 1978 lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. For works published prior to 1978, the duration of a copyright varies depending on several factors. January 1 of each year is sometimes called Public Domain Day.

Duke University Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain assessed 1925’s cultural achievements this way:

In 2021, there is a lot to celebrate. 1925 brought us some incredible culture. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. The New Yorker magazine was founded. The literature reflected both a booming economy, whose fruits were unevenly distributed, and the lingering upheaval and tragedy of World War I. The culture of the time reflected all of those contradictory tendencies. The BBC’s Culture website suggested that 1925 might be “the greatest year for books ever,” and with good reason. It is not simply the vast array of famous titles. The stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers, while characters such as Jay Gatsby, Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and Clarissa Dalloway still resonate today.

Reading the annotated editions of The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway is like reading a book with a quiet, but very helpful, friend. What follows explores how annotated editions offer additional context, meaning, and enjoyment for books that may be very familiar.

The Great Gatsby Annotated

The Annotated Great Gatsby—100^th Anniversary Deluxe Edition was published by the Library of America earlier this year. Edited by James L.W. West III, Professor of English Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University, the annotated edition adds new understanding even for readers already very familiar with Gatsby.

An annotated edition slows us down as readers, but in a good way. Annotations can add substantially to our understanding of the novel’s characters, time, and setting.

Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwest native and Yale graduate. Nick is Jay Gatsby’s neighbor on Long Island and the cousin of Daisy Buchanan, for whom Gatsby yearns.

Early in the novel, Nick describes a female dancer at one of the massive shimmering parties at Gatsby’s mansion in a paragraph that West annotates twice:

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco,³ dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies.⁴ The party has begun. (48)[1]

“Frisco” is probably a mystery to most readers, and there is only a hint about who Gilda Gray is (presumably, a performer at the Follies) and no information about who her understudy might have been.

Here are West’s annotations, which include illustrations not reproduced here:

3. In the dancing style of Joe Frisco (1899-1958), a comedian popular during the 1920’s. Frisco was famous for a soft-shoe shuffle, of his own invention called the “Frisco Dance.” Beginning in 1918, he was featured in The Midnight Frolic, a late-night floor show staged by the impresario Florenz Ziegfield (1867-1932) on the rooftop of the New Amsterdam Theatre, on West 42^nd Street. He performed also in Vanities, a Broadway girly-leggy variety show produced by Earl Carroll (1893-1948.)

4. Gilda Gray (1901-1959), born Marianna Michalska, was a Polish American dancer and cabaret singer who popularized the “shimmy” in the 1920s. She performed the dance in the Ziegfield Follies, a Broadway revue with revealing costumery and elaborate sets. The shimmy was characterized by suggestive movements of the shoulders and hips (“I’m shaking my shimmy, that’s what I’m doing,” Gray explained).

Is knowing how Joe Frisco moved his hands, or that Gilda Gray’s understudy would know how to shimmy, essential to understanding and enjoying The Great Gatsby? Probably not, but the annotations confirm important things about Nick, and the book’s time and place, that are obscured for most of us due to the passage of time. Nick was not from New York, but he was no bumpkin. We learn that Nick is fully versed in New York’s entertainment culture. In short, Nick is hip and hipness, as exemplified in the Broadway’s entertainment culture, is important to the characters in the book.

Gatsby is a slow reveal: Nick gradually discovers the origins of Gatsby’s self-created life and invented back story, and his many lies. The annotated version describes how Gatsby, originally James Gatz, comes into focus for Nick, and explains seeming anomalies.

For example, Gatsby tells Nick that he is from the Middle West and this exchange ensues:

He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”⁵

“I see.” (71)

Gatsby’s response, “San Francisco,” is odd. At first, it seems like a misprint or a production error. A common reaction to Gatsby’s response to Nick’s question might be, “Say what?”

Here is West’s annotation which adopts an explanation by a literary critic, the late Hugh Kenner:

5. Gatsby’s supposition that San Francisco is in the Middle West, Hugh Kenner writes, is a way of establishing “for the hasty reader of novels the fact that Gatsby is not quite what he seems to be.” A Homemade World, p.41.

Kenner’s premise, that many of us are “hasty readers” of novels, is undoubtedly true and it is another reason why re-reading books that move us is rewarding.

Nick’s measured response, “I see,” to Gatsby’s assertion that he hails from the Middle Western city of San Francisco is an effective two-word summary of a major through line of the novel. Much of Gatsby is about seeing: how Nick comes to see Gatsby, how Gatsby saw Daisy in the past and how he sees her in the novel’s present, and how Nick sees the forces that accelerated Gatsby’s rise and his sudden death.

The importance of sight, or seeing, is reinforced when Nick describes an image on a huge advertising billboard for an eye doctor in the valley of ashes which is halfway between Long Island, where Nick, Gatsby and Daisy live, and New York. In the valley of ashes, “The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high, they look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.” (31)

All this, and much more, is explained in West’s deftly annotated Gatsby.

Mrs. Dalloway Annotated

Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, contrasts significantly with Gatsby. For example, in Gatsby, Nick tells us the story. We see and hear Jay Gatsby over time, but we are never in his head or aware of his thoughts. In contrast, Virginia Woolf puts us inside Clarissa Dalloway’s mind throughout Mrs. Dalloway. The novel takes place in a single day; the omniscient narrator relates Clarissa’s thoughts (and those of other characters) on a day in late June as she prepares to give a dinner party. Clarissa is the wife of a Conservative member of Parliament—a parallel story involves Septimus Warren Smith, a haunted World War I veteran.

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, was published by W.W. Norton in 2021 and edited by Merve Emre, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. This thoroughly annotated version is a guide to the novel’s time and place and to the interior lives of its characters. The annotations also confirm Woolf’s extensive knowledge of the setting, London.

In this paragraph, Clarissa is on foot in London shopping for her party:

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, ³⁸ Bath House,³⁹ the house with the china cockatoo,⁴⁰ she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons [sic] plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. ⁴¹ But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street,⁴² did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it, or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.⁴³ But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’⁴⁴ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.⁴⁵ (17-18)

In one paragraph, Clarissa’s mind ricochets from her personal traits to the nature of memory and companionship, to Peter, a former lover, to mysteries of time, nature and death, to Shakespeare and elsewhere.

Emre’s eight explanatory notes locate us in Clarissa’s mind and world. Here is a summary of the annotations, numbered as in the annotated text:

(38) Devonshire House was the home of the imperialist William Cavendish, the 3^rd Duke of Devonshire;

(39) Bath House was built by the Earl of Bath in the 18^th century;

(40) the house with the china cockatoo was the home of Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, a baroness and philanthropist;

(41) the Serpentine is a forty-acre lake that separates Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park;

(42) Bond Street, a shopping mecca for the London’s upper classes, is the only street connecting Piccadilly to Oxford Street;

(43) here Clarissa contemplates the nature of individual existence;

(44) Hatchard’s Bookshop was London’s oldest bookstore; and,

(45) this is a passage from a dirge in Shakespeare’s play, Cymbeline, that encourages its listener to face death without fear.

Is it possible to read and enjoy Mrs. Dalloway without a complete understanding of the explanatory context provided in annotations such as the eight described above? Of course, but part of the joy of annotated versions is their continuing invitation to reread a passage or a chapter and to linger in a fuller understanding of the novel’s time, setting and ideas as revealed through the annotations.

A Few Final Thoughts

If you have read this far, thank you.

If you are interested in exploring annotated editions of other classic works, a good place to start is the Norton Annotated Series. You will not be disappointed.

Your comments are very welcome.

[1] All page references are to The Annotated Great Gatsby or The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway.

Special thanks to Charles Baxter and Patrick Welsh for assistance with this post.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading About Alexandria!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

Mark Twain, the subject of Ron Chernow’s extended recent and positively reviewed biography, is not just relevant in our time, he is essential. This post, from August 2023, describes Twain’s career, contains a brief guide to his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and describes my father’s one degree of separation connection to Twain through Elizabeth Wallace whom he knew as a boy in Minneapolis.

We can only guess what Twain would say about the state of American politics today. There are hints. It was Twain who said, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

In his time, Twain’s fame extended beyond his reputation as a journalist and writer. His world-wide lecture tours made him so famous that he became America’s first literary rock star.

This is also the season of graduations and commencement speeches. Twain excelled at speeches of all kinds. Here, as a day brightener in our difficult and uncertain time, is Twain’s undelivered speech to the Yale Club of Hartford, Connecticut. Twain’s wife, Livy, whom he adored, put her foot down and made him promise not to give the speech.

Fortunately, the text of the speech survives. Please see if Mark Twain’s planned speech to the Yale Club makes things a little better. You can read it

here.

The August 2023 post on Twain follows. Of course, your comments are very welcome.

The Lincoln of Our Literature

American author and critic William Dean Howells (1837-1920) called Mark Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature.” 

Howells’ compliment is about the highest possible praise, and Twain is still very much with us. Since 1998, the John F.  Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to “…individuals who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th-century novelist and essayist Samuel Clemens, best known as Mark Twain. As a social commentator, satirist, and creator of characters, Clemens was a fearless observer of society, who startled many while delighting and informing many more with his uncompromising perspective on social injustice and personal folly.”  Information on the Mark Twain Prize, and its recipients, is available 

here.

Howells’ Lincoln-Twain comparison extends to the lively sense of humor that each man possessed. Lincoln, of course, was constrained by the need to be seen as a statesman, but there are extensive accounts of his fondness for jokes.  Historians have written that Lincoln was belatedly invited to make remarks at the ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania because it was feared that he would not be sufficiently serious or somber.  Twain, however, gave free reign to his gift for humor, particularly when he could aim it at other writers whose reputations or work he considered overblown.

Twain’s sense of humor is evident in novels (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and short stories (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County) and in his very successful career as a traveling lecturer. The late Hal Holbrook portrayed Twain as a speaker in his long-running one man show, Mark Twain Tonight!  

Twain’s willingness to make fun of other writers, including eminent authors, is evident in an 1898 letter describing his opinion of Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) classic novel, Pride and Prejudice.  Twain wrote, “I have to stop every time I begin.  Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.”

Twain was a widely traveled and sophisticated man who delighted in posing as an uncouth character.  Whether his loathing of Jane Austen’s work was genuine or professed for comic effect is debatable, but there seems to be little doubt that Twain was at his funniest when he posed as a literary critic.

So, in these anxiety-filled times when a good laugh is a valuable thing it is worth pausing to enjoy Twain’s 1895 essay, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, which appears in numerous anthologies and can be read

here.

Twain Takes on James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper was a successful author of historical romances featuring colonial and indigenous characters.  Cooper’s fictional scout, Natty Bumppo, appears in several of his books.  Cooper’s romantic vision of the American frontier is evident in The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841) which are collectively called the Leatherstocking Tales.  Cooper’s reputation, and his success, made his works an inviting target for Twain.

Cooper’s writing owes much to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), author of The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and other works. This passage from The Deerslayer exemplifies Cooper’s elaborate descriptive style:

The arches of the woods, even at high noon, cast their sombre shadows on the spot, which the brilliant rays of the sun that struggled through the leaves contributed to mellow, and if such an expression can be used, to illuminate. It was probably from a similar scene that the mind of man first got its idea of the effects of gothic tracery and churchly hues, this temple of nature producing some such effect, so far as light and shadow were concerned, as the well-known offspring of human invention.

It is difficult to imagine Twain writing this way.  As a writer, Cooper was of his time, but Twain’s works, particularly Huckleberry Finn, show that he was of his time and is highly relevant in our time.    

Twain begins Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences by quoting extravagant praise for Cooper’s works by professors at Yale and Columbia and by a critic, Wilkie Collins.  The essay draws us in this way:

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Twain’s understated and effective word choice (“decorous”) and the sly suggestion that the literary experts would not praise Cooper’s work as they did if they had read it launches the essay.  More devastating understatement follows:

Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115.  It breaks the record.

Only Mark Twain could describe 114 out of 115 “offences against literary art” in two-thirds of a page as “some defects.”  It is hard to read Twain’s essay without laughing, audibly or otherwise.

Was Twain being mean to the deceased Cooper to score a few cheap laughs?  There is a comedic intent to Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences but the essay also signifies Twain’s revolt as a modern artist against the work of a romantic traditionalist, Cooper. 

T.S. Eliot, a modernist by any standard, wrote an introduction to a 1950 edition of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which praises the novel’s stylistic “innovation.”  For Eliot, Twain’s “new discovery” is the creation of “natural speech in relation to particular characters” without a single “sentence or phrase” compromising the illusion of each character’s voice.  Twain’s characters sound completely authentic and true to themselves and not like figures in a romanticized vision of the American frontier. More about Mark Twain as a modernist writer can be seen

here.

Why Huckleberry Finn Still Matters

After years of start-and-stop work, Twain completed Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884.  The heart of the book are the adventures on a raft trip down the Mississippi River by the runaway slave, Jim, and the wise-beyond-his years Huck.  The raft trip, in about 1835[1], transports us in many ways. Huck and Jim have a series of encounters that involve philosophy, social observation, the nature of friendship, humor and race relations.

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” said Ernest Hemingway, calling it, “the best book we’ve had … There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”  Yet, Huckleberry Finn is among the most banned books in schools, and a controversy continues over whether the n-word, which appears 219 times in the novel, should be replaced with “slave” or a similar word.

 The American Library Association has designated Huckleberry Finn as one of the “most challenged” books.  The irony in the attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn or “update” Huck’s language to align with modern sensibilities is that Huck repeatedly makes decisions involving his relationship with Jim, and about how he and Jim deal with race in America, that almost anyone would think of as enlightened or progressive.

Huck, about 13, lacks formal education (his father, Pap, a mean drunk, does not want him to go to school) but the lessons he teaches in his acts and words are profound.  Even more impressive, there is nothing teacherly about what he does—he lives life as it comes.

Huck’s crisis of conscience—the book’s moral center—occurs in Chapter 31 when Jim is held captive and Huck decides to write Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, a letter telling her where Jim is so that Jim, her property, can be returned to a life of slavery.  Huck writes the letter and then tells us:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray, now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking; thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storm, and a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.

Huck sees the letter and says:

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Huck’s decision to “go to hell”—to defy the legal conventions associated with the slavery system —demonstrates Twain’s literary genius.  The novel is a masterpiece of language, plot and character. About 20 years after the Civil War and roughly a century before the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, Twain has Huck condemn America’s pervasive racial inequality in compelling moral terms understandable to everyone.

 A Brief Guide to Enjoying Huckleberry Finn

Those who have never read Huckleberry Finn, or who have not read it recently, have a treat in store.  Here are a few suggestions.  An English teacher in your service area may have additional recommendations.

Make Sure Your Copy of Huckleberry Finn Includes Edward W. Kemble’s Illustrations.  Huckleberry Finn has long been in the public domain and the novel is available at all price points.  The first edition of the book included extensive illustrations by the self-taught artist, Edward W. Kemble (1861-1933.) 

Kemble, who was personally selected by Twain, was only 23 when he illustrated the novel.  More about Kemble is available

here.

And, for fabulous further reading, there is Michael Patrick Hearn’s lavishly illustrated and endlessly interesting 480-page annotated version of the novel. 

The annotated version is a wonderful gift for a family member or friend. Information about it is available

here.

Do Not Become Dispirited or Annoyed About How the Characters Speak.  Twain had a remarkable ear for dialect.  Huckleberry Finn includes this “Explanatory:”

     In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

      I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Anyone who encounters difficulty with the accents of the characters in Huckleberry Finn needs only to read the dialogue aloud—it will be immediately understandable.

Huck and Jim Miss the Turn at Cairo.  In Chapter XVI, Huck and Jim are thrown from the raft and nearly killed by a steamboat.  In the confusion, they pass by the Ohio River and continue down the Mississippi, a crucial event that is not completely clear in the book.

By missing the chance to sail the raft up the Ohio River to the free states, Huck and Jim create a duality: as they run away from Missouri and Jim’s enslavement they are also running toward New Orleans, the center of slavery and a place of great peril for Jim.

Why the Phelps Farm Section of Huckleberry Finn Matters.  Critics have denigrated the post-raft trip section of the book when Tom Sawyer reappears as “irrelevant” (Philip Young) and a “flimsy contrivance” (Leo Marx.)  Tom proposes elaborate schemes to free Jim from captivity on the Phelps farm and Huck seems to become a bystander. 

The speculation that Twain did not know how to end the book is unwarranted.  Matt Zahn, an accomplished English teacher, sees the Phelps farm section this way:

Huck has just traveled with Jim through the dark and treacherous heart of the American South, and he has emerged better.  The trip, and the book, have been picaresque in the best way.  The writing is not overtly moralizing, but it seems so obvious that the adults in the American South have lost their way just as Huck is finding his.  They adhere to strict codes, slavery chief among them, without justification or morality.  Huck can still be impish and rebellious, but now he now knows what he's rebelling against.  

The ending of the book - specifically the 'freeing' of Jim - turns a critical eye toward the abolitionist North and its motivations.  While Huck has vowed to free Jim from the Phelps family and risk going to hell for it, Tom Sawyer sees an opportunity to come up with a plan for personal glory.  It's not enough to simply free Jim (and there are ample opportunities to do so).  Tom wants an elaborate ruse that makes him the savior.  While the rest of the book is a clever and frequently caustic indictment of the American South, it is an easy target.  The final section of the book criticizes the savior complex of the abolitionist North and their (and, sometimes, our) need for recognition as allies and heroes.  Twain uses this section to suggest that Jim shouldn't be saved because of what he represents.  He should be saved because he's human.  

Final Thoughts.  Thank you for reading this far.  If you might explore, or return to, Twain’s work, then this post is a success.

Twain seems to be the most American of authors—a kindred spirit or neighbor to us all.  Here is my connection to him.

My father, who was born in 1922, told me that when he was a boy in Minneapolis his family would periodically see an elderly lady whom he knew as Ms. Wallace. She was rumored to have known Mark Twain. 

The rumors were true.  Elizabeth Wallace (1865-1960) met Mark Twain in Bermuda in 1908 and for the last two years of Twain’s life they exchanged books and letters, and celebrated Thanksgiving together.  In 1923, Wallace and two others became the first women to be named a full professor at the University of Chicago.  She seems to have known everyone.  As one chronicler wrote:

After her University of Chicago career ended, Wallace stayed active until her death in 1960—as a scholar, attending academic conferences all over the world, and as the Zelig-like figure she’d long been, crossing paths with a colorful cast of writers and intellectuals.  Among those she encountered, (both during and after her UChicago career) were Henri Bergson, Marc Chagall, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Emile Zola, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and Edith Wharton.

More about Elizabeth Wallace is available

here.

So, while I did not know Mark Twain, I knew someone who knew someone who knew him.

 Your comments are very welcome.

[1] The title page of the book states, “Scene: The Mississippi Valley” and “Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                                                                   --1919

This post about Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his 1919 poem, “The Second Coming,” originally ran in February 2022. It is relevant today as we begin the second coming of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Poetry and historic occasions, such as a presidential inauguration or a day honoring the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., seem to go together. The poetry-history connection is evident in the tradition of poetry readings in presidential inauguration ceremonies.

At first, Yeats’ vision in “The Second Coming” may not seem uplifting. These lines are especially concerning:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming” should be read as a caution or prediction, not as a definitive conclusion or final verdict. We can look to Dr. King’s life and achievements, and his abundant conviction, as an antidote to the potential world described in “The Second Coming.”

If we maintain and act on our convictions, for example, that a fair, compassionate and democratic America is both possible and something to strive for, then we may avoid the cataclysm of the Second Coming. To give up those convictions is to settle for a nation that will be, at best, what Yeats called a “rough beast.”

The post notes that Yeats described the Irish as “a nation of believers,” something that could also be said of Americans. “The Second Coming,” does not celebrate America’s promise, nor does it describe the nation’s past glories. However, it seems appropriate for today, January 20, 2025.

If the pandemic, climate change, Ukraine, the Middle East, etc.  suggest a societal Great Unraveling, then it is modestly comforting to know that Irish poet William Butler Yeats confronted the same feelings of social entropy and dread of what comes next over a hundred years ago. 

Yeats, considered one of the greatest poets in the English language, wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919 when England and Europe were in the upheaval of World War I and a flu pandemic (which nearly took his wife’s life) was raging.  “The Second Coming” resonates today.

Yeats (pronounced “Yates” even though another English poet, John Keats, is “Keets”) captured the sense of entropy, or a gradual decline into disorder, in “The Second Coming.”  Other writers chronicling disintegrating communities or societies have borrowed phrases from the poem, notably Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart and Joan Didion in her essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Long time (and masterful) New Yorker cartoonist George Booth also used a line from the poem:

The poem begins with six measured couplets that describe the circular path, or gyre, of the falcon that is now beyond the hearing of the falconer. The “mere anarchy” with its “blood-dimmed tide” that is “loosed upon the world” builds to the second stanza’s introduction of the “vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” or spirit of the world.  That spirit has become so degraded that the “second coming” is the antichrist, a sphinx figure: “A shape with lion body and the head of a man.”

“The Second Coming” shows Yeats’ careful use of enjambment—the spilling over of a sentence from one poetic line to the next without any terminal punctuation.  Enjambment stresses the last word in the line by providing a frame of space and a microsecond pause before the reader’s eye moves to the next line.   For example, the enjambed fifth and seventh lines of the first stanza end with the words “everywhere” and “worst”—an accurate summary of the stanza’s essential meaning.

In the last stanza the speaker realizes that “twenty centuries of stony sleep” or 2,000 years, have become a nightmare as a child has nightmares from a rocking cradle. Something uncertain, a “rough beast” is unhurriedly slouching its way to Bethlehem to be born where Christ was born.  In Yeats’ dark vision the descent into social chaos means that something cataclysmic is on the way; we just do not know what it is.

Yeats was also committed to writing about Ireland and national identity. He said, “I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think I shall hold that conviction to the end.”  He was a fervent Irish nationalist and even served six years in the Senate, the Dáil Éireann.  Of Ireland, Yeats said, “We are a nation of believers.”

As a child, he was homeschooled and then sent to art school to follow in the footsteps of his father, a famous portrait painter. One of his report cards said, “Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling.” Undeterred, he quit art school and devoted himself to poetry. His collections include In the Seven Woods (1903), Responsibilities (1904), and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910.)

Yeats became famous in his lifetime. Poet Ezra Pound became his secretary for a time when they shared a cottage in Sussex for several months. Yeats cut a dashing figure in London. A friend said, “Yeats was striding to and fro at the back of the dress circle, a long black cloak drooping from his shoulders, a soft black sombrero on his head, voluminous black silk tie flowing from his collar, loose black trousers dragging untidily over his long, heavy feet.”

Yeats met the great, unrequited love of his life, Maud Gonne, in London. She was tall, beautiful, devoted to Irish nationalism, and did not return his affections. He wrote several plays for her including The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), in which Gonne played the starring role. Yeats proposed to her three times over several decades and each time she refused. The last time she rejected him, he proposed to her daughter, who said no, as well. When Yeats met Maud Gonne, he famously said, “The troubles of my life began.”  

At 52, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees and had two children. They lived in a tower on the outermost edge of Ireland and practiced spiritualism. Yeats had many lovers over the years, but Georgie forgave him.

His other notable poems include “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading About Alexandria!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

     - D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence’s very British assessment of the core elements of the American character seemingly explains conditions such as the epidemic of gun violence or the rise of MAGA-related isolationism in foreign affairs or reduced participation by Americans in community organizations.  However, Lawrence was writing about American literature, and literature is more fun than national pathologies.  

Some of Lawrence’s observations are confirmed in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 noir novel, The Long Good-bye.  The book is fascinating, and moving. It is hard-boiled detective fiction, but it is unexpectedly about the compassion and friendship shown to the dissolute Terry Lenox by the narrator, Philip Marlowe, a tough and stoic Los Angeles private investigator.

Why Detective Fiction Matters

For many years, detective fiction was in the down-market section of American literature’s department store—it was not accorded the respect given to “serious literature.”  Detective fiction is plot and character driven and usually light on themes involving social conditions or big ideas.  The genre often employs slang, which does not age well.  When was the last time a gun was called a “gat” or someone encouraged a person to talk by saying, “Spill”? 

The emphasis on plot and character in detective fiction may account for the enthusiasm with which moviemakers have embraced it.  The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown are among the classic films that feature detectives who work alone. [1]

The appreciation of Chandler’s work by academic authorities may have been slow in coming, but Chandler’s writing offers many reading pleasures. [2] Chandler, an exceptional prose stylist, renders the notion of “guilty pleasure reading” obsolete.  There is only great writing and Chandler’s work qualifies.  The following is an appreciation of The Long Good-bye and, just for fun, some additional thoughts.               

Why the The Long Good-bye Matters

Possibly Chandler’s masterwork, The Long Good-bye turned 70 last year and is the last of his novels featuring Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe.  Marlowe is surprisingly compassionate and generous in his accidental friendship with Lennox, a shiftless drunk.

Marlowe describes Lennox in the novel’s first line which is worthy of anything by Jane Austen or Herman Melville: “The first time I saw Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.” 

Marlowe sobers up Lennox and they begin a casual friendship.  Lennox’s heiress wife, Sylvia, is brutally murdered and Marlowe is sure that Lennox is not the killer. Lennox hires Marlow to drive him to Mexico. Marlowe’s commitment to ascertaining whether Lennox murdered his wife, and whether Lennox subsequently died by suicide in Mexico, drives the novel.

Marlowe navigates a Los Angeles of money, power, deception and self-hatred.  Along the way we meet rich and bored women, aggressive cops with borderline ethics, scheming lawyers, corrupt doctors, mobsters, and a grasping publisher who wants a final book from an anguished and declining writer.  Marlowe moves easily in wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods and in the city’s underworld.

It is not an accident that two of the actors who portrayed Philip Marlowe in the movies are the enduring Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum:

Chandler’s Descriptive Powers

Chandler’s powerful descriptive writing is succinct and efficient.  Here is Marlowe telling us where he lives:

I was living that year in a house on Yucca Avenue in the Laurel Canyon district. It was a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees across the way.  It was furnished, and it belonged to a woman who had gone to Idaho to live with her widowed daughter for a while.  The rent was low, partly because the owner wanted to be able to come back on short notice, and partly because of the steps. She was getting too old to face them every time she came home. (3)

In five plain sentences Chandler locates Marlowe in hilly, quiet and wooded Laurel Canyon and shows that he inclines to numerous (“that year”) and uncomplicated (“furnished”) and thrifty (“The rent was low”) living arrangements.  Marlowe is no homebody. The long flight of redwood steps is not an accident—the steps figure in subsequent scenes. Move over, Ernest Hemingway.

Marlowe is man of long experience and no delusions.  Here he is describing his return drive to Los Angeles after driving Lennox to Mexico:

    It’s a long drag from Tijuana and one of the dullest drives in the state. Tijuana is nothing; all they want there is the buck. The kid who sidles over to your car and looks at you with big wistful eyes and says, ‘One dime, please mister,’ will try to sell you his sister in the next sentence.  Tijuana is not Mexico. No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront. San Diego? One of the most beautiful harbours in the world and in it nothing but navy and a few fishing boats. At night it is fairlyland. The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns. But Marlowe has to get home and count the spoons. (41)

Marlowe seems to talk to us out of the side of his mouth.  His anecdotes convey his worldly experience with border towns and waterfronts and his jesting idiom (“count the spoons” dates from the 1840’s) illustrates his cynical attitude about the departure of the untrustworthy Lennox.

Speaking Truth to Wealth and Power

The Long Good-bye’s many joys include razor sharp dialogue.  A private eye, Marlowe represents himself without any police-community relations faux courtesy.  Marlowe tells off police officials, mobsters, and the great and powerful of Los Angeles with equal force and effect.

Here is Marlowe talking to the powerful and manipulative Los Angeles business titan, Harlan Potter [4]:

I got your point all right, Mr. Potter. You don’t like the way the world is going so you use what power you have to close off a private corner to live in as near as possible to the way you remember people lived fifty years ago before the age of mass production. You’ve got a hundred million dollars and all it has brought you is a pain in the neck. (276)

Marlowe is “isolate” in D.H. Lawrence’s terms because he lacks organizational connections and restraints—he reports to nobody and nobody reports to him—which gives him the freedom to say exactly what he thinks in blunt ways.  Many of us lead lives filled with compromises; it is fun to watch Marlowe move through life on his own terms.

Marlowe reserves special contempt for people who are not genuine.  Marlow talks back to the evil hoodlum Mendy Menendez even as Menendez beats him up and threatens to kill him:

‘Lennox was your pal,’ I said, and watched his eyes. ‘He got dead. He got buried like a dog without even a name over the dirt where they put his body.  And I had a little something to do with proving him innocent. So that makes you look bad, huh? He saved your life and he lost his, and that didn’t mean a thing to you.  All that means anything to you is playing the big shot.  You didn’t give a hoot in hell for anybody but yourself. You’re not big, you’re just loud.” (410)

Moral Choices, Big and Small 

Menendez tries to insult Marlowe by calling him “cheapie.”  It does not work.  Marlowe’s attitude about money and his refusal to be bought are central to his identity.

Marlowe charges Lennox $500 and a gun to drive him to Mexico.  Lennox subsequently sends a $5,000 bill [5] to Marlow who keeps it in his safe.  Describing the eventual disposition of the $5,000 bill would be a spoiler. However, that disposition is consistent with what we know about Marlowe who is described by another character in a climactic scene as having, “no price tag.”

The ultra-wealthy Potter is inconvenienced by Marlowe’s investigation and wants to buy Marlowe off.   He asks, “What do you want from me, Marlowe?”  Marlowe responds, “If you mean how much money, nothing.” (277)

Marlowe’s attitude about money recalls that of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart, deprecates the Maltese Falcon, an item of supposedly inestimable value that almost everyone in the movie chases, by calling it, “the dingus.”

Fidelity to the truth is another trait that makes Marlowe fascinating.  Marlowe’s loyalty is not to a person or persons or an organization. Marlowe is not focused on “my truth” in today’s phrase. Rather, Marlowe is dedicated to the truth as an objective ideal—the most accurate version of what actually happened.

Marlowe’s obsession with the truth and his refusal to be bought off are a powerful combination. Here is Marlowe explaining things to Potter just before Potter tries to buy him off:

That’s all there is, there isn’t any more. You don’t care who murdered your daughter, Mr. Potter. You wrote her off as a bad job long ago. Even if Terry Lennox didn’t kill her, and the real murderer is still walking around free, you don’t care. You wouldn’t want him caught because that would revive the scandal and there would have to be a trial and his defence would blow your privacy as high as the Empire State Building. Unless, of course, he was obliging enough to commit suicide, before there was any trial.  Preferably in Tahiti or Guatemala or the middle of the Sahara Desert.  Anywhere the County would hate the expense of sending a man to verify what had happened. (275)

The contrast could not be clearer: unlike Potter, Marlowe cares about discovering who killed Sylvia Lennox, cares about whether the real murderer is walking around free, cares about whether Lennox died by suicide, and does not care if the facts come out. Marlowe is a man with clear principles and he lives by those principles.

Marlowe knows how to stay on the right side of the law, but he delights in insulting the police.  Marlowe’s counterpart from the contemporary underworld might be The Wire’s Omar Little (Michael K. Williams.)  Omar robs drug dealers, but he follows his own rules which include not using, “my gun on people not in the game.” D.H. Lawrence’s description—“hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”—seems to fit Omar.

In this scene Omar explains how his world works to Detective Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) of the Baltimore Police Department.  Omar, a fatalist, tells Moreland that he will probably be “seeing God,” or dead, before he takes an oath before God and testifies in court. Moreland tells Omar that even if he is not guilty of the crime (Moreland describes it as a “taxpayer murder with an eyeball witness”) for which he has been arrested, Omar is surely guilty of numerous other serious crimes.

Omar acknowledges what he has done, but points out that if he is convicted for an offense he did not commit an injustice occurs because the guilty party escapes punishment. Omar reminds Bunk, “A man got to have a code.”

Why Loaners With Codes Fascinate Us

Joan Didion describes our enduring fascination of characters like Philip Marlowe and Omar Little in her essay, 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38 [6]:

Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.

If you have read this far, thank you.  I hope you will consider reading The Long Good-bye, a wonderful addition to the narratives of American loners who live by moral codes.

Your comments are very welcome.

[1] Pauline Kael’s 1973 review of Robert Altman’s movie version of The Long Goodbye quotes highbrow critic Edmund Wilson who describes his “old crime-story depression.” For Wilson, detective fiction, “…fails to justify the excitement produced by the picturesque and sinister happenings, and I cannot help feeling cheated.” Kael’s review can be seen

here.

[2] Detective fiction’s close relative, crime fiction, has also gained increasing respect from literary authorities.  The Library of America publishes hardcover anthologies of works by writers who are deemed worthy, thus becoming a kind of cultural gatekeeper. Crime fiction master Elmore Leonard’s novels (Get Shorty, Be Cool, Riding the Rap, and many others) have been published by the Library of America.  Leonard’s best-known character is Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens who resembles Marlowe with a badge.  More about Leonard is available

here.

Collections of Chandler’s novels have also been published by the Library of America and can seen

here.

[3] All page citations are to The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, Penguin Books, 2010.

[4] Perhaps Harlan Potter is related to Henry F. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore), the businessman who dominates Bedford Falls in Frank Capra’s movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.

[5] About $57,000 in today’s dollars.

[6] Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1968, p. 71.

Wendell Berry, 89, is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essay writer, and advocate. 

Berry has a long history of commitment to a variety of causes.  He was vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War, against the death penalty, and against mountain top removal coal mining. Berry’s activism includes opposition to large-scale agribusiness.

Berry was born in Henry County in north central Kentucky.  Berry has lived and farmed in Port Royal, Kentucky since 1965.  He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and essays, and has won many literary awards.

Berry’s stature as a poet, and his personal appeal and authenticity, have led to numerous profiles including one in The New Yorker in February 2022.  It can be seen

here.

If the world sometimes seems to be on fire, Berry’s poetry is a refuge.

Here are two of Berry’s short poems that are worth thinking about as 2023, a difficult year, comes to an end. 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

            —1968

Here is a video of Berry reading the poem:

“The Peace of Wild Things” was the title poem in a collection that Berry published in 1968.  In a year of tragic deaths (Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)  Berry found solace and peace, “…where the wood drake/ rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

English teachers talk about diction, or word choice, in poetry. Berry choses his words very carefully. A drake is a mature male duck—this graceful word adds to the poem’s simple elegance and confirms the speaker’s familiarity with nature.  The speaker knows exactly what he is looking at when he sees the drake.

Similarly, the speaker describes the heron as “great,” evoking a heron’s majestic stillness and deliberate gait in a wetland. The greatness of the heron goes beyond its possible identity as a great blue heron, a specific species.

The power of the poem is in the intensity of the speaker’s personal impressions.  The repeated pronoun “I”, and the active voice, invite a sharing of the those experiences: “I wake” and “I go and lie down” and “I come into the peace of wild things” and “I come into the presence of still water” and “I feel above me the day-blind stars” and “I rest in the grace of the world.”

The breaks in the 11 lines of the poem emphasize the most important words and ideas at the end of each line: “me,” “sound,” “be,” “drake,” “heron feeds,” “wild things,” “forethought,” “still water,” “blind stars, “a time” and “am free.” The sequence of these words is very nearly another poem.

Berry is that rare artist willing to express his flawed humanity while acknowledging his gifts. That remarkable juxtaposition is on view in this poem:

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

          —1973

Five years later, Berry published a collection of poems called The Country of Marriage, that contained “A Warning to My Readers.”

This 11-line poem, with lines of no more than five words each, is a marvel of concise expression.  Berry, in an act of rare artistic humility, disclaims moral or personal superiority and aligns himself with us, his flawed readers.

In Joan Didion’s essay Why I Write (a titled borrowed from George Orwell) she explained:

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

Wendell Berry intrudes on our “most private space” as readers with full disclosure and special courtesy.

“A Warning to My Readers” also acknowledges that the debate, or process, of distinguishing an artist’s personal qualities from the meaning and effect of his or her art will never be finally resolved.  Poets, painters, singers, and others—many of the greatest can be very difficult people.  The saintly-looking and revered poet Robert Frost is revealed in biographies as a very difficult man.  Frank Sinatra, a transcendent singer, had according to every account of his life, thuggish personal qualities.

Berry, with unusual candor, dispels any confusion that, as the creator of poems like “The Peace of Wild Things,” he is a superior person.  He separates his art (“I honor the grace/that keeps this world”) from his personal qualities (“a man as crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant/stubborn, angry, full/of fits and furies”) for us. 

Berry, acutely self-aware, views his gift for poetry (“That I/may have spoken well/at times”) as “A wonder is what it is.” In so doing, he draws us closer to him and to what he has to say.

Your comments are very welcome.

The Lincoln of Our Literature

American author and critic William Dean Howells (1837-1920) called Mark Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature.” 

Howells’ compliment is about the highest possible praise, and Twain is still very much with us. Since 1998, the John F.  Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to “…individuals who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th-century novelist and essayist Samuel Clemens, best known as Mark Twain. As a social commentator, satirist, and creator of characters, Clemens was a fearless observer of society, who startled many while delighting and informing many more with his uncompromising perspective on social injustice and personal folly.”  Information on the Mark Twain Prize, and its recipients, is available 

here.

Howells’ Lincoln-Twain comparison extends to the lively sense of humor that each man possessed. Lincoln, of course, was constrained by the need to be seen as a statesman, but there are extensive accounts of his fondness for jokes.  Historians have written that Lincoln was belatedly invited to make remarks at the ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania because it was feared that he would not be sufficiently serious or somber.  Twain, however, gave free reign to his gift for humor, particularly when he could aim it at other writers whose reputations or work he considered overblown.

Twain’s sense of humor is evident in novels (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and short stories (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County) and in his very successful career as a traveling lecturer. The late Hal Holbrook portrayed Twain as a speaker in his long-running one man show, Mark Twain Tonight!  

Twain’s willingness to make fun of other writers, including eminent authors, is evident in an 1898 letter describing his opinion of Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) classic novel, Pride and Prejudice.  Twain wrote, “I have to stop every time I begin.  Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Twain was a widely-traveled and sophisticated man who delighted in posing as an uncouth character.  Whether his loathing of Jane Austen’s work was genuine or professed for comic effect is debatable, but there seems to be little doubt that Twain was at his funniest when he posed as a literary critic.

So, in these anxiety-filled times when a good laugh is a valuable thing it is worth pausing to enjoy Twain’s 1895 essay, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, which appears in numerous anthologies and can be read

here.

Twain Takes on James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper was a successful author of historical romances featuring colonial and indigenous characters.  Cooper’s fictional scout, Natty Bumppo, appears in several of his books.  Cooper’s romantic vision of the American frontier is evident in The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841) which are collectively called the Leatherstocking Tales.  Cooper’s reputation, and his success, made his works an inviting target for Twain.

Cooper’s writing owes much to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), author of The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown and other works. This passage from The Deerslayer exemplifies Cooper’s elaborate descriptive style:

The arches of the woods, even at high noon, cast their sombre shadows on the spot, which the brilliant rays of the sun that struggled through the leaves contributed to mellow, and if such an expression can be used, to illuminate. It was probably from a similar scene that the mind of man first got its idea of the effects of gothic tracery and churchly hues, this temple of nature producing some such effect, so far as light and shadow were concerned, as the well-known offspring of human invention.

It is difficult to imagine Twain writing this way.  As a writer, Cooper was of his time, but Twain’s works, particularly Huckleberry Finn, show that he was of his time and is highly relevant in our time.    

Twain begins Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences by quoting extravagant praise for Cooper’s works by professors at Yale and Columbia and by a critic, Wilkie Collins.  The essay draws us in this way:

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Twain’s understated and effective word choice (“decorous”) and the sly suggestion that the literary experts would not praise Cooper’s work as they did if they had read it launches the essay.  More devastating understatement follows:

Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115.  It breaks the record.

Only Mark Twain could describe 114 out of 115 “offences against literary art” in two-thirds of a page as “some defects.”  It is hard to read Twain’s essay without laughing, audibly or otherwise.

Was Twain being mean to the deceased Cooper to score a few cheap laughs?  There is a comedic intent to Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences but the essay also signifies Twain’s revolt as a modern artist against the work of a romantic traditionalist, Cooper. 

T.S. Eliot, a modernist by any standard, wrote an introduction to a 1950 edition of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which praises the novel’s stylistic “innovation.”  For Eliot, Twain’s “new discovery” is the creation of “natural speech in relation to particular characters” without a single “sentence or phrase” compromising the illusion of each character’s voice.  Twain’s characters sound completely authentic and true to themselves and not like figures in a romanticized vision of the American frontier. More about Mark Twain as a modernist writer can be seen

here.

Why Huckleberry Finn Still Matters

After years of start-and-stop work, Twain completed Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884.  The heart of the book are the adventures on a raft trip down the Mississippi River by the runaway slave, Jim, and the wise-beyond-his years Huck.  The raft trip, in about 1835[1], transports us in many ways. Huck and Jim have a series of encounters that involve philosophy, social observation, the nature of friendship, humor and race relations.

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” said Ernest Hemingway, calling it, “the best book we’ve had … There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”  Yet, Huckleberry Finn is among the most banned books in schools and a controversy continues over whether the n-word, which appears 219 times in the novel, should be replaced with “slave” or a similar word.

 The American Library Association has designated Huckleberry Finn as one of the “most challenged” books.  The irony in the attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn or “update” Huck’s language to align with modern sensibilities is that Huck repeatedly makes decisions involving his relationship with Jim, and about how he and Jim deal with race in America, that almost anyone would think of as enlightened or progressive.

Huck, about 13, lacks formal education (his father, Pap, a mean drunk, does not want him to go to school) but the lessons he teaches in his acts and words are profound.  Even more impressive, there is nothing teacherly about what he does—he lives life as it comes.

Huck’s crisis of conscience—the book’s moral center—occurs in Chapter 31 when Jim is held captive and Huck decides to write Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, a letter telling her where Jim is so that Jim, her property, can be returned to a life of slavery.  Huck writes the letter and then tells us:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray, now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking; thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storm, and a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.

Huck sees the letter and says:

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Huck’s decision to “go to hell”—to defy the legal conventions associated with the slavery system —demonstrates Twain’s literary genius.  The novel is a masterpiece of language, plot and character. About 20 years after the Civil War and roughly a century before the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, Twain has Huck condemn America’s pervasive racial inequality in compelling moral terms understandable to everyone.

 A Brief Guide to Enjoying Huckleberry Finn

Those who have never read Huckleberry Finn, or who have not read it recently, have a treat in store.  Here are a few suggestions.  An English teacher in your service area may have additional recommendations.

Make Sure Your Copy of Huckleberry Finn Includes Edward W. Kemble’s Illustrations.  Huckleberry Finn has long been in the public domain and the novel is available at all price points.  The first edition of the book included extensive illustrations by the self-taught artist, Edward W. Kemble (1861-1933.) 

Kemble, who was personally selected by Twain, was only 23 when he illustrated the novel.  More about Kemble is available

here.

And, for fabulous further reading, there is Michael Patrick Hearn’s lavishly illustrated and endlessly interesting 480-page annotated version of the novel. 

The annotated version is a wonderful gift for a family member or friend. Information about it is available

here.

Do Not Become Dispirited or Annoyed About How the Characters Speak.  Twain had a remarkable ear for dialect.  Huckleberry Finn includes this “Explanatory:”

     In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

      I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Anyone who encounters difficulty with the accents of the characters in Huckleberry Finn needs only to read the dialogue aloud—it will be immediately understandable.

Huck and Jim Miss the Turn at Cairo.  In Chapter XVI, Huck and Jim are nearly killed by a steamboat and are thrown from the raft.  In the confusion, they pass by the Ohio River and continue down the Mississippi, a crucial event that is not completely clear in the book.

By missing the chance to sail the raft up the Ohio River to the free states Huck and Jim create a duality: as they run away from Missouri and Jim’s enslavement they are also running toward New Orleans, the center of slavery and a place of great peril for Jim.

Why the Phelps Farm Section of Huckleberry Finn Matters.  Critics have denigrated the post-raft trip section of the book when Tom Sawyer reappears as “irrelevant” (Philip Young) and a “flimsy contrivance” (Leo Marx.)  Tom proposes elaborate schemes to free Jim from captivity on the Phelps farm and Huck seems to become a bystander. 

The speculation that Twain did not know how to end the book is unwarranted.  Matt Zahn, an accomplished English teacher, sees the Phelps farm section this way:

Huck has just traveled with Jim through the dark and treacherous heart of the American South, and he has emerged better.  The trip, and the book, have been picaresque in the best way.  The writing is not overtly moralizing, but it seems so obvious that the adults in the American South have lost their way just as Huck is finding his.  They adhere to strict codes, slavery chief among them, without justification or morality.  Huck can still be impish and rebellious, but now he now knows what he's rebelling against.  

The ending of the book - specifically the 'freeing' of Jim - turns a critical eye toward the abolitionist North and its motivations.  While Huck has vowed to free Jim from the Phelps family and risk going to hell for it, Tom Sawyer sees an opportunity to come up with a plan for personal glory.  It's not enough to simply free Jim (and there are ample opportunities to do so).  Tom wants an elaborate ruse that makes him the savior.  While the rest of the book is a clever and frequently caustic indictment of the American South, it is an easy target.  The final section of the book criticizes the savior complex of the abolitionist North and their (and, sometimes, our) need for recognition as allies and heroes.  Twain uses this section to suggest that Jim shouldn't be saved because of what he represents.  He should be saved because he's human.  

Final Thoughts.  Thank you for reading this far.  If you might explore, or return to, Twain’s work, then this post is a success.

Twain seems to be the most American of authors—a kindred spirit or neighbor to us all.  Here is my connection to him.

My father, who was born in 1922, told me that when he was a boy in Minneapolis his family would periodically see an elderly lady whom he knew as Ms. Wallace. She was rumored to have known Mark Twain. 

The rumors were true.  Elizabeth Wallace (1865-1960) met Mark Twain in Bermuda in 1908 and for the last two years of Twain’s life they exchanged books and letters, and celebrated Thanksgiving together.  In 1923, Wallace and two others became the first women to be named full professors at the University of Chicago.  She seems to have known everyone.  As one chronicler wrote:

After her University of Chicago career ended, Wallace stayed active until her death in 1960—as a scholar, attending academic conferences all over the world, and as the Zelig-like figure she’d long been, crossing paths with a colorful cast of writers and intellectuals.  Among those she encountered, (both during and after her UChicago career) were Henri Bergson, Marc Chagall, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Emile Zola, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and Edith Wharton.

More about Elizabeth Wallace is available

here.

So, while I did not know Mark Twain, I knew someone who knew someone who knew him.

 Your comments are very welcome.

[1]  The title page of the book states “Scene: The Mississippi Valley” and “Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago.”

The first and last stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are shown below. You can read the complete poem

here.

1

Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

* * *

9

* * *

We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through your color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

     --1856

In 1855, the then unknown Whitman chose this portrait to run opposite the title page of his first collection of poems, Leaves of Grass.  Whitman’s image of himself as a poet-pirate announced a new literary esthetic for a rapidly expanding America.

Whitman sent an unsolicited copy of the self-published Leaves of Grass to Ralph Waldo Emerson, then the most prominent person in American literature.  On July 21, 1855, Emerson responded with a generous and encouraging letter about Whitman’s work:

I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat & mean.  I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception can only inspire.  I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.

Whitman saw the value of the letter immediately and publicized it as widely as he could.

Emerson was intuitively correct—Whitman’s “long foreground somewhere” included work as a printer’s assistant, typesetter, teacher and as the founder and editor of the Long Islander.  In 1846, he became the editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, where he was fired for political reasons.  In the years before publishing Leaves of Grass Whitman ran a printing business, a bookstore, and a housebuilding business.  He wrote freelance journalism before he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass which he revised and added to for the rest of his life.

The “Sun-Down Poem” Becomes “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Whitman published new poems the next year, 1856, in a second edition of Leaves of Grass.  One of these new poems, the “Sun-Down Poem,” was continually revised and by 1860 it was called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”  The poem’s buoyant 12 stanzas are an antidote to our era’s text/email/tweet abbreviated communications modes.

Whitman’s torrent of words may be off-putting to those who like poetry in Emily Dickinson-style super-concentrated language.  Yet, Whitman (and this is especially true when “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is read aloud) is not wordy.  You are sincerely encouraged to read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” slowly and, if possible, aloud.  It will absolutely be worth your time.

Whitman and New York’s Ferries

Whitman, a Long Island native, was intimately familiar with the ferries in the New York archipelago.  In Specimen Days, one of his prose works, Whitman echoes the poem when he describes his relationship with the ferries and waterways of New York:

Living in Brooklyn or New York city from this time forward, my life, then, and still more the following years was curiously identified with Fulton ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity and picturesequeness.  Almost daily, late (’50 to ’60) I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilothouses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath—the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements.

Reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” jumps off the page with energy.  Whitman personifies and addresses the natural world directly.  In the first stanza, he sees “face to face” both the “[f]lood tide below me” and the “[c]louds of the west.”

Whitman’s vision and imaginative embrace include the ferry passengers he sees and everyone who has ever taken, or ever will take, the ferry.  The third stanza begins:      

It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.

The lengthy recital of shared experiences and images which follows consolidates a feeling of surpassing commonality and community—Whitman professes an intense and indiscriminate affection for others, seen and unseen.

The expansiveness of Whitman’s view—he seems to see everything before him in great detail—matches the expanse of his embrace of humanity.  Whitman exults that:

I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water, that
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,

Stanza 5 takes the other side of the argument by examining that which divides us—doubt, human failure, and evil in various forms.  Whitman frames the possible divide between his countrymen this way:

            What is it then between us?

            What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever the differences are that divide Americans, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” assures that such differences can be overcome. Whitman tell us that “it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.”   

According to Whitman, our shared experience includes the affirmative and the negative aspects of life and experience. Stanza 7 shows Whitman’s surpassing empathy for others:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

Whitman and the Civil War

The empathy Whitman showed for others in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was evident in his life, not just in what he wrote.  Whitman was too old to fight in the Civil War but he was deeply moved by an 1862 visit to the front when his brother, George, was wounded fighting for the Union at Fredericksburg. George sustained a minor injury but Whitman never forgot the carnage he saw at the front.

Whitman returned to Washington where he became almost a full-time daily nurse and comforter to wounded soldiers from both sides of the war who were hospitalized in Washington.  Much of his later poetry describes his experiences going from ward to ward to comfort soldiers recuperating from devastating wounds.

The story of Whitman’s selfless, and self-imposed, service on behalf of the wounded of the Civil War is told eloquently in a 2008 PBS American Experience documentary.  Information on the film is available

here.

Critical Perspectives

Yale professor and literature mega-authority Harold Bloom wrote an Introduction and Celebration to a 2005 reprint of the first edition of Leaves of Grass which marked 150 years since the book’s publication. (1)

Even though “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was not included in the first edition, Bloom could not resist quoting the poem’s ninth stanza:

I have titled this introduction a “celebration,” not only because it is now a century and a half since Leaves of Grass was first published, but also to show gratitude to Whitman.  Who except Whitman could have so greatly redeemed the entire tradition of Western Literature?

Bloom, a rigorous critic, holds Whitman in the highest possible regard.  His Introduction and Celebration, calls Whitman “…still the greatest writer engendered by the New World, whether in American English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.  None of the possible rivals in the United States is finally of Whitman’s eminence.” 

For Bloom, Whitman’s genius is in the strength of the connections the poet establishes with his readers. Bloom “can think of no other poet who addresses the reader as directly,” as exemplified by this:

Closer yet I approach you;
What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance;
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.
   
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me

Bloom asks, in wonderment and admiration:

How could the “Sun-Down Poem” of the second Leaves of Grass (1856), later retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” change so radically the immemorial covenant of intimate separations between reader and poet?

Other authorities are similarly admiring of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:”

With exalted and sustained inspiration the poet presents a transcendent reality unlimited by the tyranny of time or person a space, a poetic demonstration of the power of appearances—”dumb, beautiful ministers”—to affirm the soul. Philosophical in theme, the poem is yet profoundly personal—his own daily experience made illustrious—and its strength lies in its aesthetic vision. (2)

Why Whitman Connects to Our Time

Editorial writers and columnists now write endlessly about our tendencies to atomization and tribalism.  Our politics and social interactions often devolve into insular social or interest groups that show anything from a guarded attitude to outright hatred of the “other”—people who look or think or act differently from “us.” Whitman reminds us that, even with the looming Civil War, Americans had, and still have, much more in common than that which divides us.

When the rhetoric of hatred or denigration of the “other” becomes essential political rhetoric it results in the rise of fascism.  Yale professor Jason Stanley writes, in his acclaimed book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (3):

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division.  It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”  Many kinds of political movements involve such a division; for example, Communist politics weaponizes class divisions.  Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. (p. xvi)

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” does not just, as Bloom said, “change the separations between reader and poet.”  The poem obliterates the concept of the “other,” or reduces it to something inconsequential. 

Some people have adopted the practice, in correspondence and elsewhere, of identifying their pronoun choices, for example, “she/her” or “he/him” or “they/their.” For Whitman, there is no “you and I” and there is barely an “us” or a “we.”  He is the poet of a world in which pronouns are unnecessary.

The final stanza of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is worth special attention.  Whitman brings the poem to a crescendo that emphasizes the oneness of human experience, including the “dumb ministers” of nature and appearances. Whitman’s final call for inclusion is magisterial:

We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Final Thoughts

Two concluding thoughts for those who have read this far:  First, thank you very much.  Second, please take a minute to read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” again.

Of course, your comments are very welcome.

(1) Leaves of Grass—The First (1855) Edition, Penguin Books, New York, (2005.)

(2) Leaves of Grass—Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, (1965) edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, p. 159.

(3) How Fascism Works—The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley, Random House, New York, (2018.)

George Orwell

Moral and mental glaciers melting slightly

Betray the influence of his warm intent.

Because he taught us what the actual meant

The vicious winter grips its prey less tightly.

Not all were grateful for his help, one finds,

For how they hated him, who huddled with

The comfort of a quick remedial myth

Against the cold world and their colder minds.

We die of words. For touchstones he restored

The real person, real event or thing;

--And thus we see not war but suffering

As the conjunction to be most abhorred.

He shared with a great world, for greater ends,

That honesty, a curious cunning virtue

You share with just the few who don’t desert you.

A dozen writers, a half-a-dozen friends.

A moral genius. And truth-seeking brings

Sometimes a silliness we view askance,

Like Darwin playing his bassoon to plants;

He too had lapses, but he claimed no wings

While those who drown a truth’s empiric part

In dithyramb* or dogma turn frenetic;

--Than whom no writer could be less poetic

He left this lesson for all verse, all art.

                     --Robert Conquest (1969)

*A wild or inflated speech or writing.

Master Essayist

Robert Conquest’s tribute poem, “George Orwell,” was written in l969 during the Cold War when the prospect of nuclear winter was always present.  Now, with the return of the Cold War or something similar, Orwell and his special talent as an essayist and truth-teller are especially relevant. [1]

Orwell’s essays are justly celebrated.[2]  In The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, William E. Cain describes Orwell’s accomplishments as an essayist:

Resistant to any type of corporate mentality, Orwell crafted essays to prompt and and press readers toward independence of vision, uncommon common sense, and integrity of mind.  This motive informs Orwell’s best novels, his political satires Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which secured his place in literary history.  But his achievement as author of these novels has prevented us from gauging the full power and richness of the work he produced in the same decade in essays, newspaper columns, review articles and book reviews…what Orwell did in these years as an essayist is one of the major achievements of modern literature.  (p. 77)        

Orwell was perceptive about some of the character qualities that contributed to his work as an essayist.[3]  In his essay, Why I Write (1946) he said:

I knew I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. 

What follows is a short appreciation of one of Orwell’s most compelling essays and some thoughts on how the essay relates to unpleasant facts in today’s struggle between democracies and authoritarian regimes.

The Intersection of Writing, Thought and Government

In 1946, Orwell wrote Politics and the English Language.  Here is the essay’s brilliant opening:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse.  It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental anachronism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.  Underneath this lies half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument we shape for our own purposes.

Orwell deftly enlists us in his argument—if we read any further we belong to his club of “people who bother with the matter [the English language] at all.”  He then articulates the “general assumption” that “we cannot by conscious action do anything about it”—something he completely disproves in the essay.  The third point, that civilization`s degrading contributes to the collapse of language (and writing) becomes something different in the essay: Orwell shows that speech and writing, particularly by governments, is a cause, not just an effect, of debased civilized norms.  The essay demonstrates that language is, in fact, “an instrument we shape for our own purposes.”

Politics and the English Language seems to be a cheerful argument for better writing hygiene, but it is much more than that.[4] The essay unites two themes: the importance of clear and precise written expression and the uses of language by governments and politicians to advance their agendas. These agendas can range from regime perpetuation to disguising ineptitude to genocide or combinations of the these and other goals. 

Orwell analyzes five passages from two leading professors, a magazine essay, a Communist party pamphlet and a letter to the editor.  Before pointing out specific problems with each one, he provides this overview:

   Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.  The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.  The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially any kind of political writing.

The essay, to the joy of generations of English teachers, rails in lively ways against cliches, awkward constructions, circumlocutions and other writing problems in sections attacking “Dying Metaphors,” “Pretentious Diction,” “Meaningless Words.” The essay also explains the cost to writers of imprecise writing and defective usages:

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader, but for yourself.

Orwell detonates the “general assumption” described in the opening of the essay—that writing and expression cannot be improved by “conscious action”—by showing exactly how to do it:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?  And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?  But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.  They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.  It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

The exploration of the “special connection” between politics and the debasement of language is the heart of the essay. As Orwell describes it, when “some tired hack on the platform [is] mechanically repeating the familiar phrases,” we develop mental lassitude.  This produces in the audience (the electorate), “a reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, [that] is at any rate favorable to political conformity." Thus, the status quo sought by politicians in power is perpetuated.

            Orwell drives the point home:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.  Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

What We Can Learn from Orwell Today

There is persuasive evidence that Orwell’s thinking enhances our understanding of events today.  In her essay, They’re Not Human Beings—Ukraine and the Words that Lead to Mass Murder, in the June 2022 issue of The Atlantic, historian and journalist Anne Appelbaum[5] describes the connections between language and Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and how the war has been prosecuted.

The Russian government and media (there appears to be no difference between the two) described the invasion of Ukraine in language asserting that Ukraine is not really a nation, that Russia had “no choice” except to invade, that the conflict is not a war but rather a “strategic military operation,” and that the war is for the purpose of “de-Nazification.”  Each of these phrases seeks to justify evil. Many of these concepts were described in writing by Russian President Vladimir Putin before the invasion.

Appelbaum argues that language such as this does not just enable the war and genocide, it is essential to it.  Appelbaum describes the relationship between language and behavior in words that could have been written by Orwell:

 In Putin’s language and the language of most Russian television commentators, the Ukrainians have no agency.  They can’t make choices for themselves. They can’t elect a government for themselves. They aren’t even human—they are “Nazis.”

Politics and the English Language asserts that in 1946, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”  This is true in the speech and writing justifying Russia’s war on Ukraine which increasingly involves acts of genocide.

Appelbaum extends Orwell’s argument about the language used by governments and how it influences their behavior:

The relationship between genocidal language and genocidal behavior is not automatic or even predictable.  Human beings can insult one another, demean one another, and verbally abuse one another without trying to kill one another.  But while not every use of hate speech leads to genocide,  all genocides have been preceded by hate speech.

Appelbaum and Orwell remind us that how we say what we say and write matters.  This is particularly true of governments.  Imprecise or cloudy language contributes to imprecise or cloudy thinking or worse in the case of authoritarian regimes.  It also induces that “reduced state of consciousness” favorable to political conformity that Orwell described. We need to pay attention. The citizen’s duty is to be as watchful and thoughtful as possible about what political leaders say or write.

1.  Orwell’s life resonates because it demonstrated commitment to the values articulated in his writings. As a young man, Orwell was an imperial policeman in what was then Burma. Later, he wrote effectively about the evils of imperialism in his essay, Shooting an Elephant. He portrayed the experiences of struggling English coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and of the underclass in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933.)  Orwell was wounded while fighting Franco’s fascist forces in Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Homage to Catalonia (1938), one of the best nonfiction accounts of life in armed combat. 

2. There are collections of Orwell’s essays in various lengths.  A Collection of Essays (Harcourt Brace & Company, New York 1946) contains essays on Dickens, Kipling and Gandhi, and Orwell’s classic, Such, Such Were the Joys…, about his miserable experience as a boarding student on scholarship in an elite English school.  Few other writers could begin an essay this way:

Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed.  I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier.

3. Orwell’s literary assault on authoritarianism inspired readers outside the United Kingdom.   In his book, Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books 2002), Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) described Orwell this way:

But this gaunt and aloof person underwent his two crucial epiphanies of Burma and Catalonia; and his work in its smuggled form was later to kindle a spark in the Siberias of the world, warming the hearts of shivering Poles and Ukrainians and helping to melt the permafrost of Stalinism.  If Lenin had not uttered the maxim ‘the heart on fire and the brain on ice,” it might have suited Orwell, whose passion and generosity were rivalled only by his detachment and reserve. [2]

Why Orwell Matters may be one of the best secondary sources on Orwell who has attained a sort of secular sainthood that obscures who he was a person.  Hitchens devotes separate chapters in his efficiently-written book to aspects of Orwell’s thinking, for example, “Orwell and Empire,” “Orwell and the Left,” “Orwell and the Right,” “Orwell and America,” etc.  An oversimplified takeaway might be that Orwell was neither right about everything nor admirable in every way as a person, but history has proven him right about the big issues of his time on which he expressed himself clearly and fearlessly.

4.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with books or essays advocating techniques for better writing.  However, the prescriptive or scolding tone of some of these books can be off-putting. This may explain the enduring appeal of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.  The book, which originated as a Cornell University English class handout, is helpful without being didactic. Contact the English teacher in your service area for additional recommendations.

5.  Appelbaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. She is a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former member of the editorial board of The Washington Post. Her book, Gulag: A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

“Dearborn Suite” by Philip Levine

1.

Middle-aged, supremely bored

with his wife, hating his work,

unable to sleep, he rises

from bed to pace his mansion

in slippers and robe, wondering

if this is all there ever

will be to becoming Henry Ford

the man who created

the modern world.  The skies

above the great Rouge factory

are black with coke smoke, starless,

the world is starless now, all

because he remade it in

his image, no small reward.

2.

Monday comes, as it must, with a pale

moon sinking below the elms.

They told us another dawn was

on the way, possibly held up

by traffic on Grand Boulevard

or by Henry, master of Dearborn,

who loathes sharing the light

with the unenlightened among us.

That was 60 years ago.

The day arrived, a weak sun

but none the less an actual

one, its sooty light bathing

walls, windows, eyelids while

old pal moon drifted off to sleep.

3.

As a boy I’d known these fields

rife with wild phlox in April,

where at night the red-tailed fox

came to prey and the horned owl

split the air in a sudden rush

for its kill.  I loved that world

with its little woods that held

their darkness and the still ponds

clear as ice, that held the stars

each night until the dawn broke

into fenced plots of land,

claimed and named, barns and stables,

white houses with eyes shut tight

against the intrusion of sight.

4.

Hell is here in the forge room

where the giant presses stamp

out body parts and the smell

of burning skin seeps into

our hair and under our nails.

The old man, King Henry, punches in

for the night shift with us,

his beloved coloreds and Yids,

to work until the shattered

windows gray.  There is a justice

after all, there’s a bright anthem

for the occasion, something

familiar and blue, with words we

all sing, like “Time on My Hands.”

                                      --2008

Philip Levine, Poet

Philip Levine (1928—2015) was described as “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland” by poet and critic Edward Hirsch. 

Levine, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, was born and raised in Detroit.  At 14, he began working in automobile plants.  Much of Levine’s poetry is from the perspective of industrial workers.  His poems are direct, accessible, realistic and sometimes grim. 

He graduated from what is now Wayne State University in Detroit in 1950 and attended the University of Iowa where he studied with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman.  After earning a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 1957 Levine joined the English department at California State University, Fresno where he taught until he retired in 1992. In 2011-2012 he was the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Images of Light and Dark

“Dearborn Suite” was published in The New Yorker in 2008. The poem begins with a restless Henry Ford at the peak of his career pacing at night in Fairlane, his Dearborn, Michigan mansion.  Ford wonders “if this is all there ever will be” to becoming the man who (as the stanza break emphasizes) created “the modern world.”[1]

Much of “Dearborn Suite” explores images of light and darkness.  The poem shows Ford’s dark side—he “loathes sharing the light/with the unenlightened among us.”  And, in the second stanza the light of dawn was “possibly held up by/traffic on Grand Boulevard” or by “Henry, master of Dearborn.”  Thus, the modern age has its drawbacks, morning traffic among them.

Another result of industrialization—the making of the modern world—is a starless sky “black with coke smoke” over the Rouge [2], Ford’s giant vertically integrated industrial complex at which everything from steel making to final assembly took place.  At its peak, 100,000 people worked at the Rouge.  The modern world Ford made has elements of darkness consistent with his personality.

But, even with Ford’s loathing of “sharing the light,” neither he nor the traffic on Grand Boulevard [3] can delay the ultimate arrival of the dawn light. Thus, a “weak sun, but none the less an actual one” arrives to bathe “walls, windows, eyelids” with “sooty light”—an image that calls up the persistent grime of the Rouge and other automobile plants of the era.

Henry Ford had strong opinions about the color of his company’s cars. He said “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” [4]

How the Poem is Constructed as a Suite

“Dearborn Suite” has such a consistent and regular design that it seems to have been machined in a plant. Each of the four sections of the poem is 14 lines in two stanzas that connect to each other.  The first stanza of each section is eight lines; the second stanza of each section is six lines.  The eight-six arrangement, with a line break in the middle, is the traditional form of a Petrarchan [5], or Italian, sonnet in which a question or problem posed in the first (eight line) section is resolved in the second (six line) section.

 “Dearborn Suite” is a suite of four sonnets similar to the four cylinders that powered Ford’s Model T, the car that helped create the modern world by bringing mobility to the masses. [6]

Where the Speaker of the Poem Takes Us

In the first section, or sonnet, the speaker is a disembodied presence that witnesses the middle-aged Henry Ford, then at the peak of his power, restlessly pacing in his mansion.  

The second sonnet describes the grim start of the workweek in an industrial environment when “Monday comes, as it must” and the dawn light in the form of a “weak sun” with “sooty light” arrives.

In the third sonnet, the speaker travels back in time before the advent of the modern world to an era of open fields and “ponds that held the stars each night.”  In this world, the stars are not obscured by coke smoke; they are visible in ponds and the sky. When the dawn breaks it illuminates an agrarian world of “fenced plots of land/claimed and named” much like what Ford, as a Michigan farm boy, saw in his youth.  The agrarian community has a forbidding sense of privacy: “white houses with eyes shut tight/against the intrusion of sight.”

In the fourth sonnet the speaker takes us to the heart of the Rouge which is described this way: “Hell is here in the forge”—where enormous presses stamp out car body parts and “the smell/ of burning skin seeps into/ our hair and under our nails.”  The imagery is startlingly fragrant and tactile.  “King Henry,” happy at the Rouge but not in his mansion, “punches in for the night shift with us,/his beloved Coloreds and Yids.”  Although Ford hated unions, he loved the idea of his workers—they were, indeed, in a sense his “beloved.” [7]

The “justice after all” in working at the Rouge and creating the modern world is supremely ironic, even bitter.  The justice is in the “bright anthem/ for the occasion”—a song “familiar and blue which we all sing.”  The song, sung by everyone in the plant, is “Time on My Hands”—the perfect song to offset the mind-numbing repetition of working on a Rouge assembly line which seems to extend time infinitely.

A Few Final Thoughts

Alexandria, for all its many charms, has no large manufacturing facilities.  The same could be said of Northern Virginia. Does this matter?  On a day-to-day basis the answer may be “No.”  However, our devices must be made somewhere. Complex manufacturing on an industrial scale is difficult and interesting. The story of how Henry Ford and his workers created the modern world in plants like the Rouge is amazing and, at times, a little terrifying. 

Philip Levine’s four sonnets in “Dearborn Suite” tell that story in vivid and compelling ways.

[1] Ford was a cruel bigot.  The phrase “coloreds and Yids” in section 4 captures his racism and anti-Semitism and he may be history’s most unlikeable Great Man.  He made life miserable for almost everyone around him including his forward-thinking son, Edsel.  At the onset of World War II, Henry Ford was in declining health.  Edsel mobilized the Ford Motor Company in the war effort, primarily in manufacturing bombers at the Willow Run plant near the Rouge.

[2] The Rouge plant is named for the nearly Rouge River.  There are three types of automobile plants: engine plants, stamping plants and assembly plants.  In its heyday, all three functions were performed at the Rouge.  Today, Ford manufactures its F-150 pickup truck at the Rouge in a modern and green assembly plant with a vegetated roof and extensive robotics. When the assembly line is working at full capacity the plant produces a finished truck about every 80 seconds.

You can find out more about a virtual or in-person tour of the Rouge:

here.

[3] Grand Boulevard has a special resonance.  It is a major east-west route between Detroit and its western suburb, Dearborn. It carried traffic to and from the Rouge in the pre-freeway era and it does so today. The massive Henry Ford Hospital complex is on West Grand Boulevard as was the former headquarters of General Motors.  Careful About Alexandria readers will recall that Motown’s Hitsville, U.S.A. recording studio and former headquarters (and now a museum) is on West Grand Boulevard. 

[4] My Life and Work by Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther.

[5] Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, was a 14th century Italian humanist and poet. His rediscovery of Cicero’s letters was an important event in launching the Renaissance.  He wrote 14-line sonnets in sections of eight and six lines.  The other major sonnet form, the Shakespearean sonnet, is typically composed in three quatrains and a couplet.  For more information, contact the English teacher in your service area. Calls may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.

[6] Ford, in an intuitive macroeconomic masterstroke, also accelerated the arrival of the modern world with his Five-Dollar Day (abhorrent to Wall Street interests and many economists of the era) that paid his workers enough so that they could afford to buy the company’s products.

[7]  Ford’s negative personal characteristics should not obscure his accomplishments. He was a mechanical genius, a relentless worker, and capable of envisioning and implementing manufacturing processes at an astonishing scale. The first Model T left the plant in the fall of 1908. The Model T’s production run ended 19 years later in 1927 and the Ford Motor Company had sold 15 million cars.  Ford built his first car—the “Quadricycle” shown below—in the garage behind his Detroit home.  The contrast between that building and the Rouge complex is astonishing.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                                                                   --1919

If the pandemic, climate change, Ukraine, the Middle East, etc.  suggest a societal Great Unraveling, then it is modestly comforting to know that Irish poet William Butler Yeats confronted the same feelings of social entropy and dread of what comes next over a hundred years ago. 

Yeats, considered one of the greatest poets in the English language, wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919 when England and Europe were in the upheaval of World War I and a flu pandemic (which nearly took his wife’s life) was raging.  “The Second Coming” resonates today.

Yeats (pronounced “Yates” even though another English poet, John Keats, is “Keets”) captured the sense of entropy, or a gradual decline into disorder, in “The Second Coming.”  Other writers chronicling disintegrating communities or societies have borrowed phrases from the poem, notably Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart and Joan Didion in her essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Long time (and masterful) New Yorker cartoonist George Booth also used a line from the poem:

The poem begins with six measured couplets that describe the circular path, or gyre, of the falcon that is now beyond the hearing of the falconer. The “mere anarchy” with its “blood-dimmed tide” that is “loosed upon the world” builds to the second stanza’s introduction of the “vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” or spirit of the world.  That spirit has become so degraded that the “second coming” is the antichrist, a sphinx figure: “A shape with lion body and the head of a man.”

“The Second Coming” shows Yeats’ careful use of enjambment—the spilling over of a sentence from one poetic line to the next without any terminal punctuation.  Enjambment stresses the last word in the line by providing a frame of space and a microsecond pause before the reader’s eye moves to the next line.   For example, the enjambed fifth and seventh lines of the first stanza end with the words “everywhere” and “worst”—an accurate summary of the stanza’s essential meaning.

In the last stanza the speaker realizes that “twenty centuries of stony sleep” or 2,000 years, have become a nightmare as a child has nightmares from a rocking cradle. Something uncertain, a “rough beast” is unhurriedly slouching its way to Bethlehem to be born where Christ was born.  In Yeats’ dark vision the descent into social chaos means that something cataclysmic is on the way; we just do not know what it is.

Yeats was also committed to writing about Ireland and national identity. He said, “I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think I shall hold that conviction to the end.”  He was a fervent Irish nationalist and even served six years in the Senate, the Dáil Éireann.  Of Ireland, Yeats said, “We are a nation of believers.”

As a child, he was homeschooled and then sent to art school to follow in the footsteps of his father, a famous portrait painter. One of his report cards said, “Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling.” Undeterred, he quit art school and devoted himself to poetry. His collections include In the Seven Woods (1903), Responsibilities (1904), and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910.)

Yeats became famous in his lifetime. Poet Ezra Pound became his secretary for a time when they shared a cottage in Sussex for several months. Yeats cut a dashing figure in London. A friend said, “Yeats was striding to and fro at the back of the dress circle, a long black cloak drooping from his shoulders, a soft black sombrero on his head, voluminous black silk tie flowing from his collar, loose black trousers dragging untidily over his long, heavy feet.”

Yeats met the great, unrequited love of his life, Maud Gonne, in London. She was tall, beautiful, devoted to Irish nationalism, and did not return his affections. He wrote several plays for her including The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), in which Gonne played the starring role. Yeats proposed to her three times over several decades and each time she refused. The last time she rejected him, he proposed to her daughter, who said no, as well. When Yeats met Maud Gonne, he famously said, “The troubles of my life began.”  

At 52, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees and had two children. They lived in a tower on the outermost edge of Ireland and practiced spiritualism. Yeats had many lovers over the years, but Georgie forgave him.

His other notable poems include “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923.