Scarriet

John Milton is John Keats.

Samuel Johnson is T.S. Eliot.

Literature repeats, just as happy thoughts commonly intrude upon sad ones.

Vermilion beauty is reached, but the sun brings a new day. New philosophers congratulate themselves. A shadowy sage announces, “You are not enjoying the spring! You are someone else!” Philosophy vomits a new stone. A city shudders. Romanticism and youth, together with Conscience panting after the Good, are mocked and overthrown at last. Or this is only hyperbole getting the last word.

Milton, writing an elegy for his college friend, Edward King, drowned, spends most of the following passage asking “valleys low” to do something. The educated will have no trouble understanding and enjoying poetry like this—resembling a race horse able to burn for the entire course. It is excellent, whether or not you “like” it. It is too fanciful for Modernists—the same ones who lament that modern life is estranged from nature, so how dare Milton commune with nature. Ah the intricacy of modernity. Eliot and Pound were not high on Milton.

Every poetry has faults—Poe pointed out for America’s readers that Milton babbling to, and with, the non-human was annoying. It was. Poe said Paradise Lost was too long—and he was not blaming Milton, exactly, but ourselves, since none of us, limited as we are physically, can be entranced by a poem for very long.

The old will influence, even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s sheared by modern shepherds. Keats learned from Milton. To learn from (and improve on) the past is a truism, which some damn, anyway, like the avant-garde, which prepares its feast on a very little table—or makes a large table for a small feast.

Here is the passage from Milton’s “Lycidas”—as far from the avant-garde as possible:

Return, Alphéus; the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale Jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cow-slips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so, to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise,
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurled…

Keats could not have written “Ode To A Nightingale” but that he saw this passage—which is Romantic before any scholar said it was. The Metaphysical Poets had the silliness knocked out of them by their successors and self-conscious Romanticism kept the Miltonic luxury—even as the 18th century, in a bizarre detour through Johnson, condemned it. Just as the 20th century, in a harrowing road through T.S. Eliot, condemned it.

Is the following by Johnson or Eliot? It’s hard to tell.

“One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is Lycidas of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion, for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Minicus, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.”

Dissociation of sensibility, in other words.

The writer continues:

“In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.”

What was thought to be the greatest lyric in English gets an ‘F.’

It is Johnson who tramples Milton’s flowerets, not Eliot, but it could have been either one.

It is not our intention to defend Milton.

No one needs to defend Milton—or Johnson.

I am not here to defend Romanticism—only to point out that literature is a roller coaster ride and Romanticism is now ready to trample Johnson—the Enlightenment genius and contemporary of Mozart—who dared to call John Milton’s exquisite lyricism in Lycidas “disgusting.”

Who else would dare? The amusement park of Letters is for your pleasure, but you don’t own the rides—only guys like Johnson do. You don’t know anything about this. You own an opinion the way you own a book—you bought the book; you did not write the book. You think what everyone else thinks.

But Scarriet is here to guide you.

Poe, unafraid to trash Milton, writes the following on the man who dared to trash Milton, Dr. Johnson:

“What is Poetry? — Poetry! that Proteus-like idea, with as many appellations as the nine-titled Corcyra! Give me, I demanded of a scholar some time ago, give me a definition of poetry? “Tres- volontiers,” — and he proceeded to his library, brought me a Dr. Johnson, and overwhelmed me with a definition. Shade of the immortal Shakspeare! I imagined to myself the scowl of your spiritual eye upon the profanity of that scurrilous Ursa Major. Think of poetry, dear B—, think of poetry, and then think of — Dr. Samuel Johnson! Think of all that is airy and fairy-like, and then of all that is hideous and unwieldy; think of his huge bulk, the Elephant! and then — and then think of the Tempest — the Midsummer Night’s Dream — Prospero — Oberon — and Titania!”

It would be silly for any of us to censor Poe as he damns Johnson—we are in a war, you twits!

Whether Poe is correct, or not, is beside the point.

Your opinion doesn’t matter to the gods. You collect only.

Dismissing Poe’s “elephant passage” on Samuel Johnson would be as useless as dismissing Lycidas, or dismissing what Johnson said about Lycidas—one hundred years before Poe and one hundred years after Milton. Poe was dismissed by Eliot one hundred years later. And now you cannot stop, one hundred years on, what is going to happen to Eliot, who used Johnson as a cudgel and now in turn will be beaten to a pulp by a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For it is a dream—all literature is a dream! You cannot defend the poet who writes “honied showers” against the poet who writes about beefsteaks; but one day the spell will wear off and the poet who proudly rejected “vernal flowers” and wrote on ham will seem an ass.

It doesn’t matter who is winning the Pulitzer Prize these days, or what anyone is saying about anything.

In Letters, whatever Johnson and Eliot represent is now plummeting, and whatever Milton and Keats represent is on the rise—tempered, of course, by adjustments made over the centuries; the Romantics were not as artificial as Milton, but preferred him to Johnson, finding Milton thrilling, Johnson, pedantic.

Eliot turned his Samuel Johnson-Laser on Romanticism. Eliot, in turn, must fall, and we can see the nature of his destruction simply by looking at what Johnson wrote—and putting it in reverse.

“Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” Here, in a nutshell, is Eliot’s “Objective Correlative,” a theory (obviously cribbed from Dr. Johnson) Eliot used to condemn “Hamlet.” This is what the genius dares—and you do not—in the service of these hundred year- swings. Shakespeare, himself, is censored.

Remember, Shakespeare’s poetry was not appreciated much in the 18th century (he was converted to a story-teller)—and there came a revival in the 19th century, and to be honest, Shakespeare as a playwright found popularity in the 20th century, but as a poet, his Sonnets were turned into soap opera; T.S. Eliot, as we just mentioned, damned him; and if we look at Understanding Poetry, the leading poetry textbook of the 20th century, Frost gets more attention than Shakespeare, Yeats just as much, and Shakespeare is discussed in many places as if he were a Modern—his “imagery” held aloft, the immortal Bard just a more emotional version of WC Williams. Even genius goes up and down every century, so inevitable are trends.

Romanticism has plenty of “leisure for fiction.”

And all the “grief” they want.

And why not?

Think about it.

What literary “theory” (the “Objective Correlative” or any one you choose) can possibly prevent words of the imagination—literature—from doing whatever it wants?

Let Milton be Milton—but not for one hundred years.

It’s time to be Milton again. Modified, of course. “Lycidas” perfected into the Odes of Keats, and then further modified.

The new Romantic poets of the middle 21st century may not be that great. That’s not the point.

Whenever has “the green turf suck the honied showers,” “beside the white chickens,” “angry fix,” “bag full of God,” or “Does my sexiness upset you?,” been good enough that the new cannot mock it?

The New Romanticism is even now arriving.

Think of the distinguished and praised poems of the 20th century—they had no time for “leisure of fiction;” they were anxious to give us the real—and with it, tremendous grief.

Let’s take three: “Prufrock,” “The Waiting Room,” and “Supermarket in California.”

In Lycidas, Milton describes “grief” with the “leisure of fiction.” The sorrowful delight of Milton’s extended “leisure” includes flowers of “white pink.”

In all three of the 20th Century poems we get darkness as the impulsive force. The 20th century played in a grave.

Eliot: “the wind blows the water white and black.”
Bishop: “The waiting room was bright/and too hot. It was sliding/beneath a black wave…”
Ginsberg: “…and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”

Eliot’s poem has a “patient etherised upon a table” and a “bald spot.”
Bishop’s poem features the “horrifying” breasts in National Geographic and pain in a dentist’s chair on a dark winter day during World War One.
Ginsberg gives us a “headache” and a homeless guy “eyeing the grocery boys” in a supermarket.

Some say this is “progress.” But is it?

It’s poetry writing as far away from Milton as possible.

There’s no progress in poetry.

What we choose to include in a poem can only be a matter of taste, not science, since what exists outside the poem is not impacted by the poem. Has there ever been a headache, in Milton’s or Ginsberg’s day, which knew a poem, or was known by a poem, or was cured by a poem? We cannot remove the “headache” from Ginsberg’s poem without changing it irrevocably—what is essentially a meaningless bridge between life and poetry (a “headache”) is, no one can deny, essential to the poem. Therefore it follows that poetry exists as its own product, within its own rules and influences, within a “tradition”—not in the world—which the moderns were more adept at superficially recording, but only as it affects the poetry; any other conclusion by the modern poet is vanity.

Any poetry can be denied.

A movement cannot.

Romanticism can be defined simply, then. It is poetry not afraid of the “leisure of fiction.” Johnson, the anti-Romantic, says the “leisure of fiction” cannot have “grief,” and Eliot, with his Objective Correlative, agrees. But Romanticism finds nothing preventing “grief” from attending the “leisure of fiction.” It isn’t science. It’s literary taste—which, for scientific reasons, comes and goes.

The New Romanticism is proving the Moderns wrong. This is happening right now.

One hundred years from now, the New Romanticism will be wrong, again, for reasons no one will quite understand—even as long lines of “prophetic” professors and their theories will pretend they do.

Romanticism and its Samuel Johnson counterpart—which trade fashionable places every hundred years can also be looked at this way:

Romanticism: the World is newly and differently Glorious—my poetry will demonstrate this fact.

Dr. Johnson-ism: the World is Wretched—no artificiality can change that fact. Perhaps some glory will be glimpsed among the bald spots and the headaches, but we will know that glory is earned and legitimate, for that very reason.

Romanticism responds: poetry succeeds on its own merits and it doesn’t matter whether you add the flaws of the world or not—it’s the poetry that matters; the tedious pedantry that makes rules about what should be “put in” poetry to make it “less artificial,” will only in the long run, inhibit poetry.

Back and forth it goes. The argument is not as important as the back-and-forth.

The courting world brings flowers to the poem. Then gets tossed out.

Every one hundred years.

It was no good writing Romantic poetry, as some did, in the 1980s. It was still the 20th century. Pound lived until 1972. Many of us can remember 1972.

But something is going to happen in 2022.

Because it’s 2022—100 years since “The Waste Land.”

But Eliot won the Nobel in 1948. That’s only 75 years ago.

So we may need to wait another 25 years for the true New Romanticism. Poems on headaches, however, don’t seem to be the thing right now. The shift appears to be happening.

Here is a sampling of nine New Romantic poems and three epigrams, a hint of what will emerge with even greater force in the next few years. Scarriet guarantees it. The content is more or less modern; it’s the delicate formalism, the chaste emotionalism, combined with Romantic-philosophical sensitivity, which is the difference.

One could say what follows is really nothing more than Edna Millay or Edward Arlington Robinson or Donald Justice—the sort of earnest, tasteful, non-pretentious poetry that was appreciated in the 20th century, in spite of Romanticism on the wane. Fireworks and trumpets don’t necessarily accompany these one hundred years shifts; sometimes the archeological alteration appears after the fact, in the midst of scholarly digging. The distinction could be as subtle as this: Edna Millay and Donald Justice considered as major 20th century poets—rather than let’s say, Ezra Pound and WC Williams. Romanticism very well could be accused of saying, “It’s only poetry, and once you admit this, poetry is saved.” The shifts are not necessarily earth-shaking. Poe and Emerson were contemporaries—they reviled each other; it was Emerson, precursor of Nietzsche, who insisted, seer-like, the poet is a god; Poe, herald of detective fiction, was merely the better poet. And yet…something unmistakably human—not watered down by fetish, politics, or pretense, of the low or high kind—stains the writing of the New Romanticism.

DAN SOCIU (trans. Thomas Graves, Ana-Maria Tone, Alexandra Gaujan)

AFTER SOME DAYS OF BEING DEAD

This tomb was built like a fort
but he still pushed out of it
and feverish, Lazarus stumbled to Earls Court
for some lemons and sparkling water.

The drizzling air was a fresh kiss
he breathed in greedily—
in the crowd he smiled stupidly, like me,
because I went thru something like this.

A man just risen has a special gravity.
Women, kids, feel it—even dogs pulled
their owners closer and it was remarkable—
the vending machine gave him water for free.

NIMIC NU MAI E POSIBIL

Nothing is possible anymore between me
And a nineteen year old girl, just as nothing
was possible when I was nineteen
years old. I listened to them carefully, they ruffled my hair,
they’d gently reject my touches, no, Dan,
you are not like this, you are a poet. They came
to me for therapy, they’d come with their eyes in tears
to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love
around the poet and none with him.
The poet would go out every evening
quaking like a tectonic wave and
in the morning he’d come back humiliated
in his heart—the quakes moving
for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

TWO PAPER LANTERNS

two paper lanterns
flying over the sea
one is lost
beyond the horizon
into the unknown
where only planes
fly on

two paper lanterns
one near the shore
still shimmering
the other far
barely in sight
which one is
the finer lantern

the one you see
or the one lost
where only planes
flew on?

THOMAS GRAVES

CLOUDY IN THE CITY AND EVERYTHING IS COLD AND GREY

You are superior to me because you are obscure.
No one quite knows what your poetry means
and this gains you sophisticated followers,
nonetheless shy when questioned.
Rattling the New York Times in the beginning of the day,
they feign surprise when I accost them with tears.
Is this a bullet train? Or is the driver drunk?
When do we arrive in Swampscott?
The commute home, when you are tired,
calmly surrendering to the motion of the train—
a mass of hurry—is a rich feeling. Out of the corner of your eye,
a torn ticket. A slightly windy sky.

THE HUG

When we finally hug I know
It will hurt you, even as you love
In the forgiveness of the hug,
Because, to forgive, you were so slow.
Maybe there will be no hug,
Since friendship and forgiveness are as irrational as love.
Maybe we waited too long;
Now we are weak in ratio to how much our love was strong.
You miss my friendship. I know
You miss my friendship, the hug
Will be that; our passionate love
Hid the friendship, so the hug
Will be a feeling and a symbol of that,
Yet who knows that friendship and sex are not exactly the same
When, after years, you hug the one who broke your heart, and call them by their name.

A SIGH SINCERELY SIGHED

I saw a lady in an emptying train, sighing.
Troubles are infinite,
But when you see someone sigh, sometimes you know why.
The exiting passengers filed past the lady;
She was in no hurry to leave her seat.
She was sitting there sighing, this lady;
Had she sighed to her lover, it might have been sweet.
But this was no sigh of love. The lady
Was no longer young, and the lines
On her face, I could see, had come
Only in the past few years.
Everyone wants to be beautiful and young.
This is why she remains in her seat,
And the sigh she sighs is more sad than sweet.
She knew she would never be young, again.
Some miseries are greater than others.
Age is the worst thing that happens to us.
But something tells me, I don’t know why,
I stopped for a moment, when I heard her sigh,
When I sighed, because she sighed, I thought,
As I left the train, in the station, I thought,
The world is going to happen again,
With the very same ladies, and the very same men.

BEN MAZER

DELIRIUM

I hear my mother rattling in the sink,
though I am loose in dreamy marble halls,
my sense of time is present, and I think
that comfort ravages the castle walls.
Night is as tall as those who are within
should wish to speak, of anything at all,
with fever burning underneath the skin,
to whom infinity could be so small.
I fall to earth in my delirium,
and wake to life to find I’m being shot
by someone who was real but now is not,
a skinny robber, canceling out the sum.
Dad’s in his parka in the cold garage;
I’m strangely comforted by this barrage.

THE SUN BURNS BEAUTY

The sun burns beauty, spins the world away,
though now you sleep in bed, another day
brisk on the sidewalk, in your camel coat,
in another city, wave goodbye from a boat,
or study in an archival library,
like Beethoven, and thought is prodigy.
Do not consume, like the flowers, time and air
or worm-soil, plantings buried in the spring,
presume over morning coffee I don’t care,
neglect the ethereal life to life you bring.
O I would have you now, in all your glory,
the million-citied, Atlantic liner story
of what we were, would time come to forget
being so rich and passing, and yet not covet.

ST. MARTIN’S LANE

Remember when we went to see St. Martin’s Lane?
We huddled in Charles Laughton’s room
just as I huddled there with you,
shivering. Popcorn for dinner. Breath like fog.
We followed Charles out to the London streets
without ever stirring from our seats.
We could have worked an act up for busking,
I might have even kissed you for the asking.
You were so still, sitting next to me,
covered by the flickering reflections
of the inhuman mechanical projections
of the original camera’s inspections.
The darkened rain, the poverty of gloom,
were only ours, stuck in a little room.
But when the film ends, and we leave our seats,
it’s pouring outside, and the whole film repeats.
(I too have often followed Sylvia Sidney
to a small diner for some beans and kidney.)
These fantasies are real. Our life is real.
Our quiverings half-concealing when we feel.
Our waverings aligned with electricity and steel.
Who do we thank for bringing things to order?
Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Alexander Korda.
When the film’s over, we have grown up too fast,
like Barbara Stanwyck’s daughter in Stella Dallas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ache to kiss her like the ache to kick the ball found on the path

—Dan Sociu

Intelligence is panic. Imagination is panic that sleeps well.

—Thomas Graves

A greater amount of emotion is the effect of a greater work of art.

—Ben Mazer

The sampling could have included others (who have appeared in Scarriet, or poets you like) but the above features what must be considered the core of the New Romanticism right now, its Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron. Sociu, Graves, and Mazer.

Salem, MA 5/14/22