George III—the monarch when England nearly owned everything.
There is a new king on the British throne. Charles III (already disliked) has been an heir for a lifetime, since Chubby Checker and Little Richard.
Perhaps we should take this moment in history for a little review:
Elizabeth I, (daughter of Henry VIII,) who never marries, is succeeded by James I, VI of Scotland. Elizabeth and James are Shakespeare’s monarchs.
The son of Scotland’s James I—Charles I, is beheaded in 1649—150 years before the French Revolution.
In 1649 the British monarchy is abolished.
Oliver Cromwell rules for 5 years, is replaced by his son who has no military flair and therefore Parliament decides it wants a king again:
Charles II, son of the beheaded king, who has 13 known mistresses, plenty of illegitimate children, but produces no heir.
Succeeding playboy Charles II, the younger brother, James II—served in the French and Spanish army, is a Catholic. Parliament now decides it wants a Dutch prince to be king.
Enter William. It’s called the “glorious revolution.”
Queen Anne, a protestant, and now we’re in the 18th century. She has 17 pregnancies and one child—who dies of smallpox at 11 years old.
Now the British use Germans as their kings—George I, George II (the last king to fight a battle) and George III (1760 to 1820)—the ruler during the American Revolution and the Romantic poets.
Two more kings and then Victoria (1837 to 1901), during which Ezra Pound and other assorted crazies are born.
Then Edward VII, George V, and Edward VIII who abdicates (too close to the Nazis).
Finally, after George VI (the stutterer), during America’s post-war boom, the current king’s mother, Elizabeth II, begins her reign.
This is the 200th anniversary of Byron’s 1822 poem, “Vision of Judgment,” featuring the death of King George III of England.
A couple of stanzas:
He died! — his death made no great stir on earth; His burial made some pomp; there was profusion Of velvet, gilding, brass, and no great dearth Of aught but tears—save those shed by collusion. For these things may be bought at their true worth; Of elegy there was the due infusion— Bought also; and the torches, cloaks, and banners, Heralds, and relics of old Gothic manners,
Formed a sepulchral melodrame. Of all The fools who flocked to swell or see the show, Who cared about the corpse? The funeral Made the attraction, and the black the woe. There throbbed not there a thought which pierced the pall; And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low, It seemed the mockery of hell to fold The rottenness of eighty years in gold.
We speak, of course, of literature and art—but politics and art, as Plato, knew, are one.
The tyrant is the “nice guy” who opposes criticism.
The good soul always welcomes criticism.
This is counter-intuitive. An explanation is necessary.
Let’s begin with your typical poet who loves poetry—by its very nature, inclusive and soulful—and dislikes criticism, finding it either either mean, parasitic, or pointless—why tell us what the poet has already told us?
Criticism can be all these things.
But poetry can be all these things, too.
A bad example of a thing should never be our definition of a thing.
One who opposes criticism is like someone who thinks an author has written a book only for him.
If he likes a book, none are allowed to dislike that book.
And if he dislikes a book (the author apparently having a personal dislike for him) none are allowed to like it.
To acknowledge that a book may have been written for someone else is to acknowledge the existence of criticism.
Especially if we seek to understand others.
The tyrant opposes criticism—initially with kindness, for the successful tyrant never starts out as one.
The would-be tyrant opposes criticism of all kinds, defending anti-social behavior, for two excellent reasons: on the grounds that it is due to an earlier wrong, to oppression; and more importantly, to generally appear kind and beneficent: “Oh let them do that! It isn’t harming anyone!” “Let those who are starving steal! Let’s not criticize theft!”
And here’s the important thing to notice: the successful tyrant defends behavior which then becomes that tyrant’s army.
The tyrant continues to oppose criticism (free speech) when the tyrant comes to power.
The critic is not the tyrant.
The one who opposes criticism, the one who wants there to be only “poetry” and no criticism, is the tyrant.
This is true at both levels, the aesthetic and the political.
We must remember the two-stage process of tyranny’s rise.
First, excusing bad behavior as a localized impulse of short-term good—which then leads to the gradual transformation of excusing bad behavior by a far-reaching force of influence.
The end result is an army of thugs who oppose criticism—and an army of bad poets who oppose criticism.
Criticism, no matter how painful it is, should never be opposed.
The flourishing of Criticism leads to a free society and a flourishing of Poetry.
You never had to say goodbye to things. Things never said goodbye to you. What a bunch of foolishness this loneliness brings When what’s inanimate inanimately sings.
You never had to be awake. Things are away. They dream. Well, that is what you say. Saying is nice. Thinking is nice. But things mean less when you scream. Be lonely, say the things.
I missed a favorite plate when it broke, the same way I missed you. How lonely to realize things don’t care. Not piece one, not piece two.
I put them together in a poem. I repair all things. I made myself believe I wasn’t lonely when someone told me: Look. Your poem sings.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith—poet, women’s rights activist. Poe was murdered, she said.
TEN. Sara Teasdale (d. 1933) There are hundreds of women poets better than H.D. and Marianne Moore and who certainly rival Bishop, Plath, and Sexton, and clamor for second or third place behind Dickinson and Millay—and one of these is Teasdale, sadly neglected.
NINE. Christina Rossetti (d. 1894) Yet another representative of a chorus of neglected females languishing in the shadow of the two average poets who rode the Pound clique to some notoriety among academics—H.D. and Moore (who made Bishop). This entire underrated list includes poets like Amy Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who wrote a lot more than Shall I Count the Ways? including heaps of dramatic verse and was far more famous than he was when she eloped with Robert), as well as an army of 19th and 20th century women—Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Fanny Osgood, Alice Cary, Anna Hempstead Branch, Elinor Wylie, Dorothy Parker, Ellen Wheeler Wilcox, Lucy Larcom, Emma Enbury, Emma Lazarus, Frances Harper, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Helen Whitman, Genevieve Taggard, Inna Donna Coolbrith, Lydia Sigourney—and the list goes on.
EIGHT. Rudyard Kipling. (d. 1936) The rip-roaring ballad is too rip-roaring for academia—which has taken over poetry in a manner today we can hardly understand and why the barroom music of Rudyard Kipling is an underrated treasure.
SEVEN. Archibald MacLeish. (d. 1982) OK. He went a bit too far in one poem; the lines that brought him fame eventually destroyed his reputation (funny how that works). If this: “a poem should not mean/but be” belonged to an essay rather than to a poem that vaulted him briefly and fatally to the top, he might be appreciated for his spectacular poems (check out “The End of the World”) far more.
SIX. Philip Sidney. (d. 1586) You know there are poets you ought to know and might even enjoy, despite their bygone status. Here is one of them. He was a soldier for his country, never saw any of his work published—his Sonnets rival Shakespeare, Donne, Millay.
FIVE. D.H. Lawrence. (d. 1930) Better known for his lousy sex novels (sex sells), David Herbert Lawrence wrote the kind of free verse poetry which should have been at the center of Modernism—instead, we got the clown show that was Pound, WC “Plums” Williams, and the Anglican weirdo, T. S. Eliot. Eliot belonged to an influential New England family connected to the Transcendentalists and Emerson—godfather of William James, brother of Henry James. “Prufrock,” Eliot’s best poem, is actually a Romantic/Victorian masterpiece—the Modernism fraud used Eliot’s versifying skill as a kind of Trojan Horse to convince us that truly talented Eliot’s circus friend, Pound, was a “master” of the “new”—one of the most spectacular cultural lies there is. Read Lawrence’s “The Snake.” Then attempt to enjoy Williams afterwards.
FOUR. Thomas Campion. (d. 1620) This may not seem “new” to Pound fans, but Thomas Campion, composer, as well as poet, who died broke, published his Art of English Poesie in 1602, arguing “against the vulgar…custom of riming.” Samuel Daniel—another underrated poet—greeted this with his “Defense of Rhyme” (rhyme aids “memory” and has “delight”) the following year. But we look at Campion’s poetry—and find it rhymes, so we must, in this case, be looking at his songs. It is a layered, rich, intoxicating contemplation—the one that considers poetry versus song. Here is my favorite poem by Campion:
When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admired guest, The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, White Iope, blithe Helen and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finished love From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake: When thou hast told these honors done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.
THREE. Leonard Bacon. (d. 1954) He won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1941. He’s utterly forgotten. But look at how he writes:
In short he was the very symbol of The second nature of free verse—free love.
Or this:
Still polyphonic prose is simply prose. Free verse is but the shadow of a song, Though sham sham sham and pose repose on pose, Though Greenwich Village pillage still in gutters, Though Arensburg believe what Kreymborg utters. *
*Alfred Kreymborg published Pound’s Des Imagistes in 1913 and helped to advance the careers of Moore and Williams. Walter Arensburg used inherited steel money to fund Duchamp and the artistic circles associated with Kreymborg.
This by Leonard Bacon is perhaps more scandalous than any couplet I’ve ever seen:
She beat her bosom, which appeared to be Flat as the level of democracy.
Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, Bacon didn’t take the Modernists seriously. Bad move. He’s been cancelled.
TWO. Robert Hillyer. (d. 1961) He won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1934—objected strenuously to Pound’s post-WW II Bollingen Prize. He taught at Harvard. His papers are at Syracuse.
His work has a song-like beauty, and is worth remembering, but alas, he was no genius. Here’s a sample:
About the headlands and the rocky shoals I hear the breath of twilight, sighing, sighing, And over the wail and dash of breakers, crying, The voices of old ships and wandering souls. Through the wet air squadrons of gulls are flying, Wheeling but once against the skies, then tossed Into the wind like a flight of visions lost With vanished souls into the darkness dying.
ONE. Howard Nemerov. (d. 1991) He won the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. That doesn’t matter. The shadows of oblivion have already touched his brow. Who speaks about him now? He was a pilot in WW II.
For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead, Who rarely bothered coming home to die But simply stayed away out there In the clean war, the war in the air.
Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales Of hitting the earth, the incomprehensible sea, But stayed up there in the relative wind, Shades fading in the mind,
Who had no graves but only epitaphs Where never so many spoke for never so few: Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars, Per aspera, to the stars.
That was the good war, the war we won As if there was no death, for goodness’s sake. With the help of the losers we left out there In the air, in the empty air.
Reputations should depend on the poetry—not cliques, friends, and movements claiming to be “new”.
TEN. Sir Geoffrey Hill (d. 2016) Starting in 2006 many in Great Britain and America said he was the greatest poet in the world. I don’t think he will be overrated much longer because he’s already being forgotten. He was never very good. Only bombastic. Here’s the second stanza of “Funeral Music,” considered one of his best poems. The dullness will be immediately apparent. (And all his work is like the sample below. It never drops this mask. Reading him is like being trapped inside a hedge.) What’s it about? Who knows? Who cares?
For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain— For none but the ritual king? We meditate A rueful mystery; we are dying To satisfy fat Caritas, those Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled By silent music; imagine the future Flashed back at us, like steel against sun, Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn, Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.
NINE. Pablo Neruda. (d. 1973) His poetry has always seemed to me written by someone just trying to get laid. But he’s much admired, so he made this list.
EIGHT. Marianne Moore. (d. 1972) The only woman who gets to suit up with Team High Modernism and she’s so obviously the token woman of the group (no real enthusiasm for her) this alone puts her in the overrated camp—her most popular poem calls poetry “all this fiddle”—which describes exactly what she writes: brittle, busy, shrill, sermonizing. Fiddle. Or as she puts it in the same poem by way of defining good poetry: “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Real toads? Really?
SEVEN. Hart Crane. (d. 1932) We all know he wrote something called “The Bridge” and jumped off a boat into the ocean. He’s the reckless, out-of-control modern who wrote nothing memorable but is nonetheless admired for writing the kind of clanging, noisy poetry popular between the wars. The fact is, almost anyone can write ‘show-off-y’ poetry which really makes no sense, if they put their mind to it. Critics who encourage this are foolish. One stanza from “The Bridge” will make it clear what I mean:
Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days— Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale And roots surrendered down of moraine clays: The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.
There’s something utterly childish about Crane: how to write about a large bridge? “Damp tonnage” of course. “Nights turbid” —or should it be, “Poetry turbid?” What is “roots surrendered down of moaraine clays” but the same sort of thing? His poetry goes on and on like this. This sample is enough. God rest his poor soul. Some might argue the point of Crane’s Modernist work is to expand poetry’s reach from human romance to a romance of things. But poems about watering cans help neither the watering can nor the poem. Love, on the other hand, is never a trivial thing. We know that much.
SIX. Seamus Heaney. (d. 2013) In his most anthologized poem, “Digging,” we find his chief fault, which is a good one to have, since metaphor (which Heaney loves) underlies it. Nearly every reader of poetry is a sucker for metaphor—but here’s the problem: ‘that is like this,’ overdone, can turn ‘that’ into a bridge to nowhere. “Digging” labors with forced metaphors: a spade becomes a pen and a gun. Observing his digging dad’s rump, Heaney wants his readers to appreciate rump and head, spade and pen. The suck and muck of his poetry’s sound, combined with an affection for simile, creates a recognizable, charming style—which stays away, in almost every instance, from the sublime.
FIVE. Ocean Vuong. (b. 1988) He’s overrated, like Heaney, for something all poets strive to do—and which Vuong does very well. Vuong fails spectacularly in a manner in which many modern poets fail—making him popular with those who embrace the Modernist aesthetic. The trope I refer to is the one in which everything in a Vuong poem is highly personal—the sky, the pavement, the room, the father, the mother, etc are his—and the glimpses of these things in fragmented and rapid fire epiphanies cause us to witness these things in awe and sympathy and respect—but it is precisely this experience which inhibits the grasping it as a poem. Vuong is building on a Modernist method practiced since the Imagists: the poet essentially says to the reader: This object, image, experience, is so important to me personally and exists in such a genuine manner as a thing outside the poem, that only through a unique, personal transcendence can you understand my poem. The reader is so ashamed at not being able to do this, they decide to pretend they can. I peruse a typical Vuong poem and am unmoved—precisely because Vuong has succeeded so well in making the poem his.
FOUR. John Donne (d. 1631) is a great poet, make no doubt about it. He’s in the top five poets most anthologized, since T.S. Eliot famously praised the Metaphysical Poets 100 years ago in a bizarre theory claiming Donne and the Metaphysicals (Samuel Johnson coined the term) were united in their sensibility, whereas the Romantics, for instance, were not. Eliot was merely trying to make a name for himself as a critic by saying odd, controversial things (it worked). Isn’t it obvious to everyone Donne was mostly re-writing Shakespeare’s Sonnets? (Donne’s most famous poem, “Death Be Not Proud,” is brilliant but sounds like Shakespeare Sonnet 146) The Sonnets, which predate Donne, are as “metaphysical” as any group of poems could possibly be. Can it be that T.S. Eliot the Modernist, was truly enamored of lines like this?
Only our love hath no decay;
This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday;
Running, it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
“The Anniversary” (Donne)
THREE. Robert Lowell. (d. 1977) His reputation depended solely on the fortunate dilemma—was the Lowell name being exploited by him more or by others? No one, not even his masters Ransom at Kenyon, Engle at Iowa, or various ambitious academics like M.L. Rosenthal quite knew. His poetry never enlightens or wrestles with anything; like the writing of another wealthy heir, Henry James, it listlessly records. It was supposed to be a big deal when the “cooked” guy (electro-shock therapy) embraced the “raw” (the drugged Beats) but this was only a meds adjustment. The poetry was comfortably numb until the end. (It must have thrilled his young BU students, Plath and Sexton, to quickly discover “gee, my work is better than teacher’s!”) His most anthologized poem is about a skunk—or something else, we’re not sure.
TWO. William Carlos Williams (d. 1963) He rhymed unsuccessfully in the beginning of his career and was already in his 40s when his Wheelbarrow haiku got attention. The New Critics admired Williams. Poet Louis Ginsberg (Allen’s nudist colony dad) belonged to Williams’ artist clique—which included Man Ray. The WCW plums poem is the worst poem ever written. When I read this poem I eat a refrigerated plum. My teeth hurt. This is all Williams has ever done for me. Why do people like his work so much? My guess is it’s the Ginsberg connection. Or the “bad-poetry-admired club” to which bad poets (Williams was its first member) belong.
ONE. Ezra Pound (d. 1972) —Crackpot literary theories such as saying it doesn’t matter which leg you work on first when you make a table —ABC of Reading chap. 7— and ranking his friend Henry James as the most important of the modern writers while downplaying every beloved English speaking poet who ever lived—to seem eclectic. His Cantos is collage-–the worst thing ever invented for art and poetry. Unfocused, pretentious cheapening. He was a social butterfly more than a man of letters. His most anthologized poem, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” isn’t his; he was a borrower and a thief in his work; similar to how he lived—off his family and rich women. He made a great show of lamenting the decline of civilization—but he belongs to its decline. “Make the old—new!” he cried. Whatever that means.
A dash indicates a sudden, unexpected shift in perspective, a “lightning bolt” of awareness, not as gradual as a comma and not as normative as a period. The dash, previously known as two hyphens, is now raising havoc on the whole “idea” of what “poetry means.” The dash, while also slashing our “way of seeing things” to bits, has the additional advantage of confusing the reader into a fresh way of understanding the world, existence, and the very substance of being.
He was reacting to the following Scarriet poem on Facebook. He seemed to feel it went a little overboard with dashes. What do you think?
IF YOU HAVE NO FAITH I CAN DEPICT
If you have no faith I can depict
how delicately the sensitive turns to sin—
or make a world with verse and fit the pieces in—
and get the shadows right—
by going beyond black and white,
even getting the color of your lover’s skin
exactly right,
then do not read me, or talk to me again.
Live with things. Converse with actual men.
You’ll not finally understand what any of it meant.
Your head is thick. No thought can make a dent.
Thought is for the memory and problems solved in haste.
My poetry—and the world, as well—is to you a wide waste;
I am sensitive and need to think, apart,
and in solitude understand the tides and errors of my entangled heart.
Only through duplication—my poem filtering your eyes—
the 18th century the same as the 21st century lies
(an opium prostitute reading Sade asking when will modernism start)
can I hope to know and not be murdered by surprise.
I need to keep things at arm’s length even as things
murder me. Silent—before this strange dog sings.
~~
And here’s how I—in classic Scarriet form—responded:
No, a “dash” does not indicate “a sudden, unexpected shift in perspective, a “lightning bolt” of awareness…” What follows the dash adds information specifically to the meaning-unit immediately preceding the dash. That’s about it.
And I elaborated further, as another Facebook member, Peter—whom I respect—joined the conversation:
Peter: Thomas, a dash has many uses. If the intended effect is conveyed, it’s successful.
Thomas: Edgar Poe wrote a piece in praise of the dash. I should look for it, but the essence of what he said, if memory serves, is what I said.
Peter: Didn’t he use dashes to cut off sentences sometimes, for effect?
Thomas: He loved italics for emphasis. He came up with his own scanning marks because it saved ink. As for the dash, Poe always used it as a mark for follow-up, additional information. “Hear the loud alarum bells—Brazen bells!” What kind of bells are we listening to, exactly? Brazen bells. More information. “Of the bells, bells, bells!—Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!” It’s an “onward” sign, the dash. I can see how one might think the dash is used here to “cut off sentences,” but Poe was always aware of mathematical precision in terms of time, of ease which saves time, and so by using the dash in “The Bells” he is marking the continuation of the repetition so the eye doesn’t get lost in too many “bells.” It’s not so much emphasis as it is a marking device which lets the reader know, “this next sequence is adding to what went before—the excess, the onwardness, the simple, linear accumulation is—intended.
Now, in this Scarriet piece, I might as well quote Poe on the dash. I found it online and it doesn’t disappoint:
THAT punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the extent of its importance! The writer who neglects punctuation, or mis-punctuates, is liable to be misunderstood — this, according to the popular idea, is the sum of the evils arising from heedlessness or ignorance. It does not seem to be known that, even where the sense is perfectly clear, a sentence may be deprived of half its force — its spirit — its point — by improper punctuation. For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
There is no treatise on the topic — and there is no topic on which a treatise is more needed. There seems to exist a vulgar notion that the subject is one of pure conventionality, and cannot be brought within the limits of intelligible and consistent rule. And yet, if fairly looked in the face, the whole matter is so plain that its rationale may be read as we run. If not anticipated, I shall, hereafter, make an attempt at a magazine paper on ‘The Philosophy of Point.’
In the meantime let me say a word or two of the dash. Every writer for the press, who has any sense of the accurate, must have been frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by the printer’s now general substitution of a semi-colon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago.
The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into the grossest abuse — although his very error arose from the philosophical and self-dependent spirit which has always distinguished him, and which will even yet lead him, if I am not greatly mistaken in the man, to do something for the literature of the country which the country ‘will not willingly,’ and cannot possibly, ‘let die.’
Without entering now into the why, let me observe that the printer may always ascertain when the dash of the MS. is properly and when improperly employed, by bearing in mind that this point represents a second thought — an emendation. In using it just above I have exemplified its use. The words ‘an emendation’ are, speaking with reference to grammatical construction, put in apposition with the words ‘a second thought.’ Having written these latter words, I reflected whether it would not be possible to render their meaning more distinct by certain other words.
Now, instead of erasing the phrase ‘a second thought,’ which is of some use — which partially conveys the idea intended — which advances me a step toward my full purpose — I suffer it to remain, and merely put a dash between it and the phrase ‘an emendation.’ The dash gives the reader a choice between two, or among three or more expressions, one of which may be more forcible than another, but all of which help out the idea. It stands, in general, for these words — ‘or, to make my meaning more distinct.’ This force it has — and this force no other point can have; since all other points have well-understood uses quite different from this. Therefore, the dash cannot be dispensed with.
FOR MY BROTHER ON WHAT WOULD’VE BEEN HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY
His greatest joy was to pin my arms to the floor with his knees and fart in my face. The day he pushed me and I slammed my head on a nail jutting out of the wall, he full-blown blubbered all the way to the hospital— it was my greatest revenge.
For years we didn’t speak. He spent much of that time sleeping in abandoned houses, with a habit of pulling a revolver on his friends and squeezing the trigger just to hear the click and his own laughter.
He smirked when I arrived to see how gaunt he’d become, the slightest flash of tooth, knowing I knew he was dying.
Always ready to fight the world, when he needed a cane he chose one that sheathed a blade in its handle.
And when there was nothing left to say and I told him I had to go, he wrapped his arms around my neck and I could feel his ribs through the flannel.
~~~~~~~
This poem made me burst into tears—it bullied me into crying.
When a joke succeeds, we laugh out loud at the end.
No matter how annoying it was until the punchline, no matter what analysis or scholarship may say, is not the successful poem measured this way—except at the end comes not laughter, but tears?
My tears chose this as a “great poem Scarriet found on Facebook.”
What more can the critic say?
Strangely, there is more to say, because when I went to open this poem to copy it out, I discovered I had accidentally assumed the poem was the same as copied above. The last part of the poem was cut off when I first perused it. It turned out the poem had four more lines!
as he heaved and wept, the way he did in the backseat of our father’s Pontiac when he held that blood-warm towel to my face.
In my reading (perhaps understandably), I find these last four lines, discovered newly, completely unnecessary. They ruin the effect for me. The ‘saying goodbye’ moment pushed me over the edge; this: “he wrapped his arms around my neck.”
I don’t want to hear anything more. Then it becomes not the brother’s poem, but the poet’s—who is re-capping the experience and adding details I don’t need: “Pontiac,” “blood-warm towel.”
And it is the brother’s poem.
There are a few poems like this: the subject is the poem; the poem, remarkably, is not the poet’s. These poems are often the most moving poems of all.
The brother wrote the poem, just as Milton wrote “Paradise Lost” and God did not.
Scarriet 