It's Your Verses That We Want and Your Verses We Shall Have! Notes on Plagiarism, Piracy, and Found Poetry

 

'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, 

and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Coming as I do from a punk anarchist tradition [2], I'm pretty much of the view that all property - including intellectual property - is theft and that piracy is a swashbuckling method of redistributing gold and cultural capital.

 

And I have little sympathy when bourgeois poets complain about plagiarism, bleating that such an illicit compositional technique is an assault upon originality of expression and the authenticity of experience (i.e., their artistic integrity). 

 

I can see there's something slightly shameful about covert plagiarism, when an attempt is made to hide or disguise what one's doing; if you're going to steal, then do so like Willie Brodie for the sake of the danger and to liberate ideas, not merely so that you might pass off something taken as your own. 

But if you're upfront and open about what you're doing - if your plagiarism is overt and you make no secret of the fact that you located your materials here, there, and everywere - then that seems admirable to me. 

 

In fact, I'm something of a fan of so-called found poetry ...

 

 

II.

 

Found poetry is verse created by recontextualising words, lines, and even whole passages purloined from elsewhere and then making a number of crafty modifications to the text in order to give it fresh meaning or look. How and to what extent the poem is changed - or treated, as they say in the trade - is really up to the finder.    

 

In a sense, a found poem is the literary equivalent of the readymades that Duchamp and the Dadaists foisted on the art world over a century ago. I don't know if he was the first to hit on the technique, but the great American writer and artist Bern Porter famously published Found Poems with the Something Else Press in 1972 [3] and it's him that I initially think of whenever the subject comes up.   

 

 

III.

 

Having found a text to work on, there are several ways one might then begin to fuck with it, including  ...  

 

(i) Erasure

 

Poems produced by erasure have had words from an existing text redacted or blacked out, thereby producing a new work whilst at the the same time making us curious about what has been concealed.

 

Thus, whilst erasure may subvert the question of authorship, it nevertheless acknowledges (and draws attention to) an original text and perhaps raises political questions around censorship, secrecy, and the control of information. 

 

The name often associated with the technique is Doris Cross, who, in 1965, famously placed certain columns from a 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary under erasure [4]. 

 

(ii) Patchworking

 

A cento is a poetical patchwork entirely composed of verses, passages, or simply short fragments taken from an author (or several authors), then stitched into a new body of text à la Dr. Frankenstein. 

 

It's a very old form, originating in the 3rd or 4th century (if not earlier), but it's one that is still explored and experimented with today by writers such as myself [5]. 

 

(iii) Découpé

 

This is what we call in English a cut-up technique; i.e., one that involves a lot of textual snipping and rearranging in order to create what is known as an aleatory narrative; i.e., a story that incorporates chance or randomness into its composition and/or structure. 

 

William Burroughs and his pal Brion Gysin popularized this technique in the 1950s and 1960s, although it can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920s (Tristan Tzara was a fan of such instant poetry). 

 

It has since been used by many scissor-wielding artists in a wide variety of contexts, though those who think that découpé might magically reveal a text's implicit content or true meaning are being ridiculous [6]. 

 

In closing, let me express my admiration for Deleuze's attempt to transform the cut-up into a rather more promiscuous (and less learned) pick-up technique. As he writes: 

 

"You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other." 

 

Deleuze continues:  

 

"You don't have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different. [...] Burroughs' cut-up is still a method of probabilities - at least linguistic ones - and not a procedure [...] which combines the heterogeneous elements" [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'Philip Massinger', essay in The Sacred Wood, (Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 114.

 

[2] That is to say, an anarchist tradition that owes more to Malcolm McLaren than it does to Proudhon. 

 

[3]   In 1972, Bern Porter published Found Poems via Something Else Press. It features hundreds of found poems selected from newspapers, ads and everyday printed matter, some involving collage techniques, others displayed as readymades. 

 

[4] For an interesting attempt to answer the question 'Who Is Doris Cross?' by Lynn Xu posted on the Poetry Foundation website (25 April 2014): click here. 

[5] See the post: 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' (6 March, 2022): click here. 

[6] Burroughs was drawn towards the idea of a text being invested with unconscious meaning. He also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination: 'When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.' That seem's doubtful, although it's a nice thought. 

      I found this line from Burroughs in the 'Translator's Introduction' to Síomón Solomon's Hölderlin's Poltergeists (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 14.  

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 10.   

A Blast From the Past

Wyndham Lewis photographed by George Charles Beresford in 1913

Front cover of the first edition of his Vorticist magazine Blast (1914)

 

"We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. 

Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes."

 

 

I. 

 

Despite the fact that there has been renewed critical interest in his work and he is now regarded as a major British artist and writer of the twentieth century, the figure of Wyndham Lewis doesn't mean a great deal to me.  

 

Indeed, I sometimes confuse him with his friend Ezra Pound (to be fair, both were controversial figures associated with the avant-garde movement known as Vorticism and both were unpleasant characters - talented, certainly, but unpleasant).       

 

This year, however, marks the 110th anniversary of Lewis's magazine Blast and I thought I might say something about this short-lived publication in which he advanced the aesthetic ideals of Vorticism on the one hand and vilified his enemies (which, by this date, included Marinetti) on the other.    

 

 

II. 

 

When I say that Blast was short-lived, I mean it was short-lived. In fact, only two editions were ever published; the first in July 1914 and the second in July 1915. Both were primarily written (and edited) by Lewis - although other contributors included Pound, Epstein, and Rebecca West - and both cost 2/6 (or half-a-crown to you and me). 

Although the second issue doubtless contained some interesting material - including poems by T. S. Eliot and a short play by Pound - it's the first issue with its punk-looking bright pink cover that is recognised as a seminal text of 20th-century modernism - particularly English modernism, whose distinct style it helped create; Lewis's use of bold typographic innovations and fonts again anticipating the punk aesthetic of the 1970s.  

 

The illustrated issue featured a (mostly positive) critique of (and extracts from) Kandinsky's pioneering work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (newly translated into English by Michael Sadleir); a plea to suffragettes not to destroy works of art; a review of an exhibition held in London of Expressionist woodcuts; and an open attack on Marinetti's model of Futurism (dismissed as little more than an up-to-date Impressionism).

 

The opening twenty pages of Blast 1, however, were taken up with the Vorticist manifesto ...

 

 

III.

 

Written by Lewis, the manifesto is primarily a long list of things that deserved either to be Blessed or Blasted, depending on how he perceived them at the time; one is tempted to say that Lewis woke up one day and suddenly knew which side of the bed he was lying on ... Among those blasted were members of the Bloomsbury Group and among those blessed were hairdressers who, for a small fee, attacked Mother Nature.    

 

Perhaps predictably, the English press was unimpressed, finding the writing dull and describing the artwork and typography as simply a pale imitation of the Futurist style (much to Marinetti's amusement and delight). 

 

Although after the War Lewis attempted to revive the avant-garde and declared his intention to publish a third edition of Blast, essentially the game was up and the world had moved on. Four years of mechanised slaughter and unrelenting horror had put things in perspective and many former revolutionaries were now hoping for a little peace and quiet and looked to more traditional art values. 

 

By 1920, even Lewis had to admit that the age of Vorticism was over and these days Blast is itself a museum piece.       

 

 

Notes on Crosby and Crane: Pin-Up Boys of the Lost Generation

Harry Crosby (1898-1929) and Hart Crane (1899-1932)

 

La plus volontaire mort c'est la plus belle.

 

 

I. 

 

The initials HC mean different things to different people. 

 

For example, for poor souls suffering with an unremitting headache, they refer to Hemicrania continua, whilst for those to whom the health of horses is a concern, they refer to the connective tissue disorder hyperelastosis cutis.        

 

Then again, for students of organic chemistry - or those working in the oil and gas industry - HC is short for hydrocarbon, whilst for fans of the Tour de France, HC designates the most difficult type of mountain climb (one which is hors catégorie). 

 

For me, however, as an amateur literary critic, the initials HC bring to mind the two Jazz Age American poets Harry Crosby and Hart Crane ...

 

 

II.

 

Crosby and Crane sounds like a double act and, as a matter of fact, these two are often linked in the cultural imagination; not merely because they were both poets of debatable merit, but because each committed suicide at a young age (Crosby was 31 when he shot himself in the head in December 1929 and Crane was 32 when he literally jumped ship in April 1932).  

 

They met for the first time in Paris in January 1929. Harry and his wife, Caresse, had set up the Black Sun Press and were keen to publish new work by the most interesting authors of the day in de luxe editions. Crane was then working on the long poem by which he is best remembered, The Bridge, which he intended as a positive counterstatement to Eliot's Wasteland (1922).    

 

Crane gave Crosby the MS to read and the latter loved it, encouraging his new friend to complete the poem he had been obsessively reworking since 1923. For Crosby, Crane's poem was full of thunder and fire and swept away all the dust and artificiality of the times, reminding him of Blake and, one suspects, of what he aspired to in his own heliocentric verse. 

 

As one commentator notes: 

 

"Crosby's obvious excitement had its source not only in the poem itself but also in finding a work answering to his own theories of poetry and his own particular enthusiasms." [1]    

 

For example, both had a quasi-Futurist love of speed and modern technology, seeing in the machine a dynamic expression of man's essentially restless spirit and desire to self-overcome; both also valued open spaces in which to move; and both believed that poetry should not only look back to the past, but connect the present to the future and concern itself with the only themes that really matter: love, beauty, and death. 

 

At heart, then, both were Romantics in the era of Modernism; writers who sought spiritual illumination and a glimpse of some essential reality or lyrical absolute. It's no wonder then that despite his initial enthusiasm for the work of D. H. Lawrence, Crosby concludes that the latter is not his cup of tea:

"'I am a visionary I like to soar he is all engrossed in the body and in the complexities of psychology. [...] He admits of defeat. I do not. He is commonplace. I am not.'" [2]

 

This - and the fact that he can't really write for toffee - puts me off Crosby. I can't dislike him, but neither can I accept this son of one of the richest banking families in New England to be the real deal (despite the painted toe-nails and sun tattoo) [3].  

 

As for Crane, well, to be honest, I'm undecided, knowing as I do so little of the man, so little of his work. Many think him a genius and admire his highly stylised and difficult poetry - for its ambition if nothing else. And some scholars working within queer theory champion Crane as an exemplary outsider who struggled with his homosexuality (when not fucking sailors).    

 

  

III. 

 

In late November 1929, the Crosbys arrived in New York for what they planned to be a short visit. Hart Crane threw a party for them at his Brooklyn apartment on December 7th, where fun was had by all (including fellow poets E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams).

 

Three days later, however, Harry killed himself and his 21-year-old lover - Josephine Rotch, aka the Fire Princess - in an apparent suicide pact. It was Hart Crane who broke news of this tragic event to Crosby's wife and mother. 

 

Shortly after the funeral, Caresse returned to Paris and arranged for the Black Sun edition of The Bridge to be published in February 1930. Sadly, the reviews weren't great and Crane's sense of failure resulted in a creative slump. 

 

Although he desperately looked for "another great theme around which he might order his work" [4], he unfortunately never found such. Rather, having relocated to Mexico, Crane had simply discovered the intoxicating power of tequila.

 

Having attempted suicide on several occasions, Crane boarded a ship back to New York - the S. S. Orizaba - from where, on April 27, 1932, he jumped into the sea having shouted goodbye to a group of fellow passengers. He left no suicide note and his body was never recovered. 

 

Sy Kahn writes:

 

"Crane's death by water and Crosby's death by exploding bullet in his head, in retrospect, and with the testimony of their poems, seem inevitable acts of self-destruction. For both men death was not fearsome, but a portal through which they might find the tormenting, often elusive, absolutes they felt and sought." [5] 

 

He concludes:

 

"The parallels and similarities (even the accident of their initials) in the works and lives of these two poets express the literary vitality of the 1920s [...] In retrospect it seems almost ordained that these poets should have encountered each other before their deaths." [6]  

 

What a pity, then, that both of these young men had always been "too rich and spoilt" and left with no new pleasures to experience but suicide: "the last sort of cocktail excitement" [7].  

 

Notes

 

[1] Sy Kahn, 'Hart Crane and Harry Crosby: A Transit of Poets', in the Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 1, No. 1 (Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 45-56. The line quoted is on p. 47. 

      This essay can be accessed on JSTOR by clicking here. 

 

[2] Harry Crosby writing in his diary, quoted by David Ellis in D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 472-73.

 

[3] Without getting into issues of authenticity etc, let's just say that, for me, Crosby tries a bit too hard to be un poète maudit like his heroes Baudeaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, et al. Some people just are extreme and achieve a state of inspired madness without having to paint their nails. Ultimately, who gets closest to the sun - Van Gogh, or Harry Crosby ...?     

 

[4] Sy Kahn, 'Hart Crane and Harry Crosby: A Transit of Poets', Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 54. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 55. 

[6] Ibid., p. 56. 

 

[7] These phrases were said by D. H. Lawrence with reference to the case of Harry Crosby; see his letter to Giuseppe Orioli [18 Dec 1929], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 600-601. 

      See also Lawrence's kind letter to Caresse Crosby (30 Jan 1930), Letters VII 634, in which he tells her: "Harry had a real poetic gift - if only he hadn't tried to disintegrate himself so! This disintegrating spirit, and the tangled sound of it, makes my soul weary to death." 

      He also advises that she not try to recover herself too soon; "it is much better to be a little blind and stunned for a time longer, and not make efforts to see or to feel. Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness. It was too dreadful a blow - and it was wrong."

Lobster Variations (I - IV)

Nobuyuki Shimamura: Fantasy Lobster (2013)

Hoki Museum Collection, Chiba, Japan 

 

I.

 

Such is my fascination with lobsters at the moment that I'm beginning to think that, like Prufrock, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" [1].

 

Though of course, literary scholars are divided about the nature of the marine creature that is immortalised by Eliot in these lines: is it a lobster, is it a crab, or is it some other (perhaps entirely imaginary) denizen of the deep? 

 

Whilst I understand the arguments put forward by those who favour the crab reading - for example, it's true that the word scuttling is more suggestive of the quick movements made by crabs than the slow crawling walk of the lobster - nevertheless I opt for the lobster interpretation, as I think lobsters have a richer (and more perverse) symbolic history. 

 

Ultimately, however, we can never know and, of course, Eliot's poetic language doesn't really operate by referring us to some actual sea creature outside of the text, so this question is largely moot.            

 

 

II. 

 

Lawrence's poem 'Demiurge' [2] is one of a series of late verses that share a common objective; namely, to expose the absurdity of Plato's theory that only ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things, rather than physical forms existing in the material world.     

 

It's also a poem which features a rather lovely description of a lobster ...

 

They say that reality exists only in the spirit

that corporal existence is a kind of death

that pure being is bodiless

that the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.

 

But what nonsense it is!

as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster

dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!

 

Even the mind of God can only imagine 

those things that have become themselves:

bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation

even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.

 

 

III. 

 

More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of ten interlocking short stories, set in Dublin, by Samuel Beckett [3]. It was first published in 1934, just a couple of years after Lawrence's Last Poems. 

 

The opening story - 'Dante and the Lobster' - concerns the reaction of the tale's protagonist (Belacqua) discovering to his horror that the lobster he has purchased for dinner with his aunt must be prepared in a particularly unpleasant manner:

 

"In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. [...] Now it was going alive into scalding water." 

 

His attempt to console himself (and us) with the fantasy that the creature's death will be a relatively quick and painless one is undermined by the narrator of the tale declaring with grim assurance: It is not.      

 

 

IV.  

 

And this brings us, finally, to David Foster Wallace's famous essay 'Consider the Lobster' [4] ...

 

Disguised as a review of the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and originally published in the August 2004 edition of the food and wine magazine Gourmet, it's a wilful provocation which irritated many readers by primarily concerning itself with the ethics of boiling a highly intelligent and sensitive creature alive in order to enhance the consumer's (sadistic) pleasure. 

 

Keen to dispell the myth that lobsters have such simple brains that they don't really experence pain as we understand it, Wallace even includes a handy discussion of lobster neurobiology. Though, as he points out, deciding whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer isn't just determined by the complexity of their sensory hardware; we must also examine whether the animal displays behavior associated with pain. 

 

And of course, as anyone who has ever watched a lobster thrashing about in a pan of boiling water for up to 45 seconds and desperately trying to escape will tell you, it requires an impressive display of intellectual gymnastics not to view this as pain-behaviour.  

 

Arguably, however, in even raising the possibility that we might compare the treatment of lobsters at the 56th annual Maine Lobster Festival to the fate of the Jews transported to Nazi extermination camps, Wallace oversteps the mark (i.e., he's walking the lobster, as they say in 1990s urban slang) [5]. 

 

Indeed, Wallace himself nervously backs away from this line of thought, but not before wondering if the reason why such an argument seems so outrageously extreme is precisely because we still largely believe animals to have significantly less moral value than human beings.

Wallace concludes his essay by asking his readers (as fellow meat-eaters and seafood lovers) two key questions:

 

"Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?"

 

And to those who show no desire to worry about such things or dismiss the question of animal welfare out of hand, he asks:

 

"Is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don't want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?" 

 

Ultimately, Wallace is right to argue that we all need to be a bit more thoughtful about what we eat and how our food is produced; all need to be a bit more attentive to the suffering not just of our fellow mammals, but birds, fish, and, indeed, crustaceans like the lobster.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', (1915): click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603.  

[3] Samuel Beckett, 'Dante and the Lobster', in More Pricks Than Kicks, (Chatto and Windus, 1934). A more recent edition, ed. with an extensive Preface by Cassandra Nelson, was published by Faber and Faber in 2010. The story can also be read online as originally published in the literary magazine Evergreen Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1957): click here. 

[4] David Foster Wallace, 'Consider the Lobster', in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, (Little, Brown and Co., 2005). To read this essay online (in an annotated version), click here. Or, to listen to the author read his essay (audiobook style) on YouTube, click here.   

[5] It might be noted that several writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals within the industrialised food industry and the Holocaust. Animal rights groups, including PETA, also have no problem with making such a metaphysical equivalence, though there are many who find the idea that meat is murder morally obtuse and highly offensive. 

      Without wishing to get too off-topic, it might also be noted that the Nazis were greatly concerned with animal welfare; for example, they outlawed vivisection, regulated animal slaughter, gave the wolf protected status, and prohibited the boiling alive of lobsters. 

 

 

I would like to acknowledge my debt for (some of) the ideas pursued here to an article by Jonathan Greenberg; 'A Lobster Is Being Eaten' (19 May, 2019), in the Journal of the Modernist Studies Association Modernism/modernity. Click here to read online.    

In Memory of Joris-Karl Huysmans (and His Bejewelled Tortoise)

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

To be honest, I increasingly find that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to read 19th-century French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans who are a little too Symbolist, too Decadent and too Catholic for my tastes. One really has no wish to end up at the foot of the Cross, be it inverted or upright and I find elements of his philosophy - much influenced by Schopenhauer - highly suspect; suggestive as they are of weakness, rather than a more Nietzschean pessimism of strength. 

However, as Huysmans and I share the same star sign making us astrological kin - and as today happens to be the 170th anniversary of his birth - I thought I might say something in memory of this idiosyncratic writer, notorious for writing against the grain and against nature ...

The first thing that needs to be said is that Huysmans was clever - very clever. And I'm with Eliot on this question: the essential requirement of all good writing - be it prose or poetry - is intelligence. An inspired idiot is unfortunately still an idiot and inspiration won't compensate for (or disguise) a lack of learning and quick-wittedness for long. L'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité was not surprisingly one of Huysmans's pet peeves. 

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), strongly influenced by Baudelaire. This was followed by a novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876), which brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar in style: realistic and rather grim depictions of life in Paris.

Again, to be honest, you'd have to have a great passion for French literature or a scholarly interest like the middle-aged protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission (2015), to bother with these books. But on the other hand, his scandalous novel of 1884, À rebours, is a must read - if only for the bejewelled tortoise in chapter four. 

And that's particularly so for lovers of Oscar Wilde; for this poisonous tale of the aristocratic aesthete Jean des Esseintes - a man who rejects both the natural order and bourgeois society and attempts to live exclusively in a perversely sensual yet highly artificial world of his own invention - greatly influenced The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Amusingly - though not for poor Constance - Wilde first read À rebours whilst on honeymoon in Paris and it immediately became for him what it was also for Paul Valéry and, many years later, the punk singer Richard Hell - a bible and bedside favourite.       

See:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Joris-Karl Huysmans, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Penguin Books, 2003).

To read an excellent essay by Adam Leith Gollner on 'What Houellebecq Learned from Huysmans', in The New Yorker (12 November, 2015), click here. 

For an interesting note on À rebours and its influence on Oscar Wilde, visit the British Library website: click here. 

For a related post to this one that reflects more closely on the bejewelled tortoise, click here.

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

On the Joy of Metaphysical Conceit (With Reference to John Donne's 'The Flea')

John Donne (1572-1631): The Flea 

(First published posthumously in 1633) 

Whilst it's true that I don't like conceited individuals, I do like writers who make use of conceits; i.e. literary devices that form extremely ingenious or fanciful parallels between apparently dissimilar objects. And I'm particularly fond of what are known as metaphysical conceits, associated - not surprisingly - with a loosely associated group of 17th century English poets known as the metaphysical poets, a term coined rather sneeringly by the critic Samuel Johnson.

These conceits, according to Johnson, violently yoke together in a clever but displeasing manner the most heterogeneous ideas and establish provocative analogies between spiritual qualities on the one hand and base matter on the other; such as, for example, the virgin purity of an unmarried woman and the vile body of an insect.

It's for this reason that John Donne's famous poem, The Flea, continues to delight. It's a comic and erotic verse that uses the conceit of a flea which has sucked blood both from the male speaker and the young woman he is hoping to seduce, as an extended metaphor for the amorous relationship between them.

The speaker attempts to persuade the woman to surrender her sex to him, not with sweet talk, or romantic flattery. Nor does he make an emotional appeal to her feelings. Rather, he uses his wit and his logic to appeal to her reason, arguing that if their blood mingles together within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife, so may as well fuck together without further delay.

Thus, as Dryden rightly says of Donne - and again, one can sense the disapproval in this remark:

"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."

However, despite the criticisms of Dryden and Johnson, there have been those, following T. S. Eliot, prepared to champion metaphysical poetry for its witty, cerebral style. Camille Paglia, for example, ranks The Flea as amongst the world's best - and queerest - love poems; a perfect illustration of Donne's effrontery and ostentatious use of conceits, in which, amongst other things, he satirizes the absurd arguments men will advance in the hope of getting laid.

As Paglia also points out, the three stanzas that compose The Flea are like scenes from a play; full of what she terms dramatic immediacy. This is in part due to the fact that there's no superfluous or old-fashioned lyricism; the reader feels as if they are listening to a genuine conversation between actual lovers, rather than the speech of those still earnestly clinging to the tired conventions of Petrarch.

Ultimately, perhaps what's most engaging about The Flea is the fact that the young woman is "serenely impervious to the poet's dazzling flights of rhetoric." So much so that, despite his desperate plea for clemency, she squashes the blood-swollen bug beneath her nail without a qualm. He may imagine that they are united as one within the body of the flea, but she's not buying into this holy trinity line of bullshit for a second.      

However, in protesting that the death of a flea is inconsequential and that her act of cruelty is not one that in any way morally dishonours or physically weakens her, she allows the man an opportunity to make his final, beautifully nihilistic point: nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Thus the sacrifice of her virginity means nothing more, nothing less, than the murder of an insect and her determination to maintain her maidenhead until her wedding night, based on groundless fear and superstition, is absurd.

(Whether this finally convinced her to take him into her bed, we sadly cannot know ...)  

See:

Helen Gardner (ed.), Metaphysical Poets, (Revised Edition: Penguin Books, 1966). The quote from Dryden is taken from this text. 

Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: The Divine Poems, (Second Edition: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Camille Paglia, 'John Donne, The Flea', Break, Blow, Burn  (Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 20-25.

Of Spiders and Flies (Notes on the Lawrence-Eliot Relationship)

D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot 
by David Levine

The relationship between D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot was never going to be anything other than strained at best. And often it was hostile, even spiteful (one is tempted to say catty). There are several explanations why. F. R. Leavis, for example, accused Eliot of snobbishness in his appraisal of Lawrence and there is undoubtedly an element of class antagonism present in the Lawrence-Eliot relationship.

But Eliot doesn't just dislike or dismiss Lawrence for being an oik; they were artistically and philosophically irreconcilable, as well as belonging to different social worlds. And they were also poles apart religiously, which, arguably, was the really crucial issue for both.

Eliot, who famously converted to Anglicanism in 1927 and identified with the more orthodox wing of the Church, was as contemptuous of the young Lawrence's nonconformist background as he was disdainful of the mature Lawrence's neo-paganism. In After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot argues that whilst Lawrence's vision of life is spiritual, it's nonetheless corrupt and represents the intrusion of the diabolic into modern literature. 

Eliot also seems to have disliked Lawrence's idea of what constituted wholesome fucking:

"When his characters make love - or perform Mr. Lawrence’s equivalent for love-making - and they do nothing else - they not only lose all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable; they seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution, passing backward beyond ape and fish to some hideous coition of protoplasm."

This might not be entirely fair, but it is rather amusing.

Far less amusing, however, was Eliot's response to E. M. Forster's generous and straight out description of Lawrence following his death in 1930 as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Eliot - to his great discredit - felt it appropriate and worthwhile to pick this touching tribute apart, demanding that Forster explain and justify his terms:

"I am the last person to wish to disparage the genius of Lawrence, or to disapprove when a writer of the eminence of Mr Forster speaks 'straight out'. But the virtue of speaking straight out is somewhat diminished if what one speaks is not sense. And unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by greatest, imaginative, and novelist, I submit that this judgement is meaningless."

This - written in a published letter - is just nasty and petty, is it not? Insulting to Forster, insulting to Lawrence and insulting to the friendship between them. Forster was stung to reply:

"Mr T. S. Eliot entangles me in his web. He asks exactly what I mean by 'greatest', 'imaginative', and 'novelist', and I cannot say. Worse still, I cannot even say what 'exactly' means - only that there are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider, and the death of D. H. Lawrence is one of these."

       
See:

T. S. Eliot, 'The Contemporary Novel', in The Times Literary Supplement (12 August 2015). Click here to read.

The Forster-Eliot letters were published in The Nation and Athenaeum in March/April 1930 and can be found in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930-1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, (Faber and Faber, 2014): click here. 

April is the Cruelest Month

Despite the horror of the night before, in the morning the birds still sang, the flowers still opened and the sun continued to shine regardless ... And it is this surging indifference of the world to suffering, particularly noticeable in the spring, that strikes some minds as cruel.

But, for me, it allows petty personal concerns to be placed within a wider (non-human) perspective; enabling one to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. I draw much comfort knowing there is an eternal return of the natural world the same as ever and thronging with greenness.

In fact, sitting at the hospital, I wonder how those individuals who fail to encompass their own lives within what Lawrence terms the blue of the Greater Day manage to find the courage that is needed to survive and flourish in the face of a mortal existence that brings with it an enormous quantum of pain and sorrow.

If they can't transform the undifferentiated black-nothingness of death into a line of flight and fiery resurrection, then it's no wonder they become possessed by that spirit of revenge which animates so many who slander life as it is and long for spiritual immortality and heavenly reward.

Ultimately, it's not Eliot's moral idealism but Nietzsche's perfected nihilism that makes innocent and sets free; which shows us joy in a handful of shit ...