From a Commonplace Book

There is no use talking to the ignorant about lies, for they have no criteria.

- Ezra Pound, "The Constant Preaching to the Mob"

I found this one, I suspect, on Brian Leiter's blog, since he's quoted it a number of times (with slightly different wording -- "You can't talk to the ignorant about lies, since [or because] they have no criteria". But I went and dug up the original citation for this blog post, and the original context is interesting -- you can read the whole thing here, it's only a page and a half. It's Pound denouncing the idea that poetry is meant to entertain as "flatter[ing] the mob". But, of course, it's a good line (and an important truth) whatever one thinks of its provenance. A truth's not responsible for the person who first expressed it.

The Evolution of Section 1 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"

I have long known that the first edition of Walt Whitman's seminal book of poetry Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, was much shorter than the final edition (the so-called "death-bed edition" of 1891-1892.) (The first edition had twelve poems in it; the last (depending on how you count) ten or more times that.) I was less focused on the fact that, in addition to poems being added, the older poems were rewritten as the editions went on. And only in the last day or two have I taken note of the fact that that rewriting was a gradual process, as various poems I've come to know and love in their final forms only took those final forms in the 1881-1882 edition. (The death-bed edition was unchanged, save for a number of poems added as "annexes" at the end.)

In this post I thought I'd trace the changes in the first section of "Song of Myself" -- probably Whitman's most famous,* and arguably his greatest, poem, and certainly the most famous and greatest one from the first edition of Leaves of Grass. And, not incidentally, my personal favorite too.

(Note: all the texts here are from the astonishing Walt Whitman Archive, which has both text and scanned-page-image versions of all the editions of Leaves of Grass, as well as a really amazing amount of Whitmania. If you're at all interested in Whitman, check it out.)

First I should mention that, the title of the work underwent several changes. In the 1855 edition, the poem later known as "Song of Myself" was basically untitled.** There were no numbers (the final text was divided into 52 sections). The opening words were:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

And that's it: there's then another stanza break, and the next words are the words that (in the final text) start section two ("Houses and rooms are full of perfumes"). Note that the ellipsis in the final line above is in the original.

In the second edition of 1857, a mere two years later, the poem has acquired a title: "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.". Its opening is as follows:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

That is, substantially the same, but the ellipsis is gone.

In the 1860 edition, the poem's title has been shortened to "Walt Whitman". The text is unchanged -- save for the addition of a capital letter on soul's s -- but each subsection is now numbered:

1 I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

2 I loafe and invite my Soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

These numbers do not correspond to the section numbers of the final text; one is given to each stanza, so there are 366 in total, far more than the 52 sections of the final text.

In the 1867 edition, the only difference is that the commas at the end of the first, second and fourth lines have become semi-colons. In the 1871 edition, nothing at all has changed in the opening.

Then, in the 1881-1882 edition, there are a host of changes, as the poem takes on its final form. First, it first takes on the title "Song of Myself", by which it has since been known. Secondly, the poem is now divided into 52 sections rather than numbering each stanza. And the first section takes on its final form:

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

The commas are back. And the first line is filled out -- "I celebrate myself" has become "I celebrate myself, and sing myself". I definitely prefer the latter, but I don't know if it's because it was the first I got to know well.

But there are two wholly new stanzas, adding a substantial amount of text between the "spear of summer grass" and the "houses and rooms" which starts section 2.

They are not, however, original to the 1881 edition. Rather, they were moved to "Song of Myself" from a different poem -- the poem that would become known as "Starting from Paumanok".

"Starting from Paumanok" does not exist in any form in either 1855 or the 1857 editions. In the 1860 edition, however, a set of prefatory stanzas -- numbered, as were the stanzas of "Walt Whitman" (aka "Song of Myself"); there were 66 total -- were added before the words "I celebrate myself", which had previously been the first words of the first poem. In the 1860 edition those prefatory verses were titled "Proto-Leaf", and the 11th and 12th stanzas were as follows:

11 In the Year 80 of The States,
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here,
From parents the same, and their parents' parents the same,
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

12 Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
With accumulations, now coming forward in front,
Arrived again, I harbor, for good or bad—I permit to speak,
Nature, without check, with original energy.

Close to the two stanzas that would be added to section one of "Song of Myself", but not identical -- a few lines never made it into "Song of Myself" -- particularly the first line ("In the Year 80 of The States") and the middle of the second stanza ("With accumulations, now coming forward in front,/Arrived again..."). And there are some minor changes of punctuation and line formatting.

"The Year 80 of The States", incidentally, is presumably dated to the Declaration of Independence, which would place it from July 14, 1856 - July 13, 1857. Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, so for most of that year he was 37 years old, turning 38 shortly before the end of the period. Nevertheless, in this version Whitman describes himself as "thirty-six years old"; he wouldn't update (correct?) that until the 1881-1882 edition (at which point he was 62). Oh, and it was Balboa, not Cortes, Mr. K.***

In the 1867 edition, the prefatory verses had become "Starting from Paumanok", and is divided into sections, although each stanza is still individually numbered. Section 4 of the newly-titled poem reads:

11 In the Year 80 of The States,
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

12 Creeds and schools in abeyance,
(Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,)
I harbor, for good or bad—I permit to speak, at every hazard,
Nature now without check, with original energy.

The extra lines from the second of those two stanzas are gone. As if in compensation, the final line gains the word "now". And the punctuation is still different -- the second line is in parentheses, there's the m-dash in the third, and a few commas are different. The first stanza is changed largely in line breaks and punctuation (including, oddly, the previously normal word "formed" becoming here "form'd").

The 1871 edition made no changes in those verses.

Then, in 1881-1882, they are not only given a few changes, but are translated from the fourth section of "Starting from Paumanok" to being the second half of the first section of (the newly christened) "Song of Myself".

Which I've already quoted.

I haven't yet read through all the various versions side by side, or even the 1855 version and the final 1881-1882 text side-by-side, to see how this goes through the whole poem. My sense is that, given the transposed stanzas, this section goes through larger changes than most. But I don't know. I do know that a fair number of Whitman scholars apparently prefer the 1855 version -- and that, based on this little exercise, I -- so far -- don't.

Still, it's all interesting. At least to people given to Nortonian pedantry (are you reading the footnotes?)

_________________________
* Its only competitor for this title, I think, is O Captain! My Captain!, which is widely taught in schools -- but which is also utterly uncharacteristic of Whitman, as atypical a work (at least in form) as he ever wrote (at least in his mature period).

** It was headed with the words 'Leaves of Grass', the title of the book of the whole, as were half of the dozen poems included, but it's not really a title and has never been taken as such.

*** Or was it? It seems there are counter-arguments to this oft-made puff of Nortonian pedantry (who knew?): see C. V. Wicker, "Cortez-Not Balboa", in College English, Vol. 17, No. 7 (Apr., 1956), pp. 383-387, expanded on in Charles J. Rzepka, "'Cortez: Or Balboa, or Somebody like That': Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' Sonnet", in Keats-Shelley Journal , Vol. 51, (2002), pp. 35-75. (Links to stable JSTOR cites for those with library-granted access.) I only skimmed the first of them, but it seems to me like Wicker has a pretty decent argument.

Theodorides's Epigram (and Diverse Tangentially Related Matters)

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.

-- Theodorides, trans. H. Wellesley (from the Greek Anthology)

I saw this in William James's Pragmatism, chapter 8, where it is quoted and ascribed simply to The Greek Anthology. (An 1895 volume called Selections from the Greek Anthology is online here; this epigram is on p. 275). The Greek Anthology ascribes it to Theodorides, and credits the translator.

In the notes to the Penguin edition of James, Giles Gunn refers to the author as "Theodorides of Syracuse", adding that he "wrote towards the end of the third century B.C.", although Gunn downgrades him from the author to the reported one, saying that the epigram is "ascribed to" him. Poor Theodorides does not come up in the first page of Google results for a search on Theodorides, and does not even seem to have a Wikipedia page in English. (Here's one in French.)

Here's an alternate translation:

Shipwrecked I; but be none scared by my ill-starred lot;
Other ships sailed the sea with mine, and suffered not.

-- from this web site, and a few others, although none that I found credit a translator.

I must say that poor Theodorides of Syracuse seems sadly underrepresented on the web.

The translator, interestingly, does somewhat better. H. Wellesley seems to be Rev. Henry Wellesley, D.D. (1794 - 1866), principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, editor & translator of a volume called Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages Chiefly From the Greek Anthology (London, 1849), available in full at the link. The link before that is to a genealogy site from which I got his dates; it, in turn, seems to be citing this W. H. Auden-focused genealogy site on which Rev. Wellesley turns up.* From those two sites, both just lists of facts, you get a sketchy but none-the-less real picture of his life: he was ordained at Oxford at age 28, married at 40; and was the father of four children (one of whom died at birth). He became a Doctor of Divinity at age 51, the same year he was made principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford (the latter, at least, because of his uncle, the Duke of Wellington, who was the chancellor of the university). He died at age 71.

Wellesley's translation of Theodorides is in his Anthologyia Polyglotta, at page 300, along with two Latin translations (one by Samuel Johnson (!)), a German translation, and the Greek original. Interestingly, Wellesley seems to have organized his book by subject and theme, so that on the very next page he reproduces a nearly identical epigram by Leonidas of Tarentum, also from the 3rd century B.C.E., who is also well represented in The Greek Anthology (with over a hundred poems, according to Wikipedia). Here's Wellesley's translation of the Leonidas:

Fearless set sail from this wreck'd seaman's grave.
We perish'd: others safely rode the wave.

And here's a second English translation, which Wellesley attributes to one W. Sheperd:

Loose from my tomb thy hawser: though I died
Shipwreck'd, my comrades 'scaped the raging tide.

Those two English epigrams read simply as alternate translations of Theodorides -- indeed, at first that's what I thought they were. But the Greek Wellesley gives is (even to this non-Greek reader's eye) different. So I suppose that either two versions of a common poem have come down to us, or it was a common sentiment in 3rd century B.C.E. Greece. (Click through for French, Latin and Italian translations, plus the original.)

Take heart, Henry Wellesley! Your work lives on: though you died, it has, so far, weathered the gale.

Update: An anonymous source, who agreed to be described as "one familiar with the President's thinking on the issue", sent in the following literal translation of the Theodorides:

I am a shipwrecked man's tomb; but you, sail! For even as we
Perished, the surviving ships traversed the sea.

--------------------------------
* Wellesley is on an Auden-focused genealogical site for the single most distant relationship I have ever had reason to contemplate: Wellesley's sister's great-grandaughter's husband's second wife was the granddaughter of Auden's aunt (by marriage's) brother's son's wife's great-aunt's husband's brother. I swear to God I didn't just make that up (although I might well have gotten something wrong there -- it isn't the easiest chart to put into words!); in fact, it took some effort to extract that from the site, so I hope you appreciate it.

Poem of the Day: Rudyard Kipling Waxes Metaphorical About Fifteenth Century England

The Dawn Wind

The Fifteenth Century

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down,
Dozing and chewing the cud; or a bird in the ivy wakes,
Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind strays on,
Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness breaks.

Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel's wing,
Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts: "The Sun! The Sun!"
And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing,
And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is day and his work is done.

So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!
-- Rudyard Kipling

I'd always known the opening quatrain only in the context of its use as the epigraph for The Citadel of the Autarch (the fourth book of Gene Wolfe's masterpiece The Book of the New Sun). Recently it occurred to me to wonder what poem it came from; the above is the answer. It's one of a cycle of poems first published in A School History of England (1911) by C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling. Peter Keating notes that "It was used to close chapter VI, ‘The End of the Middle Ages: Richard II to Richard III, 1377-1485.’ An entry in the right hand margin beside the poem reads: ‘The hour before the dawn’ which might – given that the poem is centrally about process rather than achievement - make a more precise title for the poem than the one it carries."

Two Poets Walk Into a Pub

...Except they never met, really, and it wasn't a pub, it was a bar.

Maybe I should back up.

A commentator with the delightful* handle Steve with a book, over at Making Light, mentioned (in passing) what he called "Auden's questions: In what pubs are they welcome? What girls marry them?".

Well, I loves me some Auden, and those lines weren't from any Auden poem I knew, so I went and tracked them down.

The first thing to say is that, as I said at the beginning, it's not a pub, but a bar. The pub misquotation (to judge from the google results) originating in Clive James's book Cultural Amnesia, in a section that was reprinted in slate under the title Assessing Terry Gilliam, which presumably accounts for its prevelance in the googlesphere. Apart from that Anglicization of the post-English Auden, though, James's quotation seems perfectly apposite: he's discussing the torturer Peron, and Auden's original use is simply to stick the questions into parentheses after mentioning "torturers": "In what bars are they welcome?/What girls marry them?" A misquotation, to be sure, but not at all a misuse. Surely we can spot James a round at a pub in return for bringing to our attention those two lovely lines.

But what about the larger context, i.e. the whole poem? That, Noble Reader, is where things begin to get interesting.

The lines are from a poem (or ought one say group of poems?) that Auden published later in his career called "Eleven Occasional Poems". In particular, the lines are from the fifth subsection of that poem (or ought one to say to a poem in that group?), which is titled "Josef Weinheber" and subtitled with his dates (1892 - 1945). The subsections are separately dated**; "Josef Weinheber" is dated February, 1965.

And who, one wonders, was Josef Weinheber?

Well, it's not the kindest way to begin introducing the man, but given that we've come across him in the context of lines questioning the social acceptance of torturers, it seems appropriate to begin by noting that Josef Weinheber was a Nazi. I don't mean that rhetorically, but literally: he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich. (He was Austrian, and became a citizen of the Reich with the anchlauss, which Weinheber apparently welcomed.)

Now, lest any of my readers not be all that familiar with Auden, let me hasten to add that the man was no Nazi sympathizer. (If he committed any political sins in the 1930's, they were on the left, not the right.) In fact, a fair amount of his poetry has a specifically and not-too-subtly anti-Nazi message. In "Spain" (1937) he wrote admiringly of the struggle against the fascists in Spain; in "Refugee Blues" (1939) he dramatized the plight of German Jewish refugees with nowhere to go in a way that is still being used in Holocaust course material. Auden himself married Erika Mann (daughter of Thomas, and Jewish on her mother's side) in order to obtain a British passport for her in 1935. (Auden was openly gay, and the marriage was forthrightly just for convenience. "***)

Okay. So Auden was no Nazi sympathizer. What was he doing eulogizing a former Nazi?

Well, for one thing, Weinheber apparently had -- eventually -- a falling-out with Naziism, and came to regret his support for them. Weinheber was also a poet that Auden admired, and was the only other resident of note in a town in southern Austria, Kirchstetten, where Auden summered in the last several years of his life (and where he died, and where he is buried.) Here's how Auden himself put the matter, at a 1968 poetry reading, as recoutned by James Fenton in the Guardian a few years ago:

[Auden] reads a poem in memory of Joseph Weinheber and, on introducing it, tells the audience that Weinheber was an important Austrian poet who was at first an enthusiastic Nazi supporter, but who gradually during the course of the second world war became disillusioned and depressed until, in 1945, he committed suicide. There is a dialect phrase in the poem, which Auden has to explain. Weinheber had been taken up by the Nazis, and Goebbels had asked him what the party could do for Austrian culture. "In Ruah lossen," Weinheber's reply, means that they should leave it alone, leave it in peace - precisely what the Nazis were unprepared to do. What Auden is addressing here is the ghost of a man who had made a very big mistake (supporting Nazism) and died regretting it.

Anyone interested in more details should seek out an article by Peter Edgarly Firchow, called "Auden and Weinheber: Poets of Kirchstetten", which explores the various intersections of the poets' lives in some detail. (It appeared first in the journal Salmagundi (No. 96 (Fall 1992), pp. 187-211) -- the link is to JSTOR, where it can be found by those who have access -- and later as the fifth and last chapter of Firchow's 2008 book Strange Meetings: Anglo-German Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960.) Definitely the major piece in this admittedly small corner of literary studies.

Or you could just read Auden's poem, which I've posted below.

Josef Weinheber
(1892 - 1945)

Reaching my gate, a narrow
lane from the village
passes on into a wood:
when I walk that way
it seems befitting to stop
and look through the fence
of your garden where (under
the circs they had to)
they buried you like a loved
old family dog.

Categorised enemies
twenty years ago,
now next-door neighbors, we might
have become good friends,
sharing a common ambit
and love of the Word,
over a golden Kremser
had many a long
language on syntax, commas,
versification.

Yes, yes, it has to be said:
men of great damage
and malengine took you up.
Did they for long, though,
take you in, who to Goebbels'
offer of culture
countered -- in Ruah lossen?
But Rag, Tag, Bobtail
prefer a stink, and the young
condemn you unread.

What, had you ever heard of
Franz Jägerstätter,
the St. Radegund peasant,
who said his lonely
Nein to the Aryan State
and was beheaded,
would your heart, as Austrian,
poet, have told you?
Good care, of course, was taken
you should hear nothing,

be unprepared for a day
that was bound to come,
a season of dread and tears
and dishevelment
when, transfixed by a nightmare,
you destroyed yourself.
Retribution was ever
a bungler at it:
dies alles ist furchtbar, hier
nur Schweigen gemass.

Unmarked by me, unmourned for,
the hour of your death,
unhailed by you the moment
when, providence-led,
I first beheld Kirchstetten
on a pouring wet
October day in a year
that changed our cosmos,
the annus mirabilis
when Parity fell.

Already the realms that lost
were properly warm
and over-eating, their crimes
the pedestrian
private sort, those nuisances,
corpses and rubble,
long carted away: for their raped
the shock was fading,
their kidnapped physicists felt
no longer homesick.

Today we smile at weddings
where bride and bridgegroom
were both born since the Shadow
lifted, or rather
moved elsewhere: never as yet
has Earth been without
her bad patch, some unplace with
jobs for torturers
(In what bars are they welcome?
What girls marry them?),

or her nutritive surface
at peace all over.
No one, so far as we know,
has ever felt safe:
and so, in secret regions,
good family men
keep eye, devoted as monks,
on apparatus
inside which harmless matter
turns homicidal.

Here, though, I feel as at home
as you did: the same
short-lived creatures re-utter
the same care-free songs,
orchards cling to the regime
they know, from April's
rapid augment of color
til boisterous Fall,
when at each stammering gust
apples thump the ground.

Looking across our valley
where, hidden from view,
Sichelbach tottles westward
to join the Perschling,
humanely modest in scale
and mild in contour,
conscious of grander neighbors
to bow to, mountains
soaring behind me, ahead
a noble river,

I would respect you also,
Neighbor and Colleague,
for even my English ear
gets in your German
the workmanship and the note
of one who was graced
to hear the viols playing
on the impaled green,
committed thereafter den
Abgrund zu nennen.

-- W. H. Auden
February, 1965

Hey! Wanna see my impression of an editor for the Norton Anthology of Whatever?

• 8: "circs": circumstances. Fenton comments: "The abbreviation of circumstances to "circs" in the first stanza is typical of the linguistic mannerisms that used to annoy his critical readers, but Auden is expecting us to notice that the very informal language is gently referring to a terrifying moment in history."

• 27: "in Ruah lossen" Weinheber's (apparently real) response to Goebbels's question about what he could do for Austrian culture -- which Firchow translates as "leave 'em alone".

• 31: "Franz Jägerstätter". The story Auden tells here is a true one. Details here.

• 45-46: "when, transfixed by a nightmare/you destroyed yourself." Weinheber committed suicide on April 8, 1945,

• 49-50: "dies alles ist furchtbar, hier/nur Schweigen gemass" - lines quoted from a poem of Weinheber's called "Auf das Unabwendbare" ("On the Unavoidable"), which Firchow translates as "all of this is terrible;/here silence is the only proper response." Firchow goes on to say that "The words actually do not actually appear in quite the way that Auden cites them, but represent a fusion of the stanzaic refrain (Dies alles ist furchtbar) with the final line of the poem (Hier ist nur Schweigen gemäss)."

• 55: "Kirchstetten" - we already covered this, O Careless Reader! That's the town in southern Austria where Weinheber lived & where Auden had a summer home.

• 59, "annus mirabilis" - Latin for "year of miracles". Originally used in reference to 1666 (see here for more), now a common phrase. Firchow glosses this as (for Auden) 1939.

• 103-104: "Sichelbach tottles westward/to join the Perschling". The Perschling is a tributary to the Danube in Austria; I'm presuming that the Sichelbach is too, but, really, who the fuck knows. An actual Norton editor gets paid for this shit, right?

• 119 - 120: "den/Abgrund zu nennen". Of these lines, Firchow writes that they are

taken, again in slightly altered form, almost as if Auden were revising one of his own poems, from the poem "Kammermusik" (1939), in the collection of the same name. The poem, subtitled "A Variation," consists of four stanzas, with each stanza being spoken by one of the instruments in the quartet. The two violins start off expressing, as in their nature, sunny or only slightly shaded views of life. The viola, however, provides a dark glimpse of the abyss, which, drawn as it is to suffering rather than to naive optimism, the viola feels obligated to name (den Abgrund euch zu nennen). The cello closes the poem on a note of reconciliation, of seeing the whole, of accepting what fate brings: "I don't warn, I weep with you. I console." Significantly, however, Auden picks out the suffering Christian voice of the viola, rather than the balanced Greek voice of the cello, when he wishes to give us his final verdict on Weinheber.

• "February, 1965": Has the poem been translated into German? Why yes, it has.

________________________
* Well, a good name and a good object, what else could you want?

** Which inclines one towards calling them poems, with Auden's collective grouping simply being a way of slightly deemphasizing poems which fall into his category of "pieces he has nothing against except their lack of importance" (which, Auden continues, "must invariably form the bulk of any collection since, were he to limit to to... those poems for which he is honestly grateful, his volume would be too depressingly slim.") But the typographical signals in the layout of the Collected Poems definitely marks them out as a poem, rather than as eleven of them.

*** There are a number of charming stories about the marriage arrangements, most of them, I believe, appocraphal. I recall two. One is that when Auden was approached to see if he would marry Mann in order to get her out of Nazi Germany, he replied, affirmingly, "What's a bugger for?" The other is that before Mann arrived to marry Auden, they'd never met, so he didn't know what she looked like. There was a mix-up about the times, so she was not on the train; but Auden, seeing a lone woman get out, assumed it was her, walked up to her, and said, "Madam, I understand that we are to be married tomorrow."

Sourcing a Superlative Cento (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 13)

Centos -- poems composed by quoting lines from previously existing poems -- have been mentioned on this blog before; in the latter case, I did what I propose to do here, and cited sources for all the lines from one of my favorite centos. (The word is pronounced with a soft c, incidentally -- 'sento'.) This cento is by R. S. Gwynn (what a marvelously voweless* name!); I found it on p. 68-69 of the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. Oddly, despite that book's having an index of forms, and including this cento, they don't list "cento" among the forms the book uses.

Anyway, first just the cento, with no links, so you can just enjoy it as a poem (and personally I think it's a very good one).

Approaching a Significant Birthday, He
Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry

All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall—
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.

If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain

And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

-- R. S. Gwynn

Anyone who's read even a little English poetry will recognize some -- maybe even many -- of those lines. They are all -- as the title of course indicates -- extremely famous. Nevertheless, as a public (not-really-all-that-significant-a) service, here is the poem again, with each line linked to its original source:

Approaching a Significant Birthday, He
Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry

All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall—
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.

If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

-- R. S. Gwynn

And here's a list of the sources, in order:

John Dryden, "Mac Flecknoe"
Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier"
Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Percy Bysshe Shelly, "Ode to the West Wind"

John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"
John Donne, "Elegie: His Picture"
Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time"

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Tithonus"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
Robert Frost, "Design"
William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

Robert Brooke, "The Soldier"
Thomas Hardy, "Hap"
John Keats, "When I have fears that I may cease to be"
John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"

John Crowe Ransom, "Piazza Piece"
John Milton, "Lycidas"
William Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much With Us"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night"
John Milton, "Lycidas"
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Mr. Flood's Party"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Break, Break, Break"
William Shakespeare, Richard II, 3:2.
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I suppose that just reading the 26 poems quoted in that one poem would be a pretty decent syllabus for an introduction to English poetry. (Not a perfect one, to be sure -- I note, just as a fer'instance, that there isn't a single female poet on the list). Most are very famous -- several are among the most famous poems in the language -- although in a number of cases (Donne, Roethke, Ransom, Hardy, Robinson) I hadn't heard of that particular poem previously, although I knew other poems by all of them (indeed, many poems fairly well in some cases). Rupert Brooke I don't think I'd ever heard of at all.

A couple of further notes:

• Gwynn twice uses two lines from a single poem: Lines 5 & 16 are both from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"; Lines 18 & 22 are both from Milton's Lycidas. (Thus, while there are 28 lines in Gwynn's poem, it has only 26 poems for sources.)

• Gwynn uses lines by 20 poets. He takes three lines each from Tennyson (from three separate poems) and Keats (two lines from one poem, one from another); he uses two lines each from Stevens, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton (in the first three cases, from two separate poems; in the final case, two lines from one poem). That's half the poem. The other fourteen lines come from fourteen different writers.

• In Gwynn's use of Hopkins in line 20, he doesn't actually use the entire line, which in its original setting is "It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil". For his antepenultimate line, Gwynn makes a single line out of what was a pair of lines in its original home in Tennyson's poem. These are the only times that Gwynn uses something other than a single, full line of poetry from another source. (Unlike Harry Mathews, I might add.)

• I'm curious about whether all these poems are really in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (do they include speeches from Shakespeare's plays, for instance?), but not curious enough to check.

Finally, a word about the poem overall. I said above that I thought that Gwynn's was a very good poem in its own right. A cynic might note that of course it was a good poem: he stole from 26 of the best poems in the language! And there's some truth in that, I suppose. But of course he didn't just pick lines higglety-pigglety. He put them in an order that made sense -- a new (and interesting and aesthetically powerful) sense that none of the original poems had. And he did so in a way that followed his own aesthetic form (alternating quatrains, quoth the back-matter of Rebel Angels). So while he may not have written any of the lines, he definitely wrote the poem -- which is to say, he created its structure and its meaning. All this is just to defend collage as a genuine artistic practice, which despite its obvious validity in power is somehow always needs redoing.** But as Montaigne said, there have been a great many centos, including "some very ingenious ones". And there have been many equally so since Montaigne wrote; among which I'd number this poem of R. S. Gwynn's creation.

___________________
* Yes, I know 'y' counts as a vowel.

** I grant this is an odd way to put it, since the cento is an ancient form, while collage was invented by Picasso. But for all cento's age, it remains an obscure practice; while collage is done, I'd guess, in every preschool in America.

Poem of the Day: Robbing God

I first read the line "If I slack my hands, I rob God: for God cannot make Stradivarius violins without Stradivarius" quoted, just like that, in a book when I was a child -- some book of plays for children, I think, which quoted it in its preface. But perhaps I misremember. At any rate, I quoted it that way for years, until, at a party, a graduate student writing his dissertation on Stradivarius gently informed me that Stradivarius left very little writing, that he'd read it all, and that that line is not among them. (He was kind enough to suggest perhaps there was a source he didn't know, hence gentle; but it was clear that I was wrong.) I mentioned this to a group of friends at college, and one did the obvious thing, that I had never thought of, and looked it up in Bartlet's. It's dialogue put in Stradivarius's mouth by George Eliot, writing well over a century after his death. (I mention this in part because (and you can see if you google it) it is still occasionally misattributed the line to Stradivarius.

Here's the actual source -- which doesn't have the precise wording I remember so clearly, but near enough.

God Needs Antonio

Your soul was lifted by the wings today
Hearing the master of the violin:
You praised him, praised the great Sabastian too
Who made that fine Chaconne; but did you think
Of old Antonio Stradivari? -him
Who a good century and a half ago
Put his true work in that brown instrument
And by the nice adjustment of its frame
Gave it responsive life, continuous
With the master's finger-tips and perfected
Like them by delicate rectitude of use.
That plain white-aproned man, who stood at work
Patient and accurate full fourscore years,
Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,
And since keen sense is love of perfectness
Made perfect violins, the needed paths
For inspiration and high mastery.

No simpler man than he; he never cried,
"why was I born to this monotonous task
Of making violins?" or flung them down
To suit with hurling act well-hurled curse
At labor on such perishable stuff.
Hence neighbors in Cremona held him dull,
Called him a slave, a mill-horse, a machine.

Naldo, a painter of eclectic school,
Knowing all tricks of style at thirty-one,
And weary of them, while Antonio
At sixty-nine wrought placidly his best,
Making the violin you heard today -
Naldo would tease him oft to tell his aims.
"Perhaps thou hast some pleasant vice to feed -
the love of louis d'ors in heaps of four,
Each violin a heap - I've naught to blame;
My vices waste such heaps. But then, why work
With painful nicety?"

Antonio then:
"I like the gold - well, yes - but not for meals.
And as my stomach, so my eye and hand,
And inward sense that works along with both,
Have hunger that can never feed on coin.
Who draws a line and satisfies his soul,
Making it crooked where it should be straight?
Antonio Stradivari has an eye
That winces at false work and loves the true."
Then Naldo: "'Tis a petty kind of fame
At best, that comes of making violins;
And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go
To purgatory none the less."

But he:
"'Twere purgatory here to make them ill;
And for my fame - when any master holds
'Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,
He will be glad that Stradivari lived,
Made violins, and made them of the best.
The masters only know whose work is good:
They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill
I give them instruments to play upon,
God choosing me to help him.

"What! Were God
at fault for violins, thou absent?"

"Yes;
He were at fault for Stradivari's work."

"Why, many hold Giuseppe's violins
As good as thine."

"May be: they are different.
His quality declines: he spoils his hand
With over-drinking. But were his the best,
He could not work for two. My work is mine,
And, heresy or not, if my hand slacked
I should rob God - since his is fullest good -
Leaving a blank instead of violins.
I say, not God himself can make man's best
Without best men to help him.

'Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: he could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel."

-- George Eliot

A Final Quote for 2010

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into... a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity.

-- William James, 1903

So it is cited for an epigraph to Bruce Kuklick's seminal work The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860 - 1930 (1977). But tracking down the original source for this blog posting, I found it slightly but significantly different. The phrase omitted by the ellipsis ("the phantom of an attitude, into") does not seem to materially change the thought -- presumably it was omitted simply because it was felt that the repetition of the phrase "the phantom of an attitude" was an aesthetic gaff. On the other hand that final period (after "singularity") which Kuklick puts in, James does not: and it seems to me that the full paragraph is actually far more upbeat than how Kuklick, somewhat misleadingly, quotes it. Here is the full paragraph from James -- which is the opening paragraph from his "Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord":

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity — happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement.

As Kuklick elides it, the paragraph is wholly dark; but James (thinking, of course, of Emerson) adds a possibility of hope -- that one might possess a "singularity" which would enable one to "be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement." And James returns to this uplifting interpretation; he closes by recurring again to his opening metaphor:

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after they are departed? Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but the very voice of this victorious argument. His words to this effect are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on, and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity. "'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master. As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages with which you have enriched it.

Again, James's text seems to me quite different in spirit than that which one gleans from Kuklick's epigraphal quoting of him.

As a temperamentally pessimistic fellow, I must admit I prefer the Kuklick version to James's original. But I think it's a bit surprising that he would, without any acknowledgement of doing so, edit the paragraph in so substance-altering a fashion.

Happy new year to one and all.

Poem of the Day: Harry Mathews, "The Maoist's Regrets"

A cento (pronounced with a soft c -- "sento") is a poem made up entirely of lines from other poems. (One I like is Tom Disch's "There is An Index of First Lines", from his collection Dark Verses & Light.)

A perverse is a line of verse created by crossing two preexisting lines of verse. (Unlike "cento", which indeed is a common term you will find in dictionaries, "perverse" is, I believe, a coinage from the French literary group the Oulipo; I got it from the best English-language introduction to their work, the Oulipo Compendium.)

Naturally, a poem made up of perverses is also a cento -- albeit a cento of a certain type.

The following is a Cento by Oulipo member Harry Mathews; it too comes from the Oulipo Compendium (p. 78 of the recent second edition).

The Maoist's Regrets

Shall I compare thee, China, to Peru?
That is no country! Amid the alien corn,
The wood's decay, the yielding place to new,
The old order changeth: blow his wreathed horn!
They that have the power to (men, lend me your ears!)
Could to my sight that plods his weary way
Rage, rage, against the lie too deep for tears,
The feathered glory of an April day.
That's my last Duchess dying of the light --
Put out the light and gaze towards paradise,
A thing of beauty loved not at first sight
(The uncertain glory from her loosening thighs...)
Something there is that is a joy forever.
Friends, "Romans", country? Never, never, never.

-- Harry Mathews

To my ear, it is, in fact, a good poem -- and certainly one which required a fair amount of creativity to put together, albeit creativity of a somewhat different sort than writing an original sonnet would take. But you could say something similar of all transformative art.

Obviously the play with the borrowed words -- changing their meaning with the context, etc. -- is a part of the pleasure here.

Both halves of the lines Mathews's borrows are used in six cases -- split up and used in different lines of "The Maoist's Regrets", but still both halves are used. Sixteen other sources are used only once, i.e. only half the line is used at all.

Most of these half lines will be familiar to anyone with any familiarity with English-language poetry. Nevertheless, in case anyone is interested in the sourcing, here is Mathews' poem again, this time with hyperlinks:

The Maoist's Regrets

Shall I compare thee, China, to Peru?
That is no country! Amid the alien corn,
The wood's decay, the yielding place to new,
The old order changeth: blow his wreathed horn!
They that have the power to (men, lend me your ears!)
Could to my sight that plods his weary way
Rage, rage, against the lie too deep for tears,
The feathered glory of an April day.
That's my last Duchess dying of the light --
Put out the light and gaze towards paradise,
A thing of beauty loved not at first sight
(The uncertain glory from her loosening thighs...)
Something there is that is a joy forever.
Friends, "Romans", country? Never, never, never.

-- Harry Mathews

My first thought was that the first half of the tenth line was from this Frost poem -- but it can't be, since that leaves the "and" unaccounted for. So Othello it must be.

A far more complicated case is the second half of the first line -- "China to Peru". In the linked version above, I cited it to Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749):

Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru;

But Bartlett's familiar quotations notes that the same phrase appears in Thomas Wharton's "Universal Love of Pleasure":

All human race, from China to Peru,
Pleasure, howe’er disguis’d by art, pursue.

-- Since I don't know the date of the Wharton poem, it's not to me clear which came first; most likely the Johnson, but Wharton was twenty-one in 1749, so it's just possible that his poem came first.

But then, the phrase might have been original with neither of them. In a letter to the April, 1907 edition of Modern Language Notes (p. 126), one W. M. Tweetie of Mt. Allison College writes:

The following example of the above phrase may be of interest. It occurs in Sir William Temple's Miscellanea, Part 11 ("Of Poetry " : last paragraph but one):

"...what honour and request the ancient poetry has lived in, may not only be observed from the universal reception and use in all nations from China to Peru, from Scythia to Arabia, but from the esteem of the best and the greatest men as well as the vulgar."

This reads somewhat as if it were a stock phrase. Bartlett in his Familiar Quotations, refers, under Dr. Johnson, only to Thomas Warton.

A similar point was made more recently by Laura Brown in a footnote to Fables of Modernity (2001). At any rate, my suspicion is that Harry Matthews got it from Samuel Johnson.

Postscript: Madison on War

The worries of the founders about war as the engine of tyranny are famous. But in trying to find online sources to link to in the above piece (which I'm keeping above this one, since this is but a postscript to it), I found a Madison quote that -- so far as I can tell -- is spurious.

But first two real Madison quotes that are often paired with it.

First, from Madison's "Political Observations" (1795):

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

I don't have a copy of Madison's collected papers handy, but this quote is well sourced: Scott Horton gives a full citation here, for example. This looks like a complete online edition of the pamphlet, but as always, caveat surftor.

Second, from a May 13, 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions agst. [against] danger real or pretended from abroad.

The letter is reprinted in this 1865 edition of Madison's letters, online thanks to the awesomeness of Google Books; or, in a perhaps more accessible format, you can read the letter online here, from this site which offers a lot of Madison's papers online (although not, alas, the 1795 "Political Observations").

Finally, the (apparently) spurious quotation:

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

-- This is quoted all over the place, and almost always attributed to Madison (although at least once to (!)), but the citations are never specific. (I hate it when quote sites don't give real citations!) A bunch of sites specify that he said it while in Congress -- a bit of pseudo-specificity that makes it sound genuine but doesn't actually help in tracking it down. At least one article I've seen specifically says it's a made-up quote -- suggesting, persuasively, that it's a corruption of the second quote given above. (Frankly, any time a quote is widely quoted but never given a specific citation, skepticism is called for.) The Madison page I cited before gives the quote.. but only without a proper citation on their "Madison quotes" page. (Doesn't inspire much confidence in the web site, frankly.)

So: unless anyone has a real citation for that last quote, I have to say that it's most probably made up.

"I quote others only in order the better to express myself"

So my recent mucking about with quotes got me to thinking about a Montaigne quote that I've long loved and frequently quoted: "I quote others only in order the better to express myself." A great sentiment; hits the nail on the head.

But did he say it?

A google search turned up... that quote on a lot of quotation sites, such as brainyquote. (I hate those sites: they never give the source for anything, but just clog up google results with useless repetitions.) Which led me to believe that perhaps the quote was apocryphal.

But it's not, quite. Wikiquote had an alternative version of it, and that led me to the source.

The quote is from Book One, Chapter 26 of Montaigne's Essays. (According to that site, it was added in a later version of the text.) The original French context is this:

De ma part il n'est rien que je veuille moins faire. Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d'autant plus me dire. Cecy ne touche pas des centons qui se publient pour centons: et j'en ay veu de tres-ingenieux en mon temps, entre autres un, sous le nom de Capilupus, outre les anciens.

I have put the words that became the quote under discussion in bold.

The only widely available online translation of Montaigne (at least of the complete text) is the Charles Cotton version. Now Cotton lived in the 17th century, so he hardly translated Montaigne into contemporary English. (He may have translated Montaigne into something closer to the English of Montaigne's own day, which has another sort of advantage.*) In any event, here's how he translates that passage:

For my own part, there is nothing I would not sooner do than that, neither have I said so much of others, but to get a better opportunity to explain myself. Nor in this do I glance at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which sort of writers I have in my time known many very ingenious, and particularly one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.

(Again, the passage under discussion is in bold.) Not precisely clear; and the bolded part, you may notice, isn't even given its own sentence... as Montaigne does in French (at least if the on-line text is accurate.)

Most of the other versions of Montaigne I could find online didn't seem to have this passage. (I searched for "Capilupus", a word I thought unlikely to be altered in translation and which was right by the passage. No luck.)

I happened to have a copy of the Donald Frame translation on dead trees handy -- a far more modern version, first published in 1943. Here's how Frame translates the passage:

For my part, there is nothing I want less to do. I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better. This does not apply to the compilations that are published as compilations; and I have seen some very ingenious ones in my time; among others, one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.

This seems to be where Wikiquote's alternate version comes from.

Thanks to the miracle of GoogleBooks, however, William Hazlitt's 1850 translation is online (courtesy of Harvard's library). And here's how the passage runs there:

For my own part there is nothing I would not sooner do than that; I quote others only in order the better to express myself. In this I do not, in the least, glance at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such ; of which sort of writers I have, in my time, seen many very ingenious, particularly one, under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.

So there you have it: the quote itself, in the form I knew it.

So it's not a misquotation; it's just a particular translation of a quote. But I have to admit I think the Frame version is better. The Frame version gets across the emphasis -- that the only valid purpose of quoting is to "speak my own mind better" (as opposed to flashily (and poorly) display erudition, which is what Montaigne is actually speaking against here); the Hazlitt version, particularly as excerpted in "compilations" (which, I admit, is where I first saw it -- quite an irony, had I but known), makes it sound like that is the only purpose of quotation, full stop. Though perhaps this is because Hazlitt's English is a century and a half (give or take) older than mine, and I just hear it differently.

But that's where the quote is from.

Post-Script: If you're curious, as I was, about who Capilupus is, you'll find that Google knows him almost entirely in reference to this single passage of Montaigne. The most I could find out about him was a footnote in the Hazlitt translation I linked to above. Here's what Hazlitt says (I reproduce his footnote in full):

Lelius Capilupus, a native of Mantua, who flourished in the sixteenth century, was famous for compositions of this kind, as may be seen under his name in Bayle's Dictionary, who says that the Cento, which he wrote against the monks, is inimitable; it is to be found at the end of the Regnum Papistieum of Neogorgas. He wrote one also against the women, which Mr. Bayle also mentions as a very ingenious piece, but too satirical. It was inserted in a collection, entitled Baudii Amores, printed at Leyden, in 1638. This Lelius had a nephew, named Julius Capilupus, who signalized [sic] himself by Centos, and even had a talent for it superior to his uncle, if we may believe Possevin. Poet. Select. Lib. xvii. 24.

They don't make footnotes quite like that any more.

Hazlitt also lists one of Capilupus' works in one of his other books, saying of it that "The whole poem is made up, Mr Aldis Wright informs me, of bits of Virgil pieced together, with marginal references. Not in Herbert." -- And that's about it, as far as Capilupus and Google go. (Actually, if you read French, you can read the entry from Bayle's Dictionary (pp. 402-3) at Google Books. Doesn't seem to have made it into any of the available bits of available English translations, though.)

Talented as a Cento-writer or not, neither Capilupus seems to have made it very far on the electronic frontier as yet.

Ah, the vagaries of fame!

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* Actually, there is an even older translation online -- I think in full -- that of John Florio from
1603. Here's how Florio translates this passage:

As for me, there is nothing I will doe lesse. I never speake of others, but that I may the more speake of my selfe. This concerneth not those mingle-mangles of many kinds of stuffe, or as the Grecians call them Rapsodies, that for such are published, of which kind I have (since I came to yeares of discretion seen divers most ingenious and wittie; amongst others, one under the name of Capilupus; besides many of the ancient stampe.

"I never speake of others, but that I may the more speake of my selfe" -- maybe that's how I should quote it from now on!

"Happiness is the Exercise of Vital Powers, Along Lines of Excellence, in a Life Affording Them Scope"

A wonderful sentiment. But who said it?

It seems to have been popularized by the television show Babylon 5, which used "The Exercise of Vital Powers" as the title of one of its fourth season episodes (written by creator & executive producer J. Michael Straczynski, who has gone on to get a reputation as a writer of terrible Marvel comics). In that episode one of the characters says that the "ancient Greeks" defined happiness as "the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope".

Fine. But where does this come from?*

It is most often attributed to Aristotle -- sometimes specifically to the Nicomachean Ethics. But while Aristotle says arguably similar things, he doesn't quite say that.

So who did say it first?

The answer was uncovered by the researches of Jeffq at Wikipedia (upon which most of this post is based).

Jeffq tried to track down the quote in reference to the B5 episode. He noted that the phrase has become popularized in commencement addresses and the like, often cited to Aristotle... but that all of these seem to post-date the B5 episode.

But he did track down what seems to me the ur-source of the quote, namely, Edith Hamilton's 1930 book The Greek Way. (Jeffq cites a 1964 paperback, but the book was from 1930). In her second chapter, she writes:

The exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope" is an old Greek definition of happiness. Through all Greek history that spirit of life abounding moves. (p. 24 of the Google Books-available version)

A number of later writers explicitly cited this to Edith Hamilton; so far as I've seen, no one has found an earlier citation for it. (If anyone has one, please leave it in comments!)

My guess, however, is that the quote became more widespread due to its use by John F. Kennedy. In this 1963 speech (or proclamation or whatever it was) he wrote that "Happiness, as defined by the Greeks, is 'the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.'" Presumably he got it from Hamilton, who was a widely read popularist in her day, but he doesn't cite her. Anyway, he may have helped spread the quote around.**

Whoever said it, it's a nice phrase. But until an earlier source appears, it looks like Edith Hamilton, not Aristotle, deserves the credit for this one.

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* In a later internet posting, JMS rather unhelpfully said (scroll down) that "It's not so much a quote as the Greek definition of happiness." This rather thoroughly begs the question, since definitions don't write themselves: even if you want to argue that the definition was implicit in an entire culture's view of happiness (which does seem to be what Hamilton is saying, see above), someone needed to be the first to use that phrasing. So of course it's a quote, even if the source of the quote intends it as a definition.

** Actually the Kennedy brothers seem to have been a good conduit for this sort of thing. The spurious ancient Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times" -- whose earliest known source is a 1950 SF story by Eric Frank Russell -- seems to have been put in widespread circulation by a 1966 speech by Robert Kennedy. (For more on the history of this fascinating spurious quotation, see this Wikipedia page; this Kevin Drum post; and this Language Log post. All of these links trace to Stephen DeLong's research, which is preserved here.)

Does Anyone Know the Source of This Quote?

Moses Hadas is credited all over as the author of the famous book review put-down "This book fills a much-needed gap." But no one seems to give the context. Does anyone know anything more -- what book he was reviewing? Where the review appeared? Anything?

Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and a Mangled Quotation

Preparing for a class tomorrow (in which I'm teaching Philip Roth's marvelous novel The Human Stain), I was looking up a quote I remembered from an interview that Roth did with Czech novelist Milan Kundera. I remember it well; and I've seen it quoted many times. But -- so far as I can tell -- it's misquoted on both Milan Kundera's official website and on the NY Times web site (where the interview appeared). Here is the quotation -- both the question and answer -- as it appears there. (I cut & paste from the NY Times, but it looks like it's word-for-word the same on both sites.) I've bolded the relevant part:

PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?
MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out in the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

The problem is that this makes no sense: Kundera is praising questioning (as he does in many places in his work). Why would he say that "The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything"? He is in fact famous for saying the opposite.

And when I looked at the Lexis/Nexus archived version of the interview, it was reprinted as I remember it -- as it is often quoted -- and in a way that makes sense. Slightly, but crucially differently. The Lexus/Nexus site has the exchange as follows:

PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?
MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Now that makes sense: the quoted lines now fit with the rest of the paragraph, as well as with what Kundera is frequently quoted as saying (it's a famous quote), not to mention everything that I (at any rate) know of his worldview. Not to mention my vivid memory of reading it, in the back of my parents old paperback of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (The newer edition, which I have, doesn't have the interview reprinted -- alas.)

But why would both the Times and Kundera's own site get it wrong? I can only assume that Kundera's site took it from the Times site, and that it got mangled somewhere. (I can sort of imagine that: a line of type -- "...an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having..." -- got dropped somewhere, aided and abetted by the fact that "comes from having" appears twice.)

Anyway, I mention this for two reasons: first, to get the fact about the misquotation out (insofar as I am able) into the memeosphere, to try and correct what appears (to me) to be an out-and-out error on the part of two rather credentialed websites; and second, to ask if anyone knows how that did (or might have) happened. -- Any thoughts?

(Any irony about my looking for answers, given the content of the quotation in question, will be punished by my hitting you on the head with very heavy Philip Roth quotes.)

In Which the Author Distracts Himself from Impending Global Disaster with Minor Literary Research

While I was seeking for a link for my previous post (which I have, contrary to blogging custom, left higher on the blog than this one since it is more important (the topic, not the post)) I found that what I thought was an old nursery rhyme has a history somewhat more complex than that.

Though it is often cited to "anonymous", and other times to Ben Franklin (see below), its earliest recorded author seems to have been poet George Herbert (1593 - 1633). In a work called Jacula Prudentum (dated 1651 in several places, so a posthumous work unless that date's wrong (also, see here for a note on the title.)) Jacula Prudentum was a collection of proverbs -- proverbs he may have gotten from contemporary folklore -- meaning that this phrase may not have been originally his; but he seems to be the earliest person whose name we know associated with it. At any rate, Herbert wrote:

For want of a naile the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

And that's where he ended it. (The work as such is not online, but you can see the relevant page via google book search here (p. 160 -- try searching for "for want of a nail".))

Then, a century or so later, Benjamin Franklin took the quote and modified it, using it as one of the maxims which preface the 1757 version of Poor Richard's Almanac (at least according to Bartlett's Familiar quotations). Franklin wrote:

And again, he adviseth to circumspection and care, even in the smallest matters, because sometimes a little neglect may breed great mischief; adding, for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and for want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.

Note that the second cite (pun intended) linked above gives the quote's context in Benjamin Franklin's "The Way to Wealth" -- singed by 'Richard', so presumably it's from the almanac, although I don't know for sure. Notably, the more complete version's use of italics distinguishes (somewhat) what was original with Franklin with the rest, although he doesn't cite Herbert as such.

It's also worth noting that Franklin's opening phrase -- "a little neglect may breed mischief" -- puts a very particular spin on the notion. It turns it into one of Franklin's little maxims of instruction -- a very characteristic keeping-working-harder sentiment. By contrast, the more familiar version is more about sensitive dependence on initial conditions. An interesting twist for some cultural historian to trace out, perhaps.

The most familiar version, I believe, is the nursery rhyme variation. It's all over the place (e.g.), variously credited, but usually written the same way that I remembered it:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of the horse, the rider was lost,
For want of the rider, the battle was lost,
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a nail!

The longer version is usually cited to "anonymous" -- certainly I haven't seen any author claimed for the final half. The two significant variations seem to be in the articles -- some people say, in the second half of each phrase, "a shoe", "a horse", etc, rather than using the definite article -- and in the final line, where some versions add the word "horseshoe" before the word "nail". I don't know about the articles, but I think that the word "horseshoe" detracts rather than adds to it (it's unnecessary, it breaks the symmetry, etc.)

One nice rendition of that version can be found here (the link's at the bottom of the page, or here's a direct link), in a pro-library advertisement (a good cause if ever there was one). They add "one book can change a life; imagine what a library could do." Just as Franklin turned it into a moral maxim for self-improvement, they turn it into a pro-charity story -- in, admittedly, a rather sentimental way. I wonder if that sort of sentimentalism-for-charity is typical of our time the way that Franklin's discipline-for-success was of his (narrowly speaking)?

Interestingly, that's not quite the end of it: there is another version that is even longer -- and arguably better. In the article on "Causation" in the Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, Wesley C. Salmon wrote:

An old nursery rhyme (which I'm extending a bit)... "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of the shoe, the horse was lost; for want of the horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the message was lost; for want of the message, the battle was lost; for want of the battle, the war was lost; for want of a victory, a Kingdom was lost. All for want of a nail."

The benefit of this version is that (as befits a philosopher's revision) the causality chain is stronger. The line about the loss of a single rider determining the outcome of a battle has always struck me as the least convincing in the causal chain (and, notably, was not in the versions given by either Franklin or Herbert). Here it is spelled out in a convincing fashion. But the final link -- battle-war -> victory-Kingdom -- is badly marred by the word switch ("war" in the first, "victory" in the second); even if the idea is clear, the aesthetics are thrown off. (This isn't online either, but it comes up in a Google book search here; it's from p. 27, or search for 'for want of a nail' in that book.)

So that's the nail that -- running down the causal chain -- caused this particular rhyme to stick in my head. It does seem that Herbert (and Franklin, maybe, although he's more widely credited even though Herbert wrote it (or wrote it down) first) should get more credit than he does for starting the poem off.

(Sources: I didn't find any single web site that presented this story quite as I just did (or I would have just linked to it!), but the bits and pieces come from here, here and here in addition to the web sources cited above.)