The Golden Ass

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Book Reviews

April 2002

Bultmann: "Theology of the New Testament"
Doherty: "The Jesus Puzzle"
T.S.Eliot: "Four Quartets"
L. Forward: "Dragon's Egg"
Janes Joyce: "Ulysses"
Immanuel Kant: "Critique of pure Reason"
Lerner: "Big Bang Never Happened"
The New Testament
The New Testament in detail
Edgar Allan Poe: "Eureka"
Ezra Pound: "Personae"
Pushkin: "Eugene Onegin"
Salinger: "The Catcher in the Rye"

close, but not quite there yet
"Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse" by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837), translated by Robert Falen

Falen did as good a job as possibly could be done, - and yet ... . Poetry can be defined in many ways, and what ever your college teacher is telling you, it is not about ideas and opinions. Collapsible soapboxes have nothing to do with it. Diction, sensitivity, sensual quality, lucidity of image and thought, and fantasy is what we should be looking for. Poetry is sensual thought. It doesn't pontificate, it has no message. Poetry is a mode of perception and representation, the poet's way to interface with his world.

In the beginning was the word, and the word became flesh in the poet; in the beginning was a vision, in the beginning was magic, and if it is poetry it should come across as magic. Eugene Onegin is a novel in verses. Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana are rounded characters. The story has few incident, but drifts along with grace and plausibility, and the narrator now and then adds his own little aside. Alexander Pushkin has a deserved reputation as perhaps the purest story teller, who ever walked the earth.

The big problem is the medium. I have no Russian, so I have to take for granted, that there is a very good reason for the way Pushkin is idolized in his country. From what I hear, his poetry has a light and graceful touch and a natural and unobtrusive bent that seemingly without effort follows every turn and wrinkle of mood and perception. It speaks at least for Falen's ambition that he took on himself the laudable task to recreate Pushkin's stanza and rhyme scheme.

Falen's knack for sniffing out suitable rhymes is admirable. But I bet my piggybank, that from a purely statistical point of view, the number of rhymes in Russian must outweigh the translation by a ratio of 1:3 at least. In English, choices are limited (I of all people should know) and there is nothing anybody can do about. For short poems this doesn't pose a serious problem. But the longer a narrative poem, the more likely will the original's carefully crafted counterpoint of rhyme words translate to a mindless jingle.

Rhyme is not supposed to be purely ornamental, or comical at best. It should not annoy by diverting the reader's attention from what the author has to say; and most definitely rhyme should not drown in noise the subtler touches. In a good poem, rhyme words are semantic anchor points, which toss on the ball to their resounding companions. For English prosody this means, there has to be a sufficient distance between the echoing pairings and a minimal length of the line is required to avoid unintended humor.

This needs to be assisted by numerous enjambments to suppress the ding dong even further. A good rhyme is semantically justified and at the same time unobtrusive. Unfortunately an English imitation of Pushkin's short tetrameter has the effect to turn up the noise of the rhyming even farther. It also makes the enjambments unrecognizable because it draws all the attention to a line's ending. And in this day and age, any kind of poetry is expected to stay clear from two extremes:

First of being merely a candy for the ear and secondly merely to agglomerate slick and self-serving sound-bites. Poetry is not just a stand-up routine. I don't know what in Russian is doing the trick, but I do know it doesn't work for a long poem in English if it isn't more of a satirical parody, like Byron's "Don Juan." Nabokov had a point, when he launched his savage attack on Arendt's translation; but that doesn't mean he was right from the point of principle. His own deliberately prosy rendition is a poor substitute for a good translation.

Translating a poem should result in a poem. Evolution took a couple of billion years to produce the naked ape. Good translations too, climb on the shoulders of lesser predecessor's and Falen's effort is certainly the best performance, today's money can buy. But it might not be the last word. Pushkin had intended it to be a melancholy and mildly witty narrative with wide swinging vistas and sensual perceptions of great beauty. Pushkin, in prose and verse, was a past master of measured pace.

But Falen's rendition sometimes races along in a burlesque dance, breathless like the high kicking cancan in a vaudeville show. And this, certainly, does Pushkin no justice. However, being a translator myself, I am not prepared to concur with Nabokov's defeatist position on the possibility of producing a rendition that is equally faithful to content and structure and doesn't fall into the trap of padded jingles. It can be done; and Falen, more often than not, came very close to it.

the kids love it
J. D. Salinger (*1919) "The Catcher in the Rye"

For Salinger's afficionados, his novel is a "real life" experince. "Gangly" 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, his "adorable" little sister Phoebe, his "crude" macho roommate Stradlater, his teachers and peers at Pencey Prep, old Maurice, the nasty New York elevator boy, phony Sally Hayes, who Holden used to neck with "so damn much" that he thought she was intelligent, smart Jane Gallagher, the muckle-mouthed girl who Holden used to play checkers with and once almost necked with, the two nuns at breakhast counter at Grand Central Station - and then, lurking at the shadowy core of it all, the tragic ghost of Allie, Holden's dead brother" - they all seem as real as the kids from around the block. Which is a good thing.

"School was crumby,
Classmates mean.
Holden Caulfield,
Aged sixteen,
Copped out to the
New York scene.

There he wandered
Sorrow's son,
Overgrown
But underdone
Seared by girs ...
It wasn't fun.

Broke, disheartened,
Home he slid.
Sister phoebe
(Perky kid)
Buoyed him up,
She really did.

Only for the
Moment, though;
Down the skids,
Alas, he'll go,
Landing in a
Shrink-château.

Ah, what torment
Must be his
Who Goddams
But feels Gee Whiz!
Youth is rough,
It really is."

(by Maurice Sagoff)

I like Mark Twain (1835-1910), the literary equivalent to a stand-up comedian - delivery is everything. As an American writer he is important, as Hemingway (1899-1961) had already pointed out. The "Huckleberry Finn" is indeed the archetype for a whole new direction in American writing. "Huckleberry Finn" is the one book of Twain I don't like. Intended or not it created the parochial, corn-pone, folksy, cutsy, I tell ya, adolescent cynicism, as phony as Rousseau's constipation of the heart possibly can get, and which has disfigured the literature of this country ever since, no matter how proudly it is waved into the bland faces of a politely silencing world.

You guessed it, Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" is Salinger's one book I absolutely detest. But it would be extremely unfair to Twain and Salinger to hold against them these slips of better judgement. In Twain's case we have someone who is keeping his tongue firmly in the cheek. Twain had humor and tons of it to burn. Salinger - well, let's just say he was carried away by his talent, pushing the envelope, trying to find out how far he could venture into a medium foreign to his own nature. Salinger has genius, and tons of it to burn.

Personally I have a dim view of this piece of nostalgia from then 50s. The whole decade is an embarrassment for me. Sudden flashes of memory make me wince: it was part of my childhood; it was all the childhood I ever had. If I can't avoid a sudden flash, I take a sharp deep breath and mentally elbow it behind. But many don't see it that way. I wish them luck - read and enjoy! Salinger definitely is one of the most enjoyable reads around. He has the gift. But make sure you are getting an American edition - I mean, really set and printed in the US.

English editions not only change typography and spelling, they substitute terms and words. Go to a book shop with both editions on the shelf and see for yourself the difference it makes and what it does to the spirit of the thing. And this is perhaps a structural weakness of the book: in imaginative literature style and structure are everything, but when the nuance of expression becomes of such importance that minor changes affect the narrative substance, a red flag goes up.

If I compare how the wear and tear of time has affected "Madame Bovary" and "Don Quixote," then I notice with surprise that the crazy Don still shows many signs of vitality. He may easily make it for an other few centuries before Elysium opens to him the tunnel towards oblivion. As for Emma, on the other hand the prognosis is dim. The book is destined to end up as a hollow husk - labeled a classic. Salinger of course is a bit weightier than that: he pushed Flaubert's method to new heights, his narrative perspectives and mimetic representations are miraculous.

* what else is new?
"Theology of the New Testament" by Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)

"Few areas of academic endeavor are so in need of public debunking as biblical studies. The physicist Richard Feynman coined the term "Cargo Cult science" to refer to literary speculations that try to steal the authority of the physical sciences by using some of their vocabulary and format. Much the same relationship holds between such enterprises as the Jesus Seminar and the methods of serious historians." (John J. Reilly)

I couldn't agree more! But having said this, it is still legitimate to ask, "who was this guy, who affected the course of history in so many ways? Mostly unintended no doubt, but still as a catalyst and operative agent?" Two answers seem possible: the "guy" was the fellow who invented the tale, and if we take it from there we look perhaps at a person known as St. John - but I know I am at odds here with the majority of scholars, including Bultmann, who maintain that John was too late for that.

Or there was really a Galilean troublemaker slouching about in bast sandals. If so, one has to admit, in the decades immediately after his death, it was one of the best kept secrets. I shall leave it by that and recommend, I of all people, a book of consummate New Testament scholarship: Bultmann's academic sum of a lifetime, the magisterial 'Theology of the New Testament,' which until his death he continued to revise and expand in countless new editions.

What he was trying to do, was give an exposition of the teachings in the New Testament, according to their chronological order and function in the canon. It would be easy to criticize this as a rather arbitrary arrangement because of the way the church councils originally assembled the "canon" or purged it of unwanted materials after they briefly had enjoyed a place in the New Testament, such as "The Shepherd of Hermas," or the "Letter of Barnabas."

However the premise of his book is of course that the canon took its shape the way it did for a reason and Bultmann has set out to interpret this reason. One should not expect Bultmann to be contesting established doctrine. Because his subject is exactly that: the gradual evolution of unfolding doctrine beginning with the different stages of the initial "kerygma," the "proclamation" of Christ. Bultmann gives us a thorough interpretation and glimpses of historical context.

So from a hypothetical inner circle we move on to the earliest community in Jerusalem, then to Paul, to the Hellenistic Churches in the Diasporah, then to John, and the other apostolic letters, as far as they influenced ecclesiastic organization and set precedents for the early Church(es). Fundamentalists will be in for a disappointment: their favorite read, the "Apocalypse," is mentioned only in passing. But what could all this possibly tell us about a historical Jesus?

Well, try seeing it in the reverse: if all those developments of the "kerygma" had indeed been developments away from an initial message, or at least expanded on it, then we see here a sort of pointing arrow, or conduit, that funnels us back to a not completely invisible point of departure in actual history. Bultmann even gleaned a whole set of sayings from the synoptic texts that seem to warrant a special status, because they fit badly into later developments.

But the reader attempting to discover the "true" Jesus in this collection better braces himself for yet an other disappointment. Because not only will he find nothing particular divine in these snippets, it will hit him as a wave of hysterical outbursts by a mouth frothing fanatic, which by itself sounds about right, but hardly gives the impression Bultmann himself may have intended. (Below I give in full this collection of "authentic" utterances.)

Bultmann is one of those academic events, who, like Mommsen for Roman history, not only laid once and for all the foundation, but almost left nothing more to be done for later generations. The reason, that their names have become less familiar with the wider public has something to do with the fact that subsequent generations of academics try to make a living on thoroughly plowed ground. But I am not aware that they have managed to come up with something radically new.

Of course there is still plenty of detail to discover, but it really belongs into an appendix to the work of the aforementioned giants. Perhaps I am just getting old, and I really have seen it all. For example the debate over Jesus' historicity goes back to 1912 and even farther, when a certain Arthur Drews proposed that Christianity as a religion would actually be much better off with a mythical Christ than a disappointingly mundane fellow in the flesh.

Bultmann used to evade such debates, but actually never spoke of anything else but the "proclaimed" Christ, though in a much better informed fashion and thoroughly familiar with every snippet of primary source available, which has earned him his reputation across the creeds. (In fact in his younger, more outspoken days, he was quite capable to deny any knowledge of Jesus's historicity.) Taken for what the book is meant to be, it is still a usefully comprehensive reference.

The "authentic" utterances from the earliest layer of proclamations, as identified by Bultmann:

I. Parousia
So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. (Mt 13:49-50) Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? (Lk 12:56) The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. (Mk 1:15) And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. (Lk 10:18) Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. (Mk 8:38) For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. (Mt 24:27/37/44)

Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God? For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven. And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye therefore do greatly err. (Mk 12:18-27) The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here. (Lk 11:31-32)

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. (Mk 9:43-48) And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. (Mt 10:28)

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is [already] among you. (Lk 17:21) And they shall say to you, See here; or, see there: go not after them, nor follow them. For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in his day. (Lk 17:23f) Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors. (Mk 13:28f)

II. Promises:
And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. (Mt 8:11) For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven. (Mk 12: 25) Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: For I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them. (Lk 10:23f) Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? as long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days. (Mk 2:18f)

III. His "credentials:"
Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation. (Mk 8:11) But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you. (Lk 11:20) No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house. (Mk 3:27)

IV. Call to arms:
No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God (Lk 9:62). Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead. (Mt 8:22) If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Lk 14:27)

not such a hot idea
"The Jesus Puzzle. Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?" Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus by Earl J. Doherty

Whenever it comes to mythology I am soon engulfed in my own yawns. But I hand it to Mr. Doherty, his exposition of the known facts has speaking for it clarity, simplicity, and elegance. However, what Doherty ironically termed a "conspiracy of silence," could actually even apply on a real-life character who slouched through history on bast-sandals. Just ask yourself: "what if I take the gospels on surface value, and if it were true that Paul's and some of the apostolic letters antedate the earliest gospel?"

Well, what looks back at me, is the story of a man whose Jewish mother had shamefully conceived out of wedlock and who himself ended in utter disgrace. This alone must have been a sufficient reason for the earliest missionaries to keep his actual life under the lid, while elaborating more on the meaning of his life than the facts. From such beginning flows quite naturally the mythological flavor and confusion between the different narratives. It makes sense that the earliest gospel doesn't mention his childhood.

I mean if I follow Doherty's own line of reasoning, what is to be gained for the Christian cause to abandon the purity of a mythological message, and to fudge the issue with dubious tales of a Jesus in the flesh? Given the cultural climate of the period, this would make the early missionaries' business harder, not easier. None of the pagan critics - neither Celsus, nor Porphyrius - ever questioned the historicity of Jesus. Instead they first leveled their criticism against the lowly status of the man, and the dubious credibility of his fellowship.

So why this turn in the message, if not for a compelling reason? Thing is, the silence in the early sources could simply be a sign of embarrassment. I guess, as an archaeologist, I would just like to point my finger on something tangible, a person - Jesus, John, Sosthenes, anybody - and say "hey, he started it." So when biblical scholars do their quoting, either out of context or wrestling it into a different context, and always claiming to find the true context, then, well then, I wish I could just book a ticket.

But not to Jerusalem! The temporary internment there was meant to be vacated from the outset. No, I would look closer to Jesus' hometown. But since no grant is likely to be forthcoming, nor an excavation permit, nobody will even care to look for an ossuary containing a skeleton whose ankles are nailed together, with a slab in between that reads "Jesus, King of the Jews." Such find would once and for all settle the issue on all the relevant questions - it also would incite some idiot to shoot the archaeologist.

Seriously, who has an interest in Jesus' actual remains? Not the Churches! Not the believers in resurrection and ascension! As it is, the weight of the debate is carried along in theological interpretations; not a good way to get to the bottom of historical facts. It is true, the gospels' fictional features are pretty obvious: they present us with a Roman governor who acts like a Jewish judge and who is shown to conduct his duties in a fashion which a Roman reader would find reprehensible.

A final point: Doherty's deductions lean heavily towards a late dating of the gospels. But Mt. 5:23-24 presents a Jesus concerned with participating in the Temple cult. Especially the Jesus in John, after the incident in Jn. 2:14 took considerable risks year after year to celebrate the holidays in Jerusalem (Jn.5; Jn.11 etc.) Notice Jn. 7:10:

"then went he also up unto the feast, not openly, but as it were in secret,"

presumably after he had received an "all clear" from his companions in Jerusalem (Jn. 7:8-10).

This opens to the possibility that Matthew and even the supposedly late John had been composed before the Temple's destruction in 70 AD. Or it may merely reflect the position of the earliest church, but either way the Temple cult apparently was a vital concern for early Christians who still submitted to the jurisdiction and ordinances of Jewish law. In fact if Jesus and Paul after his conversion would have been able to meet in the flesh, they may have found very little to agree upon.

* good news? excuuuse me ...
The New Testament

Northrop Frye used to stress the importance of reading the Bible - Old and New Testament - as a unity, as a continuous story. He thought this would follow the intentions of the final editors most closely. This is true. However the faithful seems to be more likely to ignore the larger concept and prefers to be curiously selective in his or her reading. The quoting is usually all over the place without any regard for context and focusses often entirely on the so called New Testament. However - Jews too are part of our heritage.

Western culture is not identical with an entirely Christian world; thank goodness! Without our classical heritage and without Jewish contributors, our civilization would be poorer and less interesting. And of course Jews - secular and religious - represent a section in the cultural spectrum that couldn't care less for the significance of the New Testament, except for the reprehension and bodily grief caused by waving the thing into their faces. As for me: the Bible is a book of imaginative literature. It's the only way I care reading it.

In my review on the The King James Bible I have already said that the New Testament strikes one as something of a letdown. The Old Testament is the militant monument to a nation; but this sorry appendix is the first example for the most popular genre on our bookshelves: the self-help manual. How to repair your car and loose weight in seven easy steps. The narrow horizon of vindictive but purblind sectarians who can see things only in two colours: black and white. Everybody in this picture is barely more than a puppet in a cosmic chess game between good and evil.

Except for John the Evangelist and passages from Luke, the quality of writing is generally poor. It takes a St. Augustine to defend Paul's rhetorical skills in 2 Cor. 11:16-33. Somebody seems to have taken a chapter out of Dostoyevsky at his worst: everybody wallows in hysterics and the "disciples" binge on self-humiliation and sin their way to Jesus. Whether New Testament or Dostoyevsky: they spoil my day. I detest the anti-intellectual bias and the folksy mythology. I detest this phony offer of effortless shortcuts and the phoney glorification of the disenfranchised as the secretly privileged.

Fast food for the simple minded, quick fixes for the hopeless. In fact, I have always considered " who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Mt. 3:7) a fair question. There is something woolly and sickening in all these hysterics over an (ultimately broken) promise (Mk. 9:1, 13:30; Mt. 10:23; 1 Cor. 16:51; 1 Thess. 4:15-17). The book aims at the lowest common denominator and it doesn't improve the aspect, when the arrogance of self-styled innitiates in some homespun "Gnosis," chooses to walk in the shroud of meekness.

The period was teeming with religious con-artists. Apollonius of Tyana, Peregrinus Proteus and Alexander of Abonuteichos plied their trades in the eastern bazaars, they practiced healing and soothsaying, and stories of Apollonius' birth by a virgin followed on the imposter's heels. Exposing the baloney was as ineffectual then, as it is now. Despite the charlatan's exposure by the satirist Lucian (c.120-c.190 AD.) the cult of Alexander of Abonuteichos continued for centuries and is even commemorated on coins of the period.

Those were credulous times and the general decline of Hellenistic sciences and public education didn't help the situation at all. Surviving a snake bite was evidently enough for the inhabitants of Malta to believe that Paul himself was a god (Acts 28:6). And Paul and his companion Barnabas had to go to some lengths to convince the Lycaonians of Lystra that they were not deities, for the locals immediately sought to sacrifice to them as manifestations of Hermes and Zeus, simply because a man with bad feet stood up (Acts 14:8-18).

It explains why the claptrap in 1 Cor. 2:14-15 could ever be taken seriously:

"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man (sic!)."

Somebody give me my flyswatter. I think I could make a very good case, to deny altogether a grand unity that bridges both parts of the Bible, as proposed in Northrop Frye's "Great Code."

No doubt the Tanakh is the New Testament's point of reference, which in itself is already a con-act. Clearly the Old Testament is not constructed to suffer this ludicrous appendix as a conclusion to its own story. Old and New Testament are telling two different tales. When progressing to a Christian canon, the councils deliberated on the best arrangement to establish the presumed symmetry between what Frye used to term as "types" and "anti-types." A typical case of "hindsight reading," but little more.

For the interested, the archive details the story and structure of the New Testament and how it developed from the gospels to "Revelations," which the editors not without hesitation had added as the capstone to the edifice. It appeared to be the only conclusion that could interpret and put in context the incidents and proclamations collected in the texts, which were documents from a bygone period of hope to overturn Roman rule in a great cosmic cataclysm. After Constantine's edict of toleration in 314 AD this was no longer on of course - but by then the canon had solidified.

See also:

I. the canon 
II. the story
III. Jesus
IV. narrative ploys
V. his credentials
VI. Judas
VII. Jesus' arrest
VIII. the session of the Sanhedrin
IX. Pilate
X. wittnesses 
XI. the trial
XII. execution

XIII. release of the corpse 
XIV. interment 
XV. "resurrection" 
XVI. Peter 
XVII. John the Evangelist
XVIII. Paul
XIX. second coming
XX. "Q" 
XXI. Cerinthus (c. 80-80 AD)
Bibliography
appendix I: biblical homophobia
appendix II: triads in Matthew

* authors and their interpreters
Edgar Allan Poe: "Eureka"

For a mere "lay-person," Poe has repeatedly been credited with great scientific foresight. That even poets could get things right, still seems to baffle a common prejudice. Poe was an educated man. He was conversant in the old languages and he knew the Roman and Greek classics. He was widely read, including in contemporary sciences. For inner reasons he seemed to have supported a perspective which loosely resembles the hysterical rejection of life in the flesh by the radical ascetics of ancient Gnosticism.

I am certainly the last to deny Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) the clout he deserves. However it is easy to misinterpret if the reading is influenced by the prejudice of a different education or simply underestimates the knowledge of a more distant past.

"Poe, besides being fairly well informed in science and mathematics, seems to have had the mind of a mathematician, and consequently was not to be put off with vague phrases,"

says his biographer (Quinn 555).

Well "the mathematical mind" is part of the Poe-mythology. Poe himself kept it verbal - perhaps he had a premonition of Professor Hawking's publisher, who instructed his illustrious author not to use equations in his book! Publishers believe that the sale of a book drops by half with every mathematical equation showing on the pages. But despite of Poe's disciplined restrain, it hasn't helped the popularity of "Eureka." Nor does it really support modern interpretations.

There is a temptation for critics, which for lack of a better term I use to call "hindsight interpretation." It can turn around the sale of an old author. It can transform a perfectly respectable sourcerer into a prophet. Recently I came across an essay by a certain Juan Lartigue G. professor at the Nuclear Chemistry Department, Faculty of Chemistry, National University of México. Enlightened by modern science he offers his reading of Poe's "Eureka."

For instance, when Poe is writing

"Discarding now the two equivocal terms of 'gravitation' and 'electricity,' let us adopt the most definite expressions 'Attraction' and 'Repulsion, ...there being no conceivable case in which we may not employ the term 'matter' and the terms 'attraction' and 'repulsion', taken together, as equivalent, and therefore convertible expressions in Logic" (Poe 18),

then Mr. Lartigues feels the urge to see an

"evident similitude of Poe's beliefs and Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy."

Oh really? What Poe is doing here, if anybody cares to listen, is declaring that the ("strong") electrical force and the ("weak") gravitational force are equivalent. Every particle physicist can tell you that this is baloney. The two "attractions" cannot be mixed up in such a fashion, they are not only of a fundamentally different nature, they are expressed in constants of different value. Poe of course couldn't know this, it is really not his fault. But a Professor of nuclear chemistry should know better.

Yet he allows himself an even larger leap of fantasy: "... the space-time in Special Relativity and the geometrical interpretation of gravity in General Relativity (Brillouin 50), were anticipated by Poe." And he quotes:

"...these considerations ... enable us clearly and immediately to perceive that Space and Duration are one ... We thus establish the Universe on a purely geometric basis" (Poe 16 and 63).

Lartigue concludes: "the coincidence between Poe's foresight and Special Relativity corollary cannot be denied."

Well you tell me! Poe drew on suggestions by Kepler in 1597 and by Descartes in 1664. But Einstein himself had been careful to stress, that the relativistic concept of dynamic geodesics can not be interpreted in terms of rigid Cartesian ordinates. Then the poet stretches his wings and speculates:

"Have we any right to infer ... an interminable succession of the 'clusters of clusters' or of 'Universes' ..., having had no part in our origin, nor portion in our laws?"

And Poe draws the conclusion:

"They neither attract to us, nor we them. Their material, their spirit is not ours ... in any part of our Universe. They can not impress our senses or our souls. ... Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God" (Poe 55).

Poe's physics here are based on a suggestion from Sir Isaac Newton's correspondence. The poet was obviously a latter day polytheist. He is quite unambiguous and I fail to see how Poe's expression can be interpreted in any other way.

Not so by Prof. Lartigue, who seizes the opportunity to refer to the "Einstein-Rosen's Bridges Model or Wormholes which have been graphically developed, lately, in the Penrose Diagrams (Kaufmann 56). Those bridges may also represent the path from a black hole to a white hole, i.e., the establishment of a spatial singularity where the matter eaten by the black hole surges as new matter into another Universe." Very interesting, but what has this to do with Poe's remote super-clusters in their disconnected isolation?

I think it is fair to sum up Poe's cosmology as the old stoic universe, already familiar to Marc Aurel. It envisions a universe, for ever oscillating between bang and crunch. And when we see Poe adding to this concoction a few catch phrases from neo-Platonic philosophy, then we really see the confidence-man at work, the hoaxer and trickster, the stage-illusionist, who makes us believe, that he is imparting to us great "spiritual insights," yet not so far removed from Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence."

But the way he uses his pickings betrays that Poe himself hadn't had a clue what Plotinus really had in mind when he expounded on emanations from the "One." In fact, in all likelihood, Poe didn't even care to understand - which is ok with me; in my eyes it doesn't make him any less of a writer and artist. But it answers, at least for me, the real question: how serious was it Poe with his cosmology? Perhaps, in the desperate squeeze of his life, speculations of this kind offered a certain comfort and escape.

* critique of pure reason
"Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
"Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."
(Immanuel Kant "Critique of Pure Reason," first edition p.51)

In his enquiry in the foundations of our reasoning, Kant sought to make sense of the way our senses present perceptions to our understanding. After eleven years of hard thinking, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) became convinced, that it is inevitable that certain principles which underpin intuition and reasoning, cannot help but goad us into contradicting conclusions. As he saw it, it is not a quirk of our mental capacities, but the necessary outcome of the logic that underpins our intuitions.

Which means Aristotelian logic. For Kant it was still the one and only available mode of thinking. He had of course no idea that there might be something else, in fact it never crossed his mind, that Euclid and his principles could be anything, but sacrosanct. Who, at his time, would have thought, (perhaps, with the exception of Leibnitz,) that the only book of undisputable truth that had outlasted the last two millennia Euclid's "Elements" could eventually end up as a sideshow; and so soon.

Euclid's geometry now is widely considered to be a specialized case within the framework of Newton's physics. Fewer consider Newton's physics as a specialized case within Einstein's nonEuclidic edifice, which still has to find its place within the even more alien features of quantum physics. In other words, our intuitions so far, have proven not to be very reliable when it comes to matters of cosmology. That makes Kant's critique of our intuition, still valuable.

Especially if working with ambiguous data, human reasoning is apt to stray in more than one direction; in good faith and with no intended deception! The first of Kant's four "antinomies" gives in a nutshell the problems caused by what he proposed to be the subjective character of our intuition for time and space. The schools of thinking who followed him in this, have often misunderstood his proposition as a statement for the innate character of our intuitions, as something we are born with.

But this was far from Kant's mind, and he repeatedly interrupted his lengthy and not always easy to follow deductions, to insert an explicit caveat against the error to interpret his "categories" as features of our biological makeup. Kant was still a child of the 18th century, and even so he confessed himself to be profoundly moved by Rousseau's 'Emile,' his concern with the thought-pattern of the human mind was still an enquiry into the mechanics and manifestations of objective logic.

So when Kant appears to speak of subjective intuitions, what he means to say is, that intuition in order to function, is based on a set of objectively logical propositions, such as "time" and "space," which he thought to be "a priory" the "necessary" form of representing empirical data to the mind, without being empirical in itself. It is an elegant solution that answers the odd questions raised by Hume and Berkeley, and is a worthy successor in the line of reasoning which Descartes had initiated.

If nothing else it had the advantage to do away with the cumbersome distinction between primary and secondary qualities of empirical data. From now on, the grass is again allowed to be as fresh and green and reeking of harvest as it presents itself to our senses. The way our mind prefers to assemble these appearances as phenomena in time and space would neither take away from it nor add to its sensual appearance, because it is the mind's way to assemble all these data presented by our senses.

It is true, Kant himself often entangled himself in lengthy diversions on the subject, that the "real" appearance of empirical data is withdrawn from our understanding, precisely by the logical mechanism that presents them to our reasoning. This is a serious flaw in his own deduction. Because reason does not judge appearances, but tries to understand and make sense of what is presented to the faculty of reasoning.

This way we can correct a deceiving impression, at least in theory, and reconstruct the reality behind our perceptions or develop a tentative model of what it might be. What seemed to have been completely out of Kant's ken and most of the philosophers before him, is the simple fact, that we put our models of perception to the test: we interact with the world we perceive, and if in vital areas we get it seriously wrong, we pay the penalty of pain, even extinction.

However to actually be in danger to be penalized, one would have to go to the extremes; we would have to get it wrong really bad. Because, it seems that this, our world, is nothing like the stern taskmaster in Darwin's fitness gym. There appears to be ample space left to go wrong and still to survive. It is easy to understand the idea of the "survival of the fittest," but Nature's exuberant plenitude has left ample room for the survival of the misfit.

*? Big Ugly Bang
"Big Bang Never Happened" by Eric J. Lerner

Even outstanding scientists like Professor Hawking commit the occasional lapse into bad rhetorics. I remember from his "History of Time" the sentence:

"nobody can argue against a mathematical theorem."

Well, who does? The real issue here is whether a mathematical theorem applies on anything observable out there. And if observations have to be tweaked to fit the theorem, then something is seriously fishy with the science.

Lerner's excursion into history, philosophy, and sciences outside of his own discipline, is the weakest part of his book, but I can imagine it will attract a certain kind of reader. Yet he draws from other people's information, like everybody else, and sometimes this information is outdated. We don't postulate anymore the origins of life from a primordial soup. Only in his own field he makes a strong argument, and I am sure he is right.

Since 1986 a series of astronomical surveys have led to the understanding that entire galaxies and clusters of galaxies agglomerate to string like structures, "cosmic walls," each a billion light-years across. Given the average travel speed of a galaxy 1000 kilometers per second matter must have moved at least for 270 billion light-years. The implication is obvious: The "puny" 15 billion years of the Big Bang scenario simply doesn't cover it.

The Universe is too big for the bang. Nor can the bang be moved back in time. The estimate that the Big Bang occurred ten or twenty billion years ago is based on extragalactic distances from us, and the speed at which galaxies appear to be receding from one another. If galaxies receding at half the speed of light appear to be about 5 or 10 billion light-years away, the reasoning goes, that they were all much closer ten or twenty billion years ago.

Big Bang is based on two key predictions: One is the abundance of helium and of the two isotopes deuterium and lithium, supposed to be created in the initial bang. The headache about these data is the way they distribute through the Universe. The surplus is required to distribute evenly but it doesn't. The other prediction is the microwave radiation in the background, commonly sold to the public as the debris from the bang.

Here again the trouble is how it distributes through space. Only this time it is the other extreme, too smooth and homogeneous. The background radiation is not an exclusive Big Bang thing, it is called for in every cosmological scenario that contains matter. Even more troublesome for the theory are recent observations at stars in the globular cluster, which appear to be older than the surrounding radiation. How can that be if radiation was supposed to be generated before the formation of stars?

And then there is the little matter of average density. In order to create enough gravity pull to get a sizeable bang in the first place, the theory requires the existence of "dark matter." But painstaking surveys have left no doubt, that there is no gravity effect which is not accounted for by actually observed matter. The final clincher however comes from the particle physicists. At extremely high densities, as postulated for the initial bang, matter and antimatter are supposed to be created in equal quantities.

Unfortunately if matter and antimatter come together they completely annihilate each other. After the initial bang, there would have been left only energy no Universe. Finally: Big Bang depends on the assumption that spin effects of particle collisions, like all other asymmetries, should decrease at higher energies, and eventually completely break down. But experiments refuse to confirm it. Experimental results show that spin effects steadily increase with the energy of the collision.

So is Big Bang a dead donkey? Well, not quite. Anti-bangers who try to come up with an alternative scenario have a problem. It's called 'the second law of thermodynamics.' As long as this law is holding water we have to accept that whichever cosmological scenario we choose, it has to allow for a universe with a history and an arrow of time pointing from past to future. How infinity of space and duration could make a difference and whether such thing is possible at all, is far from clear.

But why such a passionate account on such arcane matters in the first place? What difference does it make to anyone of us, whether the world had a beginning? People seem to feel that here is more at stake, than just wanting to know. Remember the hullaballoo in the press after the presentation of the Cobe-experiment? Far from confirming Big Bang, the problem with the satellite's images is, that it can be interpreted in a hundred different ways, of which none necessarily points to a singular event.

In the final analysis it is not the application of mathematical concepts and the correct interpretation of observational data that seems to concern the author and most of his readers, but how this translates into deep-seated believes - philosophical and religious. Cosmologists continue promising us a "theory of everything," neatly expressed in one equation, small enough to "fit on a T-shirt." I don't share this bleak pessimism: what could be gloomier, than to know it all!

These days, quantum physics determines our understanding of the counter-intuitive features of "empty" space, which seems to sparkle with tiny bursts of quantum uncertainty on the most basic level, where distances are calculated in Planck lengths. Apparently it is the accumulating force of these virtual energy bursts that pushes entire galaxies apart, and seems to fill the void between with gaseous new matter, according to the observable fact, that the mutual escape velocities of galaxies continue to increase.

great idea - usual delivery
"Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward

Science fiction is not my regular diet - but I like it. It is imaginative literature by its very definition. However I soon found out that most of this stuff suffers from poor writing, and if it is not, it is either poor in imagination or short of science. I don't say this to belittle anything. Good writers in SF are as exceptional as good writers in every other field. Take C. Arthur Clarke for example. Like most of his readers I like his wry humor.

I remember a story located on Mars, Science fiction's favorite place since Kepler's (the astronomer's) novel "Conversation with the Starry Messenger" from 1610. A thief, trying to burglarize the museum for indigenous artifacts, is caught red-handed. Since the budget can't afford the human resources, guess where the thief is doing his time? As security guard in the same museum hd tried to burglarize. During the 50s Clarke's stories would convey sheer magic.

In "Childhood's End," "The Sands of Mars," "The City and the Stars," "The other Side of the Sky," in "Deep Range." However, there is little to redeem Clarke the writer: wooden dialogues, protagonists with less character than the Jacks and Queens in a pack of cards, a style that reads like a parody on British Movies from the 1940s. And it mixes well with a hearty appreciation of the cliche ("why is it that all doctors are atheists?" muses who? A navigator who also is a Jesuit.)

When the 50s came to an end, Clarke had lost his touch. "2001, A Space Odyssey," is even more boring than Kubrick's film. So in more than one sense Clarke represents the majority of lesser writers in SF. They share his shortcomings as a writer, but barely match his imagination, and often go with much less of science. Besides it is difficult to write a novel about the technology of, say, the year 2,200 AD which won't be already antiquated in five years from now.

Of course Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe are proof that SF is not a license for poor writing. Some authors combine talent with a profound education in the sciences, but still lack in the character department. Baxter's "Titan" is a well composed, well researched, and ambitiously written novel. The pains of the marooned team on Titan ooze a heart-breaking authenticity. The characters don't. Robert Forward too, as a writer had to make due with whatever gifts the good Lord has endowed him.

He looked for new ways to mask his difficulties, but not very effectively. The structure of "Dragon's Egg" is split up in little news reels, discontinuous scenes and log entries, interspersed with articles from a fictional encyclopedia. Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Series" is a much better written example for this sort of thing. But Forward conveys a truly stunning piece of imagination. It is hard to fancy aliens more alien than Mr. Forward's Cheela.

To begin with: these creatures live on the surface of a neutron-star. One should think the steep gravity and hostile chemistry should exclude any possibility of sentient life. But this is just a bias of us carbon-based life forms, sheltered in the comfort of our pretty blue planet. Forward develops a coherent biochemical hypothesis. The physics are interesting too: Neutron stars are the next best thing to black holes.

Their gravity curves space-time to such degree that time on the surface compresses a normal human lifetime to barely 45 minutes. This is a real compression of time, not a shortened life span like the difference between bacteria and human. It is a variant of Einstein's twin-paradox. So a Cheela in his environment can do in 45 minutes for what a human may spend 80 years. Imagine what this means if such civilization on an asynchronous time line establishes communication with our's - or vice versa.

The physics are impeccable, but the Cheela's social life is as ridiculous as the Indians' in James Fenimore Cooper. And we all remember Mark Twain's scathing ridicule of Cooper-Indians, don't we? And not unlike Cooper's "Deer Slayer," the story trudges along at a painfully slow pace and lacks all of C. Arthur Clarke's undeniable sense of comedy. A missed opportunity. Two races of sentient beings so extremely different should open up to all sorts of comic relief.

(Which reminds me: a Swedish author published in the sixties a novel about time travelling aliens who foraged human history for their space travelling freak-show in the higher dimensions. It was absolutely hilarious, a forerunner of "The Hitchhiker's Guide" - but I lost the book long ago and forgot title and author. If this rings a bell with anyone, please drop me an email at michaelsympson@prodigy.net). For the hard core SF-buff it is a meal. If only the writer would have been able to live up to the story's potential.

not quite so superb
"Personae: The Shorter Poems" by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Sadly, most of the great poets in the 20th century, perhaps with the exception of Saint-John Perse and William Carlos Williams, felt an inexplicable urge to join the herd and camp out in highly dubious company. Mayakovsky, Ungaretti, Auden took at least temporary refuge in the dream of a world ruled by the proletarians of all nations. T.S. Eliot didn't mind showing his antisemitic leopard spots, Gottfried Benn, no anti-Semite by any means, converted with zest to Nazism because of their eugenic policies.

Of those who came clean through, Georg Trakl died too early to make bad choices, though he had his own problems; Marianne Moor, I guess, can claim a gender privilege; Brodsky and Else Lasker-Schüler had little choice anyway because they sat on the sharp end of the century's numerous persecutions. Also rather strange to see the top aces Eliot and Auden cross the Atlantic in opposite directions and swapp nationalities or even to emigrate out of their languages altogether, like Sengor and Brodsky.

For a poet this should be tantamount to artistic suicide. But it had been done before: the first rate Roman poet Claudianus was born Greek, the Archepoeta excelled in Latin when it had become the artificial Esperanto among medieval intellectuals, the French Chamisso naturalized himself in German - though I heard a Russian(!) friend of mine dismissing him as substandard - the Polish born Conrad was awarded the Nobel-prize for his novels in English, Nabokov was a leading American writer.

Being bilingual myself, I know the pains. Something is lost. No matter how attentive the author's ear - he almost inevitably has more dictionaries than friends for company. To be a poet in troubled times is never easy, and the 20th century was a watershed between the cultural paradigms. Ezra Pound was a card carrying fascist and activist in Musolini's operatic dictatorship. He was definitely a most able translator; he had the right instincts; he knew everything there is to know about literature.

Poetry is a pagan instinct, and the last line of defence of the old idols - maybe it has really run its course. But then language still needs a shepherd to protect it from the stench and spill of modern journalese, and new poems, waiting to be discovered, are still floating in that haze of unborn dreams, that is shrouding our planet. It seems Pound, with all his considerable powers, spoke too loud, and with too booming a voice, to actually sense the arrival of a new poem from limbo.

So when he ultimately failed in his original poetry, it must be a deficiency of temperament, and character, and perhaps even talent. But in "Personae" he gives us what he could do best - to create and impersonate a persona from the stockpile of dead poets. His impersonation of Propertius is superb, the translation of Cavalcanti and other residents from Dante's inferno is a labor of love. As for his ventures into Chinese I recommend caution. The Chinese I knew had a funny way to respond to his renditions.

Alongside of Kipling, though not quite as talented, Pound is the best ventriloquist in the language. However he picked up a trifle too much from Propertius' obscurity. A comparison of Propertius poems with Pound's own "Cantos" is revealing. Obscurity became Ezra Pound's last exile before silence took possession of the old man. A typical case of an author, who is more interesting for what he knows about the craft, than his original productions.

* a monstrous magnifying glass
"Ulysses" by James Joyce (1882-1941)
"The only demand I make of my reader, is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." James Joyce

Joyce had been called a writer's writer. I even heard saying that we should give Ulysses the benefit of a doubt, for the same reason we ignorant lay-folk use to accept on sight modern physics or Einstein's Relativity Theory. Now I can think of all sorts of definitions for the meaning and purpose of imaginative literature - to serve as the arcane Cabala for the initiates of a secretive cult is not one of them. The "lay-reader" is the very rationale for the existence of imaginative literature!

Granted that it is the reader's prerogative to choose and pick - it is not up to the novelist to be selective about his readers. A bad writer is just bad, because he can't cope with his task. But there is also a possibility that I may detest a good writer for the waste of skill and talent on something I deem to be an unworthy or misguided effort. So even if I may not like what I read, I can still be impressed by the beauty and cogency of the delivery.

I am the first to give Joyce due credit for the linguistic scope and the skill with which he engineered the plot in Ulysses - but answer me honestly: does any of the characters come to live the way, say, Tolstoy manages to animate his people with a much more primitive technique? Compare "Oxen of the Sun" with the moments when women break their water in Tolstoy's novels. Giving birth is not a linguistic exercise. Joyce's display of 60 different styles completely detaches from the event.

Joyce the human being had limitations, which got in the way of Joyce the writer, which prevented Joyce the artist, from living up to the full potential of Joyce the talent. Style is the immediate reflection of an artist's temperament. Obviously the writer of "Ulysses" could never make up his mind what kind of style it is going to be. The book's vision lacks unity and appears in places unnecessarily oracular due to the breaks in style.

And if that wouldn't be bad enough, more than once Joyce went off on a rather revealing tangent: take the masturbation scene in "Nausicaa." Superbly written as it is, it gives us the human deficiency of Joyce in a nutshell. He imitates the presumptuous and pompous phrasing from certain fashion magazines of the period, but, pray, to what end? Is it to poke fun on the cliches in the mind of a crippled girl? A fine subject for heavy weight satire!

Or is it just a piece of "anti-philistine" snobbery on the author's part? Joyce ventriloquizes a lot; the English language is taken through her paces like a dressage horse, and sometimes Joyce even presents a superb artistic flash, like the gold coins the principal is handing out to Stephen. Yet even here I see the author glancing sideways under his eyelids: are we really looking? Do we catch the moment? (Kafka did such things in his sleep.)

So ok, a letter, torn to tiny shreds and drifting down the river, carries to a corresponding theme five chapters later; a cake of soap, bought in the morning, becomes an important item in late afternoon; a crowd of town-folks revolve around each other and do their thing - mostly in pubs, hospital-canteens and hostelries. A tat one-sided, if, based on the book alone, we had to reconstruct Dublin from scratch. "Ulysses" is a writer's portfolio and Joyce is flaunting stylistic prowess.

God knows, I am all for paying to a good author the respect he deserves and pitching in a bit of effort. But the reward should offer better things than the gratification of a crossword puzzle. I want participation, to see things the way they present themselves to the artist's temperament. But this here is a look into the shards of a carefully shattered mirror. It must be me, but I can't help feeling something amateurish in all this contrivance, an impression I get from the entire work.

When I was young and naive, I had read every single line of Joyce, including his letters and poems. Except for a precious few luminous moments in the "Portrait" - the travel of young Stephen in the train compartment, the creeping cold damp on the rugby pitch - it really amounts to little more than an exercise in the rhetorics of imaginative writing. We all know Joyce was determined to be remembered as the outstanding writer of the 20th century.

And he is! We remember his legend the same way we think of Cervantes or Kafka before we open their books. But that's where the comparison ends. Take away the halo from Cervantes and Kafka and you still enjoy a robust read - I am not sure the same can be said of Joyce. He had the gift, and he knew it, but even his consummate admiration for Ibsen didn't help him to find for himself a story worth telling, that is a story which would make his talent shine and captivate the reader.

I can't help it, the man was an amateur for all his life, a typical tinkerer and home improvement guy who probably never really found the kind of subject matter that could have distracted him from his own precious self. Joyce had tons of talent to burn, but something went seriously wrong here. Reading Joyce, makes one realize that talent is not everything. He was a small character. Approaching Ulysses is an experience not unsimilar to "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim."

the perfect poem? you tell me!
"Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

A latter-day Georgic, a poem on everything and anything, an artistic inspiration for the often poetic prose (sic!) of Ms. Winterson. The muffled voice of a mumbler. The butt of satire ("Chard Whitlow" by Henry Reed (1914-1986); a meditation on the passage of time - "Burnt Norton" - "East Coker" - "The dry Salvages" - "Little Gidding," often teetering on the ludicrous, with pomposity sailing the Banale Grande, slouching along the tall slag walls of paradise. Now and then a whiff of dry autumn leaves comes down from the other side. We hunch the shoulders in our coats; it is grey and cold.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was a man who carried Kennedy's agenda to the place where it really belongs - "don't ask what your language can do for you, ask what you can do for your language" - in other words he was more of an innovator than a mining-engineer. Eliot on the other hand, was more occupied with digging through the leftovers of Britain's abandoned mine-shafts. It is a matter of choice, the difference between the innovator and the exploiter, if you have the talent. (I know, Eliot wrote "Wasteland" - sooo?) And of maturity! Hart Crane (1899-1932) died too soon to make a choice.

So there are left only Stevens and Marianne Moore (1887-1972) and Auden (1907-1973) as the innovative forces of the 40s and 50s. And perhaps William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). Bad timing of course but not their fault. Since then we are left waiting. Not that there are no more talents and remarkable poets, but no great contributions. Knowing Ginsberg, Corso, Ashby, Bukowsky doesn't really make a difference to not knowing them. Even the sweet and very competent Richard Wilbur (*1921) doesn't make much of a dent. (When he is gone, can I have his parking lot?)

Poets, in this day and age, I am sorry to say, don't seem to matter a lot - even when badly needed.

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