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Putting together Tuesday’s post, I naturally spent some time skimming back through many of the narratives, especially the earlier ones. I wasn’t so much amazed at how much I’d forgotten, but at how little I’d realized the tightness and cohesiveness of the section. Tightness, ha, how many narrators are there again? Yet I’m serious. [...] Since I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how the second section of The Savage Detectives worked—and who was reporting it, as discussed, for example, here, I decided to actually analyze the darn thing and try to figure some stuff out about it. First, one possibly interesting observation that struck me as [...] Since I didn’t wrap up reading The Savage Detectives until last night, I’ve stayed away, so far, from most other participants’ posts. One of the few I did read, because I could tell right away that she had stopped before the point I had already reached, was Dolce Bellezza’s lament that the second part [...] In an effort to not work-work on Boxing Day, and to give everyone a warm-up for the rest of the week, which will be full of fun and meaningless end-of-year posts, I thought I’d start off today with my long overdue comments on the last piece in Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God, “The [...] The first poem in Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God is called “The Glass Essay,” and if you’re anything like me, the title might seem odd. Essay? As Guy Davenport’s introduction to the collection explains, though, Carson’s poems can seem like verse essays: “She writes in a kind of mathematics of the emotions, with [...] Robert Nichols, a fellow English war poet, wrote an introduction to Siegfried Sassoon’s 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems that is reprinted in my Dover Edition of the War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. In it, Nichols recounts a conversation he once had with Sassoon, on the topic of “certain exalté poems in [Nichols's] Ardours [...] On Tuesday, one of the poems I wrote about, “To Any Dead Officer,” ends very bluntly, as I noted: “I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.” This kind of bluntness is characteristic, especially as a sort of epigrammatic last line to Sassoon’s poems. “Trench Duty” ends, “I’m wide awake; and some chap’s [...] On Monday, Dwight pointed me to an article in The Guardian about new poems by Sassoon recently unearthed by his biographer. As reported, these poems “show how the young poet, who joined his battalion in France in November 1915, did not immediately plunge into writing angry poetry about the horrors of his experience, rather [...] Yesterday I ended with a question about Sassoon’s bitterness. Today I want to discuss a theme in many of Sassoon’s poems that is often treated more sweetly than you might expect: death. I mean here the state of death, the afterlife in the most literal sense possible—what happens after life ends. Sassoon speculates often [...] Why not have a week on Siegfried Sassoon? I mean to say, on his war poems. I can name a few good reasons: I’m not even really supposed to have read them yet; I probably ought to be writing about a lot of other things first; should one shortish book of poetry really make [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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