As for On Solitude, applied to our current predicament, I’d roughly translate it thus: stop seeking approval from others. Don’t feel the need to communicate 24-7. Don’t fall into lazy habits. Get to know yourself. Or, more simply: get off Twitter. Get off Houseparty. Stop watching that shit series on Netflix. Go read Montaigne for a bit instead.
Speaking of whom, one passage in his “Of the Education of Children” caught me recently:
History is more my quarry, or poetry, which I love with particular affection. For as Cleanthes said, just as sound, when pent up in the narrow channel of a trumpet, comes out sharper and stronger, so it seems to me that a thought, when compressed into the numbered feet of poetry, springs forth much more violently and strikes me a much stiffer jolt.
I agree, and I’ve resolved to read more poetry henceforth. It’s strange, though, because while I would also claim to love poetry “with particular affection,” I seem to love a Platonic ideal of it more than most actual examples. I don’t just mean formless, navel-gazing contemporary poems. A lot of classic poems likewise fail to move me, even as I can appreciate their technical qualities. As Dom DeLuise’s Julius Caesar said in History of the World, Part. 1, “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.” Maybe that’s the problem, though. The truly thrilling examples of poetry have made me insatiably hungry for more. No amount will ever be enough.
April 15, 2020 @ 2:01 pm
I want to like poetry more. I think the trouble is that the really good stuff is such a small fraction of the whole, even within the collected works of a single poet. I see you’re reading some Dickinson. I do like Dickinson at her best, a lot. Honestly, she makes me proud to be an American, since America produced her. I also like/admire Eliot, Frost, Auden, Yeats, and Larkin. But I don’t read much poetry. I am reading through Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of Ovid right now. Poetry in translation is hard, but Mandelbaum’s first ten pages of Metamorphoses are really terrific. Droops a bit later on.
April 15, 2020 @ 2:51 pm
I like the way Dickinson’s poems are deceptively simple. It appeals to my tendency toward extreme parsimony, to say as much as possible in as few words as necessary. That said, I often have no idea what she’s talking about, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of nuance.
I have one 900-page compilation of Auden’s work, and there’s a handful of truly amazing lines/poems in there but I also sense that I’m not learned enough to grasp all of his references. I like reading Yeats in the same way that you can appreciate a melody without being a musician; his words and phrases are very evocative. But what I know of his dense symbolism makes me think I’m probably too lazy to fully appreciate what he’s saying.