The fan turnout has been unbelievable for this year’s Madness tournament. Everyone is flying to Madness Island for these games. And Marla Muse has been quite the hostess.
Marla Muse: I love the Romantic poets!
In Round One play, first seed artist/poet William Blake (the Tyger), who died in the first quarter of the 19th century, takes on 16th seeded author and wit Oscar Wilde, who died at the 19th century’s close.
Blake’s Tyger should terrify any opponent; Blake’s music is like a hammer, like Beethoven, or like heavy metal—what simplicity, what power: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright in the forest of the night.” One has no problem imagining Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin singing this.
Wilde’s essay “The Critic As Artist” is like the music of Ravel:
We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep, scraped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort. There is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one.
Interesting contest, because Wilde insists on the “self-consciousness” of the “critic/artist” in the face of Blake, perhaps the most impetuous, and least self-conscious, artist who ever lived.
Blake romps, to the blood-curdling yells of his fans, and advances to Round Two. So long, Oscar! You are right. The artist needs the self-consciousness of the critic. The bullied child is full of knowledge.
~~~~~~~~
Goethe’s poetic drama, Faust v. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” a poem as iconic as Blake’s Tyger.
We kept the devil away for two millennia, thanks to the Christian religion—whether the “devil” really exists, or not. Life is merely the play of our imagination—so say the non-religious; so why then, do they object to Christianity so much? If Christianity is real, or it’s poetry, it’s still pretty good poetry. In this passage from Goethe, Faust, the professor, woos a Christian peasant:
Gretchen: You don’t believe in God?
Faust: Do not misunderstand me, my love, my queen!
Who can name him?
Admit on the spot:
I believe in him?
And who can dare
To perceive and declare:
I believe in him not?
The All-Embracing One,
The All-Upholding One,
Does he not embrace, uphold,
You, me, Himself?
Does not the Heaven vault itself above us?
Is not the earth established fast below?
And with their friendly glances do not
Eternal stars rise over us?
Do not my eyes look into yours,
And all things thrust
Into your head, into your heart,
And weave in everlasting mystery
Invisibly, visibly, around you?
Fill your heart with this, great as it is,
And when this feeling grants you perfect bliss,
Then call it what you will—
Happiness! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name for it!
Feeling is all;
Name is mere sound and reek
Clouding Heaven’s light.Gretchen: That sounds quite good and right;
And much as the priest might speak,
Only not word for word.Faust: It is what all hearts have heard
In all the places heavenly day can reach,
Each in his own speech;
Why not I in mine?Gretchen: I could almost accept it, you make it sound so fine,
Still there is something in it that shouldn’t be;
For you have no Christianity.Faust: Dear child!
Gretchen: It has long been a grief to me
To see you in such company.Faust: You mean?
Gretchen: The man who goes about with you.
I hate him in my soul, through and through.
And nothing has given my heart
In my whole life so keen a smart
As that man’s face, so dire, so grim.Faust: Beloved child, don’t be afraid of him!
“Feeling is all,” says professor Faust, wooing by expanding Christian love to include sex. A great speech, Gretchen acknowledges, though not quite true to the words of my religion. This “not quite” is finally the only “not quite” there is. Faust says religion is whatever good thing our hearts hear, but Gretchen’s Christian heart won’t be melted by that, and then she mentions Mephistopheles, and again, without learning, she instinctively understands, in the most innocent simplicity, that something is not right. First she rejects the idea of “what Faust’s individual heart thinks” and then she rejects “how the devil’s individual face looks.” For Gretchen, a standard judges the individual. Faust comes from the opposite direction—the individual is supreme. Gretchen eventually is seduced—because she is an individual.
Everyone knows Emily Dickinson’s great poem. But here it is no match for the mesmerizing Faust!
Goethe advances!
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Coleridge’s Kubla Khan versus Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Third seed, fourteenth seed.
Why do we include Marx in a sublime contest with poets?
Because this idea shook the world:
“There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.”
There. It is that simple. With one blow, Marx broke everything in two. A ghost inhabited every object.
Trade, or capitalism, existed long before Marx—the word “commodity” came into use in English in the 15th century.
A country has excess grain and trades it for coffee, and now it has grain and coffee, two things instead of one.
Commodity meant “convenience” or “advantage,” and it was a good thing as long as trade produced a greater variety for everyone.
But as trade became more sophisticated, commodity pricing—trade for the sake of trade—replaced things themselves.
Commodities were still things, up until Marx. As trade became weaponized, a commodity was now more valuable and sacred than a thing.
And this happened just when mass wealth began to upset the old hierarchical order. A new hierarchy of hoarded wealth emerged, and Marx was the bitter result.
We say “bitter result,” because with bad faith trading, things were no longer what they were; everything was ephemeral and relative, and nothing was stable.
The sublime slid into the fast and the commonplace in a manner that was nearly sublime. Marx is nearly sublime, but not finally sublime. He fell into what he criticized.
Kubla Khan by Coleridge is sublime.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge advances.
~~~~~
Shelley (the Cloud) v. Hawthorne (the Scarlet Letter)
The passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne is lovely and sublime:
She inherited her mother’s gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid’s garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. A letter,—the letter A,—but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.
Now here is the excerpt from Shelley’s “The Cloud:”
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
And since in Shelley’s divine poetry, he captures the roving and playful essence of Hawthorne’s Pearl, Shelley advances.
~~~~~~~
John Keats v. R.H. Horne
The Englishman Richard Henry Horne (1802-1884) fought for Mexican independence in the 1820s, was a literary friend of Elizabeth Barrett (before she became Browning) and Charles Dickens in the 1840s, called himself the “father of the Australian wine industry,” as he spent most of the 1850s in Australia, and spent the last 25 years of his life in London. He published plays, and an epic poem, “Orion,” which Edgar Poe praised in 1844. From “Orion:”
There, underneath the boughs, mark where the gleam
Of sunrise through the roofing’s chasm is thrown
Upon a grassy plot below, whereon
The shadow of a stag stoops to the stream,
Swift rolling toward the cataract, and drinks,
While ever and anon the nightingale,
Not waiting for the evening, swells his hymn—
His one sustained and heaven aspiring tone—
And when the sun hath vanished utterly,
Arm over arm the cedars spread their shade,
With arching wrist and long extended hands,
And grave-ward fingers lengthening in the moon,
Above that shadowy stag whose antlers still
Hung o’er the stream.
The painting here is quite admirable, and there is a certain Miltonic force to Horne’s long poem—all but forgotten today.
Keats, who lived less than a third of Horne’s long life, rose to remarkable fame, and Horne was one of the few, early on, to praise Keats.
From Hyperion:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
How interesting it would be, if Horne would win…
Holy God! He does! R.H. Horne advances!
~~~~~~~
Marla Muse: Blake, Goethe, Coleridge, and Shelley—not much surprise that these advance. And R.H. Horne in an upset!
How many outside this tournament even know who Horne is, Marla?
Marla Muse: I see quite a few fans studying their programs with puzzled looks!
Is it not strange that Richard Horne wrote thousands of letters to Elizabeth Barrett, before Robert ran away with her? And Poe, who loved “Orion,” also corresponded with Elizabeth, when she was still Barrett, and that Poe dedicated his 1845 Poems to her?
Marla Muse: O that is sweet! And speaking of which, look who is coming this way!
Elizabeth Barrett versus Pushkin!!
Both of these entries are stunning!
First Elizabeth Barrett, from her epic poem, The Drama of Exile:
On a mountain peak
Half sheathed in primal woods and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine, at that hour
A lion crouched,—part raised upon his paws,
With his calm massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world, right suddenly
He sprang up rampant, and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes,—and roared so fierce,
(Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear)—
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast keen echoes crumbling down the vales
To distant silence,—that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
In savage and in sorrowful complaint
Which trailed along the gorges.
I don’t think many of our March Madness fans are acquainted with this side of Elizabeth Barrett!
“Which trailed along the gorges.” What a vast, dramatic scene she paints!
This is masterful.
And a lyric poem from Pushkin, who is so adept at breaking one’s heart:
If I walk the noisy streets,
or enter a many thronged church,
or sit among the wild young generation,
I give way to my thoughts.
I say to myself: the years are fleeting,
and however many there seem to be,
we must all go under the eternal vault,
and someone’s hour is already at hand.
When I look at a solitary oak
I think: the patriarch of the woods.
It will outlive my forgotten age
as it outlived that of my grandfathers’.
If I caress a young child,
immediately I think: Farewell!
I will yield my place to you,
for I must fade while your flower blooms.
Each day, every hour
I habitually follow in my thoughts,
trying to guess from their number
the year which brings my death.
And where will fate send death to me?
In battle, in my travels, or on the seas?
Or will the neighbouring valley
receive my chilled ashes?
And although to the senseless body
it is indifferent wherever it rots,
yet close to my beloved countryside
I still would prefer to rest.
And let it be, beside the grave’s vault
Young life forever will be playing,
and impartial, indifferent nature
Spreads, forever staying.
Which is more sublime?
Pushkin, who puts his whole, melancholy life into one beautiful lyric poem?
Or Barrett, who displays artistic unity in one sublime passage?
Elizabeth Barrett wins!
~~~~~~
And look who we have now!
Marla Muse: I don’t think I can contain my excitement!
Byron versus Poe!!
This is one of the biggest crowds we’ve ever had for March Madness. Poe against Byron. The fans are merry, not melancholy, as the excitement lifts up even the most melancholy and literary of spirits.
Sometimes we swear the sublime is simply that which is terribly sad.
Is there anything sadder than this excerpt from Byron’s poem, “Darkness?”
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
This is so beautiful: “as they dropp’d they slept on the abyss without a surge.” Listen to this, children! This is poetry. No mere fop, Byron.
Poe counters with an ‘end of the world’ tale of his own; not everything Poe wrote became famous. The entry is a passage from Poe’s neglected “Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (two spirits named after Cleopatra’s attendants) which imagines a comet approaching earth; people are terrified, then realize the comet is merely made of gas, and can do no harm. Halley’s comet (1835) would have been seen by Poe a few years prior to writing this tale, and, in 1832, there actually was a “comet panic” in which scientists miscalculated, and said a comet was going to hit the earth. Poe’s stories tend to be based on facts, or at least actual scary events.
The prevalence of oxygen in the comet has a pleasurable and life-giving effect at first, as it moves into our atmosphere. Then Poe brings the hammer down:
It had been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen, in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a total extraction of the nitrogen? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; — the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.
Why need I paint, Charmion, the now disenchained frenzy of mankind? That tenuity in the comet which had previously inspired us with hope, was now the source of the bitterness of despair. In its impalpable gaseous character we clearly perceived the consummation of Fate. Meantime a day again passed — bearing away with it the last shadow of Hope. We gasped in the rapid modification of the air. The red blood bounded tumultuously through its strict channels. A furious delirium possessed all men; and, with arms rigidly outstretched towards the threatening heavens, they trembled and shrieked aloud. But the nucleus of the destroyer was now upon us; — even here in Aidenn, I shudder while I speak. Let me be brief — brief as the ruin that overwhelmed. For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then — let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God! — then, there came a shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of Him; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all.
Which deserves to win? The sublime poetry of Byron? Or the hypnotizing prose of Poe?
The March Madness committee fears a riot—whoever wins, both sides loyal and passionate, as one might expect of those souls who gather beneath the banner, Byron, or the banner, Poe.
But the crowd is calmer than expected. Deadly quiet, even.
And with a whisper comes the result: “The winner is the poet, Lord Byron!”
~~~~~~~
And the final First Round contest in the Romantic Bracket—Cornelius Matthews versus Lord Tennyson!!
Everyone knows this by Tennyson. His sublime poem, The Splendor Falls, quoted in its entirety:
The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowng!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
.
O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
This may be the most iconic poem ever.
Marla Muse: It makes me want to faint!
Oh, Marla, people love to catch you when you fall!
Marla Muse: I know! (laughter)
Cornelius Matthews wrote a 34 stanza poem called “Wakondah,” from which has been selected one beautiful line, selected once, for praise, by Poe, in a review in which he otherwise mocked the work.
And then we find in a letter from Poe to Matthews—where Poe asks Matthews for R.H. Horne’s address—that Poe, in his review of “Wakondah,” was only kidding, and has since become terribly ashamed, and sorry.
Ah, Letters!
The line is:
Green dells that into silence stretch away
Magnificent!
It will be amazing to see if a single line of sublimity can beat Tennyson.
But first we must attend to Marla Muse.
She has fainted.