NORTH BRACKET
- Baudelaire v. 16 Scarriet Editors
- Lessing v. 15 Kipling
- Brecht v. 14 Wanniski
- Heine v. 13 Benson
- Larkin v. 12 Eliot
- Plotinus v. 11 von Strassburg
- Santayana v. 10 Rosenberg
- Stickney v. 9 Holmes
- Holmes
- Rosenberg
- von Strassburg
- Eliot
- Benson
- Wanniski
- Kipling
- Scarriet Editors
“Bragging rights” is a common phrase meaning you win—but there’s no profit in it, and it mostly applies to sports, but in the context of our loved/reviled literary “March Madness,” is it too embarrassing to point out that “bragging rights” is perhaps as true for literature and life as it is for sports, if not more so? What is Elizabeth Barrett doing in her letter to Robert, if not “bragging” (look how loving! look how brilliant I am!) or in her poem, where she says, “If thou must love me, let it be for naught/Except for love’s sake only”—is this not an elaborate “brag?” I cannot/will not “brag” about my beauty—I will “brag” in the heady, transcendent, abstract. Life and poetry are nothing but brag, if you think about it. This is all we have—and all we finally are.
Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867 (Critics on Poe p. 26 1973)
If Poe attracted a great deal of attention, he also made many enemies. Firm in his convictions, he made indefatigable war upon false reasoning, silly imitations, solecisms, barbarisms, and all literary offenses perpetrated every day in newspapers and books. In these respects no fault could be found with him, for he practiced what he preached; his style is pure, adequate to his ideas and expresses them exactly. Poe is always correct.
…As a poet, Edgar Poe is a man apart. Almost by himself he represents the romantic movement on the other side of the Atlantic.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729-1781 (Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry p. 92 1898)
Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow. Poetry, in its progressive imitations, can use but a single attribute of bodies, and choose that one which gives the most vivid picture of the body as exercised in this particular action. Hence the rule for the employment of a single descriptive epithet, and the cause of the rare occurrence of descriptions of physical objects. I should place less confidence in this dry chain of conclusions, did I not find them fully confirmed by Homer…
Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956 (“Die Maske Des Bosen” in Selected Poems 1947)
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.
Heinrich Heine 1797-1856 (“Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne” The Poetry of Heinrich Heine p. 70 1969)
The rose, the lily, the sun and the dove,
I loved them all once in the rapture of love.
I love them no more, for my soul delight
Is a maiden so slight, so bright and so white,
Who, being herself the source of love,
Is rose and lily and sun and dove.
Philip Larkin 1922-1985 (“High Windows” The Complete Poems p. 80 2012)
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Plotinus 204-270 (“On the Intellectual Beauty” The Norton Anthology Theory and Criticism p. 174, 2001)
It is a principal with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will…come to understand the…Transcendent of…Divine Being. …Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman’s hands into some statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor’s art has concentrated all loveliness. Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist’s hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone—for so the crude block would be as pleasant—but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art. …Every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effect can be: the musical does not derive from an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in the material work derives from an art yet higher. Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects are themselves imitations.
George Santayana 1863-1952 (“As in the Midst of Battle There Is Room” An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry p. 716, 1944)
As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love…
As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb
The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:
So in this great disaster of our birth
We can be happy, and forget our doom.
For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy
Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth,
And evening gently woos us to employ
Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth;
Till from the summer’s trance we wake, to find
Despair before us, vanity behind.
Trumbull Stickney 1874-1904 (“Mt. Lykaion” Dramatic Verses 1902)
[…] A river like a curl of light is seen.
Beyond the river lies the even sea,
Beyond the sea another ghost of sky,—
O God, support the sickness of my eye
Lest the far space and long antiquity
Suck out my heart, and on this awful ground
The great wind kill my little shell with sound.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894 (The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table p. 13, 1858)
The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of disease. Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble. ‘Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,’ said Queen Elizabeth, ‘but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.’ The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice.
…The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts.
Harold Rosenberg 1906-1978 (Discovering The Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture & Politics, “The Herd of Independent Minds” 1948, 1973)
The mass-culture maker, who takes his start from the experience of others, is essentially a reflector of myths, and lacks concrete experiences to communicate. To him man is an object seen from the outside. Indeed it could be demonstrated that the modern mass-culture elite, even when it trots around the globe in search of historical hotspots where every six months the destiny of man is decided, actually has less experience than the rest of humanity, less even than the consumers of its products. To the professional of mass culture, knowledge is the knowledge of what is going on in other people; he trades his own experience for an experience of experience. Everyone has met those culture-conscious “responsibles” who think a book or movie or magazine wonderful not because it illuminates or pleases them but because it tells “the people” what they “ought to know.”
Gottfried von Strassburg d. 1210 (medieval romances, 1957, “Tristan and Isolt” p. 182)
“Tristan!” said fair Isolt. “I were liefer I were dead and buried than left in his care. He is but a flatterer who is ever at my side telling me how dear he holds me! Yet I know well wherefore he doeth so: he slew my uncle and doth fear my hatred! For that alone doth he ply me with flatteries , thinking to win my friendship, but it helpeth him little! ‘Tis true, I have spoken to him oft with lying lips and friendly glances, and laid myself out to please him, but I did it for thy sake, and lest men should bring against me the reproach that women aye hate their husband’s friend. Ofttimes have I deceived him with friendly words, so that he would have sworn they came from my heart! Sir, leave me not in the care of thy nephew Tristan, no, not for a day, if I may persuade thee!”
T.S. Eliot 1888-1965 (Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
Sally Benson 1897-1972 (Twenty Grand Short Stories 1947, “After the Ball”)
No one could have guessed her age seeing her drive around town in the cream-colored convertible coupe, its top down. She drove carelessly; one hand resting casually on the wheel. Her lipstick matched her nails and blended with the color of her dress; rust polish with green, red and white, or brown, rose with pastel shades. She was perfect from her smart well-fitting sandals to her seemingly endless supply of small felts. Her manner was perfect, too. She spoke in a tired, low-pitched voice, and she looked at the person she was addressing as though he were very, very far away. Every morning when she strolled in Osborne’s Market, she created something of a sensation. The two boys who sold fruit and vegetables simply stared and even old Mr. Osborne who had, as he put it, “seen hundreds of them come and go,” was impressed and suggested filet mignon or a nice rib roast, feeling vaguely that chopped round steak or shoulder lamb for stewing was out of the question.
She might have been Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, or the pampered daughter of a millionaire, home from a winter on the Riviera. She might have been anyone romantic and exciting. But her name was Norma Martin and she was sixteen years old. In her smart little bag with her lipstick and compact was her first driver’s license.
She was not the same Norma Martin who had recently been graduated from a school for girls. Her hockey stick had been left to warp in the hall closet at home; her plain white underthings with their name tapes lay packed in a trunk in the attic; her school books had been sold to a child who still believed that being a senior was all that Life could hold. For the Norma Martin summering at Pine Bluffs, school days were gone forever. Pine Bluffs was the Present. It was Life.
Jude Wanniski 1936-2005 (The Way the World Works p. 84, 1978)
Smith and Jones each want to trade sixteen hours of their skills with each other, but in order to complete the transaction each must give the government two hours of their skills, the two must do thirty-six hours work to transact thirty-two. The four hours “tax” is the wedge between them, If the government increases its tax from $20 to $30 on a $160 transaction, Smith and Jones must work thirty-eight hours to transact thirty-two. If the government then requires that each fill out a form that takes fifteen minutes of their time for each $160 transaction, the wedge widens to six and a half hours. If the form is so complex that each must hire a lawyer and accountant, each paying the lawyer and accountant $5 for every $160 transaction, the wedge widens to seven hours.
The “wedge,” then, is not only the financial tax or slice out of the transaction pie, but also all other government burdens on the transaction that requires labor. Because the government does not realize revenues from a regulatory order—red tape and paper work—it does not think of such orders as “taxes.” But to Smith and Jones, there is no difference between financial taxes and regulatory burdens; each requires precise amounts of labor.
Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936 (“Recessional” A Pocket Book of Modern Verse 1954)
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget! […]
Scarriet Editors (“Relationship Hell” Blog Scarriet 3/12/24)
Relationship hell works like this.
The romancers have cultivated
in mainstream imagery the kiss
which captures every squeamish imagination
due to germs, childhood, bodily autonomy and warmth
as it presents itself strangely and socially,
the way in to society, and immersion in human weather like no other.
Of course you want to take a lover.
But the ratio of the excitement of the bonding
is connected to how much alienation exists—afraid of others
is why she is not afraid of you.
The one you have found
is afraid. This keeps going round
until love finally fears
itself, us. Sorry, dears.