Maybe other people who love poetry, as I do, find the “situation” of poetry in America today somewhat paradoxical. There are probably more active poets in the country than there have ever been. At practically every college in the country a poet in residence is teaching a poetry workshop that has a waiting list of hopeful applicants, many of them talented. But how many of our fellow citizens regularly read poetry? I believe that the paradoxical answer is: not as many as the number of them writing it.
Whether or not there is any substance behind this suspicion, I have been thinking about my own reading history. I can remember very clearly how I got turned onto poetry and can still recite the poem that did the turning: “Bed in Summer,” by Robert Louis Stevenson.
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
This is a poem of remarkable simplicity, three stanzas long, with each stanza made up of two rhyming couplets of absolutely regular iambic tetrameter. The rhyme words are emphatic and exact. More than ninety percent of its roughly eighty words are monosyllables. There are few poems simpler in structure and diction than “Bed in Summer”. But it tells a story, and it was my story and that of most children my age, the story of a kid who wants to stay out in the waning light of a long summer evening. That’s what we want in a story—for it to be ours, or susceptible to being made ours by imagination. I want to emphasize the story aspect of poetry. I do not deny the power of lyricism, but great poetry demands the amplitude of narrative.
During the war—I refer to the Second World War of the last century--my mother, my two siblings, and I took up residence in the house of my maternal grandparents in Denver. My dad was in the South Pacific. Back in the day—the day being the first decades of Colorado statehood, my grandmother Davidson had been a school-teacher in the mountain village of Salida. Salida is now a rather fancy place and miniature Aspen, but it was then a company town of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway Co. Her husband, my grandfather Davidson, was a locomotive engineer. My grandmother remained at heart a teacher all her life. My older brother and I benefited from being her captive residential pupils. After a while she introduced me to more Stevenson—this time to two of the great “youth” novels in our literature: Treasure Island (1882) and Kidnapped (1886), to be read in that order. For a growing boy the youthful heroes of these two tales, Jim Hawkins and David Balfour are the most “relatable” literary characters imaginable. At the same time they are both “historical” novels—meaning that for their contemporary audience they already had the allure of exotic times, curious customs, and a vanished or vanishing maritime world. Long John Silver has to be one of the greatest characters in world history, so good that he cannot be ruined even by having his name appropriated by a bad fast-food joint or parodied in a puerile obscenity that surface in the Clarence Thomas Judiciary Committee hearings of 1991. Thus, I owe to this formidable lady—Cora Louise Nelson Davidson—many wonderful examples of the role of family mentoring in the transmission of knowledge and the whetting of a young person’s appetite to know things. Among the other fatal misprisions undermining our national social arrangements is the legal fiction that the public schools, or any school for that matter, can compensate entirely for the informal but crucial education of family life. Some other reading advice my grandmother gave me was that, though I should try to read widely, I should likewise carefully choose some authors to be my personal favorites, and that I would easily find one or two who had written many books, so many that I should not soon run out of them. She gave Dickens as an example, but at that time it was Stevenson who stuck. I especially loved the stories in New Arabian Nights.
Such were
the origins of my admiration of the great Scottish writer as poet and fiction
writer. Many other authors have been
drawn to my attention in a similar manner, that is, on the recommendation of
relatives or friends. I am particularly
admiring of our many writers who have excelled both at poetry and prose. But more recently, in fact only quite
recently, have I come to appreciate Stevenson in a third important
category—that of literary critic and historical scholar. In the past few months, I have been nosing
around in the works of a medieval French poet I too long underestimated and
thus neglected: François Villon. Regular
readers of the blog may have noticed a few references to him recently. Villon is one of few medieval poets that many
general readers have heard of. There are
many reasons for his (comparative) fame, but one of the principal ones is the
modern taste for the edgy, irreverent, and transgressive. Villon was a bad boy, a very bad boy,
actually. I refer to his actual
documented personal criminality, but there is a sauciness in much of the verse
itself that is daring and provocative. He
became something of a vogue among French and English bohemians in the
nineteenth century. Having now had the
opportunity to read a good deal of the more recent scholarship and criticism
Villon continues to attract, I still adjudge two periodical pieces published by
Stevenson in 1877—one of them a short work of fiction—among the finest and most
illuminating things ever written about the vagabond versifier. But then I revel in being old-fashioned,
frequently quoting Oliver Goldsmith’s most famous dictum—perhaps his only famous
dictum? I love everything that's old, - old friends, old
times, old manners, old books, old wine. But these days it's ixnay even on the vino.
