able beauty

The beauty of poetry is being able to write poetry.

always a refuge

Whatever poetry is or becomes, let it always be a refuge for beauty.

function, structure and design.

The Roman architect Vitruvius suggested that buildings can be judged according to their utilitas, firmitas, and venustas, that is, according to their fitness for their purpose, their structural soundness, and their beauty; or, in Richard Krautheimer’s version, their function, structure, and design.

—Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing about Art, (HarperCollins, 1989)

[The same criteria could be applied to a good poem.]

make a verse of

Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make A Verse Of (Simon and Schuster, 1961)

I found reference to this book on the site Neglected Books. Intrigued by the description, I bought a used copy (second printing) online. Helen Bevington was an associate professor of English at Duke University, teaching alongside her husband, Merle Bevington, whom she affectionately refers to as “B.” The book is a series of brief encounters with books, with authors, about the people she’d met and places visited.

After many of the vignettes she offers a poem, hence the title, …Make A Verse Of.  Her poetry is accomplished but clearly out of synch with post WW II late-modernism of her times. Her gift is light verse, wry verse, and touching sentiment never lapsing into banal sentimentality. He poetry appeared in many leading periodicals like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

She is scholarly but with an easy erudition and the ability to disclose what may have been overlooked. Helen Bevington is a genial guide through the literary byways of Robert Herrick, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, Madame de Sévigné, and many other literary figures.

A couple of samples:

The Poet as Singer

    We complain today that the poets no longer sing. They talk to themselves in the low conversational tones, expecting to be overheard. (Marchbanks says, in [G. B. Shaw’s] Candida, “That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them.”) Sir Herbert Read even urges poets not to be audible, but to keep private and remain unheard: “Never lift your voice—modern poetry has an inaudible wavelength.”

   Yet in a golden age, Pindar and Sappho sang. The Elizabethans were lyric poets in the true sense: “to be sung to the lyre.” Campion’s lyre was a real one; it was a lute. I have no idea whether he wrote the poems first and afterward set them to music, or whether he added the words to existing songs. It may have made no difference to him which came first. His words and notes, he said, were coupled “lovingly together.”

   Unlike our modern poets, Campion remembered that, if a song is to be heard, he must trust the rest of us to become singers, too:

               All the songs are mine, if you express them well,

               Otherwise they are your own, Farewell. 

[91]

=

The Wisdom of William Morris

   When I look at my own house, I think wistfully of the good sense that William Morris would teach me. He once said (in a lecture on “The Beauty of Life”),

    “…if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

   I choose to believe that the advice rules out most gadgets. It meets Thoreau halfway in the matter of simplicity. It echoes the Greeks, whose possessions had both utility and grace. It mixes, as Horace said, the utile with the dulce.

   Where, then, is the time and skill for the acquiring of beautiful saucepans, or of stirrings spoons to stir the soul?

[139]

artist books

I love looking at them: artist books. Some can't be handled, which I find annoying. Most are collector's items or museum pieces. Seems a sad fate for the text therein.

star from the start

The attractive beauty of an inchoate poem.

beauty can't be stopped

The setting for Linda Gregg’s poem “Fragments” is an underground subway car, late at night in the city. The speaker observes the pathos and unglamorous fatigue of the other riders. We’ve been here before, we readers, in life as well as in literature. Yet the abstract assertion in line five, when we encounter it, gathers the entire scene into a unified magnetic field:

   You can’t call the exhausted people on
   the 1 or 9 beautiful. Especially
   the drunk at the back yelling and stumbling
   and grabbing the pole gracefully just
   in time. Beauty has a strangeness.

[…]

Indeed, the poem's worldly descriptions are now changed, because they are filtered through the idea of beauty. We see that “Fragments” is making the case for a particular kind of beauty: the beauty of so-called ordinary reality, even in its most awkward, tawdry manifestations. Even in fatigue, asserts the poem, even in this flawed impoverished setting, beauty makes its appearances. Beauty cannot be stopped.

—Tony Hoagland, “Say It. Say it.” The Art of Voice (Norton, 2019)

steel grace

I append the translation by J. U. Nicolson (The Complete Works of François Villon). I find Mr. Nicolson’s rendering of this poem more satisfactory than D. G. Rossetti’s or John Payne’s, both of whom make the poem too “musical,” destroying its natural diction which was Villon’s great quality, and both of whom make the poem too sentimental. Villon has sweetness in him and love of beauty, even piety; but his grace is a steel-like hardness; he is never, except perhaps in the Ballade of Grosse Margot, sentimental. Swinburne understood Villon perfectly, and he did several excellent translations but he did not translate the Dead Ladies:

    Say where, not in what land, may be
    Flora the Roman? Where remain
    Fair Archippa’s charms, and she—
    Thaïs—in beauty so germaine?
    Echo, calling afar, in vain,
    Over the rivers and the marshes wan,
    Lovelier once than girls profane?
    But where are the snows of the last year gone?

—Burton Rascoe, Titans of Literature (Blue Ribbon Books, Inc., 1932)

before he was anything

My father, before he was anything else, was a poet. He regarded this vocation, as he records in the notebooks, as some “mission from G-d.” (The hyphen indicated his reverence to the deity; his reluctance to write out the divine the name, even in English, is an old Jewish custom and is further evidence of the fidelity that he mixed with his freedom.) “Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money…nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.” This statement of purpose was also a statement of regret: he offered his literary consecration as an explanation for what he felt was poor fatherhood, failed relationships, and inattention to his finances and health. I am reminded of one of his lesser-known songs (and one of my favorites): “I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind.” But not far enough, apparently: in his view he hadn’t left enough. And this book, he knew, was to be his last offering.

Foreword by Andrew Cohen to The Flame: poems, notebooks, lyrics, drawings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) by Leonard Cohen.

beauty blinded

This light, this landscape (Poros, Greece), these days start to threaten me seriously. I close the shutters so I can work. I must protect myself from beauty...You feel your brain emptying and lightening; the long day absorbs it. Today I understood why Homer was blind; if he had had eyes he wouldn't have written anything.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

sure surrender

It is not possible to understand without surrender. As long as the slightest inclination to criticism remains in the consciousness it is hopeless to do justice to what is strange.

Beauty is not intrinsic in any form—it comes to make that form.

To critics: Write of the quick, as you do of the dead, with the same detachment.

Every aesthetic expression is dynamic and therefore involves distortion.

Too much craft in art ruins the art in the craft.

One can live for years with nothing on outside but a few hours with nothing in inside; that applies to art also.

Art never improves, only changes.

—Margaret Preston, Aphorisms (Art in Australia, LTD, 1929)

beauty beat down

A poem that beat me down with its beauty.

sublimity of the spectacle

…imagine the stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in geometrical patterns; say in a Latin cross, with the words In hoc signo vinces in a scroll around them. The beauty of the illumination would be perhaps increased, and its import, practical, religious, cosmic, would surely be a little plainer; but where would be the sublimity of the spectacle? [And he answers.] Irretrievably lost.

—George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (Scribners, 1896).

unprejudiced observation

[Bϋchner] believed that the poet must strive to imitate reality, instead of improving upon and thereby distorting it, as do idealistic poets, who create mere puppets devoid of life. The individual, no matter how insignificant or unattractive, must take precedence over philosophical abstractions.
[…]
Bϋchner’s concept of beauty appears to be based upon unaffected sincerity among human beings and upon a Goethean perception of nature as an endless metamorphosis of forms and images that art can never fully capture nor transmit. Unprejudiced observation, he insists, leaves one open to an infinity of sensory impressions and human truths.

—Georg Bϋchner, “Bϋchner on Aesthetics,” Woyzeck and other Writings (Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers, 1982), edited by Henry J. Schmidt

silent tribute

Cavafy was as reticent and decorous in conversation as he was outspoken in his poetry—some things, he said, needed art to make them beautiful. But it is related that if a beautiful face showed itself in his house, he paid it the silent tribute of lighting another candle.

—Robert Liddell, “Studies in Genius, VII – Cavafy,” Horizon, Vol XVIII, 105, 1948.

first script

No neatly printed page can equal the beauty of handwritten lines in a notebook.

who have loved beautiful things

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

―Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little Brown and Co., 2013)

[The painting: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654)]

truth and beauty

The poet averred her sincerity and the truth of the poems when she read, but then I bought her new book and I saw that her author photo was at least ten years out of date.

beauty be

The whole project of 'aesthetics' is in many ways about defining beauty. The problem is not ‘the trying to define’; the problem is thinking there is a fixed immutable definition upon which all will settle and all debate will cease. It's all the 'talk about' that creates its own kind of value.

oblique reference

No poet ever travelled in search of beauty. No poet ever looked at a scene and cried ‘Wonderful’. Memorable beauty comes at us obliquely while we are going about our troubled business.
[…]
The pursuit of beauty is one of the defects of the tourist’s point of view. The tourist is in a hurry; he demands quick returns of the picturesque and the obvious. But for all that, it is possible even when we pursue beauty or happiness to come upon oblique references to it. The job is to recognize them in the hurry.

—Patrick Kavanagh, title essay of A Poet’s Country (The Lilliput Press, 2003), edited by Antoinette Quinn