same times

The feet at which I have before or after sat include those of Heidegger, Coué, Bertrand Russell, Charles Péguy, C.S. Lewis, Whately Carrington, Charles Williams, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, Kenneth Burke, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Fr. [Martin Cyril] D’Arcy, Professor [Herbert] Butterfield, Gerald Heard, J.B. Priestley, J.-P. Sartre and others too numinous to mention at random. Few men can know more than I have been told about the Contemporary Crisis, the Modern Malaise, the Present Predicament, or the Dilemma of Today. None of these things (sometimes I suspect they may all be one) seems to differ radically from the problems with which, say, Ecclesiasticus, Montaigne or Leopardi was confronted.

—Daniel George, Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954)

sad parade

Poets and social media: a parade of narcissistic self-promotion.

no word in edgewise

The contemporary poetry scene can be summed up by the word "anecdoche."

amid alien circumstances

The substance of the late poetry is, then, the emotion of the Poet as Poet (in the romantic sense) when faced with modern times, when forced to exist and to practice his art in the circumstances of the last forty years. . . . Yeats shifted from the effort to write the “poetic” poetry of the nineties to the concern, as poet, with what it was to be a poet amid the alien circumstances of his age. That is why he is so often, in his later poetry, writing about the artists, scholars, and beautiful women he has known, and their unfortunate lives. . . . The will to seek one’s opposite, the doctrine that one must seek one’s anti-self, is at once the method by means of which Yeats found his genuine and peculiar theme, and one more example of the concern with acting a part which flows from the obsession with Art. The result has been a group of poems which will be known as long as the English language exists.

—Delmore Schwartz, “The Poet as Poet” (1939), Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, (U. of Chicago Press, 1970), edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker

remains airborne

A poem that somehow remained airborne in the zeitgeist.