[Richard Meyer]

Interesting post, Bill.

I don't know much about Mallarmé, but after a little checking I read that he learned English before traveling to England in 1862, and he said the main reason for learning the language was "the better to read Poe."

It seems that Mallarmé believed the sounds and shapes of words are as important as the meanings of words, that word sounds are more evocative and emotive than word definitions. This seems similar to the medium is the message notion.

Richard

[Lance Levens]

Just repeating Greg's quote from Wilbur. Poe's poetry is unalloyed negation, the spurning of all supernal beauty. Hypnotic, spell-casting,
it enchants teenagers and all who want poetry to free the mind from the fetters of thought.

[John Whitworth]

Ah, I see Mallarme and I are of one mind. And probably the President of the Poetry Society, the excellent Roger McGough who should be made a knight. He could have that one they took off the banker.

It appears that foreign poets rate Poe higher than we do. Jorge Luis Borges was another fan. The same thing is true of Byron. We know Keats and Wordsworth are better but the foreigners rate Byron. AND for the wrong stuff.

I like Byron because he wrote 'Don Juan'.

Come all your lords of ladies intellectual
Inform us truly, have they not henpecked you all?

What's not to like? Byron was henpecked by his Italian Countess who liked knitting. Not a lot of people know that.

[Roger Slater]

Maybe foreigners liked Poe more than native English speakers because the sounds and rhythms were so exaggerated that they were easier to hear for a non-native speaker, whereas the somewhat more subtle sonics of Keats and Wordsworth might prove elusive to the foreign ear.

I wonder if there are any foreign poets we English speakers value more than folks who speak the language.

[Bill Carpenter]

Richard, I would say Mallarme thought the sound and shape of well-selected words could make them more fully representational, gesturally and emotively, beyond the simple denotation. (As everybody knows.) He didn't neglect the definitions and use words as mere sounds or pigments, but tried to enrich them. His textbook Les Mots Anglais demonstrates this approach by describing the emotional and expressive qualities of each letter.

As to negation, he thought language existed in a dialectical relationship with reality, that language negates reality, and that the poet's task is to negate the randomness in language (le hasard) to reach Reality. A negation of a negation, if you like. In the Poe poem, death is a figure for negation, death negates biographical Poe to create Poe in himself, as Poe's language, a death-like negation, purifies the dialect of the tribe. At best poetry is a monument to the sacred ideality of negated things. Stone and ice are frequent figures for him of the Reality the poet seeks to embody, but see also the absent breast of the Amazon in Mon bouquin referme... and the hypertrophic gladioli in Prose pour des Esseintes.

[John Whitworth]

Our favourite Latin poet is Catullus. The Romans rated Horace more highly.

[Richard Meyer]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

I wonder if there are any foreign poets we English speakers value more than folks who speak the language.

That's an intriguing question. I wouldn't have any idea. But, as a generalization, I wonder if Americans tend to pay less attention to foreign writers. For example, even in the narrow area of contemporary popular books, how many foreign titles make a splash in the U.S.? How is the market for American authored books overseas?

Richard

[John Whitworth]

Oh, we read American books. And we watch American films. Good stuff.

Americans generally don't learn languages, I think, and we have followed that. My daughter's boyfriend as was, a charming and intelligent man, can speak no foreign language at all. Neither can she, but she did pass a ridiculous exam in French. All our exams are ridiculous now, in the name of equality and fairness. Pshaw, or as the French would say, Pfui.

Everybody should learn to speak French. Their literature is (almost) as good as ours. If it were not for Shakespeare and P.G. Wodehouse, it would be better. Nobody is educated, in my opinion, who cannot read, after a fashion, Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme And then there are novelists, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert (don't like him) and Proust. Dear me, I am pretending I speak good French. No I am not. I speak BAD French and we all ought to be able to do that.

[R. S. Gwynn]

The best Wilbur essay on Poe is from a little ($.35 in 1965) Laurel paperback edition that he edited. I don't think it's ever been collected.

Poe's "The Haunted Palace" and "Israfel" are two of my favorites. And I'd give a fair price for a recording of James Mason reading "Ulalume" (as he does, briefly, in Lolita).

[Richard Meyer]

Many years ago, when my teaching assignment included some sections of American literature, I would play a tape of recorded Poe stories and poems to my students. The reader was Basil Rathbone. I thought he did a fine job.

Richard