[Andrew Frisardi]

Auden called English-Welsh poet-painter David Jones’s Anathémata the greatest long poem of the 20th century—his review of the book can be read here. I don’t know if Auden was right or not, but I do think that Jones belongs in this list and that the Anathémata was his most important single piece of writing.

Jones subtitles his poem “Fragments of an Attempted Writing,” and in fact it is an arrangement of pieces. I can’t claim to have understood half of the poem, but I am drawn to it for its scope and energy and insight and break-through passages of beauty. It is a Joycean hodgepodge (Joyce was one of Jones’s favorite writers, although he came to his style independently) of western culture—Roman and Welsh and British history, Pleistocene cavemen, Helen of Troy, Christian liturgy, Arthurian legend, Welsh legend, and more. The poem’s language varies registers from street-slang to liturgical, with Latin and Welsh phrases thrown in along the way.

Jones’s early long poem In Parentheses, which is based on his experience in the trenches in World War I, is earthier and much more accessible, and I might even have chosen that volume to represent Jones in this list, if I didn’t think that Anathemata is more ambitious and far-reaching, more challenging to the presuppositions of an age. In the introduction to the poem, Jones says its subject is the “actually known and loved,” and what he means by this, I think, is our conscious relation to the artifacts of living—including, or even especially, artefacts of language (as a visual artist as well, Jones was a superb calligapher and engraver of letters). Jones constantly refers to the artist as a “sign-maker,” and struggled to find a language for this in an age that has no unified collective symbolic language. So he writes in the introduction to Anathémata:

If the poet writes “wood” what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked? Should the answer be “None,” then it would seem that an impoverishment of some sort would have to be admitted. It would mean that that particular word could no longer be used with confidence to implement, to call up or to set in motion a whole world of content belonging in a special sense to the mythus of a particular culture and of concepts and realities belonging to mankind as such. This would be true irrespective of our beliefs and disbeliefs. It would remain true even if we were of the opinion that it was high time the word “wood” should be dissociated with the mythus and conceps indicated. The arts abhor any loppings off of meanings or emtpyings out, any lessening of he totality of connotation, any loss of recession and thickness.

In his writing Jones did as he did in his visual art—he was a master in both forms: he arranged fragments of shattered western culture, not to “shore them up against our ruin,” as Eliot put it, but to call on collective memory of all of human life—past present and future—as contemporaneous.

There is a newer edition inprint from Faber, but the one with the cooler cover, with Jones’s engraved lettering, is here.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I’m allowed one more nomination for this list, and I want to use it for the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, whose work I have recommended here before. I pick The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) in particular, not because I don’t think other volumes of Watkins were just as good, but because it’s the collection in which his own voice comes clean. It’s the collection in which Watkins first comes into his own—a debut of sorts, of a unique and wonderful poet.

Watkins avoided universities—always a good idea, if you can do it—and spent his whole life in the seaside place he grew up in, working as a bank clerk and refusing all promotions at his job so it wouldn’t interfere with his poetry. He wasn’t interested in literary fashion; his aesthetic was in the line of the English Romantics and Yeats, and his style at times (he was well aware) can seem taken straight from Yeats—more often, though, it is Watkins’s own. His view of things is definitely his own, although he draws on a similar Romantic (actually much older than that but you know what I mean) idea of Imagination and metaphysical-visionary thought. But Watkins gives that contemplative tradition a local habitation and a name—the landscape he lived in his entire life, and the Welsh bardic/poetic tradition he naturally felt close to.

I like Watkins most (although I like almost all his poetry) in his symbolist mode, as in this poem that opens this collection ( this poem was beautifully illustrated, later on, after this volume, by Watkins’s friend the painter Ceri Richards). This poem is the first in a series called "Music of Colours," which Watkins would return to over the years--in the thread I link above, "Music of Colours: Dragonfoil and the Furnace of Colours" is perhaps the strongest poem in that series.

Music of Colours: White Blossom

White Blossom, white, white shell; the Nazarene
Walking in the ear; white touched by souls
Who know the music by which white is seen,
Blinding white, from strings and aureoles,
Until that is not white, seen at the two poles,
Nor white the Scythian hills, nor Marlowe’s queen.

The spray looked white until this snowfall.
Now the foam is grey, the wave is dull.
Call nothing white again, we were deceived.
The flood of Noah dies, the rainbow is lived.
Yet from the deluge of illusions an unknown colour is saved.

White must die black, to be born white again
From the womb of sounds, the inscrutable grain,
From the crushed, dark fibre, breaking in pain.

The bud of the apple is already forming there.
The cherry-bud, too, is firm, and behind it the pear
Conspires with the racing cloud. I shall not look.
The rainbow is diving through the wide-open book
Past the rustling paper of birch, the sorceries of bark.

Buds in April, on the waiting branch,
Starrily opening, light raindrops drench,
Swinging from world to world when starlings sweep,
Where they alight in air, are white asleep.
They will not break, not break, until you say
White is not white again, nor may may.

White flowers die soonest, die into that chaste
Bride-bed of the moon, their lives laid waste.
Lilies of Solomon, taken by the gust,
Sigh, make way. and the dark forest
Haunts the lowly crib near Solomon’s dust,
Rocked to the end of majesty, warmed by the low beast,
Locked in the liberty of the tremendous rest.

If there is white, or has been white, it must have been
When His eyes looked down and made the leper clean.
White will not be, apart, though the trees try
Spirals of blossom, their green conspiracy,
She who touched His garment saw no white tree.

Lovers speak of Venus, and the white doves
Jubilant, the white girl, myth’s whiteness, Jove’s,
Of Leda, the swan, whitest of his loves.
Lust imagines him, web-footed Jupiter, great down
Of thundering light; love’s yearning pulls him down
On the white swan-breast, the magical lawn,
Involved in plumage, mastered by the veins of dawn.

In the churchyard the yew is neither green or black.
I know nothing of Earth or colour until I know I lack
Original white, by which the ravishing bird looks wan.
The mound of dust is nearer, white of mute dust that dies
In the soundfall’s great light, the music in the eyes,
Transfiguring whiteness into shadows gone,
Utterly secret. I know you, black swan.




Oh, I almost forgot to say where the book can be got: a used copy for a reasonable price is here. His collected poems is easily found as well, and well worth getting.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes, Andrew! The Duino Elegies went through me like a bolt from the blue at a young age and has has never ceased reverberating. I was going to, next, put up the Sonnets To Orpheus...partly because I thought it might inspire me to go back and re-read it in its entirety again. But I actually know the Elegies better. The translation question is a thorny one: there have been so many of Rilke. I have always avoided the Snow one for some reason. Learning German (not in the cards this lifetime for me, alas) would have a another plus side, being able to read Hölderlin in his native tongue.

Nemo

[Jim Burrows]

As long as we're including Rilke, someone has to list New Poems (I'm thinking of the Stephen Mitchell translations). Duino Elegies is usually considered the masterwork, with Sonnets to Orpheus a close second, but even if the Elegies are his most original and fullest expression, the poems in New Poems are my favorites.

Many of the poems are sonnets, and all have a very strict formal discipline which the Elegies threw off like chains a few years later. Rilke was the type of poet who is always threatening to just fly off the earth, and New Poems was his last book that was deeply, desperately connected to the natural and human world, his last book as a mortal, so to speak. Like Another Time, (#14) Harmonium (#8), or North of Boston (anyone?), New Poems is one of those books that amazes you simply with its table of contents: "All those poems were in one book?"

[Susan McLean]

I will confess to having a taste for the dry, ironic wit and restrained emotion of Louise Glück. This book is about the breakup of her marriage, but it is so controlled that you would hardly think so. In some poems the story is told through the trope of Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope; in some, through a conversation between two unnamed people, who seem to be the husband and wife. It is unsparing toward herself, and the language is very stripped down. If the poetry of restraint moves you, this book may appeal to you. The style is very much of a piece with her style in other books, but the stakes are high in this one.

Susan

[Philip Morre]

I realise that to some of you this will seem like nominating Beelzebub, but this US published volume does contain much of the best of Ez, notably 'Homage to Sextus Propertius' and 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', plus Cantos 4 to 7.

[Patrick Foley]

I came pretty close to putting Pound in at least for the Homage. "Now for a large-mouthed product..." I thought of doing the Confucian Odes too.

He doesn't mean as much to me as he once did, but my god what an ear he had. When I do feel like reading him, I still find him a marvel. There haven't been many with such unfailing control of sound.

Pat

[Patrick Foley]

Pound done, I'll put in Williams.

I want to do Spring and All for historical reasons, but some of my favorite poems are elsewhere. And that elsewhere is sometimes not really a book, but the odds & ends he pulled together for the various collecteds over the years. Hence my giving up and taking the collected. (It's less than half though!)

A few years ago, I did read all of volume I of the new final definitive collected, straight through cover-to-cover, and it was really a joyful experience. I remember feeling that at a certain point he just nailed it, and while the work varied from slight to major statement, there was a sureness about everything he did. It's curious, it seems he never really understood what he was doing, thoughtful and observant though he was. (Pound seems always to know exactly what he's doing down to the phoneme.)

There are things I love in the later work, but it's always this first half of Williams that comes back to me.

Pat

[Andrew Frisardi]

I'm glad someone added Pound and Williams; it would have been shameful to leave them out.

John Crowe Ransom, anyone? Also, although I've never liked his poetry, I'm surprised no one has nominated Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, or one of those early vols. of his.

[David Rosenthal]

Howl?

David R.