New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1940, Sunderland Capture and Other Poems.

Lauro de Bosis

Laughed by his own truth in the teeth of fate,
He rose like his own Icarus and fell,
The liberator who arrived too late.
Yet who is he dare say he did not well?

Over Rome towering, unafraid he came,
Thundering his challenge from the Autumn cloud.
And they who took it up name not his name —
No man has strength to cope with the uncowed.

Into the darkness, whether or no shot down,
What skill to ask? Or who is it that cares?
In the abyss he vanished with the crown
That only the triumphant spirit wears.

And none henceforth shall dare forget this thing
While dream and truth subsist, or wreath and wing.

From Leonard Bacon’s The Mound Builders (in Guinea-Fowl and Other Poultry).

…………………………….
In a world of mighty men he moved twice-born.
They made more fair for him the existing day.
He never felt amid the alien corn
As if they were two thousand years away.
For him they emptied an abundant horn,
And to his spirit nobly said their say
In glittering prose, or verse like breakers rolling,
The very essence of the soul controlling:

Horace, Catullus, whose ecstatic phrase
Burns on for ever in a generous brain,
And Juvenal, whose line like lightning plays,
Tined with a wrath that is not wholly sane,
Or he whom Dante did not dare to praise,
And who the Italian’s praises might disdain,
Had the noblest nature that was ever born
Known the sublime infirmity of scorn.

Or the class-room hushed, as he discoursed of Homer,
Seeing in Ithaca the great bow bend,
Or the narrow galley ride the wine-dark comber,
And Achilles mourning for his fated friend.
For learning was to him not a misnomer
For deadly drudgery without an end,
A dull, interminable, unseemly traffic,
The robbery of graveyards paleographic.
…………………………….

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1927, Guinea-Fowl and Other Poultry.

Evening in Great Portland Street

(James Boswell speaks to his son Alexander)

If I was drunk last night, what is it to thee?
Wise men were so before, and yet will be.
But it was wretched port. A doctor? No!
I shall be better in an hour or so.
Your intonation is not kind, my son —

You’re a Scotch numbskull, when all’s said and done,
Who hate — ay hate — my book, and feel disgraced
By virtue and by fame, by truth and taste,
By everything I had and you have not.
At length I know why Johnson loathed a Scot.
You never waited, troubled and distrait,
While Beauclerk tarried two long hours away.
Eheu fugaces — hours that would not fly,
Even though charmed away by Lady Di.
But Beau did come at last. That was a night!
Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, and that central light
Of my existence, whom I yet reflect,
Being of the elect, my son, of the elect,
The elect, who know it grateful to the mind
The pure reward of certitude to find,
Sweet to the soul, floating in dereliction,
To base at last upon superb conviction.
That Johnson gave me. Then I could lay hold
On thought, and know base metal from true gold,
And seize the pure idea, unrefined
And virgin from the matrix of the mind.

Men have laughed at me, that I jotted down
What was their only title to renown.
Yet Beauclerk might have thanked his generous fate
Because I saw how little things are great.
Fame is a solid, say they what they will
For long years hence they will be living still.
They lived and loved and laughed at me. I proved
To others that they laughed and lived and loved.
Though, it may be, some after age will find
Their figures but the fiction of my mind,
And century after century insist
Upon the whimsy of a novelist.
(Centuries themselves perhaps foredoomed to be
Parentheses in future history.)

Grant my impertinence! grant I was absurd!
Yet it was greatness, that I saw and heard.
And is it not my merit, that I drew
The features of the greatness that I knew?
Is it not well for later time to hear
The voice of Johnson, genial and severe?
Johnson who hated Hume and Whigs and Traitors,
Scotchmen and Hacks and Cant, and loved good Haters,
Good English, and the King, and Church and State,
And set unclouded in the gulfs of Fate.

Let ’em laugh at my note-books. It was much
To have the ears of Midas — and the touch, —
To lime the winged wisdom of an age,
The obviously immortal on my page,
Knowing, however well the form I caught,
‘Twas but the shadow thrown by radiant thought,
The uncapturable thing that still escapes,
Though seen, Protean, in a thousand shapes.
I saw, what is suspected now and then,
A motion forward in the minds of men,
And, in a waste of things and thoughts a-swarm,
Perceived a wholeness in the multiform,
Perceived, was dazzled by excess of light,
And — drunk on execrable port last night.
Here’s Aleck, glum and with reproving eyes.
Come, come, my son! “Don’t attitudinize!”

An Afternoon in Artillery Walk

(Mary Milton loquitur)

I think it is his blindness makes him so
He is so angry, and so querulous.
Yes, Father! I will look in Scaliger.
Yes, Cousin Phillips took the notes — I think —
May all the evil angels fly away
With Cousin Phillips to the Serbonian Bog,
Wherever that may be. And here am I
Locked in with him the livelong afternoon.
There’s Anne gone limping with that love of hers,
Her master-carpenter, and Deborah
Stolen away. Yes, Father, ’tis an aleph
But the Greek glose on’t in the Septuagint
Is something that I cannot quite make out.
The letter’s rubbed.
Oh, thus to wear away
My soul and body with this dry-as-dust
This tearer-up of words, this plaguey seeker
After the things that no man understands.
‘Tis April. I am seventeen years old,
And Abram Clark will come a-courting me.
Oh what a Hell a midday house can be!
Dusty and bright and dumb and shadowless,
Full of this sunshot dryness, like the soul
Of this old pedant here. I will not bear
Longer this tyranny of death in life
That drains my spirit like a succubus.
I am too full of blood and life for this —
This dull soul-gnawing discipline he sets
Upon our shoulders, the sad characters.
Chapter on chapter, blank and meaningless.
Now by the May-pole merry-makers run,
And the music throbs and pulses in light limbs,
And the girls’ kirtles are lifted to the knee.
Ah would that I were blowsy with the heat,
Being bussed by some tall fellow, and kissing him
On his hot red lips — some bully royalist
With gold in’s purse and lace about his throat
And a long rapier for the Puritans.
Or I would wander by some cool yew-hedge,
Dallying with my lover all the afternoon,
And then to cards and supper — cinnamon,
Some delicate pastry, and an amber wine
Burning on these lips that know a year-long lent.
Then to the theatre, and Mistress Nell
That the king’s fond of. Mayhap gentlemen
About would praise me, and I should hear them buzz,
And feel my cheek grow warm beneath my mask,
And glance most kindly
I was in a muse
I have the paper, father, and the pens.
Now for the damnable dictation. So!
“High — on a throne — of royal state — which far
Outshone — the wealth of “Ormus” — S or Z?
How should I know the letter? — “and of Ind.
Or where — the gorgeous East — with richest hand
Showers — on her kings — barbaric — pearl and gold.
Satan exalted sate.”

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1930, Lost Buffalo and Other Poems. From Lost Buffalo:

…………………………….
Our Father who art in Heaven, who adaptest
Thyself successfully to every creed,
Whether it be brain-fodder or the raptest
Enthusiasm that the heart can plead,
Implying to the Papist and the Baptist
That each is very It in every deed,
Couldst thou not by some stretch of power or other
Adapt successfully brother to brother?
…………………………….

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1936, The Goose on the Capital. From Post-Obit for Post-Depressionists:

 Ill fares the land, swift hastening to her fate,
 Where wealth decays and boobs accumulate;
 Where a declining demos must be courted
 And those who venture naught must be supported;
 Where wisdom is supplanted by loquacity
 And there’s a premium on incapacity.
 That’s why we have by popular consent
 Such Representatives to represent.
 It’s hard to grant such origins of tosh
 Represent anything at all, by gosh,
 Indicate our tendency and our direction,
 Afford of us a tolerable cross-section.
 No! In the Senate when the windbags blare,
 The men we have elected are not there.
 Herd impulses are sweet. But those unheard
 Are sweeter, where our actual spokesmen gird
 Their loins in labs, or on far railway lines,
 On the walls of dams, in the corridors of mines.
 Our spokesmen! Who, in paths beyond our knowing,
 Keep an exanimate republic going.
 I’ve done my bit. I’m weary of the task.
 Now a quick exit’s all the prize I ask.

 That’s why I’m bound where gentle Ocean shuts
 Sweet isles apart, to live on coconuts.
 If better men can do it, why not I,
 When Roosevelt’s levanted to Hawaii?
 I flee ‘a world each morning obsolete,’
 A world of pasteurized milk and shredded wheat;
 A world bright only with a morbid slime
 Of dull society and stagnant crime;
 A world that staggering to destruction walks
 And talks and talks and talks and talks and talks.
 Stay if you like. I’ll never balk your wish.
 Go shoot your bandits. I’ll be spearing fish.
 Treat your pale leprosy and scratch your scurf.
 Somehow I like the notion of warm surf
 And brown girls singing in a moonstruck arbor.
 To hell with Newport! Devil take Bar Harbor!

From Leonard Bacon, 1951, Camões and the Glory of Portugal (@IWP Articles).

camões by leonard bacon

I

Have I done with Camões? — Is he done with me?
Although, like Fanshawe and the rest, I failed
To shadow forth the splendor that once sailed
Across the new-discovered “Secret Sea,”
Yet the game was worth the candle. Liberty
Lived on the page. And what a flag he nailed
To the masthead of the Soul! Brave thought, not staled
By cant, but fit to keep republics free.

The one-eyed wanderer, whose clear, lovely mind
Puzzles sophistication, holds the clue
To labyrinths we all must blunder through,
Sophisticates or not, and still whets bright
The honor and the conscience of mankind,
Against the reign of Chaos and Old Night.

II

How shall we judge Camões? — Judge the Sea,
Anatomize a forest, count the birds
In the Fall migration, measure well the words
That are to analyse a melody,
Pick and choose elements of artistry,
Plunge deep with Proteus’ oceanic herds,
Sail round all Guardafuis and Cape Verdes,
Adamastor still maintains his mystery.

But the man is here, as if in talk with you,
In spite of all conventions of his time,
Conceit and pun, extravagating rhyme —
So runs the critic’s dry as dust rehearsal.
What matter, if Paradisiac powers renew,
Simple, complex, individual, universal?

New at IWP Articles: Leonard Bacon, 1951, Camões and the Glory of Portugal.

“But before launching into what to me is a tremendous theme, I must make two admissions, first, that I am pretty much of a tyro with respect to the magnificent language of Portugal, and, second, that I am in the words of a Portuguese friend, ‘a co-religionist of the Camonian cult’ — a besotted enthusiast, who had his small episode on the Road to Damascus some thirty years ago. It was then that the scales fell from my eyes, as I wandered idly through a footnote in Fiske’s Discovery of America, where the fiftieth stanza of the Fifth Book of the Lusiads burned as bright as a ruby in a beam of sun. This happens to be a stanza so easy that a little French and less Latin would enable anyone to perceive without difficulty its clear transplendence. And my demon told me there and then that some day, if only because of those eight blazing and sonorous lines, I would translate the Epic, which has, in fact, come to pass. Accordingly, bear with me if I seem a little mad about my great man, and if I speak of his poetry in terms which, whatever they may appear to you, are certainly not hyperbolic to me. However, what troubles me most is ignorance, sheer ignorance, of which, in spite of seven years’ toil, magnificent residues remain. But all my life circumstance has compelled me to speak or write about subjects concerning which I was insufficiently informed, and I do not see why I should stop now, particularly as I am burning to infect others with an interest in Camões, because of the pleasure he can give them, and because such pleasure increases human understanding between the nations of men.”

From The Life of Samuel Johnson:

“The late ingenious Mr. Mickle, some time before his death, wrote me a letter concerning Dr. Johnson, in which he mentions: ‘I was upwards of twelve years acquainted with him, was frequently in his company, always talked with ease to him, and can truly say, that I never received from him one rough word.’ In this letter he relates his having while engaged in translating the Lusiad had a dispute of considerable length with Johnson, who, as usual, declaimed upon the misery and corruption of a sea life, and used this expression: ‘It had been happy for the world, Sir, if your hero Gama, Prince Henry of Portugal, and Columbus, had never been born, or that their schemes had never gone farther than their own imaginations.’

“‘This sentiment,’ says Mr. Mickle, ‘which is to be found in his Introduction to the World Displayed, I, in my Dissertation prefixed to the Lusiad, have controverted; and though authors are said to be bad judges of their own works, l am not ashamed to own to a friend, that that dissertation is my favourite above all that I ever attempted in prose. Next year, when the Lusiad was published, I waited on Dr. Johnson, who addressed me with one of his good-humoured smiles: ‘Well, you have remembered our dispute about Prince Henry, and have cited me too. You have done your part very well indeed: you have made the best of your argument; but I am not convinced yet.’

“‘Before publishing the Lusiad, I sent Mr. Hoole a proof of that part of the introduction in which I make mention of Dr. Johnson, yourself, and other well-wishers to the work, begging it might be shown to Dr. Johnson. This was accordingly done; and in place of the simple mention of him which I had made, he dictated to Mr. Hoole the sentence as it now stands.

“‘Dr. Johnson told me in 1772 that, about twenty years before that time, he himself had a design to translate the Lusiad, of the merit of which he spoke highly, but had been prevented by a number of other engagements.'”

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon’s Ph.D.s Male and Female Created He Them. From Sophia Trenton:

…………………………….
And he was very greatly to be pitied,
 And yet more pitiable, alas! he knew it,
For he had been irrevocably committed
 To talk about a thing and not to do it.
Men suffer thus however nimble-witted,
 And find not, though they seek peace and ensue it,
Their minds in a perpetual bereavement,
Wanting the strong embraces of achievement.

Not that he was not highly publicatious,
 Each year a volume more or less he tallied —
The simulacrum of a book, but, gracious!
 What reader e’er so hardy ever rallied
His forces to the sticking-point audacious,
 And faced that ghost of learning thin and pallid?
Ah! never, never shall that reader be
Saving perhaps another Ph.D.,

Who with great show of learning shall refute
 That which already has been self-refuted,
And multiply the matter in dispute,
 Merely to be himself in turn disputed.
So rushes on the circular pursuit,
 And will, I fear, till Gabriel’s horn is tooted.
But the interruption of the Day of Doom
Once o’er, I’m sure the champions will resume.
…………………………….

New at IWP Articles: Jacques Barzun, 1959, The Tyranny of Idealism in Education.

“Education is always inadequate, its pure purpose flawed by those who give it as well as by those who take it. But one element which belongs to it, and which we have suppressed in favor of ideal projections since Wilson and Dewey struggled with an older pedantry, is still there to be used as a tonic and a test: that element is intellectual work, the use of the mind for creating order in a man’s perceptions and thoughts about the world. Everything else, character included, is a by-product, and hence impossible to ‘give’ or even to cultivate directly.

“Nor, in the end, is this effort of intellect to know itself and its surroundings a selfish individual pursuit, though even if it were it would still be the only possible goal of higher education properly so-called. When sufficiently widespread the individual effort does not remain a private good but has a national result, as Wilson, once again, made evident: ‘America will be great among the nations only in proportion as she finds an adequate voice…. She will not be known until she is understood; …her wealth will not interpret her, or her physical power, or the breadth of her uncounted acres, or anything she has builded; but only such revealing speech as will hold the ear and command the heed of other nations and of her own people. Our thinkers must assist her to know herself.’”