Harvard University Press Blog

Marking the 75th Anniversary of Independence from British Rule

August 14 and August 15 mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence from British rule for Pakistan and India, respectively. Inextricably linked to the birth of these two South Asian nations is the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent that tragically accompanied the end of British colonialism.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, described the moment of independence as a tryst with destiny. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…” he said in his famous speech on August 15, 1947.

The world-renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote in “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Dawn of Freedom”):

These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light —
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

The volumes below illuminate the lives of individuals, the politics, and the literary traditions that shape the rich histories of both nations. They are in the spirit of Nehru’s midnight and Faiz’s dawn alike.

Pakistan

Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
Ammara Maqsood, The New Pakistani Middle Class
Bullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, Sufi Lyrics: Selections from a World Classic

India

Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation
Edited by Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern India 
Ruth Harris, Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Gandhian Moment
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism
Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism
Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, The Essential Tagore
Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence

Annotating Frost

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest in a five-volume collection of the poet’s correspondence. Gathering hundreds of Frost’s letters, most of them previously uncollected, Volume 3 follows Frost through a seven-year period in which he achieved new literary heights while also navigating great personal upheaval. In honor of Poetry Month, HUP Editor Emily Silk asked Mark Richardson, Volume 3 coeditor (with Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore) to share a behind-the-scenes look at editing and annotating Frost’s correspondence.

Tell us a bit about what readers can expect to see in Frost’s letters from this period. To whom is he writing? Any new or surprising correspondents, especially for readers familiar with the previous volumes?

This volume differs most from volumes one and two in the number of letters it contains from Frost to members of his family—to his son Carol, his daughters Marjorie and Lesley, his grandson Prescott, and his son-in-law Willard Fraser. In 1931, diagnoses of tuberculosis led Marjorie to move to Boulder, Colorado, for treatment (where she met and got engaged to Willard); and led Carol to take his wife Lillian (who’d also fallen ill), and their young son Prescott, to Monrovia, California (where the Pottenger Sanatorium was located). This family diaspora occasioned numerous letters. Readers will also find a rich series of letters to Frost’s friend and protégé J.J. Lankes, a woodcut artist who “decorated,” as Frost put it, a number of his books. A few things more. Reading this volume again in proof, we were struck by how much Frost has to say about marriage; about the nature and trials of the literary vocation (often in letters to younger, aspiring writers); and about book design and fine printing (he worked with some of the best printers in America).

What does the work of editing and annotating Frost’s letters involve? Did you make any unexpected discoveries as you annotated the letters in Volume 3?

I’ve been reading Frost’s mail for twenty years. Making the letters fully “available” to readers involves considerable annotation. What we learn while annotating often surprises me. Consider, for example, a casual remark in an October 1932 letter Frost wrote from Massachusetts to his son Carol. Frost had just completed a cross-country trip by rail—New England to Los Angeles and back, with stops along the way in Colorado, Michigan, and elsewhere. “One thing in favor of all this travelling back and forth,” Frost writes: “it has got the country pretty well shrunk, so that we needn’t feel very far away from each other.…If it weren’t for the coal dust in trains which catches me colds, I shouldn’t mind being on the go between places half the time. I wish the locomotives would use oil or electricity.” That “wish” sent us into the history of twentieth-century rail travel. As we discovered, and as we indicate in a note, passenger trains in the US were coal-powered all the way into the 1930s. General Motors ameliorated Frost’s train-specific colds, when, in 1934, it debuted its Winton 201A diesel engine—the first in America suitable for powering passenger trains. I’d lived for decades in perfect ignorance of the fact that passenger trains in the US remained coal-powered all the way into the 1930s. Annotating another letter to Carol answered a second question it had never occurred to me to ask: Exactly when and where was the first attempt made to view the Leonid meteor shower from a high-altitude plane? In November 1931, on a triple-engine Fokker aircraft staffed by astronomers from Mount Wilson—which was visible from Carol’s residence—and flying above 10,000 feet. I wonder which I’ll forget first—that Winton 201A engine or that triple-engine Fokker.

Any favorite stories from the archive, as you conducted the research to prepare this volume?

Certainly—one associated, as it happens, with that October 1932 letter to Carol. To sort it all out we had to consult US Census and immigration records, old maps, Amherst town directories, and an archivist at the Hampshire County (Massachusetts) Registry of Deeds. In closing that letter, Frost relays a bit of gossip then circulating in Amherst: “You remember Toggles Thompson the [Amherst College] chemistry professor people used to make fun of gently? He’s just been in to interrupt me with an interesting story of the depression. He has a Polish tenant of a small place he owns down at Hockanum by the Connecticut River. The man is twenty-eight and has a wife and two children. He hasn’t had work for more than a year and is more than a year behind on his rent. Something put it into Thompsons [sic] head to propose going into the wood business with him. Thompson got him an old truck and bought a wood lot on this side of the Holyoke range—twelve acres. Then Thompson did the soliciting. The Pole is not only out of trouble, but making money and so is Toggles Thompson.…Toggles is a funny sentimental fellow and the whole thing makes him talkatively happy. He came to try to take me over onto the wood lot. It is of course a good story. The Pole was desperate and had no good out of this country since he came to it seven or eight years ago.”

Frost mistakes the age of Thompson’s beneficiary, but essentially gets the story right. It’s corroborated by a quitclaim deed dated July 30, 1934, held now in the Hampshire Registry of Deeds, and kindly made available to us by archivist Beth Callahan. The document, signed in one of the worst years of the Depression, records the sale of a twelve-acre woodlot, located along the Holyoke Range near a place called Hockanum Flat. The seller is Edward ‘Eddie’ Berestka (1913–1993), the eldest son, as census records tell us, of a Polish immigrant named Ignacy Beretska (1886–1956); the buyer is Joseph Osgood ‘Toggles’ Thompson. The purchase price was the nominal sum of one dollar, indicating that Thompson loaned the Beretskas the money to buy the land from one Carrie Marsh in 1929. City directories dating to the 1950s show that Eddie Beretska, with his family, went on to run a construction business on Lawrence Plain Road (now Massachusetts Route 47)—having got his start through the generosity of Toggles Thompson. I keep a copy of that quitclaim deed pinned to my office wall, as a token of gratitude to Ms. Callahan and the many archivists who’ve helped us.

You mentioned that you have been reading Frost’s mail for twenty years. How would you characterize Frost as a letter writer?

Frost’s letters are not simply a record of a remarkable literary life. They are themselves a remarkable contribution to American literature. He has as distinctive and lively a prose style as any American writer of the twentieth century—by turns gnomic, allusive, playful, mercurial, moving, and startling. Had Emerson forsaken Plato, and grown a sense of humor instead of sideburns, he might have written prose like Robert Frost. I offer here, in parting, some of the most astonishing sentences in the book. They occur in a 1935 open letter Frost addressed to undergraduates at Amherst College, where he taught English: “There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, but calls for it. We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way. The artist, the poet might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance. But it is really everybody’s sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones we throw off, like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody’s cooperation; a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem.…The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so?” Nothing at all, Professor Frost, nothing at all—and thanks for writing.

The Story behind Dante’s Bones

Last year, Italy decreed March 25 as National Dante Day. This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. To honor these occasions, Guy Raffa explains how he came to write Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, on what some might consider to be a morbid topic.

Dante’s Bones is the most personal book I have written. In it, I tell the story of the poet's adventurous physical afterlife—how his bones have been stolen, hidden, contested, discovered, examined, and, above all, venerated—and I unravel the meaning of these events at pivotal moments in Italian history from the late Middle Ages to the present. The book’s exploration of Dante’s graveyard history reflects an obsession I have had with cemeteries and tombs—how we mourn and honor the dead—literally for as long as I can remember. I trace this fascination to my earliest memory: watching President John F. Kennedy's funeral procession with my parents on our black and white television set in 1963, when I was three years old.

Now, just past my sixty-first birthday, my memory of the slain president’s funeral feels more like the memory of a memory. I've seen those iconic images many times since that first, live experience, but one moment brings an aching pang of recognition whenever I see it on a screen or in my mind: John F. Kennedy Jr., on his third birthday, saluting his father’s flag-draped casket after it has been carried outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, and begins its slow journey to Arlington National Cemetery. Forever fixed in my memory is one three-year-old boy watching another three-year-old boy say goodbye to his father.

Forty years later, in 2003, my own father died. Dante was on my mind as I addressed family and friends at his burial in Long Island National Cemetery (Pinelawn), not far from Smithtown Pines, the town where I lived as a child. The pine trees of my young life and my father’s final resting place (my brother is also buried there) joined in my imagination with the famous pine forest—the pineta—outside Ravenna, where Dante died and was buried in 1321. The poet modeled the Terrestrial Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory, the most human-centered afterworld of the Divine Comedy, on this pine forest. My attachment to Dante’s Purgatory, the poetic site of loving care between purifying souls and living human beings, has grown stronger as I’ve grown older. Dante’s imagining of communion between the living and the dead is a big part of why I love reading, teaching, and writing about his Divine Comedy. This posthumous communion is also central to the adventurous afterlife of the poet’s mortal remains that my book recounts.

Personal and professional interests in Dante’s bones coincided when I learned that traces of the poet’s physical afterlife—a small packet of “Dante dust” and impressions taken of his skull—had been discovered in the National Central Library of Florence. On July 16, 1999, three days before the discovery, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bassette, died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I had always felt an odd sense of connection to this famous Kennedy son, whom I only knew through media coverage. Similar to how he was known as “John-John” to his family, my parents had affectionately called me “Guy-Guy” to distinguish me from my father, whose birth name (Gaetano) had been Americanized as “Guy,” my given name. Reclassification of efforts to find the crash victims from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery” appeared in newspapers on July 19, 1999, the same day as the discovery of the missing Dante relics. The sad news of JFK Jr.’s death inevitably reawakened my memory of him saluting his father’s casket, while news of the “Dante dust” and cranial impressions piqued my curiosity about the fate of the poet’s physical remains. The seeds of Dante’s Bones had been planted.

Much of what I subsequently learned about Dante’s physical afterlife came to light during the 600th anniversaries of his birth (1865) and death (1921). #Dante2021 and #Dante700 are popular Twitter hashtags recognizing that 2021 is another huge year for Dante Alighieri: the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death in Ravenna, where he is buried. He is thought to have died during the night of September 13-14, 1321. The year-long commemorations began in Italy on September 5, 2020, when Sergio Mattarella, the president of the Italian Republic, and Michele de Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna, presided over the opening of the refurbished chapel or tempietto (“little temple”) holding Dante’s tomb.

Celebrations of the poet’s life, works, and legacy have continued throughout the year not only in Italy but around the world, including a dynamic series of Dante-themed events in the United States—though the reality of life under COVID-19, with conferences, talks, and exhibits held remotely, has essentially erased borders and collapsed distances for the real-time dissemination of knowledge. While all-things-Dante are on the table for this milestone anniversary of his death, the occasion sparks special interest in the poet’s graveyard history, the subject of Dante’s Bones.

During World War II, the casket containing the poet’s remains was removed from the marble tomb and hidden underground to protect his bones from bombing and looting. But the last time the bones were actually taken out of the casket and examined was soon after the commemorations in 1921. It was reported last summer that plans are underway to reexamine Dante’s bones with modern scientific methods before the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021. As you might imagine, I can’t wait to see what new light is shed on this subject that, for me, is more than just academic.

New Year Poetry Playlist

Over the last several months, we’ve admired the creative ways in which colleagues across disciplines have preserved a spirit of community and collaboration in virtual classrooms, at-home offices, the “halls” of online conferences, and elsewhere. In anticipation of attending this week’s virtual MLA conference, HUP Editors Emily Silk and Joseph Pomp decided to put together a virtual collaboration of their own.

Missing the opportunity to swap reading recommendations with friends and colleagues in person at MLA, they invited several HUP authors of recent and forthcoming books to contribute to a “poetry playlist” for 2021. In thoughtful responses gathered below, some spoke of long-time favorites, others of recent discoveries, still others of poems that felt particularly resonant in this new year. Amidst the bustle of Zoom conferencing, we hope that you may find a few recommendations that speak to you, too; where possible, we have included a link to a publicly available text or audio recording of each poem.

 

“I was introduced to Brenda Shaughnessy’s work at a reading a few years ago and was drawn to the openness and warmth of her humor. When I tracked down her books—the most recent ones are So Much Synth and The Octopus Museum—I was struck by how the humor mixes with feelings of fury and helplessness and self-recrimination. That tonal range and her wild range of subjects have stuck with me; they seem right for 2021.”

—Calista McRae, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman

 

“Since March 2020, when the poem was read at the end of a televised news report on the unfolding pandemic by the national broadcaster in Ireland (RTE), Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Everything Is Going to be All Right’ has been widely quoted in the Irish and international media. As with all great poems, even if readers already know it, the poem is worth reading again, and especially as we begin the New Year 2021. Mahon passed away in October 2020, leaving behind an amazing body of work that includes some of the best poems written in the English language over the last half century, including ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.’ Often complex in their philosophical and cultural allusiveness and depth, his poems can also be mischievous and fun. Mahon is willing to record all that can be seen by the ‘watchful heart’ but his poems also celebrate ‘the hidden source’ that is the basis for all great art.”  (Listen to Derek Mahon read “Everything Is Going to be All Right.")

—Philip Coleman, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman

 

“Arguably one of the most luminous, Black feminist affirmations of survival and euphoric resistance in contemporary poetry, Lucille Clifton’s ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a wondrous work of conviction and resolute determination. We all want to be with her on that ‘bridge between starshine and clay’ looking out across the vista of what’s ahead in 2021 and drinking up Clifton’s insistence on recognizing the miracle of her pure existence. Anything from Tracy K. Smith’s remarkable Life on Mars would seemingly be suitable for this moment in which we find ourselves, but ‘Everything That Ever Was’ especially sums up the feeling of cosmic enormity that remains especially palpable right now. In the whirlwind of catastrophic loss and urgent, necessary, everyday hope, Smith’s declaration that ‘…everything / That ever was still is, somewhere, / Floating near the surface, nursing / Its hunger for you and me…’ is a powerful reminder of the forces and the debris of life that constitute who we are, ‘the largeness we can’t see,’ as she puts it in the title of another one of her poems. Heavy words that capture the bigness of this universe, they encourage humility and reverence for the universe that we inhabit. Having just watched Sylvie’s Love, Eugene Ashe’s gorgeous African American homage to the golden age of cinematic melodrama, I’ve been drawn back to repeat listenings of Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly’s classic 1962 album. Wilson was a masterful song stylist, one of the very best of the modern era, and her stirring, sophisticated, and intelligent love songs with alto saxophonist Adderly are some of the best sonic articulations of epic and exquisitely realized intimacy, the ability for romance to be all-encompassing, sweeping, immersive. What could be more necessary now than our ability to get swept up with one another as we face an uncertain future?”

—Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (forthcoming, February 2021)

 

“The contemporary volume of poetry that I recommend most strongly is The Red List by my colleague Stephen Cushman. The Red List is a long poem that runs the length of a volume. The trigger for this magnificent work is the mental illness of the poet’s dear son. Cushman charts his and his boy’s sorrows and sufferings and their hopes for renovation and renewal in memorable, sometimes soul-piercing lines. It’s also a calendrical poem and explores the turnings of the season with exemplary grace. It’s a real achievement and deserves the widest audience.

—Mark Edmundson, author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“I have two recommendations that speak to our historical moment beautifully. First, if readers have not already read it, I would recommend Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. As an allegory against totalitarianism, it is one of the most moving and beautifully crafted books of poetry I have read in years. The second is Alice Quinn’s anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic. Taking its title from Pablo Neruda’s ‘Keeping Quiet,’ the book gathers a diverse group of poets and forms that speak to our isolation and our almost unbearable yearning for human connection. The great variety of responses to the pandemic not only salves the pain we are collectively feeling but also reveals the breath of imaginative ingenuity in American poetry.”

—Robert Bernard Hass, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“As a momentary stay against our current confusions, I recommend reading a poem by Robert Frost called ‘The Onset.’ How often in 2020 have we found ourselves where the first stanza leaves us, alone and despairing. But as the calendar turns, so may our fortunes, if we—like Frost—hold to a belief that a better community and world is always possible.”

—Donald Sheehy, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“Seventeenth-century India saw the revival of an ancient genre—collections of 700 poems on love and other themes linking this world and eternity. The Hindi poet Biharilal (born c. 1600) composed one of the best known of these collections. In my new translation for the Murty Classical Library of India, his pithy, often aphoristic couplets overflow into three lines. Though subjected to many a long commentary, these short poems require little work on the part of an English reader with a taste for delicately poised sentiment and economy of wording. ‘Leaving me, he bears my joys away; / to summer days and winter nights / his parting gives long leases on my heart.’”

—Rupert Snell, translator of Biharilal’s Poems from the Satsai

 

“H. Leivick (born Leivick Halpern, 1888–1962) was an American Yiddish poet whose sensitivity to sound and language equaled his belief in repairing a fractured world. Born in the Belarusian shtetl of Igumen, Leivick was sentenced to a tsarist labor camp in Siberia for revolutionary activity, escaped to the US, and made his living there as a wallpaper hanger while becoming one of the world’s most respected Yiddish modernists. Over the course of his life, he wrote about topics ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the possibility of forgiveness. His knowledge of Jewish texts found its way into his avowedly secular verse, helping him to seek meaning in a particularly dark time.”

—Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

(Listen to Glaser read and discuss Leivick's poem ‘Mem Haamekim’ on Hevruta: A Podcast from the San Diego Jewish Academy.)

 

“Thomas Hood’s terrifying ‘Dream of Eugene Aram’ left traces on Oscar Wilde’s late poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ But it’s another narrative poem by Hood, his comical ‘Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg,’ that we ought to be reading in the dog days of the Trump regime, as the first family packs its Gucci bags and heads to Mar-A-Lago. The hilarious story of the spoilt daughter of a property tycoon, who, following an alarming accident, insists on being fitted with a solid gold prosthetic limb, Hood’s poem is a biting satire of the corrupt moneyed elite of his day. First published in 1840, five years before Hood’s death, it is best read alongside Thomas Seccombe’s witty—and oft-reproduced—illustrations of 1870.”

—Nicholas Frankel, editor of The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection

 

“In his newest collection, Topsy-Turvy, Charles Bernstein includes a translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, III, the poetry match between Damoetas and Menalcas. The poem is titled ‘Echologs’ and pitches a wonderful homology between the Latin and American dialects aimed at a new turn, one that not just keeps the poetry fresh, but lets history remade freshen our own responses and habits of reading. What we thought we knew becomes new and what we had forgotten or not known gets worked into our responses and imaginations. The Arts and Letters pamphlet by Bernstein and Richard Tuttle, also called Echologs, includes following the translation a palimpsest of previous translations from the Loeb edition to David Ferry.

—Paul A. Bové, author of Love’s Shadow

(Listen to a 2015 recording at Bowery Poetry of Charles Bernstein introducing and reading “Echologs” on PennSound.)

A Very Hippo Holiday with Edward Lear

Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and has captivated the imagination of readers, young and old, for generations. As a holiday treat, we asked Sara Lodge, author of Inventing Edward Lear to reflect on Edward Lear as a Christmas poet.  

Edward Lear is an apt character to think about at Christmas-time. His nonsense books, most famously Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), which contains ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, were published in December to catch the Christmas gift market. And Lear associated himself with the spirit of the season. Lear’s first, anonymous book of illustrated limericks for children, A Book of Nonsense (1846) announces on its title page that:

There was an old Derry down Derry, who liked to make little folks merry;
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook
At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

As Vivien Noakes points out, Derry down Derry was ‘one of the fools of the traditional English mummers’ plays’. Mummers’ plays were a practice dating from at least the eighteenth century and probably linked to much older festivals and masques – they were traditionally staged at Christmas time by itinerant groups of actors who were not professional players but were drawn from the local community and were often raising funds for food and drink to celebrate the season. In the Buckinghamshire mummers’ plays, ‘Hey Down Derry’ or ‘Don Derry’ has a particular function. He is the announcer of the performance whose arrival signals its beginning. He calls on the assembly to make room for the entertainment, sometimes also pretending to sweep bystanders back with a broom that he carries for this purpose. In some versions he is the Fool, but in others he is Father Christmas.

It is telling that Lear invokes this figure on the title page of his Book of Nonsense, dancing with an audience of children who are jumping in the air or turning handstands. He is announcing his own entertainment at its commencement, like the Christmas mummer of old. In fact Lear in 1846, when he published A Book of Nonsense, was only thirty-four. He was not an old Derry down Derry at all. But as a figure who promised mirth to children, like Old King Cole, Old Mother Hubbard or Old Mother Goose, Lear was placing himself within a tradition that was extremely old. It is noteworthy that Lear refers to his authorial alter ego as ‘making’ children a book. This book is a hand-crafted object. Lear has ‘made’ it in a sense that only an artist-author can claim to do who has both written the text and drawn the illustrations. It has the hallmarks of a personal gift, even when sold in a commercial bookshop. Lear’s persona as the dancing Derry down Derry is part of that gift. Lear places his alter ego in the midst of his nonsense not as an author in the commercial sense but as a figure for the emotional transaction, beyond words, that the season invites.

James T Fields of Boston in his collection of sketches of eminent contemporaries Underbrush (1877) described Edward Lear, ‘Nonsense-Poet’ thus:

if you chanced, a few years back, to go to Farringford about Christmas time you would have been likely to find a tall elderly man, in enormous googles, down on all fours on the carpet, and reciting in the character of a lively and classical Hippopotamus new nonsense verses to a dozen children, amid a roar of laughter…

It is easy to picture the sixty-something Edward Lear, with his super-strength glasses to combat myopia, larking about at Christmas on all fours in Alfred Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. One imagines that this ‘classical’ Hippo, inspired by its Greek name, may wallow in the Hippocrene, spring of the Muses. Most of Lear’s poetical works, from his nonsense verses to his illustrated alphabets, started their life as gifts: sung or recited at friends’ houses, enclosed with letters, or laid on a hotel table at lunchtime to delight bored holidaymakers. They have never lost the quality of gifts: and Lear’s comic persona ­– needy, funny, anxious, boisterous ­– is an integral part of the offering he presents.

 

Lear sketched endless caricatures of himself in letters to friends. In them, his body is always risible. In his twenties, he depicts himself as a lanky, blundering string-bean, blown away with his umbrella in a high wind. In later life, his self-caricature is small (he is the same size as slugs, snails and frogs), bearded, myopic with a plum-pudding belly and thin legs that stick out like a bird’s. Often, he is off the ground. Like Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, he gets into comic scrapes. One of the most important things I realised, in producing an account of Lear, was that – just as Charlie Chaplin is not identical with his most memorable character, The Little Tramp – Edward Lear is not identical with his self-caricature. The small, ‘minor’ figure who consorts with molluscs is a performance. The real Lear was tall, a well-read intellectual with serious ambitions and an extraordinarily large and varied social, cultural and political network. In tracing Lear’s intellectual life, I was constantly surprised by the strength and depth of his connections. He set Swinburne, Shelley, and his friend Tennyson’s verse to music; he was a self-elected member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with strong views on John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown. He was influenced by American artists including Frederic Church and Alfred Bierstadt. And, as a naturalist and natural history painter, he moved in scientific circles that included Charles Babbage, Joseph Hooker, and the Darwins.

When living in San Remo, which he did from 1871 until his death, Lear preferred a quiet Christmas, often refusing invitations. Raised a dissenter in religion, he valued simplicity in expressions of faith and his sensitive ear and mind disliked the ‘bother’ of big parties. Lear’s ‘sudden reversions’ from gloom to cheer, his equal and opposite desires for lively company and silent solitude, are to me the essence of December and the contradictory moods it can inspire. In appreciating this complex man, who so ardently seeks the reader’s sympathy and was all his life committed to greater tolerance amongst ‘humanbeans’, I gained greater understanding of my own frequent switchbacks as a writer from delight to despair and back again. One of Lear’s early limericks features a lady ‘Whose folly/ induced her to sit in a holly’. She tears her dress and grows ‘melancholy’; but the limerick is designed to amuse, converting her tear or tears into a smile we can join in. Whether you are approaching the holiday season with a grin or a groan – or both at once – Edward Lear has his arm in yours.

A Life of Miłosz

Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz is the first full biography of Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz was born in 1911, died in 2004, and was a witness to and participant in almost all of the crucial events of a century full of pain. Indeed, what comes across strongly in Franaszek’s account is how constantly Miłosz was confronted by upheavals within the political and social landscapes he inhabited, first in Lithuania, next in Poland and then in France and the United States, in each of which he experienced periods when he felt utterly alienated from his surroundings. The book puts Miłosz’s outsider status at the center of his life and work, and gives us a moving account of the writer’s difficult personal odyssey and the appalling history through which he lived.

In Aleksandra and Michael Parker’s English-language edition of Franaszek’s original Polish, the book is a feat of immersion, combining biographical narrative and critical insight with generous excerpting of Miłosz’s poetry and prose. Miłosz wrote prolifically but also thought without end about the role of the writer and the work of the intellectual, and his feelings on these things evolved over his long life. Franaszek interweaves it all, such that on nearly every page you’ll learn about an event in Miłosz’s life or in the world he watched so closely, then read a bit of a poem or letter he wrote about it at the time, followed by quotes from his reflections decades later.

Altogether, Franaszek gives us a remarkably intimate sense of Miłosz’s complicated life, wrapped in an emblematic portrait of the twentieth century. During the first eleven years of Miłosz’s life, his family was caught up in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian-Polish War. In his late twenties and early thirties he witnessed the catastrophe of the Second World War, lived through the hell of Nazi occupation, and witnessed the beginning of a new chapter in European history. Finally, he settled down in the California of the 1960s, and for a long time was safe and stable, but still largely unknown to readers of English. This sense of his own obscurity weighed on him tremendously, as Franaszek describes:

It is easy to dwell on the latter, happier years of his life, when he was constantly honoured. From 1951 until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, he had a small readership, and could count on the fingers of one hand the number of articles written about him. For almost three decades after his defection from Poland in 1951, Miłosz was a writer who had resigned himself to the fact that he had failed and would be forgotten.

He hadn’t, of course, and he wouldn’t be.

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago has spent this entire month celebrating Czesław Miłosz and highlighting the work University Presses do to help keep poetry in play. Day by day they’ve shared lines from Miłosz’s 1978 poem “Notes,” and this week they published a wonderful consideration of Milos’z “The World: A Naïve Poem” from Michael Parker, who describes how the poem explores concerns that Miłosz would address throughout his literary career. His treatment of the poem offers a way into one of the great lives of the twentieth century, which Franaszek’s landmark biography now presents in such vivid detail.

Claudia Rankine’s Genius

Stephen Burt’s The Poem Is You is, in the author’s words, a “new kind of guide to the profuse, diffuse magnificences of American poetry now.” Running chronologically from a 1981 John Ashbery poem through a Ross Gay piece from just last year, the volume collects sixty poems that together reflect the demographic and stylistic variety of contemporary American poetry, pairing each with an original essay on how and why it works. One of Burt’s selections comes from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, a provocative meditation on race that challenged readers at a moment when the precarity of black life in America was laid bare.

This week brought both extraordinary acknowledgment of Rankine’s work by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and awful reminders that that moment of black precocity continues. In recognition of that wrenching concurrence, we offer Burt’s essay on Citizen below. The short excerpt on which Burt focuses, in which a couple goes to a movie, a friend provides childcare, and a neighbor calls the cops, is available online from PEN America.

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Likely no book of poetry—no book designated as poetry—in the United States in the twenty-first century has received as much attention, discussion, and debate as Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), from which these paragraphs come. They occupy exactly one page of the meticulously designed book, which includes other anecdotes like this one; sparse pronouncements and queries in verse (“How to care for the injured body, // the kind of body that can’t hold / the content it is living?”); evocative, more conventionally lyrical blocks of prose; essays on racial stereotypes in sports, such as those that vex Serena Williams; and multipage “scripts” for short videos, co-created with Rankine’s husband John Lucas, about instances of deadly racial injustice: Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six. Printed (like museum catalogues) on glossy, photography-friendly paper, Citizen also incorporates visual elements: a two-page work of graphic art by Glenn Ligon, whose text repeats Zora Neale Hurston’s apothegm “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND”; a color photograph of the 2007 Rutgers University women’s basketball team; J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” (with which the book ends).

These elements—and the near (though not total) absence of self-contained units in verse—trouble the bounds of the category “poetry,” to which its author and publisher say that Citizen belongs. Yet Citizen was a finalist in poetry for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and in Britain the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The National Book Critics’ Circle nominated the book in two categories, poetry and criticism. Rankine won the Forward Prize, the L. A. Times Prize, and the NBCC award in poetry, as well as the PEN Open Book award and the NAACP’s Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry, as well as several other awards. And very sensibly so, if “poetry” means a text that brings together the many aspects of language in order to explore someone’s, or anyone’s, interior life, to challenge the transparency of common language, and to do something that mere exposition or narrative could never do. Rankine’s wary, exasperated, outraged book, taken all in all, asks (and gives no one answer) how she and other people ought to respond to stereotypes and assumptions around race, the overt violence, the tacit self-regulation, the assumptions and attitudes and awkwardness, from thoughtless snubs to hate crimes, that race and “anti-black racism” (the term Rankine uses in interviews) can produce.

The book appeared at a horrifyingly appropriate moment. Completed after the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer, the book was published just before the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Eric Garner in Staten Island, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore; the protests in Ferguson; and the sudden national attention, in white-controlled mass media, to black men’s deaths at the hands of police. All the parts of Citizen ask how and whether a black person, or a person whom others identify as black, can live as a citizen, equal to other citizens, protected by custom and law: much of the book explores the common assumption that a black person in a historically white, privileged space—Wimbledon’s tennis courts, or a suburban street—amounts to a dangerous anomaly. That idea helped kill Trayvon Martin. What else does it do to the people who harbor it? What kinds of contradictions, nervous ness, wariness, expectations of anger, passivity, self-defense, or violence does it entail? How often do white people perpetuate racism without realizing it? Can poetry help them realize it? Should this dark-skinned Jamaican American poet care? Can poetic language speak to what Rankine has called her “visceral disappointment ... in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived”?

On Emily Dickinson’s Birthday

Tenth of December, in addition to being a stellar collection of George Saunders stories, is also Emily Dickinson’s birthday. She was born on this day in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town from which she only rarely strayed. When thinking of the poet’s life, it’s hard not to recall that it was only posthumously that her work was recognized, and even then it was mediated. Poems themselves were notoriously altered for publication, but even the truest transcription removes the poems from their material conditions, about which Dickinson so clearly cared. Two recent projects—one newly announced, the other newly honored—are intended to rectify that disconnect.

The newer project, slated for publication in April, is both the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poetry and the first to draw a distinction between the poems that she herself preserved and those she did not. While her major modern editors have employed a strict chronology in their collections of the poems, editor Cristanne Miller instead presents the poet at work, beginning with her early copying of the poems she wanted to keep onto folded sheets of stationery and progressing through her late poems that were left in a state of chaotic draft, or perhaps experimental fluidity, sometimes on scraps of paper or envelopes.

Through its focus on Dickinson’s own use and retention of poems, Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them proposes a radical shift in the center of gravity of Dickinson studies—away from the letters and the late poems, back to the poet’s most productive years and her fascicle-booklets and unbound sheet poems. In doing so, the book both presents Dickinson’s poems in the order she copied them, and renders visible at a glance the poems she retained in pristine condition and those that include possible substitutions for a concept or thought—a distinction disguised in other reading editions by editorial choices that present hypothesized clean versions of the poems.

The other recent project intended to bring readers closer to Dickinson’s own vision for her work—the open access Emily Dickinson Archive—was awarded first place last month at the New England Publishing Collaboration Awards ceremony. The project, which offers high resolution scans of Dickinson’s manuscripts alongside their best-known transcriptions, was produced by HUP in collaboration with Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Amherst College, Boston Public Library, and nearly a dozen other partners. In General Editor Leslie Morris’s description of the archive, below, one gets a sense of the significance of a volume like Miller’s to longstanding debates over how to represent the variations in Dickinson’s poems and how to meaningfully reflect her unique creative process.

 

Helen Vendler's Critical Life

In 1963 we published Helen Vendler’s first book, a study of Yeats based on her Harvard dissertation. We’ve since published nearly two dozen more of her 31 books, a corpus to which we’ll soon add The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, a collection of two decades’ worth of her essays, book reviews, and prose.

Vendler begins The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar with an account of her life as a critic, from childhood enthusiasm to sharpened focus and an urge to write, and from early-career impediments to the “free rein, unlimited space, and genial encouragement” of William Shawn’s New Yorker.

Her life and work are further fleshed out in a recent Harvard Gazette interview, part of a series of discussions with Harvard faculty on their personal paths to becoming teachers and scholars.

With the Gazette Vendler touched on such topics as her early dissatisfaction with the teaching of poetry:

In my student days, it was common to assume that the poem makes a statement — that it’s protesting war, or is grieving a death. My teachers, on the whole, didn’t see a poem as an evolving thing that might be saying something completely new at the end because it had changed its mind from whatever it had proposed at the beginning. I was sure you couldn’t sum it up propositionally: You couldn’t say, as it was common to say, “What is the meaning of this poem?”

Her fascination with the development of individual poets:

My mother had brought back from the bookmobile a biography of Hopkins which quoted many of his poems. I began to read Hopkins with great elation and memorized much of what I read. I wrote what was supposed to be a 17-page high school senior paper, only it turned into a 40-page essay. [Laughter.] I think it was my first book. And it gave me my first taste of critical competence: by then I knew everything Hopkins had written — the letters, the sermons, the devotional writings, the biography. It’s not a big corpus.

It was exhilarating to write at length from knowledge of a single poet’s complete works, since anthologies offer only little snippets. I very soon grasped how rewarding it was to write on a single poet. I’ve never written on themes except as elements in the changing explorations of a poet, the evolution of the author’s poetics from the early juvenilia all the way up to the end.

And sustained need to consider the work of each alone:

I can understand poets only one by one: They are too idiosyncratic to be lumped together.

Each book had a polemical purpose: to declare that Yeats’ “system” had powerful poetic implications; to argue that Stevens’ long poems were not “ponderous and elephantine”; to contest the belief that Herbert could be appreciated adequately only by a faithful son of the church; to show that Keats’ odes had been insufficiently well read, and were in fact interconnected as a series; to assert that Shakespeare’s sonnets, all 154 of them, not merely the famous ones, deserved individual commentaries; to offer an alternative to the Irish political criticism that had neglected Heaney as a poet; and to suggest that Dickinson’s harsher and more difficult poems could, and should, be read by a wider public.

It’s a hallmark much evidenced in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, which includes readings of longtime Vendler subjects Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, along with consideration of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Ford, and more.

MOOCs Are the Thing with Feathers

If we could channel a time before “how to code” seemed deemed the only thing worth learning, an enhanced appreciation for poetry would probably feature highly on surveys of edificatory aspiration. Such a goal may also be among those most rarely pursued, though, given the barriers—real or imagined—that surround that most refined of literary forms.

Enter the MOOC. Maligned as they are, MOOCs can actually be just the thing for someone looking for a bit of guidance on a first foray into an area they may never have visited on their own. And so Harvard’s edX Poetry in America series has hopefully been received as a welcome entry point for the masses to whom it’s open.

The next four-week installment of the course, set to begin March 4th, explores the work of Emily Dickinson. The course description:

This course, the fourth installment of the multi-part Poetry in America series, explores the poetry of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s most distinctive and prolific poets. While Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems during her lifetime, she chose never to publish, opting instead to revisit and revise her works throughout her lifetime. Keeping this dynamic of self-revision in mind, we will consider a number of Dickinson’s poems—many seemingly in tension with one another—concerned with Nature, Art, the Self, and Darkness. We will travel to the Dickinson Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library, and to Amherst, Massachusetts, paying a visit to the house in which the poet lived and wrote until her death in 1886. Distinguished guests for this module include NBA athlete Jason Collins, dancers Damian Woetzel and Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, and President and CEO of the New America Foundation Anne Marie Slaughter, among others.
 


Led by Harvard Professor Elisa New, Poetry in America surveys nearly 400 years of American poetry. Through video lectures, archival images and texts, expeditions to historic sites, interpretive seminars with large and small groups, interviews with poets and scholars, and conversations about poems with distinguished Americans, Poetry in America embarks on a journey through the literature of a nation. Distinguished guests, including President Bill Clinton, Elena Kagan, Henry Louis Gates, Eve Ensler, John McCain, Andrea Mitchell, Michael Pollan, Drew Faust, Tony Kushner, and Nas, among others, bring fresh perspectives to the study of American Poetry.

Previous units of the course took as their subjects the poetry of early New England, “Nature and Nation,” and Walt Whitman. With the launch in 2013 of the open access Emily Dickinson Archive, though, this new installment should prove itself an unusually fruitful bit of internet matchmaking. And, as Houghton Library curator and Emily Dickinson Archive General Editor Leslie Morris explains in the video below, that’s exactly what we all hoped for as the Archive took shape.