“Nothing is Beneath Consideration”: Christopher Bakken reads letters of Lowell, Wright, Clampitt
by Ernie on 18/02/08 at 12:58 pm
This is a wonderful piece by Christopher Bakken that I published in this month’s issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review:
By my count, the greatest collection of letters ever produced by a poet advances at least one exquisitely rendered thought per page, and many of these thoughts match in wit and wisdom, and often in beauty of expression, the intensity of that poet’s best poems. Before I reveal the obvious, let me quote my favorite passage in all those letters:
Yesterday I got a black eye—the first time I took a Cricket bat—Brown who is always one’s friend in a disaster applied a leech to the eyelid and there is no inflammation this morning, though the ball hit me directly on the sight—it was a white ball—I am glad it was not a clout—This is the second black eye I have had since leaving school—during all my school days I never had one at all . . .
This passage, from an extraordinarily long letter written by (who else?) John Keats to his brother and sister in 1819, has always satisfied me in a way the undeniably beautiful, highly precocious purple passages in his letters cannot: here I am allowed a peripheral glimpse at a meteoric life in progress, at the actions of a physical beast, in this case the soon-to-be tubercular human being of John Keats. I am moved and instructed knowing that while he tinkered with early drafts of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Ode to Psyche” the young poet also played cricket (rather badly, it appears), played cards until dawn, and spent hours guzzling cellar-cooled claret, enjoying a rarefied buzz which, according to him
mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad house looking for his trul and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the waist-coat; but rather walks like Aladin about his own enchanted palace that you do not feel his step.
In short, in his letters I make the acquaintance of Keats the hilarious and charming, in addition to the Keats the great poet whose bones have been picked clean by a thousand scholars.
To make a truly complete appraisal of any poet’s work, one of my teachers always insisted, we need the collected poems, plus all the poet’s prose, plus as many of the poet’s letters as can reasonably be gathered into print. Without the letters we can evaluate only the performances rehearsed, polished, and spotlit for public consumption. Without the letters we cannot know the diva as she looked backstage, with her hair in curlers, her wrinkles showing, her gown crucified on its hanger. In addition to opening a window into a concealed portion of a poet’s practice—those missed steps and rehearsals and smudged drafts that make up the main portion of a writer’s life—letters also offer the kind of intimacy we seek when we come to real poetry in the first place, not to mention the makings of biography we long for with poets we adore.
Therefore, even though I know better, I almost always allow myself to believe in the fiction that letter-writing exposes parts of a literary mind that aren’t likely to be revealed in poems. At the very least, letters would seem to spring from a different department of the poet’s mind, since the conventions that power the composition of verse (meter and rhyme in particular) are rarely much involved in the composition of letters. The poet’s inner editor, otherwise leering into each phrase with the eye of an enemy, or scything away at the rough edges of stanzas, is typically banished—if not into the next county then at least to the other end of the couch. Revision, that alchemical process through which poems become poems, is not a requirement of the letter-making convention. So when there are ideas (where would poetry be without Keats’s letter defining “Negative Capability”?) they are meant to come unencumbered by titles, stanzas, and lines; fallaciously or not, we read letters expecting a spontaneous honesty and levity, a lucidity of thought and a revelatory surprise that, in truth, only the best letters—like the best poems—ever attain.
Read the full the review here.
