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The career of W.B. Yeats is something of an inspiration and a comfort: his poetry showed great promise in his youth, and continued to promise for going on four three (edited because I cannot do math on the fly) decades before he finally started carrying through, some time around the end of WWI.
♣
Today we think of Byron as the preeminent narrative poet in English of the Romantic era. Before he burst onto the best-seller scene, Walter Scott held sway with such hits as The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake -- and before Scott, it was Robert Southey, now best known as the deserved target of Byron's vicious parody, The Vision of Judgement.
Madoc has not been the best regarded of his narrative poems, but since it was based on the same legends of Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd that L'Engle used in A Swiftly Tilting Planet and, well, it's been a while since I reported on very bad poetry, I decided to give it a try.
And, yanno -- it isn't that bad, at least as poetry goes. His storytelling is more than a little wonky, with a plot that wobbles like a top about to tumble, but the verse is readable, if a little plain. The story is a weird mishmash of pantisocratic radicalism and anti-revolutionary reaction (he wrote and revised it over a decade of increasing personal conservatism), and his attempt to give the Aztecs epic grandeur falls straight into that looming Noble Savage sinkhole. I can't actually recommend it for its own sake unless you're interested in the Madoc legend -- but as a sample of very bad poetry, it fails.
♣
On the other hand, there's Lilith: The Legend of the First Woman by Ada Langworthy Collier -- and no, you are not expected to recognize that name, even if you are from Dubuque, Iowa (where she was born and lived), as what literary fame she had in her time came from articles and short stories. But she also published this book-length poem, spun out from a couple fragments of Jewish folklore she somehow managed to stumble upon.
I've gotten used to 19th minor narrative poets writing underbaked Byron, so I was caught a little off-guard to be confronted instead with underbaked Shelley. Shelley was not, in fact, a wholly pernicious influence, as Browning demonstrates -- but Collier was no Browning, nor indeed a Shelley.* Her verse at the line level is competent if not exactly glowing, and she rarely drops those jewels of gloriously inappropriate metaphors that are the delight of very bad poetry. Her set-piece scenic descriptions are even pleasant. And yet -- and yet -- oh dear gods her characters are so, so tiresome, even when they aren't speechifying. Possibly worse than that, she is downright wretched at transitions between scenes. The effect is: describe describe describe WRENCH high-flown speech, high-flown response WRENCH high-flown lengthy monologue WRENCH describe describe et cetera.
In other words, not only is the failure mode of Shelleyism entirely different from the failure mode of Byronism, it is less entertaining.
♣
Goethe's Roman Elegies may be the most purely classical original work written in the modern era I've met. It is also the first book in a long while -- and the first book of poetry ever -- I've immediately reread upon finishing.
* Who often underbaked himself, if it comes to that.
---L.
Today we think of Byron as the preeminent narrative poet in English of the Romantic era. Before he burst onto the best-seller scene, Walter Scott held sway with such hits as The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake -- and before Scott, it was Robert Southey, now best known as the deserved target of Byron's vicious parody, The Vision of Judgement.
Madoc has not been the best regarded of his narrative poems, but since it was based on the same legends of Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd that L'Engle used in A Swiftly Tilting Planet and, well, it's been a while since I reported on very bad poetry, I decided to give it a try.
And, yanno -- it isn't that bad, at least as poetry goes. His storytelling is more than a little wonky, with a plot that wobbles like a top about to tumble, but the verse is readable, if a little plain. The story is a weird mishmash of pantisocratic radicalism and anti-revolutionary reaction (he wrote and revised it over a decade of increasing personal conservatism), and his attempt to give the Aztecs epic grandeur falls straight into that looming Noble Savage sinkhole. I can't actually recommend it for its own sake unless you're interested in the Madoc legend -- but as a sample of very bad poetry, it fails.
On the other hand, there's Lilith: The Legend of the First Woman by Ada Langworthy Collier -- and no, you are not expected to recognize that name, even if you are from Dubuque, Iowa (where she was born and lived), as what literary fame she had in her time came from articles and short stories. But she also published this book-length poem, spun out from a couple fragments of Jewish folklore she somehow managed to stumble upon.
I've gotten used to 19th minor narrative poets writing underbaked Byron, so I was caught a little off-guard to be confronted instead with underbaked Shelley. Shelley was not, in fact, a wholly pernicious influence, as Browning demonstrates -- but Collier was no Browning, nor indeed a Shelley.* Her verse at the line level is competent if not exactly glowing, and she rarely drops those jewels of gloriously inappropriate metaphors that are the delight of very bad poetry. Her set-piece scenic descriptions are even pleasant. And yet -- and yet -- oh dear gods her characters are so, so tiresome, even when they aren't speechifying. Possibly worse than that, she is downright wretched at transitions between scenes. The effect is: describe describe describe WRENCH high-flown speech, high-flown response WRENCH high-flown lengthy monologue WRENCH describe describe et cetera.
In other words, not only is the failure mode of Shelleyism entirely different from the failure mode of Byronism, it is less entertaining.
Goethe's Roman Elegies may be the most purely classical original work written in the modern era I've met. It is also the first book in a long while -- and the first book of poetry ever -- I've immediately reread upon finishing.
* Who often underbaked himself, if it comes to that.
---L.