Tit, meet tat

[larryhammer]

Those who liked the earlier comments on Tennyson may enjoy this -- a contemporary slagging off by Edward Bulwer Lytton (yes, that Bulwer Lytton) in The New Timon (1846):

Not mine, not mine, (O Muse forbid!) the boon
Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune,
The jingling medley of purloin'd conceits,
Outbaying Wordsworth, and outglittering Keats,
Where all the airs of patchwork-pastoral chime
To drowsy ears in Tennysonian rhyme!
 ... [obligatory praise of Pope and Dryden omitted]
Let School-Miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
On 'darling little rooms so warm and bright!'
Chaunt, 'I'm aweary,' in infectious strain,
And catch her 'blue fly singing i' the pane.' ...
Rather, be thou, my poor Pierian Maid,
Decent at least, in Hayley's weeds array'd,
Than patch with frippery every tinsel line,
And flaunt, admired, the Rag Fair of the Nine!

What strikes me the most, I confess, is how surprisingly competent the verse is -- not graceful, but brisk and unstrained, with less teeth-grinding than usual for Victorian satire. It's not that I didn't know Bulwer Lytton could write, but I didn't know he could write this.

Tennyson, btw, responded with a direct attack -- a poem he suppressed from his collected works -- in which he points out that a man who made his reputation through dandyism has no business talking about others' tinsel, roasts again the old "critics are failed writers" chestnut:

And once you tried the Muses too;
   You fail'd, Sir: therefore now you turn,
You fall on those who are to you,
   As Captain is to Subaltern.

... and concludes that Bulwer Lytton doesn't deserve to live up to Timon's name, which in any case he doesn't. The interested can find both poems in The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse ed. Edward Lucie-Smith (1967).

There ain't nothin' like a literary spat. Makes me want to write a dedication to Robert Bly modeled on Byron's to Robert Southey.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

A lot of people had their noses out of joint that Bulwer was famous first crack out of the bag. Not just famous but he singlehandedly changed men's fashions as well as literary fashion--the black suit on men is still with us today. And all before he turned 25.

Like Anthony Hope, if he's stayed with wit and satire, he would be a lot more famous, but he made the terrible mistake (like Hope) of suppressing his greatest work (and bowdlerizing it when he couldn't entirely suppress it--it took me years to obtain a copy of the 1828, uncut version of "Pelham") and then churning out a series of dull, preachy lead bricks meant to be High Literature.

"Lord save us from the earnest jester"

[larryhammer]

I wouldn't mind reading the original Pelham. From all I've heard, it's worth the read.

---L.

Re: "Lord save us from the earnest jester"

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

On the very first page, Pelham's mother is about to elope with her latest lover, sees her husband coming down the stairs, sighs, goes off to a party instead.

[azang.livejournal.com]

Have you ever done/thought about doing a poetry workshop for SOGG or SCBWI...I love talking in letters, but I digress. ?
The thing is, nuts and bolts workshops are great-but when they are also taught with the history and heart it is so much better.

I can't really discuss here, because I'm pretty far out of this circle, but did the female bards spar too? Or better yet, a Billie Jean-King/Bobbie Riggs type of a thing? (Why do I keep wanting to ask about Ninjas??)

[larryhammer]

No, I've never thought about doing that -- I'm not sure what I could contribute, given a) I feel like I've barely got a handle on this whole versecraft thing and 2) have never managed to sell any poetry for children.

Someone who's studied women poets has a better chance of answering the second question -- I've a reading acquaintence with the major names, but not past the standard women's studies anthologies. I vaguely recall some snark-in-verse between a couple Romantic-era poets (Joanna Bailie may have been involved? and maybe some Dellacrucians?) but mutual support and props seems to have been the norm.

---L.

[azang.livejournal.com]

Hmmmn, seems you may have more to contribute than you realize. I think that anyone who has a passion, like you seem too, has plenty to bring to the table. If you've a goal to sell children's poetry, just keep going, you'll get there.

Mutual support makes sense, I think that is mostly the case now too.