"The cedar reaching high / To kiss the sky, / The cypress, pine, / And useful sassafras"

[larryhammer]

Reading, meming, meming, reading.

Mostly, more articles from Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition -- right now, working through volume 11 (Franciscans to Gibson), where I am now being edified upon by French Literature.

But I've also started Parnasus edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poetry anthology published late in life based on his commonplace book. As such, it has a lot of extracts not marked as such, supplied with editorial titles -- on the other hand, he includes entire several long poems, including Comus. His taste is, to my surprise, quite palatable. It turns out he was lukewarm on Wordsworth:

Wordsworth has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slipshod newspaper style! … No great poet needs so much a severely critical selection of the noble numbers from the puerile into which he often falls. Leigh Hunt said of him, that “he was a fine lettuce with too many outer leaves.”

Well said, Mr. Hunt, well said indeed. (Emerson devotes several paragraphs to the issue, suggesting a certain defensiveness with this opinion.)

---L.

Subject quote from "To the Virginian Voyage," Michael Drayton.

Comments

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

...he was a fine lettuce with too many outer leaves...

heh! Nice one! Reading people's reactions to Wordsworth is just so entertaining...