Samizdata quote of the day

Johnathan Pearce (London) · Slogans & Quotations

“Beware of people who read poetry in public. They may have other nasty habits.”

– R.A. Heinlein, from the Notes of Lazarus Long.

March 29th, 2007 |

10 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

• Chris Harper (Counting Cats)

  March 29, 2007 at 11:33 am

  Even Heinlein couldn’t be right all the time.

• Francis Turner

  March 29, 2007 at 11:58 am

  FWIW this is available in electronic form at baen’s webscription site

• RAB

  March 29, 2007 at 1:36 pm

  Um… I’m afraid I have read poetry in public.
  I was chair Bard (disqualified) of my Grammar School.
  As for the nasty habits, I fear the knock on the door daily…

• Stormy Dragon

  March 29, 2007 at 2:30 pm

  Does this apply to all poetry or just bad poetry?

• veryretired

  March 29, 2007 at 3:18 pm

  I have the strangest urge to stick out my thumb and catch a ride with some passing spacecraft.

  I sure hope it’s not square…

• Johnathan

  March 29, 2007 at 3:19 pm

  Stormy, probably all of it.

• dearieme

  March 29, 2007 at 9:31 pm

  He’d never been to a Burns Supper, then?

• Billy Beck

  March 29, 2007 at 11:03 pm

  “There are days when every one of us experiences this ontogenetic back-firing, and returns to an earlier stage of development. It is on such days that grown men play games, or cheer the flag, or fall in love. And it is then that they are in the mood for poetry, and get comfort out of its asseverations of the obviously not true. A truly civilized man, when he is wholly himself, derives no pleasure from hearing a poet state, as Browning stated, that all is well with the world. Such tosh not only does not please him; it definitely offends him, as he is offended by an idiotic article in a newspaper; it roils him to encounter so much stupidity in Christendom. But he may like it when he is drunk, or suffering from some low toxemia, or staggering beneath some great disaster. Then, as I say, the ontogenetic process reverses itself, and he slides back into infancy. Then he goes to poets, just as he goes to women and to theology. The very highest orders of men, perhaps, never suffer from such malaises of the spirit, or; if they suffer from them, never succumb to them. Charles Darwin was such a man. There was never a moment in his life when he sought religious consolation, and there was never a moment when he turned to poetry; in fact, he regarded it as silly. Other first-rate men, more sensitive to the possible music in it, regard it with less positive aversion, but I have never heard of a truly first-rate man who got any permanent satisfaction out of its content. The Browning Societies of the latter part of the Nineteenth Century (and I choose the Browning Societies because Browning’s poetry was often more or less logical in content, and thus above the ordinary intellectually) were not composed of such men as Huxley, Spencer, Lecky, Buckle, and Trevelyan, but of third-rate schoolmasters, mooney old maids, candidates for theosophy, literary vicars, and other such Philistines. The chief propagandist for Browning in the United States was not Henry Adams, or William Sumner, but an obscure professor of English who was also an ardent spook-chaser. And what is true ontogenetically is also true phylogenetically. That is to say, poetry is chiefly produced and esteemed by peoples that have not yet come to maturity. The Romans had a dozen poets of the first talent before they had a single prose writer of any skill whatsoever. So did the English.

  …

  Poetry is a form of writing in which the author attempts to disarm reason and evoke emotion, partly by presenting images that awaken a powerful response in the subconscious and partly by the mere sough and blubber of words. Poetry is not distinguished from prose, as John Livingston Lowes says in his ‘Convention and Revolt in Poetry’, by an exclusive phraseology, but by a peculiar attitude of mind — an attitude of self-delusion, of fact-denying, of saying what isn’t true. It is essentially an effort to elude facts, whereas prose is essentially a means of unearthing them. The gap is bridged by sentimental prose, which is half prose and half poetry. Immediately the thing acquires a literal meaning, it ceases to be poetry; immediately it becomes capable of convincing an adult and perfectly sober man during the hours between breakfast and luncheon it is indisputably prose.

  …

  No, I am no poetry hater. But even Shakespeare I most enjoy, not on brisk mornings when I feel fit for any deviltry, but on dreary evenings when my old war wounds are troubling me, and bills are piled up on my desk, and I am too sad to work. Then I mix a stiff dram — and read poetry.”

  (H.L. Mencken — “The Poet And HIs Art”, from “Prejudices: Third Series”, 1922, pp. 150-70, reprinted in “The Mencken Crestomathy”, pp. 449-58)

  This, I believe.

• gravid

  March 30, 2007 at 12:54 pm

  Do you know where your towel is VR?

• veryretired

  March 31, 2007 at 3:53 am

  Yes, gravid—very nice.

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