Lyrical Ballads, and other early poems
William Wordsworth
1785-1799
(A poetic sage takes lessons on goodness and beauty from nature.)
A man of wisdom, a poet of nature, is Wordsworth. These are the goals to which he aspires, goals that are discernable in his work from a very early age. He wrote many of his greatest poems in the years covered here, before he reached 30. Wisdom, or more specifically a yearning for and contemplation of goodness and beauty, suffuses his poetry. Thus he is keen to deliver moral advice, and almost seems to teach or prophesy rather than reflect. But it is the deepest and most profitable kind of reflection, I can almost hear him replying, whose results teach the reflector something. And since he insists in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads that he writes each poem with a purpose, and with the intent of delivering objective truths rather than ideas that one may take or leave as a matter of preference, we must prepare for a slight didactic or pedagogical flavor now and then. For Wordsworth, though firmly against elitism in poetry, is aware of his own wisdom, and is driven to share it with others. The topics range from attitudes towards people (as in “Matthew”), to attitudes towards nature (as in “Lines Written in Early Spring”), to a straightforward exhortation to be good (as in “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”). He imparts his values on social matters as well, regarding for instance the evil of slavery (at the end of “Descriptive Sketches”), the necessity of legislated charity (at the beginning of “The Old Cumberland Beggar”), and thoughts on education (e.g. “Expostulation and Reply”).
Discourse on Method
(Discours de la méthode)
René Descartes
1637
(A scientist-philosopher wishes that all the deep questions of life could be as certain as his mathematical results—so he decides to start from scratch and make them that way.)
The influence this little book has had over the past few centuries is (to make a ridiculous understatement) vastly out of proportion to its size. It is manageable in a single evening sitting, or (as Descartes is kind enough to inform us) in six roughly equal short sittings. My recent reading of it was over breakfast. It is strange to think that one can read a book so illustrious and philosophical over breakfast, but such is Descartes’ charm. He is of course a philosopher of the highest rank: the cogiter of that most famous phrase in the history of thought, cogito ergo sum. He is one of the chief inspirations for the modern movement in philosophy in which we still are steeped today, which emphasizes, among other things, a systematic and reasoned approach to all matters of inquiry in an effort to gain a scientific understanding of everything there is to know. Yet, again, the charm of Descartes is that he gives us this little journal, this series of ideas, as if he were chatting to us in front of a fire. He tells us how he came to think the way he does about things, rather than giving us “the way things are” in an authoritative or textbook manner. By this strategy he draws us in, perhaps unawares. This is an important quality to recognize in Descartes today, or at least it was for me. For I, like most students over the last fifty years or so, was warned about Descartes in college, as a naughty modernist, a reductionist, a disenchanter, a rationalist. What dry and impersonal words these are, and yet how personal is the Discourse compared with most philosophical writings! The criticisms may very well be true of his system, but there is more to this book than just a set of statements—we get to meet an author, a person. We should meet someone before we criticize him too harshly; often knowing the person tempers our antagonism.
Sappho’s poetic fragments
Sappho
7th-6th centuries BC
(The tenth muse expresses beauty, love, and the contents of her heart.)
Αιαι. Aiai! If only our dinner hosts still upheld the custom of ordering beautiful recitations over the wine! So it was in the days when some, at least, still believed in the Muses. On one of these evenings, Solon the Athenian stopped his nephew Execestides, who had just sung a song. “Teach it to me,” he said. Then he turned to an inquiring fellow guest. “I want to learn it and die.” (Aelian, in Stobaeus’ Anthology 29.58). The ancients spoke of only one poet in such tones: Sappho (Σαπφώ, spelled in her dialect Ψάπφω). Strabo called her the greatest poetess (Geography 13.617). Her people the Mytilenaeans engraved her on their coins (Pollux, Vocabulary 9.84). Plato called her the tenth muse (Palatine Anthology 9.506). We can surmise, then, how precious her works must have been to these many admirers through the centuries, these classical devotees of expression and imagery. Once, a volume of her poetry was taken from the town hall of Syracuse. “How sorely this stolen Sappho was missed,” moaned Cicero, “is almost more than words can tell” (Orations against Verres 2.4.57). Who would have thought that anything could even “almost” leave our eloquent Tully at a loss for words! But just imagine how his tongue would have failed him if not just one volume but her entire works had been stolen, and not just from a town library but from the whole world! For we are in this very state today, by some unhappy accident of history. All we have of her nine books of poetry are a couple hundred fragments, most of them mere words or phrases that scholars have gleaned painstakingly from quotations throughout Greek and Latin literature. A great irony lies in the epitaph Pinytus wrote for her, whose promise has sadly failed: “This tomb hath the bones and the dumb name of Sappho, but her wise utterances are immortal” (Palatine Anthology 7.16).
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
1749
(Tom really wants to be good for the sake of his love Sophia, but his nature keeps getting in the way!)
It is prudent to be morally pure– there can be weighty unseen consequences to any moral failure. Fielding’s signature novel has this ponderous theme, and yet manages not to be at all heavy-handed but funny, colloquial, at times bawdy, ironic, rollicking. The theme is kicked here and there and tossed around like a ball, but it is pervasive nonetheless: throughout this History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, from his birth to the point at which he finally comes to the beginning of what promises to be a good and happy life with Sophia, all of Tom’s sundry dilemmas and anguishes are a result of his own moral weakness. Although an otherwise upstanding and honorable individual, poor Tom cannot seem to surmount two kinds of temptation: to lust and to folly. He repeatedly places himself into compromising situations with women that– even if Fielding’s presentation of them makes us smirk– only prove disastrous to him through his family or his beloved. Also, to achieve his goals he often resorts to schemes that involve some deceit; they always backfire on him in the worst way imaginable. We see Tom, and rightly so, as a victim of Fortune throughout the book; but he lays himself open to Fortune’s whims by his actions, and so he has lured his own fate. No elements of the plot of this book are foreign to this theme.
The Catcher in the Rye
June 7, 2014 / Leave a comment
J. D. Salinger
1951
(He may not know what he wants to be in life, but he sure knows one thing he doesn’t want to be—phony! Unfortunately, the world doesn’t seem to agree with him).
Holden Caulfield is a unique and precious personality in literature. Although I surely would not want to be subjected in all my reading to the starkness of The Catcher in the Rye, the book is curiously invigorating and liberating. Despite what one might call the main character’s cynicism, almost paradoxically the strongest draw of the novel for me is that he is refreshing. Holden is thoughtful, genuine, unsettled, and uninhibited, and these qualities allow the author to portray our secret thoughts and the culture of our time, in the evident hope that we can be enlightened by them.
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