About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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(1533–92), and Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911), Mary Caponegro (b. 1975), Marianne Moore (1887–1972), and Henri de Mantherlant (1895–1972), Melvin Dixon (1950–92), Daryl Pinckney (b. 1948), Roger Zelazny (1937–95), Randall Kenan (b. 1963), and Don Belton (b. 1956), Guy Davenport (1927–2005), and D. H. Lawrence (1888–1930), Hart Crane (1899–1931), and Jean Toomer (1897–1968), Ethan Canin (b. 1960), William Gass (b. 1924), Bruce Benderson (b. 1955), Ursule Molinaro (1923–2000), Paul West (b. 1930), Alan Singer (b. 1948), James Alan McPherson (b. 1943), Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), Breece D’J Pancake (1879–1952), Michael Moorcock (b. 1939), and R. M. Berry (b. 1947), Edward Gibbon (1737–94), Richard Powers (b. 1957), John Galsworthy (1867–1933), and James Gould Cozzens (1903–78), Steve Erickson (b. 1950), Brian Evenson (b. 1966), Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), and Victor Hugo (1802–85), and any of the three hundred or five hundred or fifteen hundred others any literate reader would have to add to such a list. The greater their literacy, the more names they will add—and the more they will disagree over. Indeed, such a list only becomes useful as we read its biases and blindnesses, its gaps, its errors, its incompletenesses. The diversity and difference among such lists make the literary field rich and meaningful—not some hierarchical order that might initially generate one such list or another. Difference and diversity as much as education and idiosyncrasy will always defeat and shatter such a hierarchy after more than six or seven names are forced into it.
And that’s a good thing, too.
When you have read widely among these indubitably good writers, you must make an average image for yourself of their inarguably talented work—and realize that is what your own work must be better than. And you must realize as well, one way or another, that is what they are all (or were all)—living and dead—doing.
IV
Begeisterung was formulated and written about by a group of Germans some two hundred years ago. But the nature of the literary world has changed mightily since.
I’ve already used the phrase “the enlarged democratic field.” But what exactly are we talking about? Today the functionally literate population is more than fifty times the size it was 190 years ago in 1814, which is to say just at the time when ideas from Germany such as Begeisterung were first making their way through England and France both. It was after the Napoleonic wars but before the mid-nineteenth-century republican revolutions in Europe and the Civil War in the United States.
The Revolution of 1848 in France and the other uprisings within a few years of it throughout the continent (and, a dozen years later, the American Civil War) were armed battles between wealth concentrated in the old-style widespread agricultural capitalist system and wealth concentrated in the new-style widespread industrial capitalist system. Both in Europe and the United States, these conflicts were brought on by rising populations and changing technologies. First in Europe, then in the United Sates, new-style industrialism won.
Today a far higher percentage of the world’s population lives in cities than ever before. Public education has made advances that would have been inconceivable a century ago, much less two centuries. In England toward the end of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the major poets of that time numbered six: Wordsworth (1770–1850), Coleridge (1772–1834), Blake (1757–1827), Byron (1888–24), Keats (1795–1821), and Shelley (1792–1822), all of whom were writing in the year 1814.
By general consensus some fourteen poets of considerable, if minor, interest were also writing then: Robert Southey (1774–1843), poet laureate in his day but known now only as the poet Lewis Carroll parodied in some of his Alice and Wonderland poems; Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was as famous as his close friend Lord Byron was in his day; he allowed Byron’s journals to be burned—and is himself now unread, although his Irish Melodies receives a passing mention in Joyce’s “The Dead”; during his lifetime Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was far better known as a poet than a novelist; his novels all appeared anonymously and he did not acknowledge their authorship till 1827; also there is Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), mostly of interest because he figures so importantly in Keats’s biography. He was far better known than Keats during his lifetime. As well as his famous statement of radical reformist religious thought, “Abou Ben Adhem,” he wrote a charming poem to Thomas Carlyle’s wife, Jane, that sticks in the mind, “Jenny Kissed Me”:
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who loves to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Poets practically unknown in their time whom scholars have since rediscovered and found interesting include George Darley (1795–1846), Winthrop Mackworth Pread (1802–39), and John Clare (1793–1864). I’ve now named seven minor romantics. Someone might add another seven, to make, perhaps, fourteen. But today all fourteen concern a small group of professors and graduate students, enough to fuel the odd doctoral thesis and interest readers particularly focused on the period. At the time, however, when those six major and fourteen minor poets were writing, there were considerably less than 2.5 million people in the British isles who could read and write well enough to be poets of such ranking.
Today the current literate field (in American English, say)—at least twenty-five times the size of the field of 1814—might be expected to hold twenty-five times six major poets producing poems of an interest comparable to those of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley (that is to say, 150 major poets), and twenty-five times fourteen minor poets (or 350) of considerable interest.
That’s about what the statistics are.
The fundamental difference between the world of 1814 and the world of the present day is that six major and fourteen minor poets is a knowable field. Arthur Symons’s The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (New York: Dutton, 1909; Symons: 1865–1945) gives essays on 87 poets born after 1722 and dead by 1868—his own cut-off point for the romantics—arbitrarily as all such dates must be, but still eminently sensible. In a final chapter, “Minors,” he mentions another 52 poets who fall within the same period. Though it may take a decade or more of reading, a single reader can be familiar with the totality of that field. No single reader can be thoroughly familiar with the works of 150 major poets and 350 minor poets. Symons’s 340-page book could not cover the major English language poets alive today—much less give a comprehensive survey of both the major and the minor poets whose births and deaths were contained within the last 140 years. Thus, the doling out by the literate readership of fame, merit, or even simple attention is an entirely different process from what it once was.
When Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair was published in 1814 (that year when all the romantic poets we’ve mentioned were writing), queues began to form outside London bookstores four and five hours before they opened, and, by the time the doors unlocked, those queues stretched around the block. The Corsair sold ten thousand copies on the first day of publication, and three hundred thousand in the next year. (That is to say, by the year’s end, a copy was owned by just over a quarter of the people in the British Isles who could have actually read it.) And when the poet, novelist, and playwright Victor Hugo (b. 1802) died in Paris in 1885, his funeral was a four-day state affair, notably longer and finally grander than, say, the funeral of President Kennedy (b. 1917) on his assassination in 1963. Two years before, in 1883, when opera composer Richard Wagner (b. 1813) died in Venice, his funeral was not much smaller.
Today the deaths of artists simply do not constitute such national events. A far greater percentage of the society has seen the works of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas than ever saw Wagner’s operas—or saw Hugo’s plays or read his poems and novels. But though Spielberg’s and Lucas’s works cost more to make and make more when they appear, when at last these film directors go, neither is likely to have the same sort of final send-off as Wagner or Hugo—which is another way of saying that today even the most popular arts fit into the society very differently from the way they once did,