Weekly Readings #23 (07/11/22-07/17/22)

petal and thorn

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

My Scroll column this week summarized and assessed the fissures in the new right, the quarrel between the libertines and the conservatives, the “cads” and the “trads”:

Is the Anti-Woke Alliance Already Dead?

Niccolo Soldo followed up my piece with some thoughts of his own at the famous Fisted by Foucault SubStack:

Saturday Commentary and Review #89

He predicts that “the USA will default back to pre-woke liberalism, thus satisfying the disaffected liberal”—the likeliest outcome in my view as well, barring external catastrophe and consequent total political upheaval.

At my daily blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, I elaborated on this subject in a more theoretical register, responding to a Tweet from Anna Khachiyan about Curtis Yarvin, Lana Del Rey, and whether or not dissident cultural elites should ally with those who are not cultural elites. I suggested that the prospect of social mobility is missing from Yarvin’s theory and—in a briefer subsequent post—that an anxiety about a growing culturally conservative, working-class, and above all multiracial political coalition may be responsible for Yarvin’s (also Richard Spencer’s) recent feints in the direction of what I’ve called “dark liberalism.”

Speaking of cultural elites with radical and reactionary politics, and elsewhere online, let’s turn once again to poetry. In the London Review of Books, Thomas Jones writes about Shelley:

Their daughter Clara died aged one in Venice in September 1818; Mary’s first baby, a girl born prematurely in London in February 1815, died at twelve days. Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself in the Serpentine in November 1816. She was 21 and pregnant (Shelley wasn’t the father). He was denied custody of their two surviving children. ‘I am hardly anxious ... to hear from you,’ he had written to Harriet in September 1814, after leaving her for Mary, ‘as I despair of any generosity or virtue on your part.’ There’s a glimmer of self-awareness in Epipsychidion, a dawning realisation that his serial disappointment in women had at least as much to do with him as with them – ‘In many mortal forms I rashly sought/The shadow of that idol of my thought’ – but the self-pity is unabated: the poem literally says ‘Ah, woe is me!’

How serious or even just irritating you find the faults in Shelley’s character no doubt says a lot about your sensibility. While keeping in mind his permanent youth—he was in his 20s when he was breaking hearts; he died at 29—I find him insufferable. Just beneath what Harold Bloom unstintingly praised as the poet’s urbane lyricism, I see the proverbially predatory male (or nowadays nonbinary) feminist, posturing as an angel without sex or aggression even as he/they leaves a trail of wreckage behind. This may be an ethical complaint, and a political one, given Shelley’s utopianism, but it’s also an aesthetic judgment: here we have an inadequate vision, actually false rather than productively fictional.

Like Jones, I centered my assessment of the poet’s flaws on Epipsychidion in my own essay on Shelley from late last year. In this poem championing free love, he writes of himself: “soft and fragrant is the faded blossom, / And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom.” I write:

This phallic divestiture continues throughout the poem: the autobiographical speaker portrays his love life as a series of violations and betrayals of his passive soul. […] Arnold charged Shelley with humorlessness, but he lacks a sense of the tragic too. Both the comic and the tragic require an acknowledgement of existential realities, of incommensurate goods in conflict; for the comedian and the tragedian, we achieve our human dignity in rising to the occasion of these inexorable limits, either with knowing laughter or grave equanimity. Shelley wants it all, free love in Plato’s Republic, this woman and that woman and this other girl too—above all, faded though it be, the rose without the thorn.

But in the same essay, I also extensively praise his great Romantic manifesto, “A Defence of Poetry,” and—also Jones’s subject—his final, unfinished poem, “The Triumph of Life,” in which, instead of dreaming utopia, he wonders, “why God made irreconcilable / Good and the means of good.”

Ezra Pound is a different type of flawed poet-radical. If Shelley was revisited in a prestige legacy journal this week, then Pound got a similarly insightful treatment right here on SubStack, where Will Waltz writes about “In a Station of the Metro” as the ultimate Anglophone haiku at the provocative and sometimes controversial Safety Propaganda.

Petals on a Bough, by Will Waltz

I haven’t written about Pound, largely because, though I feel like I’ve been reading him on and off since my teens, I’ve never read him systematically and never dared The Cantos beyond the anthology pieces. As with Shelley, I particularly enjoy the prose: ABC of Reading, for example, is especially fun.

If Shelley is known for his personal faults, Pound’s are more public, but both, I suggest, and this is admittedly just what a “disaffected liberal” would say, come from an overvaluation of what’s collectively possible for human beings to achieve in the way of ethics. This similarity seems more important to me than the difference of Shelley’s having been on the political left and Pound on the right. But it is possible to be too harsh in these matters, as if, on some days at least, it didn’t take a soul of steel not to wish—or pray or beg—that the world wouldn’t hurt. “Put not your trust in princes,” though, remains sound advice.

As for “In a Station of the Metro,” it’s a great classroom set piece. I used to teach it in every possible context, from creative writing to multicultural literature. I even have two pandemic-era YouTube lectures in which it features heavily:

1. an Introduction to Literature class where I use it as the student’s initiation into poetic form:

and 2. an Introduction to U.S. Multicultural Literatures class where it works as our first example of the western mind’s breakdown at the last century’s opening, when culture went from meaning “the best that has been thought and said” to “what [X] group does,” thus paving the way for a multicultural literature:

I defer to Waltz’s comprehension of the haiku; as shown in the videos above, my own contribution to “Metro” studies—unless somebody thought of it first, but I haven’t seen it—is that the rhythm of the title and the first line mimic the rhythm of a train on the tracks, until halted by the ghostly arrest of the final image.