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The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: from Quatrains by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poet TO clothe the fiery thought In simple words succeeds. For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds. Gardener TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet, Expound the Vedas of the violet, Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop, See the plum redden, and the beurré stoop. Heri, Cras, Hodie SHINES the last age, the next with hope is seen, To-day slinks poorly off, unmarked between: Future or Past no richer secret folds, O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds. Casella TEST of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove; Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard graduate, minister, essayist, orator and popular philosopher, he was a crucial figure in the development of American liberal values. He was a founding father of Transcendentalism, the literary movement rooted in English and German Romantic traditions. These four short poems are from the group of individual verses entitled Quatrains, first included in the collection Mayday and other pieces (1867). They can be read here in their initial sequencing. The suggestion, made on the basis of Emerson's own comments, is that they respond formally to the Persian genre of epigrams and gnomic verses. The first, Poet, is particularly four-square and hymn-like, but its command, 'to mask a king in weeds' has different possible interpretations. Does it declare the poet's obligation to speak truth to power, or suggest that the poet must refuse to acknowledge worldly power altogether? And what about 'weeds'? It's an old word for clothes so might suggest a king disguised in a non-ceremonial, simply woven garment, but there's an inevitable hint, too, of the botanical kind of weed in all its clambering natural vigour. It's also interesting to imagine the king as emblematic of the major cultural figures Emerson names in his poem Solution. Solution is a rather long-winded companion poem to another shorter one, The Test, in which the Muse sets us a puzzle: to identify the five creative spirits whose work burns brightest. The answer is: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg and Goethe. In Poet, Emerson might be reminding himself that the 'craft of genius' lies in resisting the display of such influences, using 'simple words' rather than grand, imitative gestures. Or perhaps the matter is more basic and technical: any 'fiery thought' in a poem is stronger if it creates the impression of having occurred as naturally as a weed. The Gardener of the second quatrain is addressed as 'true Brahmin', a priest of Brahma. In Hindu thought, Brahma is the supreme being, manifesting himself throughout the universe. Artists sometimes depict him with four heads – and perhaps the quatrain form itself distantly reflects that cardinal structure. Emerson, deeply influenced by eastern philosophies, unites the Brahmin, the Gardener and the (ideal) Poet. Because of his particular identification with nature, 'hid in vines, peeping through many a loop', his vision will be sharpened and refined rather than obscured. In the imagery of the vines and the 'beurré', a variety of pear whose ripening causes its branch to 'stoop', there may be an echo of the opening lines of Keats's Ode to Autumn. And despite the specifically Sanskrit reference Wordsworth, I think, would not have found the 'Vedas of the violet' an alien concept. Heri, Cras, Hodie (Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today), juggling the usual, chronological word order of the Latin list, expands on the ancient eastern theme of mindfulness, (described engagingly here as 'not wobbling'). The three chronological units, Past, Future and Present, are skilfully evoked, with a rather effective shift into personification characterising the Present as an outcast, a 'poor relation', almost: 'To-day slinks poorly off'. There's a rhetorical force which works especially well in the vatic tone of the last couplet: 'Future or Past, no richer secret folds, / O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds.' This poor relation offers wealth to those who can ignore the ever-attractive 'shine' of times past and the tendency to squint, vaguely hopeful, at something that cannot in fact be 'seen'. My selection of Quatrains ends with a return to the Poet as central figure. Casella isn't himself a poet: he is the composer and singer who appears in the second canto of Dante's Purgatorio, and who, it seems, has set the poet's own work to music. I can't help feeling that Emerson, while a huge admirer of Dante, is making fun to some extent of Casella, or of romantic love itself. The dactylic rhythm isn't the only feature that suggests a comic undertow. There's the end-rhyme of the last couplet, with its insistence on a mis-stress (if not a mistress). If you stress the word 'OF' instead of 'YORE' as the metre demands, the result is one of those double-rhymes that often signals bathos: 'OF yore' and 'LOVE-lore'. The poem might have trembled more empathically, it's true, but I warm to that possible flash of good-humoured mockery. Emerson the writer is remembered today as a major essayist rather than a major poet. His poems are at their best, I think, when their focus is small-scale. The Quatrains are poetic distillations of his key ideas, but have the directness and vitality that prove them more than a by-product.
Boston Globe
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Who's afraid of Emily Brontë? On the recent termination of NEH Public Scholar grants.
We were three women biographers meeting for lunch on a Friday to discuss our projects: Heather Clark, a 2018 Public Scholar fellow for her biography of Sylvia Plath, 'Red Comet,' a Pulitzer finalist, at work now on a book about Anne Sexton; Abigail Santamaria, recipient of a 2022 Public Scholar grant for her biography-in-progress of Madeleine L'Engle; and me, a veteran biographer in quest of a new subject. But conversation stalled as we kept returning to the text of the letter Lutz had posted on Instagram that morning: 'Defending women'? Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what the NEH had done for us and our subjects by funding our books? Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up I still remember the day in 1987 when I opened an envelope from the NEH telling me I'd been awarded an Independent Scholar Fellowship to support my biography of the Peabody sisters, three little-known women of New England's 19th-century cultural renaissance, Transcendentalism. I was two years into the project, which, due to the copious research required and the demands of parenting, would take another 18 years to complete. Advertisement The good news was an elixir that lasted. I used a portion of the NEH's roughly $20,000 in funding to hire a student researcher who photocopied articles and out-of-print library books I'd rely on in the years ahead. But most important, whenever I thought of giving up or feared I might never finish, I remembered that day and that letter and I kept going. Published at last in 2005, 'The Peabody Sisters ' was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. I still remember the day in the late 1990s when the panel of judges the NEH had invited me to join debated the merits of an Independent Scholar Fellowship application from Stacy Schiff for a biography of Vera Nabokov. She got her letter. Her book won the Pulitzer. In 2014, a half-century after its founding, the NEH initiated the Public Scholar program, opening up funds for more writers like Schiff and me with 'grants to individual authors for research, writing, travel, and other activities leading to the creation and publication of well-researched nonfiction books in the humanities written for the broad public.' The first group of 36 fellows, who received their good-news letters awarding stipends of up to $50,400, included Carla Kaplan for a biography of Jessica Mitford, Anne Boyd Rioux for a book about 'Little Women,' and Gregg Hecimovich, for a biography of Hannah Crafts, author of 'The Bondwoman's Narrative.' Hecimovich's 'The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,' published in 2023, received the National Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times awards in biography and an American Book Award in nonfiction. Advertisement Later NEH Public Scholar recipients writing on women include Janice Nimura, for 'The Doctors Blackwell,' a Pulitzer finalist; Natalie Dykstra, for 'Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner,' winner of the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing; and, along with Deborah Lutz in this year's class, Charlotte Gordon, for a group biography of abolitionists Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. (Gordon's funding period ended in January; she was not cut loose.) All of these works took or will take many years, some more than a decade, to complete, with the NEH providing material support in the short term and moral support for the long haul. In one of the articles that my NEH-funded student assistant photocopied for me in the 1980s, 'Claims of the Beautiful Arts,' from the November 1839 issue of Democratic Review, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody argued that in the young American nation, arts and culture deserved government funding to replace the arbitrary and capricious system of patronage that held sway under European monarchies. The resulting works would represent the spirit of a democratic people and bolster its fledgling institutions. Capricious monarchal patronage? Acting chairman McDonald's termination letter fairly gloated at the chance to shove Lutz aside in favor of 'repurposing' the NEH's 'funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda.' After the weekend passed, I phoned Lutz to ask how she was handling her loss of funds and the rude letter, so unlike the initial good news email from the old NEH. She thanked me, then brightened. By coincidence, the day she received the termination email was the date her final NEH lump sum payment of $20,000 was due to be released for direct deposit to her bank account. The termination email had not come from the secure '.gov' address from which all financial communications were meant to be issued. She guessed the new admins had failed to successfully navigate the secure system of payment set up by their predecessors. And lo, the $20,000 appeared in her bank account Monday morning. She quickly transferred the sum to a different account, having heard from another NEH fellow that their own 'pending' lump sum payment had disappeared. Advertisement Lutz is back at work on her biography, set for publication in 2026. By then, presumably, American women will have been secured against the threat posed by the likes of Emily Brontë, the Alcott and Blackwell sisters, Hannah Crafts, Sojourner Truth, and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
