Racetrack Wiseguy

For some years now I've insisted that this is my time of year whether there's been any evidence in the actual results or not. That is mainly because it's when the big stables start to bring out their best horses for the winter jumping season, which is the sort of racing one can understand a bit better.

How ironic, then, that a big part of the 'kickstart' this year came about yesterday by following the Professor in with the Aidan O'Brien treble at the Curragh, on the flat, all of which won well at surprisingly good prices and turned negligible stakes into proper ammunition for the forthcoming weeks.

Landing the double today in similarly impressive fashion, my economy is at a year's high point compared to that of the government's, which is wretched, but they don't exercise caution, wisdom or apply any sort of sense to prevailing conditions. And they are a complete shambles. The way things are going, with the revolving doors in Downing Street spinning at a dizzying rate, I'm likely to be Chancellor of the Exchequer sooner than I thought with my proven track record but, of course, confidence is a dangerous thing and so we stick to the plan because it works. Unlike that of Prime Minister Truss. Who would have thought that the worst Prime Minister anybody can remember could be replaced by a worse one. I honestly never thought I'd have to say that.

But not only do we sing when we're winning, we press on.

The success of those O'Brien horses yesterday was 'easy to be persuaded' to back, as I wrote to the Prof. Horses ready to go after a prep run. Not many of his good ones need three chances to win their first race. It's exactly the back-end time of the season when those horses can help themselves. And even though it feels more like jump race weather now that summer's over, there's big prize money to be had. It's always reassuring to read of him in Timeform, Yard having good spell.

We stick with the momentum of the O'Brien stable in making Peking Opera (Leopardstown, 2.05, nap) irresistible if we can have even money. But Ryan Moore goes to Ascot for the Big-Time Charlie races that begin with the long distance heat where Trueshan looks like a favourite worth taking on and the progressive Waterville (Ascot 1.25, pictured) is an option worth taking, mapping the trajectory of his improvement and finding it potentially good value at 7/2.

Also progressive could be Progressive (Stratford, 3.54), with Mr. Henderson going softly softly on a day that is very likely to see Paul Nicholls having any number of winners. Which ones, though. It really is a mug's game to spread it all across big combinations because at short prices it only takes a couple to get beaten to reduce your palace to matchsticks.

Him Malaya (Newton Abbot, 2.55) and Huelgoat (Stratford, 2.14) could be the ones to put in tonight but if the bandwagon starts rolling we could start throwing money around like confetti at all of them because one doesn't want to read the headlines about his fantastic day and not have been on.

Another O'Brien doing well is Fergal and Free Handshake (Market Rasen, 1.17) goes onto this list of six that my next job is to mix up into doubles, trebles and even more ludicrously ambitious concatenations. 

There is a sort of symmetry about believing that having had 6 out of 6 winners on Thurs and Fri, one can do it all again on Sat but even Garfield Sobers only did it once. As Dr. Johnson points out in one of his many brilliant essays, unlike animals, we spend most of our time thinking about the future and the past whereas they, for all we know, seem to live in an ongoing present. And he's right, we live in the present while the race is on but otherwise, we are thinking about what will win forthcoming races or fondly remember those that have won races in the past.

But what we do is go carefully until we have manufactured an advantageous position and then play with that advantage. What those bonkers Conservative politicians do is gamble on an unlikely outsider called Growth when it obviously isn't going to happen. I'd bloody love to be their bookmaker. 

Top 6 Songwriters

Ahead of next week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting on the subject of Song Lyrics, I've been giving it some thought. For those of us for who pop music began with Move Over Darling by Doris Day, or anywhere near it, there's plenty of it and would be enough for a whole new society rather than an evening. I first thought I'd be betting without classical composers but we mustn't do that, we must answer the question. However, I have reframed it to songwriters, which includes the tune, rather than just the words.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which prompted some debate and consternation. Of course, being Dylan, he had to be difficult about it but found time to accept it in the end. I'd have preferred it if he could have stuck by his principles having once said that Smokey Robinson was the real poet among pop song writers. That was the right answer.

 

Tamla Motown overflowed with talent organized into the production line in the hit factory that ensured huge commercial success on the back of artistic excellence, which wasn't always the way in pop music. As well as Smokey, the engine roon was driven by Holland-Dozier-Holland, Brian, Lamont and Eddie, who provided Berry Gordy's quality control with a job as enjoyable as wine taster. The question for them was who to give the best songs to and the answer was usually Diana Ross & the Supremes.

 

My interest in pop music was extended longer than it might have been by being introduced to The Magnetic Fields and the potent combination of heartbreak and dark satire in the songs of Stephin Merritt. I suspect he's not quite the force he was 20 years ago and the songs up to and including 69 Love Songs, and more beyond, but he was a once-in-a-lifetime tip from a friend to who I've been grateful ever since.

For many people Lennon-McCartney would be a no-brainer selection as obvious as Shakespeare would be for a list of people who wrote plays but having set themselves a very high standard they went on to indulge themselves and live off their reputation a little bit which might seem harsh but there's not much room in a top 6 and Burt Bacharach provided the foundations for any number of 1960's artists that possibly amount to more.

 

The second, third and fourth divisions would be easy to fill with great writers that the proper rules of a Top 6 don't allow me to namedrop here and so I've only got one space left and even I don't know who I'm going to give it to yet.

 

But, no, I can't do it. It will have to remain, in such difficult circumstances, that elite Top 4. It was going to be Carole King and Mozart, for his sublime arias that he did the music for but the Italian words wewre by Lorenzo da Ponte and the German by Emanuel Schikaneder, but the original question was Song Lyrics and perhaps it's not for me to re-write it.

So I admit defeat in the face of the choice between Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Dory Previn, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, some memorable 'dab hand' efforts by Rod Stewart, the great Newcastle poet, Alan Hull, and the extraordinary reading list that would come about if we did have a Portsmouth Song Lyrics Society. If we had world enough and time which, sadly, I don't think we do.

Adscititious Johnson

I was never persuaded by John Peel's adage that he was more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that that he had. Even aged 6 I don't know if I could have been persuaded to trade Silence is Golden, Move Over Darling and She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah for the promise of The Well-Tempered Klavier. One can't be convinced by something one doesn't know about.

By a certain age one will surely have found one's way to most of what one would like. One thing leads to another until surely the Known must be impregnable to any challenge from the Unknown. And yet, getting into Donald Rumsfeld territory, how could we know. Certainly, being introduced to the music of The Magnetic Fields just at the age when I thought pop music was over extended my pop life and they entered the very top echelon of my favourite things but even then I wouldn't have swapped Tamla Motown, T. Rex, Bowie, Al Green and reggae for them.

Similarly, there must still be writers I've not read that would be added to my Premier League if I found them but I wouldn't abandon James Joyce, for Dubliners, Rosemary Tonks, for her Baudelairean ennui, Larkin for his downright common sense, etc. It wasn't as if I didn't know about Dr. Johnson but I'd read more about him than by him and gladly accepted Robbie Coltrane in Blackadder as a beginner's guide.

Although it was only a few weeks ago, I already can't remember what prompted the recent reading of the Lives of the Poets. It's highly likely to have been an item at Anecdotal Evidence , perhaps the finest of literary 'blogs', that provides something good every day and today, as it quite often is, cites the good doctor. The Lives were a revelation, as below on the 'Dr. Johnson' tab, and led immediately to Selected Essays which is 550 pages of literary joy. To those who've read them, a recommendation would be as useful as one for The Beatles, or tipping Red Rum for the National, but not everybody will have and if you haven't, you must. It is never too late to find a new enthusiasm and I'm very glad I found out in time.

One could call him a philosopher in the way that Alan Partridge, when asked to name a philosopher, said, 'Peter Ustinov', but he is such in the ways that Montaigne or maybe Marcus Aurelius are, not demolishing the rickety systems of previous generations of thinkers only to replace them with flawed edifices of their own, impenetrable, dense with jargon and eventually falling back on 'a priori' assumptions or turning out to be circling around nothing at all. I have a lot of time for Sartre but not so much the free will or the support for the Soviet Union and I'm sadly not one of the six people in the world said to fully understand Derrida. For all their sophistication, that sort of philosopher makes a poet seem as practical as a plumber in comparison.

 

Dr. Johnson is a moralist, Anglican and Tory but one mustn't let our prejudices from 250 years after the fact blind us to the way he saw through superficial human frailties, not least that,

What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught...men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

He finds Abraham Cowley 'never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within'. He notices 'a man writes much better than he lives'. On our tendency to give away secrets, he realizes that,

most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance,

that, yes, they would prefer to show they know a secret and that they lacked the integrity to keep it than maintain the virtue of discretion.

The Essays is a book where one regularly has to stop to make a note of page numbers and, a rare thing for me, one that it is a pleasure to take time over, re-read paragraphs for pure enjoyment and to see how he did it and relish the language. Few books provide quite such a guarantee that every page is worth reading, not least, indeed, for being 'reminded' as much as informed but that it was 'ne'er so well express'd', which were Pope's words, not his. 

Perhaps it is to Dr. Johnson's advantage, or mine really, that C18th Lit was the period I missed out at university. While 'education' can enhance and encourage appreciation, it can also ruin it and it's a good thing to come to these essays in a better position to simply enjoy rather than have to encounter them on a compulsory reading list. They are thus not a duty like Middlemarch first was, that it took me some decades to return to and like much better. 

I want to do a Top 6 Writers just so that I can put him in it but it would be unfair to leave out any of Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Larkin, Camus, Ovid, Rosemary, maybe still Thom Gunn, and the boy from Stratford amongst others from such a crucial list only to honour him.

 

A biography of The Waste Land by Matthew Hollis will be on its way when released, as will new poems by Sean O'Brien in November. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, is on the waiting shelf as well. But with Rassellas due here, too, and a logistical project in hand of where the Johnson section can be accommodated in a suitably eminent position on the shelves, the lives by Boswell and John Wain as well as Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings will be re-read with new enthusiasm. So there is an Autumn programme in place even if it makes me sound like a 1973 schoolgirl wrapped up in her devotion to the Bay City Rollers.

Portsmouth Steinway Concert

Steinway Concert, Portsmouth Central Library, Oct 8

It was a gala occasion this afternoon in Portsmouth's Menuhin Room, marking the resurrrection of the Steinway grand, 'widely regarded as the finest instrument along the South Coast' and, we must earnestly hope, the versatile space that was once known as the Third Floor Arts Centre and had theatre groups and readings as well concerts. Enormous thanks must go to Andrew McVittie for organizing it all and being its genial host and for all he will go on to achieve there.

Valya Seferinova was one of many others involved in bringing it all together and she began with Debussy's Cathedrale Engloutie emerging from the mist or waves to ring and chime. She was then joined by Bogdan Vacarescu and his violin for a Brahms Hungarian Dance that zipped along, some exhilarating top notes in the song and dance of a Chopin Waltz before The Bee by Schubert, not previously known to me but I suspect it was known to Rimsky-Korsakov. The room has a fine, intimate acoustic and Bogdan's wonderful technique benefitted from it as did all the performers.

We will hope to hear Ashton Gray play whole Beethoven Sonatas sooner rather than later but today, as here writing about it, there was a lot to pack in and so we only had the first movement of Op. 14, no. 2, early Beethoven and thus redolent of Mozart with Ashton's subtle dexterity as the main theme changed hands littered with sunbeams.

Angela Zanders ran beautifully through the paces from gentleness to rapture in Dreaming from Four Sketches, op. 15, by Amy Beach before the bonus item of a pertinent poem from Diana Swann, a piano teacher who, now 88, feels 'old age isn't the bitter end, that you can find new and interesting things to do' and has eloquently proved it. The first half ended with Karen Kingsley, the immensely versatile pianist back in her double act with clarinettist Robert Blanken for the Sonatina by Horowitz, in which the Allegro calmato was as acrobatic as a kitten and the 'calmato', if it really means 'tranquil', was lost on me. Rob's clarinet was warm in the shades of evening in the second movement and, if I usually think of the clarinet as a jazz instrument due to my father's Sid Phillips records more than Artie Shaw, the Con Brio fulfilled my expectations.

Karen's choice of Bogies and Sprites that Gambol by Night by Hubert Parry was a quirky, comic piece to begin the second half with, quoting Three Blind Mice, I think, and not something one would guess was written by the same person that arranged Jerusalem. Ashton returned with Novellette no. 2 by Robert Schumann which began in full spate before restraining itself into lyricism and then returning to a strident, bravura recapitulation of where it had started.

Valya's En Autumn by Zygmunt Noskowski, she explained, represented a bridge between Chopin and the C20th and proved tumultuous in its broad sweep, still very much the acceptable face of late Romanticism. But in a programme made up entirely of highlights, and mainly because it was Shostakovich and cello, when she was joined by Mikhail Lezdkan for Adagio and Spring Waltz, they edged it as my favourites, the first sonorous and resilient, the second merrier as Shostakovich somehow had the resources to be. There isn't enough Shostakovich played in the concerts I regularly attend locally. It is the one, very minor complaint I can summon up if I have to find one and, so, heartfelt thanks to Mikhail for that. Valya then did the underwater paddling while Mikhail glided serenely on the surface of The Swan.

As Andrew said, we hadn't had four hands on the Steinway yet but Helen Morris and Katie Burrows were rhapsodic in A Song Before Sunrise by Delius and then changed places as well as mood for a somewhat de-constructed transcription of Gershwin's I Got Rhythm by Gregory Stone.

To finish, it was fitting to have Chopin and Angela Zanders returned for a fluent Polonaise in C sharp minor that was at different times military and sensitive.

And all that was for free ( ! ) and so it was little wonder it was well attended and hugely appreciated. Portsmouth and its surrounding area are not badly served for excellent music events but any further series established in this venue will add an extra dimension. There is no shortage of wonderful musicians or repertoire. All that is needed is an audience of similar proportions if and when it actually costs money to get in.  

Again, thank you very much to all involved in making this afternoon happen.

Betcha by Golly Wow, I'm more stunned by the array of talent than when it is only one artist playing. I feel a bit dizzy actually and almost overwhelmed. Let there be more of it, then.     

Ode to Autumn Journal

I thought this year I'd join my friend in his annual reading of Autumn Journal. I bought mine several years ago in Chichester and began it on the station waiting for the train back but as with so many books these days I remember being impressed by it but not much else about it.

It might almost be where Auden took his later, more discursive style from. In some ways it seems more Audenesque than MacNeice-ish if we concentrate on the long lines, the extended meditation, the political tenor and tendency towards something mildly didactic. Like Auden often does, he takes a wide perspective but his concern is above all for the ordinary. 'Society', for want of a better word, is a bigger thing than the individuals with their selfish priorities who don't appreciate that the best thing we have is each other, not ourselves,

                                a monologue

Is the death of the language and that a single lion

    Is less himself, or alive, than a dog and another dog.

 

He's also dubious about his dubious status,

As it is, the so-called humane studies

    May lead to cushy jobs

But leave the men who land them spiritually bankrupt

    Intellectual snobs.

 

And,

     I hasten to explain

That having once been to the University of Oxford

    You can never really again

Believe anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset

    In a world like ours;

The rhymes might be prominent in those lines but for the most part they can pass unobtrusively, as part of the design but not dominating the sound like an C18th poem. I can see why it's a book one would return to. There's room in it, a finely-tuned 'voice' and attitude at work and, as work of significance is often said to, it comes from a time of some historical importance as well as from the time when Auden was also doing his best work and doing equally well, in Musée des Beaux Arts, at rhyming discreetly.

Also in common with that, what Autumn Journal recognizes is the worth of everyday life when it is threatened by a crisis like the ominous prospect of war or the misadventure of flying too close to the sun. The relatively mundane is much under-rated.

It's a bit of a stretch, perhaps, to make much of parallels with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had precious little opportunity to enjoy ordinariness. At last, I've got myself a copy of the late stories, Apricot Jam (Canongate, 2011). A battered copy but cheap and it's the words inside I want it for.

To simplify Sozhenitsyn down to one sentence, his theme is that of the title of his play Candle in the Wind. The precarious commodity of 'life' is the candle and the wind, in his case, is the Soviet regime, mostly in the personality of Stalin, but the metaphor can be extended for personal use to any such life-reducing system which we may think of as religion, doctrine or institutions like Catholicism, libertarianism, campus Marxism - to name a few of my own- that go too far in imposing their supposedly well-intentioned gospels onto their long-suffering subjects. 

Solzhenitsyn had something to write about but could hardly be expected to write about anything else. He couldn't be expected to take time out to reflect on a painting by Brueghel, the night an imaginary fox appeared to him while he was writing or that when he was old he would wear purple. Whether he wanted to or not I don't know but he had more pressing concerns. His writing makes the subject matter of writers who lived in less demanding times seem a bit superfluous but on the other hand it is that they should have the opportunity to do so that concerns him. As it is, it's grim but we need to know.

What Nastenka realizes in what is possibly the best of these stories is that,

poets and writers did not create their works guided by free inspiration: though the writers themselves might have been unaware of it, unwittingly but objectively they were fulfilling someone else's command.

Solzhenitsyn might have Socialist Realism and the sort of censorship that Shostakovich was subject to, but subtly subverted, in mind there but it's an idea that can be extended to apply further afield. We all comply to some expectations whether we think they're of our own choosing or not. 'Freedom' is an illusory thing and although we surely have more of it than artists in the USSR did, it becomes a banal and treacherous word when used by Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg to promote their cynical agendas.

 

What middle-blass twits we are

To imagine for one second

That our privileged ideals

Are divine wisdom,

said Derek Mahon in Afterlives, although I don't think it says 'twits' in the version he first wrote and meant.

And how privileged we are to be able to enjoy the luxuries of Dr. Johnson nearly 240 years since he departed this life. He set some sort of standard of how to read, and write about, other writers. My copy of The Lives of the Poets, a Selection arrived yesterday, all pristine and gorgeous and with a few more lives and a different editor than the library's edition.

I'm glad to see John Mullan's introduction saying much what I've said below. Maybe I get a B+.

I'm glad to see Johnson is supposed to be funny but also so many other things that he knew all that time ago that not everybody seems to know now.

Johnson is 'unenchanted' by the writers he writes about,

In a 'Rambler' essay he noted how disappointment was the likely reflex of any admiring reader who discovered something of the life of the writer.

Yes, I know, with special reference to the letters of Thom Gunn and James Joyce but not only them. Of course, the writing and the writer are two different things. A widespread assumption that Shakespeare was a great human being is based solely upon him being ostensibly a great writer but that is no evidence at all. And, as elsewhere below here, Johnson 'ruefully catalogues the occupational delusions of authors' which he knows because he is one and, ever more gladly, both Prof. Mullan and now I can re-echo these thoughts, appreciating that Johnson 'found fault' with iconic poets so that future generations might imitate only those features of their work that fitted with his prescriptive recipe for poetry and avoid the failings.

'The corrosive influence of patronage', the fall-out from the difficult relationship between writing and money and Johnson's natural scepticism are all succinctly summarized by Mullan, of who I could read plenty more but it's Johnson who we admire for being who he was and the Lives is a sort of scripture for those who would write about poetry and I'm confidently expecting more of the same from the Essays.

 

Patrick Hemmerlé in Chichester

Patrick Hemmerlé, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 4 

 

 If there were only sunlight on water was the first line of a little-known, otherwise untitled 1990's poem, little known because it was by me. Whereas the poem moves on to other ideas, Patrick Hemmerlé's 50-minute set in Chichester today explored it thoroughly. A poetry competition on a dedicated theme will find many poems doing very much the same thing and it was as if that had happened here with six composers describing water and light. But while they could almost have been the same piece, they could be differentiated by paying attention to them.

A Barcarolle is a boat song and Chopin op. 60 was a song tinged with sadness but sprinkled with light and harmony. Liszt's glittering opening to Les Jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este led to some pensive rather than flamboyant Liszt, mesmerising and testing the top limits of the keyboard as others were to do, that being where the shiniest light is. After which, we were French and suitably 'impressionist', which, of course the painters labelled as such said that they weren't but they could hardly deny they were interested in light.

Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau had a busy surface pattern with eddies and maybe whirlpools. We need to be careful if tempted to imagine stories in music in case they weren't meant to be there but surely the stillness of the ending was the light fading and the reflets with it.

Ravel's Jeux d'eaux was a different take on the Liszt with the light dancing. I've never been a believer in synethesia, seeing colours when hearing music, not being sensitive enough to have it happen to me, but I got as close to it as I'm likely to with the yellow and white one is prompted to imagine in this. Oddly, one result from looking it up on Google has it as a 'disorder'. I'd have thought it was a gift.

Patrick is a 'strong advocate of music by lesser-known composers' and so one need worry less if Déodat de Séverac and Gabriel Dupont, contemporaries of Ravel, have so far escaped our notice. Séverac's skittish Baigneuses au soleil was the most modernist of today's programme whereas the Dupont Le Soleil se joue dans les vagues was quicker, louder and more expansive and found its way towards more of a tune than impressions to end a little bit closer to where we began.

Patrick, the notes told us, has The Well-Tempered Klavier in his repertoire as well as Chopin's 24 Etudes. This was a highly enjoyable set of variations on a strictly-defined theme and musicians might be encouraged to find other such themes to explore but maybe next time he comes our way, on what looks like a busy schedule, we might get some Bach.

Meanwhile there'll be plenty more on Saturday in the Central Library as a fine selection of local talent including the great Valya and Karen Kingsley have a go on the Steinway,

Steinway Concert

But it's 'sold out', which I'm glad to see and was ever likely to happen when that much talent is on show for free. If you're not already on the list, come back here and I'll tell you what it was like.

Johnson on Pope

Dr. Johnson esteemed his life of Cowley the best of his Lives and perhaps it does contain some of his most significant commentary on poetry but his lengthy discourse on Pope is better for entertainment, for the sheer joy of reading it and the obvious enthusiasm with which it is written. Much of that is due to its subject, one dare estimate, for no writer can make so much of an ordinary subject as they can an extra-ordinary one and Pope provides all the subject an expansive writer such as Johnson could wish for to expand into. 

The acrimony of Pope's many literary vendettas are pursued to the limit sometimes, more personal than literary and a sport in themselves. They might serve to remind us that poets can be a proud, vain and vituperative lot when they find rivals and that there is less of this knockabout now than there was in the 1960's and 70's which might have been equally energetically engaged in then but went on unnoticed by a wider public, poetry being a backwater of significance only to itself then whereas in the C18th it had a wider audience.

Joseph Addison is an early combatant, their battleground centring on their rival versions of the Iliad rather than Blur and Oasis trading insults and then releasing singles at the same time to, presumably, both benefit from the publicity as well as see who won, which was Blur, surprisingly. Pope's Dunciad, in a similar way, seems to have been popularized by those it satirized,

in which he endeavoured to sink into contempt all the writers by whom he had been attacked, and some others whom he thought unable to defend themselves.

In all this, Johnson finds much raw material from which to derive his telling observations on both human nature and how it is manifested in literary affairs. In his Characters of Men, Pope examined the idea of 'ruling passions', including that,

No man can therefore be born, in the strict acceptation, a lover of money, for he may be born where money does not exist; nor can he be born, in a moral sense, a lover of his country, for society, poltically regulated, is a state contradistinguished from a state of nature...

Dr. Johnson takes exception to that, perhaps anticipating Karl Popper's Falsification Principle, with,

its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination or overruling principle which cannot be resisted

but I say, 'Pope, thou shouldst be living at this hour'. 

In a fracas with the laureate, Colley Cibber, apparently provoked by Pope who quite possibly assumed Cibber to be one of those he thought unable to defend themselves, his victim announces,

his resolution from that time never to bear another blow without returning it, and to tire out his adversary by perseverance if he cannot conquer him by strength.

If the later C17th and the C18th aren't nowadays overly celebrated for their verses by some of us, it is a period rich in aggravation for its own sake. Pope is to get back much of his ill will from Martha Blount, his 'favourite' to who he sent a message only for her to reply,

'What? is he not dead yet?'

 

Johnson says more than he has before about poets taking themselves at their own estimation and how,

The writer commonly believes himself. 

But,

While such ideas are formed they are felt, and self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy.

Wow! If I still copied out memorable lines into a book of quotes like I did 45 years ago, that would be straight in.

He makes a distinction between Dryden and Pope that Dryden had better passages but worked less hard on them whereas Pope was always as good as he could be, not sending anything to the press for two years in order to make sure he was happy with it,

Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and levelled by the roller.

I suspect I'm a Dryden on those terms but would rather read the critic than the poets in this example. If Johnson doesn't know, he says so which is an example we all might follow but he excels himself by having nailed the big 'what is poetry' question long before many of us tried to say with,

To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer,

 

He has also quoted Dryden as saying, 'Music is inarticulate poetry' without questioning it deeply enough. One might see what Dryden meant by 'inarticulate'. in that it is wordless, but it's no better than poetry claiming to be 'heightened' language when the likes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf write prose far more 'heightened' than much that claims to be poetry. Dryden couldn't have been expected to know how articulate Beethoven and Mozart were to be, or even Bach and Handel, but if he found the music to 1700 inarticulate he must have been tin-eared.

Apparently not knowing when to stop, but never being anything less than interesting, Johnson finishes with some close readings of epitaphs by Pope, finding it unnecessary to say in one that the subject is dead and in another lamenting that they are not named in the verses because the epitaph might not always be read on the tomb.

 

Not for the first time, a library book has to be returned but I must have my own copy. The selected Lives of the Poets is thus on order, as is the Selected Essays with its pieces from The Idler and The Rambler. Dr. Johnson will be promoted to have his own, more prominent place on the shelves with those books about him, but not by him, that I already have. The Lives have been a revelation, not so much for the lives themselves but for the industrious, well-organized mind that wrote them, the brilliant prose they are written in and the pure enjoyment of reading them. The low grade poetry magazines by the bedside are only there because I thought I ought to have a look at hem but they are largely awful. I'd be able to reach out and pick up a volume of Dr. Johnson confident of being able to open it anywhere and find him good value. Then, and only then, will we see about Rasellass. It might be any good.