Book Logging: Project Gutenberg Poetry
Aug. 12th, 2021 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAs usual, there's some I liked, some I didn't, and some I just didn't understand.
One author below, Benjamin De Casseres is noteworthy for having critical praise as writing 'proto-Dadaist rhetoric' and as 'The American Nietzsche.' It's been 2-3 months since I read that Wikipedia article, and I still can't fit those two idea together at all.
Ballad Book edited by Katharine Lee Bates - Project Gutenberg. DNF. All of the ballads I looked at were in phonetic dialect, and I just couldn't do it. The book seems to be intended as instructional; at least, there's a preface with suggestions for teachers.
Brown, Paul Cameron. The Long Necked Bottle - Project Gutenberg. Only runs about a dozen pages and is illustrated by Jon Vlakos. Neither poet nor illustrator have Wikipedia pages, but PG has several of the poet's works tagged as 'Canadian poetry.' I couldn't find Vlakos via Google and decided not to try searching Paul Cameron Brown. Publication year appears to be 1980 (mcmlxxx). The poems are all quite short and mostly not my thing.
Brown, Paul Cameron. Prussian Blue - Project Gutenberg. About 26 pages long. Not to my taste-- a lot of jagged words thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
Browning, Robert. Browning's Shorter Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I read about 50 pages (out of 600) and just didn't want to subject myself to more. I know Robert Browning is a Big Name in poetry, and I assume there's a reason, but I wasn't enjoying the poems.
De Casseres, Benjamin. The Shadow-Eater - Project Gutenberg. DNF (I read about half the book). Wikipedia quotes Eugene O'Neill as having called this guy 'the American Neitzsche.' Wikipedia also claims he used 'proto-Dada rhetoric.' I'm not sure where the intersection of those things might be, but it's not this book. These poems are self-consciously edgy with a side of expecting the audience to worship the poet. The book's short (about 60 pages), and I see the Neitzsche thing but not Dada. The poems are overblown (see quote from first one below). De Casseres published this in 1915. He was a fairly well known literary critic.
I'm still trying to figure out how to connect 'Dada' with 'rhetoric.'
THE PROTAGONIST
To Carlo de Fornaro*.
Medusa! I go toward you smiling, serene; my will is granite to your stare, and I have that within me which blows out the light of hells set there within your eyes and turns to mottled stone the serpents on your head.
I have woven of my pains a masque of bronze and the summits of my deepest hells are changed into the impetuous lightnings of my will and claws of steel have come to grow upon my mutilated members.
I have violated my own graves and set the skeletons of my selves at my meal-less feasting board, and still found tender meat upon their bones, and the marrow of their ancient griefs was as hippocrene to me.
Eternity! Infinity! I come toward thee swifter than a thought of death! I come toward thee bulging like a woman in her ninth month!—bulging with my hells, my devils, my Gethsemanes, booty of my sullen pride!
Benjamin De Casseres
[*Carlo de Fornaro does not have a Wikipedia page, but I think the person referred to is a newspaper writer who published a biography of Porfirio Diaz of Mexico and was convicted of criminal libel in absentia.]
Drury, Anna Harriet. The First of May - Project Gutenberg. 6th edition. 1851. 17 pages about Queen Victoria and the Great Exhibition. Primarily of historical interest.
Eden, Helen Parry. Bread and Circuses - Project Gutenberg. The poet's Wikipedia article is just barely more than a stub, so I couldn't find out much about her. She and her husband (who has no Wikipedia article) are said to have converted to Catholicism in 1909 and to have had three children. They were English. This book of poetry mentions one child, a girl named Betsey. A lot of the poems center on her. Most of the poems are small, domestic things. The attempts at playfulness fail, but some of the others show glimpses of life that feel genuine. I don't feel moved to look for more of the poet's work, but I also wouldn't run screaming from it.
Glasgow, Ellen. The Freeman and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. 1902. These poems are defiant and bleak and very angry at God. Glasgow was one of the better known post-Civil War novelists from the southern US. I'd never heard of her work before this (this may be because I haven't studied literature from that time and place, but I've at least heard of William Faulkner, so. I assume it has more to do with her being a woman who mostly wrote about women), but she has a long Wikipedia article. Given the title of the, I expected commentary on slavery, but the title poem seemed to me to be more personally bleak. It ends with this stanza:
"Around me, on the battle-fields of life,
I see men fight and fail and crouch in prayer;
Aloft I stand unfettered, for I know
The freedom of despair."
Hartigan, Patrick Joseph (writing as John O'Brien). Around the Boree Log - Project Gutenberg. This one may be of interest to fans of silent films or of Australian films as the book was adapted into a movie of the same title. (I didn't want to search 'John O'Brien' on Wikipedia and wade through the results. The title search went to the movie.) The author was a Roman Catholic priest. A lot of these poems center on the church and congregation as a community, and they draw a clear picture of certain aspects of life there from two points of view, one a boy growing up there and the other one of the priests. Time is not clearly linear between poems, and Wikipedia gives me the impression that the two are meant to be the same person. I think that both does and doesn't track as a lot of the poems are dated mostly by the recurring characters and their interactions. The poetry isn't spectacular, but it's also not terrible.
The movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Boree_Log
The author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Brien_(poet)
Holland, Norah M. Spun-Yarn and Spindrift - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I'm not quite sure what didn't work for me about these. I didn't find a lot about the poet online. https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Norah_M._Holland
A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems translated by Arthur Waley - Project Gutenberg. If I'm reading things right, the most recent of these poems is from the 9th century C.E. The introduction is patronizing with regard to the quality of Chinese literature and considers Chinese culture obviously inferior (but fascinating!). I'm torn about the translator. There are apparently many works that no one else has translated into English, so it's Waley's version, none, or learning to read Chinese. There's a similarity in style throughout the book. I can't tell how much is Waley's ideas about how poetry should sound and how much is an artifact of translation.
Huxley, Aldous. Selected Poems - Project Gutenberg. I generally enjoyed these. There was one poem that Huxley translated rather than wrote and that I found kind of disturbing. I'm not sure if that was a failure in translation or a success. (The poem in question is Stephane Mallarme's "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune")
Lowell, James Russell. The Cathedral - Project Gutenberg. Single long poem (53 pp.), navel-gazing with meanderings through philosophy, history, religion, etc., that has hints of the Old Man Yelling at Clouds.
Mackay, Isabel Ecclestone. Fires of Driftwood - Project Gutenberg. 1922. Some nature, some sentimental, a lot of child death/loss. Per Wikipedia, she was a Canadian poet and novelist born in 1875.
Medina, Frank J. Jingles - Project Gutenberg. The author does not have a Wikipedia article (there's an article for someone whose dates are completely incompatible unless he somehow published 60-ish years before he was born). Google brings up multiple Frank J. Medinas, none of whom are clearly this person (most clearly not). This book runs 36 pages is not by any stretch great poetry. He uses a lot of cliches, and the poems are rather prosaic. The most memorable are complaints about boardinghouse/hotel life. The sentimental poems are less good and less memorable.
Moreton, Marshall. The Dance of Dinwiddie - Project Gutenberg. Long poem (about 60 pages) about a flood of the Ohio river in 1884. Per Wikipedia, the river reached 54 ft (16 m) in West Virginia, and that's about 34 ft (10 m) above its normal stage. It crested in Cincinnati at 71.1 ft (21.7 m) in mid February. There was a party at one of the big houses, and when they went to leave, they couldn't. The waters kept rising around them and finally swept the house off its foundations. I think they all survived. Whether this was a real event or not, I haven't managed to discover. The poet doesn't have a Wikipedia page. Apart from many different editions of the poem, I can't find the author by Google. The poetry itself was not great. It didn't reach terrible, either. A large portion of the poem focuses on the dance and on introducing a few characters before disaster strikes. I didn't find most of them memorable.
Neilson, Francis. Blue and Purple - Project Gutenberg. Published 1920. According to the dedication, all of the poems are love poems to the poet's wife. Some of them are mourning poems for her, as well.
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur W.E. An Epic of Woman and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I found the poems tedious. I couldn't put my finger on what made them not work for me. Wikipedia says the author was a British poet and herpetologist. He's best known for having written that poem that starts with 'We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams...'
Potter, Miriam Clark. Rhymes of a Child's World - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Illustrated and fairly whimsical poems about both mundane things and imaginary creatures. Nothing terrible about the quality, just also nothing great, either. Author has no Wikipedia page.
Rice, Grantland. Base-ball Ballads - Project Gutenberg. DNF because I'm not particularly into baseball. Likely to be of much more interest to someone who likes the game or who is curious about the history of it. The poetry is a little slangy (for 1910), and poems tend toward the narrative. The poet was a well-known sports writer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantland_Rice
Simple Poems for Infant Minds - Project Gutenberg. Only 16 pages long. The poems are very simple. There's no mention of an author anywhere.
Wallace, Charles William. Spider-webs in Verse - Project Gutenberg. 1892. There are two essays in this book. I skimmed over them. There were bits of poetry embedded in them, but I couldn't be bothered to figure out whether those were quotations or the poet's own work. The poet's foreword is pretty clear that this is a vanity collection intended primarily for people who knew the poet personally. The poems themselves are a mixed bag. I liked some and found others really tedious. Wallace was was a scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. He and his wife seem to have done a good bit of research into the legal records of cases involving people working in theater, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that they weren't able to publish due to lack of funds. Wikipedia says that he turned to wildcatting in an effort to raise money for publishing, and I would be curious to know where he looked for oil and how he went about it. Just not sufficiently curious to do actual work trying to find out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_William_Wallace Wallace's wife does not have her own Wikipedia page.
Wells, Carolyn. Children of Our Town - Project Gutenberg. I suspect that this book is meant to be illustrated, partly based on the tone and layout of the poems and partly based on the title page. The poems are-- How to put it? They're part frothy, comedy and part sandpaper. Every poem that talks about how much fun kids have skating or skipping or what-have-you also includes dire warnings about how bad such activities are for old people (not just adult people but actually old people). I think it's all meant to be funny, but it wasn't quite. Wells wrote a vast number of books. Wikipedia's still building the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Wells
Young, T.F. Canada and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I didn't enjoy the poems I read. I couldn't find this author on Wikipedia and didn't look elsewhere.
One author below, Benjamin De Casseres is noteworthy for having critical praise as writing 'proto-Dadaist rhetoric' and as 'The American Nietzsche.' It's been 2-3 months since I read that Wikipedia article, and I still can't fit those two idea together at all.
Ballad Book edited by Katharine Lee Bates - Project Gutenberg. DNF. All of the ballads I looked at were in phonetic dialect, and I just couldn't do it. The book seems to be intended as instructional; at least, there's a preface with suggestions for teachers.
Brown, Paul Cameron. The Long Necked Bottle - Project Gutenberg. Only runs about a dozen pages and is illustrated by Jon Vlakos. Neither poet nor illustrator have Wikipedia pages, but PG has several of the poet's works tagged as 'Canadian poetry.' I couldn't find Vlakos via Google and decided not to try searching Paul Cameron Brown. Publication year appears to be 1980 (mcmlxxx). The poems are all quite short and mostly not my thing.
Brown, Paul Cameron. Prussian Blue - Project Gutenberg. About 26 pages long. Not to my taste-- a lot of jagged words thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
Browning, Robert. Browning's Shorter Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I read about 50 pages (out of 600) and just didn't want to subject myself to more. I know Robert Browning is a Big Name in poetry, and I assume there's a reason, but I wasn't enjoying the poems.
De Casseres, Benjamin. The Shadow-Eater - Project Gutenberg. DNF (I read about half the book). Wikipedia quotes Eugene O'Neill as having called this guy 'the American Neitzsche.' Wikipedia also claims he used 'proto-Dada rhetoric.' I'm not sure where the intersection of those things might be, but it's not this book. These poems are self-consciously edgy with a side of expecting the audience to worship the poet. The book's short (about 60 pages), and I see the Neitzsche thing but not Dada. The poems are overblown (see quote from first one below). De Casseres published this in 1915. He was a fairly well known literary critic.
I'm still trying to figure out how to connect 'Dada' with 'rhetoric.'
THE PROTAGONIST
To Carlo de Fornaro*.
Medusa! I go toward you smiling, serene; my will is granite to your stare, and I have that within me which blows out the light of hells set there within your eyes and turns to mottled stone the serpents on your head.
I have woven of my pains a masque of bronze and the summits of my deepest hells are changed into the impetuous lightnings of my will and claws of steel have come to grow upon my mutilated members.
I have violated my own graves and set the skeletons of my selves at my meal-less feasting board, and still found tender meat upon their bones, and the marrow of their ancient griefs was as hippocrene to me.
Eternity! Infinity! I come toward thee swifter than a thought of death! I come toward thee bulging like a woman in her ninth month!—bulging with my hells, my devils, my Gethsemanes, booty of my sullen pride!
Benjamin De Casseres
[*Carlo de Fornaro does not have a Wikipedia page, but I think the person referred to is a newspaper writer who published a biography of Porfirio Diaz of Mexico and was convicted of criminal libel in absentia.]
Drury, Anna Harriet. The First of May - Project Gutenberg. 6th edition. 1851. 17 pages about Queen Victoria and the Great Exhibition. Primarily of historical interest.
Eden, Helen Parry. Bread and Circuses - Project Gutenberg. The poet's Wikipedia article is just barely more than a stub, so I couldn't find out much about her. She and her husband (who has no Wikipedia article) are said to have converted to Catholicism in 1909 and to have had three children. They were English. This book of poetry mentions one child, a girl named Betsey. A lot of the poems center on her. Most of the poems are small, domestic things. The attempts at playfulness fail, but some of the others show glimpses of life that feel genuine. I don't feel moved to look for more of the poet's work, but I also wouldn't run screaming from it.
Glasgow, Ellen. The Freeman and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. 1902. These poems are defiant and bleak and very angry at God. Glasgow was one of the better known post-Civil War novelists from the southern US. I'd never heard of her work before this (this may be because I haven't studied literature from that time and place, but I've at least heard of William Faulkner, so. I assume it has more to do with her being a woman who mostly wrote about women), but she has a long Wikipedia article. Given the title of the, I expected commentary on slavery, but the title poem seemed to me to be more personally bleak. It ends with this stanza:
"Around me, on the battle-fields of life,
I see men fight and fail and crouch in prayer;
Aloft I stand unfettered, for I know
The freedom of despair."
Hartigan, Patrick Joseph (writing as John O'Brien). Around the Boree Log - Project Gutenberg. This one may be of interest to fans of silent films or of Australian films as the book was adapted into a movie of the same title. (I didn't want to search 'John O'Brien' on Wikipedia and wade through the results. The title search went to the movie.) The author was a Roman Catholic priest. A lot of these poems center on the church and congregation as a community, and they draw a clear picture of certain aspects of life there from two points of view, one a boy growing up there and the other one of the priests. Time is not clearly linear between poems, and Wikipedia gives me the impression that the two are meant to be the same person. I think that both does and doesn't track as a lot of the poems are dated mostly by the recurring characters and their interactions. The poetry isn't spectacular, but it's also not terrible.
The movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Boree_Log
The author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Brien_(poet)
Holland, Norah M. Spun-Yarn and Spindrift - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I'm not quite sure what didn't work for me about these. I didn't find a lot about the poet online. https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Norah_M._Holland
A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems translated by Arthur Waley - Project Gutenberg. If I'm reading things right, the most recent of these poems is from the 9th century C.E. The introduction is patronizing with regard to the quality of Chinese literature and considers Chinese culture obviously inferior (but fascinating!). I'm torn about the translator. There are apparently many works that no one else has translated into English, so it's Waley's version, none, or learning to read Chinese. There's a similarity in style throughout the book. I can't tell how much is Waley's ideas about how poetry should sound and how much is an artifact of translation.
Huxley, Aldous. Selected Poems - Project Gutenberg. I generally enjoyed these. There was one poem that Huxley translated rather than wrote and that I found kind of disturbing. I'm not sure if that was a failure in translation or a success. (The poem in question is Stephane Mallarme's "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune")
Lowell, James Russell. The Cathedral - Project Gutenberg. Single long poem (53 pp.), navel-gazing with meanderings through philosophy, history, religion, etc., that has hints of the Old Man Yelling at Clouds.
Mackay, Isabel Ecclestone. Fires of Driftwood - Project Gutenberg. 1922. Some nature, some sentimental, a lot of child death/loss. Per Wikipedia, she was a Canadian poet and novelist born in 1875.
Medina, Frank J. Jingles - Project Gutenberg. The author does not have a Wikipedia article (there's an article for someone whose dates are completely incompatible unless he somehow published 60-ish years before he was born). Google brings up multiple Frank J. Medinas, none of whom are clearly this person (most clearly not). This book runs 36 pages is not by any stretch great poetry. He uses a lot of cliches, and the poems are rather prosaic. The most memorable are complaints about boardinghouse/hotel life. The sentimental poems are less good and less memorable.
Moreton, Marshall. The Dance of Dinwiddie - Project Gutenberg. Long poem (about 60 pages) about a flood of the Ohio river in 1884. Per Wikipedia, the river reached 54 ft (16 m) in West Virginia, and that's about 34 ft (10 m) above its normal stage. It crested in Cincinnati at 71.1 ft (21.7 m) in mid February. There was a party at one of the big houses, and when they went to leave, they couldn't. The waters kept rising around them and finally swept the house off its foundations. I think they all survived. Whether this was a real event or not, I haven't managed to discover. The poet doesn't have a Wikipedia page. Apart from many different editions of the poem, I can't find the author by Google. The poetry itself was not great. It didn't reach terrible, either. A large portion of the poem focuses on the dance and on introducing a few characters before disaster strikes. I didn't find most of them memorable.
Neilson, Francis. Blue and Purple - Project Gutenberg. Published 1920. According to the dedication, all of the poems are love poems to the poet's wife. Some of them are mourning poems for her, as well.
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur W.E. An Epic of Woman and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I found the poems tedious. I couldn't put my finger on what made them not work for me. Wikipedia says the author was a British poet and herpetologist. He's best known for having written that poem that starts with 'We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams...'
Potter, Miriam Clark. Rhymes of a Child's World - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Illustrated and fairly whimsical poems about both mundane things and imaginary creatures. Nothing terrible about the quality, just also nothing great, either. Author has no Wikipedia page.
Rice, Grantland. Base-ball Ballads - Project Gutenberg. DNF because I'm not particularly into baseball. Likely to be of much more interest to someone who likes the game or who is curious about the history of it. The poetry is a little slangy (for 1910), and poems tend toward the narrative. The poet was a well-known sports writer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantland_Rice
Simple Poems for Infant Minds - Project Gutenberg. Only 16 pages long. The poems are very simple. There's no mention of an author anywhere.
Wallace, Charles William. Spider-webs in Verse - Project Gutenberg. 1892. There are two essays in this book. I skimmed over them. There were bits of poetry embedded in them, but I couldn't be bothered to figure out whether those were quotations or the poet's own work. The poet's foreword is pretty clear that this is a vanity collection intended primarily for people who knew the poet personally. The poems themselves are a mixed bag. I liked some and found others really tedious. Wallace was was a scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. He and his wife seem to have done a good bit of research into the legal records of cases involving people working in theater, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that they weren't able to publish due to lack of funds. Wikipedia says that he turned to wildcatting in an effort to raise money for publishing, and I would be curious to know where he looked for oil and how he went about it. Just not sufficiently curious to do actual work trying to find out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_William_Wallace Wallace's wife does not have her own Wikipedia page.
Wells, Carolyn. Children of Our Town - Project Gutenberg. I suspect that this book is meant to be illustrated, partly based on the tone and layout of the poems and partly based on the title page. The poems are-- How to put it? They're part frothy, comedy and part sandpaper. Every poem that talks about how much fun kids have skating or skipping or what-have-you also includes dire warnings about how bad such activities are for old people (not just adult people but actually old people). I think it's all meant to be funny, but it wasn't quite. Wells wrote a vast number of books. Wikipedia's still building the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Wells
Young, T.F. Canada and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I didn't enjoy the poems I read. I couldn't find this author on Wikipedia and didn't look elsewhere.
