Poems of Jules Laforgue

 Poems of Jules Laforgue by Jules Laforgue, translated by Patricia Terry, 100 pages

Largely forgotten today, in his time Jules Laforgue was very much in the vanguard of French poetry. 

Her eyes said, "Do you understand?

Why don't you understand?"

But neither would take the first step;

We wanted to fall together to our knees.

(Do you understand?)

His verse often, unfortunately for him, reads like an echo of Baudelaire.

Man and his wife, to the body

Slaves, whirlpooling sewers

Webbed with harp-string nerves,

Serfs to all and jumping their tracks

Under miscellaneous attacks.

Yet even then, he has a voice that is uniquely his own.

And even if we trample where we like,

Never will we be as cruel as life...

Jules Laforgue died at the age of 27.  As always, one wonders what he might have been had he been given more life.  As it is, his verse proved more influential in the Anglosphere than it ever was among the Francophones, inspiring Pound and Eliot.

Like the thorn that sees the petals

Falling, by evening excused, from his best rose.

First Boredom, Then Fear

First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin by Richard Bradford, 263 pages

Philip Larkin is generally accepted as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the 20th century.  The publication of his collected letters in 1992, unfortunately, led to a chorus of denunciations due to his outspoken heretical views on matters of race and gender.  First Boredom, Then Fear is Richard Bradford's attempt to correct the record, casting Larkin's racism and xenophobia as consciously exaggerated in his letters and incidental to his poetry.

Certainly, Bradford treats his subject with respect.  His book is a literary biography in the best sense, illuminating the poetry through the life of the poet.  This is somewhat difficult with Larkin, who was, as Bradford notes, uncomfortable with anything that revealed too much of himself.  In Bradford's telling, even Larkin's closest friend could only say, "He didn't keep half his life in compartments."  And yet, paradoxically, this was the same poet who "spoke so candidly to his readers." 

Some readers, exposed to the candid Larkin, are likely to agree with those who saw in him the embodiment of "an undergraduate attitude perpetuated into adult life."  Like all artists, Larkin was a man of his time and place, and for him that was England in a particularly silly season.  Seen from this perspective, his commitment to an accessible, popular poetry and his lifelong fascination with the permanent things take on a value diminished but not extinguished by his chronic inability to commit himself.

Masaccio's Trinity

Masaccio's Trinity, edited by Rona Goffen, 138 pages

In the early 15th century, the artist Tommaso Guidi, better known as Masaccio, painted a fresco of the Trinity represented as the Throne of Mercy, flanked by the Blessed Virgin, St John the Apostle, and a pair of donors.  The fresco was covered up by renovations in the late 16th century, but was uncovered in the 19th, at which time it was detached from the wall and moved to another location in the church of Santa Maria Novella.  20th century renovations uncovered another part of the fresco in the original location, and the whole was reunited with considerable difficulty.  Even as damaged as it is, Masaccio's Trinity remains a striking work of art, remarkable for its use of perspective and fictive architecture.

The present book was published in 1998 as part of the Masterpieces of Western Painting series.  Predictably, perhaps unavoidably, the quality of the included essays are uneven, but all of them contain at least some interest.  The highlight is the essay "Time and the Timeless in Quattrocento Painting" by French poet Yves Bonnefoy. 

Ancient City

The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, translated by Willard Small, 323 pages

In The Ancient City, the 19th century historian Fustel de Coulanges explores the origins of the great city-states of the classical world, chief among them Sparta, Athens, and Rome.  All of these, he observes, were born out of a context of familial, tribal associations bound together by religious observance, in which the concept of property was centered on the ancestral tomb and law was "at the same time a code, a constitution, and a ritual."  The history of the ancient world then progresses or degenerates as a movement away from this hierarchical religious community towards a polity which is more egalitarian, secular, and dissolute.

In an age like our own when historiography generally treats religion as an accident, this landmark work indisputably establishes religion as the central reality of every ancient civilization.  The family, the tribe, and the city were all religious in their foundations.  Then, as now, those foundations are vulnerable to water and fire, to the slow drip of complacency and the burning flame of resentment.