Landor E-Book

Walter Savage Landor

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999

Beschreibung

Walter Savage Landor was born in Warwick, in 1775, and died in Florence in 1864. His output in prose and poetry was prodigious. 'No English writer - no English poet - of equal size and quality has been less attended to in the last fifty years' wrote Geoffrey Grigson in 1964, and though three selections appeared in the next eight years, this remains broadly true. Most editors have mixed verse and prose, doing him dubious service. This short and lively selection of Landor's poetry concentrates on the lyrical and epigrammatic poems in which, Maurice Craig believes, his greatest strength lay. Landor is fortunate in his editor, who shares much of his wide learning and whose eagerness to transmit his understanding and life-long admiration for Landor is reflected in this fresh collection. New readers will discover in Landor a remarkable poet; those who already know him well will welcome this charming anthology and Maurice Craig's thoughtful and perceptive introduction.

Leseprobe

WALTER SAVAGE LANDORONE HUNDRED POEMS

Selected and Introduced by MAURICE CRAIG

MERRION / LILLIPUT

London and Dublin

In memory of Geoffrey Taylor & Vivian Mercier

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

INTRODUCTION

1 Proem

POEMSPUBLISHED BEFORE 1837

2 Rose Aylmer

3 from Sappho

4 from Alcaeus

5 Corinna to Tanagra

6 Progress of Evening

7 To Sleep

8 Smiles soon abate

9 Past ruin’d Ilion

10 Mild is the parting year

11 Dirce

12 Lines to a Dragon Fly

13 Cleone to Aspasia

14 We hurry to the river

15 In Clementina’s artless mien

16 On a Quaker’s tankard

17 On love, on grief

18 Naturally

19 Demophilè rests here

20 To Burns

21 The Mermaid

22 To Priapus

23from Mimnermus

24 On a Poet in a Welsh Churchyard

25 To a Painter

26 Fæsulan Idyl

27 Farewell to Italy

POEMS PUBLISHEDIN 1846–7

28 from Moschus

29 Leontion on Ternissa’s death

30 On seeing her sit for her portrait

31 The Fæsulan Villa

32 Remain, ah not in youth alone

33 Dull is my verse

34 Thou hast not rais’d

35 What News (sent to Lady Blessington)

36 Tell me not things

37 He who in waning age

38 Milton

39 To Robert Browning

40 Boastfully call we all the world

41 Twenty years hence

42 In spring and summer

43 Retire, and timely

44 Night airs

45 The brightest mind

46 Ten thousand flakes

47 Various the roads of life

48 Plays

49 Sweet was the song

50 Fate! I have askt few things

51 Why, why repine

52 My guest! I have not led you

53 O friends! who have accompanied

54 The leaves are falling

55 From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass

56 Idle and light

57 Is it not better

POEMSPUBLISHED IN 1849–1864

58 I strove with none

59 Why do I praise a peach

60 Separation

61 In memory of Lady Blessington

62 Remonstrance and Reply

63 Lately our poets loiter’d

64 There falls with every wedding chime

65 A Funeral

66 Leaf after leaf

67 The Georges

68 The Dule of York’s Statue

69 March 24 1854

70 All is not over

71 Age

72 Death of the Day

73 On Catullus

74 Destiny Uncertain

75 ’Twas far beyond the midnight hour

76 Ye who have toil’d uphill

77 To Age

78 The cattle in the common field

79 Well I remember how you smiled

80from Appendix to the Hellenics

81from To Cuthbert Southey

82 When the mad wolf

83 Death indiscriminately gathers

84 The scentless laurel

85 A Quarrelsome Bishop

86 Here lies Landor

87 Come forth, old lion

88 What bitter flowers

89 A Reply to Tom Moore

90 To a Fair Maiden

91 Verses why Burnt

92 The Grateful Heart

93 Portrait

94 He who sits thoughtful

95 There are who say

96 Life’s Romance

97 There is a time

98 Death stands above me

99 Memory

100 A Friend to Theocritos in Egypt

NOTES

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

Copyright

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

Landor is fortunate in his editor, Maurice Craig, who shares much of his wide learning. His eagerness to transmit his understanding and life-long admiration for Landor is reflected in this fresh collection.

Merrion and Lilliput are happy to span the Irish Sea in publishing this anthology together, as a tribute both to W. S. Landor and to Maurice Craig.

INTRODUCTION

Landor will not fit in. He will neither stand up to be counted nor lie down as though dead. He is not an Augustan nor is he (for the most part) a Victorian, yet he is not quite an early Romantic either. His devotion to the concrete and his aversion to metaphysics sets him apart from them. As a prose-writer he is very much a special taste, and his lovers cannot justly complain if the vast majority of readers do not share their pleasure.

But his poetry is another matter. His own remark that ‘Poetry was always my amusement, prose my study and business’ has been swallowed without examination. Heine, it will be remembered, made a disclaimer about his verse, in almost identical terms. Writers’ own statements about their work are almost always suspect. They may not themselves know the truth, or they may not be able to tell it. Or if they are they may not wish to tell it. Critics have spoken of ‘half a dozen perfect lyrics’ or ‘a score of lapidary poems’, and dismissed the rest of his, admittedly much too bulky, output as of no account. But good judges have thought otherwise.

‘No English writer – no English poet – of equal size and quality has been less attended to in the last fifty years’ wrote Geoffrey Grigson in 1964, and though three selections appeared in the next eight years, this remains broadly true. Landor the poet should, I believe, be kept apart from Landor the prose-writer, to be seen to best advantage. Most editors have mixed verse and prose, doing him dubious service.

During the first 27 years of his adult life, till he was 45, his output was almost entirely in verse. The next seventeen years, from age 45 to age 62 (1820–1837) saw the production of the vast bulk of his prose Conversations and of the three long prose works. But for the next quarter-century he wrote mostly in verse, and more than half the poems in this book date from that period, or seem to do so. A considerable number were first published in 1846 when he was 71, and some of these may have been written ealier. But to judge by his publishing habits it is unlikely that many were. It is not easy to date Landor’s poems by their style, which changed very little.

He wrote a great deal of occasional verse, most of it very trivial and some of it little more than doggerel. (I have nevertheless given one or two poems of this character, on their merits.) Like many of his contemporaries he wrote some lengthy verse ‘tales’ which are rarely memorable. And like almost everybody else from James Thomson to Robert Bridges he wrote tragedies in blank verse, with no better success than the rest.

His greatest strength lies in lyric epigram and in the elegaic forms. He lacked, as he himself well knew, the architectonic power to sustain poetic quality in a long poem. He never wrote one as good as George Darley’s Nepenthe, yet he is a much more considerable poet than Darley, with a much wider range of effective human sympathy. The Landorian tone is unmistakable, inimitable and unparodyable.

He had found his personal voice by the time he was thirty, if not earlier. It can be heard even in his ambitious epic Gebir, written probably when he was 20, while living with a girl in South Wales and fathering an illegitimate child. One of the best-known of his lyric epigrams, RoseAylmer, was probably written very soon afterwards, though he improved it in 1831, when he was 56, and again, by the addition of one word, fifteen years later when he was 71. ‘Past ruin’d Ilion’, already a very good poem when first printed in 1831, was immeasurably improved in 1846 by the omission of the third stanza and the recasting of what had now become the last line.

Gebir is still fairly accessible, so I have omitted it intoto. In only three cases, on pages 18, 82 and 83, have I given excerpts from longer poems. One of these seems designed to stand alone as an epigram. The other two are patches of glowing poetry in poems otherwise somewhat slack and diffuse.

He is not a rural poet, as Wordsworth is, nor an urban poet like Prior or Pope. Rather he is the poet of a populated landscape, such as those which surround the cities of Florence and Bath, in which he spent so much of his life, or the idealised city-states of Greece and Ionia in which he set his Hellenics. Looked at in one light, he is the perfect product of the English public-school system: deeply versed in the classics and as much at home in Latin as in English, and a life-long rebel against authority in all its forms – except the linguistic, in which his respect for precedent is matched only by his own desire to be a legislator. Nor did he ever complain about the order of nature.

‘The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus sensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrows.’ The reader will find, in the pages which follow, this thought, here so perfectly expressed in prose, expressed again and again in verse, with varied imagery and emphasis, but with equal perfection. If romanticism means a yearning after the unattainable and an addiction to the mysterious, Landor was no romantic. What he sees of the world he sees clearly, and renders it with equal clarity. Regret there is, and in plenty (for he had much to regret), but always tempered with resignation. His melancholy is not the conventional melancholy of the eighteenth century. His epithets are sparingly used and freshly minted: ‘the peopled hills’ (page 13); ‘the entangling dance’ (page 17); ‘the flowering children and rough-rinded fathers’ (page 84).

The theme of old man and young girl is constantly recurrent. As a husband and a father he was a failure, perhaps not altogether through his own fault. But his affectionate and avuncular relationships with a long succession of charming young women lie behind his AesopandRhodope, his EpicurusLeontionandTernissa, his Anaxagoras in PericlesandAspasia, and even the Agamemnon in his Iphigeneia fragment, to say nothing of numerous lyrics in the following pages and throughout his work. Though vigorous of body and of a susceptible temperament, he knew the score: ‘Were it possible,’ he wrote to a friend in 1838, ‘that a beautiful girl could love me (which I need scarcely say it is not) I would not let her: I would not be guilty of so cruel an imposture.’ Fifty years later Lady Aberdare recalled his ‘chivalry and fire and gentleness’.

It is tempting to draw comparisons between Landor and Thomas Love Peacock. The superficial resemblances are obvious. They were very close contemporaries (Peacock ten years younger); both were steeped in classical literature; both wrote predominantly in dialogue form; both were involved with Wales; both were simultaneously radical and conservative; both stand aside from the literary mainstream of their time. Peacock’s last recorded words ‘By the immortal gods, I will not move!’ might well have been spoken by Landor. Both have always had their admirers.

But, by contrast with Landor, Peacock, for all his foibles, is affable and approachable. He is, in his prose, pre-eminently a social writer, and a sociable one. Landor, by contrast, is, in his prose at least, always the heavyweight. Peacock’s poetry, with half-a-dozen shining exemptions, is pale and derivative. But in almost every line that Landor wrote, the Landorian note is heard. Even his least considerable scraps are clearly by a major poet. Peacock’s life, though not without its sorrows, was a success. Landor’s is remembered as a series of well spaced-out disasters. The marmoreal calm of his style stands in sharp contrast to the turbulence of his life: the self-defeating quarrels and the sudden rages which erupted sometimes in physical violence. ‘He had a loving heart’ observed Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘and was born to tyrannise.’ No writer has more aptly exemplified the antithesis between the chaos of life and the order of art.

The order is, for the most part, a small-scale order. Only very rarely, as in the ScipioPolybiusandPanaetius (prose) conversation, could he control any form more than a few pages long. We read his narratives less for the story-line than for their poetic texture. A partial exception is the Hellenics, the most coherent group of poems which he ever published. Ten of them were first written in Latin, and published before 1815, as IdylliaHeroica, and in 1846–7 he translated these into English and published them with eighteen similar poems in English, as TheHellenics of 1847. When, in 1859, a (very disorderly) fresh edition of the Hellenics appeared, nine of the Latin poems had been re-translated, in versions which are by no means always inferior to those of 1847.

The 1847 Hellenics, and the full text of Gebir, are still reasonably accessible in the Temple Classics edition of 1907. These, along with some other aspects of Landor’s verse, are not represented in this book. The Hellenics, though uneven in quality – as which long poems are not? – demand to be read together and in their own context. Like nearly all his poetry, they repay reading by the kind of reader who can find for himself those passages where word is matched with word, the imagery blossoms and the note of this most individual of poets is struck, for five, ten or fifteen lines at a time.

So what, in the end, becomes of Landor’s evaluation of his poetry versus his prose? In modern jargon, he asserted his professionalism in the latter while confessing to being an amateur in the former. The truth, I believe, is that as a prose writer he suffered from the financial independence which gave him leisure to write. He never had to meet a deadline, or write to a prescribed length, or deal with a specific subject on a realistic scale. A little of the discipline of the market might have done him good. But the disciplines of poetry are quite other. They include the consistent practice of verse, day after day, the exploitation of classic forms and the exploration of new ones, and an assured command of imagery and diction, so that thought and expression are one. On all these counts Landor qualifies.

He had an aversion to the sonnet-form, and wrote only one, translated from Alfieri, unless the blank verse poem which I have put at the head of this selection can be counted as a a sonnet of sorts.