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November 17, 2001 Pure Simon Poets, poetry, and a touch of autobiography.

eaders of National Review are familiar with John Simon's writing about movies, but in other venues he has written on just about everything, and with the same stringency. Here we have him on poets and poetry, and it is a dazzling book. Simon is courageously lucid, literate in several languages, formidably erudite, and can turn a phrase into a rapier — as when he observes that Whitman reads as well (or badly) in French as in English.

Woven into these fine essays are bits of autobiography. At Harvard, Simon wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the prose-poem genre, focusing on the difficult Arthur Rimbaud; he assisted the legendary polymath Harry Levin in his big course on modern comparative literature. (Why Harvard did not anoint Simon as Levin's successor is beyond me; from that missed moment literary studies at Harvard have declined precipitously.) In thinking of Levin with Simon at his side, one irresistibly recalls the great Benjamin Jowett, the redoubtable Oxford classicist about whom the student jingle went: "Here I come, my name is Jowett / All there is to know, I know it / What I don't know, is not knowledge / I am the Master of this College." One is also reminded of Harvard's own George Lyman Kittredge, a Chaucerian and Shakespearian who refused to take the oral examination for his Ph.D., explaining, "No one at Harvard is competent to examine me." Kittredge, by the way, unsuccessfully opposed tenure for Levin on the grounds that Levin was Jewish. Gaudeamus igitur.

Among the important matters Simon deals with here are Eliot's Quartets, Robert Graves and his dominatrix Laura Riding (what's in a name?), James Merrill, the "New York School" of poets, Oscar Wilde's poetry, a virtually unknown great poem about sexual intercourse (I will reprint this for you in a moment), Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Rilke, Larkin, Celan, Verlaine, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and a roundup review of 19 poets in translation, most of them awful, including some early lyrics by Karol Wojtyla, clearly not yet infallible.

Simon's approach is careful and intelligent, paying close attention to technique. The many languages in which he is fluent enable him to be especially persuasive when he evaluates translations of lyric poetry, many of the properties of which tend to be almost untranslatable.

Among Simon's many accomplishments in this book is making the persuasive case for a new look at Oscar Wilde's poetry. Long ago I decided that Wilde was a purveyor of paste gems, utterly derivative, a sort of anthologizer of the weakest aspects of the Romantic tradition. But Simon demonstrates that Wilde in his later lyrics did develop a distinctive voice and style that made worthwhile his technical skill. Simon is also delightful in his demythologization of the so-called New York School of poets (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler). With disarming — and amusing — candor, Simon writes: "To put my cards on the table . . . I declare that none of these poets has written what I would call a single poem of any importance." True; and I will myself here toss some cards on the table. I have read perhaps 50 poems by John Ashbery, and have taken the pledge: I will not read one more poem by him. He strings words together in pleasant patterns, but nothing happens; there's no there there. When Boswell asked Johnson whether any modern man could have written the Ossian poems, Johnson replied, "Any man, any woman, any child." This applies to Ashbery.

Simon's essay on James Merrill, a very gifted poet, opens a window on abnormal psychology. Merrill's life combined high culture with a continuous homosexual orgy. "There are witty aperçus, as when Merrill observes two of his male friends together: 'Pangs reserved exclusively for the gay shot through me — I was jealous of both parties at once.'"

Simon is so engaging and perspicacious a commentator that one is surprised to come upon such a judgment as the following: "For me, the Arch Poet of the modern English language has always been Robert Graves. E. E. Cummings, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and John Crowe Ransom follow closely, but Graves is 'it.'" That is so far outside the informed consensus that has evolved over the last 50 years that it would take sustained argumentation and demonstration even to attempt to defend it. In actuality, it is not sustainable. The consensus, as of the end of the 20th century, would be this: Eliot, Yeats (or Yeats, Eliot), Frost, Auden, Stevens, Pound. That, gentlemen, as Hemingway would say, is the "A" team.

Nobody can justly accuse Simon of critical timidity. Here's another example: "It would be preposterous, indeed foolish, to try to pick the greatest love poem in the English language. But I will stick my neck out and name my candidate for the finest overlooked love poem in modern English." After that first sentence, one starts thinking of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (Elegy XIX); the second sentence lowers the bar somewhat, but, as it turns out, not that much. Simon has unearthed a very fine, almost unknown poem by one Eric Robertson Dodds, professor of classics at Oxford. Dodds's other poetry was undistinguished; this one, however, entitled "When the Ecstatic Body Grips," beautifully describes the strength and ambiguity of one kind of sexual experience.

When the ecstatic body grips
Its heaven, with little sobbing cries,
And lips are crushed on hot blind lips,
I read strange pity in your eyes.

For that in you which is not mine,
And that in you which I love best,
And that, which my day-thoughts divine
Masterless still, still unpossessed,

Sits in the blue eyes' frightened stare,
A naked lonely-dwelling thing,
A frail thing from its body-lair
Drawn at my body's summoning;

Whispering low, "O unknown man,
Whose hunger on my hunger wrought,
Body shall give what body can,
Shall give you all — save what you sought."

Whispering, "O secret one, forgive,
Forgive and be content though still
Beyond the blood's surrender live
The darkness of the separate will.

"Enough if in the veins we know
Body's delirium, body's peace —
Ask not that ghost to ghost shall go,
Essence in essence merge and cease."

But swiftly, as in sudden sleep,
That You in you is veiled or dead;
And the world's shrunken to a heap
Of hot flesh straining on a bed.

That is a strong piece of writing by an obscure don. Not coincidentally did I think of 17th-century dialogues between body and soul. One must judge the man's behavior as deplorable: The goal is not to frighten the woman, let alone hurt her. He should have heeded those Renaissance commentators on love who urged mesure, "moderation," or, in the circumstances, "consideration." But congratulations to Simon for discovering this poem, and champagne to him for a dazzling book.

— Jeffrey Hart is author, most recently, of Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education