| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1939/05/02 | William Wordsworth | Trosachs |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 3
| [John] Berryman is right about Wordsworth being a good poet. I read his sonnets in the Oxford Book today. "The Trosachs" is good, so is "Nuns fret not," which I should have remembered. Then I had forgotten "Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn" which is a swell sonnet - a good last line to a good sonnet. 5 |
| 1939/05/02 | William Wordsworth | Trosachs |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 3
| [John] Berryman is right about Wordsworth being a good poet. I read his sonnets in the Oxford Book today. "The Trosachs" is good, so is "Nuns fret not," which I should have remembered. Then I had forgotten "Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn" which is a swell sonnet - a good last line to a good sonnet. 5 |
| 1939/10/22 | Jules Laforgue | Complaintes |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 66
| I think the best modern poetry is being written in France, has been for the last fifty years. Between 1880 and 1920 perhaps the only good poetry was being written there. This week, for the first time I read the Complaintes of Jules Laforgue: or some of them. They are very fine and very moving: more moving than anything in Enlish since then, except by Yeats. I make a big exception for Yeats, because he is very good, too. |
| 1939/11/08 | Ezra Pound | Lustra |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 86
| Reading my diary for 1931, which I ought to destroy, I am surprised at my childish paganism. Announcing what I wanted: to be drunk. To the end of useful notes for novel: in my 16 year old unquietness, what things stirred me, and seemed to be connected with desires. "Autumn Crocus." Omelet and rhine wine at the Trocadero. Edna Best, Madeleine Carroll, etc. Picture of Clara Bow on a beach in Sporting and Dramatic. Cocktail Bar at the Mayfair. Side cars. Grogs in Strasbourg. Maison Olivier, Strasbourg. Anita Page in War Nurse. "Echoes of the Jungle," by Duke Ellington. "Georgia on my Mind," by McKinney's Cotton Pickers. T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land." Oxford. Cambridge. Ezra Pound's "Lustra." |
| 1939/12/14 | Herbert J.C. Grierson | Methaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C. |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 104
| The books on my bed are Grierson's Metaphysical Poets, Bossuet (whom I haven't read a line of yet), Saroyan, the New Yorker and F. García Lorca. Lorca is fine. A swell poet. For that reason I stop writing this and go back to reading him. Flamenco poetry. Very fine stuff. |
| 1939/12/17 | Federico Garcia Lorca | Romancero Gitano. Poema del Cante Jondo. Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 106
| Lorca is easily the best religious poet of this century. I wish I could stop trying to make judgments-"best in the century" etc. Never got over the sin of editing a college yearbook. (What an embarrassing thing that was. Would like to buy back all the copies and burn them.) He is a "flamenco" poet. Flamenco music is terribly religious: Lorca's poetry is very very deeply religious. The poems of arrests are fascinating in the Romancero Gitano. There are certain attitudes in Prendimiento De Antonito el Camborio en el Camino de Sevilla which are the primitive and formal attitudes of figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting. The Arrest itself seems to be a kind of Douanier Rousseau treatment |
| 1939/12/21 | Herbert J.C. Grierson | Methaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C. |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 121
| I opened up Grierson's Metaphysical Poets and saw on the page Donne's "Nocturnal upon Saint Lucie's Day": today being the winter solstice and the shortest day I thought it must be Saint Lucy's: but looking into my Daily Missal I found Saint Lucy's Day on the 13th and that today is the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Then this is really my Saint's day. I went to Mass and received [Communion] this morning but didn't know anything about it, and I am sorry. |
| 1940/04/00 | Federico Garcia Lorca | Romancero Gitano. Poema del Cante Jondo. Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 166
| I admit freely that I looked at a couple of García Lorca's poems, from the Poema del Cante Jondo, on the beach, and saw even more clearly than before how good he is and-how many of the Spanish words I don't know. |
| 1940/11/03 | John Donne | Poems of John Donne / ed. H.J.C. Griesron |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 250
| The other thing I have just understood for the first time is Donne's Ecstasy. I have been reading it for years and getting lost after the lines As twixt two equal armies, fate... |
| 1940/11/03 | Robert Herrick | Hesperides: or the Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. / British Poets, edited by F.J. Child |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 250-51
| Another thing: I am no longer sore at Herrick, or not as sore as I was. I think he is a Highschool boy, yes. But he has some fine lines and slick ideas... "The Argument of His Book" (Hesperides) is good. Some lines from a long epigram "Upon M. Ben Jonson" are very good. Some lines from the "Farewell to Sack" are fine. I take back what I have said about Herrick, except I am tired of poems about how drunk we all love to get. |
| 1940/11/13 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Rime of the Ancient Mariner |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 256
| The first time I ever read the Ancient Mariner was in Saint Antonin, when I was about eleven. The Mayor's older son had had it in the Lycee and he lent the book-it was in a thin little book by itself, to me, or to my father and I read it . Anyway, I reread the Ancient Mariner today-for, maybe, the tenth time since 1928, and for the first time realized what a really great poem it is! |
| 1941/02/02 | Paul Valery | Variety |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 481
| "In numerous minds is to be found the coexistence of faith and atheism, of anarchy in the sentiments and of some doctrine of order in the opinions. On the same subject, the majority of us will have several theses, which, at the same moment, are without difficulty mutually interchangeable in our judgements according to the passing mood." Paul Valery-Variety. p. 188. |
| 1941/02/04 | T.S. Eliot | Waste Land |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 301
| This morning, sitting alone at a big empty table in the vasty hall of the caf' I reflected upon the elegant works of T. S. Eliot, particularly the part in the "Waste Land" where he says O, O, O, That Shakes-pearian rag It's so elegant It's so intelligent and then I thought to myself, wasn't he bold when he wrote that. How sly! What an independent little old elf! How cute! The lines embarrassed me the moment I was sixteen, and I didn't realize, until this morning, how much. |
| 1941/02/09 | Dylan Thomas | 18 Poems |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 305
| I've got a book of poems by Dylan Thomas and I can't put the book down. I read him in Horizon and it was a good poem. I read him now, and he is a good poet. The poems stand on the page and look very valuable. His writing is very strong and sinewy and has much craft and wit but it is musically tremendously coherent... He is so much better than T. S. Eliot that Eliot and Auden and even Spender, all those guys, become very insignificant, trivial, chatty, slightly mystical, drawing room boys, which we always knew they were anyway. |
| 1941/09/26 | Coventry Patmore | Poems |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 410
| In spite of a stupid, pompous, inanity stuck in the front of the Phoenix Library Edition of [Coventry] Patmore's Poems, I have again made some kind of effort to read him but I guess it's no use. The quotation which should have kept me out of the book in the first place is: "I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which care for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me!" It is enough to make you want to throw the book on the floor and stamp on it. I give up wondering what he could possibly mean by "I have respected posterity." But if he does mean anything by it at all, as for instance "I have worried a lot about whether or not I would be remembered after I died," then he is confessing himself to be a man with very trivial concerns. |
| 1941/10/10 | John Keats | Eve of St. Agnes |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 435
| Keats takes the content of his imagination and builds a fairy palace and invites himself to a poor substitute for a physical feast in this unreal palace. Keats describes what is unreal, Coleridge what is real. (Keats' experience is usually unreal, because at one remove from reality, but Coleridge's experience is real because of the complete integration between the poem itself and his imagination.) His poem is the world in his mind. Keats takes what is in his mind and uses it to build an unreal world for his poem. The Ancient Mariner is thoroughly well geared to Coleridge's imagination because it is his own experience retold as a myth. The Eve of Saint Agnes represents not a myth for a real psychological experience but a daydream of some physical experience that Keats never had, and is therefore unreal. |
| 1941/10/10 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 435
| Coleridge sometimes gets up to the heights of real myth,too. Keats, seldom. Coleridge, like a surrealist, describes the content of his own imagination and the result is good because the content of his imagination is interesting in itself (Kubla Khan and Ancient Mariner, anyway). |
| 1941/10/10 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Rime of the Ancient Mariner |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 435
| Coleridge sometimes gets up to the heights of real myth,too. Keats, seldom. Coleridge, like a surrealist, describes the content of his own imagination and the result is good because the content of his imagination is interesting in itself (Kubla Khan and Ancient Mariner, anyway). |
| 1941/11/09 | Charles Baudelaire | Fleurs du mal |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 476
| In all evil, there is something holy perverted. The dialectic between the good that underlies evil and the evil into which this good is perverted is frightful. In every evil act of Baudelaire's life, God was present to remind him of exactly what he was doing, who he was crucifying. That is the greatness and the terror of the Fleurs du mal, and it is proved by the fact that Baudelaire finally admitted it, and gave in to God [whom] he had killed all his life. And anybody who can't see the intimate connection between Baudelaire's love of evil and his return to the love of God, had best leave him strictly alone. What terror is in that book! God, save me! |
| 1947/05/00 | T.S. Eliot | Four Quartets |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 170
| The autobiography [The Seven Storey Mountain] comes along slow. Haven't seen page proofs. Bob Giroux must be very busy. I was reading T. S. Eliot"”"East Coker," etc. & this time I liked him a lot. I got those books by Ruysbroeck"”in French. He is wonderful. I'd like to do an edition of him for N. Directions. As it is I am going to do John of the Cross' Dark Night for them in English & Spanish with notes"”using Peers' translation & not doing one of my own. Also I am doing a book of more or less disconnected "thoughts" & aphorisms [Seeds of Contemplation] about the interior life also for N. Directions. |
| 1947/09/07 | Paul Claudel | Connaisance de l'Est |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 105
| Paul Claudel's verse bores me but his poetic prose about the Orient is wonderful. I have never read anything as good in its species as Novembre, La Pluie, Le Cocotier, etc. Patrice de la Tour du Pin writes too much: it is too glib. I don't like it and I don't like his way of talking about Christ. It is too silly. |
| 1947/10/16 | Patrice Tour du Pin, de la | Dedicated Life and Poetry |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 125
| Laughlin sent Patrice de la Tour du Pin's Dedicated Life and Poetry [which appeared as part of La Somme de Poesie, 1946]. At first sight, seeing the titles, "Solitude," "Virginity," I began to feel enthusiastic. Now the thing depresses me: the clever and obscure language, the context that I don't know or understand, and the vague impression that he has simply taken the terms of the contemplative life and watered them down and degenerated them to suit the experiences of a poet. All this makes me feel sad. |
| 1947/10/19 | Patrice Tour du Pin, de la | Dedicated Life and Poetry |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 127
| I have tried again to read Patrice de la Tour du Pin and sometimes find him very antipathetic. All that stuff is not for me. Keep away from poets! |
| 1947/12/16 | Robert Lowell | Lord Weary's Castle |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 146
| Yesterday Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell came and it is terrific. Harcourt Brace sent it after I had begged all around the town. But Lowell is a poet. I'd like to write an article about him. You could compare "The Quaker Graveyard" with Hopkins' "Wreck of the Deutschland," and Lowell is in some ways better than Hopkins. Though he is not as deep spiritually, he is sometimes more of a poet. |
| 1948/03/04 | Marbodus Redonensis | Opuscula |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 175
| Yesterday I discovered that there were marvelous poets in the 12th century. I never knew it except by vague hearsay. But for the first time I read Marbod of Rennes and he is wonderful. Such skill! What he can do with meters and rhymes. He is very slick and very sure of himself and his poetry is above all alive. It is just as much a living medium as classical Latin and somehow younger than classical Latin. Plenty of delicacy and energy at the same time. Serious in such a way that he is as stimulating as if he were being funny, and his poems make you dance and laugh and make you very happy. |
| 1948/03/14 | T.S. Eliot | Four Quartets |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 183
| After dinner I sat here in the sun and read T. S. Eliot's Four Quartet, or rather East Coker and part of The Dry Salvages. Eight years ago, when we were at the cottage at Olean, Nancy Flagg had East Coker in ms., for it was still not published, and we all said we didn't like it. But today I like it quite a bit except I paused a bit at the archaic English, but there were only two or three lines of that. I was surprised at so much St. John of the Cross and do not immediately see how it fits in. |
| 1948/06/06 | T.S. Eliot | Four Quartets |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 210
| I wouldn't mind being recognized as a poet if I really were a poet. But it gives me comfort to read poets who are poets. Eliot's Little Gidding and Robert Lowell. "¦the flies, the flies of Babylon. |
| 1948/09/03 | Robert Graves and Alan Hodges | Reader over Your Shoulder |
Ltrs: CforT p. 6
| It has been quite humiliating for me to find out (from [Robert] Graves and [Alan] Hodge [authors of The Reader over Your Shoulder, which Waugh had sent to Merton]) that my bad habits are the same as those of every other second-rate writer outside the monastery. The same haste, distraction, etc. Really I like The Reader over Your Shoulder very much. In the first place it is amusing. And I like their thesis that we are heading towards a clean, clear kind of prose. Really everything in my natur"”and in my vocation too"”demands something like that if I am to go on writing. The contemplative life demands that everything, all one's habits of thought and modes of action, should be simple and definite and free of waste[d] motion. In every department of our life, that is our biggest struggle. You would be shocked to know how much material and spiritual junk can accumulate in the corner of a monastery and in the minds of the monks. You ought to see the pigsty in which I am writing this letter. |
| 1948/09/06 | Robert Graves and Alan Hodges | Reader over Your Shoulder |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 229
| One good thing. Evelyn Waugh sent me a fine book to help me to write better, The Reader over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodges. They seem to think that the time for experimental prose writing is now spent and that we are heading for clear, logical prose that can be rapidly read. I have a definite hunger for clarity and order in my writing"”not necessary for conventions of grammar. Anyway it helps me see my faults and has ascetic implications as well. |
| 1948/11/03 | Therese Lentfoehr S.D.S. | I Sing of a Maiden |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 188
| I would like to assure you that I was very glad to get that beautiful big book, I Sing of a Maiden & the only reason I accepted the job of reviewing it was because I couldn't resist such an acquisition for our library. I am no longer reviewing anything"”and incidentally I felt rather cheap after having made the statement reflecting on all Catholic poets in the U.S. en masse. I shouldn't have said what I did if I did not believe it"”but I wish I could have avoided the subject. |
| 1948/11/18 | Therese Lentfoehr S.D.S. | Give Joan a Sword |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 188
| It would be inhuman for a person to resist the temptation to answer such a beautiful letter as your last one, and fortunately I have a moment in which to do so and to thank you for the windfall of books. I have already passed one of I Sing of a Maiden to our choir-novitiate, where they can do with a little life and color and Marian music to help them along. The other will be for the guest-house. Meanwhile I have been reading Give Joan a Sword with the greatest pleasure, and agreeing with the reviewers on the jacket that the poems are delicate, graceful, full of serenity and peace and order which mine are not. Yes, I liked "First Mass in the Catacombs": and envied such a marvelous privilege. I liked the one on Murillo's painting and "Port-of-Call" and all those that brought back to me the atmosphere of the Eternal City. But I thought the very best was "Write it upon the Stars." |
| 1948/11/18 | Therese Lentfoehr S.D.S. | I Sing of a Maiden |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 188
| It would be inhuman for a person to resist the temptation to answer such a beautiful letter as your last one, and fortunately I have a moment in which to do so and to thank you for the windfall of books. I have already passed one of I Sing of a Maiden to our choir-novitiate, where they can do with a little life and color and Marian music to help them along. The other will be for the guest-house. Meanwhile I have been reading Give Joan a Sword with the greatest pleasure, and agreeing with the reviewers on the jacket that the poems are delicate, graceful, full of serenity and peace and order which mine are not. Yes, I liked "First Mass in the Catacombs": and envied such a marvelous privilege. I liked the one on Murillo's painting and "Port-of-Call" and all those that brought back to me the atmosphere of the Eternal City. But I thought the very best was "Write it upon the Stars." |
| 1949/12/03 | Kenneth Patchen | Dark Kingdom |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 374
| Kenneth Patchen's "For losing her love all would I profan" struck me with great force and after a moment I realized that for me (perhaps not for him) it simply echoes St. John of the Cross' Por toda la hermosura nunca yo me perdere [for all the beauty in the world never will I lose myself]. |
| 1949/12/10 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 377
| I am abashed by the real solitude of Rilke which I admire, knowing, however, it is not for me because I am not like that. But his is a solitude I understand objectively, perhaps not by connaturality at all, but it moves me tremendously. You see, to begin with, he did not want it or go looking for it. It found him. Tremendous how he finds himself in the solitude of Christ (David) in the psalms, all of a sudden, there on of Malte Laurids Brigge. Who is the French poet that he quotes there? |
| 1949/12/20 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 380-81
| Rilke's Notebooks have so much power in them that they make me wonder why no one writes like that in monasteries. Not that there have not been better books written in monasteries, or no books more serene. But monks do not seem to be able to write so well-it is as if our professional spirituality sometimes veiled our contact with the naked realities inside us. It is a common failing of religious to lose themselves in a collective, professional personality to let themselves be cast in a mold. |
| 1949/12/30 | Kenneth Patchen | Dark Kingdom |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 390
| I like Kenneth Patchen's Dark Kingdom, but it does not do anything beyond interesting the surface of my mind. It does not make a deep impression and it cannot because it is only poetry. The only books that move me deeply are the Bible, St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, and a few others like that: Tauler, St. Augustine-parts of St. Bernard-St. Gregory of Nyssa. |
| 1950/02/23 | T.S. Eliot | Four Quartets |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 411
| I came out of choir yesterday morning after the distribution of the ashes and put on our shoes and socks in the cloister and walked off to work with a keen desire to read some very obscure, very disciplined poetry-something like William Empson. Of course I was much too busy. But this unexpected hunger still strikes me as having been clean and even somehow appropriate to Lent. Only at the end of work did I get a minute, and I came away from the archives with Four Quartets and read the magnificent opening to "Little Gidding" which, though not obscure, exactly suited my mood. |
| 1951/04/06 | Jean Cayrol | Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 454
| camps. When first arrested, they dreamt they had not been arrested but had escaped. Then, resigned to their arrest, they dreamt they were allowed to go home from time to time. This in prison, before the camp itself. In the concentration camp magnificent dreams of landscapes, of baroque architecture. Color in their dreams. (And I thought of Doctor Morris Thompson in Louisville who was telling everybody about his visions of color. Doctor Henry thought he was going crazy!) Blue dreams, green dreams, red dreams of salvation. A sailor who saw a diamond cross rising out of the sea. Dreams which tell us something about our own immediate future! Things the body already knows before the soul has found them out. Jung, I think, holds something to this effect. This worked out in those salvation dreams. I have walked alone on the road to the barns, looking at the high clouds and thinking, "In war and in battle men look up sometimes and see such clouds as these." Cayrol tells of the Appel [roll-call] at Mauthausen, men being beaten up in the presence of a magnificent sunset on the Austrian Alps. The ones who were completely incommunicado were called Nacht und Nebel [Night and Mist], which might conceivably be the name of a perfume. And I thought of St. John of the Cross. His Spiritual Canticle was born of the imprisonment at Toledo! Confirmation of Cayrol's thesis in these two studies. |
| 1953/04/07 | Mark Van Doren | Spring Birth and Other Poems |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 24
| It was wonderful to get the letter and the book [Spring Birth and Other Poems], which both arrived long enough before Lent for me to have answered them long ago, if I had not been busy. I know you understand what "busy" means, because I think I am closer to people working in the woods than I would be writing them letters. But now that Easter has come I can at least tell you how happy the letter made me. It made the writing of [The Sign of ] Jonas seem completely justified. I had a little trouble with the book within the Order, and it does not appear that I will be writing another one like it quite soon. But that does not matter very much and I do not regard it as strange that Trappists should be surprised that a Trappist should publish a journal! Spring Birth is wonderful. I still think I like the sonnets best of all"”I saw them before in the pamphlet. |
| 1954/10/16 | Mark Van Doren | Selected Poems |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 26
| At last it is raining and I not only have the time to write a letter but am more or less in a mood for one. So after a long delay I thank you for Selected Poems which was a very pleasant surprise. I was really happy to have it. Fr. Matthew [McGunigle] and I had been cooking up a plot to ask you for some books of verse of yours, and then this came. Now he has it, but before he took it I had time to dig into Winter Diary, which I had never read, and to re-read so many other favorites. I still like your sonnets best. And I want to use one of the later short pieces ("If they could speak") in a book I have been writing this fall, which is all about man being in the image and likeness of God. It is largely about Adam, and the poem would come in where I talk about him naming the animals. The book is called (so far) "Existential Communion" [eventually published as The New Man]. It is about the business of "coming to oneself" and "awakening" out of the inexistential torpor that most people live in, and finding one's real identity"”in God. |
| 1956/07/18 | Stephen Spender | Collected Poems |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 47
| Spender's Collected Poems-a most satisfying book. He has done a better job of versifying than Auden. No man should allow himself to publish so many poems in one volume as Auden did-and now, on top of everything else, the blurb on the back of the volume says "Auden"¦is the most impressive poet of his generation." |
| 1956/09/01 | Helen Waddell | Wandering Scholars |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 77
| The Cistercians of the 12th. century were forbidden to write not only rhyming verse, as Helen Waddell records, but any verse. And then, she has Serlo of Wilton always in a cowl, not only after his conversion, but before. [Note 9: Serlo of Wilton (1110?-1181) was a writer of erotic verse who later entered the monastic life, eventually becoming abbot of the monastery of L'Aumone near Chartres, France.] |
| 1957/08/10 | Ezra Pound | Hugh Selwyn Mauberley |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 110-11
| The best of Pound is in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley... Sometimes as much like Ogden Nash as he is like Auden. Pound found marvellous words everywhere. One feels that the most fruitful moments in the life of Julien Green are those which he spent looking out of his window, not thinking anything, just looking at the buildings and the trees of Paris. |
| 1957/08/14 | Publius Ovidius Naso | Metamorphoses |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 112
| Frankly, Ovid had terrible taste. Yet in the Metamorphoses there are some wonderful things mixed up with ponderously comical lapses into crudity. The goddesses who are able to sustain their nobility for twenty lines and then break down into slapstick and hit someone in the face with a dead fish. Followed by the inevitable change into a plant, a brook, a newt, a frog, a tree. But I ought to keep quiet and look at it again in Latin. |
| 1957/09/22 | Saint-John Perse | Excile: and other Poems |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 120-21
| I wonder if it is a sin against poverty to read the poems of St. John Perse. They are magnificent. Immensely rich. To read such poems is to be a millionaire, to live in splendor. Your heart becomes a palace, full of all that is fine in the world. Exile, the first that I read, my discovery, months ago, I still like the best. More perfect and spontaneous delight in Crusoe-moves one more personally, more intimately. Such joy in reading it. Only Stages has let me down a little so far-it is halting and does not have the sustained grandeur of the rest |
| 1957/09/22 | Saint-John Perse | Excile: and other Poems |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 121-22
| Tremendous religious power and purity of St. John Perse's Rain. Four lines like the prophetic books of Blake, but a sane and ordered Blake in communication with the world. I mean the lines: "Dressez, dressez, à bout de caps, les catafalques du Hapsbourg, les hauts bûchers de l'homme de guerre, les hauts ruchers de l'imposture etc. etc." ["Raise up, raise up, at the end of promontories, the Hapsburg catafalques, the tall pyres of the man of war, the tall apiaries of imposture."] St. J. P. writes like the prophets of the Old Testament and like the Greeks atthe same time. But never copies them, never mimics them, never borrows their expressions. It is all new and his own. A great effort of sincerity and detachment. |
| 1958/05/03 | Pablo Antonio Cuadra | Jaguar y la luna : poemas |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 200
| Pablo Antonio Cuadra arrived with his wife last evening and left this afternoon. Read me some very fine poems - his latest - El jaguar y la luna - after showing me some Indian ceramic designs by which they were inspired. Fine short poems with a very high degree of mystical quality and power. Was deeply moved by dialogue of two stars (Indians believed warriors and mothers became "stars" in heaven because of their suffering). The warrior says he died that the future might be born and that he has not seen that future. This was what most moved me, because perhaps this also is my own destiny. All the poems had very impressive titles. Were at once very Asiatic and very American. This is the voice of the true America. |
| 1958/10/07 | Cesar Vallejo | Poesías completas (1918-1938) / Cesar Vallejo ; recop. y pról. de Cesar Miro |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 223
| Reading Vallejo. Oye a tu masa a terrific poem which I will translate. |
| 1959/08/09 | William Blake | Complete writings : with all the variant readings / William Blake ; ed. by Geoffrey Keynes |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 315-16
| And several books on Blake from U.K. library (I had asked for them). When I was in Louisville I picked up, on the wing, "by chanc" Blake's poems and realized again how much I love them, how much I am at home with him. Reading the prophetic books with immense enjoyment-feeling thoroughly at home in them now, though I don't follow all the cast of characters. It is a life-long study in itself. Just glanced at some of his letters which Victor brought. Blake is never merely indifferent. Always if not inspired, at least very alive. Never dead. I love Blake. |
| 1959/09/12 | Ernesto Cardenal | Gethsemani, Ky |
Ltrs: CforT p. 114
| Your poems about Gethsemani [Gethsemani, Ky.] are very effective and have a special meaning for anyone who knows the scene and the incidents. The simplest ones are the best"”for instance the little song "Hay un rumor de tractores "¦" and the other one about the smell of the earth in the spring in Nicaragua, and the ones that bring to mind contrasts and comparisons with Nicaragua. The one about the snow is very effective: perhaps it is the best "¦ I think you are right in saying that these are less good than the ones you wrote before coming here. Certainly they have less power. But they should be what they are, simple and quiet and direct. And with that charming Chinese brevity. On the other hand your poems in the Revista de la Literatura are splendid. They constitute some of the few really good political poems I have read"”they have the quality, and even more, that the left-wing poets had in the thirties. They are powerful and arresting and I am very happy with them. I wish I knew more about the background and the story. I think they are clearly your best poems. |
| 1959/12/20 | Robert Lax | Circus of the Sun |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 360-61
| Lax's Circus book is a tremendous poem, an Isaias-like prophecy which has a quality you just don't find in poetry today, a completely unique simplicity and purity of love that is not afraid to express itself. The circus as symbol and sacrament, cosmos and church-the mystery of the primitive world, of paradise, in which men have wonderful and happy skills, which they exercise freely, as at play. But also a sacrament of the eschaton, our heavenly Jerusalem. The importance of human love in the circus-for doing things well. It is one of the few poems that has anything whatever to say. And I want to write an article about it. |
| 1959/12/29 | Charles Peguy | Mystery of the Holy Innocents |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 364
| Read some of Peguy's "Mystery of the Holy Innocents" to the novices last evening. |
| 1960/04/16 | Thomas Trahern | Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 384
| Excellent book by Scholem Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Traherne's Centuries, sent by Natasha Spender. Finished Fromm on love. And a little thing by Jungmann, The Sacrifice of the Church. |
| 1960/05/06 | Robert Lax | Circus of the Sun |
Ltrs: CforT p. 68
| I wish you could see one good book, though, that is unknown, by my friend Robert Lax"”The Circus of the Sun. I'll ask him to send you a review copy for Kultura. It is an expensive limited edition, beautifully done. Lax you would like. I have read the Bouyer book, or part of it, and it is very fine. I am interested in Protestantism now, am having some meetings with Protestant theologians, pleasant, honest and earnest men: but how serious are they I wonder. No more than Catholic theologians of the same temper and background. |
| 1960/06/12 | Ernesto Cardenal | Gethsemani, Ky |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 10
| Ernesto Cardenal's book of poems about Gethsemani arrived. Small, bare, but warm poems, austere annotations, like Haiku, one of the most elementally simple being the one about a dog barking behind this wood here and another replying behind that other wood further away. His allusions to Nicaragua, to the train by the lake of Managua, to the steamboat Victoria that sank-give them a special quality. But they do not need this reference to be already very personal, pure and sacred. The religious ones are often the most simple and direct of all. Simplicity = Sacredness. These poems prove the essential and deep connection. |
| 1960/11/17 | Thomas Trahern | Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings |
Ltrs: HGL p. 45
| Some important books which I recommend to you can be obtained from Harper Brothers "¦ They are publishing an interesting little volume, the Centuries of Thomas Traherne, which you ought to have "¦ They print something of Fenelon, I believe. Also a fine book by John Ruysbroeck, the Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage. You should also get to know the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the early fathers of the Cistercian Order of which I am a monk, has some very important mystical writings. Perhaps the best way to get to know him would be to read the Mystical Theology of St. Bernard by Etienne Gilson. |
| 1961/01/26 | Salvatore Quasimodo | False and True Green / translation from the Italian: Il falso e vero verde |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 91
| [Salvatore] Quasimodo's wonderful poem on Auschwitz [Complete Poems, New York, 1984] sees this. I am deeply influenced by Quasimodo, richness, firmness of his imagery, sober, spiritual. He is no Marxist poet even though his political sympathies may be that way. He is of my country. |
| 1961/07/11 | Allen Ginsberg | Kaddish and other poems 1958-1960 |
Ltrs: CforT p. 289-90
| It has taken me a long time to get to be able to follow your advice and read Kaddish [and Other Poems], because nobody sent me one. But finally Laughlin is out in SF and the City Lights Books sent me a copy. I agree with you about it. I think it is great and living poetry and certainly religious in its concern. In fact, who are more concerned with ultimates than the beats? Why do you think that just because I am a monk I should be likely to shrink from beats? Who am I to shrink from anyone, I am a monk, therefore by definition, as I understand it, the chief friend of beats and one who has no business reproving them. And why should I? Thank you for telling me about Kaddish. And I also liked very much the poem on Van Gogh's ear ["Death to Van Gogh's Ear!"]. I think this is one of the few people around who is saying anything. The others are in a bad way. I hope I can some time send you a long poem I think you may like. It ["Hagia Sophia"] is being printed by a friend of mine down the road here in Lexington. |
| 1961/09/19 | Denise Levertov | With Eyes in the Backs of Their Heads |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 239
| One new poet I am very happy about is Denise Levertov. New Directions has done a book of hers, With Eyes in the Backs of Their Heads. I think it is very fine, very spiritual in a broad, Jungian sort of way. She is not Catholic as far as I know, or may be. I think a poem of hers was in Jubilee. Ned O'Gorman is very fine too, I like him. |
| 1961/10/16 | Denise Levertov | Overland to the Islands |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 145
| Did I send to your library a book of poetry called Overland to the Islands by Denise Levertov? I think I did. Could I borrow it back, please? |
| 1961/10/17 | Robert Lowell | Imitations |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 170
| Lowell's Imitations, a fascinating book. He has developed the vein I liked least in Lord Weary's Castle of taking liberties with the language and experience of foreign poets. It is no longer they-no longer Baudelaire, but something fascinating, a picture of Baudelaire's idea with the solidity of Hogarth, for Lowell's is an 18th century idiom. He cannot imitate Valery, no one can. He is good at Rimbaud and Pasternak. |
| 1961/10/23 | E.I. (Edward Ingram) Watkin | Poets and mystics |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 173
| Etta Gullick-along with wonderful letters from the Adriatic, for she was at Istanbul to see the Patriarch and at Patmos also-sent Watkin's book Poets and Mystics. She wants me to read especially the Essay on [Augustine] Baker. I have begun instead with Julian of Norwich, because all this year I have been more and more attracted to her. Now the immense wonder of her is opening up fully. The doctrine on sin. The parable of the servant. Tremendous! How great a joy and gift! |
| 1961/12/12 | | Poems on Solitude / Transl. from the Chinese by Jerome Chen and Mike Bullock |
Ltrs: HGL p. 620
| "¦ Someone has recently sent me a marvelous book, Poems of Solitude, a collection including Juan Chi, Pao Chao, Wang Wei, Li Ho and Li Yu. Maybe you are right about my being Chinese, because this kind of thing is just what makes me feel most happy and most at home. I do not know whether or not I am always happy with mystical writings that are completely out of touch with ordinary life. On the contrary, it seems to me that mysticism flourishes most purely right in the middle of the ordinary. And such mysticism, in order to flourish, must be quite prompt to renounce all apparent claim to be mystical at all: after all, what difference do labels make? I know you agree, for this is what St. Therèse so well saw. |
| 1962/03/00 | Daniel Berrigan S.J. | Encounters |
Ltrs: HGL p. 73
| I am glad you like New Seeds and will look forward to seeing the review. Your poems [Encounters] arrived. They are tremendous. You have great energy and discipline. I mean especially discipline of your poetic emotion and experience. Discipline in the art can and must only flow from a deeper discipline like this. I would be hard put to it to say what I like best, but I do think "Tasks" is exceptionally good "¦ |
| 1962/03/00 | Raymond E. F. Larsson | Book Like a Bow Curved |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 38
| Forgive me for waiting so long to acknowledge the book. As a matter of fact, I remember having some correspondence with Raymond Larsson several years ago and had kept track of him from a distance since then. I knew he was still writing, but I had no idea the poems he had done were so fine. It is a splendid book [Book Like a Bow Curved], and I congratulate you on it. And of course him also. I will have to get in touch with him, and send him something of my own. Larsson has used traditional idioms with perfect integrity, and he is certainly a fine poet, underestimated and probably little known, for all I can tell. It is interesting that his sickness has given him a valid and a fruitful kind of distance, protecting him from movements and delusive fashions. More power to him. This is fine poetry, from a noble person. |
| 1962/09/02 | Lawrence Binyon | Flight of the Dragon |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 242
| Beautiful lines of the Japanese poetess Komachi, quoted by L[awrence] Binyon in The Flight of the Dragon [London, 1911]. "It is because we are in Paradise that all things in this world wrong us; when we go out from Paradise nothing hurts for nothing matters." |
| 1962/11/17 | Ernesto Cardenal | Epigramas: Poemas |
Ltrs: CforT p. 136
| Yes I have received your Epigrams: they are magnificent. The Revolutionary Poetry of Nicaragua [Poesía revolucionaria] too I have received: there is much in it that is most deeply moving. I am grateful for your corrections of the translations of Alfonso, and I have put them into the text. The poems are to be published in a New Directions anthology but unfortunately I can see that J. Laughlin is going to waste an enormous amount of time getting down to business with it. I may give them to some magazine, and will draw on your very fine article for a biographical introduction. |
| 1962/11/17 | Ernesto Cardenal | Literatura indigena americana: Antología |
Ltrs: CforT p. 136
| Your poems about the Indians have been simply superb. I am sure your whole book [Literatura indígena americana: Antología] will be splendid and look forward to seeing it. You have a very great deal to say and I know it is most important. This is something far deeper than indigenismo with a political"”or religious"”hook inside the bait. This is a profound spiritual witness. Also a reparation, and a deep adoration of the Creator, an act of humility and love which the whole race of the Christian conquerors has been putting off and neglecting for centuries. It reminds me that some day I want to write something about Vasco de Quiroga. I have not forgotten about the Indians and all that they mean to us both. |
| 1962/11/17 | Ernesto Cardenal | Salmos |
Ltrs: CforT p. 137
| Your Psalms [Salmos] are terrific. Those are the versions we should really be chanting in choir. How few monks think of the real meaning of the Psalms. If priests knew what they were reciting every day. I am sure some of them must realize. Do we have to be in the concentration camp before the truth comes home to us? |
| 1962/11/27 | Daniel Berrigan S.J. | World for Wedding Ring |
Ltrs: HGL p. 75
| Just got your blanks from the Goggenbuch Stipend House. I will write you up a litany of praises that will knock them off their chairs. I will tell them you are Scipio, Cicero, John O'Hara and twenty-five other people, including Berrigan. Your last book of poems deserves half a dozen Guggenheims. It is really splendid, you have really got in there now: the others I always felt were sort of tending in the right direction, now you are on your beam. I didn't find any cliches anywhere, and that in a book by a Catholic and a religious is a major miracle. It is terse and even Zen-like, and it is the integrity of the experience that above all comes through. Great, man, great. |
| 1963/07/19 | William Blake | Complete writings : with all the variant readings / William Blake ; ed. by Geoffrey Keynes |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 166
| The following are the questions, with Merton's answers: 1. Name the last three books you have read. The Platform Scripture of Hui Neng, translated by Wing Tsit Chen The Proslogion by St. Anselm of Canterbury A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley 2. Name the books you are reading now. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by John Huizinga Ratio Verae Theologiae (The Real Meaning of Theology) by Erasmus The Historian and Character by David Knowles 4. Books that have influenced you. Poetic Works of William Blake Plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas Sermons of Meister Eckhart De Doctrina Christiana, Confessions, and Sermons on Psalms of St. Augustine Rule of St. Benedict The Bhagavad-Gita The Imitation of Christ, etc. 5. Why have these books been an influence on you? These books and others like them have helped me to discover the real meaning of my life, and have made it possible for me to get out of the confusion and meaninglessness of an existence completely immersed in the needs and passivities fostered by a culture in which sales are everything. 6. Name a book everyone should read. Besides the Bible (taken for granted and not included above) and such classics as The Imitation of Christ, I would select a contemporary book which I consider to be of vital importance and which I think everyone should read at this time: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. 7. Why this book? This is the most forceful statement about a crisis that is of immediate importance to every American, and indirectly affects the whole world today. It is something that people have to know about. The Negro has been trying to make himself heard: in this book he succeeds. |
| 1963/08/18 | Mark Van Doren | Collected and New Poems, 1924-1963 |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 45-46
| Thanks for the letter and above all for the book [Van Doren's Collected and New Poems, 1924"”1963]. THE book in every way: yours, ours, the year's, the world's and the time's. As it should be, a world in itself, and a century in itself, an era, an Eden, full of Bible, full of world, full of America, full of farms and people and animals. In every way the best book ever "¦ |
| 1963/09/20 | Iris Origo | Leopardi: A Study in Solitude |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 17-18
| Iris Origo's life of [Giacomo] Leopardi [Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, 1935] was a fascinating discovery (not new!). Leopardi is one of the few Romantics I really like. Victor Hammer wants me to translate a few of his poems. |
| 1964/06/23 | Kenneth H. Jackson | Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 121
| Blazing hot, stuffy air, barely moved by a little breeze here in the woodshed. What a day it is going to be! Even the woods will be an airless furnace. It calls for one of those nature poems, a kerygma of heat such as the Celts never had. (Finished Kenneth Jackson's excellent book on Early Celtic Nature Poetry before Prime as the fierce sun began to burn my field.) |
| 1964/06/26 | Rabindranath Tagore | One Hundred Poems of Kabir / translated by Evelyn Underhill |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 121
| I finished the old Jundt book on Les Amis de Dieu which I borrowed from the Columbia Library. (Will not forget reading the chapter on the book of the mine rocks while flying over the Appalachians.) Must find out more about Rulman Merswin. This afternoon-wrote a note on Kabir [One Hundred Poems of Kabir, 1962] for the Collectanea [Cisterciensia]. |
| 1964/07/12 | Rafael Squirru | Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to the Latin American Scene |
Ltrs: CforT p. 232
| Many thanks for your little book on the "New Man." I have read it carefully and with pleasure and want to congratulate you on it. I especially liked the essays on the poet and on the role of the intellectual. It seems to me that this little book represents a vitally important trend of thought, and you know of course how much I agree with it. The thinking of the public, especially in the "‘great powers," seems to me to be hallucinated by the unreal concept of what one might call an Atlantic gigantism (except that it would have to include Russia and even China). The belief that the only kind of thinking that is real and meaningful is that which is associated with European and North American thought patterns, extending this also to Chinese Marxism. But this cerebration leaves out most of the human race, most of its needs, most of its aspirations. It has proved itself completely incapable of really solving the problems of man and is now increasingly incapable even of defining them. |
| 1964/07/18 | Jorge Carrera Andrade | Interpretacion de Ruben Darío |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 128
| Read an excellent piece by [Jorge] Carrera Andrade on Ruben Darío. Important, a key man for the "consciencia americana"-and the "new man." I must read him sometime, and also Martí. Vitier mentioned him in a letter recently. |
| 1964/11/16 | Robert Lowell | For the Union Dead |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 165-66
| Brother Antoninus [William Everson], tall, bowed, gentle, benevolent, given to quiet laughter was here from Friday to Sunday... Told me I [Emblems of a Season of Fury] was well reviewed by [Haydn] Carruth in the Hudson Review. I had vaguely heard of this but not seen it. Brother Antoninus did not like [Robert] Lowell's new book. Offended by its destructiveness, its desiccation, and Lowell's obsession with destroying that in himself that might save him. But for my part (less compassionate no doubt) I liked its hardness (For the Union Dead). |
| 1964/12/05 | Kenneth H. Jackson | Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 175
| So many good books around and in the woodshed after dinner. Pasternak once. Lately Ellul, and Felix Green's Curtain of Ignorance (good information on the bad reporting about China), Stevie Smith, Françoise Henri on Irish art, Auden "The Enchafed Flood," and last summer Kenneth Jackson's Early Celtic Nature Poetry. Also Nora Chadwick, etc., etc. (I got a charming letter from the Carmelites of Waterbeach, her friends). And of course recently Ionesco-Rhinoceros, The Future Is in Eggs, etc. I am still busy with his Notes et contre-notes. |
| 1964/12/19 | Czeslaw Milosz | Postwar Polish Poetry: An Anthology |
Ltrs: CforT p. 83
| Just a word to wish you the blessings of the holy season and to say I have recently written to Anne Freedgood with a statement about the anthology [Postwar Polish Poetry]. I had her send me proofs as I wanted to read it at leisure, and I am more convinced than ever that it is excellent. Your notes are very helpful, and your own poems are by no means the least interesting in the book. I especially like the Ghetto one ["A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto"]. The whole book really gives an impression of life and direction. Poland is alive, poetically, and I find that the Polish poets are people with whom I can feel myself in the greatest and most spontaneous sympathy. They speak directly to me, and I respond to them much more than I do to the poets in the U.S., or France, perhaps even England (though I do like some of the young English poets a lot). I respond to these as much as I do to some of the Latin Americans. The very young ones are quite encouraging too. Some of the surrealist stuff is better and more real than anything else that has come out of that trend. |
| 1964/12/19 | Mark Van Doren | Mayfield Deer |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 49
| Which reminds me that the Narrative Poems came, and I like best The Mayfield Deer always. Your two books together with the bright covers are very comforting, a presence and a reassurance. Someone at least has done something worth while: you. Thanks for this one too, and for the other. I am sending you my new one [Seeds of Destruction], it has peace talk in it and anger about race. The peace talk was nearly not published but eventually got done up better and was allowed. So there it is. And to plague you more in a season when you are deluged, here is an article ["Rain and the Rhinoceros"] I was asked for, and wrote in the hermitage. As one can easily tell. |
| 1964/12/19 | Mark Van Doren | Narrative Poems: Jonathan Gentry |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 49
| Which reminds me that the Narrative Poems came, and I like best The Mayfield Deer always. Your two books together with the bright covers are very comforting, a presence and a reassurance. Someone at least has done something worth while: you. Thanks for this one too, and for the other. I am sending you my new one [Seeds of Destruction], it has peace talk in it and anger about race. The peace talk was nearly not published but eventually got done up better and was allowed. So there it is. And to plague you more in a season when you are deluged, here is an article ["Rain and the Rhinoceros"] I was asked for, and wrote in the hermitage. As one can easily tell. |
| 1965/01/09 | Clayton Eshelman | Residence on Earth / translation of Neruda, Pablo. Residencia en la Tierra |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 190
| Clayton Eshelman sent his translation of Residencia en la Tierra [by Pablo Neruda]. Some of it is very successful. On the whole a good translation. |
| 1965/01/17 | William K. Everson o.p. | Tongs of Jeopardy / pseudonym: brother Antoninus |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 192
| In the monastery after dinner I played Brother Antoninus' record "The Tongs of Jeopardy" to the novices and some of the juniors. It is remarkably good-meditation on the Kennedy assassination. He was talking about his ideas on this when he was here and I was very struck by them then. They cannot be summed up simply as "Jungian." A remarkable and sensitive poetic insight into the state of the American mind-better than anything else I know (for instance how much deeper say than Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd which I have just recently read). More than Jungian, the "Tongs" meditation is deeply Buddhist, and the Cain idea, the drive to fratricide as the great weakness in the American psyche, is most impressive and I think accurate. Illtud Evans is coming to preach the retreat and I will talk to him about it. Am tempted to review it for Blackfriars. |
| 1965/01/22 | Clayton Eshelman | Residence on Earth / translation of Neruda, Pablo. Residencia en la Tierra |
Ltrs: CforT p. 256
| Glad for Residence on Earth [Eshleman's translation of Neruda's poems]: your translation made me look more closely at the original. The translation is very good. It is real. I mean it is a real experience in its own right and an adequate communication of Neruda except in the few places where he is uncommunicable in English perhaps. I know what you mean about my translations of Vallejo not being "involved" in him. I had not read enough of his poetry or studied enough of his life to really get into it that deeply. |
| 1965/02/09 | Quintus Horace | Epodes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 202
| I must admit I am much moved by Horace-as for instance a quote from the Second Epode which I ran across by chance when leafing through the Liber Comfortatorius of Goscelin (11th century letter to a Recluse). The structure and clarity and music of Horace are great and he is not trite. There is, it seems to me, real depth there, and this is shown by the sustained purity and strength of his tone and this is I think really untranslatable. |
| 1965/03/13 | Falleció Roberto Guervara | Días móviles |
Ltrs: CforT p. 223
| First, I will get busy and dig up a "manifesto" for you, as well as the books I promised. You can take anything you like from the books "¦ It seems that Caracas is very much alive poetically, and above all the editions are splendidly handsome. I thought Roberto Guevara's book [Las dias móviles] was beautifully produced, the drawings were very interesting and lively. The poems themselves are I think of a very high quality with much promise, a fine sense of distances and areas and movements with a cosmic and dreamlike solemnity. I am especially struck by the fifth section and the sixth even more, in "Noche heredad nómade." I once did a version of a piece from Meng Tzu ["Ox Mountain Parabl"] in which he speaks of the power of the night spirit which recreates and renews life. Ernesto [Cardenal] translated it, and I don't seem to have a copy, but it is also printed here in a special edition [Ox Mountain Parable of Meng Tzu, Lexington, Ky.: Stamperia del Santuccio, 1960] "¦ |
| 1965/03/20 | Nicanor Parra | Versos de salon |
Ltrs: CforT p. 212
| Thanks very much for the two books of poems, which you sent me some time ago. You seemed diffident about Versos de salon but I enjoyed it very much and, as you see, I have made a few translations. [James] Laughlin would be interested in using some of my translations of your work, but after I had made these he spoke of needing some of the "antipoems," so I may try some of these later. I am not sure whether I do not like the earlier book even better than the more recent one. In any case I find that I agree with your dissonances, and find them to be in fact very monastic. In fact, today the poets and other artists tend to fulfill many of the functions that were once the monopoly of monks"”and which of course the monks have made haste to abandon, in order to center themselves firmly in the midst of a square society. |
| 1965/03/31 | Alfonso Cortes | Poemas Nuevos |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 223
| A collection of poems [Poemas Nuevos] by Alfonso Cortes came, sent by his sister. It looks very interesting. With all his insanity there remains a great wholeness and real penetration in his work, and sometimes a really startling picture of intuition. I do not find much mere incoherence and posturing or mere vociferation-indeed I find less in him than in many who are "sane." Strange to find this sense of economy preserved, as it is in his verse. |
| 1965/04/20 | Alfonso Cortes | Rimas universales |
Ltrs: CforT p. 177
| I am very happy to have in hand your new book, Las rimas universales , in which I read with admiration of new poetry and where I come to know you even better. You know with what esteem I had read and even tried to translate some of your very great poems, so profound and so penetrating. You are as a matter of fact a poet to whom God has given a very original intuition, even in a prophetic sense. You have suffered much, but in you the power of the artist and of the contemplative has made you master the suffering. It has been very fertile in your life, and you have not regretted a malady to which so many others, less endowed than you, would certainly have succumbed. |
| 1965/06/02 | Angel Martínez Baigorri | Sonetos irreparables |
Ltrs: CforT p. 207
| Your beautiful book reached me, beautiful visually and in its contents. I was most touched by your friendship and by the warmth of your words, and by your thought of me in my jubilee of existence. And I suppose it is partly because of this growing weight of years that I have been slow to respond. |
| 1965/06/23 | Ernesto Cardenal | Oración por Marily Monroe y otros poemas |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 258
| Ernesto Cardenal sent his new booklet of poems ("Oración for Marilyn Monroe," etc.), and they are very fine, simple, direct, with an extraordinary poetic sense of modern life seen with great innocence and clarity. Also some pages he wrote on my anti-bomb essays reprinted from Papeles de son Armedans. |
| 1965/07/11 | Paris Leary | Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poets |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 267-68
| Yesterday the new anthology by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly arrived. Controversy of Poets. Ambiguous title, good anthology, in fact it strikes me as one of the best and I am certainly glad to be in it. [n: Seven poems by Merton appeared in this volume] Found a lot of new people I had never heard of but like. Especially a fine long poem by Galway Kinnell about the Lower East Side. A good one on Kennedy's funeral by Georgia Lee McElhaney. (How would you pronounce it?) I like the abstract dances of Jackson Mac Low, and Jack Spicer's poem on the death of Billy the Kid. Diane Wakoski, O.K. Gary Snyder I had heard of but not read. Like his poems, they are more substantial because of Zen, not just poured out. Reading [Allen] Ginsberg's long ether-sniffing poem from Lima, have concluded for Ginsberg, it is a good poem and one must take Ginsberg on his own terms. I defy the cowards who bully Ginsberg. Jonathan Williams I knew before. Liked "Blues for Lonnie Johnson" and great atomic stuff in the Blake-like poem ["In England's Green and (A Garland and a Clyster)"]. Maybe Jonathan Williams best in the book. I'll get to know later. Denise Levertov always good. And [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti also. I liked the underwear poem and the Castro ["One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro"] I saw before. |
| 1965/08/17 | John Heureux | Quick as Dandelions |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 251
| Many thanks for your note from Georgetown. I am glad you had such a good time. You deserve it, and I am sure it will be very fruitful for you, in your life and in your work. I thought John l'Heureux's book of poems [Quick as Dandelions] was first-rate and he sounds like a splendid guy. |
| 1965/08/31 | T.S. Eliot | Four Quartets |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 147
| I enclose a long article on existentialism which I did for The Critic ["The Other Side of Despair: Notes on Christian Existentialism"]. (Do you know this magazine? It might be interesting.) The bit for Motive, a magazine you don't know, I imagine, mostly Protestant, published in Nashville, might possibly go with the "Behavior of Titans" stuff. J. wanted a new title for that and I have what I think is a fairly passable one: Raids on the Unspeakable. It is an improvement, I think, on a phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets, "raids on the inarticulate." It sounds a little more sinister, and therefore good for a title. What do you think? |
| 1965/10/03 | Thomas Trahern | Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings |
Ltrs: HGL p. 518
| Now that I go to answer your letter I find that I have misplaced it, but I think most of the points are in my mind. But first of all thanks very much indeed for the two books. Of course I like [Thomas] Traherne very much; I have the Centuries. I will try to find a copy of an essay I did on the English mystics and send it along. I have asked someone to send more copies of the ones you asked for, and you ought to have them by now. The book by Fingarette looks particularly interesting. I am just getting into it and I can see that it will be stimulating and probably very helpful to me. |
| 1965/10/18 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Das Buch der Bilder |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 305
| So I share some of Rilke's fear and vulnerability, and it is true. "Der Nachbar" is certainly part of my own experience of "the others"-this is the worst possible admission to make in the current enthusiasm for togetherness. But there is a deep truth in "Der Nachbar." And those who simply rush together will only debase friendship if they never sense one another as "alien violins." It is a very deep poem. The programs of "Klag"-a typical modern experience, trite even this experience. But under it the modern lostness, at least one star has not gone out-perhaps. One stands firm like a white city stud where the beam begins. I read Rilke, then sing the poems aloud, making up Lieder. They are very moving. I keep notes on them. The world of spiritual senses in Rilke! How did I get this book? Yesterday after the High Mass I went to the library and was "told" to go to the poetry shelf and look. I came up with this and Peter Levi (whose stuff I greatly admired already two years ago). This has been very healing. I needed it. |
| 1965/10/19 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Das Buch der Bilder |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 307
| Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr, Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben, wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben und wird in den Alleen bin und her unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben. [Whose house is not built now shall build no more, who now is lonely long shall be alone, shall lie awake, and read, long letters write, and restlessly, among the drifting leaves of avenues shall wander, to and fro.] Rilke's autumn poem ["Autumn Day"]. Beautiful and close to home. |
| 1965/11/15 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Neue Gedichte |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 316
| I continue with Rilke (and talked to novices of him yesterday)-often I can't stand his mental climate when it is too adolescent. But when he is out of that, above it, beyond it, he is a great artist. Also it falls often short of the real depth and clarity of vision. He is blocked by cleverness, by emotion, by clogging sensuality, from really mystical apprehension (except perhaps in some lines of the Duino Elegies-but I am working on the Neue Gedichte). When he is objective (in his own way of being objective), he is great. Perhaps at his greatest in his Olive Garden poem-the agony of Gethsemani, which Catholics have probably read with severe displeasure as a denial of faith. Is it, though? Is it perhaps not a deeper realization of the loneliness of Gethsemani and a key to Rilke's "unchristian" spirit, or a pointer to a solution-that he obscurely could not have a Mediator "outside," he had to be completely identified with Christ, all is not perfectly "pur" but it is nevertheless all the more true. Did not Christ take upon himself the utter, inadequate forlornness of the unbeliever? But I admit I am getting into the tone and music of Rilke, and sensing the differences of mood and intonation (v.g., in "Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter" ["Song of Women to the Poet"]-lovely and funny). |
| 1965/11/29 | Pablo Neruda | Residence on Earth |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 319
| This morning I really opened the door of the Duino Elegies and walked in (previously I have only peeked in through the windows and read fragments here and there). For one thing I got the sound of the German really going, and got the feel of the First Elegy as a whole. (Did this before to a lesser extent with the Eighth.) I think I needed this hill, this silence, this frost, to really understand this great poem, to live in it-as I have also in Four Quartets. These are the two modern poems, long poems, that really have a great deal of meaning for me. Like Lorca (whom I have not read for years-). Others I simply like and agree with. Auden, Spender to some extent. Dylan Thomas in an entirely different way. But the Duino Elegies and Four Quartets talk about my life itself, my own self, my own destiny, my Christianity, my vocation, my relation to the world of my time, my place in it, etc. Perhaps Neruda's Residence on Earth and of course Vallejo will eventually do this but with Residence I have, once again, only looked through the windows (still I might get with that later and even give talks on it). |
| 1965/11/29 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 319
| This morning I really opened the door of the Duino Elegies and walked in (previously I have only peeked in through the windows and read fragments here and there). For one thing I got the sound of the German really going, and got the feel of the First Elegy as a whole. (Did this before to a lesser extent with the Eighth.) I think I needed this hill, this silence, this frost, to really understand this great poem, to live in it-as I have also in Four Quartets. These are the two modern poems, long poems, that really have a great deal of meaning for me. Like Lorca (whom I have not read for years-). Others I simply like and agree with. Auden, Spender to some extent. Dylan Thomas in an entirely different way. But the Duino Elegies and Four Quartets talk about my life itself, my own self, my own destiny, my Christianity, my vocation, my relation to the world of my time, my place in it, etc. Perhaps Neruda's Residence on Earth and of course Vallejo will eventually do this but with Residence I have, once again, only looked through the windows (still I might get with that later and even give talks on it). |
| 1965/12/01 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 319-20
| When I got up it was about thirty on the porch and now at dawn it is down to twenty-one. These are the coldest hours-meditation, lectio, and hot tea with lemon and a good fire. I am reading [Paul] Evdokimov [La Femme et le salut du monde, 1958]-after tea-and then the Duino Elegies. The Elegies I am just reading, without comment, especially the German, aloud, to try to get the magnificent substance of sound and to think in the German (it is a language I can't think in, as I can French and Spanish). I will go over it again for notes later. The Leishman-Spender [James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender] translation is the best piece of translating done for Rilke. Rilke's long wait for the Elegies sobers me not a little. |
| 1965/12/21 | Alfonso Cortes | Coplas del pueblo |
Ltrs: CforT p. 178
| I am very happy to have your new book of poems [Las coplas del pueblo (1965)], which without doubt will be one of the most popular which you have written, for it is addressed to all. It is truly the task of the poet to teach the ways of truth in the language of beauty. It was a great pleasure for me to receive the visit of Father Ernesto Cardenal who spoke to me of Nicaragua and of you. I think often of you dear Poet, and I am happy to know that you continue to make your compatriots happy with the gifts of your genius, which I always admire for you are an extraordinary Poet. |
| 1965/12/25 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 327
| I made my thanksgiving quietly, said Lauds and had a snack and some wine (the last of what Brother Clement gave me a couple of months ago) and so went back to bed for a couple of hours. Got up again, said Prime and read E[dwin] A[rcher] Burtt's book [In Search of Philosophic Understanding, 1966] which he sent. It is clear and informative. And Schlier. Now I am going to get back to Rilke (volumes to be returned to University of Kentucky in a few days). It is the kind of day I like, and like Christmas to be too: dark, cloudy, windy, cold with light rain blowing now and then. |
| 1966/01/13 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 6
| Nishida throws much light on Rilke. He makes clear and explicit what Rilke was reaching for in the Duino Elegies: the pure event. This must become a dimension in my own life - it is what the present transcends. |
| 1966/01/15 | Esther Cáceres | Tiempo y abismo |
Ltrs: CforT p. 167
| I was very happy to get your advent letter and your book Tiempo y abismo which I enjoyed thoroughly, your praise of earth and of the senses"”and your struggle with time. I still have to fight a bit with time myself when it comes to writing letters, but for the rest I am now living in solitude and strictly taking three to four hours a day for meditation, besides reading and studying. And I try to keep up with writing (I will send you some recent essays). |
| 1966/01/16 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Sonnets to Orpheus / translated by J.B.L. Leishman |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 7-8
| Finished Nishida's Intelligible World. As to the Sonnets to Orpheus - German text that came yesterday from the U.K. I think the best way to read it is this: each day take one sonnet in the German, without English, and try to translate it straight on through as on an examination, not fearing to write nonsense, however. In this way, to stop holding back from the German, simply plunging into it. I really know more German than I think, maybe, and am enough attuned to Rilke to be right in first guesses now. My own guesses will be better for me than the translation (J.B.L. [Leishman]) which sometimes distorts in order to rhyme. Then I can find out my mistakes from the translation. |
| 1966/01/17 | Ernesto Cardenal | Gethsemani, Ky |
Ltrs: CforT p. 228
| Your piece on Cardenal's Gethsemani was very good. You are right that Cardenal is now this way and now that, doubtless. You have no idea how difficult and complex a task he has taken upon himself, to be a poet and a priest at the same time and in a society that is completely fed up with priests. He is just beginning, and the task of being two people is still difficult. Only when one realizes that one cannot be two people, can one be two or many people, that is everybody. No priest and no poet is really mature until he is everybody. But who is everybody? One lets go a little, and one begins to disappear in everybody, and then one wakes up and begins to defend a limited identity once again. An uncomfortable existence. This discomfort is not necessary for those who identify themselves completely with a Church (like the ordinary priest) or a party (like the Communists). |
| 1966/01/17 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Ltrs: CforT p. 228
| Do you read [Rainer Maria] Rilke at all? Does he mean anything to you? I think you would like the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. |
| 1966/01/17 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Sonnets to Orpheus / translated by J.B.L. Leishman |
Ltrs: CforT p. 228
| Do you read [Rainer Maria] Rilke at all? Does he mean anything to you? I think you would like the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. |
| 1966/01/24 | Ernesto Cardenal | Vida en El Amor |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 11
| I took a short walk in the hollow behind the hermitage after dinner, then wrote a draft for a preface for Ernesto Cardenal Meditations (La Vida en El Amor), which are excellent. Some of them written when he was novice here. |
| 1966/01/28 | Miguel de Unamuno | Agonia del cristianismo |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 12
| I still read a lot of Rilke and Unamuno - with questions and reservations. They are often unsatisfactory in much the same way. Sometimes their intuitions are brilliant, at others merely irresponsible. Both are utter individualists. This is their weakness and their strength. For Rilke: I have no questions about the value of the Neue Gedichte, or the real beauty of the Elegies and some of the Orpheus Sonnets. But I still do not know about the spiritual world of the Sonnets. For a Christian there is always a natural tendency to read such things in implicitly Christian terms and to ensure, therefore, that he understands. But this is lazy. And where the question is once raised - I wonder if I get anything that he says, really! Except that he praises poetry, in poetry, for being poetry. Which is OK. But if this implies a view of life itself "¦ it raises many questions. Yet Unamuno's Agonia is a fascinating, though sometimes unsatisfactory book. Many excellent points - and above all he has a fine sense of the insufficiency of Christian rationalism, activism etc. "Power Christianity." Is he truly Pauline? Was he unacceptable in Spain because he had protestant insights? Indeed in many ways he is like [Karl] Barth. |
| 1966/01/28 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Neue Gedichte |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 12
| I still read a lot of Rilke and Unamuno - with questions and reservations. They are often unsatisfactory in much the same way. Sometimes their intuitions are brilliant, at others merely irresponsible. Both are utter individualists. This is their weakness and their strength. For Rilke: I have no questions about the value of the Neue Gedichte, or the real beauty of the Elegies and some of the Orpheus Sonnets. But I still do not know about the spiritual world of the Sonnets. For a Christian there is always a natural tendency to read such things in implicitly Christian terms and to ensure, therefore, that he understands. But this is lazy. And where the question is once raised - I wonder if I get anything that he says, really! Except that he praises poetry, in poetry, for being poetry. Which is OK. But if this implies a view of life itself "¦ it raises many questions. Yet Unamuno's Agonia is a fascinating, though sometimes unsatisfactory book. Many excellent points - and above all he has a fine sense of the insufficiency of Christian rationalism, activism etc. "Power Christianity." Is he truly Pauline? Was he unacceptable in Spain because he had protestant insights? Indeed in many ways he is like [Karl] Barth. |
| 1966/02/03 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 357
| Distraction - from the illusory expectation of some fulfillment, which in the end is only a human loneliness. Warst du nicht immer noch von Erwartung zerstreut, als kündigte alles [eine] Geliebte dir an? [Were you not forever distracted by expectation, as if everything were announcing to you some (coming) beloved?] Distracted that is from the solemn Auftrag - [a commission entrusted to one by another] the [indecipherable] suddenly "giving itself" etc. Rilke (1st [Duino] Elegy) |
| 1966/02/07 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Book of Hours |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 18
| Talked on Rilke in Chapter Room and read 3 poems from the Book of Hours - their merits and deficiencies. |
| 1966/02/13 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 226
| As to Rilke - I know what you mean. He is a fine poet but I have grave reservations about him too. As prophet there is really something missing. One may however like the Duino Elegies in spite of these reservations. My reservations have been more seriously on the Orpheus Sonnets, and ther 'Theogeny.' |
| 1966/02/13 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Sonnets to Orpheus / translated by J.B.L. Leishman |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 226
| As to Rilke - I know what you mean. He is a fine poet but I have grave reservations about him too. As prophet there is really something missing. One may however like the Duino Elegies in spite of these reservations. My reservations have been more seriously on the Orpheus Sonnets, and ther 'Theogeny.' |
| 1966/02/21 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 20
| Rilke again. Rereading the II Elegy and [Romano] Guardini about it. It seems to me that Guardini, while right in many judgments about R., takes too seriously R's own "passionat" rejections of Christianity in letters etc. For passionately one should understand emotionally. For subjective reasons beyond his control (his mother) R. simply could not be at peace with conventional Christian language and even with the idea of Christ as Mediator. I do not minimize this - objectively a failure of faith. Yet G. does not see that R. was also struggling with a false religious problem imposed on him by 19thcentury Christianity. The problem of finding wholeness (ultimate truth etc.) in God by denying and excluding the world. The holy is the non-secular. Feeling himself called upon to deny and exclude what he saw to be in reality necessary for "wholeness," "holiness," "openness," he finally refused this denial, and chose his "open world." In a sense he does come up with a cosmology that seems a parody of Christianity - but is it really as G. thinks, a "secularization" in the sense of a degradation? Is he not really reaching for the kind of Pleroma revealed in Colossians? Yes, his choice of angels is in a sense a failure, acc[ording] to Paul - yet was it entirely his fault? Was it forced on him by a manichean type of Christianity? I cannot agree with all Rilke says - but I do not think he himself would have expected, still less demanded, an act of theological faith in the content of the Duino Elegies!! |
| 1966/02/21 | Romano Guardini | Rilke's 'Duino Elegies': An Interpretation |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 20
| Rilke again. Rereading the II Elegy and [Romano] Guardini about it. It seems to me that Guardini, while right in many judgments about R., takes too seriously R's own "passionat" rejections of Christianity in letters etc. For passionately one should understand emotionally. For subjective reasons beyond his control (his mother) R. simply could not be at peace with conventional Christian language and even with the idea of Christ as Mediator. I do not minimize this - objectively a failure of faith. Yet G. does not see that R. was also struggling with a false religious problem imposed on him by 19thcentury Christianity. The problem of finding wholeness (ultimate truth etc.) in God by denying and excluding the world. The holy is the non-secular. Feeling himself called upon to deny and exclude what he saw to be in reality necessary for "wholeness," "holiness," "openness," he finally refused this denial, and chose his "open world." In a sense he does come up with a cosmology that seems a parody of Christianity - but is it really as G. thinks, a "secularization" in the sense of a degradation? Is he not really reaching for the kind of Pleroma revealed in Colossians? Yes, his choice of angels is in a sense a failure, acc[ording] to Paul - yet was it entirely his fault? Was it forced on him by a manichean type of Christianity? |
| 1966/03/03 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Letters to a Young Poet |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 24
| Today, warm, grey, went down early for Mass, took a hot bath in the infirmary and got into secular clothes to go to town for back X-rays. (Hand has been numb for some time.) At the U[niversity] of L[ouisville] library was really moved by parts of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (they certainly complete and deepen some of the things said about love - and criticized - in the Duino Elegies). |
| 1966/03/16 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Neue Gedichte |
Ltrs: CforT p. 260
| "¦Liked everything you said about Rilke. The things you did not like about him were the things I thought you probably would not like: the perfume and the older women. But the older women had enough sense to give him castles to write in and I rather like the Princess, not to mention the one he went to Russia with. You are very right about his ideas on death: they are deep and solid intuitions. I think of him as validly religious, and his reaction against a sick Catholicism is perfectly understandable. The translations stink, though the [J. B.] Leishman [-Stephen] Spender job on the [Duino] Elegies is fair. It is at least passable, most of the time. I find myself preferring the Neue Gedichte and not preferring the Orpheus sonnets [Sonnets to Orpheus]. I do like the Elegies very much. Also the Letters to a Young Poet; very good indeed. I am lecturing on them to the monks. "Young Workman's Letter" is fine too "¦ |
| 1966/03/16 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Sonnets to Orpheus / translated by J.B.L. Leishman |
Ltrs: CforT p. 260
| "¦Liked everything you said about Rilke. The things you did not like about him were the things I thought you probably would not like: the perfume and the older women. But the older women had enough sense to give him castles to write in and I rather like the Princess, not to mention the one he went to Russia with. You are very right about his ideas on death: they are deep and solid intuitions. I think of him as validly religious, and his reaction against a sick Catholicism is perfectly understandable. The translations stink, though the [J. B.] Leishman [-Stephen] Spender job on the [Duino] Elegies is fair. It is at least passable, most of the time. I find myself preferring the Neue Gedichte and not preferring the Orpheus sonnets [Sonnets to Orpheus]. I do like the Elegies very much. Also the Letters to a Young Poet; very good indeed. I am lecturing on them to the monks. "Young Workman's Letter" is fine too "¦ |
| 1966/05/08 | Matsuo Basho | Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches / translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa |
Ltrs: CforT p. 262
| Thanks for the books which came in yesterday. Have already begun the Bash which is just what I have been wanting after so much tired stuff, this is the greatest the most alive and you are right perfect monasticism. Thanks for the intuition that it is what I would need. Maybe when I read it carefully I will know a lot more about the question. And there is no question that the great issue is freedom. From Urizens goddam hammers. I go where I am Los (turned loose) so far the one place where I can be the sunlight is up here on this hill where all the angels shine around me in each leaf and no one can prevent them. I have been on the road before and there were fewer and sometimes none. I think I have only one way to travel and it is straight up. Or straight down into the root. |
| 1966/06/25 | Eugenio Montale | Ossi di Seppia |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 88
| Came upon [Eugenio] Montale's magnificent poem on the sea of ancient wisdom, which sums up exactly my task. (Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce [Ancient one, I am intoxicated by the voice] "¦ ) |
| 1966/07/30 | Edwin Muir | Collected Poems |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 233
| Can you help me with some more books? I have to review Edwin Muir's collected poems for Sewanee Review and I will need some background material: chiefly Muir's own Autobiography. Do you have this? Also an important review of this book, Collected Poems in its earlier edtiont by Kathleen Raine in the New Statesman, april 23, 1960. If by any chance there has been anything about the book lately in magazines like the Kenyon Review and others of the same type, I would appreciate having access to them. Maybe you could obtain for me a Xerox of the Raine article, and the monastery of course would pay for it. |
| 1966/07/31 | Edwin Muir | Estate of Poetry |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 105-06
| Small wonder that I have in these weeks walked in the world of folk-song and passion - the only one adequate for my perplexities (well, Gregorian is too, thank God). I realize, reading Muir's lecture on "The Natural Estat" of poetry [in The Estate of Poetry, 1962], what the real hermit temptation is: it is to go off with the elves. To take the "Road to Fair Elfland" with the Queen of the Elves - which is neither the narrow thorny path of righteousness nor the broad path of wickedness. That has been my persuasion - that there was another purely free and neutral road, love for M. in our own kind of woods and Cherokee Park (note "Clerk Saunders and May Margaret"!!). It is True Thoreau the layman who goes to Elfland for seven years and then returns! |
| 1966/07/31 | Edwin Muir | Estate of Poetry |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 107-08
| I like Edwin Muir's Norton lectures on poetry - very good one on Yeats, and a lot of sense in his lecture on literary critics. Against the professional critic who considers himself a kind of orchid which the tree of poetry exists to sustain. (Northrop Frye has a whole doctrine of the critic as the man who is needed to perfect the poetic experience - he is essential to poetry!) E. Muir - the traditional public is essential. The critics = the critic is essential. Critic is now the poet's public. Poetry tends to sterility and irrelevance in proportion as the poet addresses himself to the critic rather than to the public... Are people like Camus and Muir the true monks of our day? Is monasticism to be really found in an external commitment to certain formal sacrifice and an institutional and ritual life or in the kind of solitude, integrity, commitment that Camus had - or the fidelity to vision that was Muir's? |
| 1966/07/31 | Edwin Muir | Estate of Poetry |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 257
| We have had some nasty weather, very hot, but lately it has been much better. I am going along with work, mainly articles, reviews and so on. Am reviewing Edwin Muir [The True Legendary Sound: The Poetry and Criticism of Edwin Muir] for the Sewanee Review and I am glad to find out how good he is. If you ever get a chance to read him you would like his poetry very much I think. I am also trying to get his Autobiography for background. A rather extraordinary person "¦ |
| 1966/08/00 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Ltrs: SofC p. 311
| By the way I am reviewing the collected poems of Edwin Muir, and incidentally reading his autobiography along with them. He is quite remarkable. If you do not know him, you should. Not exactly Christian in a very formal sense, yet very Biblical too and soaked in a sense of myth, a very fine poet. A bit like Blake, a bit like Rilke. Eliot liked him "¦ |
| 1966/08/00 | Edwin Muir | Collected Poems |
Ltrs: SofC p. 311
| By the way I am reviewing the collected poems of Edwin Muir, and incidentally reading his autobiography along with them. He is quite remarkable. If you do not know him, you should. Not exactly Christian in a very formal sense, yet very Biblical too and soaked in a sense of myth, a very fine poet. A bit like Blake, a bit like Rilke. Eliot liked him "¦ |
| 1966/08/15 | Eugenio Montale | Selected Poems / introduction by Glauco Cambon |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 114-15
| I walked in the woods (D[erby] D[ay] place) for a while; read some bits in a selection of Protestant Mystics - liked Rufus Jones and especially an anonymous Anglican woman called Aurelia who seems to be right on target! Then read more Montale. The "Eastbourn" poem. His motets are exquisite - one, a still life of Pompeian souvenirs, is as pretty as Mozart |
| 1966/08/18 | Rene Char | Fureur et mystère / Rene Char ; pref. de Yves Berger |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 115-16
| Have had difficulties for some time with the verse of Rene Char - finding it impenetrable. Today I think I have broken through - and precisely with this short poem. Un oiseau chante sur un fil Cette vie simple à fleur de terre Notre enfer s'en rejouit. Puis le vent commence à souffrir Et les etoiles s'en avisent. O folles de parcourir Tant de fatalite profonde! Why did this click? Not just because of the birds that sing on the powerline to my house. The middle couplet, I think, affected me first. But at any rate I recognized my own kind of poetic world, which, in many French poets, I simply cannot. But this is exquisite. Though exquisite is not my kind of a word. Well, what is it then? But after this they all connect and I laugh. |
| 1966/08/22 | Rene Char | Fureur et mystère / Rene Char ; pref. de Yves Berger |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 117
| Yesterday - a fine sunny afternoon full of white and blue cumulous clouds. Went out tothe D[erby] D[ay] place in the woods, thinking of M., read some Eckhart - and concluded that I had to simplify and unify everything by making no further plans to get together with her or to keep in habitual contact (but only to take what obviously came by itself). Principle - that what we renounce we recover in God. Then read more Rene Char. He has to be read aloud. Compact, rich, intense, full, much music, more austere and self-contained than Saint-John Perse. I must really read him now. It will take time and attention to absorb all that is there. Perhaps a long course of reading, in the full afternoons out under the trees! |
| 1966/10/04 | Edwin Muir | Autobiography |
Ltrs: HGL p. 229
| Here is uncorrected bit on Muir, thought you would like it. His literary essays are very fine and as a poet I like him very much too, though he is a bit bumpy at times. A great man. If you have never read his autobiography I think you would greatly enjoy it. |
| 1966/10/04 | Gabriela Mistral | Motivos de San Francisco : poems en prosa / por Gabriela Mistral ; seleccion y prologo de Cesar Diaz-Munoz Cormatches |
Ltrs: SofC p. 317
| Today, feast of St. Francis, I am reading a book you would like and ought to have there: Motivos de San Francisco by the Chilean poetess Gabriela Mistral. She is one you must know about if you want to cut any ice in Chile. A very fine Catholic poet, dead now, but very well worth reading. This particular book is poetic prose, very beautiful. St. Francis has a way of inspiring good books. |
| 1966/11/04 | John Milton | Paradise Lost |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 157
| In these circumstances, readings on Paradise Lost have been deeply moving and magnificent. At times I have felt that Milton is the one who really knows the world as it is. M. and I are so much, in so many ways, Eve and Adam. One thing I am grateful for: this thing of having made with her a world of reality that is our own and subsists in and by and for us. A world of love which is the real world - because it is a world of choice, in which we have decided to be essential to each other's meaning, each other's grasp of everything else. It is as if we were married. |
| 1966/11/05 | Pablo Neruda | Residence on Earth |
Ltrs: SofC p. 319
| Just want to take up a couple of points from your letter, for which many thanks. Certainly I know [Pablo] Neruda, and he is I think a better poet than Gabriela Mistral, when at his best. Anyone who wants to really understand South America needs to have read his Residence on Earth. This is available in English too, and I can perhaps get it for you if you like. His more recent stuff is written on whiskey and is Communist Party propaganda of little value. Still you might get to know Neruda one of these days. |
| 1966/11/12 | T.S. Eliot | On Poetry and Poets |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 159
| Eliot's essay "What Is a Classic?" is short, brilliant and absurd. His definition of a Classic is solidly useful, and then he proceeds to make its use impossible except for a few choice spirits - Virgil, Dante, Racine and for no one in English. Perpetual somersaults of logic in order to make sure that this title must be denied Milton precisely because he is such a genius, but also because he does not completely exhaust the possibilities of language - etc. This is apparently one of the great problems of literary criticism: one can formulate splendid principles - and their use is always contestable unless it is so restrained that it is hardly a use at all. Here more than anywhere else one always has the sense that the opposite to what is said can be convincingly asserted. |
| 1967/01/10 | Amiya Chandra Chakravarty | Tagore Reader |
Ltrs: HGL p. 113
| I am very grateful for your kind letter and for the other package of books. I am especially glad to have the ones on India, and I am bent on continuing to read about Hindu thought and deepening my appreciation of it. I am particularly glad to have your Tagore Reader, which seems to me to be much better than another collection of his that I have. |
| 1967/03/11 | Louis Zukofsky | "A" 1-12 |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 205-06
| Did I mention anywhere here Zukofsky's two letters. They were beautiful. He liked my revisions (at which I was most happy) and promised to send books. So I sent a scrawl from the hospital saying "send books!" He wrote back with all kinds of family advice about bursitis (the way he and Celia fight back with aspirin and something else, some mystery of Squibb) and then the books came, and they are perfect. I am reading the early "A's" ["A" (New York, 1967)] and find them more moving than any other modern poetry I have read. The ground of his verse: a whole musical family. That makes the difference. He never reaches to make anything "musical" or "poetic"; he just touches the words right and they give the right ringing and tone. And all the rest too, the humorous drawing. |
| 1967/03/11 | Louis Zukofsky | "A" 1-12 |
Ltrs: CforT p. 291
| And now to your books [Bottom: On Shakespeare; All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958; "A" 1-12; "A" 9; and A Test of Poetry]. What a happening. Really. Especially to have the superb volumes of Bottom: On Shakespear"”it's like getting The Anatomy of Melancholy from [Robert] Burton himself: a book into which everything has gone. It will be something to think about for years. I look at it with wonder as I move around my front room. Never having read the early "A‘s" it is they that I have begun on, and they are full of everything that is best. To begin with, this is the right way to read "A's" I think, not bit by bit here and there in magazines. One really gets into them. "A" 7 is a most marvelous Easter fugue. You are in fact sacred music but as it should be, not just Church music. With the kind of secularity that is in Bach. And the compassion. |
| 1967/03/11 | Louis Zukofsky | Bottom: On Shakespeare |
Ltrs: CforT p. 291
| And now to your books [Bottom: On Shakespeare; All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958; "A" 1-12; "A" 9; and A Test of Poetry]. What a happening. Really. Especially to have the superb volumes of Bottom: On Shakespear"”it's like getting The Anatomy of Melancholy from [Robert] Burton himself: a book into which everything has gone. It will be something to think about for years. I look at it with wonder as I move around my front room. Never having read the early "A‘s" it is they that I have begun on, and they are full of everything that is best. To begin with, this is the right way to read "A's" I think, not bit by bit here and there in magazines. One really gets into them. "A" 7 is a most marvelous Easter fugue. You are in fact sacred music but as it should be, not just Church music. With the kind of secularity that is in Bach. And the compassion. |
| 1967/03/11 | Louis Zukofsky | Test of Poetry |
Ltrs: CforT p. 291
| And now to your books [Bottom: On Shakespeare; All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958; "A" 1-12; "A" 9; and A Test of Poetry]. What a happening. Really. Especially to have the superb volumes of Bottom: On Shakespear"”it's like getting The Anatomy of Melancholy from [Robert] Burton himself: a book into which everything has gone. It will be something to think about for years. I look at it with wonder as I move around my front room. Never having read the early "A‘s" it is they that I have begun on, and they are full of everything that is best. To begin with, this is the right way to read "A's" I think, not bit by bit here and there in magazines. One really gets into them. "A" 7 is a most marvelous Easter fugue. You are in fact sacred music but as it should be, not just Church music. With the kind of secularity that is in Bach. And the compassion. |
| 1967/03/11 | Louis Zukofsky | The Collected Short Poems,1923-1958 |
Ltrs: CforT p. 291
| And now to your books [Bottom: On Shakespeare; All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958; "A" 1-12; "A" 9; and A Test of Poetry]. What a happening. Really. Especially to have the superb volumes of Bottom: On Shakespear"”it's like getting The Anatomy of Melancholy from [Robert] Burton himself: a book into which everything has gone. It will be something to think about for years. I look at it with wonder as I move around my front room. Never having read the early "A‘s" it is they that I have begun on, and they are full of everything that is best. To begin with, this is the right way to read "A's" I think, not bit by bit here and there in magazines. One really gets into them. "A" 7 is a most marvelous Easter fugue. You are in fact sacred music but as it should be, not just Church music. With the kind of secularity that is in Bach. And the compassion. |
| 1967/04/15 | Louis Zukofsky | "A" 1-12 |
Ltrs: CforT p. 292
| The long Marxist section of "A" brought back the thirties as nothing else (though also a friend sent me a picture of Groucho Marx in the paper, another more influential Marxism of the thirties!) (Thought Groucho had gone to the Valhallas of laughter). "A" 10 is right up my alley as you will see from parts of Conjectures (though I do not write explicitly about the war). It is in a way Blake-like. So many good rich things. Especially the last long one. And now I read Bottom, too, when I am not writing my own: and the principle you lay down there is the one: that language comes up out of love in S. [Shakespeare] and in any valid poet. This is the truth we live for and by and there is no other (the Bible is full of the same). |
| 1967/04/15 | Louis Zukofsky | Bottom: On Shakespeare |
Ltrs: CforT p. 292
| The long Marxist section of "A" brought back the thirties as nothing else (though also a friend sent me a picture of Groucho Marx in the paper, another more influential Marxism of the thirties!) (Thought Groucho had gone to the Valhallas of laughter). "A" 10 is right up my alley as you will see from parts of Conjectures (though I do not write explicitly about the war). It is in a way Blake-like. So many good rich things. Especially the last long one. And now I read Bottom, too, when I am not writing my own: and the principle you lay down there is the one: that language comes up out of love in S. [Shakespeare] and in any valid poet. This is the truth we live for and by and there is no other (the Bible is full of the same). |
| 1967/04/30 | Jerome Rothenberg | Gorky Poems |
Ltrs: CforT p. 218-19
| Very good to get your letter and all the books: also your own ms. of Cuba poems (I'll return, you may need this copy). Where to begin thanking you? [Jerome] Rothenberg first: the Gorky book [The Gorky Poems], beautiful, hard and flexible, no waste. I am very moved by [Arturo] Giovannitti of whom I had never even heard. Takes you back when: the kind of epic poetry that came spontaneously out of Sacco and Vanzetti, back when I was a little kid. Giovannitti's face looks like someone who came up to me when I was on a picket line against the Ethiopian war, came up and said: "Look, I am Italian, let me tell you what is happening in my country "¦" |
| 1967/06/23 | Ronald Johnson | Book of the Green Man |
Ltrs: CforT p. 293-94
| What I have just read and highly recommend: Ronald Johnson's lovely poem The Book of the Green Man "¦ It is really substantial and full of color, draftsmanship of a high order, sound, and memories most rich of things that have been forgotten to our cost, myths, and well-chosen people and places. It is one of the very finest things I have seen anywhere and I know you will like it if you have not liked it already. |
| 1967/06/25 | Ronald Johnson | Book of the Green Man |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 254
| Day before yesterday read Ronald Johnson's long poem The [Book of the] Green Man, which I think is one of the best poems written in this century. I wrote to him about it. |
| 1967/09/24 | David Jones | Anathemata |
Ltrs: HGL p. 234
| The David Jones Agenda is a real event and revelation. As I told you, I did not know him at all. This has me felled. It is just what I have looked for so long: better than Bunting. With Jones, Bunting and Zukofsky we have the real poets and I wonder where they have been hidden. Of course it is no problem to keep a poet hidden from me as I don't see most of the mags. (a subscription to Poetry was given but the Boss would never let it through). Anyway, I am happy with the discovery and want to go into it much more. Also"”could I ask you for this? Can you dig up for me the paperback of Finnegans Wake and I'll swap you a drawing for it. I need it bad with Jones here. I'm trying to get In Parenthesis [by David Jones] etc. to do a chronicle for Continuum on him. |
| 1967/09/26 | David Jones | Anathemata |
Ltrs: HGL p. 235
| The books arrived yesterday. It is sheer joy to get back into Finnegans Wake again after all these years. The lightness and freedom of it is a huge relief after all the piles of heavy junk one gets buried under. All the messages, all the media, all the mustaches"”for the medium as we know is the mustache. I have gone right into The Anathemata [of David Jones] and it is a fine poem: curious from the Catholic viewpoint right at this time! I hope at least one or two Catholics read it one of these days and keep their sense of continuity with the past. He says everything. And has the sap and solidity of Romanesque sculpture, too "¦ |
| 1967/10/01 | Alfonso Cortes | Poema cotidiano |
Ltrs: CforT p. 178
| I have received the package of your two latest books [Las puertas del pasatiempo and El poema cotidiano, both published in 1967] and I am especially enchanted by your beautiful dedication. I have read with much pleasure these two books, especially because I believe that the idea of poetic autobiography is a very beautiful one. I assure you of my esteem and my friendship always very cordially, and I greet your estimable sister with much respect. |
| 1967/10/01 | Alfonso Cortes | puertas del pasatiempo |
Ltrs: CforT p. 178
| I have received the package of your two latest books [Las puertas del pasatiempo and El poema cotidiano, both published in 1967] and I am especially enchanted by your beautiful dedication. I have read with much pleasure these two books, especially because I believe that the idea of poetic autobiography is a very beautiful one. I assure you of my esteem and my friendship always very cordially, and I greet your estimable sister with much respect. |
| 1967/12/19 | Matsuo Basho | Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches / translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 27
| Reading Basho again. Deeply moved by the purity and beauty of his travel notes and Haiku. "All who have achieved real excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind sees is flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature." (Penguin"”p.72) |
| 1968/01/15 | David Jones | Anathemata |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 41
| Between ballots, the cloister full of people reading, I read long chunks of David Jones's Anathemata, somehow very moving and sonorous in that charged silence, and one felt a blessing over it all even before having any idea how it would tum out. |
| 1968/02/29 | David Ignatow | Rescue the dead : poems |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 60
| Tried some books. Carlos Fuentes' Change of Skin, new, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux "”starts out lovely, fuzzy, but doesn't hold me. I guess it is a good job but it doesn't hold me. What do I care about those people? Very good, though, the new Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow, from New Directions, with a fine terse, complex introduction, putting it all in a setting"”and also a great poem on Christ in the Garden"”like Rilke. Also, the new Gary Snyder"”strong, clear, definite poetry, a man of solid experience. No faking. David Ignatow"”a good poet but describing a person that stands between himself and lif"”and on which sometimes are projected rimal murders. He screams. The screams are unreal (Rescue the Dead). I notice in the poems of Vassar girls a hell of a lot of death wish. |
| 1968/02/29 | Robert Eduard Duncan | Bending the Bow |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 60
| Tried some books. Carlos Fuentes' Change of Skin, new, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux "”starts out lovely, fuzzy, but doesn't hold me. I guess it is a good job but it doesn't hold me. What do I care about those people? Very good, though, the new Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow, from New Directions, with a fine terse, complex introduction, putting it all in a setting"”and also a great poem on Christ in the Garden"”like Rilke. Also, the new Gary Snyder"”strong, clear, definite poetry, a man of solid experience. No faking. David Ignatow"”a good poet but describing a person that stands between himself and lif"”and on which sometimes are projected rimal murders. He screams. The screams are unreal (Rescue the Dead). I notice in the poems of Vassar girls a hell of a lot of death wish. |
| 1968/06/15 | Rene Char | Rene Char. Presentation par Pierre Guerre. Choix de textes, bibliographie, portraits, fac-similes |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 130
| I got home and shaved on the porch and had my one meal about 3:30 p.m. Then fell on the bed in a stupor, slept an hour, got up and said Office, read a few Zen texts in Spanish in Cona Franca and finally some Rene Char (which Jonathan Greene left with me) which I very much enjoyed again. Fascination of his language and line: Buses, milans, martres, ratiers, Et les funebres jarandoles, Se tiennent aux endroits sauvages. [Buzzards, kites, martens, ratters, and funereal farandoles keep to primeval places.] It takes me back to the summer of 1966 when I was so much under his spell (along with all the other spells of that time!). |
| 1968/07/03 | Brother Antoninus | Poet is Dead: A Memorial for Robinson Jeffers / pseudonym of William Everson |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 138
| New Directions sent me Bro. Antoninus's book on Jeffers. I began reading it immediately, on account of the coast. (I never paid much attention to Jeffers before. But Ping was talking about him when I was at the Redwoods and called him in Santa Barbara, enthusiastic about the sunny day at the shor"”May 13"”and Steller's Jay.) |
| 1968/07/21 | Ernesto Cardenal | Mayapan |
Ltrs: CforT p. 162
| Your Mayapan [long poem] is fine. I am doing some things like that now in a poem. I'll send you bits when they are published. William's latest poems in El Corno are magnificent, strong, rugged, impressive, clean. |
| 1968/09/09 | Robinson Jeffers | Selected Poems |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 167
| And then (10:15) for some unknown reason Is it up late reading Robinson Jeffers, that Pacific Blake, and he is O.K. I am deeply moved by him, I abide by him! We have climbed at length to a height, to an end, this end: shall we go down again to Mother Asia? Some of us will go down, some will abide, but we sought More than to return to a mother. This huge, inhuman, remote, unruled, this ocean will show us The inhuman road, the unruled attempt, the remote lodestar"¦. "And the old symbols forgotten in the glory of that your hawk's dream." [Note 7: Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books), 40-41. This is an excerpt from "The Torch-Bearer's Race," written in 1928, which several times refers to the "hawk's dream," after which Merton titled this part of the journals.] So-title! |
| 1968/10/15 | Anne Marie Esnoul | Ramanuja et la mystique vishnouite |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 206
| Hrishikesa, destroyer of Titans, ogres and canailles [scoundrels], [Note 1: It appears that Merton was reading Ramanuja et la mystique vishnouite by Anne-Marie Esnoul (paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964) on the airplane between San Francisco and Hawaii. In this volume he found quoted some unpublished French translations by J. Filliozat of devotional hymns written by the ninth-century Tamil poet Periyalvar. Using the parodistic technique he had developed several years earlier for his last major poetic work, The Geography of Lograire he composed this and the following poem, which are partly Merton's translation of Periyalvar's text and partly his own interjections of images drawn from his immediate experience.] Slaves flee the old group, embracing the feet of Hrishikesa, flying from Wallace, Free champagne is distributed to certain air passengers "Ad multos annos [For many years]," sings the airline destroyer of ogres and canailles In the sanctuary of the lucky wheel Blazing red circle in the fire We are signed between the eyes with this noble crim-Son element this Asia, The lucky wheel spins over the macadam forts Showering them with blood and spirits The thousand bleeding arms of Bana Whirl in the alcohol sky Magic war! Many armies of fiery stars! Smash the great rock fort in the Mathura forest Baby Krishna plays on his pan-flute And dances on the five heads Of the registered brass cobra Provided free by a loving line of governments. |
| 1968/10/20 | Milarepa | Sixty songs of Milarepa / transl. by Garma C.C. Chang ; select. and introd. by Bikkhu Khantipalo |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 217
| I have been reading the poetry of Milarepa, the great Tibetan yogi, who was born in 1052. "Repa""”"clad in one piece of cotton." (Because of his heat meditations?) He stands at the head of the Kagyudpa tradition. The "whispered transmission," i.e., esoteric. But he was not a bhikkhu, and his master, Marpa, was a layman. |
| 1968/11/05 | Edward C. Dimock and Denise Levertov | In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 256
| Here are some examples I like from the In Praise of Krishna anthology. The translations are by Professor Dimock in collaboration with the poet Denise Levertov. [Note 50: Edward C. Dimock, Jr., and Denise Levertov, In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (London: Cape, 1968).]: |
| 1968/11/05 | Edward C. Dimock and Denise Levertov | In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 255-56
| E. C. Dimock, Jr., on Vaishnava poetry: Vaishnava (Bengali) poetry originated in the Vaishnava bhakti sects of the 16th and 17th centuries. For the most part they are love poems, of the love between the god Krishna and Radha, most beautiful of the gopis, sung in kirtan ("prais") gatherings with drum and cymbals. But some are hymns to Chaitanya, a 15th-century Bengali Vaishnava saint considered to be an incarnation of Krishna. Krishna has many aspects, but for the Vaishnavas, "Krishna was the lover and beloved, whose foremost characteristic is the giving and receiving ofjoy, who is approachable only by bhakti, by devotion and selfless dedication." The sardaya, "the man of sensibility," who is aware of certain associations in Bengali, can appreciate in Vaishnava lyrics their interplay of the erotic and the mystical. The mood of the poems is called madhurya-bhava, a mood of identification in which poet or reader enters into the love-longing of Radha or another of the gopis. One of the formalities is the bhanito, or signature line, usually at the end of the poem, in which the poet identifies himself by name. |
| 1968/11/11 | Publius Ovidius Naso | Metamorphoses |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 271
| "Exemploque pari furit omnis turba, suoque Marte cadunt subiti per mutua vulner a fraters." "The same madness raged through them all, and those who had been brothers an hour before perished by wounds they gave each other." (Ovid, Metamorphoses III) |
| 1968/11/24 | Bhakta Tukaram | Poems of Tukaram |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 295
| Outside of the window of a Jesuit scripture scholar's cell, which has been loaned to me for the night, there is a brilliant and somber fiery sunset amid low blue clouds. The scholasticate here at Kurseong is high up on the mountain and looks far out over the Ganges plain. The school has an excellent library. I wanted to dip into Fr. De Smet's thesis on the theological ideas in Sankaracharya, but did not get a chance. I read a few songs of Tukaram, the greatest Marathi poet, and some Sufis; there was no time for more. Tukaram lived in Maharashtra (the region around Bombay) from 1598 to 1650"” within two years of being an exact contemporary of Descartes. He was ordained by Chaitanya in a dream and began teaching. He was ordered by some brahmins to throw his books in the river. He did so and went into a seventeen-day fast and meditation, after which the river returned his books to him. |
| 1968/11/27 | D.H. Lawrence | Selected Poems / edited by J. Reeves |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 301
| I got Lawrence's Twilight in Italy in Darjeeling and now, here in Madras, a little way down Mount Road, a thin volume of his Selected Poems (edited by J. Reeves). I'm curious to read again after so many years his "Virgin Youth" when today I have seen the Shiva lingam at Mahabalipuram, standing black and alone at the edge of the ocean, washed by spray of great waves breaking on the rocks. |