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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 3, 2008

OGIC: “A vapid and effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood”

December 3, 2008 by ldemanski

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Keats and “To Autumn,” mentioning in passing the poet’s contemporary critics. A reader wrote with further reflections on Keats’s critical reception. He unfurls this more artfully than I possibly could, so here’s his message in its entirety:

Reading your comments on Keats today, and especially your mention of his critics,
moves me to share with you one of my very favorite passages. It is from a biography
of Keats that was published in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
After a single sentence giving the date and place of Keats’ birth, the author moves
directly into the critical history:

In his first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely
good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were
undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. His third book raised him at
once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Never was any one of
them but Shelley so little of a marvelous boy and so suddenly revealed as a
marvelous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement
of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his
fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket
with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer. The Ode to a
Nightingale, one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all
ages, is immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the most vulgar
and fulsome doggerel ever whimpered by a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the
sickly stage of whelphood.

If that strikes you as unusual prosody for an encyclopedia, you are right. It is
Swinburne. On a few occasions I have, with some success, read this paragraph aloud
to auditors.

Just marvelous. Thank you, Bob.

OGIC: Morning coffee

December 3, 2008 by ldemanski

• Cinetrix finds awesome celeb memoir cover art. (And, as a commenter notes, the title’s not too shabby either.)
• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
• Something I looked at over Thanksgiving weekend. And looked and looked at. Idea for a future post: the difference between luxuritating in half a dozen Breugels in a single room and encountering a single Breugel in a sea of less-great art.
• An adolescent girl “is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs–to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others–are met precisely by the act of reading.” Enough to make me order the first two novels in the Twilight series.

TT: Snapshot

December 3, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five perform “Don’t Worry ‘Bout That Mule” in 1946:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

December 3, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you’ll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday.”
Alfred Döblin, Alexanderplatz, Berlin (trans. Eugene Jolas)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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