I don't have control at YouTube over who can see and who can't, like I do here. It's two different entities, unfortunately. Let me see what I can do...
It’s really inexpensive , and provides plenty of excellent entertainment value Suzanne. YouTube videos are essentially free, not for the livestream performances though.
I’ve often been put off by the overly sophisticated, but I don’t begrudge them their group of likeminded friends. I like what you’ve shown us of Teasdale’s poetry for the reasons you point out. Aren’t they just right?There’s a stage of growth that comes after sophistication. To me that’s a mind comfortable with not knowing anything. Just not knowing. I loved the way she made me experience the fresh wetness of the Aprils of her era.
Oh, I love me some pretentious stuff, too. But I think the kind of poetry Teasdale wrote isn't much seen now; it has been subsumed by song lyrics, which is ultimately, I think, what she was writing.
Many would say Sara Teasdale’s life didn’t end well I suppose. A ‘bad’ end like that seems so much better than suffering and dependency until the end. She just floated away. I’m all for that if the time is ripe.
There Will Come Soft Rains is the Bradbury, just like the poem. It is in The Martian Chronicles. The story has a similar theme to the one in the bit of doggerel I have always loved:
Earth
.
by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)
.
"A planet doesn’t explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air.
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Thank you 🙏. I feel really silly since my copy of the Martian Chronicles was sitting on a shelf two steps away when I asked. Appreciation for the Wheelock, too.
It sure seems like it, right? I was listening to TS today, and she cites her depression A LOT in her more recent stuff. One never knows for sure what is a character and what is real, but I think it's real, somewhat, in her case.
Wonderful peace on a poet I'd never heard of or had forgotten if I did. This poetry, I believe, the general public would still read. Modernist poetry, for all its greatness in its own way, helped to kill off the general public reading poetry, just as modernist novels began the decline of the general public reading actual literature. An analogous development is the rise of literary theory in academia. No one without a Phd can read articles and books on literature (and even some of us with Phd's struggle to understand theory-based readings of literature--and film, too).
The purpose of poetry, said originally by Horace if memory serves (and it often doesn't as I grow older), is to delight and instruct. The modernists left out the delight and made it awfully hard to instruct with their opaque writing. (For me, in addition to Pound [except for his imagist poetry], it's Wallace Stevens that I have no clue when reading.)
One quibble, though: I don't think W. B. Yeats is like Eliot, Pound, etc. I read Yeats as an undergrad and loved (and understood) his poems: "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Second Coming," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Lapis Lazuli," and others. (Just the fact that I recall those titles says something about the impression they made on me.)
Just reading Teasdale's lines in this article brought me pleasure. Thanks, Greg!
Thanks, Lincoln. I do enjoy a more challenging poem or novel, for sure, but sometimes the moment doesn't call for that. I always feel like the very best poetry manages to put the toe right on the line where sentimentality begins. Emotional without being corny. It's hard to do.
It's funny you mentioned Stevens...I was reading his stuff the other night, having not read much before. It's all over the place! Some of it sounds like a person making up poetry some fancy but pretentious poet wrote for a movie.
I don't object to PhD-level literary criticism, except that 99 percent of it is the driest, dullest writing imaginable. So so boring. Everyone gets too bogged down with using JUST the right mode for citations, and it takes all the blood out of it. They could make the same points, share the same insights, and write it with joy. That's what I try to do here.
Greg, my daughter is a Ph.D and college English professor. She publishes lots of literary criticism, and speaks all the time. I have read much of her stuff as well as lots from others of her colleagues and contemporaries too. You do write with joy, and you are perceptive and gifted too. Yes, too many in the academic world squeeze the joy out of the work, and intend to speak to each other, not the rest of us. You make beautiful and important literature “sing” for the rest of us. Thank you.
"Barter" was just what I needed today. And it also helps me feel good about the vast sums I have just dropped on concert tickets and festivals for the coming months as I am sitting here doing bookkeeping 🤣.
"Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold."
Yes please. Or, as HST would say, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."
I have always believed that falling in love is the most delicious feeling in human experience. And that “It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," which acknowledges the pain that comes with its ending. I’ve been there enough times to fully understand. So has Taylor Swift. I believe the “barter” in this human drama is inextricably tied to our sexuality. As someone fortunate enough to have found, relatively late in life, a relationship based on unconditional love, I see that Love—as opposed to being in love—transcends human experience. It’s spiritual. I don’t see how it could end. Death will eventually end the human relationship but not the love. If either Taylor or Sara had ever felt this, I don’t see it in their lyrics.
Interesting observation, Earl. Love does transcend human experience, I believe that as well. I think Sara may have loved Lindsay, but there were too many obstacles by the time they were together; I think she liked her husband well enough but did not love him. As for TayTay, I'm hoping it works out with Travis...it's been well over a year, two Super Bowls!
Thank you for that, as I often say, maybe it’s the possibility of the implausible. That unconditional love transcends human experience. I feel that it does, but in the night, with no distractions, I wonder what is truly unconditional…
I’ve heard of Teasdale’s work, she’d have cranked out a few albums like Taylor, had she been born in today’s epoch. Thanks for sharing Greg, I always appreciate your vast knowledge of literature and poetry! How much of Pound’s writing is a product of his fascist philosophy, and subsequent time in oubliettes, and mental institutions?
Thanks, Patrick. Re Pound, I don't know. I'm just picking on him because he wound up shilling for Mussolini and I never cared for his stuff. Zelda Fitzgerald was also kind of fascistic towards the end, but that was after years in institutions, when they did all kinds of electroshock therapy on her. So maybe that's the explanation. But sometimes pretentiousness and intellectual elitism DOES lead one to fascism.
I've always loved Sara Teasdale though I've not read her much lately. But I was fascinated to find that I apparently knew major chunks of Barter by heart. As I think I have mentioned, my mom taught English in the 30s and had anthologies that I devoured as a kid. And there the poems are, when someone brings them up: rising to my lips in synch.
My boss is 88 and will occasionally start reciting some poem I've never heard of. I love when teachers made us memorize poems. The best possible use of my brain. When I taught creative writing for those three semesters, I once recited "To His Coy Mistress" from memory. It's long. I did it fast. The kids looked at me like I had three heads.
My daughter was born while I was in grad school for English lit. I used to use poems I had to know in detail as lullabies. (necessarily short ones). I have a rotten memory for memorized things, but put them to a tune they stick with me for life. That’s even though I am actually tuneless, vocally. I just remember “lyrics” way better than plain memorizing.
So 50 years later I can remember all of “whoso list to hunt.” But I have to “sing” it mentally to do so.
Bless you, Greg!! Didn't know of Teasdale but did hear/see Yevgeny Yevtushenko back in the day at Pratt. It was all in Russian so I didn't understand a word. But I certainly did feel it (probably too much)!
And thanks for giving me an excuse to drop one of my favorite Tay-Tay videos.
Beautiful again, Greg. I am ashamed to admit I did not know Sara Teasdale. Thank you for this”lyrical” column today. She is wonderful.
And man, do I need to remember “Barter” today and every day. I am a natural born cynic, the glass is for sure half empty and going fast kind of guy. That is not the right personality for today’s stupidity, insanity and honestly depravity. Despair is an ever present spector for me……..
I keep waiting for our country and its leaders to wake up and call the bluff of the greatest conman, crook, and moral degenerate of my lifetime and maybe ever, but I am still waiting.
Thank you for your voice. I may have said this here or on another site, but we need fearless, smart and YES aggressive leaders to oppose the immoral, illegal and truly destructive people in charge today. It sure ain’t Chuck Schumer, et al. We need young, articulate, aggressive, smart and principled ones. Desperate times call for desperate measures in my book. Here is my dream team for the next generation. I love what AOC is doing and saying. Give her a leadership voice. Here in my pathetic irredeemable red state of Texas, people please go see what young state rep James Talarico says about Christian Nationalism, school vouchers, the oil oligarchs takeover of our state government, and now the takeover of our public schools by nut job “Christians.” He is the real deal, and is actually like me a Christian who believes in the separation of church and state. What a concept!!!
Anyway, I am still hoping for a miracle but the denial and ignorance of what is happening is still shocking and depressing. Fox News has POISONED “middle America.”
Sorry for the long comment, but 2025 is a bad era for a 71 year old pessimist to be living through……….
I didn’t know about your enthusiastic love for poetry when I subscribed. It’s quite a bonus for me. Educational. Thank you Greg. billserle.com
It is for me too, Bill. I liked what he said about Ezra. But I loved reading Barter the most.
Me too, I loved Barter.
Thanks, Bill. I love it and writing about it every week gives me an excuse to learn more!
So members only does not mean paid subscribers? That sucks.
I don't have control at YouTube over who can see and who can't, like I do here. It's two different entities, unfortunately. Let me see what I can do...
It’s really inexpensive , and provides plenty of excellent entertainment value Suzanne. YouTube videos are essentially free, not for the livestream performances though.
I’ve often been put off by the overly sophisticated, but I don’t begrudge them their group of likeminded friends. I like what you’ve shown us of Teasdale’s poetry for the reasons you point out. Aren’t they just right?There’s a stage of growth that comes after sophistication. To me that’s a mind comfortable with not knowing anything. Just not knowing. I loved the way she made me experience the fresh wetness of the Aprils of her era.
Oh, I love me some pretentious stuff, too. But I think the kind of poetry Teasdale wrote isn't much seen now; it has been subsumed by song lyrics, which is ultimately, I think, what she was writing.
Hahaha
Many would say Sara Teasdale’s life didn’t end well I suppose. A ‘bad’ end like that seems so much better than suffering and dependency until the end. She just floated away. I’m all for that if the time is ripe.
I should say it ended unhappily, rather than not well.
Life has loveliness to sell
Sarah Teasdale tells us well.
Barter contempt for lyrical
Ezra pounds sand in hell.
What is the name of the Bradbury story, please?
There Will Come Soft Rains is the Bradbury, just like the poem. It is in The Martian Chronicles. The story has a similar theme to the one in the bit of doggerel I have always loved:
Earth
.
by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)
.
"A planet doesn’t explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air.
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."
Thank you 🙏. I feel really silly since my copy of the Martian Chronicles was sitting on a shelf two steps away when I asked. Appreciation for the Wheelock, too.
I love that poem! I think I wrote about it a while ago.
Highly intelligent and moronically stupid are not mutually exclusive, as muskrat proves daily
Heehee. Ezra pounds. Ha!
Lovely. Maybe Taylor is channeling the spirit of Sara Teasdale. It’s good to know that others a century ago suffered as we perhaps feel we do today.
It sure seems like it, right? I was listening to TS today, and she cites her depression A LOT in her more recent stuff. One never knows for sure what is a character and what is real, but I think it's real, somewhat, in her case.
Wonderful peace on a poet I'd never heard of or had forgotten if I did. This poetry, I believe, the general public would still read. Modernist poetry, for all its greatness in its own way, helped to kill off the general public reading poetry, just as modernist novels began the decline of the general public reading actual literature. An analogous development is the rise of literary theory in academia. No one without a Phd can read articles and books on literature (and even some of us with Phd's struggle to understand theory-based readings of literature--and film, too).
The purpose of poetry, said originally by Horace if memory serves (and it often doesn't as I grow older), is to delight and instruct. The modernists left out the delight and made it awfully hard to instruct with their opaque writing. (For me, in addition to Pound [except for his imagist poetry], it's Wallace Stevens that I have no clue when reading.)
One quibble, though: I don't think W. B. Yeats is like Eliot, Pound, etc. I read Yeats as an undergrad and loved (and understood) his poems: "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Second Coming," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Lapis Lazuli," and others. (Just the fact that I recall those titles says something about the impression they made on me.)
Just reading Teasdale's lines in this article brought me pleasure. Thanks, Greg!
Thanks, Lincoln. I do enjoy a more challenging poem or novel, for sure, but sometimes the moment doesn't call for that. I always feel like the very best poetry manages to put the toe right on the line where sentimentality begins. Emotional without being corny. It's hard to do.
It's funny you mentioned Stevens...I was reading his stuff the other night, having not read much before. It's all over the place! Some of it sounds like a person making up poetry some fancy but pretentious poet wrote for a movie.
I don't object to PhD-level literary criticism, except that 99 percent of it is the driest, dullest writing imaginable. So so boring. Everyone gets too bogged down with using JUST the right mode for citations, and it takes all the blood out of it. They could make the same points, share the same insights, and write it with joy. That's what I try to do here.
Greg, my daughter is a Ph.D and college English professor. She publishes lots of literary criticism, and speaks all the time. I have read much of her stuff as well as lots from others of her colleagues and contemporaries too. You do write with joy, and you are perceptive and gifted too. Yes, too many in the academic world squeeze the joy out of the work, and intend to speak to each other, not the rest of us. You make beautiful and important literature “sing” for the rest of us. Thank you.
"Barter" was just what I needed today. And it also helps me feel good about the vast sums I have just dropped on concert tickets and festivals for the coming months as I am sitting here doing bookkeeping 🤣.
"Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold."
Yes please. Or, as HST would say, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."
Yay, concerts, yay, festivals! Play on!
I'm glad you enjoyed the poem as I did.
I have always believed that falling in love is the most delicious feeling in human experience. And that “It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," which acknowledges the pain that comes with its ending. I’ve been there enough times to fully understand. So has Taylor Swift. I believe the “barter” in this human drama is inextricably tied to our sexuality. As someone fortunate enough to have found, relatively late in life, a relationship based on unconditional love, I see that Love—as opposed to being in love—transcends human experience. It’s spiritual. I don’t see how it could end. Death will eventually end the human relationship but not the love. If either Taylor or Sara had ever felt this, I don’t see it in their lyrics.
Interesting observation, Earl. Love does transcend human experience, I believe that as well. I think Sara may have loved Lindsay, but there were too many obstacles by the time they were together; I think she liked her husband well enough but did not love him. As for TayTay, I'm hoping it works out with Travis...it's been well over a year, two Super Bowls!
Thank you for that, as I often say, maybe it’s the possibility of the implausible. That unconditional love transcends human experience. I feel that it does, but in the night, with no distractions, I wonder what is truly unconditional…
I’ve heard of Teasdale’s work, she’d have cranked out a few albums like Taylor, had she been born in today’s epoch. Thanks for sharing Greg, I always appreciate your vast knowledge of literature and poetry! How much of Pound’s writing is a product of his fascist philosophy, and subsequent time in oubliettes, and mental institutions?
Thanks, Patrick. Re Pound, I don't know. I'm just picking on him because he wound up shilling for Mussolini and I never cared for his stuff. Zelda Fitzgerald was also kind of fascistic towards the end, but that was after years in institutions, when they did all kinds of electroshock therapy on her. So maybe that's the explanation. But sometimes pretentiousness and intellectual elitism DOES lead one to fascism.
I've always loved Sara Teasdale though I've not read her much lately. But I was fascinated to find that I apparently knew major chunks of Barter by heart. As I think I have mentioned, my mom taught English in the 30s and had anthologies that I devoured as a kid. And there the poems are, when someone brings them up: rising to my lips in synch.
My boss is 88 and will occasionally start reciting some poem I've never heard of. I love when teachers made us memorize poems. The best possible use of my brain. When I taught creative writing for those three semesters, I once recited "To His Coy Mistress" from memory. It's long. I did it fast. The kids looked at me like I had three heads.
I'm glad you knew Barter!
My daughter was born while I was in grad school for English lit. I used to use poems I had to know in detail as lullabies. (necessarily short ones). I have a rotten memory for memorized things, but put them to a tune they stick with me for life. That’s even though I am actually tuneless, vocally. I just remember “lyrics” way better than plain memorizing.
So 50 years later I can remember all of “whoso list to hunt.” But I have to “sing” it mentally to do so.
Bless you, Greg!! Didn't know of Teasdale but did hear/see Yevgeny Yevtushenko back in the day at Pratt. It was all in Russian so I didn't understand a word. But I certainly did feel it (probably too much)!
And thanks for giving me an excuse to drop one of my favorite Tay-Tay videos.
https://youtu.be/3tmd-ClpJxA
Barter is awesome. A keeper when the ugliness of flawed humans overtakes my senses…
Beautiful again, Greg. I am ashamed to admit I did not know Sara Teasdale. Thank you for this”lyrical” column today. She is wonderful.
And man, do I need to remember “Barter” today and every day. I am a natural born cynic, the glass is for sure half empty and going fast kind of guy. That is not the right personality for today’s stupidity, insanity and honestly depravity. Despair is an ever present spector for me……..
I keep waiting for our country and its leaders to wake up and call the bluff of the greatest conman, crook, and moral degenerate of my lifetime and maybe ever, but I am still waiting.
Thank you for your voice. I may have said this here or on another site, but we need fearless, smart and YES aggressive leaders to oppose the immoral, illegal and truly destructive people in charge today. It sure ain’t Chuck Schumer, et al. We need young, articulate, aggressive, smart and principled ones. Desperate times call for desperate measures in my book. Here is my dream team for the next generation. I love what AOC is doing and saying. Give her a leadership voice. Here in my pathetic irredeemable red state of Texas, people please go see what young state rep James Talarico says about Christian Nationalism, school vouchers, the oil oligarchs takeover of our state government, and now the takeover of our public schools by nut job “Christians.” He is the real deal, and is actually like me a Christian who believes in the separation of church and state. What a concept!!!
Anyway, I am still hoping for a miracle but the denial and ignorance of what is happening is still shocking and depressing. Fox News has POISONED “middle America.”
Sorry for the long comment, but 2025 is a bad era for a 71 year old pessimist to be living through……….
Another gem uncovered!