Christopher Reid

In the Proceedings of the Royal Institute of Anthropophagy (last year’s Spring number, page 132), there is a most unusual instance recorded of a man and woman who conspired to eat each other – and would have done so, had not the laws of nature prevented it. I heartily agree with the writer of the article who denounces the whole affair as a ‘flagrant travesty’, a...

Inevitably your biographer is getting it all wrong.

His little screen recapitulates the few known facts.

With rapidly dabbing fingertips he coaxes a workable pattern, till

there it is – the truth at last! And you stand condemned

to centuries of ignominy, your well-polished plea unheard.

Among her admirers, who tend to be wholehearted and fervent, the feeling is that Elizabeth Bishop has not yet received anything like her critical due. Things are improving – in the United States more rapidly than over here, where admission to the Pantheon seems as slow and grudging a process, and as prone to archaic shibboleths and mysterious blackballings, as election to a Pall Mall club. It is still possible to be told, by fairly intelligent readers, that her poems ‘lack form’, or that her diction is ‘flat’ and that her lines ‘don’t sing’, just as one still runs across the stubborn assertion that Matisse ‘can’t draw’. But this is getting less common.’

Joseph Brodsky’s new selection, To Urania, gets off to a troubled start with a 20-line poem that contains at least one grammatical slip and a sentence of baffling absurdity. The slip occurs in line four, where we meet the construction ‘dined with the-devil-knows-whom’ – an accusative that seems to me justified by neither the rule-book nor colloquial usage. The absurd sentence follows two lines later. ‘Twice have drowned,’ we read (the first person being understood), ‘thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ Eh? ‘Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ I see.’

To read Donald Prater’s biography of Rilke in the hope of getting to know the poet in depth would be a tantalising exercise. Lack of information is not the problem. There is no shortage of documentary evidence available to the investigator and Prater has made full use of it. Rilke himself supplied his large share in letters of a princely egocentricity, upon which he appears to have lavished a formidable outlay of time and creative energy. Many of those who were personally acquainted with him, too, were scrupulous in setting down their impressions of a figure whose near-divine poetic status was taken for granted from an early date, while scholars and researchers have shown comparable zeal in the subsequent mopping-up campaign, until now it would seem we have all the facts we could reasonably ask for. Prater’s eight-page bibliography alone testifies to the abundance of secondary literary material generated by what was, after all, an oeuvre of modest size (if one leaves aside those letters) and a life whose most notable characteristics were a cultivated detachment from the surrounding world and a dismaying evasiveness in personal matters.