Swept into ocean – fate of the Extravagator: the glassily tinkling George Darley

What a terrible discovery.  I was thinking, while writing my note on D. G. Myers’s use of the MLA International Bibliography to rank American authors, that someone else with access to the database should do the same thing for other authors and literatures.  My terrible discovery was that I in fact have access to the database.  What a time-waster!  After today, I am going cold-turkey.

Some sample results (anyone trying to use this tool for a serious purpose should think carefully about it limits).  The database goes back to 1947.  The ten most over-researched authors are:

Shakespeare (38,396 published papers or books, not even 600 per year!)
Dante (10,553)
Joyce (10,031)
Goethe (9,734)
Chaucer (9,040)
Milton (8,595)
Faulkner (6,555)*
Dickens (6,531)
James (6,491)
Cervantes (6,088)

Note that these are the ten highest ranked authors out of the ones I bothered to look up.  I coulda missed someone bigger (Kafka: 4,607).  Despite the bias caused by the historical accident of the prominence of academic research in English literatures (Wordsworth: 4,898), the central figures of German, Spanish, and Italian (Petrarch: 2,429) literature appear in reasonable spots, so I suspect the method would be similarly enjoyable for many non-English languages (Borges: 3,874).  French literature, as we all know, is unusual in that it lacks a Shakespeare-like figure, a single canonical giant (Proust: 4,165).

The next thing someone besides me should do is divvy up the data by time, like Myers did with Kate Chopin, allowing one to see that, for example, although Jane Austen’s count looks surprisingly low (3,724) fully a third of the catalogued Austen research has been published within the last ten years.  Newly minted graduate students hoping to work on Austen:  good luck (Woolf: 4,861).

I would like to suggest an alternative, a contemporary of Austen:  Anna Laetitia Barbauld.  She wrote at least one good poem, as I discovered yesterday, and her MLA count is only 131, with 15 published in the 40 years before 1987, 116 in the 25 years since.  Or, if you want to do in your career before it begins, specialize in George Darley: only 13 articles since 1947, and – oh no! – 3 since 1987.  Sorry, Darley.  Snipping him from the Norton Anthology was not a hard call.

Back in the Dark Ages of Wuthering Expectations, I wrote a few words about Darley, accompanied by many of his own, most of them involving mermaids:

In his green den the murmuring seal
Close by his sleek companion lies;
While singly we to bedward steal,
And close in fruitless sleep our eyes.

That is a euphonious sample of “The Mermaidens’ Vesper Hymn.” Darley’s poems are packed with nymphs, unicorns, a phoenix, all sorts of nonsense like that:

From “The Phoenix”

Half-buried to her flaming breast
In this bright tree, she makes her nest,
Hundred-sunned Phoenix! when she must
Crumble at length to hoary dust.

“The Phoenix” is itself just a small part of the book length Nepenthe (1935), a preposterous jumble of abstruse mythology, original imagery, and pure poetic music, in the service of what I do not remember:

The glittering fountains seemed to pour
Steep downward rills of molten ore,
Glassily tinkling smooth between
Broom-shaded banks of golden green, (Canto I, right at the start)

The water in the stream is glittering and molten because it is sunny: “heaven’s hot tyrant..  was turning all he touched to gold.”  The music of this eyewash is almost unmatched, although I would imagine readers of more astringent tastes have trouble finishing a single line.  Fair enough.

But!  I have been browsing in the only online version of Nepenthe that I could find, an 1897 edition, which I am disappointed to see is incomplete.  The book lacks Darley’s marginal notes, which run through and comment on the entire poem, mostly mocking it.  “Voluptuous emotions begin,” or, at the end, “Swept into ocean – fate of the Extravagator.”**  Suddenly Darley’s Romantic gush takes on a surprising complexity.  I begin to doubt that those 13 publications have said everything there is to say about poor George Darley.

*  I am getting slightly different numbers than Myers, a problem someone else can solve.  Close enough.

**  Examples of marginal notes taken from Michael Bradshaw’s chapter in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, 2010, p. 556.

Yes, injured woman! Rise, assert thy right! - poetry as long-lasting soap bubble

Professor Myers is investigating one of the canonical mechanisms I hid in the background yesterday:  who do researchers in English departments actually research?*  He popped names of U.S. writers into the MLA International Bibliography and counted up the results, comparing two periods, 1947 to the present and 1987 to the present.  Anti-canon radicals will be disappointed to see that much business is operating as usual:  Hank James, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville – y’all aren’t tired of those fellas yet?

The "professional commitment" of scholars has grown most rapidly for Toni Morrison, but also for Vladimir Nabokov, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton.  By this measure, feminist critics are doing well, but rarefied aesthetes are still doing all right, too, thank goodness.

Are scholars – and teachers, since I have no doubt that this ranking would be reflected in the undergraduate classroom – creating the canon here, or maintaining it?  As I wrote yesterday, I typically assume the latter, but Myers also presents a book, Kate Chopin’s 1899 The Awakening, that was clearly taken up by scholars first, not artists.  I was assigned the novel twice as an undergraduate, in 1988 and 1991, which I now see was right at the beginning of the Chopin boom.  Chopin has proved useful to feminist critics, but for the book to survive, to be canonical, it will have to be taken up by writers.  My guess is that it has been or will be – the novel is narrow but aesthetically complex, and it has certainly been assigned to enough young writers.

Who is moving in the other direction, being pushed toward the canonical exit?  In front of me is my battered, even ravaged Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 2, Fifth Edition (1986), 2,578 pages, and a near-mint Seventh Edition (2000), 2,963 pages, and bigger pages, too.  Anthologists face the most basic canonical problem:  even with 3,000 pages, not everything fits.

I think of canon-building as a slow, slow process; 14 years is nothing.  The enormous Victorian section, for example, is barely touched.  The unsettled 20th century is rearranged a bit, as I would expect.  The novelties are in Romantic poetry.  The Fifth Edition began with 70 pages of William Blake, followed by Robert Burns and Mary Wollstonecraft.  Now Blake is preceded by Anna Letitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith, and followed by Mary Robinson (all poets).  How did the editors find room for them (and also Joanna Baillie, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon)?

Three writers got the boot, all associated with Percy Shelley:  Thomas Love Peacock, George Darley and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.  As a result of my week-long exploration of the works of Peacock, he has surely been reinstated to the next edition, so that leaves Darley and Beddoes.  Beddoes is actually a favorite of mine, one of the weirdest weirdos of the 19th century, and Darley is a marvel, but I do wonder what professors ever did with them in a survey class.

Honestly, however good he is, George Darley was doomed.  Someone was going to replace him.  He is not of our moment.  Someday, someone else – no idea who – will replace some, but not all, of those women poets – no idea which ones.

My vote is to nix this terrible Anna Letitia Barbauld poem, written “ca. 1792-95,” which is as bad as John Greenleaf Whittier:

The Rights of Woman
Yes, injured woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume they native empire o’er the breast!

It gets worse after that.  But definitely keep her “Washing-Day” (1797), which is about a child’s view of chores, and ends on just the note I want for this post:

Sometime through hollow bowl
Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft
The floating bubbles; little dreaming then
To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball
Ride buoyant through the clouds – so near approach
The sports of children and the toils of men.
Earth, air , and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them – this most of all.

*  Be sure to attribute Myers’s work to the MLA – he loves that.

George Darley: minor early Victorian poet

George Darley (1795-1846) revered both Keats and Shelley, and imitated both here and there. He was a mathematician as well as a poet, although I don’t detect any math in his poems. His poetic art is in his music. Imagine you’re reading them aloud.

Here’s one of a series of poems about mermen and mermaids, maybe my favorite poem of Darley’s:

The Mermaidens’ Vesper Hymn

Troop home to silent grots and caves
Troop home! And mimic as you go
The mournful winding of the waves
Which to their dark abysses flow.

At this sweet hour, all things beside
In amorous pairs to covert creep;
The swans that brush the evening tide
Homeward in snowy couples keep.

In his green den the murmuring seal
Close by his sleek companion lies;
While singly we to bedward steal,
And close in fruitless sleep our eyes.

In bowers of love men take their rest,
In loveless bowers we sigh alone,
With bosom-friends are others blest, -
But we have none! But we have none!

Is this actually about anything? Loneliness, sexual restlessness (or a fantasy of female restlessness). But also, mermaids. When I see a poet described as “musical”, I can’t always hear it. I sure can with Darley. Some of his poems are close to pure song, meaningless, merely beautiful.

Darley’s one long work, Nepenthe, is another fantasy, with an incoherent mythological plot, and a dozen beautiful poetic nodules:

From Nepenthe

Hurry me, Nymphs! O, hurry me
Far above the grovelling sea,
Which, with blind weakness and base roar
Casting his white age on the shore,
Wallows along that slimy floor;
With his widespread webbed hands
Seeking to climb the level sands,
But rejected still to rave
Alive in his uncovered grave.

If I remember correctly, the dreaming poet is being flown from Egypt to, um, somewhere else, over the Mediterranean. Here, there is not just music but original imagery. The sea foam is the ocean’s “white age”, the waves on the beach are “his widespread webbed hands”, the blind ocean raves “Alive is his uncovered grave”. Obscure is too kind a description of the story of Nepenthe, but it’s full of passages like this one which live independently from the whole.

Darley frequently published anonymously, and his most famous poem was mistaken for a genuine early 17th century production. It begins:

A Ryghte Pythie Songe

It is not beautie I demande,
A chrystalle browe, the moone's despaire,
Nor the snowe's daughter, a whyte hand,
Nor mermaide's yellowe pryde of haire.

You might think that the title would signal that the archaicisms are a joke, but for decades Palgrave’s Treasury had this authored by “Anonymous 17th Century”. All of those extra “e”s clouded the anthologist’s mind.

Hey wait, there’s another mermaid.