Them he didn’t quite fancy-he couldn’t tell why, though: Then he thought of the Pyramids down at Cairo: He was too old for them they were partial to dandies. He thought of the Ural Mountains or Andes: Or some prominent object to stand by his side He must have some tall mountain or hill for his bride: He resolved to be steady the rest of his life,īut who should he get, which way should he go, Should have sowed his wild oats, should have finished his spree. The fields he had wasted, (not fields he had won )Īnd he thought it was time that an old man like he He began to think over the course he had run With his head in the clouds and his foot in the bay, Of the Dipartimento di Scienze Geologiche,Īs Mount Ætna sat smoking his pipe t’other day, Originally published in The Knickerbocker, May 1852 Or How Mount Ætna Courted an Iceberg, and Got “The Mitten” As a consequence, in the latter case, rediscovery is a resurrection of memory in the broadest sense: the artist as well as the artwork is retrieved from limbo.īelow is a copy of the poem as published by “porci con le ali” (“pigs with wings”), an imprint I’ve often used for self-published chapbooks. Great works survive their creators, who are nonetheless remembered as a consequence of their creations bad art dies with its creator. One shouldn’t confuse artists with their artworks, but it does feel at times that one is dealing with the person when dealing with the work, the more so the more awful the work may be. As it happened, however, a suitable occasion arose several years ago, which gave me a reason print the poem anew, as a present for my friend the vulcanologist.įriendship aside, I have to admit it tickled me to be rescuing so negligible a bit of writing from oblivion. Needless to say, “The Great Neglected” is a fairly forgettable bit of doggerel (unlike Halleck’s “Connecticut, Part 2,” a neglected masterpiece), and under other circumstances I would have let it disintegrate in the acid bath of my restless attention, which eats away at page after page and retains very little, just a word or two here or there. “The City of Catania and Mount Aetna” by W. The pages from the Democratic Review are reproduced below (click on the images for a closer view). The Jackson poem? Not so good, though I did like this passage:īehold the golden scales of Justice stand I have sampled the poems, pastiches of Greek verse interspersed among the letters (Greek verse as translated in Landor’s time, of course: they’re rhymed), and these are excellent. I’ve not read the book, though many consider it Landor’s best (“as beautiful an illustration of the blander aspects of wisdom as there can be in any language”). Or why else this ode? First published, as the editor notes here, in the second volume of Landor’s epistolary Pericles and Aspasia (London, 1836), where the poem serves as a midpoint dedication. Robert Pinsky, who wrote a book about Landor, is only the most recent in this line.Īmerican love for Landor was apparently reciprocated. He produced multiple volumes of “ Imaginary Conversations” (extended dialogues between historical figures, meetings that never occurred), and these were gobbled up in his own lifetime by Emerson and Fuller, both of whom met Landor, and after his death by Ezra Pound. Though little read today, Landor was a much-beloved writer among American poets, though admired more for his prose than poetry. The issue also included a poem for the old demagogue, the authorship of which surprised me: Walter Savage Landor. I focused on the editorial calling for a statue of Andrew Jackson. A postscript to the other day’s mention of a torn-up copy of Democratic Review found for a dollar…
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