tWi2 ^L+f JJVO s A W^dUS-i? a3 Summer 1964 $1 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY Volume V, Number 3 Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota 55057 Published by Carleton College Editor: Reed Whittemore Associate Editors: Wayne Carver and Erling Larsen Managing Editor: Carolyn Soule Editor, Department of American: Wayne Booth Cover design by Helen Whittemore Vol. V, No. 3 Summer 1964 A Malebolge of 1400 Books Six Lectures by Karl Shapiro From Aristotle to Dante 3 From Coleridge to Eliot 25 From Frost to Lawrence 46 From Lautreamont to Robert W. Service 72 From Shakespeare to Yeats 95 Henry Miller and Myself 115 The Carleton Miscellany is published quarterly. Rates are as follows: $1.00 a copy; $3.50 a year; $6.00 for two years. It is distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. De Boer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey. All volumes available on microfilm through University Microfilms, 313 N. First St., Ann Arbor, Michigan. Manuscripts should be submitted to The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, as should subscriptions. Manuscripts are submitted at the author's risk, and will not be returned unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Member of the Association of Literary Magazines of America Copyright, 1964, by Carleton College Second-class postage paid at Northfield, Minnesota 55057 Notes on this Special Issue: This issue of The Miscellany is devoted in its entirety to six lectures delivered by Karl Shapiro at Carleton in April, 1964. Mr. Shapiro's appearance at Carleton constituted the first in an annual series of public lectures, the fund for which was contributed to the College in 1962 in memory of Ward Lucas, a former trustee of Carleton, by his family. By the terms of the bequest the lectures may be delivered "in any of the creative arts . by an outstanding 'maker or doer'." Karl Shapiro was born in Baltimore, on November 10,1913. He attended the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University. In 1946 he was appointed Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. In 1950 he became editor of Poetry (Chicago). Mr. Shapiro is now Charles J. Mack Regents Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He has published seven books of verse, the second of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. In 1960 he published a collection of essays, In Defense of Ignorance. His most recent book of verse, published by Random House this May, is entitled The Bourgeois Poet. The editors acknowledge with thanks the kindness of Randy Biasing and Neil Sandstad in allowing them to reprint the Shapiro collage on the back cover. It is the work of Mr. Biasing and Mr. Sandstad, and first appeared in the Carleton undergraduate literary magazine, Ms. The editors also wish to thank Peter Schjeldahl for allowing them to reprint on the front cover Mr. Shapiro's signature in the form in which it appeared in yet another Carleton magazine, Mother. From Aristotle to Dante I have been chosen to inaugurate the Ward Lucas Lecture­ ship. It is an honor which I do not yet understand but for which I am as happy as I am surprised. In a world so populous with fine and first-rate critics, I who do not consider myself a critic have to look for an explanation for this choice. Still, I feel this way about my lecturing very often. Sometimes I have felt that I have been asked to speak at an institution of higher learning (as we call them) to provide relaxation or refreshment. Some­ times I have thought that curiosity prompted the invitation, and in one or two cases, spite. Again I have felt that I am merely answering the roll call of the living, substantiating a viewpoint or a prejudice, or illustrating a paragraph in a textbook. But on the whole I tend to give myself the benefit of the doubt and so enjoy the generosity of spirit of my hosts and the bounty of my patrons. The fact is that I love to lecture, whether I am a critic or not, and despite the fact that I dare not look back on what I have said, once it is in print. Most writers have a deep fear The Carleton Miscellany of looking back at their work, as if they will be turned to a pillar of salt. Some critics are listened to because they solve the literary problems of others, some because they make trenchant dis­ coveries, and some because they have a nuisance value. You can decide which school I belong to. Once I had agreed to deliver these lectures I was forced to ask myself what I was going to say and how I was going to fill 180 pages of typescript — to write a book really — without lying or posing or repeating things I had said before. When the initial wave of panic had passed I considered various courses. I have to rehearse this with you if you are to understand the direction my remarks will take. I considered first writing something like E. E. Cummings' non- lectures which he gave at Harvard. They were his only lectures and they were non because Cummings refused to give up poetry for lecturing. So he merely told anecdotes of his life and family, significant ones perhaps (though that didn't matter) and he read poems he had loved. A large section of his audience must have been outraged at this elderly autistic child acting exactly as a poet should — with sublime irrelevance. Then I considered writing a biographical autobiography, or pathography, a series of self-analyses along the lines of The Life of Henri Brulard. This little self-history of Stendhal's has always been a favorite of mine because it is so brilliantly full of the author's failure and his wonder at it. Stendhal was fifty when he wrote it and he records how at that age he still failed to under­ stand his life and loves. He was, people fairly agree, a literary and a political genius, a sentimentalist, a man of great decency and honor and yet an ineffectual ass in the affairs of the world and his own. His book on love, which a Spanish philosopher not long ago refuted unmercifully, confers upon Stendhal some of the ridiculousness of the poet. I'm interested in the poet as a figure of fun, a clown, a fool, and so on. I thought also of writing a work similar to that touching book of William Carlos Williams called / Wanted to Write a Karl Shapiro Poem. Imagine a bibliography being touching. But that one is. The work is a series of recollections about his own books, taken down by a lady who interviewed Williams and his wife when the poet was too ill to do the writing himself. It is a monologue, the themes of which are honesty and the improbability of being a poet in the United States. Then again I thought of rewriting or "redacting" and ex­ panding and dilating upon a verse essay on modern poetry which I wrote in the Army. It is one of my books which I most fear to look at because it occasioned so much pain to me and to others. In a recent inscription I called it "a half-arsed arse poetica." Not that it was painful to write; on the contrary, it was a sheer delight to dissect my elders and betters whom I had never met and from a distance of ten thousand miles. This work began my career of stepping out of line. It is one of those books that is terribly praised and that leaves a black mark on one's record. Next I considered an endless series of epigrams and disjointed gnomic sayings, flashes of insight and poison pen footnotes such as fill most writers' journals. And finally I thought I might present six unwritten chapters of a kind of hottentot novel I have begun. It is about myself of course, the eternal attempt to tell the truth and let it signify what it may. But I have only written one chapter and am not sure of it. In the end I dismissed all these "considerations." But not really. Cummings on the lecture platform, Stendhal amazed at the failure of experience, Williams describing his single-handed battle, my ars poetica, the jottings and the clowning of the jotter — these will serve to oil the typewriter. But not only these. The titles of my lectures, if you have seen them, will seem at first glance as learned as anything. On second glance it will ap­ pear that something is out of kilter and that perhaps they do not quite make sense. On closer examination it will appear that the principle of the lectures is the alphabet (A, D, E, K, L, R, S, Y). But much of the population today does not know the The Carleton Miscellany alphabet and would consider the titles either learned or pe­ culiar. In any case, this is not important. I spend most of my time under the shadow of a wall of books, maybe 1400 volumes, thick and thin. They are arranged for the most part in alphabetical order. Otherwise I could never find the one I need for a lecture or a class. It is not a "library" (odious word when it has domestic connotations) and if it were it would not be a good library. It is my tool shop and I rarely ever touch one of the books unless for work. Yet there are some I have carried round the world with me, some I carried in bar­ racks bags through a war, some I wrote, and some inscribed by famous men.