CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Thanks & Acknowledgments 19

PRELUDIUM

Jean-Jacques Rousseau from The Social Contract 23 from Reveries of the Solitary Walker 23

Emanuel Swedenborg from The Spiritual Diary 26

Denis Diderot from Rameau’s Nephew: An Improvisation 30

Christopher Smart from Jubilate Agno 34

Erasmus Darwin from The Loves of the Plants: Mimosa and Tremella 42

James Macpherson from : The Songs of Selma 46

Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade from Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded 53

Francisco Goya Four Caprichos 58

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Prometheus 63 Thomas Chatterton from The Rowley Poems: An Excelente Balade of Charitie: As wroten bie the goode Prieste Thomas Rowley, 1464 65 Seven Ancient Monuments: Map of Rudhall and Redcliff Wall 70

Mary Robinson from A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination 72

William Blake from America a Prophecy: Preludium 76

A FIRST GALLERY From Goethe & Blake to Solomos & Pushkin

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Mignon’s Song 81 from Scenes from the Faust of Goethe [two versions] 82 from Venetian Epigrams 84 from Trilogy of Passion: The Marienbad Elegy 87 The Metamorphosis of Plants 89 from Theory of Color: The Blindingly Bright Colorless Form 92

William Blake [Epigraph] Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802 from Songs of Innocence and of Experience The Sick Rose 95 The Divine Image 95 The Human Abstract 96 The Chimney Sweeper 97 London 97 To Tirzah 98 from An Island in the Moon: Chap 9 98 The Mental Traveller 100 from Milton, Book the First: The Vortex 103 from Milton, Book the Second: “There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True” 105 from Jerusalem: The Covering Cherub 107

Joseph Joubert

from The Notebooks: 1789 – 1794 109

vi Contents Mary Robinson A London Morning 114 To the Poet Coleridge 115 from Sappho and Phaon: Six Sonnets 117

Robert Burns A Red, Red Rose 121 Love and Liberty. A Cantata 121

Jean Paul [Richter] First Flower-Piece: Speech of the Dead Christ from the Top of the Universe: That There Is No God 133

Germaine de Staël Corinne’s Improvisation in the Naples Countryside 138 Corinne’s Last Song 142

Friedrich Hölderlin I Once Asked the Muse 145 In the Forest 147 Palimpsest: Columbus 153

William Wordsworth Lines Written in Early Spring 160 The Female Vagrant 161 Nine Sonnets: From London to Paris, August/September 1802 168 from The Prelude, Book Fifth: Books 172 Ode: “There was a time” 176

Dorothy Wordsworth from The Grasmere Journals 183 Grasmere, Lineated 184

Novalis [Epigraph] from Heinrich von Osterdingen from Faith and Love or The King and the Queen 190 from Hymns to the Night [5 and 6] 195

Samuel Taylor Coleridge [Epigraph] “The heart should have fed” Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a : A Fragment 202 Dejection: An Ode 205 Urine 209 Fragments from the Gutch Notebook 209

Contents vii Fire, , and Slaughter: A War Eclogue 213 Ne Plus Ultra 215

Charles Fourier from The Theory of the Four Movements 217 The Phalanx at Dawn 217

Thomas De Quincey Dream-Fugue: On the Theme of Sudden Death 221

George Gordon, Darkness 230 from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto Three 232 from Don Juan: Dedication 237 On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year 240

Giuseppe Belli Eleven Roman Sonnets: For the Pope 243

Percy Bysshe Shelley Song from Prometheus Unbound 250 On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery 251 Queen Mab: Canto VII 252 England in 1819 262 from Peter Bell the Third: Hell 262 “Arethusa,” with ’s “Shelley’s Arethusa Set to New Measures” 266 Ode to Liberty 269

SOME ASIAN POETS

Prologue 279

Kobayashi Issa Fifteen Haiku 281 from The Spring of My Life 282

Hô Xuân Huong Autumn Landscape 285 On Sharing a Husband 285 Jackfruit 286 Weaving at Night 286

viii Contents Wu Tsao For the Courtesan Ch’ing Lin 286 Bitter Rain in My Courtyard 287 I Have Closed the Double Doors 288

Bibi Hayati Before There Was a Hint of Civilization 288 How Can I See the Splendor of the Moon 289 Is It the Night of Power 290

Rabindranath Tagore from Gitanjali 291

John Clare [I Am: A Sonnet & a Variation] 293 The Badger: A Sequence 294 from Letter to Messrs Taylor and Hessey 295 [Mouse’s Nest] 296 Emmonsails Heath in Winter 296 from The Progress of Rhyme 297 Jack Randalls Challenge to All the World 298 To 299 Letter to Mr. Jas. Hipkins 299

John Keats Butterflies, Lineated 301 “What can I do to drive away” 301 from Endymion, Book One: Hymn to 303 Sonnet: “If by dull rhymes” 305 Meg Merrilies 305 Sonnet: “Bright star” 306 Ode to Psyche 307 Ode to a Nightingale 308 Dream and Dream Sonnet: Paolo and Francesca 311 Ode on Melancholy 312 “This living hand” 313

Heinrich Heine Ezra Pound, after Heine: Und Drang 314 Morphine 316 Heine per Gerard de Nerval The Castaway 317 The Dream 318 from Ludwig Börne: A Memorial 319

from Germany: A Winter’s Tale [23 – 26] 322

Contents ix from Crimean Sonnets: The Ruins of the Castle of Balaklava 335 The Romantic 335 from Pan Tadeusz 337 from Forefathers’ Eve: The Great Improvisation 340

Giacomo Leopardi L’Infinito 343 Saturday Night in the Village 344 from Operette Morali: Announcement of Prizes by the Academy of Syllographs 345 Broom, or the Flower of the Desert 348

Dionysios Solomos The Destruction of Psara 358 The Shark 358 The Woman of Zante 360

Aleksander Pushkin The Emperor Nicholas I 375 The Prophet 376 from The Bronze Horseman: Introduction 376 Tsar Nikita and His Daughters 379 from Eugene Onegin: Onegin at the Theater 385

A BOOK OF ORIGINS

Prologue 395

William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Ancient Poets 397

E. A. Wallis Budge from The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Chapter of Changing into Ptah 397

G. R. S. Mead from Pistis Sophia: O Light of Lights [Coptic Gnostic] 398

Sir William Jones Two from Sanskrit from The Yarjurveda 402 A Hymn to the Night 403 x Contents Edward FitzGerald from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam [Farsi] 403

Daniel G. Brinton from Rig Veda Americanus: Two for the Goddess [Aztec] 406

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow / Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Song of the Owl [Ojibwa] 407

Washington Matthews from The Night Chant: Prayer of the First Dancers [Navajo] 408

Francis J. Child Sir Patrick Spence 411

Percy Bysshe Shelley Homer’s Hymn to the Moon [Greek] 412

Vuk Karadžic´ A Poem for the Goddess Her City & the Marriage of Her Son & Daughter [Serbian] 413

Lady Charlotte Guest Hanes Taliesin / The Tale of Taliesin [Welsh] 414

Esaias Tegnér / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from Frithiof’s Saga [Icelandic / Swedish] 416

Christmas Gysarts [Mummers] Play from Bowden 417

Thomas Wentworth Higginson from Negro Spirituals 421

Anonymous Song of the Bald Mountain Witches & Magic Nymphs [Russian] 425

Five Dream Works, from Coleridge to Freud : from The Notebooks 426 : The King of Cats, a Ghost Narrative 427 Gerard de Nerval: from Aurelia, or Dream and Life 428 Georg Büchner: from Lenz 429 Sigmund Freud: from The Dream-Work 430

Charles Darwin from The Origin of Species 431

Contents xi A SECOND GALLERY From Hugo & Lönnrot to Swinburne & Mallarmé

Victor Hugo The Grave and the Rose 435 The Slope of Reverie 435 Russia 1812 439 from The of Being a Grandfather What the Public Says 441 The Immaculate Conception 442 from God: The Threshold of the Abyss 444 Ma Destinée 449

Elias Lönnrot from Kalevala: In the Beginning 451

Thomas Lovell Beddoes [Epigraph] from Death’s Jest Book, Act One Dream of Dying 460 A Crocodile 460 from Death’s Jest Book: Three Songs 1. Isbrand’s Song 461 2. A Song of the Deaths 462 3. The Song That Wolfram Heard in Hell 463 Dream-Pedlary 464

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Two Sonnets, for 466 A Musical Instrument 467 from Sonnets from the Portuguese: Three Sonnets 468 from Aurora Leigh, Fifth Book [excerpt] 470

Aloysius Bertrand from Gaspard de la Nuit: Preface and Six Poems 476

Gerard de Nerval [Epigraph] from Aurelia, or Dream and Life Panorama 482 Les Chimères 484

Ralph Waldo Emerson Days 494 Woods: A Prose Sonnet 494 from The Notebooks: “Turtle in swamp” 495 Hamatreya 495

xii Contents Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing 497 Blight 499 Bacchus 501

Edgar Allan Poe

Sonnet— Silence 504 The Haunted Palace 505 from Eureka, a Prose Poem 506

Alfred Tennyson “Flower in the crannied wall” 510 The Hesperides 510 from Maud, or The Madness “Come into the garden, Maud” 513 “Dead, long dead” 516

Robert Browning “Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes” 520 Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island 520 Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 528

Edward Lear Eight Limericks 531 Mr and Mrs Discobbolos 535 Letter to Mrs Stuart Wortley: The Moon Journey 536 “How pleasant to know Mr Lear!” 538

Søren Kierkegaard The Illegible Letter 540 from Either/Or: Diapsalmata 541 Nebuchadnezzar 542

SOME OUTSIDER POETS

Prologue 546

Antoine Ó Reachtabhra [Blind Raftery] I Am Raifteirí 547

Anonymous Revolutionary Pamphlet from The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times 548

James Reuben History of Nez Percé Indians from 1805 up to the Present Time, 1880 549

Contents xiii Jacob Carpenter

from Deaths on Three-Mile Creek: 1841 – 1915 551

Anonymous The Boasting Drunk in Dodge [1883] 552

Ernest Jones The Song of the Low 553 The Song of the Gaggers 555

Thomas Cooper from The Purgatory of Suicides, a Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books 556

Joanna Southcott from The Strange Effects of Faith 560

Anonymous The Honest Farmer’s Declaration [1853] 562

Mikhail Lermontov My Demon 563 Untitled Poem 563 A Dream 564 New Year’s Poem 566

Walt Whitman Fragment from “The Sleepers” 569 from Song of Myself: “I have heard what the talkers were talking” 570 This Compost 571 Respondez! or Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness 573 I Sing the Body Electric 576 Good-bye My Fancy! 582

Herman Melville

Lines— after Shakespeare 584 The Maldive Shark 585 from Moby Dick Father Mapple’s Hymn 585 The Cabin 586 A Squeeze of the Hand 587 from Billy Budd: Billy in the Darbies 588

xiv Contents The Sphinx 590 What Did You Do to Athens, Socrates? 591 Chopin’s Piano 592

Charles Baudelaire Correspondences 596 Two Prose Poems Get Drunk 597 One O’Clock in the Morning 597 A Carrion 598 Litanies of 600 The Voyage 602 To the Reader 606

Sándor Petöfi The Madman 608 Homer and Ossian 610 from The Apostle [1, 3, 4] 612

Dante Gabriel Rossetti from Dante’s New Life: His Pitiful Song 619 Troy Town 621 The Blessed Damozel: A Double Work of Art 624 from A Trip to Paris and Belgium 629

Emily Dickinson #1249 “Had I not seen the Sun” 634 Poem fragment: “We do not think / enough of the / Dead” 635 #627 “I think I was enchanted” 635

#764 “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – ” 637

#706 “I cannot live with You – ” 637

#778 “Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre – ” 639

Visual poem: “A poor – torn heart – a tattered heart” 640 To Recipient Unknown 641

Christina Rossetti My Dream 644 The Convent Threshold 646 from Goblin Market 649

Sousândrade [Joaquim de Sousa Andrade] from O Guesa Errante: The Wall Street Inferno 655

Contents xv Adah Isaacs Menken Judith 663 Battle of the Stars [After Ossian] 665 Sale of Souls 669

Algernon Charles Swinburne Second Chorus from Atalanta in Calydon 674 A Ballad of Burdens 675 Anactoria 677

Stéphane Mallarmé “Cette adorable bague” 686 The Tomb of Edgar Poe 687 Igitur 687 from A Tomb for Anatol 697

A BOOK OF EXTENSIONS

Prologue 707

William Blake Laocoön 709

Two Shaker Vision Sacred Roll 710 Spirit Message 711

Edward Lear from Letters to Evelyn Baring 712

Lewis Carroll Concrete Poem: A Mouse 713

Guillaume Apollinaire from Calligrams: The Bleeding-Heart Dove and the Fountain 714

Lewis Carroll Jabberwocky 715

The Shakers Sound Poem [Glossolalia] 716

August Strindberg from Holy Trinity Night: The Nightingale’s Song 716

xvi Contents Lafcadio Hearn Charcoal Man 717

James Clarence Mangan A Railway of Rhyme 718

Leigh Hunt Deformations 719

Arthur Rimbaud Vowels & Colors 719

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Writing Aslant 720

Lewis Carroll Three Syllogisms 720

Walt Whitman Words 721

Mary Shelley Improvisation: Contadini and Improvisatori 722

Henry David Thoreau A Telegraph Harp [1851] 723

Stéphane Mallarmé from Thèmes Anglais: Indefinite Articles 724

Laurence Sterne from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Verbs Auxiliary 726

Three Alphabets Christopher Smart: from Jubilate Agno 727 : A Hieroglyphic Alphabet 729 Benjamin Paul Blood: from The Poetical Alphabet 730

Sadakichi Hartmann Sadakichi’s 1895 Light Show 731

A THIRD GALLERY From Hopkins & Nietzsche to Yosano & Apollinaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins Star Images: September to December 1864 737

Contents xvii Two Sonnets Carrion Comfort 738 Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves 739 The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo 740

Friedrich Nietzsche Oedipus: Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher 743 The Desert Grows: Woe to Him Who Harbours Deserts . . . 743 Only a Fool! Only a Poet! 747 Letter to Jacob Burckhardt 750

Paul Verlaine Chanson d’Automne / Autumn Song 752 from Songs without Words: Seven Poems 753 Overture 756 Sonnet to the Asshole [with Arthur Rimbaud] 757 The Art of Poetry 758

Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont [Epigraph] “I replace melancholy with courage” from Poésies 760 from Maldoror: Shipwreck and Sharks 762

José Martí Undated Fragment 768 from Notebook 5: “Movement is contagious” 769 Not Rhetoric or Ornament 770 Two Homelands Have I 771 from Powder from the Wings of a Moth 771 from Simple Verses: “I am an honest man” 774 The Swiss Father 776

Arthur Rimbaud Morning of Drunkenness 779 The Drunken Boat 780 Second Delirium: Alchemy of the Word 783 Bad Blood 788 Farewell 793

Jules Laforgue [Epigraph] “Dans la pièce les femmes vont et viennent” 795 Complaint on the Oblivion of the Dead 796

xviii Contents The Coming of Winter 798 from Landscapes and Impressions 800

SOME ORIENTALISMS

Prologue 806

William Blake from The Book of Los: Asia 807

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Arabian Ballad 809

George Gordon, Lord Byron from The Giaour: Leila as Gazelle 813 from Hebrew Melodies Ancient & Modern: The Wild Gazelle 814

Victor Hugo from Les Orientales: Bounaberdi 815

Ralph Waldo Emerson Brahma 816

Walt Whitman from Passage to India 816

Charles Baudelaire L’Invitation au Voyage 819

Victor Segalen from Stelae: Roadside Stelae 821

Arno Holz Six from Phantasus 824 Childhood Paradise 826

José Asunción Silva Nocturne III 836

Sigbjørn Obstfelder I Look 838 839 Hurricane 841 The Woman in Black 842 The Arrow 843

Contents xix Rubén Darío In the Land of Allegory 844 Sonatina 845 Agency 846 To Roosevelt 847 Metempsychosis 849 Exploit in the Bullring 849

Alfred Jarry from Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician Elements of Pataphysics: Definition 854 A Visit to Lucullus 854 Concerning the Surface of God 858

Gertrude Stein from The Making of Americans 861

Antonio Machado Six Poems 868

Rainer Maria Rilke Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes 874

Yosano Akiko The Woman 878 from Midaregami (Hair in Disorder): Cochineal Purple 878 May It Not Come to Pass That You Die 880 In Praise of May 881 Auguste’s Single Strike 882 Song of the Letter A 884

Guillaume Apollinaire Zone 886

MANIFESTOS & POETICS

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [Toward a World Literature] 895

William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: and Energy 895

Friedrich Hölderlin from On the Difference of Poetic Modes 897

xx Contents from Advertisement for Lyrical Ballads 898

Samuel Taylor Coleridge from Shakspeare, with Introductory Matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage 899

Friedrich von Schlegel Athenaeum Fragment 116 900 from On Incomprehensibility 901

Percy Bysshe Shelley from A Defence of Poetry: Three Excerpts 902

John Keats To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818 904

Heinrich Heine from Journey from Munich to Genoa: Heine’s Epitaph 905

Victor Hugo from Preface to Cromwell 906

Ralph Waldo Emerson from The Poet 907

Walt Whitman from Preface to Leaves of Grass 908

Charles Baudelaire from The Painter of Modern Life 908

Fyodor Dostoevsky from Notes from Underground 910

Emily Dickinson Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson 912

Walter Pater from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry 913

Stéphane Mallarmé from Crisis in Verse 914

Gerard Manley Hopkins from Poetry and Verse 915

Contents xxi Arthur Rimbaud from Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871 916

Rainer Maria Rilke An Archaic Torso of Apollo 918

Credits 919

Figure Credits 926

Index of Authors 927

xxii Contents The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. . . . The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that it is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.

It should be unnecessary to point out that , as a specific state of mind and temperament whose function is to create from scratch a new general conception of the world, transcends the very limited fashions of feeling and declaiming which are proposed as its successors and which textbooks strive to situate on the same plane as romanticism itself, declaring the latter to be

decrepit — and thereby exorcising the subversive elements in it. . . . Above and beyond the sprinkling of works proceeding from it, or derived from it, notably through symbolism and expressionism, romanticism asserts itself as a continuum. ANDRÉ BRETON

The critical texts of the English and German Romantics were true revolutionary manifestos, and established a tradition which continues today. . . . But in 1800, as again in 1920, what was new was not so much that poets were speculating in prose about poetry, but that this speculation overflowed the limits of the old poetics, proclaiming that the new poetry was also a new way of feeling and living. OCTAVIO PAZ

With the Romantic movement, the intellectual adventure of not knowing, of “Negative Capability,” Keats called it in poetry, returns. The truth we know is not of What Is, but of What Is Happening. ROBERT DUNCAN

If in the , as Gertrude Stein said, people saw parts and tried to assemble them into wholes, while in the 20th century people envisioned wholes and then sought parts appropriate to them, will the 21st century carry out a dissemination of wholes into all parts and thus finish what the 19th century began? LYN HEJINIAN This page intentionally left blank