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 Ossian: 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 Summer 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 Dream: A Fragment 202 Dejection: An Ode 205 Urine 209 Fragments from the Gutch Notebook 209
Contents vii Fire, Famine, 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, Lord Byron 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 Robert Duncan’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 John Clare 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 Pan 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 Adam Mickiewicz 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 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: from The Notebooks 426 Mary Shelley: 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 Art 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 George Sand 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 Cyprian Norwid 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 Satan 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 Drawings 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 Victor Hugo: 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” Pierrots 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 The Dog 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: Reason and Energy 895
Friedrich Hölderlin from On the Difference of Poetic Modes 897
xx Contents William Wordsworth 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. FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
It should be unnecessary to point out that romanticism, 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 19th century, 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