conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled Lives of the Poets about Eliot, Pound, Lives with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author's Lives of the Poets should engender endless debates. Anytime anyone attempts a project this monumental--nothing less than the entire history of poetry in English, after all!--plenty of people will disagree with how he or she goes about it. Take, for example, the fact that the author crams 500 years of poetry (Richard Rolle of Hampole through Walt Whitman) into the first half of his massive tome, then spreads a mere century and a half (Emily Dickinson to the present) across the rest. And even 900-plus pages isn't enough space to treat every poet equally--indeed, it may be that the author's choices will spark the liveliest disagreements. Then there are his various pronunciamentos on poetry itself--everything from its form to its influences. But no matter what you may think of the author's methods or conclusions, his credentials are above reproach. Editor of PN Review and founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press, he is a man both passionate and knowledgeable about poetry--and poets. While the author does, indeed, provide biographical information about his subjects, it is with their inner lives, their imaginative landscapes, that he is chiefly concerned. Open the book to almost any page or any era, and you'll find detailed analyses of not only the poems themselves but also the times, the culture, and the literary antecedents that affected them. Of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound he writes: "Eliot and Pound rebelled together against what they saw as the misuse of free or unmetered verse." And in discussing Eliot's The Waste Land , he remarks:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lives of the Poets
  What I did on my birthday: I cleaned this place, I'm into housewifing, vacuuming, washing the bathroom floor. No one will believe that I do this.
  I heard from the Dark Lady with her astute timing telling me she will leave Athens in a day or so and go on to Egypt. I am pitted against the world.
  I received a call from the tall Icelander who with the encouragement of her covetous and luscious friend has been negotiating in some incredible upper-class way to adore me as an Eskimo slowly, patiently, endlessly tracks the giant white bear.
  I entertained my wife and children, loving them all and taking them for good Mexican food down the block. Nobody said, and everybody felt, how odd this husband and father is in his own apartment. Imagine—his having gone ahead and done this thing without any warning or announcement. I wanted them to ask me about it. I wanted to tell them: I am doing this to find out why I'm doing it. I wanted to assure them: after all, you kids could be visiting me in a prison, or a hospital, isn't this better, this working retreat I've made for myself in the middle of the electric city? I speak to the journey we each must make, I give you the lesson of courage in selfhood, I pray that I am in good health, I pray for us all that God grant us long life in excellent good health.
  That prayer part is from something I made up one night years ago when I was unable to sleep from my good fortune. I composed this placation, this fervent invocation not to be punished for my happiness: Dear God, keep the blessings flowing, grant us all great good health and long life, with no illness, no sickness, no disease, no affliction of any kind, mental or physical. Spare us from all disasters, human or natural, and from all accidents, and spare us from violence, whether organized and official or spontaneous and haphazard. Let there be no breakdown or deterioration of any of our internal systems or organs, no loss of acuity of our senses, no diminution of our abilities and capacities. Keep our reflexes sharp. Let us live in a world of peace and social justice. Let us breathe clean air and drink pure water. Let us live in love and joy and creativity, knowing courage and finding wisdom and having a shot at enlightenment. I think that about covers everything, except extend this terrific grant to everyone I know and whoever they may have an affection for and so on, amen.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I will tell Angel simply that it may not be in my nature to be married and she'll look at me, my wife of two decades, the father of her children, and I'll say there is an evolved being and eventually it declares itself. And not just to me but to you too, I am saying we must make the whole journey, it is the only justification for any of us, after the imperatives have been met—to let go, take the risk, it is the only honor and the only redemption of the last free years. And true, I have a particular hope in mind but I know what a wild hope it is, I cannot compete for her forever. And I know that. I see the stunned Mattingly wandering around trying to find a woman he can talk to, I see my friend Leonard, whose wife of fifteen years left him for a woman—he has his colleagues in for drinks in his dark new little apartment—and I see the small spaces men end up with for their lives, and there is terror, and the disgusted reproach of children, and the lapse into dereliction of men who have taken down their establishments, and I know I risk all that. I risk the drab common fate. But look, I'll tell her, if we do this right we can save of ourselves and our relationship what is good about it, we can be colleagues, we are still partners in parenthood, we can help each other, relate as real human beings, share our thoughts, maintain our regard for each other, maybe we can even go to bed from time to time.
  A call from a new El Salvadoran benefit group: Would I come to hear an American doctor who works with the rebels? That interests me—the doctor flew bombing missions in Vietnam.
  Hi, says my neighbor just now, meeting me at the incinerator. I heard your typewriter going this morning, you were on a real roll, weren't you?
  When dusk comes this time of year the lights are already on in all of the apartments and I see several floors of action simultaneously. He is playing the piano while one floor below in the identical spot she waters a potted plant. People when talking on the phone gesticulate as if the person at the other end were right there, perhaps the body movement is necessary for the inflection. One young girl has just lifted her skirt and looked into her underpants. Children, I notice, have rooms filled with primary colors, they are said to need cheerful enameled toys, little kid there stands on the windowsill, his body pressed up against the window, arms over his head, he's looking for his dad to come home. Get down, kid. And all over the complex the TV sets shine their colors synchronously, this is a popular program, the light shifts, colors flick everywhere on every floor, a news program, look how the scenes change, the light shading, brightening, darkening, some war in green hills, people running, colors shifting.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And this morning I'm writing, here it is a new day of the late winter, the Mrs. is cooking up some gruel in the kitchen, they have brought their own tortilla mix and dried beans, the kids are well behaved but beginning to explore the apartment, something just broke in the bathroom, there is an exhortation, a head pokes in, apologias, baby diapers are not the best-smelling things in the world, it serves me right, wait'll the boys hear about this, I have to get lots of things in here that I never needed before, pots pans, more dishes, soap for the basement clothes washer, quarters, I have to make sure they remember we come in and out through the basement. My friend the Señor is miserable, awfully thin, high cheekbones, black mustache, that black straight mestizo hair they have, he stands at the picture window in the finest digs he's ever seen in his life and stares at the skyline thinking what has happened to my life.
  I'll need sheets for cots, I'll need cots, I haven't got that much time today, I'm waiting for Angel in the 245DL, does this mean I'll have to live in Connecticut? Let's not get carried away. Maybe they'll really only stay a day or two, maybe they'll get arrested. Look, my country, what you've done to me, what I have to do to live with myself.
  And on the news on the radio they think they've discovered a new planet system orbiting around the star Vega, they're not sure yet, a big dust cloud, an infant system, the first ever seen going around anything besides our sun, yes, and just in time too, it'll be close in any event.
  Little kid here wants to type. OK, I hold his finger, we're typing now, I lightly press his tiny index finger, the key, striking, delights him, each letter suddenly struck vvv he likes the v, hey who's writing this? every good boy needs a toy boat, maybe we'll go to the bottom of the page get my daily quota done come on, kid, you can do three more lousy lines
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And this morning I'm writing, here it is a new day of the late winter, the Mrs. is cooking up some gruel in the kitchen, they have brought their own tortilla mix and dried beans, the kids are well behaved but beginning to explore the apartment, something just broke in the bathroom, there is an exhortation, a head pokes in, apologias, baby diapers are not the best-smelling things in the world, it serves me right, wait'll the boys hear about this, I have to get lots of things in here that I never needed before, pots pans, more dishes, soap for the basement clothes washer, quarters, I have to make sure they remember we come in and out through the basement. My friend the Señor is miserable, awfully thin, high cheekbones, black mustache, that black straight mestizo hair they have, he stands at the picture window in the finest digs he's ever seen in his life and stares at the skyline thinking what has happened to my life.
  I'll need sheets for cots, I'll need cots, I haven't got that much time today, I'm waiting for Angel in the 245DL, does this mean I'll have to live in Connecticut? Let's not get carried away. Maybe they'll really only stay a day or two, maybe they'll get arrested. Look, my country, what you've done to me, what I have to do to live with myself.
  And on the news on the radio they think they've discovered a new planet system orbiting around the star Vega, they're not sure yet, a big dust cloud, an infant system, the first ever seen going around anything besides our sun, yes, and just in time too, it'll be close in any event.
  Little kid here wants to type.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lives of the Poets
  The resonance of the passage comes from associations already attached to the names and from the Yeatsian rhythm ("Easter 1916") in which they are conveyed. But Bunting uses rhyme and a variation on the eight-syllable line with his own cunning elsewhere, not tying Celtic sound-knots as Austin Clarke does, but achieving purity of statement, a universal rather than a particular voice:
  In such passages, with controlled but not exaggerated development of back vowels, Bunting achieves unprecedented effects.
  Note how the syntax holds, tense with fear and unease. In the third section, against the antique durability of the historical setting unsettled by the sons of Shem (for there are elements of Pound's politics embedded in Bunting's social vision), a modern European war is enacted in Africa and elsewhere. The juxtaposition of the sections reveals cultural incompatibilities and continuities. The war occurs against an image—only an image—of unsettled and predatory exile (Part I) and cultural permanence (Part II).
  In Part II the poet is embattled, accusing, out to show the bogus world what he's made of. He succumbs to insincerity, degradation; he goes to sea and is forgotten. "Love is a vapour, we're soon through it." He goes to Italy, more tombstones and bulls, the bull here the Minotaur, approached in the transition of images between the music of birds and the complications of "Schoenberg's maze." Part III is tautly written documentary and description: what the poet sees and celebrates is vulnerable to exploitation, destruction. The war is approaching.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is three more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is hard to think of a more affirmative formulation than that. Singer is a scientist while Hughes is a romantic anthropologist.
  Of all the poets roughly contemporary with Thomas, the one who stands apart as a great (nonacademic) critic, political theorist and uniquely gifted poet is C. H. Sisson. With the writers of his generation he shares what the Movement most distrusted, a changing prosody sanctioned by instinct, irreducible to rule. Some of his poems are in exacting Metaphysical forms, some in a free verse that takes its bearings from Eliot and Pound. He is in their direct line, and at the same time in the line of Donne and Hardy. Donne—and Hardy? The affinities (we cannot speak of connections since Hardy was not influenced by Donne or the Metaphysicals) go beyond formal invention and have to do with elaboration of syntax, the admission of the irrational, the unexpected, which reconfigures experience and language.
  Sisson's approach to the writers he admires is to evoke their social and intellectual milieux, sketch in the native landscape and antecedents, the accidents and peculiarities that individuate them early on, and then to consider how they combine and transcend these factors. In an essay on Charles Péguy (1946) he asks, "Is not every sincere life, in a sense, a journey to the first years?" The first years of a life, of a culture, beginnings, break-points and re-beginnings, are all-important. What does art transcend, how does it transcend? This is not to confuse biography with criticism. Criticism follows from it, biography (not of the tittle-tattle sort) clears a ground, clarifies opacities, defines formative prejudices, how consciously they are entertained, what the work makes of them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last paragraph? End with the sentence ', New York, in 1999.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, in 1998. First published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.