conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Eliot, Pound, Lives with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Lives of the Poets'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first two 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.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know three more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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: Do you know 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: Do you know the first five 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.
  The Scarlatti passage is from Part IV, which begins with long lines. Bunting lets the cadence gradually dwindle. After a battle, after a flood, "I hear Aneurin..." The progression to the nipped statements of personal importance foregrounds the lines
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A wonderful poet, his best poems are elegies—to Lanyon, to the painter Roger Hilton and other artist friends—and the monologues, "Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons" (his masterpiece) and "To My Wife at Midnight," which celebrates the love of older people bound together by habit, pets and love but divided by argument. Were he a popular poet, his "Lake Isle of Innisfree" would be the poem "Imagine a Forest," playful and deadly earnest, in which he touches the rawest nerve of Romanticism with tact and subtlety. He is a largely benign monster, strictly inimitable, a little obscure, an acquired taste like all the poets who passed through the Apocalypse and were distracted by Dylan Thomas.
  Burns Singer was drawn not by Thomas but by MacDiarmid, and then by Graham, who became his master and friend and with whom he stayed in Cornwall, exchanged letters and ideas, until Singer died at the age of thirty-six in 1964.
  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. 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: Add another sentence about Sisson.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A wonderful poet, his best poems are elegies—to Lanyon, to the painter Roger Hilton and other artist friends—and the monologues, "Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons" (his masterpiece) and "To My Wife at Midnight," which celebrates the love of older people bound together by habit, pets and love but divided by argument. Were he a popular poet, his "Lake Isle of Innisfree" would be the poem "Imagine a Forest," playful and deadly earnest, in which he touches the rawest nerve of Romanticism with tact and subtlety. He is a largely benign monster, strictly inimitable, a little obscure, an acquired taste like all the poets who passed through the Apocalypse and were distracted by Dylan Thomas. 
  Burns Singer was drawn not by Thomas but by MacDiarmid, and then by Graham, who became his master and friend and with whom he stayed in Cornwall, exchanged letters and ideas, until Singer died at the age of thirty-six in 1964. 
  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: Do you know the last five paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'Beside earlier centuries, the twentieth in this account is overcrowded with poets'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Beside earlier centuries, the twentieth in this account is overcrowded with poets. And yet it is not crowded enough. There are significant absences, as in the earlier centuries, for which amends will have to be made another time.
  It is an act of folly, I now know, to undertake so large a task as this. What fueled it from the outset was a fierce and sometimes partisan enthusiasm for specific poems. I like the way that poems connect with one another and weave a larger pattern. A living poem can energize another poem at five hundred years' distance, or across the other side of the world. For the most part I follow chronology in this history, knowing how unfashionable in academic circles it now is to plot such a course. But it is only against a sense of chronology, of developing styles, that the surprise of what was once genuinely new can be understood, its abiding value inferred.
  What cannot be inferred, however, is future direction. The twentieth century is so diverse, the new technologies so volatile, that the historian is wary of becoming a prophet. No one could have predicted the enormous achievement of Chaucer, Spenser or Ben Jonson. After Jonson, certain definable lines emerge and there is for a time a progressive logic in chronology, which breaks down in the second half of the eighteenth century and is never restored. A historian can be a prophet after the event, making the case for neglected writers. Swinburne and then T. S. Eliot restored Donne, for instance, and Laura Riding is not alone in having tried to restore Charles Doughty, whose time may yet come. But "may yet come" begins to sound like prophesy; for his time to come it will take a poet rather than a critical advocate to resurrect him.
  We can predict that the questions that arise out of religious belief or doubt, out of history, politics, economics, out of anxiety, sexual desire or frustration, love or hate, will continue to exercise poets to come. So too will the nature of language, what can and cannot be said and formed. Answers will come, if at all, not in poetic theories and poets' essays, grand statements or aphorisms—things that occur after the crisis and the creative event. Answers will come in poems, not as argument but as form. Even in those poems that contain argument, what matters as poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combination makes, the ordered effects they produce in the attentive hearer. This is what survives when argument goes stale, when the rules of play change, when the poem's occasion is lost.
  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.