It's no secret that I love poetry. Today I learned that Robert Service (whom we've talked about before) so loved Keats that while visiting a famous gambling casino, he left the tables to read Keats in a corner of the kitchen. Service told how guilty he felt reading sublime Keats in so tawdry an environment.

quote:

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Your little book of limp green leather
I sadly fear that I profane,
Because we two are linked together
In this rococo hall of gain;
That I a piddling poetaster,
A nuzzler of the muse's teats,
Should in this milieu con the Master --
Forgive me, Keats.

---

Doubtless many writers are well read. Can we share passages where a noted writer paid elegant tribute to a fellow-writer?

This by its nature may be a short thread, but it can't hurt to try.

Robert Frost's view of Carl Sandburg is the opposite of an elegant tribute, but I had to link to it since it is a writer's view of another writer.

Although it is a fictional encounter, the comments of "Vladimir Brusiloff" on writers is just one extract from the hilarious short story, "The Clicking of Cuthbert" that I would share:

'Vladimir Brusiloff proceeded to sum up.

"No novelists any good except me. Sovietski-yah! Nastikoff-bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse
and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me."

And, having uttered this dictum, he removed a slab of cake from a near-by plate, steered it through the jungle, and began to champ.'

And who did Brusiloff really admire?

'"But I not meet your real great men-your Arbmishel, your Arreevadon-I not meet them. That's what gives me the pipovitch. Have you ever met Arbmishel and Arreevadon?"'

To find out who those enigmatic characters were, you need to read the story and you can find it at http://ssmith.wodehouse.ru/cuthbert.html

I humbly submit that Wodehouse was probably Britain's finest novelist of the 20th Century - certainly insofar as he made his words work for him.

Richard English

Ruth Brandes de Bedts ends her tribute to Emily Dickinson with:
What great travail was yours
To make our lines run straight
Beneath the freight they bore
I dare not contemplate.

James Kenneth Stephen praises and damns Wordsworth.

quote:

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Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now birdlike pipes, now closes soft in sleep;
And one is of an old half-witted sheep¹
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times,
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst;
At other times -- good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the A, B, C,
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

---

¹Bathos here?

Keats himself wrote a famous ode in praise of Chapman's translation of Homer.

If hic meant to include critiques as well as praises, there's the hilarious essay, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, by Mark Twain. Twain, after quoting some pedants' praises of Cooper, opens,

quote:

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It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature at Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

---

I recommend the entire essay with five stars.

I don't think US President Warren G. Harding ever pretended to be a writer, but here's a wonderful diatribe against his prose:

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

[H L Mencken, on Warren G. Harding, in the Baltimore Evening Sun (1921)]

Mencken wasn't alone in his opinion: a Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, called Harding's speeches "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea."

Now, now...

You're railing against a favorite historical figure of mine. By many accounts, Harding was the worst U.S. President we've had (all in all, actually, we've been pretty lucky) and his pompous yet shallow public speaking is often cited as one of the reasons for this lowly rating. He himself called the way he gave speeches "bloviating," a jocular word that sounds just like the meaning it expresses.

Harding once said that he knew he would never be our country's best president but that he aspired to be our best liked. He also said that one of his favorite aspects of the office was to walk out to the fence surrounding the White House (back in the days when this was possible) and to shake hands with passers-by. It was simple, he said, and the people seemed to enjoy it.

Whatta guy!