POETS Day! Lascelles Abercrombie

Illustration by Rene Sears

I sold my basketball fandom to my wife when we were dating. It wasn’t a big deal. This was back in 99 or 00, so Alabama was mid to bad and she’s a Duke grad. I don’t really care for the game anyway and it didn’t seem to be much of a conflict since Alabama and Duke were unlikely to cross paths in any meaningful way on the court. I got her football fandom in the trade for the same reason.

Now that Alabama is as good as they are, I should care more. I want them to do well, but it’s bouncy hoopty ball. It helps that I’m a jinx. I don’t watch Alabama games anymore. When I do they lose, and that’s bad because football recruits like to go to schools with good basketball teams too. All-around success by the whole athletic department is claimed as a draw for them. I’ve tuned into a game the Tide is winning and watched the lead slip away, turned it off, and checked my score app to see it reestablished. It’s uncanny.

I do my best to support non-college-football tournaments and such for the spectacle. They’re fun. In 2023, I foolishly hopped in a car with my brother in-law and headed to Louisville where I made Bama lose a Sweet Sixteen matchup with San Diego Sate University. Seriously. San Diego State.

Conference playoffs are afoot. I won’t be watching Alabama’s tip off at 7:15 tomorrow night against TBA, as of this writing. I may watch Duke play UNC at 6:00. I will definitely head to a restaurant for some of the day games even if I don’t pay too much attention. You don’t need a dog in the hunt or even a like of the game to enjoy the excitement of a basketball tournament like you don’t need to be a golf fan to have Augusta on your bucket list.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Take a POETS Day and watch the fast-paced game fans say they love devolve into an hour of last minute fouling, free throw, fouling, free throw. Keep a baseball game on your phone in case you get bored (Braves v Nats, 12:05 CDT).

Try a little verse first. Roll Devils.

***

It is our tariff on imported books. Unless an author is almost certain to appeal to a large audience, in which case his book will be manufactured in America, the publisher can import only a small edition in sheets and sell it at a relatively high price. That means that he cannot do any thing to push the book, and so the author who is not known, so to speak, to begin with, has very little chance with the American public…

That Mr. Abercrombie’s early work did not immediately surmount the handicap of being imported in a very small edition is due in part to its character and in part to our taste.
               – Llewellyn Jones, The North American Review, Dec., 1924

Jones includes an excerpt from a poem in the same article the above is lifted from; several excerpts, but there was one that caught me. This is from “Blind.” I can’t find the entirety, but this part at least is about a blind man practicing at killing the father who abandoned him and his mother.

from Blind
 Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938)

. . . “Here, my son,
Let me make sure again of your arms’ strength:
Ay, these are proper cords; and there’ll be need
To take him firmly when we find him, child.
Active he is and tall and beautiful,
And a wild anger in him.—See here, boy,
My throat’s his throat; take it as you will his,
No, tighter, tighter, where’s your strength?
Ah—”
Son.—”O mother, did I hurt you?”
Mother.—” Simple lad,
You weren’t half cruel enough; you barely brought
The red flames into my eyes this time at all.
Oh, but it’s good the grip you have, and good
To feel it on me, try the pains of those
Who strangle; they will be his some day.

From what Jones writes, the poem takes a tragic turn. I can’t be certain from what Jones tells me, but the blind man kills someone the mother loves, either the wrong man by accident or the father after some off stage reconciliation. Again, I don’t have the full poem, but that little bit above is hilarious.

I couldn’t find any short lyrics. I’m told they exist. I just can’t find them. Abercrombie was known for longer works anyway, big dramatic pieces that read like plays. He was known for plays too, more so than poetry. He may have been better known for poetic criticism than anything else.

Jones delves into Abercrombie’s theory of poetry and art. This is me distilling Jones distilling Abercrombie, so salt liberally. Abercrombie imagined that if a being, all powerful or otherwise, were able to take in the entirety of creation, that being would be enchanted by the interdependence, the completeness, and rationality of how everything fits and has a purpose. He thought the being would see beauty. An artist sequesters his work in the sense that it is its own completion, and the more integrated and complete it is, the more beautiful. Jones stressed that pleasure and joy are sensations, not to be confused with the aesthetics of the mind. A horrid thing, a tragic thing, or a pretty thing are all beautiful in completeness. It’s leaving no loose ends and including only that which adds to the composition that makes art.

Again, grains of salt. Jones may have muddled Abercrombie’s philosophy. I may have muddled Jones’s explanation. My favorite possibility is that Jones muddled it and then I muddled Jones’s take but in doing so brought it right back to what Abercrombie intended. In any case, my interest is such that I’ve downloaded his An Essay Towards a Theory of Art (only $1.94 at Amazon) which appears to be a lot of short essays towards that theory; 130 pages of rapid fire Eric Hoffer style chapterettes. Jones has me intrigued and I’m looking forward to reading.

Abercrombie eventually taught at Oxford, at Merton College, but before he lectured as a Professor of English at the University of Leeds, beating out an unknown J.R.R. Tolkien for the position. Before that, he spent time as one of the famous Dymock Poets, named for the village of Dymock in Gloucestershire where they made their home. The group was made up of Abercrombie, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Edward Thomas, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Together, they put out the literary magazine New Numbers in 1914 and 15. Brooke went off to war and rest, ending the collaboration, but names were made. Abercrombie served as well, but to a better end.

More than with the Dymocks, Abercrombie is associated with the Georgian Poets, which kind of exists as a category. Brooke and E.H. Marsh made fun of the profusion of little anthologies popping up and making rounds around 1910 or so and “Oh! We should make our own!” became “Now we have to do it.” In the last of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry, Marsh writes in the preface,

“The origin of these books, which is set forth in the memoir of Rupert Brooke, was simple and humble. I found, ten years ago, that there were a number of writers doing work which appeared to me extremely good, but which was narrowly known; and I thought that anyone, however unprofessional and meagrely gifted, who presented a conspectus of it in a challenging and manageable form might be doing a good turn both to the poets and to the reading public.”

I think there’s cohesion among them, though loosely. Wikipedia describes the Georgians, “romanticism, sentimentality, and hedonism,” though I suspect that last may have just referred to Robert Graves.

Robert Graves is a poet I bring up every so often because I grew up on him. There were his books on the shelf and a signed letter from the poet in my father’s study. I love the Moderns, but the Georgians seem to me an undecorated poetry that isn’t an attempt to be different. Imagism and such were challenges and direct attempts to steer poetry in a direction. The Georgians were modern in sensibility – this is all “if you ask me” stuff – but they were the natural growth of poetic tradition in the modern era, an organic turn rather than a disruption.

There are schools, movements, and fads. When I say that the seventeenth century style was busy, or that Tennyson was overly formal, or the Confessionals turned as they did, it’s in comparison to the Georgians. Poets as diverse seeming as Vita Sackville-West, Graves, Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, and Walter de la Mare fit together somehow. It seems right. They’re measured, awed, and humble unless they’re being arrogant, which they frequently are. Abercrombie fits right in.

Ezra Pound was one to draw lines, and maybe he needed a foil or maybe he was just in a cantankerous mood. He turned his ire on the Georgians. Frost was one of Pound’s great finds (VURRY Amur’k’n) and gets called a Modern as well, but that’s just because it’s confusing and most of these categories are promiscuous and overlap. But for whatever reason, Pound decided to pick a fight. “Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace,” he declared. Somehow things escalated to the point that he challenged Abercrombie to a duel.

Abercrombie, being the challenged, claimed the right to decide on weapons he and Pound would fight it out with, and suggested they throw the other’s unsold books at each other. That’s a hell of a line and it got Pound. He laughed, and a grudging peace arrived.

Lascelles’s great-grandson, fabulously successful fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie, recounts the duel quip on his blog in a post where he also mentioned that Lascelles “was the first name on the list of people to be immediately arrested in the event of a Nazi occupation of Britain (an alphabetical thing.)” That’s a distinction I would have left out there with no alphabet explanation. Let the legend form on its own.

I’ll end with this excerpt from Abercrombie’s entry in the last volume of The Georgians, where and alphabetical thing puts him first as well. He sets the stage like a playwright and it’s a joy to read. I’d not before recently, this one or any other by him. It’s even better out loud.

From Ryton Firs

The Dream

All round the knoll, on days of quietest air,
Secrets are being told; and if the trees
Speak out — let them make uproar loud as drums —
‘Tis secrets still, shouted instead of whisper’d.

There must have been a warning given once:
No tree, on pain of withering and sawfly,
To reach the slimmest of his snaky toes
Into this mounded sward and rumple it;
All trees stand back: taboo is on this soil. —

The trees have always scrupulously obeyed.
The grass, that elsewhere grows as best it may
Under the larches, countable long nesh blades,
Here in clear sky pads the ground thick and close
As wool upon a Southdown wether’s back;
And as in Southdown wool, your hand must sink
Up to the wrist before it find the roots.
A bed for summer afternoons, this grass;
But in the Spring, not too softly entangling
For lively feet to dance on, when the green
Flashes with daffodils. From Marcle way,
From Dymock, Kempley, Newent, Bromesberrow,
Redmarley, all the meadowland daffodils seem
Running in golden tides to Ryton Firs,
To make the knot of steep little wooded hills
Their brightest show: O bella età de l’oro!
Now I breathe you again, my woods of Ryton:
Not only golden with your daffodil-fires
Lying in pools on the loose dusky ground
Beneath the larches, tumbling in broad rivers
Down sloping grass under the cherry trees
And birches: but among your branches clinging
A mist of that Ferrara-gold I first
Loved in the easy hours then green with you;
And as I stroll about you now, I have
Accompanying me — like troops of lads and lasses
Chattering and dancing in a shining fortune —
Those mornings when your alleys of long light
And your brown rosin-scented shadows were
Enchanted with the laughter of my boys.