Today again I taught English. It had been some weeks. Back to the bus, the explanations (I did gerunds and infinitives and it feels lame to have to say some verbs just take a gerund, some verbs just take an infinitive: here is the list) and coffee with sugar (it cannot be drunk unaided, generally).

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I also went back to the library—no long absence there—and found a small volume by T.S. Eliot on George Herbert, much like one of Johnson’s Lives. I wanted to get what I thought was his introduction to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins but didn’t find it again (which makes me wonder if it wasn’t George I saw on the introduction; speaking of which, my, what a lot of introductions on that work we have! I saw Borges introducing it, which like an introduction by T.S. Eliot, will be worth reading, so maybe I’ll try again Wilkie Collins, at least this novel). I’d read it before in some place or another, but here is something he said that is worth repeating out of context because it speaks to many things: “The great danger, for the poet who would write religious verse, is that of setting down what he would like to feel rather than be faithful to the expression of what he really feels.”

I also read his preface to a collection of poems by Edwin Muir. Eliot didn’t know Muir well, but was struck by something from his acquaintance; it was the integrity of the man. Eliot did not believe Muir the sort of man to express insincerity in speech or writing—I wish I had written down the quotation.

But it is interesting, isn’t it? I understand that there are four great critics of and in English literature: Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, and, of course, Eliot himself. I’ve read Johnson’s criticism of Milton’s “Lycidas” the burden of which is to disparage the poem by exhibiting Milton’s insincerities. I can’t think of Coleridge approving exaggeration or anything but the faithful expression of what the poet really feels. I shall have to explore Arnold.

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I enjoyed this, and perhaps you will also.

Reading in Wartime by Edwin Muir

Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
And wives’ and mothers’ tears
Collected would be able
To water a little field
Untouched by anger and blood,
A penitential yield
Somewhere in the world;
Though in each latitude
Armies like forest fall,
The iniquitous and the good
Head over heels hurled,
And confusion over all:
Boswell’s turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych’s death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.