Bibliotherapy Is Having a Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: August 17, 2021
Ulisse Caputo

Wednesday

Friend and reader Valerie Hotchkiss has alerted me to a new book that is very much in the spirit of this blog. Times Literary Supplement recently reviewed Literature and Transformation, by one Thor Magnus Tangerås, which does a deep dive into the healing powers of literature. Apparently Anthem Press will be coming out with a new series on “Bibliotherapy and Well-Being.”

Reviewer Joshua Pugh says that bibliotherapy is “having a moment,” what with National Health Service’s “books on prescription” and “the novelist Ann Cleeves’s funding of ‘reading coaches’ in the northeast of England.” Pugh says that traditional literary scholarship, by contrast, is suffering through an identity crisis:

Can books change our lives? Thor Magnus Tangerås tackles this momentous question in Literature and Transformation, the first volume in Anthem Press’s new series on “Bibliotherapy and Well-Being”. The term “bibliotherapy” was coined in 1916, but the basic idea is almost as old as reading itself. The earliest known library, belonging to Pharaoh Ramses II, is said to have borne the inscription, “the house of healing for the soul”. Now there is a burgeoning field of research supporting the view that reading can heal us, and projects putting it into practice. From NHS “books on prescription” schemes to the novelist Ann Cleeves’s funding of “reading coaches” in the northeast of England, bibliotherapy is having a moment:

Many academics, myself included, agree with Tangerås that there is “something missing from, or taken for granted in” our way of reading: eager for scholarly rigour, we’ve said too little about our feelings…. The raw experience of reading – intuitive emotional reaction – is thought to belong instead to journalism.

Given that I’m in the final stages of writing a book that makes a version of this same point, I can only applaud. I’m also struck, given that I’ve just finished writing a chapter on John Stuart Mill, that literary scholarship’s crisis sounds a bit like one the utilitarian philosopher went through. He was so caught up in analysis that he lost touch with his emotions and needed the poetry of William Wordsworth to reconnect. Pugh writes,

Many academics, myself included, agree with Tangerås that there is “something missing from, or taken for granted in” our way of reading: eager for scholarly rigour, we’ve said too little about our feelings…The raw experience of reading – intuitive emotional reaction – is thought to belong instead to journalism.

Pugh says Tangerås differs from other academics because he lets readers “speak for themselves, sharing their thoughts about how books have moved them.” (I note in passing that I’ve been doing this myself for over 30 years, but not having written about it, the world doesn’t know.) The reviewer gives us a taste of what emerges:

First we meet Veronica, whose discovery of Lady Chatterley’s Lover encouraged her to break free of a failing relationship. Next up is Nina, whose rereading of her childhood favourite, Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, inspired her to pursue her vocation and become a musician. Life-changing reading, Nina reminds us, can span a lifetime; circling back to a book decades later can be as powerful as a first encounter. Then there is Esther, for whom the Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup’s “Episode” – written while Hagerup and her husband were having difficulties – triggered new insights into her parents’ “terrible marriage”. Jane, meanwhile, was deeply moved by Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, a book which shook “the very basis of everything I thought I was”, imbuing her life with a new sense of “purpose”. Finally, for Sue, two key lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life” – “But hardly have we, for one little hour, / Been on our own line, have we been ourselves” – sparked newfound direction after a suicidal depression. Of these writers, Arnold and Lawrence are firmly ensconced in the English canon (itself, after all, partly Arnold’s invention), and their books have long been viewed as life-affirming and life-improving. But canons can feel like top-down prescriptions, imposed by those who know better than us which books are “good” for us. Tangerås instead paints a bottom-up picture of literary value – one in which prestige matters less than personal experience.

Then, because Tangerås is a trying to formulate a “new and precise tool for exploring the elusive experience of reading,” he comes up with special terms:

Ultimately, he distils from his interviews a new theory of “reading by heart” – a mode of reading which is “heartfelt”, or deeply internalized, and which inspires transformative “changes of heart”. His technical term for it is lexithymia, a play on a concept from psychology: where alexithymia denotes a difficulty in identifying or describing emotions, lexithymia, Tangerås claims, is a contrasting “capacity to engage the heart in contemplation”.

Both reviewer and author are careful to distance themselves from a utilitarian agenda where literature is chiefly valuable because it is therapeutically or socially useful. They’re worried that literature will be reduced to something instrumental:

Self-help, at its least helpful, is simplistically instrumental: you diagnose a problem, and then buy a book to provide a solution. The life-altering moments captured in Literature and Transformation are not about means-end efficiency. Nor are they easily assimilable to the agendas of governments or university officials who push for proof of literature’s “usefulness”. What this book touches on is more authentic, and even, as its author unabashedly states, “spiritual”. It’s about what happens when two minds meet – which is, after all, the essence of both reading and psychotherapy. Whether on the page or the couch, such encounters can change us in ways we never imagined.

If this sounds as though Pugh and Tangerås are trying to have it both ways—helpful but not bureaucratically or self-helpy helpful, therapeutic but not narrowly therapeutic—I can report from my own research that literary theorists have been dancing around the issue of usefulness since the time of Plato, who wanted only useful poetry in his Republic. And then there was the Roman poet Horace, who wanted poetry to simultaneously instruct and delight. And Sir Philip Sidney, who essentially said that a spoonful of cherry-flavored poetry helps moral instruction go down. And Percy Shelley, who said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And Matthew Arnold, who saw requiring that everyone read poetry would usher in a new Renaissance. And Brecht, who saw literature as a hammer to shape reality. And on and on.

Rather than disavowing usefulness, I find it more useful to see (with Horace and the others) instruction and delight caught up in a dynamic tension. The best literature has always been both without surrendering to either.

One other thing I get from the review: this may be the right time for my own book.

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Lit as Truth in a Self-Deceiving World

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2021
Louis le Brocquy, Girl in Grey (1939)

Tuesday

I share today a good article about the value of literature in a world where far too many people agree to believe in preposterous fabrications. Author Brian Castleberry, writing for Literary Hub, talks about the prevalence in America of cognitive dissonance, which he defines as

our ability to believe in two contradictory ideas at once and the struggle this creates, namely, the tension as we try to form perceptions to fit what we want to believe about the world and ourselves, even when we rationally know we’re wrong.

Trumpism, Castleberry says, has been engaging in cognitive dissonance on steroids. Or as Castleberry puts it,

The Trump years were like a big-budget theatrical production of cognitive dissonance, mainly because many of us were only in the audience, watching the process work on nearly half the country, powerless to stop it. At each stage of his nomination, election, and presidency, we were asked to believe increasingly impossible things in order not to see what was right before our eyes. I say “we,” but again, not really all of us—one of the most significant changes in these past years is that a major political party stopped talking to Americans in general, and instead only talked to their Americans, wrapping those self-selected folks in patriotism for going along with the demanding wackiness of the storyline. From the beginning, in order not to face consequences for their lack of preparation, their criminal and near-criminal behavior, their open flirtation (if not outright use) of a foreign power’s meddling in the election, a conspiracy had to be born. The “deep state” gave way to “Obama spying” and eventually to straight-up “Dems are blood-sucking child molesters.”

There’s a storytelling dimension to what is going on, which as a fictional author Castleberry recognizes and which he uses his own storytelling to examine:

I’ve grown more aware of how people are predominately shaped by narratives and often by misconceptions, and that we almost always act out of a sense that we’re doing the right thing, no matter how vile. Analyzing the fault lines between what a character thinks they’re doing and the real effect they’re having on others has become central to my process.

And here’s where fiction can come to our rescue:

Fiction has the power to help us dismantle the garbage ideas that maintain our society’s cognitive dissonance. Good fiction (of whatever genre) shows us something about being human, how we connect to one another, how we fit in history, and how we wrestle with the forces around us. It has the ability to strengthen reality, to reaffirm what we actually see in front of us, to foster empathy. It doesn’t answer questions so much as it leaves one asking more questions. Rather than shutting down thinking, it demands that we participate in both thinking and creating.

Castleberry mentions some of the contemporary authors he believes are writing such fiction:

When I consider debut books I’ve admired from this last disastrous year, by writers like Megha Majumdar, Asako Serizawa, Kelli Jo Ford, Michael Zapata, and Dantiel W. Moniz (or forthcoming collections from Farah Ali and Ye Chun), I’m heartened by how writers of vastly different aesthetic approaches can be working on the same wide-ranging project. These are writers interested in the dynamics of power, trauma, and grace. They see how history weaves through our present. And they dig past our surface-level thinking to seek what fiction is made to discover: truth.

Castleberry’s article brings to mind a Salman Rushdie article I blogged on three years ago. Also thinking of Trump, Rushdie wrote that great fiction helps us maintain our bearings against an onslaught of lies:

[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. 

Perhaps a silver lining of our times is that people will turn to literature as they realize how much they need to be grounded in what is real. Truth is the pearl that rich men cannot buy, William Cowper asserts in The Task. We need it at times like these.

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Remembering School with Fondness

By Robin Bates | Published: August 15, 2021
Winslow Homer, The Country School

Monday

In celebration of a school year that is beginning or has begun, hopefully with the health of the students prioritized, here’s a poem by Scottish poet and former British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Unlike many school poems (check out my post on this one by William Blake), “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” is overwhelmingly positive. One dreams of school being like this.

Maybe I should qualify that slightly as there are slight disturbances in the otherwise calm surface of the school. I’m not sure exactly why Duffy mentions Brady and Hindley, given that they were two mass murderers who sexually assaulted and killed five kids from 10-17 years of age around Manchester in the 1960s. Maybe the story floats around, faded but still present, like the smudge left by someone trying to erase a mistake.

And then there are the frogs propagating and your parents having sex, which becomes even more frightening and disgusting because Mrs. Tilscher, who will talk about everything else, won’t talk about this. Withheld knowledge takes on a force of its own, filling the air with electricity, and one feels oppressed and out of sorts under the “heavy, sexy sky.” No wonder the child is “impatient to be grown.” Children long for knowledge, which they hope will banish their fears.  

Meanwhile, a thunderstorm is prepared to unleash upon them the full force of adulthood. Better to dream of traveling up the Nile and visiting exotic foreign lands:

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweet shop.
Sugar paper. Colored shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she’d left a good gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone’s nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared
at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,
as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

Duffy may be alluding to Thomas Grey’s “Ode to a Distant Prospect of Eton College” in that last image. There the poet, who is sitting on a hill watching students play, can see what they cannot: an approaching thunderstorm. Before it strikes, they are carefree and gay:

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
         Less pleasing when possest;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
         The sunshine of the breast:
Theirs buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever-new,
         And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
         That fly th’ approach of morn.

This, however, is followed by one of the grimmest stanzas in English literature:

Alas, regardless of their doom,
         The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
         Nor care beyond to-day:
Yet see how all around ’em wait
The ministers of human fate,
         And black Misfortune’s baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murth’rous band!
         Ah, tell them they are men!

I remember, in first grade, singing “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days.” The nostalgia in the song confused me then and now I understand why. Like “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class,” it was written by adults remembering back.

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When All Around Doubt the Mystery

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2021

Spiritual Sunday

Today being the Feast of the Virgin, the anniversary of Mary being assumed into heaven (so tradition has it), I share this Carl Phillips poem. In it we see Mary thinking back to the moment many years before when was visited by the angel Gabriel.

Or that’s what she believes happened. Others are skeptical. After all, isn’t the reality we know the only reality there is? When Mary awakes, she acknowledges that “morning was what it had always been.” She may feel “marooned in the air,” but the world around her slowly comes back into focus, nicking the blooms of suggestion.

How is one to believe in mystery when everyday items appear as they have always appeared (“every seam or pocket slowly retrieved”). Likewise, what she hears is what she has always heard, “the clubbed foot of routine, no voices, no clatter of dreams.” Her father delivers a kind of verdict as he spits into the yard. By his and everyone else’s standards, her vision is an unseemly desire to touch godhead.

Yet her being “no mystic” adds credence to the vision. Despite everything, “I saw what I saw.”

Visitation
by Carl Phillips

When it was over, they told me
that the creak of wings folding
was only the bed, that shutters

do not clap of themselves. Morning
was what it had always been, any woman
marooned in the air,
                                    the nicked
blooms of suggestion, in the lamp,
in the lemonwood stool, every seam
or pocket slowly retrieved,

were the usual ones, what
everyone knows. Father spat
into the unswept yard below,
as if it too were an unseemly desire,

and passed through the door.

I am no mystic. I know
nothing rises that doesn’t
know how to already.
In my ears, only the clubbed
foot of routine, no voices, no
clatter of dreams: but I saw
what I saw.

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Worshipping False Covid Idols

By Robin Bates | Published: August 13, 2021

Friday

As I watch the many different reasons people give for not taking protective measures against Covid, I am reminded of Danish responses to Grendel’s attacks in Beowulf. Although the poet, like the medical community, has a proven response, the people instead turn to false solutions, twisting themselves into knots in the process.

To be sure, the poet’s response would not pass muster with Covid-19. “Approach the Lord and find friendship in the Father’s embrace,” he advises. In our case, we have several miraculous vaccines, not to mention an understanding of the benefits of masking, social distancing, proper ventilation, and the like. Yet despite all that, various people set themselves up as modern versions of King Hrothgar’s counsellors, who worship at pagan shrines, vow offers to idols, and pray to killer-of-souls Satan to come to “come to their aid and save the people.”

Our own version of people worshipping false idols to deal with Covid have included: wishing it would just go away; seeing it as a hoax or no worse than the flu; recommending bleach and hydroxychloroquine; counting on the illness to affect just blue state populations, recommending we do nothing other than accept 3 million deaths and develop herd immunity that way (Sen. Ron Johnson’s solution); and imagining that letting individuals decide whether or not they should wear masks or get vaccinated will somehow address the situation by itself. A number of Republican governors seem to be operating on the principle, “What would Trump do?” And this partial list doesn’t begin to go into all the elaborate conspiracy theories.

As the poet recognizes, people do crazy things and think crazy things when disaster strikes. Or in his words, “That was their way, their heathenish hope”:

These were hard times, heart-breaking
for the prince of the Shieldings; powerful counsellors,
the highest in the land, would lend advice,
plotting how best the bold defenders
might resist and beat off sudden attacks.
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols, swore oaths
that the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge
of good deeds and bad, the Lord God,
Head of the Heavens and High King of the World,
was unknown to them. Oh, cursed is he
who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul
in the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;
he has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he
who after death can approach the Lord
and find friendship in the Father’s embrace.

When I suggested last week that a strong and forceful Beowulfian response may be the way to go—i.e., vaccine mandates—I received several negative responses, none of which offered a credible solution. One reader told me that Covid was “this joke of the flu,” another that the vaccine was a government-Big Pharma plot and was worse than having no vaccine at all–meaning, I guess, that we should go Ron Johnson’s natural herd immunity route, even though the price is millions of deaths. One reader, as an anti-vaccine argument, sent me a list of notable people attacking various vaccines, including the polio vaccine.

I’m not one to worship science, having a sense of both its strengths and its blind spots. But I trust that Dr. Fauci and his colleagues are professionals acting in good faith. In this time of trouble, they are not thrusting their souls in hellfire’s embrace, forfeiting help, but doing the best they can with the knowledge available to them. So far, the vaccines appear to be doing their job. Unfortunately, the unvaccinated continue to threaten our children and, when they themselves get sick, to swamp our hospitals.

In other words, Grendel continues to raid the great hall.

Further thought: Regarding those counting on God rather than vaccines and other health measures to save them, I think of the joke about the man stranded on his roof as the flood levels rise. He turns down help from a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter, each time saying that the Lord will provide. He asks God about this after he drowns, to which God replies, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter.” In this case, we’ve been sent life-saving vaccines.

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Tucker Carlson’s Insidious Influence

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2021
Thoden under the spell of Grima Wormtongue

Thursday

When I was a Fulbright scholar in Slovenia in 1994-95, the liberal socialist party had a goal: Sweden by the year 2000. It was an unrealistic goal, but at least it was nobler and healthier than that of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson: he wants America to become Hungary.

In other words, he wants the democracy that for so long has inspired people around the world to become an authoritarian Christian nation that rigs elections, suppresses dissent, and hates diversity and immigrants.

But why settle for Hungary when you could aspire to be Mordor? That’s the challenge thrown out to Carlson by Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri.

Speaking in the persona of Carlson, Petri writes,

I’ve found a place I like even more. My next travel will take me to a land I find infinitely more congenial and consider in even better keeping with the new tendencies of the conservative movement.

I am honored to announce I will be speaking next week at the Mordor Summit in Barad-dur at the invitation of Dark Lord Sauron! This is the future of conservatism, and I’m excited to throw open the Overton Window and let in the nazguls.

The Overton Window is a political science term for the range of political possibilities that politicians feel comfortable espousing. It was once considered extreme to entertain thoughts of overrunning the Capitol. Now Carlson and others are calling the insurrectionists “patriots.”

But even this doesn’t open the window far enough, according to Petri’s Carlson:

We, as I’m always telling my millions-strong television audience, we don’t have real freedom here (whoever wins the election gets to be president, even if I don’t like them), and I often wish we were more like Mordor. I wish that instead of getting to yell at me and try to shame away my advertisers when I said objectionable things, dissidents would simply be trampled underfoot by an oliphaunt. We can’t waste another minute: We have got to replace all our institutions with orcs. The floating eye on the back of the dollar bill can stay.

And further on:

I liked a lot about what was going on in Hungary, but it absolutely pales in contrast to Mordor. Everyone has been so welcoming. The Witch-king of Angmar and I are going to brunch Monday, and then we’re going to appear on a panel together.This is my new spiritual home, and the more I learn about it, the more I find myself unable to bear the noisome sunlight of the United States. Where are our hosts of orcs, all roaring with vitriol for those beyond their borders? Where is our enormous fortress of dark magic surveilling all the subjects of the land? I want to live in a place that seethes with hatred of outsiders at all times and is willing to trade almost any amount of freedom in exchange for that privilege. Also, I love the rivers of molten rock. Very scenic!

Petri doesn’t mention the character that Carlson most resembles, which is Wormtongue. A Saruman sycophant, Wormtongue uses his nearness to power (Fox News in Carlson’s case) to lord it over others. Take away his platform, which occurs a couple of times in Tolkien’s novel, and Wormtongue comes across as no more than a pathetic groveler.

Gandalf releases Rohan’s King Theoden from Wormtongue’s spell with the words, “I bid you come out before your doors and look abroad. Too long have you sat in shadows and trusted to twisted tales and crooked promptings.” And Theoden, when he rides off to his final battle against Sauron, forbids those who urge caution not to speak “the soft words of Wormtongue in my old ears!” He is prepared to be great again, come what may:

Long years in the space of days it seems since I rode west; but never will I lean on a staff again. If the war is lost, what good will be my hiding in the hills? And if it is won, what grief will it be, even if I fall, spending my last strength?

A significant portion of America has fallen prey to Tucker Wormtongue’s poisonous words. May we say of America what Gandalf says of Theoden when he shakes free and prepares to face his people: “Open! The Lord of the Mark comes forth!”

The future of Middle-earth hangs in the balance. 

Further thought: To complete the picture, you can read my post where I compare Trump to Saruman. Sauron in this scenario is Vladimir Putin.

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Poets and Climate Change’s 5-Alarm Fire

By Robin Bates | Published: August 11, 2021
Gustave Doré, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 Wednesday

I continue to write about the Romantic imagination for my book (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), exploring how the movement helped change the way we see nature. As we deal with the dire consequences of climate change—the recent U.N. report should scare the bejeezus out of all of us–I find it useful to review the role that literature can play in spurring us to action.

I’ve visited the issue regularly in this column but I look today at the origins of poetic warnings. The 18th century’s scientific and technological breakthroughs, which allowed allowed humans to control nature in unprecedented ways, also led to a separation. It’s easier to regard Nature as an object of Romantic reflection, after all, when it’s not starving, freezing, or otherwise killing you. Poets picked up on our growing separation from nature early, with William Blake talking of “dark Satanic mills” befouling England’s “green and pleasant land” and Wordsworth lamenting that we are out of tune with nature because “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is particularly illuminating because it foregrounds the interaction between environmental poet and public. In the poem, an apparently mad prophet enters the scene and tells a compelling story about our alienation from nature. The story is so powerful that the young man he picks out as his audience “cannot choose but hear.”

Caught up in the excitement of exploring new lands that marked the age, the mariner sets out on a journey to the southern hemisphere. This apparent openness to new experience, however, is contradicted by an act of domination: the Mariner gratuitously kills a wandering albatross that the sailors have befriended. Having thereby announced his separation from the natural order, he experiences a spiritual sterility:

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

Living a nightmarish death-in-life with his heart “as dry as dust,” the Mariner finds himself unable to pray. The albatross, meanwhile, has been hung around his neck, both as a punishment from his shipmates and a sign of the internal weight he is carrying. He is saved, however, by the sudden realization that he has a kinship with even the foulest of Nature’s creatures. In this transformation, the slimy things become marvelous creatures moving in shining tracks:

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Having had this epiphany, he feels compelled to share his insight with others:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

In this particular instance, he has chosen a callow youth to hear what he has to say, a member of a wedding party who is intent on drinking and carousing. The mariner’s message has a Sunday school simplicity to it:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Were he to deliver the message without the narrative or the poetry, however, it would fail to impress and we could not expect a change in behavior. It is the poetic imagination that draws the young man and holds him transfixed:

He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

We also learn that the Mariner’s story has had an impact:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

In exploring humans’ relationship with nature, the Romantic poets increased our awareness of what it means to be human. In the rich tradition of nature literature that has followed, along with the exciting field of ecocriticism, our thinking has moved beyond daffodils and storms (Wordsworth, Byron) to what ecocritics call an “earth-centered approach.”

As a result, we no longer makes simple distinctions between the environment and culture, between “the natural” and the human, but examine how they are inextricably linked. If today we have an ever-growing list of authors using the full powers of the imagination to address the challenges of a rapidly changing environment—Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Margaret Atwood come immediately in mind—it’s because poems like Rime of the Ancient Mariner showed the way.

Literature alone won’t save us, of course. In the five-alarm fire we are confronting, we need all hands on deck, civic leaders, scientists, academics, activists, business leaders, military leaders, etc.  The fate of our species hangs in the balance. But poets too have an important role to play, conveying the urgency in ways that other forms of rhetoric may not. May it lead all of us to rise sadder and wiser men and women.

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Plantations that Bury Their Black Past

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2021
Walnut Grove Plantation cemetery

Tuesday

A Literary Hub article by author LaTanya McQueen, whose horror novel about America’s slave past comes out this month, brought to mind a Lucille Clifton poem. That’s not surprising since both authors had the same experience visiting southern plantations.

McQueen was researching for her novel When the Reckoning Comes, in which a black woman who has fled the segregated south returns for the wedding of her one white friend, who is getting married at an old plantation. Together they find themselves encountering ghosts from the plantation’s bloody past.

The south’s bloody past was not mentioned in McQueen’s plantation tour, however:

I spent the summer of 2016 visiting plantations across the south in attempt to learn more about Leanna’s life. While I’d read about plantations, I felt I needed to see these places in person to get a true sense of them. I’d mapped out a plan to visit plantations in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and to end with the trip trying to find the Bedford Brown House, the plantation Leanna Brown lived on in North Carolina. I ended up visiting plantations in some of these states, not all of them, because what I found after a while was the same story at each of them. There was little, if any, mention of slavery. Instead, I listened to stories about the owners, often told to me by guides dressed in period costumes as they gave their little narratives about the plantation owner’s family history. Tour guides dressed in period costumes told me details about the architecture of the houses and not the backbreaking work that went into building them. While I learned a lot about the wealth of the plantation owners, I rarely learned about the work involved in slave labor, especially on sugar plantations that had some of the highest mortality rates. There was a complete erasure of what made these places exist in the first place.

I expected to go to these plantations where I’d be told the history of my ancestors, and what I got instead was a proliferation of tourist attractions meant for the white gaze.

Clifton makes the same observation with simple but powerful directness in “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989.” I’ve heard her tell the story of how, in her visit, it was only when she asked about some rocks in the cemetery that she learned that they were slave grave markers:

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.

nobody mentioned slaves
and yet the curious tools
shine with your fingerprints.
nobody mentioned slaves
but somebody did this work
who had no guide, no stone,
who moulders under rock.

tell me your names,
tell me your bashful names
and I will testify.

the inventory lists ten slaves
but only men were recognized.among the rocks
at walnut grove
some of these honored dead
were dark
some of these dark
were slaves
some of these slaves
were women
some of them did this honored work.
tell me your names
foremothers, brothers,
tell me your dishonored names.
here lies
here lies
here lies
here lies
hear

I love that final imperative. Like McQueen, Clifton has been hearing lies. But she’s also telling her readers to listen carefully because, if they do, they will hear those forgotten slaves speaking. And once one hears, one can testify.

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Chaucer Was No Sexist or Anti-Semite

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2021
19th century portrait of Chaucer

Monday

Reader and contributor Sue Schmidt recently alerted me to an essay defending Geoffrey Chaucer with which I thoroughly agree. Apparently some believe that “the father of English poetry” was a rapist, racist and anti-Semite and want to drop him from the canon. In her defense, Jennifer Wollock counters that he was actually remarkably enlightened for his age. “My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture,” she writes, “but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.”

I long ago came to a similar conclusion from teaching the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale, which I find to be centuries ahead of its time with regard to women’s liberation. To be sure, I was giving the work more than the author credit for this—sometimes a work can be more liberated than its author—but Wollock has convinced me that Chaucer the man was fully in the Wife’s camp when he has her articulate a vision of egalitarian marriage.

I’ll talk more about my own views in a moment. First, here’s Wollock’s summation of the charges:

It’s true that Chaucer’s work contains toxic material. His “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” in The Canterbury Tales, his celebrated collection of stories, quotes at length from the long tradition of classical and medieval works on the evils of women, as mansplained by the Wife’s elderly husbands: “You say, just as worms destroy a tree, so a wife destroys her husband.”

Later, “The Prioress’s Tale” repeats the anti-Semitic blood libel story, the false accusation that Jews murdered Christians, at a time when Jews across Europe were under attack.

What the critics get wrong, Wollock says, is confusing Chaucer with his characters. She attributes some of the confusion to Chaucer having been a former spy and therefore expert in indirection. He knew how “to express dangerous truths not accepted in his own day, when misogyny and antisemitism were both entrenched, especially among the clergy.”

Rather than “an exponent of toxic masculinity,” Wollock says, Chaucer “was actually an advocate for human rights”:

My own research shows that in the course of his career he supported women’s right to choose their own mates and the human desire for freedom from enslavement, coercion, verbal abuse, political tyranny, judicial corruption and sexual trafficking. In The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women, he tells many stories on such themes. There he opposed assassination, infanticide and femicide, the mistreatment of prisoners, sexual harassment and domestic abuse. He valued self-control in action and in speech. He spoke out for women, enslaved people and Jews.

“Women want to be free and not coerced like slaves, and so do men,” the narrator of “The Franklin’s Prologue” says.

Chaucer was equally advanced when it came to Judaism, Wollock says:

As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem The House of Fame. He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

In other words, rather than endorsing the Prioress’s anti-Semitic story, he is using her words and actions, along with the other pilgrims’ reactions, to expose the danger of their lies.

“Few authors have ever been more outspoke about man’s inhumanity to women,” Wollock concludes. And as for the charge that he raped and abducted a young woman, Wollock notes that the evidence is sketchy at best, and unlikely given other things we know about him.

My own reading of the Wife of Bath bears Wollock out. When I first encountered her in graduate school, one of the leading scholars of the time (D.W. Robertson) believed that Chaucer ascribed to the misogyny that the Wife is attacking, but from the first this struck me as wrong.

As I saw it—and see it still—Chaucer creates a character who is so much bigger and more vibrant than the attacks that sexist monks were leveling against women that she exposes their smallness and pettiness. Her counterarguments may be wild and incoherent at times, but they have the effect of reducing their case against women to rubble.

In addition to that, she tells a fairy tale in which, by the end, a rapist knight learns that the only way to a good marriage is to listen—really listen—to your partner. The knight has spent a year listening to women as if his life depended on it because it does: if he doesn’t figure out what women most desire, he will be executed for the rape. Chaucer, who himself was a superb listener, knows that paying attention to people is the ultimate form of acknowledgement, and he sympathizes with the Wife’s desire for R-E-S-P-E-C-T from the men in her life. He can hear the painful longing beneath her bravado, even if none of her five husbands can.

By penetrating into her own innermost desires, Chaucer gives us one of the most three-dimensional characters in all of literature. Which means that we too, as readers, are expanded as we listen to her. When a medieval character challenges still-existent sexism, you know you are in the presence of a great author. 

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