Human jam
The phrase comes from Hardy’s “The Levelled Churchyard”: “We late-lamented, resting here, / Are mixed to human jam, / And each to each exclaims in fear, / ‘I know not which I am!’” After reading this “humorous” poem I took a break from the Complete Poems.
It was a little like how I reacted to Robinson Jeffers some years ago, though I felt genuinely squeamish about Jeffers. Hardy never induced nausea, just eye rolling.
That was more than a year ago. I finished the Complete Poems earlier this year.
Then it crossed my benighted mind that Marianne Moore and Hardy are somehow alike. In Moore’s letters I found this—which made no impression when I first read it—in a 1919 letter to Ezra Pound: “Gordon Craig, Henry James, Blake, the minor prophets and Hardy, are so far as I know, the direct influences bearing on my work.”
Moore also writes of her poems being “an arrangement of stanzas, each stanza being an exact duplicate of every other stanza.” “Exact duplicate” is the distinguishing phrase since, after all, stanzaic verse had been ubiquitous for centuries. Hardy’s stanzas are also “exact duplicates,” which is striking because he, as well as Moore, tended to invent new, often intricate, stanza forms. There’s remarkably little reuse of any one form in two or more poems. Also, in a collection of nearly a thousand works, there are almost no single-stanza poems. It’s as if he felt that producing an “exact duplicate” was what certified the poem as a poem. It reminds me of how one is asked to retype a password to verify its correctness.
Hardy and Moore also shared a love for certain categories of arcane knowledge and technical language.
It was a little like how I reacted to Robinson Jeffers some years ago, though I felt genuinely squeamish about Jeffers. Hardy never induced nausea, just eye rolling.
That was more than a year ago. I finished the Complete Poems earlier this year.
Then it crossed my benighted mind that Marianne Moore and Hardy are somehow alike. In Moore’s letters I found this—which made no impression when I first read it—in a 1919 letter to Ezra Pound: “Gordon Craig, Henry James, Blake, the minor prophets and Hardy, are so far as I know, the direct influences bearing on my work.”
Moore also writes of her poems being “an arrangement of stanzas, each stanza being an exact duplicate of every other stanza.” “Exact duplicate” is the distinguishing phrase since, after all, stanzaic verse had been ubiquitous for centuries. Hardy’s stanzas are also “exact duplicates,” which is striking because he, as well as Moore, tended to invent new, often intricate, stanza forms. There’s remarkably little reuse of any one form in two or more poems. Also, in a collection of nearly a thousand works, there are almost no single-stanza poems. It’s as if he felt that producing an “exact duplicate” was what certified the poem as a poem. It reminds me of how one is asked to retype a password to verify its correctness.
Hardy and Moore also shared a love for certain categories of arcane knowledge and technical language.
posted by Joel at 11:17 AM
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