Pure Simon.(Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry)(Review)

Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry, by John Simon (Ivan R. Dee, 265 pp., $26)

National Review readers are familiar with John Simon's writing about movies, but in other venues he has written on just about everything, and with the same stringency. Here we have him on poets and poetry, and it is a dazzling book. Simon is courageously lucid, literate in several languages, formidably erudite, and can turn a phrase into a rapier-as when he observes that Whitman reads as well (or badly) in French as in English.

Woven into these fine essays are bits of autobiography. At Harvard, Simon wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the prose-poem genre, focusing on the difficult Arthur Rimbaud; he assisted the legendary polymath Harry Levin in his big course on modern comparative literature. (Why Harvard did not anoint Simon as Levin's successor is beyond me; from that missed moment literary studies at Harvard have declined precipitously.) In thinking of Levin with Simon at his side, one irresistibly recalls the great Benjamin Jowett, the redoubtable Oxford classicist about whom the student jingle went: "Here I come, my name is Jowett / All there is to know, I know it / What I don't know, is not knowledge / I am the Master of this College." One is also reminded of Harvard's own George Lyman Kittredge, a Chaucerian and Shakespearian who refused to take the oral examination for his Ph.D., explaining, "No one at Harvard is competent to examine me." Kittredge, by the way, unsuccessfully opposed tenure for Levin on the grounds that Levin was Jewish. Gaudeamus igitur.

Among the important matters Simon deals with here are Eliot's Quartets, Robert Graves and his dominatrix Laura Riding (what's in a name?), James Merrill, the "New York School" of poets, Oscar Wilde's poetry, a virtually unknown great poem about sexual intercourse (I will reprint this for you in a moment), Mallarme, Rimbaud, Rilke, Larkin, Celan, Verlaine, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and a roundup review of 19 poets in translation, most of them awful, including some early lyrics by Karol Wojtyla, clearly not yet infallible.

Simon's approach is careful and intelligent, paying close attention to technique. The many languages in which he is fluent enable him to be especially persuasive when he evaluates translations of lyric poetry, many of the properties of which tend to be almost untranslatable.

Among Simon's many accomplishments in this book is making the persuasive case for a new look at Oscar Wilde's poetry. Long ago I decided that Wilde was a purveyor of paste gems, utterly derivative, a sort of anthologizer of the weakest aspects of the Romantic tradition. But Simon demonstrates that Wilde in his later lyrics did develop a distinctive voice and style that made worthwhile his technical skill. Simon is also delightful in his demythologization of the so-called New York School of poets (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler). With disarming-and amusing-candor, Simon writes: "To put my cards on the table . . . I declare that none of these poets has written what I would call a single poem of any importance." True; and I will myself here toss some cards on the table. I have read perhaps 50 poems by John Ashbery, and have taken the pledge: I will not read one more poem by him. He strings words together in pleasant patterns, but nothing happens; there's no there there. When Boswell asked Johnson whether any modern man could have written the Ossian poems, Johnson replied, "Any man, any woman, any child." This applies to Ashbery.

Simon's essay on James Merrill, ...