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This line from Little Gidding— ‘The first-met stranger in the waning dusk’ — is always mis-read. We dusk think it means evening, but it means dawn. Eliot struggled to get this right, and sent a series of letters about it.

As he said, ‘it is surprisingly difficult to find words for the shade before morning.’ English describes the dusk better than the dawn.

Dusk can refer to the morning. It means ‘the darker stage of twilight’, which itself only ‘esp.’ applies to the evening, according to the OED. But Eliot was relying on precedent from Tennyson and knew it didn’t really work. But he was stuck.

He was going to write, ‘The first-met stranger at lantern end’, because he was thinking very specifically of the time of day when people put night lanterns out. But it was ‘too quaint’ and there ‘is so much ending at the beginning.’…

Robert Frost left Harvard due to illness and worked on a farm for nine years. During that time he wrote a lot of poetry. He didn’t get much published and he was a poor farmer. After a few years working as a teacher, he sailed for England. He was 39 when his first book of poetry was published by Ezra Pound. He had been born in the 1870s and he was published shortly before the Great War.

He was then on the track to becoming the great Robert Frost, winning his first Pulitzer Prize ten years later.

Opinions on Frost have not always been so uniformly positive. Frost is a very traditional poet who published not in his youth when the forms and styles of his poetry were current, but during the high water mark of Modernism.

His favourite anthology was the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, full of…

James Weldon Johnson by Winold Reiss

c.1920 / Pastel on illustration board / 30 1/16″x21 9/16″ / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, DC

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James Weldon Johnson~https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/james-weldon-johnson

Jackie Gleason Presents Lonesome Echo

1955 / Capitol Records W-627 / 12″ 33 1/3 RPM / Artwork & Liner Notes by Salvador Dalí

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Albert Uderzo in 2012 (via Wikipedia)

Albert Uderzo, illustrator of the popular Asterix adventures saga, passed away on March 24th at the age of 92, a few months after the comic strip, co-created with René Goscinny, turned 60 years old. This anniversary was much celebrated last year in France. Furthermore, 2020 is the bande dessineé (BD) year at the BnF (this will be covered later in another post).

The Asterix adventures have entertained, amused and captivated generations of young and less young readers. The two protagonists of the series, Asterix and Obelix, and their village of indomitable Gauls who always repel the Roman troops, have become universally known, and their series is one of the most popular created in the history of comics. Its remarkable success has not faded with time, it is the best selling European bande dessinée saga (370 million copies) and the most translated comic (111 languages).

Count BasieAnd His Orchestra

1955 / RCA Victor LPM-1112 / 12″ 33 1/3 RPM / Cover Illustration by Andy Warhol

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If we could divide books into two genres, Odyssey books and Iliad books, Siddhartha would be an exemplary Odyssey book. However, Siddhartha departs from Odysseus. He goes on a circular journey, encounters isolation, a courtesan and a wealthy merchant. He is detained by water and eventually realises that the world is an illusion to be detached from. Odysseus wants no such detachment. Hesse’s biggest argument here is against modern individualism, of which the Odyssey is the founding myth.

Siddhartha is like a well researched, post-Enlightenment version of Rasselas. I think of it as, in some ways, the opposite of Ulysses. It is no surprise that Hesse spent time in an asylum when he was young and spent periods of his life in isolation. Like many other Western wisdom-literature books (think Thoreau) this is a late-Romantic work that probably smuggles its beliefs past casual readers.

Hesse’s real challenge to readers…