D. B. Wyndham-Lewis (1891–1969)

Illus by Beerbohm. J.M. Dent: London, 1930. 2nd edition, purchased Tavistock, 2004. Earlier edition.

Though many bad verses here derive from lesser poets like Dyer, Colley Cibber, M. Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), Cottle, Dobell and R. Montgomery, big names abound: Cowley, Dryden, Longfellow, Addison, Isaac Watts, even Keats, Browning and Tennyson. Longfellow he faults for a single Latin comparative, “Excelsior.”
Cowley you recall starred in Sam Johnson’s critique of the metaphysicals. Curiously, Abraham opposed Donne’s preferred puns in his "Ode. Of Wit,"
"’Tis not when like words make up one noise;
Jests for Dutch Men, and English Boys."
Oddly, he adds,
"Nor upon all things to obtrude
And force some odd similitude."
“Evidently he considered his own ‘odd similitudes’— very largely drawn, by Donne’s example, from the learned languages of science and religion—conventional comparisons” —quoted from my Ph.D. thesis, This Critical Age, p.76. In “Friendship in Absence,” Cowley’s poem on being separated from his love, he compares their love to stars’ conjunctions, but soon uses classical allusion defending wit:
’tis not without Cause that she,
Who fled the God of Wit, was made a tree.”
Or as Marvell has it, “Apollo hunted Daphne so/ Only that she might Laurel grow,” wittily arguing that A desired poetry, the Laurel, not Daphne herself. (My This Critical Age focused on metapoetry in mid-17C England— Cleveland and Marvell, following 16C Berni and DuBellay “Contre Les Petrarquistes.”)
Wyndham Lewis includes Cowley’s “Ode Upon Dr. Harvey,” starting with Nature a virgin, unknown, until Harvey appeared, and Nature
"Began to tremble and to flee,
Took sanctuary, like Daphne, in a tree;
There Daphne’s lover stop, and thought it much
The very leaves of her to tourh,
But Harvey, our Apollo, stops not so,
Into the bark and root he after her did go..

He so exactly does the work survey
As if he hired the workers by the day." (p.25)

Others besides Shelley wrote of the Skylark, like James Hogg,
"Bird of the wilderness,
Blithesome and cumberless." (3)

R.W. Emerson is included, his verse, not essays. His bust features in my U.U Church, New Bedford MA, because he was our interim minister in 1831; he may have learned to reject communion from our own Mary Rotch, who left the service when communion was served. (Forgive making communion sound like a restaurant.) Emerson’s “Efficiency,”
Earth, crowded, cries, “Too many men!”
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.
Add their nine lives to this cat.. (165)
Contrast his great poem, “The Titmouse,” (chickadee) where he concludes that a Chickadee saved him, miles from home in a blizzard, its birdtalk very like Caesar’s:
I, who dreamed not when I came here
to find the antidote of fear
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paean! Veni, Vidi, Vici.
(Poems of R.W.Emerson.Walter Scott: London, n.d)

D.B. Wyndham Lewis fully expects a few readers to “dash this volume to the book-shop floor, crying derisively that one might as well pay admission to South Kensington to find the glass cases full of dead mice and little bits of string” (vii). He does not include faults in verse craftsmanship, suggests what makes it bad, “The most obvious tint is bathos: that sudden slip and swoop and slither as down a well-buttered slide”(x).… (mehr)