Poetry

This wing opens with a war and a voyage home, and it has been downhill for armies and uphill for readers ever since. I will be blunt about The Waste Land: Eliot appended footnotes to a poem about civilization collapsing, and the footnotes are part of the ruin. Read it anyway. Ovid is in here changing bodies into trees and gods into weather. Rumi is in here being quoted at weddings by people who have never read him; repair that. Poetry is the one shelf where slowness is the point: a page a night is a fast pace, and nothing else in the library gives back this much per line.

Hundreds of lines cataloguing ships and captains, then battle after battle in which men die identically, spear through the nipple, darkness covering their eyes, formulas recycled for oral performance. Anyone arriving for the Trojan Horse should know it never appears; the poem ends before the city falls. Achilles spends half of it sulking in his tent.

— against The Iliad

Rape drives an uncomfortable share of these transformations, and Ovid narrates each with the same urbane sparkle, which starts to read as complicity somewhere around Daphne. Connections between tales are openly arbitrary, fifteen books without a destination; near the end, Pythagoras delivers a four-hundred-line lecture on vegetarianism. In translation the wit thins, and wit is most of what protects you.

— against Metamorphoses

Four hundred-odd lines that require a reference library. Eliot quotes Latin, German, French, and Sanskrit without translation, and his own endnotes are half joke, half smokescreen. The fragments refuse to cohere by design, which means unaided readers mostly register that something important is collapsing somewhere. You will need a guide, and the guide industry knows it.

— against The Waste Land and Other Poems