In a verse chronicle in the June New Criterion, William Logan excoriates James Tate (“a wisecracker. . . [who] giggled at his own jokes”), so what else is new, pleads with the late C. K. Williams “to shut the hell up,” and makes the astounding claim that “scarcely anyone reads James Schuyler or Kenenth Koch” these days. He loses no time in making a false assertion with the confidence of a lobbyist. “One poem like Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems.” Dull? Has Logan read Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Propsect of Eton College,” or the sonnet on Richard West’s death or his ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’.” I ask readers to judge for themselves. Here is Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Propsect of Eton College,” with my gloss on it, along with the other two poems I’ve named. — DL
https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44305/on-the-death-of-richard-west
from “Hymn to Adversity”:
Thy form benign, O Goddess, wear,
Thy milder influence impart,
Thy philosophic Train be there
To soften, not to wound my heart.
The gen’rous spark extinct revive,
Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are, to feel, and know myself a Man.
