Though I haven't mentioned poetry lately, I have continued to read it, even amid the toils of Moby-Dick and Great Expectations. Specifically, I have continued to slowly copy out Wordsworth's The Prelude.

When I say "slowly," I mean "slowly." For some reason this copying project is advancing at glacial speed. Yesterday, I finally finished Book First (and what's with that wacky section title: why not Book One?), but I may be collecting Social Security by the time I reach the oh-so-distant Book Fourteenth. At this point I really can't say whether or not I like the poem, though certain lines do rise up to greet me. Nevertheless, I can say that it's an easier copying job than Paradise Lost was, if only because of the more predictable syntax and capitalization. Yet it doesn't glitter like Milton's poem does. It feels, on the whole, far more pedestrian.

This makes me sad. I want great poems to be great, and I hope this one will accrue into something significant. Wordsworth is unfashionable these days; and as an unfashionable writer myself, I like to make allowances for the ineluctable variance of literary taste. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a very well known poet and creative-writing professor that I was copying out The Prelude, and she said, "What for? That poem's got nothing in it that's worth spending time on." I blushed and scuttled, but her comment, if anything, made me feel even more defensive of this project. I suppose it bears a certain resemblance to my defense of Milly Jourdain's oeuvre (and more on her tomorrow): I don't want to deride a body of work simply because it doesn't fit a contemporary conception of how a poet ought to handle language and reveal his or her thoughts and emotions.

As The Prelude's Book First draws to a close, Wordsworth writes:

. . . should neither I be taught

To understand myself, nor thou to know

With better knowledge how the heart was framed

Of him thou lovest; need I dread from thee

Harsh judgments . . . ?

He wrote those lines with confidence that he was loved, yet today he is not, on the whole, loved much at all. And whether or not he deserves my love, that desertion is its own tragedy.

Dinner last night, which was not quite as delicious as the pork chops and mushrooms but was still pretty good: tomato soup finished with bread crumbs, parsley, marjoram, and olive oil; cheddar-cheese wafers; kohlrabi spears; apple and cranberry clafoutis with whipped cream.