The last edition of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems is a very large book and there are quite a few bad poems in it. But there are also many, many good ones. Start with those I have already mentioned. Go on to read “Revelation,” “The Oven Bird,” “The Runaway,” and “To Earthward.” Make sure to read “The Silken Tent,” noticing that the entire poem is just one sentence. Start with these, and when you have done with them, go on to make your own list.
WALLACE STEVENS
1879–1955
Selected Poems
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879. After attending Harvard for three years he worked briefly as a journalist, then acquired a law degree and practiced law in New York. He had been writing poems for years, but his first published work appeared in Poetry in 1914. Two years later he joined an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut, rising in 1934 to vice president, a position he retained until his death in Hartford in 1955.
His first book, Harmonium, was published in 1923 and sold fewer than one hundred copies. Nevertheless, it included some of his best poems; for example, “Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and his own favorites, “Domination in Black” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
The theme of the conflict between and the relation of reality and imagination imbues many of his poems, both in Harmonium and thereafter. In “Esthetique du Mal” (“Aesthetic of Evil”) he argued, brilliantly as was always true of his verse, that beauty is inextricably linked with evil. But in “Sunday Morning,” my own favorite, which was written twenty years before, he had declared that “death is the mother of beauty.” I believe both of those contentions are correct, in the sense in which he uses the terms.
In his recent book, The Best Poems in the English Language, Harold Bloom (who is given to such exclamations) declares that “Stevens is the principal American poet since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.” Certainly he is one of the three or four—or five. But he isn’t easy to read. You have to work. Begin with the poems mentioned here, then go on to “The Idea of Order at Key West,” perhaps his best-known poem, and “The Poems of Our Climate.” Much effort will be required, but it will be rewarded.
THOMAS MANN
1875–1955
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann was born in Lubeck in 1875, the son of prosperous middle-class parents who were sufficiently liberal-minded not to object to the fact that their son never really wanted to be anything but a writer. He prepared himself thoroughly and well, reading voraciously, studying history, literature, and law, and writing assiduously from the time he was in his early teens. He also thought about writing and what it meant to be a writer. By “writer” he meant, of course, a maker of fictions, a creator of worlds, and he was well aware from a young age of how dubious and questionable is the career of a writer, and how little he ought to be trusted by more solid persons. This self-awareness was in itself partly make-believe, but partly serious, too, as is evident in many of Mann’s novels and stories, which are as frequently about fakes and charlatans as they are about artists as such.
Mann’s father died in 1891, whereupon the family moved to Munich, where Thomas Mann lived for more than forty years, marrying, fathering a family, and writing the books that made him world famous. Buddenbrooks was the first of them; published in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, it was an instant success that, everyone knew, promised more and better things in the future. Death in Venice was published in 1912; Der Zauberberg in 1924 (the English translation, The Magic Mountain, appeared in 1927 and helped to ensure Mann’s Nobel Prize); and the series of biblical novels, Joseph and His Brothers, from 1933 to 1943. By this time, however, Mann was living in America.
He had been a political conservative during World War I, but he soon saw through Hitler in his Munich days and was outspoken in his writings about him. When Hitler came to power at the beginning of 1933, the Manns were vacationing in Switzerland. A telephone call from their son and daughter warned them not to return to Germany. Thomas Mann never lived in Germany again, although he visited it for short periods after World War II.
Mann became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1952 he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, which was close to Germany but not in it and where everyone spoke German—this was a comfort. He was, however, writing a very uncomfortable book at the time, a joke on all of his devoted and adoring followers, and a return to his old theme of the charlatan/artist. In fact, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, published a year before Mann died in 1955, is very funny, and I recommend it highly. But life is not infinitely long, and do not read it until you have read The Magic Mountain first.
This strange and beautiful book is a novel of ideas, one of the few such books to become a worldwide bestseller. Hans Castorp leaves his solid, middle-class city and takes the winding cog railway up the mountain to the sanitarium where his cousin is being treated for tuberculosis. Hans meets the director at the door and is surprised to discover that this slightly diabolical doctor would like to take his temperature. The young man refuses. There is nothing whatever wrong with him, he insists; it is his cousin who is ill, and in any case Hans is merely on a short vacation from his solid job and must return at the end of two weeks, or perhaps three. But there is something wrong with him after all; he has tuberculosis, and he finds that he must inform his family that he will not return when he planned and to ask them to forward his clothes and his books to the sanitarium, to which he has been confined for an indefinite stay.
Life in the sanitarium at the top of the magic mountain is easy and carefree, although fraught with peril, for from time to time a patient worsens and dies, and is taken out at night so that the other patients cannot see it happen. There is all the time in the world to talk, and everyone does so, but the talk is not haphazard. A consuming conflict develops among representatives of various recognizable lines of thought in early-twentieth-century Europe and America. But nobody wins, nobody is proved “right,” the talk merely goes on and on while the patients, for the most part, become sicker and sicker (although one or two are cured and leave the scene). There is also time for love; and Castorp falls in love with a beautiful and enigmatic Russian woman who denies herself for months and then, on the eve of her departure—it seems that she is one of those who is cured—gives herself to Castorp in a storm of passion that is no less violently erotic for not being explicitly described.