Virtually every home in Puritan America possessed a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee!
Bernini walked to the Gesù to pray every evening for forty years.
Cranmer watched Latimer and Ridley being burned at the stake no more than five months before he would be put to death in the same manner himself.
Head Tide, Maine, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in.
Cuchulain is illegitimate.
Arthur is illegitimate.
Gawain is illegitimate.
Roland is illegitimate.
What is this castle call’d that stands hard by?
They call it Agincourt.
The legend that Tycho Brahe died when his bladder burst after an interminable evening of drinking beer.
Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done.
Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing.
Play the man, Master Ridley.
Hank Cinq.
Cavafy died of cancer of the larynx.
Pechorin.
Rarely, if ever, having had it come to mind:
That Marcel Proust constantly wheezed.
Did St. Augustine, who was asthmatic equally?
Ophir, from where gold and sandalwood and ivory and apes and precious jewels and peacocks came. Which is mentioned a dozen times in seven different books of the Old Testament.
And which no one has ever discovered the location of.
Also even a sequence of cantos awaiting numbering, if Writer says so.
Ingres spent fifteen years doing pencil portraits of tourists in Rome.
The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen-twenty.
Cellini’s narration of the casting of his Perseus.
The inexplicable logic by which Thackeray convinced himself that Desdemona actually did have an affair with Cassio.
Christopher Smart died mad. And in debtors’ prison.
The Gesù, where St. Ignatius Loyola is buried. Bernini’s unimpeachable piety—
Yet the indisputable insinuation of orgasm in his Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
Romain Rolland died of tuberculosis.
Sigrid Undset died of a stroke.
The friendship of Heine and Karl Marx.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir were once teachers in the same lycée.
The greatest lyric poet Germany ever knew, Gottfried Benn called Else Lasker-Schüler.
Who at sixty-four was beaten with an iron pipe by young Nazis on a street in Berlin.
Marianne Moore once read a book on the craft of pitching by Christy Mathewson.
The apparent evidence that Lawrence Durrell committed incest with one of his daughters. Who eventually killed herself.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.
La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes.
I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Says Darwin’s Autobiography.
It is Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio XXVI, who was the original miglior fabbro.
Byron knew no music.
Pope knew no music.
Johnson knew no music and very little of art, either.
Ernest Hemingway once challenged Hugh Casey to a boxing match. Casey knocked Hemingway down repeatedly.
Hemingway kicked Casey in the groin.
On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima multis.
The last day for many.
Fayaway.
Much of what we have of Aristotle was not strictly speaking written by Aristotle at all. But would appear to be classroom notes taken down by others.
Both of Verdi’s parents were illiterate.
Like Abraham Lincoln’s.
Elegies to the Spanish Republic.
From Herodotus, on Thermopylae:
It chanced that at this time the Lacedaemonians held the outer guard and were seen by the spy. Some of them engaged in gymnastic exercises, others were combing their long hair. At this the spy greatly marveled.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock
Sat down and combed their hair.
Roman Jakobson, when Mayakovsky once read him his newest poems:
Very good. But not as good as Mayakovsky.
For that matter Writer also has backaches.
As did Shelley.
A poet is a waste-good and an unthrift, in that he is born to make the taverns rich and himself a beggar.
Said Robert Greene.
But to speak plainly, I think him an honest man.
Greene also said.
One of Robert Frost’s daughters went insane.
One of his sons killed himself.
Christopher Marlowe, a stage direction:
The Pope crosses himself, and Faustus hits him a box on the ear.
Puccini, sipping coffee, once told Lucrezia Bori that her costume was too neat for the last act of Manon Lescaut, in which Manon is destitute.
And dumped the coffee on her gown.
Verses of Propertius were found copied out on walls in Pompeii.
The seemingly authentic report that a doctor performed an autopsy on the Abbé Prévost after a stroke — to discover that only the autopsy had killed him.
He who wrote that painting is a higher art than sculpture was as ignorant as a maidservant, said Michelangelo.
Meaning Leonardo.
Chopin died of tuberculosis.
Salvador Dali once gave a lecture in London while wearing a diving helmet.
And nearly suffocated.
Thomas Gainsborough, while painting Sarah Siddons:
Damn your nose, madame! There’s no end to it.
Katherine Anne Porter died of Alzheimer’s disease.
Palestrina’s tomb, once in St. Peter’s, for obscure reasons no longer exists.
Musicae Princeps, it had said. Prince of music.
Would Emily Dickinson have been aware that Lord Jeffrey Amherst arranged for blankets infected with smallpox to be set out for ill-clothed Indians to come upon during the French and Indian War?
The case for William Davenant having been Shakespeare’s illegitimate son.
A Novel Without a Hero. Being the subtitle of Vanity Fair.
Though there, at least in part, meaning only that the book has a heroine instead.
Catullus once wrote a poem criticizing Caesar.
And was invited to dinner.
Osip Mandelstam once wrote a poem criticizing Stalin.