Books and Ideas (39)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Ed. Oates and Atwan. (continued)

T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. Several ideas merge in this essay. The poetry of the past lives although the poet is dead. The poet’s craftsmanship puts emotion in the poem; it is not the emotion of the poet himself. The individual poet in the present must be aware of what lives in past work so that he can produce poetry that lives now and in the future as part of that past. Eliot is laying the groundwork for the “New Critics,” who emphasized studying the work of art, not the poet, and certainly not, as Rosenblatt contends, to encourage readers to interpret the work of art with their personal experience.

Ernest Hemingway. “Pamplona in July.” 1923. Hemingway reports on the bullfights at Pamplona in Spain.

H.L. Mencken. “The Hills of Zion.” 1925. Mencken went to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes monkey trial. While there, he observed a religious ritual of fundamentalist Christians who went into convulsions, howling hosannas.

Zora Neale Hurston. “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” 1928. The title is the best summary.

Edmund Wilson. “The Old Stone House.” 1932. A trip back to the town of his youth and a mood of depression as it reveals to him a way of life that he would never want to experience again.

Gertrude Stein. “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?” 1935. Now I understand “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Convoluted sentences. Erratic punctuation. Her idea about masterpieces is almost like TS Eliot’s effacement of the author’s personality in creating a work of poetry. Stein says if you remember you are you, you cannot create a masterpiece. You are limited by your personality and identity. If you efface your identity, you can create a masterpiece. Automatic writing? Sensible ideas are occasionally thrown into what appears to be a random collection of thoughts in stream of consciousness. But the piece is well organized. She moves from defining a masterpiece to explaining why there are so few masterpieces—most writers remember themselves and their identities and therefore cannot produce anything truly original. I guess.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Crack-Up.” 1936. Reflections on what he now realizes was a nervous breakdown. Maybe it was only depression. Youth and life end in unhappiness.

James Thurber. “Sex ex Machina.” 1937. Man vs. technology.

Richard Wright. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” 1937. Learning to live in a white man’s world, a world of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Richard Wright and other blacks who endured this cruelty were bitter. His story is raw and inspires hatred for the Southern whites.

Robert Frost. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” 1939. Frost reflects on the response he has to poems. His most memorable line: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

E.B. White. “Once More to the Lake.” 1941. On his return to the Maine lake where he spent his summers as a child. As an adult with his children, the author feels the years slipping away. Everything is the same as when he was a child. Almost. Outboard motors are an irritant. And as he watches his young son, he has a premonition of his own death.

Langston Hughes. “Bop.” 1949. The origin of Bop, from the noise a cop’s nightstick makes on a Negro’s head because he’s black. Whites cannot understand Bop since they haven’t been beaten about the head because they are white.