… of James Agee’s poetry is very portable — one of many good things about it, especially when you have to go to the Starbucks in Rockville Town Center for connectivity BECAUSE YOUR CONNECTIVITY AT HOME HAS COLLAPSED (we’re working on it). Mr UD sits beside me, drinking an iced coffee, holding Philip Selznick’s The Moral Commonwealth, and taking notes. That’s a big book, but the Agee is thin and light, and has paragraphs of very intelligent criticism from Andrew. Like this one:
The poems derive their energy from their own internal conflicts in trying to become American and to absorb their many influences; the journalism of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a failure in its own time, remains heavy with a self-absorption that approaches hysteria; the movie criticism never quite becomes a coherent whole; the screenplays, although brilliant, were produced only in part or not at all; the great novel is piercing, beautiful, and perhaps great, but was not actually completed; the superb letters for all their honesty and self-criticism don’t quite attain a transforming self-understanding. Yet Agee delivers in huge measure the pleasures – eminently Romantic – of the glittering fragment.
And it’s the glittering fragment from a poem called Description of Elysium that rivets me, because I sang it before I saw it in Hudgins:
Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.
Almost hysteria again, I guess — that wandering long line that breaks out of the concision of other lines as it weeps for wonder….
Eminently Romantic, overcome with the glory of life, the mystery of the universe, the perfect moment.
I’ve sung these lines for years. Samuel Barber put them to music. The piano accompaniment is difficult for me – damn modern music – but I manage. Barely.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:11AM
Gosh – that’s lovely – alone or in the Barber setting. Thank you.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:41AM
Glad you agree, Michael.