Notes

Notes Toward an Introduction

1. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1:408–9 (#383).

2. Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 1:54, 56, 2:436–37.

3. J. Leslie Hotson, The Death of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925).

4. Justin Steinberg, Dante and the Limits of Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 176. Joan Acocella pointed out this embarrassing bit of lower criticism and identified the Cunard liner in Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 55–56.

6. Michael Cooper, “Gershwin’s ABC’s Might Not Be What They Seem,” New York Times, March 2, 2016.

7. Jonathan Sawday, “A Kinder Isle?” TLS (January 13, 2017): 15–17.

8. The directory is now at the Frost Place in Derry, New Hampshire. It was discovered by Richard Holmes, the town historian.

9. Richard Brooks, “Who’s Sleeping in Van Gogh’s Bed?” [London] Sunday Times, October 30, 2016.

10. Katy Jennison, “No Hares Were Harmed” (letter to the editor), London Review of Books 38 (November 3, 2016): 5.

11. T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Love’s Labor’s Won: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957). The manuscript leaf on which the title “Loves Labor Won” was inscribed, originally part of the daybook of the Elizabethan stationer Christopher Hunt, was discovered in the binding of a book of seventeenth-century sermons. This leaf recorded some titles of his stock in 1603.

12. Cedric C. Brown, “Milton, the Attentive Mr. Skinner, and the Acts and Discourses of Friendship,” in A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts: A Festschrift for Gordon Campbell, ed. Edward Jones (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 106–28.

13. Ferris Jabr, “Dickinson’s Inspirations Grow Anew,” New York Times, May 17, 2016.

1. Shelley’s Wrinkled Lip, Smith’s Gigantic Leg

1. Ruins play their part in, among other poems, Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” “Suggested by a Beautiful Ruin Upon One of the Islands of Loch Lomond,” “Yarrow Visited,” “At Bala-Sala, Isle of Man,” and “At Furness Abbey.” For Coleridge, the list would include “Melancholy,” “Love,” and “Love’s Apparition and Evanishment.”

2. W[illiam]. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems, 3rd ed. (London, 1802), 1:xi, vii. The preface first appeared in this edition.

3. For one account of events worldwide, as well as at Lake Geneva, see William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (New York: St. Martin’s, 2013). Mary Shelley recalled, in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, that “it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands.…‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to.” Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein (London, 1831), vii–viii. The usual date for Byron’s challenge is June 16, but astronomers have suggested that, based on Mary Shelley’s description of the moon, it occurred between June 10 and 13. See Donald W. Olson et al., “The Moon and the Origin of Frankenstein,” Sky and Telescope 122 (November 2011): 68–74.

4. “Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady.” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, viii. There seems little evidence of this, however. See James Rieger, “Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 3 (Autumn 1963): 464–69.

5. “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” “On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt,” “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” and “To the Nile.” All but the Milton ode were sonnets. We have the testimony of Woodhouse and Cowden Clarke about the quarter-hour deadline, at least for the contests that produced “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” and “To the Nile.” See the headnotes to these poems in John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 97–98, 109, 292, 307–8.

6. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To the Nile,” in The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 2:349–50. The contest and the rediscovery of the poem decades later are detailed in the headnote.

7. Leigh Hunt, “The Nile,” in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt (London, 1860), 235.

8. Shelley, Poems of Shelley, 2:307–11. The text is largely that of Shelley’s fair copy, though I have adopted his apparent verbal revisions for the Examiner as well as the newspaper’s capitalization of “Two” in line 2, the punctuation in line 3 (where the fair copy has an ellipsis between “desart” and “near”), and the quotation marks around the words on the pedestal. The fair copy’s ampersands have been spelled out.

9. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:223–24.

10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Colosseum,” in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (New York: New Amsterdam, 1988), 226–27. The portrait of the Colosseum was still accurate when Dickens visited the site more than a quarter-century later.

11. If such a traveler detected a sneer, he may have been mistaken. William Empson, in The Face of the Buddha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1, remarks, “There are two common misunderstandings about Buddhist sculpture; that the faces have no expression at all … or else they all sneer.” Though Empson (123n1) was perhaps misremembering remarks by G. K. Chesterton, what is complacent to many may be sneering to some. This temptation to read emotion into the Egyptian sculptures was perhaps common in the nineteenth century. The Reverend John Weiss recalled Thoreau, his fellow student at Harvard, “as looking very much like some Egyptian sculptures of faces, large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egotism.” Christian Examiner 79 (July 1865): 98.

12. [Ralph Beilby], History of British Birds: The Figures Engraven on Wood by T. Bewick, vol. 1, Containing the History and Description of Land Birds (Newcastle, 1797), 87, 42.

13. The remark may be found in a copy of [Ralph Beilby], A History of British Birds (London, 1821), 1:138, annotated by Thomas and Jane Bewick, the latter his daughter. Bewick signed his initials beneath the statement. The volume is held in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, shelfmark RC.N.2.

14. [Beilby], History of British Birds (1797), 1:42.

15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas (London, 1822), 49 (lines 1002–3).

16. Examiner no. 524 (January 11, 1818): 24.

17. Examiner no. 524 (January 11, 1818): 17, 24, 26, 31, 31, 29.

18. Shelley, Poems of Shelley, 2:307. Frederick A. Pottle, however, in “The Meaning of Shelley’s ‘Glirastes,’ ” Keats-Shelley Journal 7 (Winter 1958): 6–7, believes the name might have meant “one who behaves like a dormouse.” He thought it possibly Shelley’s own pet name, noting Thomas Hogg’s recollection of the poet’s terrible drowsiness during evenings at Oxford. Shelley’s and Mary’s nickname for their boy Will was Willmouse.

19. Shelley, Poems of Shelley, 2:306. The fair copy is held at the Bodleian, MS. Shelley e. 4, folio 85v. A transcription is provided in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook, vol. 3 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 327. See pp. 950–51 for a discussion of the problems of choosing a copy text for the poem.

20. It was hoped that hieroglyphics would reveal the secrets of those antique dynasties. Some of the earliest detective work had required the genius of a Thomas Young, who made important scientific contributions to the wave theory of light and to the concepts of elasticity and capillary action. Even he could not fully break the code.

21. Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (London, 1828), 285.

22. Examiner no. 527 (February 1, 1818): 73.

23. Horace Smith, Amarynthus the Nympholept (London, 1821), 213. “Nympholept” means exactly what one might think—a lover of young girls or, rather, of classical nymphs, whose beauty drove men mad. Smith wrote in his preface that he was “not aware that Nympholepsy has been made the subject of poetical experiment” (ix). Perhaps he had not only himself but Shelley in mind—Harriet Westbrook (Shelley’s first wife) and Mary Godwin had each been sixteen when the poet met them.

24. Émile Zola, Rome, trans. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (London, 1898), 1:228.

25. Henry IV, Part II, 4.5.133, 136–37.

26. Anna Laeticia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (London, 1812), 10, 16–17.

27. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 2:469.

28. Edinburgh Review 72 (October, 1840): 228.

29. Keats, Poems of John Keats, 60–62.

30. “In the autumn of 1817 the British Museum had taken receipt of … sculptures from the Empire of the Ramases.… Among these were the celebrated Rosetta Stone, and the massive figure of Ramases II taken from the King’s Funerary Temple at Thebes.” Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: Dutton, 1975), 410. The counterevidence is laid out in Shelley, Poems of Shelley, 2:309.

31. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997), 292.

32. Shelley, Letters, 1:548.

33. See, for example, Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 110–14.

34. The best summary of this complicated matter may be found in Poems of Shelley, 2:307–10. I have relied on this discussion, especially for Shelley’s sources.

35. G[eorge]. Booth, trans., The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian in Fifteen Books (London, 1814), 1:53.

36. Quarterly Review 16 (October 1816): 1–27. See also Poems of Shelley, 2:309.

37. Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (London, 1743), 1:106–7, and plates opp. 104, 105, 107. See also H. M. Richmond, “Ozymandias and the Travelers,” Keats-Shelley Journal 11 (1962): 65–71. Richmond points out (70) that the engraving opposite p. 96 in Pococke shows ruins in an empty desert. He makes a strong case for Shelley’s use of A Description but thinks the engraving there of the head and torso of the colossus shows a face “cold and brutal” (69). I would call it peaceful and impersonal, almost Buddhist. See note 11, this chapter.

38. Vivant Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, trans. Arthur Aikin (London, 1803), 2:89–90, 92–93. I have borrowed this point, as well as the quotation, from Johnstone Parr, “Shelley’s Ozymandias,” Keats-Shelley Journal 6 (Winter 1957): 33–34. The italics in the quotation, all but one, were Parr’s before they were mine.

39. Shelley, Poems of Shelley, 2:309, states that the spelling Ozymandias is otherwise unknown; but Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 3:947, shows that the spelling was common at this date.

40. “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Poems of John Keats, 537.

41. E. M. W. Tillyard, Essays Literary and Educational (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 110–11.

42. James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 57; Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 407.

43. [Mary Shelley], Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (London, 1818), 1:98, 101.

44. The original film The Mummy (1932) appeared in the wake of Howard Carter’s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun a decade before. The plot is almost certainly indebted to Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Ring of Thoth” (1890), where an Egyptian cursed with everlasting life wants to join his beloved by drinking an elixir buried with her mummy. Whether Mary Shelley’s stray remark had any influence on the writers of the film is unknown.

45. Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, 297.

46. “Ramses II, Pronounced Cured of All Infection, Goes Home from Paris,” New York Times, May 11, 1977.

47. Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

2. Frost’s Horse, Wilbur’s Ride

1. Think of the mysterious stranger who in “Young Goodman Brown” accompanies Brown through the forest, or the fountain-of-youth tale “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”

2. [Washington Irving], “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., new ed. (London, 1821), 2:259–60.

3. “Dawes” could have been rhymed on, among other words, “cause,” “flaws,” “jaws,” “laws,” and “pause.”

4. Putnam may have been the officer who said to his men at Bunker Hill (actually Breed’s Hill, but we have printed the myth too long to care much for the history), “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

5. Thomas Buchanan Read, “Sheridan’s Ride.”

6. Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), 454.

7. “The Fear,” “The Wood-Pile,” “The Code,” in Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, 89, 100, 71.

8. The most important nineteenth-century American draft horses were the Percheron and the Belgian. The Clydesdale, though well known, was used mostly in cities, the long feathery hair on its lower legs often considered unsuitable to the farm, as it became clotted with dirt and muck. See, for example, Charles S. Plumb, Types and Breeds of Farm Animals, rev. ed. (New York: Ginn and Co., 1920), 140.

9. Robert Browning, “ ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ ”; Alfred Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

10. Melody Simmons, “After Shooting, Amish School Embodies Effort to Heal,” New York Times, January 31, 2007.

11. The notebook probably dates “as early as 1920,” according to Robert Frost, The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 629, 633–34. Unfortunately, the transcriptions in this edition cannot be relied upon. See James Sitar, “Frost’s Great Misgiving,” Essays in Criticism 57 (2007): 364–72; and William Logan, “Frost at Midnight,” in The Undiscovered Country (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 300–26. A revised edition of Notebooks, not mentioned as such, was issued in paperback in 2010. Though many errors were corrected, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were left untouched. See William Logan, “Frost’s Notebooks: A Disaster Revisited,” in Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 114–29. The poem’s inspiration seems to lie in a different and also undated notebook: “As through the woods we drove for fifty miles in the dark a man came out of the trees and stabbed our horse dead.” Frost, Notebooks of Robert Frost, 358.

12. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 673n4.

13. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 263–64, 314–15.

14. “New York Loses Its Last Horse Car,” New York Times, July 27, 1917.

15. Manny Fernandez, “A Vestige of the Past Shutters Its Stalls,” New York Times, April 30, 2007.

16. G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 124.

17. Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2004), 79.

18. Browning, “ ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.’ ”

19. See chapter 5 for further discussion of Milton’s sonnet.

3. Lowell’s Skunk, Heaney’s Skunk

1. $16,500 (2010).

2. Harriett Winslow, having suffered a stroke, offered the house to Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick “as a summer retreat.” Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 223.

3. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 191–92.

4. “On ‘Skunk Hour,’ ” in Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 226–27.

5. Lowell, Collected Prose, 226.

6. “Historians’ best estimates put the proportion of adult white male loyalists somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. Approximately half the colonists of European ancestry tried to avoid involvement in the struggle.” Robert M. Calhoon, “Loyalism and Neutrality,” in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 235.

7. These were, respectively, the Rhinelander Mansion and the earlier of the two Morton F. Plant houses.

8. Lowell, Collected Prose, 229.

9. T. Westcott, “Yankee and Yankee Doodle,” Notes and Queries 6 (July 17, 1852): 56–58. This includes references to previous articles on the subject.

10. Lowell, Collected Prose, 228.

11. Lowell, Collected Prose, 312; Daniel Hoffman, “Afternoons with Robert Lowell,” Gettysburg Review 6 (Summer 1993), 481–82. Hoffman mailed Lowell a Christmas present of lead soldiers the younger poet had sought out in Dijon, soldiers Lowell had mentioned in his memoir “91 Revere Street.” Lowell graciously replied, “I stuck the Dijon in blindly, on the Flaubertian principle of always being particular.”

12. Lowell, Collected Poems, 1046n5.3; Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 96, 99.

13. Jean Stafford, Carley Dawson, and Sandra Hochman. See Hamilton, Robert Lowell, 80, 132; Sandra Hochman, Loving Robert Lowell (Nashville, Tenn.: Turner, 2017), 213.

14. Folder 2206, Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard.

15. John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 4, line 75.

16. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, I, sect. 51; Christopher Marlowe, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: 1604–1616, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 191, lines 514–15.

17. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 4, line 78.

18. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 4, lines 105–10.

19. Lowell, Collected Poems, 175, 57.

20. Hamilton, Robert Lowell, 60.

21. Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 306.

22. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (2004), s.v. “Skunk,” 1.

23. Hamilton, Robert Lowell, 224.

24. Hamilton, Robert Lowell, 40.

25. Lowell, Letters, 597; Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: Norton, 1994), 507n33. Though Lowell was not bequeathed an interest in the house, by Maine law he was entitled to half his wife’s inheritance.

26. Lowell, Letters, 288, 316.

27. Lowell, Letters, 289.

28. “I visited Lowell in Castine, Maine[,] in 1957 when I was up from Brazil with a Brazilian friend of mine. The skunk business was going on then at the back door, where we saw it with a flashlight”: Eileen McMahon, “Elizabeth Bishop Speaks About Her Poetry,” in Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Monteiro (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), 109.

29. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 213.

30. Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 204.

31. Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 230.

32. Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 258.

33. Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 583.

34. Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 324.

35. Folder 2238, Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard.

36. “In March of the same year [1957], I had been giving readings on the West Coast.… I became sorely aware of how few poems I had written, and that these few had been finished at the latest three or four years earlier. Their style seemed distant, symbol-ridden, and willfully difficult. I began to paraphrase my Latin quotations, and to add extra syllables to a line to make it clearer and more colloquial.” Lowell, Collected Prose, 226–27.

37. Steven Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 250.

38. Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (New York, 1846), 1:103. Darwin also wrote, “If a dog is urged to the attack, its courage is instantly checked by a few drops of the fetid oil, which brings on violent sickness and running at the nose.”

39. Telephone conversation, September 12, 2010. Mr. Erhard said that the skunks in Castine come in three-year cycles; after a heavy year, they’re killed off by some disease, perhaps distemper. He also mentioned that when he answers a phone call on a Sunday afternoon and is asked whether he’s the animal-control officer, he thinks, “I shouldn’t have answered the phone.”

40. Bishop based the poem on an incident observed from her Rio balcony in April 1963. Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 345.

41. Hamilton, Robert Lowell, 267.

42. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 1, lines 254–55.

43. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 48.

44. Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, 3.2.66–68. Mistress Otter: “I doe but dreame o’ the city. It staynd me a damasque table-cloth, cost me eighteen pound at one time.” Ben Jonson, The Oxford Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, corr. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 5:203.

45. According to a 1644 contract for building Syon House in Middlesex, “John Hawkes of Hounslow was to have … £5 15s. at the end of working half a million bricks, and finally 6s. 8d. for each 10,000 ‘well and sufficiently burnt and delivered out of the kiln.’ ” M. W. Barley, English Farmhouse and Cottage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 206. By my reckoning, eighteen pounds would have purchased 375,000 bricks. The face of Elizabethan statute bricks was 9" x 2½". Adding a little for mortar, every foot of a wall six feet high would require about thirty-four bricks, so for the price of a good chasuble a wall of over two miles could be built, enough to enclose Lowell’s Nautilus Island. As a statute brick was 4½" broad, a stout wall two bricks deep would have cost as much as two chasubles.

46. “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times”: “Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter,” Playboy 23 (November 1976): 86.

47. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), xxii–xxiv, 62.

48. The airmail-letter rate from the United States to Ireland, as of January 3, 1976, was 31¢ per half-ounce, up to two ounces. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990, 110th ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990), 549.

49. “I just returned from reviewing the microfilm of the New York City Telephone Directory, 1975–1976.… It indicates that calls to Europe run at 3-minute rates of $9.60 or $12.00. However, I was unable to locate rates to specific countries.” Email from Stephen Shepard, General Research Division, New York Public Library, September 16, 2010.

50. French: Dépuceler une fille, A. Boyer, The Royal Dictionary, French and English … (London, 1764). Spanish: Ò desflorár una virgen, Joseph Giral Delpino, A Dictionary, Spanish and English … (London, 1763). Swedish: Kranka a mö, Jacob Serenius, An English and Swedish Dictionary …, 2nd ed. (Harg and Stenbro, 1767). Each entry s.v. “Broach.” English: Pierce Egan, Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, rev. ed. (London, 1823), s.v. “Tap”: “To tap a girl; to be the first seducer.”

51. J. E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1: A–G (New York: Random House, 1994), s.v. “Bunghole.” The earliest use was 1611.

52. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 205.

53. Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, ed. Edward Hutchings (New York: Norton, 1984), 104–6.

54. Titian claimed he wanted to provide variety for King Philip II, his patron.

55. Titian, Venus and Adonis, c. 1540–1560; Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgment of Paris, c. 1528.

56. Lowell began to “speed up” in early December and was eventually committed to Boston Psychopathic Hospital, where he stayed a week or more. By the end of January he had been committed again, this time to McLean Hospital (Hamilton, Robert Lowell, 238–43).

57. Stanley Kunitz, “The Sense of a Life,” reprinted in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 234. Referring to this incident in a review collected in Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 216, I mistakenly recalled that Lowell was revising Paradise Lost. In fact it was “Lycidas.”

4. Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Carroll’s Hiawatha: The Name and Nature of Parody

1. [London] Critic 15 (April 1, 1856): 170–71.

2. Chambers’s Journal 45 (July 4, 1868): 420.

3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Library of America, 2000). See, for example, “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (12), “The Slave’s Dream” (24), and “The Haunted Chamber” (615).

4. Longfellow, Poems, 347.

5. Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 1936), 197.

6. Longfellow, Poems, 3.

7. Walter Hamilton, Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (London, 1884–1889), 1:63.

8. Hamilton, Parodies, 2:11.

9. Longfellow, Poems, 4.

10. Hamilton, Parodies, 2:11.

11. A. E. Housman, The Poems of A. E. Housman, ed. Archie Burnett (Oxford, 1997), 210–11.

12. See, for example, “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,” The Practitioner: A Monthly Journal of Therapeutics 2 (January 1870): 58–59; “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup—Another Baby Sacrificed,” New England Medical Monthly 29 (May 1910): 180–81.

13. Longfellow, Poems, 15.

14. Unsigned review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems, Graham’s Magazine 20 (April 1842): 248.

15. Unsigned review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 6 (February 1840): 102–3.

16. Hamilton, Parodies, 2:10. It’s not clear what sort of game the village schoolboy is playing; but Celia Thaxter, a contributor to an anthology edited by John Greenleaf Whittier, Child Life in Prose (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), 60, recalls that as a girl she and the children in her family “launched fleets of purple mussel-shells on the still pools in the rocks, left by the tide.”

17. Hamilton, Parodies, 2:10.

18. See, for example, Corey Kilgannon, “Washington Crosses the Delaware, This Time More Accurately,” New York Times, December 24, 2011.

19. Longfellow, Poems, 337, 335, 335.

20. Hamilton, Parodies, 1:68.

21. W. S. Gilbert, Songs of a Savoyard (London, 1891), 16.

22. Hamilton, Parodies, 1:70.

23. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York, 1896), 399.

24. I have traced this anecdote only as far as Channing Pollock, The Adventures of a Happy Man (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1939), 122, but he writes as if it were commonly known. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), 1:304, repeats the tale but gives no source. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), 319, thinks the story “not at all unlikely” though introduces it with “It is always said.”

25. Johnson, Dickens, 1:304.

26. Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde (London: Duckworth, 1930), 42.

27. Longfellow, Poems, 135–36.

28. Longfellow, Poems, 135–36.

29. Elizabeth Akers Allen [Florence Percy, pseud.], Forest Buds, from the Woods of Maine (Boston, 1856), 108.

30. Longfellow, Poems, 135.

31. Allen, Forest Buds, 108.

32. Longfellow, Poems, 135.

33. Allen, Forest Buds, 109.

34. Longfellow, Poems, 136; Allen, Forest Buds, 110; Longfellow, Poems, 135; Allen, Forest Buds, 109.

35. R[alph]. W[aldo]. Emerson, Essays, 2nd ser. (Boston, 1844), 40–41.

36. Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1963), 11; Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3rd ed. (Boston: Ticknor, 1886), 1:17.

37. Edward Wagenknecht, Longfellow: A Full-Length Portrait (New York: Longmans, Green, 1955), 12, 39; Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 41–42, 68–69, 108, 112, 114; Lawrance Thompson, Young Longfellow (Macmillan, 1938), 205–6.

38. For a broader perspective, see, for example, Chase S. Osborn and Stellanova Osborn, Schoolcraft—Longfellow—Hiawatha (Lancaster, Pa.: Jaques Cattell, 1942), 38–40. Andrew Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947), 43n7, suggests that, as Longfellow could not read Finnish, he perhaps read the Kalevala in Swedish (he owned a copy), though he also read the German version with a friend.

39. Thomas Percy, The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1765); Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston, 1882–1898).

40. Longfellow, Poems, 831n141.1.

41. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1902), 33.

42. [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], “Defence of Poetry,” North American Review 34 (January 1832): 75, 69.

43. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8: 1845–1859, ed. Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 464.

44. Emerson, Letters, 8:446.

45. Emerson, Letters, 8:464.

46. J. Rogers Rees, The Brotherhood of Letters (London, 1889), 82n.

47. Longfellow, Poems, 157.

48. New York Daily Times, November 24, 1855.

49. John Brougham, Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (New York, [1855]), 3. The review appeared in the New York Daily Times, December 24, 1855.

50. [Walter Scott], St. Ronan’s Well (Boston, 1824), 221.

51. [Walt Whitman], Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855), 20.

52. New York Daily Times, December 28, 1855.

53. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, geologist and Indian agent, learned the Ojibwe language from his wife, the daughter of a fur trader and an Ojibwe woman. Schoolcraft’s works, which despite their flaws helped open Indian legend to study, included Algic Researches (New York, 1839), 2 vols.; Oneóta; or, Characteristics of the Red Race of America (New York, 1847); Historical and Statistical Information, Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia, 1851–1857), 6 vols.; and The Myth of Hiawatha (London, 1856). For Longfellow’s debts, see Osborn, Schoolcraft—Longfellow—Hiawatha; and Schoolcraft’s Indian Legends, ed. Mentor L. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991).

54. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 18.

55. Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 158.

56. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters, 1853–1856, vol. 17, ed. Thomas Woodson et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 429.

57. Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1885), 2:78.

58. The Song of Milgenwater, trans. George A. Strong [Marc Antony Henderson, pseud.] (Cincinnati, 1856). In The Song of Milkanwatha, the retitled second edition, also of 1856, the hero’s name was styled thus throughout. Strong expanded the section of additional poems, but otherwise the texts are identical.

59. Longfellow, Poems, 198.

60. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 40.

61. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 79.

62. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 74–75.

63. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. 4, 1857–1865, ed. Andrew Hilen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 91.

64. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 20.

65. The Song of Milkanwatha, trans. George A. Strong [Marc Antony Henderson, pseud.], 3rd ed. (Albany, 1883), 11.

66. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 12, 77n.

67. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 37–38.

68. Longfellow, Poems, 162.

69. Song of Milkanwatha [2nd ed.], 27.

70. Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South (London: Duckworth, 1921), 140–41.

71. Mortimer Q. Thomson [Q. K. Philander Doesticks, pseud.], Plu-ri-bus-tah: A Song That’s-By-No-Author (New York, 1856).

72. Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News, September 5, 1856. I have changed the question mark at the end of the passage, probably a typo, to an exclamation point.

73. Franklin Buck, A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush, ed. Katharine A. White (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 158.

74. “The smylere with the knyf under the cloke”: Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” line 1999.

75. The parodist apparently wishes to remain anonymous.

76. Lewis Carroll, “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” The Train 4 (December, 1857), 332–33. The last three stanzas of this extract were dropped when Carroll collected the poem in Rhyme? And Reason? (London, 1883). By then the technique described was out of date.

77. “The Song of Hiawatha,” Punch 30 (January 12, 1856), 17.

78. Carroll, “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” 333.

79. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (London, 1889).

80. Carroll, “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” 334. A missing hyphen has been provided for “right-eye.”

81. William Wordsworth, “Address to My Infant Daughter,” in Poems, 2 vols. (London, 1815), 1:292.

82. Carroll, “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” 335.

83. Longfellow, Letters, 5:376.

5. Keats’s Chapman’s Homer, Justice’s Henry James

1. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:114.

2. Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (London, 1837), 328.

3. John Middleton Murry made this observation in Studies in Keats (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 21.

4. Keats, Letters, 1:114n7.

5. Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 10. Browne thought Keats’s birthday the twenty-ninth (though he has the year wrong), but most modern scholars have chosen the thirty-first. At least one recent biographer sees the date as still arguable. See R. S. White, John Keats: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–2. Jack Stillinger reviewed the book, approving of this skepticism, in the online journal Review 19 (October 28, 2010), http://www.NBOL-19.org.

6. “Meteorological Journal,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 107 (January 1, 1817): 20–21. Temperatures were taken at 7 a.m. For the Year Without a Summer, see chapter 1, note 3.

7. Charles Cowden Clarke and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (London, 1878), 121; Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (London, 1828), 246.

8. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

9. John Keats, Poems (London, 1817), 89.

10. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130, wrote “by ten o’clock.” In an article some years before, Charles Cowden Clarke recalled it as “before 10, A.M.” See Charles Cowden Clarke [An Old School-Fellow, pseud.], “Recollections of Keats,” Atlantic Monthly 7 (January, 1861): 90.

11. “I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet”: Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

12. “We have MSS known to be drafts that are cleanly written (where the words flower readily or where Keats composed in his head before setting anything down on paper)”: Jack Stillinger, The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 745. See also Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 116–17.

13. Clarke, “Recollections of Keats,” 90.

14. W. Cooke Taylor edited Chapman’s Iliad in 1843, but Richard Hooper’s edition of both books did not appear until 1857.

15. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130; William Cowper, trans., The Iliad of Homer, 5th ed. (London, 1820), 15.

16. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 128.

17. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

18. “Just at that time I was installed housekeeper, and was solitary”: Clarke, “Recollections of Keats,” 89.

19. Edward Pugh [David Hughson, pseud.], London; Being an Accurate History and Description of the British Metropolis and Its Neighbourhood (London, 1807), 4:454.

20. See the postmark on the letter to Clarke: Keats, Letters, 1:114.

21. John Feltham, The Picture of London for 1809, 10th ed. (London, n.d.), 155–57, 366. Tooley Street may be found on the list of receiving houses for the two-penny post. The pagination of this book is irregular. After p. 373, the pagination starts over as p. 338. The receiving-house list is in this latter sequence.

22. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 63–64; Murry, Studies in Keats, 22–23.

23. Critchett and Woods, The Post Office London Directory for 1817, 18th ed. (London, n.d.), 413.

24. See note 12, this chapter.

25. “To the Great Variety of Readers,” Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ed. John Heminge and Henrie Condell (London, 1623), sig. A3. Hereafter, Shakespeare, First Folio.

26. Robert Gittings, John Keats (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968), 81.

27. Critchett and Woods, Post Office London Directory for 1817, 413.

28. The detailed map of the area reproduced here may also be found in Timothy Hilton, Keats and His World (New York: Viking, 1971), 15. See also 134n15. In his caption, Hilton misunderstands the map’s house-numbering system and misidentifies the site of Keats’s lodging—it’s across from the chapel at No. 8, not next to it at No. [2]8.

29. On October 9, Keats had invited Clarke to his lodgings in Dean Street. Keats, Letters, 1:113–14. This letter, Clarke later recalled, “preceded our first symposium,” the night they read Chapman together. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 128.

30. For what it is worth, and it’s not worth much, on the 13th the weather at 8 a.m. was “gloomy and hazy”; on the 20th, “fine”; and on the 27th, “cloudy, lower,” with “wind & rain.” See Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle 86, 2nd pt. (n.s., 9) (December 1816): 482.

31. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (New York, 1850), 1:295. For the invitation to Hunt’s birthday dinner, see his letter to Clarke, October 17, 1816: John Barnard, “Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1812–18,” in Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Routledge, 2003), 46.

32. The facts of even this small anecdote from Keats’s life can be hard to get right. In The Age of Wonder (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 206–7, Richard Holmes reports that Keats had been to Cowden Clarke’s house (it was his brother-in-law’s house), where the young poets had read Chapman’s translation of the Iliad (they read in both the Iliad and Odyssey), reciting passages to each other (probable but not certain), Keats having “ ‘sometimes shouted’ with delight” (“sometimes shouted” is from Clarke; the delight is Holmes’s contribution). On the walk home, he says, Keats noticed the planet Jupiter setting over the Thames (pure imagination—and impossible to say, as we do not know the exact date of the walk and thus not the weather, which may have been foggy or cloudy), the same planet to which Homer refers in his simile about the fiery helmet and shield of Diomedes. (Homeric commentators say the simile refers to Sirius, not Jupiter, which, like all planets, seems to travel from constellation to constellation. Because its orbital period is different from Earth’s, it can’t be associated with a particular season, as Homer’s description requires.) Last, Holmes remarks that the speed with which the poem reached Clarke was a “credit also to the postal system” (we don’t know how the poem traveled, but it was probably not by post). Even Keats had difficulty getting things right—he’d told Clarke that Dean Street was the first turning to the right along Tooley, but maps show half-a-dozen streets or alleys intervening.

33. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 30–31, 703–4. Whether Keats left at fourteen or fifteen is disputed.

34. Charles Armitage Brown, Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems: His Sonnets Clearly Developed (London, 1838), 133–34.

35. “Sleep and Poetry,” Poems of John Keats, 77, lines 185–87.

36. Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (London, 1787), 4:126n.

37. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 129.

38. George Chapman, trans., The Iliads of Homer (London, c. 1614), 42 (book 3, line 243). Line numbers in this and subsequent notes for Chapman’s translation have been taken from Chapman’s Homer, 2 vols., ed. Allardyce Nicoll, Bollingen Series 41, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).

39. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer: Books I–IX, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope 7 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 207 (book 3, lines 283–86).

40. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 129.

41. Chapman, Iliads, 40 (book 3, lines 160–61).

42. Pope, Iliad: Books I–IX, 200–1 (book 3, lines 201–2).

43. Pope, Iliad: Books I–IX, 200n.

44. Chapman, Iliads, 41 (book 3, lines 183–84); The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), book 3, line 168.

45. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 126.

46. Clarke, “Recollections of Keats,” 90. (In Recollections of Writers, 129, Clarke mistakenly writes the “opening of the third book.”)

47. Chapman, Iliads, 63 (book 5, lines 6–8).

48. Pope, Iliad: Books I–IX, 266 (book 5, lines 7–10).

49. Cp. The Iliad of Homer, trans. A[lexander]. Pope (London, 1715); and Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., ed. William Lisle Bowles (London, 1806), where the long “s” is still used, with The Iliad of Homer, trans. A[lexander]. Pope, new ed. (London, 1813), where it has been dropped. Curiously, Pope’s Odyssey (London, 1725–1726) is less given to Augustan capitals than his Iliad.

50. Chapman, Iliads, 169 (book 13, lines 19–21).

51. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer: Books X–XXIV, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope 8 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 105 (book 13, lines 29–31).

52. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

53. George Chapman, trans., Homer’s Odysses (London, c. 1614), 84 (book 5, lines 608–14).

54. Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer: Books I–VII, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope 9 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 200 (book 5, lines 584–85). Pope had two collaborators on the Odyssey, whose work he revised; but he translated half the books himself, including book 5 (cxciv, cxcvi.)

55. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

56. “The poet traveller—his bread is thought”: Alphonse de Lamartine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (Philadelphia, 1835), 1:14; trans. of Voyage en Orient (Paris, 1835). An earlier use of the term in English, however, may be found in E. C. S., “The Hanging of the Spy,” Atkinson’s Casket 8 (September 1833): 386, where a reference to the “poet-traveler” introduces some altered lines of Goldsmith’s poem “The Traveler.” This likely passed from notice.

57. “When I die I’ll have my Shakespeare placed on my heart, with Homer in my right hand & … Dante under my head”: Keats, Poems of John Keats, 14–17; Keats, Letters, 1:258.

58. Keats, Poems of John Keats, 59–60.

59. Bate, John Keats, 25–26, 32; Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 125.

60. Chapman was sensitive to accusations that he was merely paraphrasing, a slander later aimed at Pope. The former felt that literal versions, whether in prose or verse, were without enough art—and that sometimes such versions did more paraphrasing than he. See Chapman, Iliads, “To the Reader,” sig. Ar-v (lines 93–134); “The Preface to the Reader,” sig. A3v-4r (lines 95–137). Ezra Pound, who called himself “very ill-taught” in Greek, used the Latin translation of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus. See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 249, 259.

61. Keats, Letters, 1:354n1, 1:404n1, 2:205n9.

62. Keats, Letters, 1:141.

63. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (New York: New Amsterdam, 1988), 297.

64. The Tempest, lines 1701–3; 4.1.247–49.

65. John Ash, The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1795), vol. 1, s.v. “Lowbrowed.”

66. Milton, L’Allegro, line 8; Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, line 244.

67. Piers Plowman, A, book 5, line 109; B, book 5, line 190.

68. “Noctes Ambrosiae, No. XLVII,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (December 1829), 857; “Letter to the Editor,” Spectator 14 (February 13, 1841): 159.

69. Chapman, Iliads, 239 (book 17, line 108).

70. “Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni,” in Coleridge, Complete Poems, 325, line 72; Dante Alighieri, The Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, trans. Henry Francis Cary (London, [1814]), 261 (canto 15, line 11), 274 (canto 19, line 60). See Keats, Letters, 1:294, 343n. In 1818, he took the edition of three 32° volumes on his northern tour.

71. Stephen Hales, Statical Essays: Containing Haemastatics, 2nd ed. (London, 1740), 2:285.

72. Keats, Poems of John Keats, 45.

73. Keats, Poems of John Keats, 48 (“To My Brother George”).

74. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

75. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130.

76. Helen Vendler, Coming of Age as a Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 53, five lines below the inset quote. The mistake was made early and late. See Classical Journal 34 (September 1826): 52; Fraser’s Magazine 14 (December 1836): 679; Dublin University Magazine 21 (June 1843): 693; as well as Bate, John Keats, 88n.

77. Examiner no. 466 (December 1, 1816): 761–62. The Examiner was a “Sunday paper,” but Hunt also published a Monday edition, identical apart from an update on the London markets. Some copies of the issue with Keats’s poem are therefore dated Monday, December 2.

78. Keats: The Critical Heritage, G. M. Matthews, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 42.

79. Keats: The Critical Heritage, 68–69, 112. Cf. 324, where a critic as late as 1848 complained that Keats “compelled his subject to bend obsequiously to his rhymes.”

80. Chapman, Iliads, 42 (book 3, lines 238–44).

81. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 125, 126.

82. “He used to spend many evenings in reading to me”: The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 2:185.

83. The Keats Circle, 2:143–44.

84. The Keats Circle, 2:148.

85. Keats: The Critical Heritage, 51–53.

86. Keats: The Critical Heritage, 54.

87. “Realms of gold”: N. Sloan, “Elegy,” European Magazine and London Review 53 (May 1808): 377. “Wild surmise”: I[saac] Watts, Horae Lyricae: Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, 8th ed., corr. (London, 1743), 200.

88. Keats: The Critical Heritage, 306.

89. Leigh Hunt, “Harry Brown’s Letters to His Friends. Letter VII. To C[harles]. L[amb].,” Examiner no. 452 (August 26, 1816): 537.

90. John Bonnycastle, An Introduction to Astronomy, 5th ed., corr. and improved (London, 1807). See Bate, John Keats, 26; and Poems of John Keats, 57n67. A listing for Keats’s copy, identifying it as the fifth edition, may be found in American Book-Prices Current, ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (New York: Richard H. Dodd, 1915), 354. It was sold in 1914 for $275.

91. “Since the time of its first publication, four additional planets, belonging to our system, have been discovered”: John Bonnycastle, An Introduction to Astronomy, 7th ed., corrected and greatly improved (London, 1816), ix, 400–1. The fifth edition had mentioned only two new planets in addition to Uranus. Keats presented a copy of that edition to his brother George: Bulletin of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, Rome 2 (London, 1913): 149.

92. John S. Martin, “Keats’s New Planet,” Notes and Queries 206, n.s., 8 (January 1961): 23.

93. William Newman, Rylandiana: Reminiscences Relating to the Rev. John Ryland, A.M. (London, 1835), 117–22.

94. Bonnycastle, Introduction, 5th ed., 371.

95. “To one who has been long in city pent,” Poems of John Keats, 46.

96. Chapman, Iliads, 63 (book 5, lines 6, 8). Richmond Lattimore renders the Greek, “She made weariless fire blaze from his shield and helmet / like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars / rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance”: Homer, Iliad, trans. Lattimore, book 5, lines 4–6.

97. Keats, Letters, 2:133.

98. Bate, John Keats, 67–83.

99. Keats’s longings were often frustrated. Keats, Letters, 1:147, 268 (Europe); 1:172 (Lisbon); 1:325, 343 (America); 2:114 (South America, India); 2:138 (Switzerland).

100. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 123–24.

101. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 124; Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking, 1965), 19. Ward, giving no source, says he won the volume at Enfield, but Clarke only that it was one of the volumes the poet read when “he must in those last months have exhausted the school library.” Keats was reading it again in the spring of 1819. Keats, Letters, 2:100.

102. William Robertson, The History of America (London, 1777), 1:204.

103. Richard Garnett, “Notes on Some Poets Connected with Hampstead,” in Hampstead Annual, 1899 (London, n.d.), 21–23.

104. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Being a Portion of the Recluse: A Poem (London, 1814), 427.

105. Wordsworth, The Excursion, 428.

106. Keats, Letters, 1:203.

107. Robertson, America, 2:49–50.

108. Robertson, America, 1:204.

109. Robertson, America, 1:200.

110. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 123.

111. Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury (Cambridge, 1861), 320n. “A.T.” is Alfred Tennyson.

112. Anon., “Leigh Hunt’s Imagination and Fancy,” British Quarterly Review 1 (1845): 576–77.

113. Charles Rzepka contends that Cortez was not an error, an idea that has been floated from time to time. Rzepka believes that Keats was declaring himself only a belated discoverer, and that Homer : Chapman : Keats :: Pacific : Balboa : Cortez. The argument depends on (1) Keats, though remembering his schoolboy conquistadors, having misread a rather jumbled sentence in Robertson, (2) the reference to Darien being the result, and (3) the watcher of the skies being, not Herschel, but any watcher seeing Mars or Venus, say, for the first time, so the planet would be new to him. In other words, Keats did make a grave mistake, only a lesser one. Rzepka has a number of telling points (e.g., that no one caught the error before Tennyson, though Rzepka is mistaken there), but his reasoning is strained and oversubtle. He suggests at one point that Keats may have been unconcerned by readers who could be misled. Rzepka’s logic depends on readers of the day understanding Keats’s subtlety (or being indifferent to the error) and virtually all readers afterward thinking that Keats got his history wrong. Charles Rzepka, “ ‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet,” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 35–75. Before Tennyson’s correction, Hartley Coleridge wrote, in “To a Red Herring,” Poems, 2nd ed. (London, 1851), 2:231, “and none had burst / Into that ocean which first Cortez view’d / From Darien’s heights.” (The meter seems to confirm the pronunciation COR-tez.) The son of S. T. Coleridge may have been influenced by Keats, but the mistake suggests that the general knowledge wasn’t general.

114. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 126, 125.

115. Hunt, Lord Byron, 249; Keats, Poems of John Keats, 62n.

116. Robertson, America, 1:204.

117. Robertson, America, 1:204.

118. Clarke and Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 130. Though the wording is ambiguous, it seems fairly clear that Clarke meant Keats’s wonderment.

119. Vendler, Coming of Age, 54–55.

120. In what is probably the manuscript Keats sent Clarke, line 12 has a comma after “Pacific,” not the comma-dash of the Examiner or the simple dash of Poems (1817). The dash might have suggested that only Cortez was silent, had “wild surmise” not implied silence among the men as well.

121. Hunt, Lord Byron, 248.

122. Ward, John Keats, 74. See, however, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), book 5, line 454: “His very heart was sick with salt water.” Chapman’s dense and complex image is not Homeric.

123. Henry James, The American Scene (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), 460. The first English edition ends with five pages not present in the first American edition, published the same year.

124. James, The American Scene, 464.

125. James, The American Scene, 463.

126. James, The American Scene, 463.

127. Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2004), 423.

128. Donald Justice, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2004), 200–1.

129. Donald Justice, The Sunset Maker (New York: Atheneum, 1987), 8.

130. Donald Justice, “Henry James at the Pacific,” Atlantic Monthly 257 (January 1986): 78. Note the variant title.

131. Donald Justice, A Donald Justice Reader (Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 1991), 5.

132. James, The American Scene, 102.

133. Edgar Poe, Annabel Lee, music by E. F. Falconnet (Boston, 1859).

134. Henry James, Letters, vol. 4, 1895–1916, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 357.

135. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 2, line 620.

136. Henry James, Letters, 4:328.

137. James, The American Scene, 229.

138. James, Letters, 4:355.

139. James, Letters, 4:357.

140. Novick, Henry James, 398.

141. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 197–227.

142. Milton’s sonnet was discussed earlier, in chapter 2.

143. Mark Twain, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 33–81.

144. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 237.

145. Justice, Collected Poems, 200.

146. James, Complete Notebooks, 242.

147. James, Complete Notebooks, 237.

148. Henry James, The Middle Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 1.

149. Robertson, America, 1:203.

150. James, Letters, 4:355.

151. James, Letters, 4:355.

152. Robertson, America, 1:204.

153. Henry James, “George Sand: The New Life,” North American Review 174 (April 1902): 543.

6. Shakespeare’s Rotten Weeds, Shakespeare’s Deep Trenches

1. [William Shakespeare], Shake-speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted (London, 1609), leaf Br-v. See note 5, this chapter, for publishing information. All quotations from other sonnets are taken from this edition, referred to in short as Q. The Quarto ends sonnet 2 with a comma, a typo corrected here. A modernized version:

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tottered weed of small worth held.

Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes

Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use

If thou couldst answer, “This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”

Proving his beauty by succession thine.

This were to be new made when thou art old

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

2. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. (London, 1598), 282r; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 2:193–94.

3. [William Shakespeare], Venus and Adonis (London, 1593); The Rape of Lucrece (London, 1594). Though the title page of the latter reads Lucrece, the running heads say The Rape of Lucrece.

4. Meres, Palladis Tamia, 281v–282r.

5. Shake-speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted. (London, 1609), published by Thomas Thorpe, who entered the volume in the Stationers’ Register on May 20 of that year. The printer was George Eld, and the copies were divided between the bookshops of William Apsley and John Wright, for whom separate title pages were printed. Apsley’s shop was in St. Paul’s Churchyard, under the sign of the Parrot, and Wright’s at Christ Church Gate. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 36–37.

6. Daniel Starza Smith, John Donne and the Conway Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 296.

7. Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–1700 [CELM]: http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#folger-v-a-100_id695234. See entries ShW 6–30, including 14.5.

8. Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, line 2142; 4.3.200.

9. Gary Taylor, “Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 68 (1985–1986): 220. Facsimiles of the Hand D ms. are available in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1780–92 (transcription included).

10. W[illiam]. Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrime (London, 1599).

11. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 1.

12. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 14–15; William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 106.

13. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 453–62.

14. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 211. One of his mss. has since been dropped (a Folger ms. that contained only one quatrain, copied from Q), and another, related to the Spes Altera group, added by Peter Beals, numbered 14.5 in CELM (see note 7, this chapter).

15. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ed. John Heminge and Henrie Condell (London, 1623), sig. A3. Hereafter, Shakespeare, First Folio.

16. Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (London, 1641), in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1640), 2:97 (pagination starts over numerous times). The disparity in publication dates reflects various disputes over rights during the printing of this edition.

17. John Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4.

18. Jonson, “To the Reader,” in Shakespeare, First Folio, sig. A3.

19. Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., 1780–1788. There are about sixteen blots attributable to Hand D. John Jones, in Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 18–27, discusses a number of these revisions or corrections.

20. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 210–46.

21. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 453–7; William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (London: Penguin, 1999), 441–43; Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 268–70; Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, 690.

22. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 212. The manuscript version, modernized, with differences from the Quarto version marked in bold:

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And trench deep furrows in that lovely field,

Thy youth’s fair livery, so accounted now,

Shall be like rotten weeds of no worth held.

Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the luster of thy youthful days,

To say, “Within these hollow sunken eyes,”

Were an all-eaten truth, and worthless praise.

O how much better were thy beauty’s use

If thou couldst say, “This pretty child of mine

Saves my account and makes my old excuse,”

Making his beauty by succession thine.

This were to be new born when thou art old

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

23. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 215.

24. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 233, 215.

25. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 453–57.

26. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 1052.

27. Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, lines 1399–1400; 3.2.6–7.

28. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, line 2120; 5.2.23.

29. Robert Armin, The Works of Robert Armin, Actor (1605–1609), ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Manchester: Charles E. Simms, 1880), 24.

30. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 456.

31. Email from John Kerrigan, March 3, 2016.

32. Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, line 2406; 5.2.660.

33. “Extracts from a Sermon, Preached 1388, and Strongly Presumed to Be Wickliffe’s,” Literary Magazine and British Review 12 (February 1794): 129. See, however, “A Godly and Famous Sermon. Preached in the Yeere of Our Lord 1388, … and Found Out Hidde in a Wall,” in Richard Wimbledon, The Regal, Clerical, and Laical Bayliffs …: A Sermon in Two Parts, 14th ed. (London, 1738), 19.

34. Shakespeare, As You Like It, line 1261; 3.2.119–20.

35. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 89.

36. Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Kerrigan, 173.

37. Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Kerrigan, 173.

38. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 457.

39. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), s.v. “Treasure,” 2. semen, referring to quote at “Fall” (Othello, lines 2747–49; 4.3.86–88).

40. Shakespeare, King Lear, line 1985; 3.7.84.

41. Shakespeare, Henry V, lines 296–8; 1.2.163–65.

42. Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, line 280.

43. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 114n8 (cf. sonnet 19, line 1).

44. Shakespeare, Othello, line 1843; 3.3.391.

45. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, line 2417; 5.3.117.

46. John Gower, “Confessio Amantis,” in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macauley (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900), 1:176 (book 2, line 1715).

47. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, line 670; 2.2.39.

48. Shakespeare, Richard II, lines 2440–1; 5.3.68–69.

49. Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Dover Wilson, xcix–c.

50. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 453–54.

51. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962), 73 (fol. 31). Cf. T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere’s Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 183–85. Baldwin’s extensive quotation of Wilson’s translation of Erasmus’s letter catches most of the passage here but oddly misses the “new born” line. The first scholar to notice Shakespeare’s use of Wilson was Edgar I. Fripp, Shakespeare, Man and Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 1:267n5.

52. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 244, though Wilson’s lines are quoted in the wrong order. In Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Kerrigan, 442, the quotations are modernized but again placed in the wrong order.

53. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 70 (fol. 29); Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Kerrigan, 174n5–6.

54. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II, line 206; 1.1.167.

55. Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation; or, A New Prayse of the Old Asse (London, 1593), 66.

56. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 137n11.

57. Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, 384n11.

58. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 13–14.

59. Taylor, “Some Manuscripts,” 230–32.

60. Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, 92–93. Some defense of the last anomaly has been made on the grounds that fifteen-line sonnets were not unknown. The poem’s first or fifth line, critics have argued, must be extraneous, if any line is—but losing the fifth would make the syntax impossible. The first line, however (“The forward violet thus did I chide:”), could have been written above the sonnet as an explanatory title of sorts, like a stage direction. The compositor might have taken it as the opening line and set it into the text—the information it conveys, important but not crucial, has confused matters ever since because the line is metrical and linked by rhyme. It’s also possible that the first line was marked for deletion—there are passages in the plays that suggest the compositors did not always see or obey such marks.

61. Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 456.

7. Pound’s Métro, Williams’s Wheelbarrow

1. Ezra Pound, “How I Began,” T.P.’s Weekly 21 (June 6, 1913): 707. Reprinted in Ezra Pound, Early Writings, ed. Ira B. Nadel (New York: Penguin, 2005), 214–15.

2. Letter to Harriet Monroe, October 13, 1912, in The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 46.

3. Poetry 2 (April 1913): 12.

4. Ezra Pound, “Silet” and “Apparuit,” in Ripostes of Ezra Pound (London: Stephen Swift, 1912), 9, 12.

5. Pound, Ripostes of Ezra Pound, 59. See also Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 4 (“The first use of the word …”).

6. Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 114–17; F. S. Flint, “The History of Imagism,” Egoist 2 (May 1, 1915): 71.

7. Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, Pound/Ford, The Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence Between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 172. Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 184, dates the roll to August 1911. Pound was counting Personae of Ezra Pound (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909) as his first book. His taste for arcane euphemism made another reader almost violent. William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Boston: Four Seas, 1920), 13, remembers that his father, finding a reference to “jewels” in some verse of Pound’s, wondered what they could be: “These jewels,—rubies, sapphires, amethysts and what not, Pound went on to explain with great determination and care, were the backs of books as they stood on a man’s shelf. ‘But why in heaven’s name don’t you say so then?’ was my father’s triumphant and crushing rejoinder.”

8. F. S. F[lint]., untitled review of Ezra Pound, Canzoni, Poetry Review 1 (January 1912): 28.

9. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 105–7, 111–12, 122. Given that there is no proof Pound examined ukiyo-e prints, Arrowsmith at times overstates his case (e.g., 126–27); but the conjunction and consequence are striking.

10. F. S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Poetry 1 (March 1913): 199.

11. Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry 1 (March 1913): 201–2.

12. Ezra Pound, “Mesmerism,” “A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet,” in Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 13, 11.

13. Ezra Pound, “Grace Before Song,” “Comraderie,” in Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 7, 31.

14. Harriet Monroe to Ezra Pound, August 7, 1912, University of Chicago Library, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, 1895–1961, box 38, folder 23.

15. Pound, Letters, 43; Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 121.

16. “It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque”: “Of All Things,” New Yorker 1 (February 21, 1925): 2. The policy had been “announced” in the magazine’s prospectus.

17. “No it wont do,” he replied to his own suggestion, written on the back of one of the canceled draft copies of “In a Station of the Metro.” University of Chicago Library, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, 1895–1961, box 39, folder 29.

18. Ezra Pound, “The Garret,” “The Garden,” “Commission,” in Lustra (New York: Knopf, 1917), 15, 16, 22. The English edition had dropped a number of poems after objections by the printer and publisher. See note 76, this chapter.

19. Pound, “The Garden,” in Lustra, 16.

20. Pound, “Salutation the Second,” in Lustra, 18.

21. Carpenter, A Serious Character, 189–91; Pound, Letters, 45.

22. [Ezra Pound, ed.], Catholic Anthology, 1914–1915 (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915); Ezra Pound, Lustra (London: Elkin Mathews, 1916).

23. Homer, Iliad, trans. Lattimore, book 11, lines 207–8.

24. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 96 (September 1, 1914): 465. Reprinted in Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: John Lane, 1916).

25. Mark Ovenden, Paris Underground (New York: Penguin, 2009), 26.

26. Ovenden, Paris Underground, 23; “Rapid Transit in London,” [Pennsylvania] School Journal 41 (April 1893): 441; John L. Stoddard, John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, vol. 9: Scotland. England. London. (Boston, 1899), 24; “London’s Underground Roads,” Western Electrician 17 (November 16, 1895): 243.

27. “Electric lighting was described as ‘brilliant,’ though by modern standards this would be a somewhat grandiose claim”: Ovenden, Paris Underground, 24. The 1900 photo in Paris Underground (a larger version has been reproduced here) shows one enclosed bulb and a series of smaller bulbs under shades, the effect very gloomy indeed; such bulbs would have been incapable of casting a strong light on the surroundings. The whole may have seemed like a shadowy closet.

28. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1976), 460.

29. William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem (London, 1850), 197 [book 7, lines 626–29].

30. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 15.

31. Ovenden, Paris Underground, 23–24.

32. Undated note to Monroe on back of a canceled draft of “In a Station of the Metro.” This is part of a marked-up manuscript of some of the poems in “Contemporania,” c. October 1912 (University of Chicago Library, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, 1895–1961, box 38, folder 29).

33. Pound, “Vorticism,” 465.

34. Ezra Pound, Exultations (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909), 30.

35. “My remains have arrived at 3 Rue de l’Odéon” [postscript], in Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1920–1912, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 66. Pound wrote the letter on February 25, 1911, while aboard the Mauretania, sailing from New York to London; but the postscript cannot have been written before March 2, when he arrived in Paris. The catacombs lay about a mile south of his pension, through the Luxembourg Gardens.

36. Pound, “A Few Don’ts,” 201–2.

37. Ezra Pound, Polite Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 170. Pound puts the definition of logopoeia in quotes, but he may simply be quoting himself from a source unknown. Cf. note 52, this chapter.

38. Ezra Pound, “How to Read, or Why,” New York Herald Tribune Books, January 13, 20, 27, 1929; noted in Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound, A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 49. Pound had almost a decade earlier used melopoeia and logopoeia in a review of Jean Cocteau’s Poésies, Dial 70 (January 1921): 110.

39. E.g., Hokusai’s Mt. Fuji with Cherry Trees in Bloom and Hiroshige’s Plum Garden at Kameido.

40. Online climate records for March 1911: http://meteo-climat-bzh.dyndns.org/relevmois-1–3-1911-1971-2000-1-1675-2017.php; and April 1911: http://meteo-climat-bzh.dyndns.org/relevmois-1-4-1911.php.

41. Email from Melanie Brkich, April 8, 2014, translating a conversation with Julian Pepinster. Smoking was allowed on the Métro until the early 1990s.

42. Emails from Melanie Brkich, March 24 and April 8, 2014, translating a conversation with Julian Pepinster. The original wooden carriages were varnished brown; the first metal cars, which started appearing on the lines in 1908, were painted brown to match. The motor cars and second-class carriages were painted dark green, probably by 1910. (First-class cars were painted red.) On the line Pound was traveling, he probably saw metal cars painted dark green.

43. Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–23, 460.

44. “The cavern was profound, wide-mouthed, and huge”: Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983), 168.

45. Ovenden, Paris Underground, 25; photographs of the Art Deco entrances: 3, 25.

46. Email from Melanie Brkich, April 8, 2014, translating a conversation with Julian Pepinster. This now serves as an exit from the station.

47. Pound, Fortnightly Review, 467.

48. “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 145. The relevant essay was originally published as “Hamlet and His Problems,” Athenaeum no. 4665 (September 26, 1919): 940–41.

49. Carpenter, A Serious Character, 296. The friend was John Gould Fletcher. Whistler had died in 1903, so Pound was paying homage to the dandies of an earlier generation.

50. Ezra Pound, “To Whistler, American,” Poetry 1 (October 1912): 7.

51. Pound, Fortnightly Review, 465.

52. “ ‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’ ” Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934), 22, 49. (In the later New Directions edition, 36, 63.) Pound marks this dictum as a quotation, but he is quoting himself (“How to Read,” Polite Essays, 167).

53. Pound, Fortnightly Review, 465.

54. Poetry 2 (April 1913): 12.

55. Pound, Letters, 53. In a letter that accompanied his return of proofs for “Contemporania,” he carefully typed out the way he wanted “In a Station of the Metro” to appear: Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters, ed. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (New York: Norton, 2002), 58. Unfortunately, the editors of this volume have misunderstood Pound’s directions, missing the space called for between “black” and “bough.” In the Poetry archive at the University of Chicago, Pound’s two-page note that accompanies some of the poems considered for the series, ranked in red grease-pencil XX or X or √ , is written on the back of a pair of typescripts of “In a Station”—one with and one without the phrasal spacing. Both have been scored through. University of Chicago Library, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, 1895–1961, box 38, folder 29.

56. The Poetry manuscripts may be disordered. As mentioned in the previous note, on the back of the letter to Monroe, beginning “I’ve marked the following poems XX …,” are two drafts of “In a Station of the Metro” that Pound has scored through with his usual wavy pencil line. These may have been scrap pages picked up from his desk. University of Chicago Library, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, 1895–1961, box 38, folder 29. Elsewhere there’s a handwritten and typescript manuscript of poems also considered for “Contemporania,” three poems of which were used and two withdrawn (box 39, folder 31).

57. Pound, Letters, 53.

58. [Pound, ed.], Catholic Anthology, 88. The colon was still present.

59. Pound, Lustra (1916), 45.

60. Ezra Pound, Personae, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1990), 111.

61. Pound, Fortnightly Review, 467.

62. Pound, Fortnightly Review, 467.

63. Pound, Fortnightly Review, 465.

64. Ezra Pound, trans., Cathay (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), 13.

65. Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 7.

66. Pound, Cathay, 13.

67. “Chinese Poetry,” in Pound, Early Writings, 298; To-Day 3 (April 1918): 56.

68. Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay, 66–67.

69. Pound, Polite Essays, 170.

70. Pound, Personae (1926), 112. In Lustra (1916), 49, and (1917), 55, the three words are each followed by three dots with no space before the first. I have used the Personae text.

71. Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 92. Cf. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 5–6, 54–55.

72. Silk, The Classical Tradition, 92n33.

73. Pound, Personae (1909), 56.

74. Pound, “How I Began,” 707; Early Writings, 214.

75. Pound, Lustra (1917), 109.

76. Gallup, Ezra Pound, 21. After the book was in type, the printer and publisher balked. Two hundred copies were printed after four poems (including “Pagani’s, November 8”) had been dropped, and a further nine poems were dropped from the second impression.

77. Pound and Cravens, A Tragic Friendship, 5–6.

78. Pound and Cravens, A Tragic Friendship, 136–37.

79. Pound and Cravens, A Tragic Friendship, 141. Pound originally submitted the elegy to Poetry with the poems that became “Contemporania.” The poem then had the title “Madonna e desiata in sommo cielo” (Pound’s recollection of a line from La Vita Nuova, “Madonna è disiata in sommo cielo”). After he marked the poem “XX” as unnecessary to the sequence (see note 55, this chapter), someone wrote “Withdrawn” on the verso. Pound published the poem as “His Vision of a Certain Lady Post Mortem,” Blast 1 (June 20, 1914): 48. Under the title “Post Mortem Conspectu,” it appeared in Personae (1926), 147. Apart from making minor changes in punctuation, Pound dropped the opening line in the manuscript, “They call you dead, but I saw you.” University of Chicago Library, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, 1895–1961, box 38, folder 29.

80. Writing “In a Station of the Metro” could have taken as long as nineteen months, from the incident in March or April 1911 to his submission of the poem as part of “Contemporania” in October 1912. When he says “six months later” and “a year later” in Fortnightly Review (September 1, 1914): 467, he could mean twelve or eighteen months. In T.P.’s Weekly (June 6, 1913): 707, “Then only the other night …” can’t be literal, as he had dispatched the poem to Poetry in October the year before. He also says in T.P.’s Weekly, “For well over a year I have been trying.” By then the poem had been finished for eight months. It’s hard to know what to make of all this, unless Pound wrote the essay and either he or the publisher let it sit.

81. Homer, Odyssey, trans. Lattimore, book 11, lines 563–64.

82. Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–23, 460.

83. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), 471, 472.

84. The most thorough history of the incident is contained in Jean Tricoire, Un siècle de Métro en 14 lignes: De Bienvenüe à Météor, 3rd ed. (Paris: Éditions La Vie du Rail, 2004).

85. Pound, Early Writings, 213–14.

86. William Rose Benét, ed., Fifty Poets: An American Auto-Anthology (New York: Duffield and Green, 1933), 60.

87. Benét, ed., Fifty Poets, vii.

88. William Carlos Williams, Spring and All ([Paris]: Contact Publishing, [1923]), 74.

89. John Henry Barrow, ed., The Mirror of Parliament for the Second Session of the Tenth Parliament … in the Second Year of the Reign of King William IV (London, 1832), 4:3007; Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle 67, pt. 1 (January 1797), 15; Kimball’s Dairy Farmer 14 (March 1, 1916): 136; Gilbert, Late Lord Bishop of Sarum, An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, 4th ed., corr. (London, 1720), 263; Proceedings of the Friends’ General Conference (Asbury Park, N.J.: Pennypacker Press, 1902), 99; American Farmer 10 (April 25, 1828): 44; Thomas Gill, The Technical Repository (London, 1823), 4:307; Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History, ed. J. T. Rutt, new ed. (London, 1826), 340; Report of the Superintendant of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the Year Ending June 2, 1884 (Harrisburg: Lane S. Hart, 1884), xv; Lancet 6 (February 12, 1825): 177; Analectic Magazine 5 (January 1815): 60.

90. Report from the Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (London, 1833), 364.

91. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Knopf, 1975), 58.

92. Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 233.

93. Tacitus had no firsthand knowledge of Germany when he wrote Germania. He probably borrowed from Pliny the Elder’s lost Bella Germaniae, but he could have learned some German in Rome by talking to traders or German mercenaries. The city was awash with languages.

94. [Jacob Abbott], Rollo at Work, 5th ed. (Philadelphia and Boston, 1841), 62; Leslie’s Monthly Magazine 59 (April 1905): 685; Scribner’s Magazine 5 (January 1889): 126.

95. Garden 66 (December 31, 1904), 438; [Susan Warner], The Flag of Truce (New York, 1878), 75; Arthur’s Illustrated Home Magazine 43 (March 1875): 183; Geyer’s Stationer 43 (July 11, 1907): 6.

96. National Magazine 27 (February 1908): 534; New-Church Messenger 114 (February 13, 1918): 131; Saturday Evening Post 192 (April 10, 1920): 19.

97. Emelyne Godfrey, “Victoriana” [review of Charlotte Eliza Humphry, How to Be Pretty Though Plain], TLS no. 5817 (September 26, 2014): 27.

98. Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumers Guide, No. 104 (Chicago: Sears, Roebuck, 1897), 164.

99. Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumers Guide, No. 104, 164. The Handsome Lawn Wheelbarrow cost $2.10, the miners’ barrow $5.82.

100. Sears, Roebuck and Co., Catalogue, No. 124 (Chicago: Sears, Roebuck, 1912), 1039.

101. Montgomery Ward and Co., Catalogue No. 97, Fall and Winter, 1922–23 (Chicago: Montgomery Ward, [1922]), 601. This was Montgomery Ward’s Golden Jubilee year.

102. Charles Ludwig Uebele, Paint Making and Color Grinding (New York: Painters Magazine, 1913), 205, 222. For the difference between American and English vermilion, see 739 Paint Questions Answered (London: Painters Magazine, 1904), 106–7.

103. A[rthur]. C[arlton]. Smith, The Plymouth Rock Standard and Breed Book, 2nd ed. (n.p.: American Poultry Association, 1921), 196–98.

104. Smith, The Plymouth Rock Standard and Breed Book, 196.

105. The American Standard of Excellence (n.p.: American Poultry Association, 1874), 19, 30, 32–34, 58, 63, 75. Between the meetings of 1883 and 1888, the title was changed to The American Standard of Perfection.

106. Smith, Plymouth Rock Standard, 199.

107. The American Standard of Perfection (n.p.: American Poultry Association, 1926), 122.

108. “No one breed or variety ever gains unchallenged supremacy.” Smith, Plymouth Rock Standard, 199.

109. N. W. Chittenden, “A Life of the Author,” in Isaac Newton, Newton’s Principia: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte, rev. and corrected (New York, 1848), 58.

110. Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), 468. The coat rack nailed to the floor of Duchamp’s studio and a hat rack dangling from the ceiling (469) are from the same period. Neither survives.

111. J[ohn]. L. B[ishop]. and G[len]. W. B[axter]., “Chinese Poetry,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 118.

112. Eliot Weinberger, ed., The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New York: New Directions, 2003), xxv.

113. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 163; William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), 152–53; Herbert Leibowitz, “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), photograph of the meeting at Williams’s home following p. 256. Though Williams never met Juan Gris, he had seen a reproduction of the painting: Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 313; Leibowitz, “Something Urgent,” 77–78, 195–97. Williams may have seen Duchamp’s Nude Descending at Walter Arensberg’s apartment after Arensberg bought the painting in 1919, but it’s possible that the poet knew it earlier in reproduction.

114. Ben Jonson, “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison”; John Milton, “Sonnet XI (‘A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon’)”; Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none” and “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”; Lewis Carroll, “Turtle Soup”; Elizabeth Bishop, “Arrival at Santos”; Robert Lowell, “For Delmore Schwartz.”

115. Williams, “XVII [‘Our orchestra’],” in Spring and All, 63.

116. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 1, lines 62–63.

117. Williams, Autobiography, 279; William Carlos Williams, The Knife of the Times and Other Stories (Ithaca, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1932), 92; William Carlos Williams, Make Light of It: Collected Stories (New York: Random House, 1950), 59.

118. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, 1921–1931 (New York: Objectivist Press, 1934), 95. Decades later, in I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, ed. Edith Heal (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 51, Williams refers to it as “The Red Wheel Barrow”; but as this book was produced from interview transcripts it cannot serve as evidence.

119. Barry Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145–46.

120. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Boston, 1869), chap. 9, “The Mock Turtle’s Story,” 133.

121. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 547. This is another instance of a remark transcribed from Williams’s conversation. See note 118, this chapter.

122. Marion Strobel, “Tarnished Talent,” Poetry (November 1923): 103–4.

123. Ahearn, William Carlos Williams, 4–5.

124. Hugh Kenner arranged it thus to make a different point (A Homemade World, 60).

125. Kenneth Lincoln, Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890–1999 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 187.

126. Williams’s reading of the poem at Columbia University on January 9, 1942, which takes nine seconds, may be found online.

127. Williams, Autobiography, 174.

128. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, 36–37. For all the helter-skelter disruption of the chapter titles, the page numbers are in the usual order.

129. Williams, Spring and All, 39; Collected Poems (1986), 1:200.

130. Williams, Spring and All, 11–12, 64–67, 74; Collected Poems (1986), 1:183, 217–19, 224.

131. Williams, Spring and All, 76; Collected Poems (1986), 1:225.

132. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, 37.

133. Williams, Spring and All, 78; Collected Poems (1986), 1:226.

134. Williams, Spring and All, 74; Collected Poems (1986), 1:223.

135. Williams, Collected Poems, 1921–1931, 50; Collected Poems (1986), 1:372.

136. Williams, Collected Poems (1986), 1:382, 453. See also “Nantucket” (1:372), “A Chinese Toy” (1:407), “Breakfast” (1:457).

137. Paul Engle and Joseph Langland, eds., Poet’s Choice (New York: Dial Press, 1962), 4.

138. Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), is a thorough investigation of the influence of the Orient on the two poets and includes a descriptive list (179–80) of books Williams owned on Oriental literature, history, and philosophy. For Williams’s opinion of Cathay, see Mariani, Williams, 122.

139. Williams, Collected Poems (1986), 1:158–60.

140. Mariani, Williams, 216.

141. R[alph]. W[aldo]. Emerson, Essays, 2nd ser. (Boston, 1844), 40–41.

142. Williams, Autobiography, 131; Mariani, Williams, 106–7.

143. Mariani, Williams, 273. See also Williams, Collected Poems (1986), 1:499–501, notes to “The Great Figure,” the dedication of Spring and All, and “Poem II.”

144. Williams, Autobiography, 134.

145. Floss Williams, the poet’s wife, said years later, “Bill did not attend the first Armory Show, though he always insisted he did. He went to the second one” (Mariani, Williams, 785n100). Biographers have frequently taken Williams at his word. Mariani does make a case for Williams’s memory (106); but the poet was certainly wrong about the Duchamp painting, which was not at the exhibition.

146. “Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close, so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily strip cartoon ‘Mutt and Jeff’ which appeared at the time”: Interview in Otto Hahn, “Passport No. G255300,” Art and Artists 1 (July 1966): 10. The particular model, whether by Mott or some other dealer in sanitary ware, has not been identified, despite much scholarly investigation. See Mott’s Plumbing Fixtures, Catalogue “A” (New York: J. L. Mott Iron Works, 1908), 410 (description of imperial and colonial porcelain), 418. The Bedfordshire model, on the latter page, is the closest to that in the Stieglitz photograph.

147. Stieglitz’s photo may be found in Blind Man no. 2 (May 1917): 4. For the misspellings, see Williams, Kora in Hell, 11–12.

148. It’s not clear why Williams thought the urinal enameled (that is, porcelain-lined) cast-iron rather than glazed solid porcelain—Duchamp simply called it porcelain. J. L. Mott, the ironworks from whose New York showroom he claimed to have bought the piece, sold both—but the model closest to the urinal Duchamp exhibited would have been all porcelain. To judge from the single existing photograph of Fountain (see notes 146 and 147, this chapter), it appears to be imperial porcelain, which was highly glazed.

149. Williams, Autobiography, 136, 138.

150. William Carlos Williams, “America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry,” Poetry Journal 8 (November 1917): 34.

151. Blind Man no. 2 (May 1917): 5.

152. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1992), 9.

153. Hamlet, 1.2.129: “solid” in the Folio was “sallied,” possibly a variant of “sullied,” in the quartos. Henry V, 2.3.16–17: “a’ babbl’d,” Lewis Theobald’s ingenious emendation of “and a Table,” has mostly been accepted. Winter’s Tale 3.3 opens after a ship has landed on the coast of Bohemia, a landlocked country. Jonson made fun of this lapse, though Shakespeare probably took the notion from his source, Robert Greene’s Pandosto. See Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. R. F. Patterson (London: Blackie and Son, 1923), 20 (“Sheakspear, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered Shipwrack in Bohemia, wher ther is no sea neer by some 100 miles”). Some have argued that at various times Bohemia did have a small seacoast on the Adriatic.

154. Williams, Collected Poems (1986), 1:500.

155. John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 111.

156. William Carlos Williams, “Seventy Years Deep,” Holiday Magazine 16 (November 1954): 78.

157. United States Census, 1920, Rutherford, Bergen County, N.J.: district 106, sheet 15a, line 35.

158. United States Census, 1930, Passaic City, Passaic County, N.J.: district 16–157, sheet 3b, line 53.

159. Insurance Maps of Rutherford and East Rutherford, Bergen County, New Jersey (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1917), sheet 40. The map marks Marshall’s house “13/11,” as if it were a duplex. Two house numbers may have been assigned because the house was occupied by two families, possibly with separate entrances, though the 1920 census taker marked both families as living at no. 11. A copy of this map is available online from Princeton University Library. (The use of “duplex house” goes back at least to 1906; the OED entry is inaccurate.)

160. United States Census, 1880, Atlantic City, Atlantic County, N.J.: district 1, p. 12, line 49; United States Census, 1900, Rutherford, Bergen Country, N.J.: district 38, sheet 18b, line 63.

161. Insurance Maps of Rutherford (1917), sheet 40.

162. Insurance Maps of Rutherford and East Rutherford, Bergen County, New Jersey (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1909), sheet 14. Curiously, the 1909 Sanborn map has the house as “13.” In the southern corner of the property stands a large structure marked “13½.” The Sanborn key identifies this building as a stable, so perhaps Marshall kept a horse or horses. No coop is in evidence. The one problem with using Sanborn maps for historical research is that they were updated by pasting new bits of map over the old. The relevant Rutherford maps for 1909 and 1917, now at Princeton, do not seem to possess any of these revisions; but physical inspection would be necessary to be certain.

163. Williams, Collected Poems (1986), 1:132. Williams also refers to Thaddeus Marshall and his son Milton in his essay “Advent of the Slaves” (William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain [New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925], 210–11), where he provides some details about the elder Marshall’s days as a fisherman. The poet was very friendly with these men; but, though he talked in the essay about the “colored men and women whom I have known intimately” (210), he used nearby the racist slur (209, 210) to which he was apparently deaf.

164. United States Census, 1910, Rutherford, Bergen Country, N.J.: district 50, sheet 14b, line 91. The census taker wrote “huskster” (sic) under “trade or profession,” and “street” under “general nature of industry, business, or establishment.” The occupation code is 3-6-3, the 1910 Census code for “huckster.” See Thirteenth Census of the United States, Index to Occupations, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, [1910]), 117.

165. “Roy Zelner takes a small wheelbarrow to gather his eggs,” Michigan Poultry Breeder 20 (February 1905): [9]; “He … was living on what he could scrape out of ash barrels, and an occasional dime for kindling-wood which he sold from a wheelbarrow,” Jacob A. Riis, A Ten Years’ War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900), 166; “You know something about the peculiarities of the Wheelbarrow salesman if you are experienced in the style of acrobatic stunts necessary to the navigation of that unwieldy contrivance from which he derives his cognomen,” Walter Dwight Moody, Men Who Sell Things (Chicago: A. C. McGlurg, 1912), 95.

166. Proceedings of the Board of Public Works, Elizabeth, N.J., 1920 (Elizabeth, N.J., 1920), 36. See also 106–7, 122–23.

167. Proceedings of the Board of Public Works, Elizabeth, N.J., 1920, 36.

168. Rutherford, N.J., ordinance 260, enacted July 20, 1897. Information provided by Rod Leith, Rutherford Borough Historian.

169. Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, vii.

170. Gary Bachlund, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” 2008. The score may be found online: http://www.bachlund.org/The_Red_Wheelbarrow.htm.

171. “XI [‘In passing with my mind’],” in Spring and All, 48; Collected Poems (1986), 1:206.

172. Reed Whittemore, William Carlos Williams, Poet from Jersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 102–5.

173. “XV [‘The decay of cathedrals’],” in Spring and All, 60; Collected Poems (1986), 1:214.

174. Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), II, table Ba 814–830: The labor force, by industry: 1800–1960, 2–110; IV, table Da 14–27: Farms—number, population, land, and value of property: 1850–1997, 4–43.

175. “England,” in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan/Viking, 1967), 46.

176. Benét, ed., Fifty Poets, vii.

177. Benét, ed., Fifty Poets, 92.

178. Benét, ed., Fifty Poets, ix–x.

179. Williams, Collected Poems (1986), 1:372. Williams’s wife wrote a reply, published posthumously in Atlantic Monthly 250 (November 1982): 145. See Collected Poems (1986), 1:536.

8. Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods

1. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1:396 (#372).

2. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 3.1.5–7.

3. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885), 230.

4. Anonymous review of W. L. Stone, Matthias and His Impostures (New York, 1835), North American Review 41 (October 1835): 310.

5. Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:319. Hereafter, Dickinson, Letters (1960).

6. Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), II, 475.

7. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 2:658 (#684).

8. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:159 (#124A).

9. There’s a mild bit of absurdist wordplay here, perhaps explained as a reaction to an event so depressing that the seeming is all but being—that is, the nerves sit like tombs inside the house, as if the house were itself a cemetery for lost hopes. Had the death been real, the tomb would be yet unvisited or only recently visited, since following interment the mourners would gather at the house for refreshment. The solemnity of “sitting ceremonious,” however, suggests that this is the mourning that precedes burial. The critic William R. Sherwood, Circumference and Circumstance: Stages in the Mind and Art of Emily Dickinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 112, compares the scene to the “mourner’s bench” on which repentant sinners slumped at the front of a revival meeting, their tears the evidence they were mourning their sins. Dickinson refused to attend revivals, but she might have heard of such furniture from members of her family. Alas, the idea is irrelevant.

10. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:583.

11. John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1859), s.v. “Stiff.”

12. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 1073.

13. A member of the Shakespeare Club later recalled that, when one of the men suggested inking out suggestive passages, the women replied, “ ‘We shall read everything.’ I remember the lofty air with which Emily took her departure saying ‘There’s nothing wicked in Shakespeare and if there is I don’t want to know it’ ”: Leyda, Years and Hours, 2:478. This may have meant that Dickinson didn’t want to be told what she could decide for herself, or that she didn’t want to hear that certain passages were considered obscene. A generation before, Dr. Thomas Bowdler and his sister had dirtied their thumbs on the text. In their The Family Shakspeare (London, 1807), 4 vols., reprinted in many editions through the following decades, “those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Miss Bowdler’s contributions went uncredited at the time.

14. Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, ed. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (New York: Henry Holt, 1939), 470.

15. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts, ed. Thomas Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 1:272; Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 162.

16. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed., rev. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), 81.

17. Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 2:357–61; Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 193–95, 199–203, 212.

18. Habegger, My Wars, 80, 242.

19. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 1:94.

20. Habegger, My Wars, 336.

21. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 1:67.

22. Habegger, My Wars, 398.

23. [Thomas Wentworth Higginson], “Letter to a Young Contributor,” Atlantic Monthly 9 (April 1862): 401–11.

24. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:403.

25. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Atlantic Monthly 68 (October 1891): 444.

26. Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” 444.

27. Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” 445.

28. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:404.

29. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 3:1533 (Appendix 2. Distribution by Year).

30. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:404.

31. Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” 445.

32. Polly Longsworth, The World of Emily Dickinson (New York: Norton, 1990), 21.

33. Sewall, Life, 2:536–37, 632.

34. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:404.

35. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:404.

36. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:405.

37. Sewall, Life, 2:415.

38. Sewall, Life, 2:420.

39. Sewall, Life, 2:419. The phrase “run frolic through the veins” was an allusion to a line from The Mountaineers, a long-forgotten play by George Colman the Younger that debuted in 1793. The original line read, “When the high blood ran frolic through thy veins,” and in various versions through the next century it became a catchphrase. See Mrs. [Elizabeth] Inchbald, ed., The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays (London, 1808), 21:39.

40. Habegger, My Wars, 235.

41. Sewall, Life, 2:419, 421–22.

42. Sewall, Life, 2:400–4, 410–15, 418–19.

43. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 1:282.

44. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:408.

45. Sewall, Life, 2:445. Dickinson was visiting the Colemans. Reverend Lyman Coleman had been her German teacher at Amherst Academy. His wife, Maria, was a cousin of Mrs. Dickinson; and Emily, their surviving daughter, one of Dickinson’s best friends.

46. Sewall, Life, 2:447–48. See also Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson (New York: Knopf, 1986), 389, where the letter is quoted in full.

47. Habegger, My Wars, 443, 572–73, 636, 731n572; Sewall, Life, 2:452–53, 593 and n.

48. Richard Sewall, “In Search of Emily Dickinson,” Michigan Quarterly Review 23 (Fall 1984): 524–25.

49. Sewall, Life, 2:449–50. There are photos of Wadsworth, young and old, opposite pp. 450 and 451.

50. Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Knopf, 2008), 71.

51. Sewall, Life, 2:448–50, 452–54, 459–62.

52. Sewall, Life, 2:452n10, 729–36; Leyda, Years and Hours, 2:7–8, 327.

53. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 3:727, 737, 744, 745.

54. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 46–47. See also Leyda, Years and Hours, 2:34.

55. Bianchi, Life and Letters, 47; Wineapple, White Heat, 334n71 [“the affliction …”]. Bianchi melodramatically reported that the poet urged a friend “to name a new little son by the name never like any other to her ears,” and later wrote to the mother, “Love for the child of the bravest name alive.” The letter was to Mrs. Bowles—and Dickinson asked that she name the boy not Charles but Robert, after Robert Browning: “Will you call him Robert—for me. He is the bravest man—alive—but his Boy—has no mama.” Dickinson, Letters [1960], 2:385. This was shortly after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bianchi’s notion that Dickinson always called the boy Charles, “whether the family adopted the suggestion or not” is certainly true, but only because the Bowleses named him Charles. Dickinson, Letters [1960], 2:383n.

56. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 3:901.

57. Sewall, Life, 2:449–50; Habegger, My Wars, 330. Sherwood, Circumference, 81, argues the case for Dickinson having known beforehand.

58. Thomas H. Johnson, editor of Dickinson’s letters, suggests the friendship commenced in 1858. Dickinson, Letters [1960], 2:335n. Sewall says the beginning of Bowles’s regular visits is “difficult to determine” but probably dated to Austin’s marriage in 1856 or possibly as late as 1858. Sue later claimed that Bowles had been their first visitor. Sewall, Life, 2:468.

59. Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 3:1531–32 (Appendix 1. Poems Published in Emily Dickinson’s Lifetime).

60. Sewall, Life, 2:472; Habegger, My Wars, 378, 381; Leyda, Years and Hours, 1:xxxiii.

61. Habegger, My Wars, 378, 578–79; Judith Farr, The Passions of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 206–9.

62. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:358.

63. Sewall, Life, 2:470, 472, 479, 481–83; Habegger, My Wars, 426, 444.

64. Sewall, Life, 2:483; Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:402–3. Bowles visited Amherst on April 5, four days before he sailed.

65. Farr, The Passions, 216, says Bowles had decided the previous September to go abroad.

66. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:419–20; Habegger, My Wars, 446–48, 720n448 (noting letters misdated in Johnson’s edition).

67. Sewall, Life, 2:472. The warm feelings for Bowles did not end. Some years after his death, Sue bought George Merriam’s two-volume Life and Times of Samuel Bowles (New York, 1885). The books were inscribed “Austin from Sue / Xmas—1885.” They are now in the Periodicals and Books from the Evergreens Collection, Brown University Library.

68. Sewall, Life, 2:510; Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:589–90 and n.

69. Sewall, Life, 2:473.

70. See note 55, this chapter.

71. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:404; Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 86–91. Martha Bianchi recalled the portrait of Mrs. Browning. For Dickinson’s taste for drivel, see Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 121–22, 125, 135–37.

72. Habegger, My Wars, 603–4, 736n604 [“would burn”].

73. “ ‘Swiveller’ may be sure of the ‘Marchioness’ ”: Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:382.

74. Johnson, in the standard edition of the letters, dates them “about 1858,” “about 1861,” and “early 1862?” Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:333, 373, 391. “Accurate dating,” Johnson admits, “is impossible” (392n). Leyda (Years and Hours, 1:352; 2:22, 24) dates them “early spring,” 1858; “January?,” 1861; “February?,” 1861. Emily Dickinson, The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Amherst: Amherst College Press, 1986), 11, 21, 31, dates them “spring 1858,” “early 1861,” “summer 1861” but has reversed the previous order of letters 2 and 3. Franklin’s introduction lays out the evidence clearly (7–9). For his considerations in dating Dickinson’s work, see Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:37–40.

75. Adapted from Dickinson, Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, 22. Angle brackets show second thoughts without deleting the original. Franklin’s transcription is in error here—there is an apostrophe, not a dash, after “Oh,” and a deliberate space between “can” and “not.”

76. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:218 (#184). Habegger, My Wars, 380, believes the poem most likely written for Mary Bowles, not her husband. The childlike usage of “its” may have been a commonplace between sweethearts. General Custer, having apologized to his wife for his peremptory manner, wrote her, “It didn’t want to be a soldier[,] did it?” Lawrence Frost, General Custer’s Libbie (Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1976), 122. This was also the practice of Isabella Bird in the 1870s and 1880s, when writing to her sister. See Isabella Bird, Letters to Henrietta, ed. Kay Chubbuck (London: John Murray, 2002), 33 and n.

77. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:454–55 (#431).

78. Adapted from Dickinson, Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, 40.

79. For Wadsworth photos, see Sewall, Life, opposite 2:450, 451; Habegger, My Wars, following 366; Wolff, Emily Dickinson, following 370. For Bowles, see Sewall, Life, opp. 474.

80. Adapted from Dickinson, Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, 36.

81. Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron (London, 1823), 4:172.

82. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:393.

83. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:433.

84. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:393; Sewall, Life, 2:488.

85. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:218 (#184).

86. Jonathon Green, ed., Green’s Dictionary of Slang (London: Chambers, 2010), vol. 3, s.v. “Pluck,” v.1: “to have sexual intercourse.” Not in OED in this sense.

87. Dickinson, Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, 43; Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:383n (Bowles accompanied his pregnant wife to New York in early December 1861).

88. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:228 (#194A). Despite the Christian trappings, it’s hard not to read this as a very earthly betrothal, one without a ring as an outward sign—a betrothal, perhaps, to someone already betrothed.

89. Dickinson, Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, 22.

90. Sewall, Life, 1:170–85; Polly Longsworth, Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

91. In her 1894 edition of Dickinson’s letters, Mabel Loomis Todd printed only a few sentences from the first Master Letter, with, according to R. W. Franklin, the “deliberately misleading” date of 1885: Todd, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston, 1894), 2:422–23; Dickinson, Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, 6.

92. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, eds., Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929). According to Bianchi’s introduction, these were poems Lavinia “saw fit never to publish” (v).

93. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:218–19 (#185A).

94. Richard B. Sewall, The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965), 76; Habegger, My Wars, 483–84.

95. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:404.

96. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:497 (#484).

97. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., LIV, 5, 1–2. Dickinson once wrote her sister-in-law, “Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson in Ticknor and Fields”: Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:455.

98. Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary (Basil, 1800), 1:354.

99. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London, 1853), 301; Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London, 1848), 49.

100. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 35, California Inter Pocula (San Francisco: History Company, 1888), 260; Madeline Vaughan Abbott, “Bryn Mawr College,” Godey’s Magazine 130 (May 1895): 491; Emmons Clark, History of the Second Company of the Seventh Regiment (National Guard) N. Y. S. Militia (New York, 1864), 1:251.

101. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 2:853 (#926).

102. Dickinson, The Poems … Including Variant Readings (1955), 1:273.

103. Dickinson, Further Poems, 175; Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), 365. In later reprints, the book’s title was changed to Poems by Emily Dickinson.

104. Dickinson, The Poems … Including Variant Readings (1955), 1:272–73.

105. Dickinson, The Complete Poems (1960), 162. Among the many volumes using the corrupt stanza: James Dickey, Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry, ed. Donald J. Greiner (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 14; Annie Finch, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 29; Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 15; David Lehman, ed., The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 168; and Judy Jo Small, Positive as Sound: Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 106.

106. “Here was already manifest that defiance of form, never through carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her”: Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” 446.

107. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:451 and n.; Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:27.

108. I have not found a previous example where critics recast the lines thus. A slightly different reordering, in an obscure textbook by Jerome Beaty and William H. Matchett, Poetry: From Statement to Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 28, merely reprints the quatrain in the Bianchi and Hampson edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1937). The lines are not arranged to reveal the initial pair of rhymes.

109. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:276 (#257), 2:805 (#857).

110. Nicholas Wood, A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads, and Interior Communication in General, 2nd ed. (London, 1832), 49, 79.

111. Francis Manley, “An Explication of Dickinson’s ‘After Great Pain,’ ” Modern Language Notes 73 (April 1958): 263; Kamilla Denham, “Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation,” Emily Dickinson Journal 2 (Spring 1993): 28.

112. Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 170–71.

113. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 3:1547–57 (Appendix 7. Recipients). Those who received more than a dozen poems were Samuel Bowles (40), Thomas Wentworth Higginson (103), Elizabeth Holland (31), Louise and Frances Norcross (71), Mabel Todd (13), Sarah Tuckerman (16), and, far the most important, Sue Dickinson, who received over 250 poems.

114. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:338–41 (#321A,B,C).

115. Sewall, Life, 2:337–39, 342–49. For somewhat sarcastic praise of the intellectual and conversational gifts of young Yankee women, see George Augustus Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War (London, 1865), 2:296–97, 299–300. Sala believed their talents had been fostered in female seminaries.

116. Sewall, Life, 2:346. The Dickinson copy of Hitchcock’s Elementary Geology, 3rd ed., rev. (New York, 1842), is held in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, shelfmark EDR 499. According to the library, when sold the books were “physically located at the Evergreens,” Austin’s home, but many had “originally been shelved at the Homestead,” Emily’s home. Elementary Geology bears no ownership signature.

117. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 1:62.

118. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 2:702 (#740).

119. [Josiah Conder], A Popular Description, Geographical, Historical and Topographical, of Brazil and Buenos Ayres (Boston, 1830), 1:258; John Hawkshaw, Reminiscences of South America: From Two and a Half Years’ Residence in Venezuela (London, 1838), 174. For Hitchcock’s use of the term, see Elementary Geology, 3rd ed., rev., 41, 58, 64, 65 [main entry], etc.

120. Hitchcock, Elementary Geology, 3rd ed., rev., 45.

121. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:388 (#363), “about autumn 1862.”

122. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:263 (#240A); 2:724 (#767), 779–80 (#824).

123. “One thinkes himself a giant, another a dwarfe; one is heavie as lead, another is as light as a feather.” Richard Burton [Democritus Junior, pseud.], The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1638), 193.

124. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II, 1.1.118; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 3.1.59.

125. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 2:722 (#764).

126. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:365 (#340).

127. For the basic work on Shakespeare’s image clusters, see Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery (New York: Macmillan, 1936); and Edward A. Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946). Their work was anticipated by Walter Whiter in A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakspeare (London, 1794).

128. William Drummond, The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. William B. Turnbull (London, 1856), 328.

129. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:476–77 (#456).

130. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:398 (“late March 1862”).

131. Thomas S. Myrick, The Gold Rush (Cumming Press, 1971), 9.

132. “Miss. [shuddering] Lord! there’s somebody walking over my grave”: Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation (London, 1783), 68.

133. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:649.

134. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales, new ed. (Boston, 1865), 1:47. The Dickinsons owned three of Hawthorne’s novels in early editions and the complete works in an 1881 edition, the latter containing Twice-Told Tales. All the volumes are now at Harvard (shelfmarks EDR 374–77). There may of course have been volumes that have not survived.

135. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:454 (#430B).

136. Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 230–31. The emblem is drawn from William Holmes and John W. Barber, Religious Allegories: Being a Series of Emblematic Engravings (Cincinnati, 1851), 10–11.

137. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:366 (#340).

138. Sewall, Life, 2:481; Habegger, My Wars, 426 and n. [“His crisis”].

139. “The Christmas Letter,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 53 (December 1856): 533.

140. Elisha Kent Kane, The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (New York, 1854), 262.

141. [Mary Shelley], Frankenstein (1818); [Anonymous, poss. John Cleve Symmes], Symzonia, a Voyage of Discovery (London, 1820); [Edgar Allan Poe], The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (New York, 1838).

142. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge (London, 1834), 2:3 (lines 59–60), 9 (line 193), 13 (line 295), 14 (lines 305–8). The poem first appeared in Coleridge’s collaboration with Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798), and was revised for the various editions of that volume, for Coleridge’s own Sibylline Leaves (London, 1817), and for editions of his collected poems, ending in 1834.

143. James Fenimore Cooper, The Sea Lions; or, the Lost Sealers, new ed. (New York, 1852), 2:151–52.

144. Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55 (Philadelphia, 1856), 1:194.

145. Kane, Arctic Explorations, 1:194–95.

146. The two-volume edition is now at Harvard (shelfmark EDR 451). Martha Dickinson Bianchi, in an unpublished biography of the poet, reports that Arctic Explorations was Mr. Dickinson’s “prime favorite” volume of travels. See Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 338n18. Edward Dickinson also owned a copy of William Elder’s Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (Philadelphia, 1858), now in the Periodicals and Books from the Evergreens Collection, Brown University Library.

147. Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 54. It had sold 60,000 copies by 1859: Nicolas Trübner, ed., Trübner’s Bibliographical Guide to American Literature (London, 1859), lxxxviii–lxxxix.

148. Charles Francis Hall, Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux (New York, 1865), 234. Instances where the “Feet, mechanical, go round” are common in anecdotes of those lost on ice, in desert, in woods. “With what uniformity a lost man travels in circles … was exemplified in two gentlemen of the Hudson’s Bay Company but a short time ago.… They strolled into the woods, and after a time commenced their return.… They continued on until, reaching a fallen tree rather more remarkable than the rest, one of the two expressed an opinion that he had passed it but a few moments before.… A third time they reached the tree, yet not thoroughly convinced of the fact; so they engraved a mark, and a few moments more actually brought them to the very same spot again”: Richard King, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Arctic Ocean in 1833 (London, 1836), 2:194–95. Beneath the circuits of such lost travelers lies stark terror.

149. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 2:874 (#957).

150. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:221–22 (#187B).

151. Dickinson, Letters (1960), 2:394–95 and n. Johnson dated the poem 1863 in his variorum edition (1955) but later assigned the poem and letter to early 1862, without much assurance. Franklin (Poems of Emily Dickinson [1998], I, 221n) redated the poem and letter to 1861. See also “In the Northern Zones— / Icicles—crawl from polar Caverns” (“Safe in their Alabaster chambers,” 1:162 [#124E]); “Some Polar Expiation—An Omen in the Bone” (“I tried to think a lonelier Thing,” 2:567 [#570]); “Then—Diamonds—which the Snow // From Polar Caskets—fetched me” (“The Angle of a Landscape,” 2:578 [#578]). This complex of polar ice and death is scattered in poems through this period.

152. Robert Herrick, “To Elektra,” lines 1–2.

153. The house is pictured in Habegger, My Wars, 121. Emily and her family lived there from 1840 to 1855.

154. Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), 143.

155. Letter to Thomas Poole, January 28, 1810, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 3, 1807–1814, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 282.

156. Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 1:367 (#341), 464 (#441); 2:736 (#782).

157. “The death did not appear painful; the vital powers, and with them the sensibility, being extinguished by degrees.” Stephen H. Ward, The Science of Health (London, n.d. [1853?]), 72. Ward is translating from Du Baron D. J. Larrey, Mémoires de chirurgie militaire et campagnes (Paris, 1817), 4:127–28, in which he recalls the deaths by freezing of Napoleon’s diminished army as it returned from Moscow.

158. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 525.

159. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 207.

160. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 145–46, 246–48, 250–53.

161. Thompson, Early Years, 257–61, 263.

162. Thompson, Early Years, 62, 85–86, 95–96, 135.

163. Thompson, Early Years, 150–51, 153–55.

164. Thompson, Early Years, 263–64, 547n12.

165. Thompson, Early Years, 261–62, 284; Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 71. Maps of the vicinity and of the Derry farm may be found on the front and rear endpapers of Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child: The Derry Journals of Lesley Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson and Arnold Grade (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969).

166. Thompson, Early Years, 49–50, 261, 275–76; Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks—Walking (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 64–65.

167. Thompson, Early Years, 277–78, 280; Mertins, Robert Frost, 78.

168. Thompson, Early Years, 276, 282, 285, 314–15.

169. E.g., Derry Enterprise, October 20, 1908: “Wed. and Thurs. October 21 and 22 / Talking Pictures / Moving Pictures that talk / and in addition a splendid program of / Moving Pictures and Illustrated Song Hits” [advertisement]. “Talking pictures” of the period used a gramophone in sync with a film. “Cinematograph and gramophone are made to act together,—in other words, the movements of animated photographs are synchronized with the time of sounds, and this is done with such exactitude that the illusion is perfect”: British Trade Journal 42 (May 1, 1904): 202.

170. N. Arthur Bleau, “Robert Frost’s Favorite Poem,” in Frost: Centennial Essays III, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978), 174–75.

171. Bleau, “Robert Frost’s Favorite Poem,” 175–76.

172. “A Note by Lesley Frost,” in Bleau, “Robert Frost’s Favorite Poem,” 177.

173. Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, “Seventh Song,” lines 1–2.

174. Derry News, December 14, 1906.

175. W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood (New York: Random House, 1950), 7.

176. Charles W. Cooper, Preface to Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 604.

177. Richard Holmes, “19th Century Survey Documents the Decline of Local Farming,” Derry News, November 26, 2015; William K. Stevens, “The Forest Primeval Isn’t What It Used to Be,” New York Times, September 24, 1995. See also Report of the Forestry Commission of New Hampshire, June Session, 1885 (Concord: Parsons B. Cogswell, 1885), 74: “There are many large, cleared tracts which should be returned to woodland.… These lands are mostly either the sandy or gravelly plains, which form the highest terraces of the rivers, high hill and mountain pastures, or farms which have been abandoned because of impoverished and cold, sterile soil.… The thin soil gathered from the debris of centuries of forest vegetation is now gone—either burned up, washed away by the rains, or exhausted by cropping and pasturage.” David R. Foster and John F. O’Keefe, in New England Forests Through Time: Insights from the Harvard Forest Dioramas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8, report that throughout New England, except in the mountains, by the 1840s “60 to 80 percent of the land was cleared for pasturage, tillage, orchards and buildings.”

178. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has published a convenient spreadsheet with the relevant data on wheat prices since 1866–67: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/wheat-data.aspx. See “Wheat Data—All Years” and “Table 1—Wheat: Planted acreage, harvested acreage, production, yield, and farm price.” The prices are not in constant dollars. The comparison here, made using USDA figures (constant dollars in parentheses), is $2.06 per bushel in 1866/67 ($32.70), $.49 in 1894/95 ($14.10), and $.99 in 1909/10 ($26.90). Calculations were made using https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/. Wheat is now far cheaper, under $4 per bushel.

179. Holmes, “19th Century Survey.” In addition, “By 1900, local shoe factories were paying men $1.85 and women $1.45 for a 12-hour workday. Staying on the family farm meant working longer hours for less money; hired male farm workers might earn a dollar a day.”

180. New England Farmer, n.s., 5 (June 1871): 299; Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics for the State of Maine, 1890 (Augusta, 1891), 131; Country Life in America, n.s., 1 (November 1901): 4.

181. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 74, 100, 341.

182. Holmes, “19th Century Survey.” See James, American Scene, 14–15: “The history was there in its degree, and one came upon it, on sunny afternoons, in the form of the classic abandoned farm.… These scenes of old, hard New England effort, defeated by the soil and the climate and reclaimed by nature and time—the crumbled, lonely chimney-stack, the overgrown threshold, the dried-up well, the cart-track vague and lost—these seemed the only notes to interfere, in their meagreness, with the queer other, the larger, eloquence that one kept reading into the picture.”

183. Richard Holmes, town historian of Derry, said in a telephone call (January 13, 2016) that a dozen places locally still collected sap.

184. There are many ways to calculate the value of currency over time. The relative standard of living, perhaps the most effective method for the purposes here, suggests that because of deflation $100 in 1865 would have been worth only $49.90 in 1898 and $54 in 1905. In 2015 that same $100 would be worth $1250. See http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/.

185. Kenneth Libbrecht, “Snow Crystal Structure,” in Encyclopedia of Snow, Ice and Glaciers, ed. Vijay P. Singh, Pratap Singh, and Umesh K. Haritashya (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 1040.

186. Thompson, Early Years, 264, 266, 314, 336; Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 63.

187. Frost reproached himself for having failed to call a doctor when Elliott fell ill. Frost, Letters, 1:532; Thompson, Early Years, 258; Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 623n26.

188. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), 40–41 (book 2, lines 164–88).

189. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 506. See also Thompson, Early Years, 267–68, 548n19.

190. Thompson, Early Years, 267, 548n18; Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 58.

191. “Books and Kitchens,” Atlantic Monthly 126 (July 1920): 137.

192. Alexander Smith, City Poems (Cambridge, 1857), 168.

193. The old tales were often set in an enchanted forest. For refuge, see “Snow White” and “The Girl Without Hands”; for danger, “Hansel and Gretel” and “Babes in the Wood.”

194. Smith, City Poems, 170.

195. Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900); Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912). See Frost, Letters, 1:11, 55 and n67, 145, 154, 167 and n233.

196. For jiggery-pokery, see, for example, Pearson’s 14 (November 1905): 529–30. Frost sold the Youth’s Companion, a magazine for children. See Jonathan N. Barron, “Robert Frost in the Magazines,” in Robert Frost in Context, ed. Mark Richardson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 313.

197. The cost of a year’s subscription to the Derry News was stated beneath the nameplate.

198. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 54.

199. Emails from Trudy Van Houten, June 19 and 21, 2016; and Suzanne Stillman, June 26, 2016.

200. “In these times of good sleighing, the law providing that horses travelling in sleighs, shall wear bells, ought to be rigorously followed up. The accidents happening from this neglect, are numerous”: Exeter News-Letter, February 26, 1833, reprinting an item from the [Nashua] New-Hampshire Telegraph. Courtesy of the Exeter Historical Society.

201. Mertins, Robert Frost, 197.

202. Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), 2:965 (#1107).

203. William Cowper, “The Task,” in The Poetical Works of William Cowper (Philadelphia, 1806), 2:113; Thomas Moore, “The Loves of the Angels,” in The Works of Thomas Moore (New York, n.d.), 6:56; Oppian’s Halieuticks: Of the Nature of Fishes and Fishing of the Ancients, trans. John Jones (Oxford, 1722), 67.

204. Derry News, December 7, 1900.

205. The Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardener, and Home Farmer, n.s., 38 (March 4, 1880): 200; The New-York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette 5 (October 20, 1827): 120; Robert Southey, Madoc (London, 1807), 1:47.

206. Walter Scott, Rokeby: A Poem (1813), 222, 42, 56, 62, 63, 160, 229, 250, 290.

207. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3, line 11.

208. Thomas Cole, The Garden of Eden.

209. Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 224.

210. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 209, 211.

211. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 207. Who inserted the comma is not known, according to Mark Richardson, one of the editors of the Library of America edition.

212. New Republic 34 (March 7, 1923): 47; Chapbook (A Monthly Miscellany) no. 36 (April 1923): 3.

213. There’s evidence of later dithering or sloppiness when Frost provided a holograph version of the poem for a calendric anthology of his poems: From Snow to Snow (New York: Henry Holt, 1936), frontispiece. There, as George Monteiro notes in Robert Frost’s Poetry of Rural Life (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2015), 104, the handwritten “Stopping by Woods” has no internal punctuation in the thirteenth line, while the printed text (Snow to Snow, 20), among small changes in punctuation elsewhere, has the comma after “lovely.” It’s not unusual for a poet to have multiple versions of lines in his head—to have settled on one but under pressure find memory providing another. With no sign of considered intention, little weight can be put on such evidence.

214. Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Three Taverns (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 12.

215. Henry D[avid]. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston, 1854), 185.

216. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 15. See also “A Dream Pang” (25).

217. John Ciardi, “Robert Frost, the Way to the Poem,” Saturday Review 41 (April 12, 1958): 13–15, 65; reprinted in John Ciardi, Dialogue with an Audience (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1963), 147–57.

218. Mertins, Robert Frost, 371–72.

219. Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 267.

220. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 203–4.

221. Thompson, Years of Triumph, 231, 236.

222. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 160.

223. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Fire Under the Andes (New York: Knopf, 1927), 300.

224. Thompson, Early Years, 597n7. Thompson first heard the tale in 1940.

225. Ciardi, Dialogues, 156–57.

226. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 504.

227. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, [trans. Edward FitzGerald] (London, 1859).

228. Cooper, Preface to Poetry, 605.

229. The word seems to have an initial descender and to be four or five letters long, but the descender may be just an ink blot. It can’t be “bay” or “gray,” as it has no terminal descender.

230. Cooper, Preface to Poetry, 605.

231. Thompson, Early Years, 282, 336. Dr. Bricault bought Billy after Carl Burell left the farm in March 1902. Frost purchased Eunice shortly afterward.

232. Letter to Charles Madison, February 26, 1950, in Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, ed. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1950), 603n.

233. Cooper, Preface to Poetry, 607.

234. R. C. Townsend, “In Defense of Form: A Letter from Robert Frost to Sylvester Baxter, 1923,” New England Quarterly 36 (June 1963): 243. By “four of a kind” Frost meant keeping the deep/keep rhyme through the whole stanza. He may have felt that the rhetorical drama of the repeated line capitalized on rather than succumbed to the monotony—or call it single-mindedness.

235. Monteiro, Robert Frost’s Poetry, 106, referring to letters to Saturday Review and New Republic.

236. “A Prayer in Spring,” in Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 22.

237. [Edmund Burke], A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed. (London, 1759), 107. The first edition of 1757 had the ambiguous “than those which.” Though even the revision is troublesome, he meant, “than those [images] have which.”

238. Thompson, Early Years, 2, 49–50, 275–76.

239. Victor Emanuel Reichert, Out for Stars: An Appreciation of Robert Frost (Cincinnati: Hirschfeld Printing, 1969), 13.

240. David Hamilton, “The Echo of Frost’s Woods,” in Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost, ed. Earl J. Wilcox and Jonathan N. Barron (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 130. Hamilton heard this at a reading in May 1961.

241. “Real estate agent H. G. Shute has sold the Magoon place for E. Y. Harwood of Manchester, to R. Frost of Lawrence, Mass., who will take immediate possession.” Derry News, September 28, 1900. Frost moved in October 1, according to Parini, Robert Frost, 72.

242. Thompson, Early Years, 263–64.

243. Conversation with Richard Holmes, Frost Place, Derry, N.H., May 21, 2016.

244. Thompson, Early Years, 276.

245. The birthdays of the Frost children are conveniently recorded in Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, note to book 1, 22 (the volume is unfortunately unpaginated beyond the child’s numbering within her journals).

246. Thompson, Early Years, 280–81, 552n14.

247. Thompson, Early Years, 285, 314–15.

248. Thompson, Early Years, 323; Parini, Robert Frost, 94–95.

249. Thompson, Early Years, 339.

250. The weather records may be found in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) online database: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search?datasetid=GHCND.

251. Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, book 2, 45–46.

252. Thompson, Early Years, 252, 315. Dr. Charlemagne Bricault, to whom Frost sold the eggs, had decided to return to his veterinary practice in late 1905 or early 1906. Richard Holmes, the Derry historian, thinks the contract was canceled before Christmas because Bricault shows up as a veterinarian in the 1906 Lawrence city directory (email from Richard Holmes, January 13, 2016). There’s no convincing evidence either way—Bricault might have placed his name in the directory before winding up the egg business. Frost could still have sold eggs to the Hoods, though at wholesale rates.

253. John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912–1915 (New York: Grove, 1988), 130, 251n130.

254. Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, book 2, 45.

255. Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, foreword to book 3.

256. Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, book 3, 62–63.

257. Thompson, Early Years, 339, 341–42, 566n5, 567n8; Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 937. Frost took the family to the White Mountains in New Hampshire from 1906–1908 and to Lake Willoughby in Vermont in 1909, after which he sold the chickens and moved into Derry Village.

258. Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, book 5, 36–37.

259. Tharpe, Frost: Centennial Essays III, 177.

260. Thompson, Early Years, 336, says that Frost had sold Eunice “before summer vacation” the year he started teaching part-time at Pinkerton Academy; that is, 1906. See also Lesley Frost, New Hampshire’s Child, book 4, 54–55.

261. Lesley Frost, “Our Family Christmas,” Redbook 122 (December 1963): 45.

262. Derry, Rockingham Co. Seabrook, Rockingham Co. Rye … (Boston: D. H. Hurd, 1892), 174. The corner where Frost stopped is at the crossroads south-south-east of Derry P.O. The poet, who would have been traveling from the west, after stopping turned south toward home, noted on the map as then the property of S. Magoon. See illustration.

263. Derry News, December issues, 1900–1906. The weather is usually reported in the “Derry Doings” column, when reported at all. The Nashua temperatures come from the NOAA online database: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search?datasetid=GHCND.

264. The New Hampshire Register, Farmer’s Almanac, and Business Directory for 1901 (Concord: New Hampshire Register, 1901), 93.

265. Thompson, Early Years, 548.

266. Email from Richard Holmes, October 22, 2015, and in conversation at the Frost Place, Derry, N.H., May 21, 2016.

267. Conversation with Richard Holmes, Frost Place, Derry, N.H., May 21, 2016. See also the Frost Place website: http://www.robertfrostfarm.org/historyproperty.html.

268. Thompson, Early Years, 339.

269. Thompson, Early Years, 260.

270. Thompson, Early Years, 266.

271. It may be hard to believe that Frost took seven hours to drive the wagon the ten miles or so from Pelham to Derry, though he did mention getting lost. Traveling on bad roads in heavy snow can be lethal.

272. NOAA online database: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search?datasetid=GHCND.

273. Louis Untermeyer, ed., Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 163; Reginald L. Cook, “Robert Frost’s Asides on His Poetry,” American Literature 19 (1948): 357.

274. Mertins, Robert Frost, 72.

275. Frost, Collected Poems (1995), 931.

276. R[alph]. W[aldo]. Emerson, Poems (Boston, 1849), 65; Dickinson, Letters (1960), 3:928.

277. Millicent Todd Bingham, A Revelation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 23. Lord’s papers went to his sister’s daughter (13–14) and after her death to a cousin, Mrs. Stockton (19, 21).