The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  Not that it is all English poetry: “all” is a meaningless word to use in connection with so sprawling a domain. “Nowhere in our publicity do we say that we are including every poem ever written or published in the English language,” writes Alison Moss, Chadwyck-Healey’s editorial director, in a news-letter; and the project consciously sidestepped certain squishy areas: American poetry, drama, verse annuals and miscellanies (with some important exceptions), and poems by writers not listed or cross-referenced as poets in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The project’s heavy reliance on this last-mentioned work has led to some puzzling exclusions. While the English Poetry Database includes a truly astounding and thrilling number of minor poems by minor poets, it is unreliable in its coverage of minor poems, and in some cases major poems, by major prose writers.

  “I shall not insult you by insinuating that you do not remember Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the top margin of page 37 of his teaching copy of Madame Bovary11; but Walter Scott’s poem is not to be found in the English Poetry Database.12 The poem by the nineteenth-century Erewhon-man, Samuel Butler, about a plaster cast of a Greek discus-thrower kept prudishly in storage,

  Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room

  The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall

  is not in the Database, even though it was good enough for Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse and for a number of editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (Inexplicably, Bartlett’s doesn’t index it under “lumber” or “room” in the current edition, as it has in the past, but it is still stowed away in there.) George Meredith is listed as a mid-nineteenth-century novelist in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and not cross-referenced as a poet, so none of his poetry is on Chadwyck-Healey’s disks, though Meredith is part of nearly every anthology of Victorian poetry. Benjamin Disraeli’s blank-verse epic, called The Revolutionary Epic, conceived, according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, as a “companion to the Iliad, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost,” was skipped over by the databasers, evidently simply because Disraeli is classed as a novelist; while five poems by his less famous father, author of Curiosities of Literature, made the grade, including these lines from the end of “A Defence of Poetry” addressed to James Pye, the poet laureate:

  Thou, who behold’st my Muse’s rash design,

  Teach me thy art of Poetry divine;

  Or, since thy cares, alas! on me were vain,

  Teach me that harder talent—to refrain.

  They make a nice table-grace for minor poets of all ages.

  There are other mystifying prose-poetry juxtapositions, too. The poems that Goldsmith inserted into The Vicar of Wake-field are in the English Poetry Database (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”), as is the “chair-lumbered closet” that Goldsmith mentions in his poem “The Haunch of Venison,” but not the poems Charles Dickens put in The Pickwick Papers (“Creeping on, where time has been,/A rare old plant is the Ivy green”13), or any of Dickens’s other poems or prologues:

  Awake the Present! Shall no scene display

  The tragic passion of the passing day?

  Leigh Hunt’s poetry is here, but not one poem by Thackeray.14 There are eighty religious poems by a certain Francis William Newman, including the interestingly abysmal antipollution tract “Cleanliness” (1858), which staggers to its Whitman-esque peak with

  The workers of wealthy mines poison glorious mountain torrents,

  Drugging them with lead or copper to save themselves petty trouble;

  And the peasant groans in secret or regards it as a “landed right,”

  And after some lapse of time the law counts the right valid.

  The work of this Newman is included because the New Cambridge Bibliography lists him as a minor poet of the period 1835–1870. Not a hemistich, however, by the man’s older brother, John Henry, Cardinal Newman, finds its way in, since the New Cambridge Bibliography categorizes Cardinal Newman as a mid-nineteenth-century prose writer. Yet Cardinal Newman’s poems are both better and better known (“Lead, kindly light”); two were chosen by Francis Turner Palgrave for his Golden Treasury, Second Series.15 Emily Brontë’s poetry was reached by Chadwyck-Healey’s rural electrification program, but Charlotte’s and Anne’s was not, despite the fact that all three women published a book together in 1846: Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. “It stole into life,” wrote Mrs. Gaskell of the book: “some weeks passed over without the mighty murmuring public discovering that three more voices were uttering their speech.” It got a decent review in the Atheneum, and while many will concede that Emily’s poetry shows the most talent, Charlotte’s is not embarrassing:

  The room is quiet, thoughts alone

  People its mute tranquillity;

  The yoke put off, the long task done,—

  I am, as it is bliss to be,

  Still and untroubled.

  (“The Teacher’s Monologue”)

  Warm is the parlour atmosphere,

  Serene the lamp’s soft light;

  The vivid embers, red and clear,

  Proclaim a frosty night.

  Books, varied, on the table lie,

  Three children o’er them bend,

  And all, with curious, eager eye,

  The turning leaf attend.

  (“Gilbert”)

  And if you search the English Poetry Database for the words join and choir and invisible together you will retrieve sixty-four nineteenth-century efforts by such fixtures of the poetasters’ pantheon as Atherstone, Bickersteth, Caswall, Coutts-Nevill, Mant, Smedley, and Mary Tighe (and Byron and Keats and Coleridge, too)—but you won’t pull up George Eliot’s

  O may I join the choir invisible

  Of those immortal dead who live again

  In minds made better by their presence

  or any other poetry she wrote. (I found two instances of “rubbish-heap” in Eliot’s 488-page Collected Poems, edited by Lucien Jenkins, but discovered no lumber.)

  Finally, if you want to read about “hope’s delusive mine” in Samuel Johnson’s verses on the death of Dr. Levet, your hopes will be dashed; in fact if you browse for any “S. Johnson” in the database’s name index you will browse in vain. (You will find “L. Johnson,” “R. Johnson,” and “W. Johnson,” though.) Still, the actual texts of Johnson’s two best poems, “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” are hidden within, retrievable not by poet’s name but by title or search-word, since they were republished in Dodsley’s Collection of 1763, one of the compendia that Chadwyck-Healey’s editors (rightly) shipped off to the Philippines for keypunching.16 Dodsley’s Collection fortunately also happens to contain one version of Richard Bentley’s only poem (he isn’t listed in the name index, either), a poem itemizing the tribulations of the scholar:

  He lives inglorious, or in want,

  To college and old books confin’d;

  Instead of learn’d he’s call’d pedant,

  Dunces advanc’d, he’s left behind.

  Samuel Johnson could recite Bentley’s poem from memory, as H. W. Garrod reminds us in Scholarship: Its Meaning and Value, before he (Garrod, that is) goes on to praise A. E. Housman (a Bentley worshipper himself) as a “great scholar and, as I shall always think, a great poet,” which is a remarkably generous assessment, since Housman had, in a preface to his edition of Manilius,17 viciously dismissed Garrod’s earlier Manilian emendations as “singularly cheap and shallow” and judged Garrod’s apparatus criticus “often defective and sometimes visibly so.”

  Housman would probably say similarly rude things about the holes, minor and major, in the English Poetry Database (no Jonathan Swift at all, anywhere?18) since Housman spent most of his life absorbed in “those minute and pedantic studies in which I am fitted to excel and which give me pleasure,” and was intolerant of grand schemes and mechanized shortcuts. Moreover, his own 1896 volume, A Shropshire Lad, is missing from the disks, possibly
for copyright reasons, a fact that would have nettled him, although he would have pretended not to care.

  But we, on the other hand, shouldn’t say rude things. This database may be, as John Sutherland pointed out in the London Review of Books (vol. 16, no. 11, 9 June 1994), the most significant development in literary scholarship since xerography. And even Sutherland’s high praise is insufficient. The EPFTD, as some refer to it, is a mind-manuring marvel, and we are lucky that a lot is left out (provided that no university libraries, tempted by its aura of comprehensiveness, “withdraw”—which is to say, get rid of—the unelectrified source books themselves); we don’t want every corner of poetry lit with the same even, bright light, for such a uniformity would interfere with what Housman himself called the “hide-and-seek” of learning. The god of scholars, Housman pointed out in his “Introductory Lecture,” “planted in us the desire to find out what is concealed, and stored the universe with hidden things that we might delight ourselves in discovering them.” And the fact is that Chadwyck-Healey’s demiurgic project comes so much closer than anything else in paper or plastic to the unattainable om of total inclusion (containing, by my estimate, several thousand times more poetry than Great Poetry Classics, itself a fine shovelware CD-ROM published by World Library, Inc.) that hunter-gatherers of all predilections can pretend, some of the time, when it calms their research anxieties to do so, that no obscurity of consequence will be left unfingered. After all, the disks hold (on top of hymns before 1800, and nursery rhymes) many verse translations from other languages into English, if they were published before 1800—a very useful subcategory for the lumber-struck.

  1 Gower’s translation offers a bonus lumber earlier that is almost as inspiring:

  Hemm’d round with learning’s musty scrolls,

  Her ponderous volumes, dusty rolls,

  Which to the ceiling’s vault arise,

  Above the reach of studious eyes,

  Where revelling worms peruse the store

  Of wisdom’s antiquated lore,—

  With glasses, tools of alchemy,

  Cases and bottles, whole and crack’d,

  Hereditary lumber, pack’d.

  This is the world, the world, for me!

  2 Not every passage quoted herein will actually contain the word; that would be obsessive.

  3 Cf. Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae, 1565.

  4 Both Locke’s and Bunyan’s dark rooms may owe something to a sermon by John Donne delivered on Christmas Day, 1624: “God does not furnish a roome, and leave it darke; he sets up lights in it; his first care was, that his benefits should be seene; he made light first, and then creatures, to be seene by that light.…”

  5 Juvenile wood is wood near the pith of the tree; it has a “larger longitudinal hygrocoefficient of expansion than mature wood,” writes Larson, who is concerned that the expansion-habits of juvenile wood will lead to “an increase in the frequency and severity in spatial deformation of wood subjected to hygrothermal gradients.”

  6 Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of Swift,” described the Athenian Society as “a knot of obscure men.” They were Samuel Wesley (whom we will meet again later), Daniel Defoe, and the publisher John Dunton, among others; they published Swift’s flattering “Ode” in their Athenian Gazette, vol. 5, supplement, 1692. Dunton wrote that Swift’s “Ode” was “an ingenious poem” (See John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Colin Clair, p. 122), but Pat Rogers (Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, p. 604) reports that Joseph Horrell’s harsh verdict—that this is Swift’s “worst poem by odds”—is “shared by many critics.”

  7 There is no lumber in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The word resurfaces in Swift’s “The Progress of Poetry,” written c. 1719 but not published until the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1728), which was edited by Pope: “To raise the lumber from the earth.” Pat Rogers subjoins a note to this line: “lumber one of Pope’s favourite terms of opprobrium.”

  8 See the WELL’s “Info” Conference (“A Conference About Communication Systems, Communities, and Tools for the Information Age”), Topic 641 (“Internet Encyclopedia”), Response 15 (Oct. 26, 1993): “Your hyperencyclopedia software (or ‘siftware’) would direct you toward a basic article on spiders, analogous to the FAQ files placed in many newsgroups.” The WELL is an electronic conferencing system: (415) 332–8410; http://www.well.com.

  9 Inspired by Kent Hieatt’s numerical analysis of Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (Short Time’s Endless Monument, 1960), a sophomore in college, in 1975, wrote a paper on the numerical structure of Book I of The Faery Queen, in which he pointed out that the word seven appears for the first time in the poem on line seven, stanza 17, Canto vii of Spenser’s poem (“For seven great heads out of his body grew”), and appears in precisely the same context (a mention of the seven-headed beast that carries the Whore of Babylon) as surrounds the word seven in Revelations chapter 17, verse 7. Without Osgood’s concordance to Spenser (1915) and several concordances to the Bible open before him, the student would never have noticed this further tiny instance of Spenserian numerology. And it was so incredibly easy, too, once I (for it was I) had decided what to look up: “Index-learning,” Pope himself pointed out, reworking some earlier snideries of Charles Boyle and Dean Swift,

  turns no student pale,

  Yet holds the Eel of science by the Tail.

  10 Soberingly, the editors of the concordance write that “this optical scanning proved to be the phase of the project that caused the most problems and it seemed for a time that we had traded a tedious but straightforward task [i.e., manual text-entry] for an exasperatingly complicated one.… But these difficulties were related to the fact that the technique of direct optical scanning, the claims of computer and data processing houses to the contrary, is still in the developmental stage. Our experience with this method makes us feel that for most purposes literary scholars had best regard it as in the realm of the possible as contrasted with the practical.”

  11 Reproduced in Lectures on Literature, p. 137.

  12 There is an ode to Walter Scott in there, by one Horatio Smith, that mentions the “minstrel’s lay” and “lordly Marmion,” and there is even the text of an entire anthology that Scott edited, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders. There are 227 poems by William Bell Scott, a painter in the circle of Rossetti. But Sir Walter’s own poetry, which, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in a review of the Lay in 1805, “has manifested a degree of genius which cannot be overlooked,” was overlooked.

  13 It was set to music several times and in song form sold tens of thousands of copies.

  14 “During almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic, which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose,” says George Saintsbury, in A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. I couldn’t find any lumber in Thackeray’s poems, but I did find a good poem about a garret, called “The Garret.” Here are two middle stanzas:

  Yes; ’tis a garret—let him know’t who will—

  There was my bed—full hard it was and small;

  My table there—and I decipher still

  Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall.

  Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away,

  Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;

  For you I pawned my watch how many a day,

  In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

  And see my little Jessy, first of all;

  She comes with pouting lips and sparkling eyes:

  Behold, how roguishly she pins her shawl

  Across the narrow casement, curtain-wise;

  Now by the bed her petticoat glides down,

  And when did woman look the worse in none?

  I have heard since who paid for many a gown,

  In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

  See Thackeray’s Ballads and Tales, Scribners, 1904, pp. 103–4.


  15 It is a comfort to know, though, that two hundred and ninety of Palgrave’s own poems are on these disks. Reading the poetry of people famous for their anthologies is a melancholy but instructive task.

  16 Optical scanning isn’t feasible for old typefaces and foxed paper, and even when the material is in a modern edition and hence legible to scanning software, the raw output still demands, just as it did for the disillusioned Pope concordancers in the seventies, a considerable amount of labor-intensive “markup”—to distinguish things like titles, epigraphs, footnotes, and side-notes from text, for instance, and stanza breaks from page breaks—not to mention the inevitable manual fiddling afterward to fix small errors, like dashes that were read as hyphens.

  17 Manilius being the Roman astrological poet who gave Johnson the tag he applied to Cowley and the rest of the Metaphysicals, discordia concors (not to be confused with Horace’s concordia discors, or Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum): you can find the Manilian reference in a footnote to the life of Cowley in G. Birkbeck Hill’s 1905 edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, a lovely example of old-fashioned scholarship, or you can search the Saturnian rings of the Latin CD-ROM published by the Packard Humanities Institute and Silver Mountain Software, which takes about five minutes.