Monday, February 14, 2005
Saint Valentine's Day
Poets don't know more about love than other people, & of course they aren't any better at it. They just have their own peculiar mix of talent & conceit, plus the ego to advertise a point-of-view. Dr. Phil on TV is less likely to help us understand intimacy than the insights of the better poets. If few poets are known by successes in love relationships, at least they sing honestly about their entrances & exits.
Three of the most enduring marriages (with children) I know have a poet in them. Two of those poets met their spouses in late adolescence & are among the few I'd say found a "soulmate," which I do not believe is common or even necessary in love. Two of the most short-lived marriages (which produced a child) among friends also included poets. All lovers are soulmates during the thirty day trial period deal, after which one may return them paying only a small shipping & handling fee.
On Valentine's Day my thoughts turn to two of the loneliest American poets; Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman. Walt is unmistakably gay in his poems & the objects of his effusive affections; he denied it to himself & others because he had to. His tried channeling his feelings into pansexuality. Of Emily, I've never read a convincing case for her being a lesbian. Perhaps she was, but I wonder if the thought even occurred to her; something else in her personality drove her to become a recluse. Wouldn't help if they had been introduced to each other; each would've been frightened & repelled by the intensity of the other's emotions & the very different forms & paths these emotions sought out. Whitman was operatic, a drama queen. Dickinson wrote in & around the cadences of Congregational hymns. In the privacy of their own thoughts, I doubt if any human behavior was truly alien to them.
The pagan holiday Saint Valentine's Day unsuccessfully attempted to replace is Lupercalia: Young men, naked except for the skins of goats that had been sacrificed, ran around the bounds of the Palatine Hill, both to purify the ancient site where Romulus & Remus had been suckled by wolves and, striking the women they met with strips of goat skin, to promote fertility. "Neither potent herbs, nor prayers, nor magic spells shall make of thee a mother," writes Ovid, "submit with patience to the blows dealt by a fruitful hand." There were also lotteries to choose lovers for the duration of the festival.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Three of the most enduring marriages (with children) I know have a poet in them. Two of those poets met their spouses in late adolescence & are among the few I'd say found a "soulmate," which I do not believe is common or even necessary in love. Two of the most short-lived marriages (which produced a child) among friends also included poets. All lovers are soulmates during the thirty day trial period deal, after which one may return them paying only a small shipping & handling fee.
On Valentine's Day my thoughts turn to two of the loneliest American poets; Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman. Walt is unmistakably gay in his poems & the objects of his effusive affections; he denied it to himself & others because he had to. His tried channeling his feelings into pansexuality. Of Emily, I've never read a convincing case for her being a lesbian. Perhaps she was, but I wonder if the thought even occurred to her; something else in her personality drove her to become a recluse. Wouldn't help if they had been introduced to each other; each would've been frightened & repelled by the intensity of the other's emotions & the very different forms & paths these emotions sought out. Whitman was operatic, a drama queen. Dickinson wrote in & around the cadences of Congregational hymns. In the privacy of their own thoughts, I doubt if any human behavior was truly alien to them.The pagan holiday Saint Valentine's Day unsuccessfully attempted to replace is Lupercalia: Young men, naked except for the skins of goats that had been sacrificed, ran around the bounds of the Palatine Hill, both to purify the ancient site where Romulus & Remus had been suckled by wolves and, striking the women they met with strips of goat skin, to promote fertility. "Neither potent herbs, nor prayers, nor magic spells shall make of thee a mother," writes Ovid, "submit with patience to the blows dealt by a fruitful hand." There were also lotteries to choose lovers for the duration of the festival.
