More Looking Back

7 Ramadhan 1435

Forgot to mention yesterday in my little reminiscence on some of the books I've read recently that I also completed cover to cover readings of poetry collections by no fewer than three writers local to these shores, and all with some connection to my place of work. I'm not sure that every poem I read worked but enough did to make my reading feel something more than just worthwhile.

I also completed Auden's The Dyer's Hand in KL. What a strange collection it is. Moments of genius mixed with a good deal of eccentricity - but always entertaining and often thought-provoking, at least when you can figure out what he's talking about. I was particularly struck by his magisterial tone. You don't hear so much definiteness about the indefinite these days. We live in uncertain times.

Which leads me to a quick comment on Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age. How fascinating it is that he genuinely captures that spirit through the individual essays on various public figures that comprise the book rather than through an attempt to deal with the zeitgeist in any kind of generalised, systematic manner. A reminder that if such a thing as a zeitgeist exists then this is how it is manifested, through the behaviour of real people within their historical context, not from some kind of abstract atmosphere floating around them. I've just finished his comments on Wordsworth which seem to me to make a great introduction to that puzzling writer even for us moderns. I didn't realise the extent to which WW felt wounded by being seen as an outsider figure even in his later years, and the degree to which his early work was seen as revolutionary in terms of its subject matter. We take it for granted that daffodils are poetic; it took a Wordsworth to make them so.