Letters to the Editor
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‘Election Ignorance Must End’
While I normally agree with Alicia Colon, a down to earth columnist, I must object to her statement in Friday’s column, that she would support Eric Gioia, my city councilman who represents Woodside and parts of Maspeth [“Election Ignorance Must End,” New York, October 21, 2005].
I think Ms. Colon has Mr. Gioia confused with Dennis Gallagher, a hard working Republican from Middle Village. Since Mr. Gioia took office, the streets have become dirtier, the schools more overcrowded, and more upscale businesses have fled the Woodside area.
Mr. Gioia has not met the tax that he did not want to raise, particularly the property tax, and is tied to the umbilical chord of tax hiker Gifford Miller. Mr. Gioia represents the values that Ms. Colon and many Woodsiders find abhorrent: support for gay marriage and abortion on demand, including partial birth abortion.
Mr. Gioia was the sponsor of the bill that would force pharmacies to state in large block letters whether they carry the morning-after bill and would force pharmacists to prescribe what many people believe to be an abortifacient Mr. Gioia also opposes school choice and was silent when several parochial schools in our district were closed.
To the best of my knowledge, his “hands on experience” has been limited to giving dictionaries (which he may have bought in one of our many 99-cent stores) to the graduates of P.S. 11.
When one realizes that a Republican-Conservative, Patrick Hurley, a man who actually works for a living, could have been our councilman, instead of a former Clinton intern, Mr. Gioia’s election is even more distasteful.
Furthermore, Mr. Gioia now resides in a luxury condominium in Long Island City, conveniently located in Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s district, in preparation for a run for congress. Heaven forbid he and other city council members, such as Gifford Miller, actually get real jobs one day.
ALICE LEMOS
Woodside, N.Y.
‘A Creek in the Vast Sea’
I am glad to see, with the publication of Eric Ormsby’s musings, that the unpublished 1805 edition of William Wordsworth’s epic “The Prelude” continues to occupy a special place in the thought of those who love and know the worth of English poetry [“A Creek in the Vast Sea,” Arts & Letters, October 12, 2005].
The 1805 edition was indeed Wordsworth’s masterpiece. But, your subhead is defective: “Wordsworth … brooded on … his masterpiece …” of 1805 not “for 35 years” as you state, but until and beyond his own death, 45 years later.
And here England’s greatest poet after Shakespeare is joined later by his “heir and pupil,” the greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman. Walt tinkered with his first and great 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass” to his dying breath. He died in 1892. But, why the tinkering, the failure to publish Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”?
Wordsworth (1770-1850) began as a poet of spiritual radicalism: first in his “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads,” and simultaneously, in his earliest published, and most brilliant, shorter poems, both entirely new to the mind of English poetry!
Wordsworth then, in his travels in early Revolutionary France, loved, produced a daughter, and these immortal lines:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven …
(“France” from “The Prelude” (Book XI)
This, before the Terror, a revelation to Wordsworth, and the moment of hurried departure, of separation. For Wordsworth was an Englishman, loyal, and a Cambridge man. He, after a long and distinguished career in which he wrote nothing so great, earned the title of poet laureate in 1843, the most deserving and greatest of all poet laureates.
It was in his awful period of reflection, and alteration, following the turn to terror in France, that Wordsworth wrote his greatest poems, “The Prelude” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollection of Early Childhood” (1802), the great “Immortality Ode,” a favorite of many, including the American poet Allen Ginsberg and his teacher, Lionel Trilling. Wordsworth, ever the programmatic master, seeking to control his masterwork, titled it “The Prelude Or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, An Autobiographical Poem.” And began it, following in the footsteps of John Milton, with inspiration:
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that while it fans my cheek Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate’er its mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me …
Thus, Wordsworth, the greatest of English Romantics, invigorated English poetry and returned it to a center place in literary life as it had not been since the time of Milton, whose epic of his time, “Paradise Lost,” served, consciously and unconsciously, as a model for this new epic of a new theme and dimension. But, hard it was for the great poet to breath memory into his youthful follies, no follies all.
ALLEN TOBIAS
Brooklyn
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