Why Amazon’s A-List Stars Are Increasingly Giving its Film Studio Bad Reviews
By ALEXANDER LARMAN
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If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the sound of the sea in a shell.
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If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision: that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.
Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you say, and well you might. Though familiar to a handful of scholars of the Victorian era, and the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity. Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.”
Sonnets, particularly Petrarchan sonnets like “Sea-Shell Murmurs,” comprise most of his poetry. His subjects tended toward the historical dramatic monologue, in the manner of Robert Browning, but condensed into the fourteen lines of the sonnet. As a master of the sonnet, particularly, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the sound of the sea in a shell.
By ALEXANDER LARMAN
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By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
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By LAWRENCE KUDLOW
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By MATTHEW RICE
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By LUKE FUNK
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By A.R. HOFFMAN
|If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision: that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.
Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you say, and well you might. Though familiar to a handful of scholars of the Victorian era, and the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity. Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.”
Sonnets, particularly Petrarchan sonnets like “Sea-Shell Murmurs,” comprise most of his poetry. His subjects tended toward the historical dramatic monologue, in the manner of Robert Browning, but condensed into the fourteen lines of the sonnet. As a master of the sonnet, particularly, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the sound of the sea in a shell.
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