Jonathan Swift’s “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” is satire. It’s fun, with tongue-in-cheek advice.
Swift urges the young poet to give up his religion and points out the ways that the pursuit of wisdom and the life of a poet are not compatible. He praises rhyme and talks of rhyming Homer.
So let the buyer of this advice beware. If you follow it literally, you’ll become a cartoon of a poet, rather than a poet.
But in the satire, there was a note on commonplace books.
A common-place book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories;” and whereas, on the other hand, poets being liars by profession, ought to have good memories. To reconcile these, a book of this sort is in the nature of a supplemental memory; or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own by entering them there. For take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.
Still satire, rather than advice, but I love that phrase “a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation.”
If I go a day without seeing, hearing or reading something remarkable, it’s possible I’m living in a dull world. Or, more likely, it could be that I’m not paying attention.
• Source: Jonathan Swift, “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” is in English Essays from Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay; New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, pp. 112-30. That’s Vol. 27 in The Harvard Classics, the “Five-Foot Shelf of Books” edited by Charles W. Eliot. But Bartleby has it here:
No comments:
Post a Comment