I imagine it would have been dangerous, though also perhaps less so, and more expected, for a wife to have a letter from her husband, not necessarily containing anything seditious beyond his own grief. Recusants circulated all kinds of underground documents, from hidden presses ---- Robert Southwell's prose works were making the rounds from hand to hand at precisely this time, for example. Incidentally, it was a relative of the Babingtons, Anne Bellamy, who betrayed Southwell to the Queen's chief pursuivant, Richard Topcliffe, who apparently had raped her and then used the shame of her resulting pregnancy as leverage to get her to tell him who the strange young gentleman in her father's house really was.
I don't know offhand, and willl have to find out, exactly when Tichborne's poem surfaced --- whether it was during his wife's lifetime or much later. I wish I'd thought to ask myself that while I was writing this piece!
Or, well, I'm off with Southwell's timeline --- he had only just arrived in England as a Jesuit the year Tichborne was executed, so his active years are 1586-1592. But people did risk printing his letters and essays and handing them around. I think the authorities would have been more concerned with that kind of evidence of an anti-English Jesuit conspiracy than with a condemned man's private letter --- fortunately for us!
Another poem I haven't seen in a long while. Thank you for such excellent commentary on it, Sally. The poem has what I'd call, from Yeats, a "terrible beauty" -- it is as poetry truly beautiful, but it is about a terrible tragedy of life lost so young. Each line's paradox repays thoughtful meditation on life and death.
I wonder if one-hits are more likely to come from the young? Whether there is a disregard to risk, an inclination to novelty?
I am also wondering about how poetry affects us more when we know the background of the poet. There are schools of thought that state that a poem ought to stand on its own. And I believe that there is something to knowing the beating heart and trembling hand that composed any line. Especially in the age of AI which will soon be able to mimic our greatest compositions, I think that biography will rise in importance when analyzing any art in this day and age.
I was very much schooled in the New Criticism in high school, and certainly to do a close reading of a poem doesn't depend on knowing the poet's biography or the historical context. Rather the opposite, I think the New Critics would say. But as much as I love close readings of poems, I also think biography is interesting --- especially in a case like this. Poems do come from living people, as you say, and belong to their historical contexts (at least to a certain extent), even though a good poem by definition stands on its own and doesn't simply explain something about the poet.
In that essay, Brad Leithauser is really talking mostly about poets who *might as well* have written only one poem (e.g. Conrad Aiken and "Morning Song" from Senlin), because no matter how many other poems they wrote, people tend to know only that one. That's not actually the overall point of the essay, but it's a passage that I thought was interesting and applicable here. Tichborne is kind of an oddity in that as far as we know, he literally wrote only one poem, and that under duress. I think he's more the exception than the rule here --- though I'm open to correction on this (and any other) point.
My first exposure to poetry was via the New Criticism movement, and to tell you the truth I think it contributed to my hatred of poetry. And this could be due to my personality because I am a people-person in a true sense (as you may have picked up from knowing me). The way a person like me loves poems is through the people. I like and appreciate poems just fine, but I have noticed that the ones that I memorize are the ones where I know something about the poet. Jane Kenyon, for example. To know how young she died and how much she suffered from depression and cancer had given me a reason to remember her--that her wisdom was earned the hard way. The same with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anna Akhmatova.
These are the poems I memorize; they become a part of me and they in turn shape the way I view the world -- creating a moral ecology. Poetry is an effective way of preserving culture, if it is easy enough to remember (the eschewing of form makes this much more difficult nowadays). I am sure that this is a flaw in me, a person who was a struggling student who could not sit still and hated the classroom with a burning passion, that all I wanted was to know people and not ideas, so to that effect my tribe of like-learners are mostly motivated through fellowship, relationship, and trust in a mentor-friend. And It hink this is where your Substack is so wonderful. The scholarship you and Jody bring a context for those like me. The ones who would not otherwise be inclined to like poetry.
I can understand that. If your introduction to poetry is as a thing to analyze, then that's not going to make poetry seem very congenial. I was one of those lucky people whose parents read poetry to us (including but not limited to the Oompa-Loompa songs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which my dad read with obvious relish, as well as a good sense of meter), and who read a lot of poetry in school (we copied poems for every conceivable holiday in elementary school) before ever encountering it as something to study.
So to me, to read a poem closely and observe what was actually happening in the language --- all the ways that the language was its own drama --- was like an enormous light going on in my head (and I hated school, and was bad at it, so did not have those moments often). But if I hadn't already had a lot of poetry under my skin, and if it had presented itself to me first as one more thing to fail at, I would have turned my back.
I still remember our senior English teacher's setting us, as a class, a surprise essay on Sylvia Plath's "You're," a poem I love to this day. Nobody had ever seen it before. I didn't know the first thing about Sylvia Plath. But halfway through my reading of the poem the particulars added up in my mind, because I was paying attention to them, and I knew what the poem was talking about --- I still remember that moment with clarity, and aside from the poem's own merits, I'm sure that's why I still love it! Which is to say that the experience of not failing is a very potent one.
I wonder if Tichborne’s wife disseminated this poem and how. Would it not have been dangerous to have a document from a traitor or to circulate one.
I imagine it would have been dangerous, though also perhaps less so, and more expected, for a wife to have a letter from her husband, not necessarily containing anything seditious beyond his own grief. Recusants circulated all kinds of underground documents, from hidden presses ---- Robert Southwell's prose works were making the rounds from hand to hand at precisely this time, for example. Incidentally, it was a relative of the Babingtons, Anne Bellamy, who betrayed Southwell to the Queen's chief pursuivant, Richard Topcliffe, who apparently had raped her and then used the shame of her resulting pregnancy as leverage to get her to tell him who the strange young gentleman in her father's house really was.
I don't know offhand, and willl have to find out, exactly when Tichborne's poem surfaced --- whether it was during his wife's lifetime or much later. I wish I'd thought to ask myself that while I was writing this piece!
Or, well, I'm off with Southwell's timeline --- he had only just arrived in England as a Jesuit the year Tichborne was executed, so his active years are 1586-1592. But people did risk printing his letters and essays and handing them around. I think the authorities would have been more concerned with that kind of evidence of an anti-English Jesuit conspiracy than with a condemned man's private letter --- fortunately for us!
Another poem I haven't seen in a long while. Thank you for such excellent commentary on it, Sally. The poem has what I'd call, from Yeats, a "terrible beauty" -- it is as poetry truly beautiful, but it is about a terrible tragedy of life lost so young. Each line's paradox repays thoughtful meditation on life and death.
I wonder if one-hits are more likely to come from the young? Whether there is a disregard to risk, an inclination to novelty?
I am also wondering about how poetry affects us more when we know the background of the poet. There are schools of thought that state that a poem ought to stand on its own. And I believe that there is something to knowing the beating heart and trembling hand that composed any line. Especially in the age of AI which will soon be able to mimic our greatest compositions, I think that biography will rise in importance when analyzing any art in this day and age.
I was very much schooled in the New Criticism in high school, and certainly to do a close reading of a poem doesn't depend on knowing the poet's biography or the historical context. Rather the opposite, I think the New Critics would say. But as much as I love close readings of poems, I also think biography is interesting --- especially in a case like this. Poems do come from living people, as you say, and belong to their historical contexts (at least to a certain extent), even though a good poem by definition stands on its own and doesn't simply explain something about the poet.
In that essay, Brad Leithauser is really talking mostly about poets who *might as well* have written only one poem (e.g. Conrad Aiken and "Morning Song" from Senlin), because no matter how many other poems they wrote, people tend to know only that one. That's not actually the overall point of the essay, but it's a passage that I thought was interesting and applicable here. Tichborne is kind of an oddity in that as far as we know, he literally wrote only one poem, and that under duress. I think he's more the exception than the rule here --- though I'm open to correction on this (and any other) point.
My first exposure to poetry was via the New Criticism movement, and to tell you the truth I think it contributed to my hatred of poetry. And this could be due to my personality because I am a people-person in a true sense (as you may have picked up from knowing me). The way a person like me loves poems is through the people. I like and appreciate poems just fine, but I have noticed that the ones that I memorize are the ones where I know something about the poet. Jane Kenyon, for example. To know how young she died and how much she suffered from depression and cancer had given me a reason to remember her--that her wisdom was earned the hard way. The same with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anna Akhmatova.
These are the poems I memorize; they become a part of me and they in turn shape the way I view the world -- creating a moral ecology. Poetry is an effective way of preserving culture, if it is easy enough to remember (the eschewing of form makes this much more difficult nowadays). I am sure that this is a flaw in me, a person who was a struggling student who could not sit still and hated the classroom with a burning passion, that all I wanted was to know people and not ideas, so to that effect my tribe of like-learners are mostly motivated through fellowship, relationship, and trust in a mentor-friend. And It hink this is where your Substack is so wonderful. The scholarship you and Jody bring a context for those like me. The ones who would not otherwise be inclined to like poetry.
I can understand that. If your introduction to poetry is as a thing to analyze, then that's not going to make poetry seem very congenial. I was one of those lucky people whose parents read poetry to us (including but not limited to the Oompa-Loompa songs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which my dad read with obvious relish, as well as a good sense of meter), and who read a lot of poetry in school (we copied poems for every conceivable holiday in elementary school) before ever encountering it as something to study.
So to me, to read a poem closely and observe what was actually happening in the language --- all the ways that the language was its own drama --- was like an enormous light going on in my head (and I hated school, and was bad at it, so did not have those moments often). But if I hadn't already had a lot of poetry under my skin, and if it had presented itself to me first as one more thing to fail at, I would have turned my back.
I still remember our senior English teacher's setting us, as a class, a surprise essay on Sylvia Plath's "You're," a poem I love to this day. Nobody had ever seen it before. I didn't know the first thing about Sylvia Plath. But halfway through my reading of the poem the particulars added up in my mind, because I was paying attention to them, and I knew what the poem was talking about --- I still remember that moment with clarity, and aside from the poem's own merits, I'm sure that's why I still love it! Which is to say that the experience of not failing is a very potent one.