One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. In an essay alleging to assess the Elizabethan dramatist Philip Massinger, he wrote: Eliot more than a half-century prior to its publication. It will be instructive to approach the poem in light of a few words tipped out from the pen of T. What we can say with assurance is that it is essentially a tardy endeavor in literary modernism.
Why the poem does this and what it is exactly are yet to be seen. A species of the found poem, Radi os (which spells a partial erasure of Milton’s Pa radise L ost) follows the same ascetic course toward spiritual enlightenment practiced by self-deniers everywhere. Left unfinished at the time of his death in 1998, the poem, a subtractive poem, a poem that is practically unknown today, persists as a high point in the thrilling history of American poetry. In 1977, Year of the Chia Pet, the American poet Ronald Johnson published the first four books of a long poem entitled Radi os. Michel de Montaigne, a member of the ruling class, had something like this in mind when, time and again, he confessed a fondness for the company of peasants, and Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness made a map of this sentiment in the cosmic-comic novel Under the Glacier, in which he describes paint peeling off a parsonage wall in layers of surprising and colorful succession.
There is nothing to be added to our lives, but much of which to let go, to unlearn, to release. Confused and frightened-soon he’ll be furious-he turns just in time to watch his son pitch himself, headlong and happily, almost feverishly, into an Umbrian snowbank.Įach vision remains a powerful metaphor for the proposition that all spiritual growth is subtractive. His father, a well-to-do silk merchant, is near at hand, gawking at the rich garments his son has cast by the wayside. Now a needle’s eye: figure the likelihood of passing through it.įinally, conjure up a mental image (olive skin, kind eyes, scant beard gaunt face and fishbone chest) of Francis of Assisi, stripped to his loincloth. Imagine the challenge of traversing its terrible narrowness without tumbling left or right.
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