Good morning. How about that friendship between Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, and . . . Walter de la Mare? “Robert Frost (1874–1963) and Edward Thomas (1878–1917) are the Pound and Eliot of regular verse, twentieth-century poets who, by tearing off the fustian and listening to how people actually speak, showed how “making it new” need have nothing to do with modernism. And while Frost is much the better known, few rival Thomas as a poets’ poet—the many who have paid tribute to his work include W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott . . . Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) has for many decades been a name more on the lips of grade school teachers than in the work of critics, but Frost’s claim of ‘greatest of living poets’ was sincere. In December 1913, Frost wrote to John T. Bartlett that de la Mare was ‘the one man we are all agreed to praise here. His “The Listeners” is the best poem since the century came in.’ Thomas joined in the praise: he was to tell the author Eleanor Farjeon that, of the hundreds of books he reviewed over the years, ‘Frost’s North of Boston and de la Mare’s Peacock Pie were the only pure gold [he] ever unearthed.’”

Stephanie Gorton writes about the days when magazines not only entertained but aspired to change everyday lives: “In 1895 Ladies’ Home Journal began to offer unfrilly, family-friendly architectural plans in its pages. They were mainly colonial, Craftsman, or modern ranch-style houses, and many still stand today. The Cosmopolitan, as it was then known, advertised the Cosmopolitan University, a custom-designed college degree—for free!—by correspondence course. McClure’s magazine, the juggernaut of investigative journalism—home to Ida Tarbell’s landmark investigation of Standard Oil, among many other muckraking articles of the Gilded Age—began to plot an array of ventures, including a model town called McClure’s Ideal Settlement.

How will the coronavirus change music? VAN magazine has a list of 19 things.

Matthew Walther revisits Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: “I find myself wanting to claim that Twenty Thousand Leagues is not one of those “good bad books” that we enjoy in spite of its style and other formal qualities. (It is worth remembering that Sand, Gautier, and Barthes numbered among Verne’s greatest admirers.) One can think of few novels mainly associated with children in which more passages of purely descriptive interest abound. Calling these “purple patches” would be an understatement. When Verne wants to tell us what something looks like he makes sure that he has at least half a page of unoccupied beach in front of him and builds castles out of novelty rainbow-colored sand that would have had Nabokov (another great fan) reaching enviously for his thesaurus. Part of the delight of revisiting this book is the chance to luxuriate in the sheer beauty of words whose definitions are mostly unknown to me.”

How a pigment invented by the ancient Egyptians is being used in biomedical research. “Egyptian Blue is one of the oldest manmade pigments. More than 4,000 years ago the Ancient Egyptians used it on tombs and on statues, including the crown of the famous limestone bust of Nefertiti, which is today in Berlin’s Neues Museum. A researcher at the University of Göttingen, Sebastian Kruss, has used the pigment, which is also known as calcium copper silicate, to produce a new nanomaterial that improves infrared spectroscopic and microscopic imaging.”

“When six of her 12 children went mad, Mimi Galvin did her best to make to light of it.” Andrew Scull reviews Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

Essay of the Day:

In Harper’s, Ishion Hutchinson writes about visiting the rock churches of Lalibela:

“As the van from the small airport climbed the rough-terraced mountain and the sky came close again, the driver asked what had brought me to Lalibela.

“I didn’t know what to tell him. I wasn’t a pilgrim, but nor was I strictly a tourist, like the tens of thousands of people who come each year to see the rock-hewn churches in the North Wallo zone of Ethiopia’s Amhara region. I wasn’t sure what I was. Saying ‘To see paradise, my childhood homeland, but not really, because . . . ’ was too complicated, would have sounded dumb, so I said something reasonable and kept quiet for the rest of the drive.

“But paradise was why I had come. The idea of paradise, something whole yet imperfect that I’ve understood all my life only in terms of loss. With nothing but this idea, the memory of an idea—this sense of Eden gone—I had departed Addis Ababa in search of a fiction spoken of in my childhood in Jamaica, in search of that fiction and its double, history.

“I was raised in a Rastafarian family in the countryside, hours away by winding road from Kingston, a place that even in the Eighties folks still simply called ‘town.’ Throughout my boyhood in Portland and St. Thomas parishes, on the cane and banana farms that entrapped imaginations on the eastern coast, Ethiopia existed as the future fulfillment of our tragic slave past.

“To the rest of the world, Rastas may seem to be black hippies: long-haired vegans practicing free love, always stoned. In reality, Rasta is a complex religion in which the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is not a god but God. Desperate were the conditions in the aftermath of enslavement in Jamaica, and neither the Western Christian churches nor the remembered West African religions seemed quite to fit the facts on the ground. We wanted a black god, but we also wanted him to be Christian.

‘Jamaica is literally hell for the black man, just as Ethiopia is literally heaven,’ was a common expression I heard as a boy. ‘Ethiopia awaits his creators,’ the Rastafarian elders said also, almost to themselves. The word ‘Lalibela’ was like the threshold of heaven when it was pronounced.

“If I took the elders’ sayings for prophecy, I never envisioned actual travel. No one I knew as a child had ever been to Ethiopia. There was a guy who’d gone to England, and his nickname was thus Ivor British. Later, in high school, and more fervently in the upper grades, I was taught that our forebears originated not in Ethiopia but in West Africa. This struck a cardinal blow to the idea of terrestrial paradise invoked daily: our ancestral claim was absurd; an entire life philosophy had been compromised.

“The knowledge did not diminish, though, the private awe of what I had heard as a boy. The rosary of Ethiopian place names chanted—Axum, Gondar, Shashamane—fixed itself in me as a truth deeper than fact, and that eternally beautiful word, Lalibela, settled and grew into something unreal in my mind, a distant planet, vague as snow to me who had never seen snow. I had, from early on, a scriptural, milk-and-honey impression of the place: a potent but indefinite sense of geographical mass. There the link between people and place was unbroken—a fact that at once divided me from and brought me closer to its enigmatic center. Then I arrived, and instantly the wonder took on real divine proportion.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Loch Lomond

Poem: A. M. Juster, “Behold”

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