Good morning. The American Interest has published a recently discovered letter from Czeslaw Milosz: “Philosophically, Milosz takes issue and expresses deep worries regarding the leftist radicalism of the students’ counterculture as well as the conservatism of the Polish Roman Catholic Church. In other words, he remains skeptical of ideological certainties, be they of the left or the right. Morally, the letter is a warning and a cri de coeur regarding what he sees as civilizational decline in the West.”

A new translation of selected Tolstoy stories gives them “new life,” writes Bob Blaisdell.

Antonia Quirke reviews a three-part BBC radio series on the life and work of William Wordsworth: “So incredibly dense and atmospheric was a three-part series about Wordsworth (marking the 250th anniversary of his birth), it almost felt as though it had been minutely storyboarded, like a movie. Locations, brilliant little scenes, Professor Jonathan Bate telling the story of the poet’s life while  Simon Russell Beale read the poems. It didn’t matter a jot that Beale’s voice doesn’t have Wordsworth’s ‘strong tincture of the northern burr’ . . . The sound effects were marvellous.”

Brian Vickers writes that the variorum edition of John Donne’s Satyres, Verse Letters, and Songs and Sonnets is “the most innovative modern presentation of a Renaissance poet, setting new standards for an edition from manuscript source.”

How will the fire at Apollo Masters affect vinyl records? “Owners of a manufacturing plant and a closely held formula for making and mounting a specific mix of lacquer onto aluminum discs, the company supplies a reported 75% of the world’s blank lacquers, the shiny circular plates essential for the production of vinyl records.”

The disappearing art of fishing like Vikings: “Though the Vikings decided that the erratic Solway required its own specific fishing method, no one quite knows why they landed on haafing . . .  it’s not particularly efficient or effective.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Claremont Review of Books, Algis Valiunas revisits the poetry and politics of Percy Bysse Shelley:

“His poetic gift was protean. Renowned above all for his flights of lyric sublimity, he could be as ravishingly melancholy as John Keats and as tenderly exultant as William Wordsworth. This is the Shelley commonly studied today, the author of ‘To a Skylark,’ ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ and ‘When the Lamp Is Shattered.’

“Yet his verse could be flagrantly unlovely in the service of his political hatreds, which were many and fierce. He raged like William Blake, with a similar caustic terseness, about the lack of justice and simple decency in society’s highest reaches and lowest depths. And like Blake he believed that the foulness of the highest was responsible for the foulness of the lowest. Priests, kings, and government ministers Shelley flayed, hanged, and quartered on general principle. Certain fellow poets he summarily executed for specific spiritual crimes against humanity. He was unable to forgive Wordsworth and Coleridge for their abandoning all democratic hope in the face of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the bloody rise and fall of Napoleon, and the Bourbon Restoration. This baleful, sardonic aspect to Shelley’s nature, however, never extinguished his confidence in human perfectibility.

“His political sentiments—savage indignation on one end and millenarian hope on the other—eventually bent toward prudent, gradual reform; and toward the end of his life he became reasonable about politics. It was as an incendiary, however, that he was known during his lifetime. He was so notorious that persons protective of their honor thought it best not to know of him at all. As his invaluable biographer Richard Holmes laments in Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), ‘At the time of his death his reputation was almost literally unspeakable in England, an object to be torn apart between the conservative and radical reviews, but not on the whole to be mentioned in polite London society.’”

Read the rest.

Photos: Vermont

Poem: Amit Majmudar, “Mirror Work”

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.