WRB—May 14, 2025

“deafening accompaniment”

Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are Washingtonians, that we are Managing Editors. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Hannah Zeavin on poets and psychoanalysis:

  We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets, whether as patients or otherwise. Elsewhere, psychoanalysis has been found guilty of plundering the poets: we see evidence in the field’s overreliance on Keats’ negative capability, and on Shakespearean drama as illustration of Oedipal conflict. The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis.

  What we have looked at less is whether poets love analysis, being analyzed, what use they make of it. On the one hand, we know poets—artists generally—tend to be afraid of the cure. Sublimation must hold. My friend Joshua Clover recently said to me, “We all know that the poems get worse after analysis, Hannah.” Suffice it to say, he has not been analyzed, and his work remains excellent. On the other hand, sometimes poets seek treatment precisely because they can’t even make their art anymore—anecdotally, from the archive: they’re too depressed or drinking too much—so they might as well get free of the thing that spurs them to sublimation, given that sublimation is now impossible.

  [I think the claims on Keats and Shakespeare are the result of a field that has always been touchy about its legitimacy taking full advantage of the ability to associate with names like that. As arguments go, one of the better ones is “the thing I am talking about is in Hamlet. It’s extremely obvious. Are you going to deny that it’s there?” —Steve]

• In Air/Light, Alina Stefanescu on Paul Celan’s letters:

  For Paul, poetic time is marked by its date and shaped by the encounter it anticipates. Time and again, Paul looks for patterns in numbers and texts, and shares his divinations with Gisele. He amplifies birthdays and anniversaries, delights in noting coinciding events, and derives significance from those numerical coincidences. The number twenty-three, for example, defines his existence: his birth date matched the date of his marriage to Gisele. Every twenty-three held traces of his life mingling with hers. This habit of making calendars to memorialize sacred dates preceded Gisele’s presence in Paul’s life.

  There is July 14th, for example, the date in 1938 when Paul arrived in Paris on a train from Vienna, fleeing the fascist regime in Romania. He returned to this date twelve years later, in a poem written on July 14th of 1950. He titled the poem as “Twelve Years.” Hitler’s Nazi regime lasted twelve years. The poem knows the name and the date. The poem re-members. The poem rises from the uncanny and often painful coincidences.

  • Eliot:

    For I have known them all already, known them all:

    Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

    I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

    I know the voices dying with a dying fall

    Beneath the music from a farther room.

    So how should I presume?

  • Robert W. Service:

    A Calendar’s a gayful thing

    To grace a room;

    And though with joy of life I sing,

    With secret gloom

    I add this merry month of May

    To eighty past,

    Thinking each page I tear away

    May be my last.

• Two in Prospect; first,

  John Harris
  on his son, autism, and Kraftwerk:

  The post also included observations of Hütter and his creative partner Florian Schneider’s supposed habits and behaviors—not anything as crass as an amateur diagnosis of autism, but rather an attempt to detect what psychologists call a “cognitive style.” Like Schneider (who left Kraftwerk in 2009 and died in 2020, aged 73), Hütter is famously reserved and taciturn. Apocryphal stories about the band have long centered on their reclusiveness and fondness for routine. Hütter and Schneider also seem to have shared an aversion to unwanted noise: on tours of the United States, they would carry scissors to cut the wires that piped muzak into lifts. “We want to listen to the elevator,” Hütter explained. “It’s more interesting to listen to the sound of the elevator—zwiiiiit, pwhrrr!—than to some muzak, which is sound pollution.”

  [There is a funny story of Kraftwerk listening to trains as part of making Trans-Europe Express (1977), deciding that the sound of a train was not danceable, and modifying it slightly so it was. It is also funny that this was part of the creation of a defining artistic statement of postwar European unity. (We can only wonder how Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy would have turned out if he had been able to listen to trains.) —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• In defense of Catherine Morland’s ability to read, and against Henry Tilney’s

• C. V. Wedgwood’s book about the Thirty Years’ War and the culture of the Germans

• Grace on a Poem by Robert Burns and the ladies

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the newsletter with a friend. —Steve]