The “I am ridiculous” factor
Because I’m trying to get back into writing regularly again… Terry Teachout has started a parlor game proposed by a friend:
What great artists (or famous people) could, and
couldn’t, say the sentence “I am ridiculous”? Washington no, Lincoln
yes. Milton no, Shakespeare yes.
I’ll bite. This is the all (pre-20th century) poets, all the time edition:
Edmund Spenser no, Sir Philip Sidney yes
Aemilia Lanyer no (with a question mark), Ben Jonson yes
George Herbert perhaps no, John Donne yes
John Milton no, Andrew Marvell yes
John Dryden no, Aphra Behn yes
Alexander Pope yes, Jonathan Swift very definitely yes
William Wordsworth no, Lord Byron yes
Percy Shelley no, John Keats yes
Alfred, Lord Tennyson no, Robert Browning yes
Emily Brontë no, Christina Rossetti yes
Jury’s out on Blake and Coleridge. I think the Pre-Raphaelites are a collective "no." It’s interesting how little of one’s response has to do with specific works. (Although that one line about "my mountain belly, and my rocky face" has a lot to do with why I would put Ben Jonson into the "yes" column.)
I just stumbled upon your lovely blog, but I must say, it’s absolutely a great game.
It’s interesting that you kept off the 20th century, because I think the only modernist who wouldn’t is Nabokov.
What about Blake’s “An Island in the Moon”? That tips him over the edge into the ‘yes’ column to me.
Shelley was getting there, I think. He’s the only English poet whose early death I really regret. Most of them would only have gone on to forty years of writing bad imitations of themselves, like Wordsworth, but I think Shelley was actually on the verge of finding a sense of humor.
Here’s some other fence-sitters: how about George Eliot? William Faulkner? Gertrude Stein?
I wouldn’t hesitate at all though about Coleridge. Definitely capable of “I’m ridiculous!”
Browning I’d put definitely in the “no” column, but my antipathy to him makes me a bad judge 🙂
[heads for PR4141 call number range, looks up Complete Works of Blake] Heh. You’re right.
Stein’s a yes. Faulkner I’d say no, though I don’t trust my own judgment, having been made to read The Sound and the Fury at probably the wrong age and having never wanted to read Faulkner again after that.
Actually, when I think of modernists who’d be in the “no” column, T. S. Eliot springs to mind…
Concur with the “no” on Lanyer and echo Dale’s “yes” on Coleridge. Jonson sold his work and I think for that period qualifies him for the “yes” column. I say “no” on Faulkner.
Good game, Amanda! I’d reproduce it but I think you got all the good ones. 🙂