The Western Canon

If I could choose only one poem from W. S. Merwin—by no means an easy task, for there are many exuberant poems to choose from—it would, nonetheless, be “Learning a Dead Language”; a poem which, on the whole, is as melancholic as it is—for the serious and deep reader—an inspiring read.

In these troubled times, when academics and readers alike are disavowing and, on the whole, neglecting our canon—for reasons I have made much of in previous issues—Merwin’s “Learning a Dead Language” comes across as a breath of fresh air.

Is the deep and serious reader dead? Has Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon” seen its day? It certainly, sadly, feels like it. Not only has the School of Resentment been a ruinous enterprise for literary criticism and for literature produced in the late twentieth and twenty‑first centuries, but now, with the advent of “artificial intelligence” and a variety of AI‑related tools (all of which I rather detest), the ancient art of memory and learning seems to have been all but forgotten, butchered—possibly beyond the irrecoverable.

Who is left to study with deep intention; to retain poems, novels, texts, languages, theories—who is left to defend aesthetic supremacy? Who will feed on the Whitmanic spectres in books? Who will look through the eyes of the dead?

The answer seems to me opaque, vague, uncertain—perhaps already lost, like a dream barely remembered.

We are some, however, who will persist, rallying against the radical, woke lemmings; defending and fighting tooth and nail, with, that is, our own intelligence, to keep the canon alive; and fight for aesthetic supremacy. It is nothing short of a duty to uphold the old deeds and the work ethic that was forged from the time of Plato through Dante to the Elizabethan grammar schools and the late(r) school of Dr Johnson, and continuing (but sadly degenerating) somewhere after the Second World War. It was then, very slowly—equally infectiously—that we saw our institutions and our curriculum become politicized; social ideologies and the suffocating wave of “political correctness”, “DEI” (which has infiltrated, scarily, modern day literature to the core, which is beyond me), and “wokeness” took over the academic institutions, replacing a deep canonical tradition with a hollow set of ideologies. Once again, I have made much of this in previous issues, see 1, 2, 3, and more.

Contrary to previous essays in which I have dissected poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Lowell, Wallace Stevens, among others, I will not plunge into W. S. Merwin’s poem through the lens of Bloomian analysis. Rather, I will let the poem speak for itself. The deep reader of our canon will no doubt find it a poem of both great sadness and great vitality—whereas I would hope, though I fear it is a vain task, that the modern reader might—just might—find revelation in lines such as:

“There is nothing for you to say. You must
Learn first to listen. Because it is dead
It will not come to you of itself, nor would you
Of yourself master it.”

Or,

“What you come to remember becomes yourself.”

Lines which, by and by, are in complete alignment with the Bloomian axiom, that we are what we remember—and therefore we must protect, nurture, cultivate, and equally solidify what is remembered. If what you read is subpar and aesthetically deficient, your “thinking” will echo much the same qualities. To Merwin’s point:

“What you remember saves you.”

Shelley realised this as he penetrated the aesthetic shell towards realising his own poetic project. A vicious reader, as well as a critic, Shelley found, like most great poets and authors, that we must wrestle deeply with our canon in order to belong in the canon. He wrote, fantastically,

“The function of the sublime is to persuade us to abandon easier for more difficult pleasures.”

A thinking of that order has been all but abandoned today, as what is, on the whole, consumed, even among learned institutions, is nothing but, or for the most part, inferior or politicised literature. In other words—reading good literature deepens aesthetic intimacy; likewise does the art of memorisation. I dare say, if I may visit the esoteric realm, in the spirit of critic Angus Fletcher, that aesthetic supremacy never stops moving. It is an oscillating, dynamic process by which we approach a centre we cannot touch, but only approach. Its movement is idiosyncratic and is honoured by being read, re-read, and, in effect, remembered. Merwin beautifully emphasises this,

“To remember
Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never
Has fallen silent.”

Let us then, together, lament, feast, and cheer over W.S. Merwin’s lovely poem:

Learning a Dead Language (1956)

There is nothing for you to say. You must
Learn first to listen. Because it is dead
It will not come to you of itself, nor would you
Of yourself master it. You must therefore
Learn to be still when it is imparted,
And, though you may not yet understand, to remember.

What you remember is saved. To understand
The least thing fully you would have to perceive
The whole grammar in all its accidence
And all its system, in the perfect singleness
Of intention it has because it is dead.
You can only learn a part at a time.

What you are given to remember
Has been saved from death’s dullness by 
Remembering. The unique intention
Of a language whose speech has died is order
Incomplete only where someone has forgotten.
You will find that that order helps you to remember.

What you come to remember becomes yourself.
Learning will be to cultivate the awareness
Of that governing order, now pure of the passions
It composed; till, seeking it in itself,
You may find at last the passion that composed it,
Hear it both in its speech and in yourself.

What you remember saves you. To remember
Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never
Has fallen silent. So your learning is,
From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself
Is memorable, what passion may be heard
When there is nothing for you to say.