Image from here.

A stream of melancholy and dissatisfaction winds through Edward Thomas’ verse, seeking an ocean it can never quite find. Most of his poems are personal observations about the English country-side, containing a ‘wry whimsicality’, as R.S. Thomas puts it in his introduction to Faber’s Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, ‘the longing to make the glimpsed good place permanent.’ He had a taste for solitude and the watching of flora and fauna. His prose rhythms and plain language "offered a break-though from the dead end of Georgian verse, and still are a salutary corrective of florid or banal writing." He was, says R.S. ‘interested in giving expression to the loves and doubts and fears that possessed him’ and at the same time, ‘the tenuous yet dear features of English country life, together with the more permanent moodiness of nature herself.’

 Here’s one of my favourites, typical of how war and countryside are wed together:      

The Sun used to Shine

The sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted

Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
We turned from men or poetry

To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined:

Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge: or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth

In sunless Hades fields. The war
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes

Could as well imagine the Crusades
Or Caesar’s battles. Everything
To faintness like those rumours fades ­
Like the brook’s water glittering

Under the moonlight ­ like those walks
Now ­ like us two that took them, and
The fallen apples, all the talks
And silences ­ like memory’s sand

When the tide covers it late or soon,
And other men through other flowers
In those fields under the same moon
Go talking and have easy hours.

 Edward Thomas enlisted in 1915, and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

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John Burlinson

I here concur by offering up Helen’s take on the matter. Writing of her uncertainty about the central conception of Donne’s poem ‘Air and Angels’, she says:

"Here I cry out for some dates. If I could date this poem, and date Donne’s other lyrics, I might be able to support one or other reading by reference to the poems which Donne was writing at about the same time. Or if I knew how old he was when he wrote it and whether he wrote it to any particular person, I might use this information to argue that this or that reading is the more likely in the circumstances in which the poem was written. Or if we had Donne’s notebooks and could see from drafts how he had begun and worked at the poem, we might find a clue. If we saw how the poem began we might feel more certainty about the intention of the poet. For it is the poet’s intention which is not clear in the poem. For that reason I have to decide that it is not a wholly successful poem. The amount of ink that has been spent on its twenty-eight lines suggest that it has had at any rate many unsuccessful readers, of whom I am one."

"I take this poem because my sense of failure with it tells me what I mean by success as a critic: the recognition of the poem’s intention, which leaves me free to enjoy the poem. If this is to be guilty of ‘the intentionalist heresy’ I am quite content to be excommunicated for it. A poem is not whatever I choose to make of it. It is something which its author made with deliberation, choosing that it should say this and not that….The power to recognize this conception, which is the source of the poem’s life in all its parts, and to read the poem in its light, is what I mean by true judgement in a critic."

Meir Shalev, (pictured above with his sister) one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists,was born in 1948 in Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav. He is a bestselling author in Israel, Holland, and Germany; and he has been translated into more than twenty languages. His novels include A Pigeon and a Boy, Fontanelle, Alone In the Desert, But A Few Days, and Esau. Russian Romance (The Blue Mountain) is one of the top five bestsellers in Israeli publishing history. Shalev is often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Prizes he has won include the Juliet Club Prize (Italy); The Chiavari (Italy); and The Brenner Prize of 2006—the highest Israeli literary recognition awarded for his novel, A Pigeon and a Boy, published in the US by Random House in 2007.

I met Meir at The Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal recently. We talk here about, among other things, television, satire, The Daily Show, great sentences, labels, Gogol, gardening and farming.

Please listen here:

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It was Marjorie Garber who turned me on to the Cranach Hamlet. She holds it particularly close to her heart, and knows it intimately, as evidenced by the lecture I attended recently at Carleton University in which she shared knowledge both of the book itself and of the players and intrigue which surrounds it. 

In  A Tale of Three Hamlets: or, Repetition and Revenge Garber knitted together – in a way that a book and literature lover truly admired – knowledge not only of the text but of the physical object too; research on the illustrator and feuds between editors; observations on the ‘detective story’ genre and Hamlet’s connection to real-life espionage in the 1930s and 1040s, and  Michael Innis’s novel "Hamlet, Revenge!"  All told, a multi-faceted presentation of real interest and value to bibliophiles and literary scholars alike.

Illustrator Edward Gordon Craig, for example, was son to famed actress Ellen Terry whose early divorce may well have lent an Oedipal structure to Craig’s life.

Treason, double agency, counter-espionage, cryptology, code breaking…all are linked to the study of Shakespeare. Hamlet is a detective. So too are bibliographers, many of whom were called upon during the world wars to help counter German intelligence.

Update: After yesterdays Cranach Hamlet post, I received an email from Caroline Brass, who informed me that the book had just been sold at the London International Book Fair, ‘to a very appreciative client.’ ‘ It’s nice,’ she said, “ to think that there are collectors out there still willing to spend money on books, even in these uncertain economic times.”

Caroline also directed my attention to a Youtube channel, where David Brass Rare Books will be featuring books that ‘we think the public might be interested in.’ Link to the page is: http://www.youtube.com/davidbrassrarebooks

I in turn directed Caroline to these audio interviews with rare book and author archive dealers Robert Rulon Miller, and John Wronoski.

Lovingly described by its seller David Brass Rare Books, as follows (this is poetry!):

Weimar: printed by Count Harry Kessler at the Cranach Press, 1930. A Landmark in the History of Twentieth-Century Book Design and Printing"A Flawless Monument" With an Illustration Proof signed by Edward Gordon Craig [CRANACH PRESS]. SHAKESPEARE, William. CRAIG, Edward Gordon, [illustrator]. GILL, Eric, [title by]. The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. Edited by J. Dover Wilson Litt. D. from the text of the Second Quarto printed in 1604-5 ‘According to the True and Perfect Coppie’. With which are also printed The Hamlet Stories from Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest and English translations therefrom. Illustrated by Edward Gordon Craig. Weimar: printed by Count Harry Kessler at the Cranach Press, 1930.One of 300 numbered copies on handmade hemp fibre and linen Maillol / Kessler paper (from a total edition of 322 copies), this being copy number sixty-two. Printed in 10, 12, and 18 point black letter, designed by Edward Johnston after that used by Fust and Schoeffer in their Mainz Psalter of 1457. Folio. (14 x 9.5 inches; 355 x 240 mm.). [vi, blank], [1-3] 4-186, [1, blank; 1, colophon, 2 blank] pp. With eighty wood-cuts and wood-engravings by Gordon Craig, of which seventy-eight are printed in black and two are printed in black and color. Wood-cut on title by Eric Gill.In the publisher’s original quarter vellum over beige paper boards, lettered in gilt on the spine [WILLIAM / SHAKESPEARE / THE / TRAGEDIE OF / HAMLET / ILLUSTRATED / BY / E.G. CRAIG / CRANACH / PRESS / MDCCCCXXX] and on the front board [HAMLET]. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed. With the publisher’s thirty-five page supplemental ‘Notes’ [separately sewn] laid into a rear pocket as issued. In the publisher’s original paper board slipcase with holograph title [HAMLET] in ink on the spine. An exceptionally fine copy, bright and clean in the publisher’s original binding and box (slipcase a bit faded and edge worn)."Together with the Maillol Virgil, this is one of the most ambitious and successful books of the Cranach Press, with a fine harmony between the type page and the illustration. A German edition in 1929 preceded this English version. Craig worked over a period of seventeen years on the wood-cuts, developing them from designs originated for his production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912." —The Artist & the Book 1860-1960, page 52."Because of the international nature of its work, the employment of British and French as well as German artists, and the production of several of its books in French and english editions, The Cranach Presse has received more atention in the English-speaking world than any other German private press. Eclogues, Hamlet, and Canticum Canticorum these three books were superb. No greater compliment could have been paid Hamlet than [famed German master printer] C.E. Poeschl’s statement to Kessler that he had a sleepless night over it, so excited had he been by the work Kessler’s undertaking was in the grand tradition in which neither time nor cost was important" (Franklin, The Private Presses, 2d ed., p. 147)."Anybody who examines the Cranch Press Hamlet must agree that it is worthy of its reputation. The paper, superficially like Bachelor’s Kelmscott, seems softer and more friendly, appropriate for the expressionist style of Craig’s woodcuts. It is an expressionist book Sometimes the woodcuts appear like suggestions for sets and costume. Sometimes they enter the page in a kind of stage setting of type, as the sources for Shakespeare make their way round the edges of the type area as a frame for the text. Red headlines and captions relieve the the severity of vision. The wood grain, the shadows from varied depths of engraving, bring valuable informality to a formidable scheme. These designs form the bravest adventure among all private press books this book is a flawless monument" (Franklin, Private Presses, 1ed., p. 164).With a Cranach Press advertising leaf announcing this present volume laid in.The Artist & the Book 1860-1960. 66. [together with]A Signed Illustration Proof from Hamlet by Edw. Bookseller Inventory # 01436

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