Perhaps by MICHAEL GLOVER [Bow-Wow Shop] – The American poet and critic Stanley Burnshaw once wisely remarked: ‘Death transforms the poet into his true self’. After death the work remains ‘henceforth untouchable’. We agree with Burnshaw, heartily. We also think that he didn’t quite spell it out in the fullness that it deserved, this profound truth that he was telling.

The true glory is that after death there is an absolute division, an unbridgeable gulf, between the man who grunts and snivels and prevaricates and procrastinates, and the writer who prophesies. The sheer, disabling embarrassment of the fact of being alive is no longer present to torment us all, to shrink that prophet to a laughable parody of himself. Think of Auden, for example, and what an embarrassing nuisance he was back at Christ Church, Oxford, in old age. The fact of his person did his reputation no good at all. Or – worse still – how intolerable Rilke would have seemed to us if we had actually known him, if we had actually been obliged to witness him, in those heavy suits of his, at the height of summer, leaning on the arm of one of those many fierce, aristocratic female minders. In part we love Rilke so much because we never heard his voice or saw him walk. Perhaps he had legs as ridiculously inelegant as Wordsworth’s, that ridiculous prig. De Quincey saw those wishbone legs. That’s why we remember them. Pity he wasn’t turned the other way.

But imagine how much less favourably disposed we would be to Rilke’s ridiculous degree of self absorption if we had recordings of him reading in a high, reedy voice, so pleased to be in the presence of his own unforgettable, unstoppable, unputdownable genius. We say all this in a spirit of reckless ignorance, of course. There may perhaps be recordings of Rilke reading his poems that have survived. And you, dear reader, may be about to alert us to that fact. One word of warning: please don’t.

Continued at The Bow Wow Shop | More Chronicle & Notices.