Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selections while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 18 June 2013, author Domenica Ruta leads a discussion on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

What was your inspiration for this book?

The book I chose for the book club? Simple – I wanted fun but stimulating summer reading. A ghost story novella by James met the criteria perfectly.

Domenica Ruta. Photo by Meredith Zinner.

For my book? A lifetime of beauty and pain only makes sense to me after it has been distilled into sentences. I had to write this book in order to move on and write other things, like my novel.

Where do you do your best writing?

Honestly…in bed. I know it’s bad for every single muscle and joint in my body. I am going to make some osteopath a very rich man.

Which author do you wish had been your 7th grade English teacher?

My seventh grade English teacher was execrable. Almost anyone with basic literacy could have improved upon her so-called lessons. I like to imagine Joseph Campbell coming in to do guest lectures on mythology. Seventh graders are perfectly located in intellectual time to be transformed by something like that – one foot still in childhood, where magical stories still have power, and one foot in the complicated world of adulthood, where metaphors can be analyzed for greater meaning.

What is your secret talent?

I am pretty good at guessing what mix of breeds make up a mutt dog.

What is your favorite book?

I cannot, will not, answer that question. I love too many too much.

Who reads your first draft?

NO ONE! My first drafts are hideous, putrid, bloody, mangled beasts. It is immoral to expose anyone to something so ugly. My seventh or eight drafts go to my best friend and best reader, novelist/screenwriter Brian McGreevy.

Do you prefer writing on a computer or longhand?

I do both. Different energy fuels each process, and so there are times when longhand makes the most sense, and times when I need to type.

What book are you currently reading? (Old school or e-Reader?)

I am just finishing a brilliant little monograph by Marie-Louise Von Franz, a disciple of Jung, called The Cat, about this wonderful Romanian folk tale. Also reading Daniel Berrigan’s Ezekiel – a brilliant and disquieting alchemy of poetry, politics, biblical exegesis, rant, and rally. I’m also reading a forthcoming memoir by Nicole Kear called Now I See You. And of course re-reading Turn of the Screw.

What word or punctuation mark are you most guilty of overusing?

I refuse to limit myself in any way when I write. (Remember what I said about horrible first drafts?) I use any color on the palette I want. If it turns out ugly, I just delete it. Guilt is a waste of time.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

A figure skater. A veterinarian. A radical eco-activist. Ideally, all three.

Did you have an “a-ha!” moment that made you want to be a writer?

Read chapter four of my memoir for the answer to that.

Do you read your books after they’ve been published?

I just recently published my first book and I’m in no hurry to reread it.

Domenica Ruta was born and raised in Danvers, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Jentel, and Hedgebrook. Her memoir With or Without You was published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, in February.

Read previous interviews with Word for Word Book Club guest speakers.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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I once gave a general talk about ancient Mesopotamian gardens, and was astonished, when I prepared for it, to find that there was really no hard evidence for the Hanging Garden at Babylon, although all the other wonders of the ancient world certainly did exist. A member of the audience stood up and said how disappointed she was that I had not mentioned it. All the stories of the garden were written by Greek writers many centuries after the garden was supposedly built, so some scholars thought the accounts were fairy-tale fiction. That meant that the Hanging Garden didn’t fit the category of marvellous places you could visit. I could see that my audience was disappointed, and the problem lingered irritatingly in the back of my mind.

Some years later I was working on an inscription of the Assyrian king Sennacherib who ruled around 700 BC, at Nineveh not Babylon. It was edited in the 1920s, and one passage made nonsense in the translation.

With a further 70 years of scholarly work now available, including vastly better dictionaries, I have been able to show that the passage relates how Sennacherib cast screws in bronze for watering his terraced garden, some centuries before the time of Archimedes whose name is usually quoted as the inventor. The castings were huge. Sennacherib’s own inscriptions show that he was personally proud of his technical achievements in metal-casting, water management, and collecting exotic foreign plants. Sennacherib called his work a wonder for all peoples.

Because this was all so unusual and unexpected, I re-read the Greek accounts of the Hanging Garden. Strabo mentioned the use of the screw, and must have known that Archimedes lived long after the garden was supposedly made. Herodotus described Babylon, but did not mention the garden. Only one author, Josephus, actually named Nebuchadnezzar as the builder. Another wrote that an Assyrian king built it. Could it be that there were so many confusions, especially Nebuchadnezzar for Sennacherib, Babylon for Nineveh?

In the British Museum a panel of sculpture found at Nineveh had long been understood as a likely prototype for the Hanging Garden at Babylon. It was carved in the reign of Sennacherib’s grandson, and was thought to show Sennacherib’s garden when it had matured. It shows an aqueduct supplying water just as the Greek accounts said. The British Museum also has a 19th century drawing of a sculpture from Nineveh, now lost, which matched the most original detail in the Greek texts: there was a pillared walkway on the top terrace of the garden, thickly roofed, and trees were planted on top of that roof.

The aqueduct shown in the British Museum’s sculpture could not be traced by archaeologists at Nineveh, but could be traced further away in a watercourse that stretched back 80km into the mountains. Wonderful rock-cut panels with huge sculptures of the king Sennacherib and the gods of Assyria, as well as an inscription, revealed that the palace garden at Nineveh was only the end result of a staggering work of water engineering.

More than 300 years later, when Alexander the Great was preparing for the battle of Gaugamela in which he defeated the Persian king, he camped in the vicinity of a central part of Sennacherib’s watercourse where over two million dressed stones were used in an aqueduct crossing a valley. His scouts would have seen inscriptions and sculptures, and heard about the garden. Later Greek writers extracted their accounts of the Hanging Garden from Alexander’s companions whose writings no longer survive.

There may be much confusion surrounding the Hanging Garden, but it is clear that amazing technology created a magnificent garden and justifies its place among the original seven wonders of the world.

Stephanie Dalley is an Honorary Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and a member of the Oriental Institute at Wolfson College, Oxford. With degrees in Assyriology from the Universities of Cambridge and London, her academic career has specialized in the study of ancient cuneiform texts and she has worked on archaeological excavations in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. Her most recent book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, was published by OUP in 2013.

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It’s the summer of the superhero here at Oxford University Press. We’re publishing two essay collections on the real powers superheroes hold — on our imagination and our understanding of the world. Our Superheroes, Ourselves, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, and What is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD and Peter Coogan, PhD, look at some of our greatest superheroes (and supervillains) and explore what exactly makes them “super”. We immediately think of the superhuman powers that our heroes use to save the day. But then again, superpowers can be used for good or evil…

What do you want for your superpower and why? Just as the powers and abilities of Batman and Superman reveal their personal history, your choice reveals a great deal about yourself. So in the spirit of revealing the truth about our superheroes — and ourselves — we are holding an essay contest to find out exactly what you’re made of. Simply follow the guidelines below on submitting your essay and you could be wearing Oxford lycra before you know it (wearing Oxford lyrca = holding an Oxford book). Entries will be judged by Oxford University Press superhero staff experts (costumes optional; secret identities to be protected and all).

Submission guidelines:

• One entry per person. If multiple entries are submitted, only the first will be considered and you will incur the wrath of your greatest nemesis.
• Entries must be no longer than 500 words. Longer entries will be zapped or kapowed.
• Email your submission to blog[at]oup[dot]com by midnight US Eastern time on 14 July 2013. Entries received after that time will not be considered and swallowed by a time vortex.
• Subject must read “OUP Superhero essay contest-(title)” (e.g., OUP Superhero essay contest-Power of Flight)
• Body of the email must include the title of the essay and your full name and contact information (street address, email, phone)
• The essay must be included in an attached document that does not include your name to facilitate blind judging. Title of the attachment must be the title of your essay.
• Be clear about whether the superpower is for good or evil, or the interpretation will be at the mercy of the judges.
• By entering the competition, you agree to these Terms and Conditions.

What the judges are looking for?

• Proper grammar, spelling, and style. Never forget the Oxford comma!
• The craftsmanship of a hero who has come on a long journey to fully realize their powers.
• Imaginative detail and creativity in your writing utility belt.
• What the entry reveals about the everyday hero behind the mask.

What will you win?

• A free copy of Our Superheroes, Ourselves, What is a Superhero?, and Classics and Comics (one of each).
• Two tickets to 92nd Street Y Tribeca event “What is a Superhero?” on 24 July 2013 (normally $15/ticket).
• The winning essay(s) will be published on the OUPblog on 19 July 2013.
• We reserve the right not to award a prize if we feel the submissions do not meet our criteria.

Go now, Braniacs, Black Widows, and Batmen, and use your creative powers to submit a piece! The fate of the world depends on it.

Robin S. Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist. In addition to running a private practice, she writes about superheroes and the psychological phenomena their stories reveal. She is editor of Psychology of Superheroes, Our Superheroes, Ourselves, and What is a Superhero?.

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Image credit: Hugh Jackman X-Men Origins Wolverine gif, creative commons license via Perez Hilton.

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Suddenly, it seems, meditation is all the rage. Prestigious medical schools (Harvard, Duke, etc.) have whole departments devoted to “Integrative Medicine” in which meditation plays an essential part. Troubled teens are given a healthy dose of mindfulness and their behavior improves. Long-term prisoners in maximum security prisons have gone on ten day meditation retreats, sitting for 12 hours a day in a makeshift gymnasium ashram. There is meditation for alcoholics and heroin addicts and overworked corporate attorneys, for those facing death from untreatable illness and for those nearing the day when, with the grace of God or Nature or Luck, they will give birth. Studies have shown that meditation helps in medical conditions from depression to diabetes, psoriasis to high blood pressure to the side effects of cancer treatments.

How come?

Spiritually, meditation’s efficacy stems from the power of the mind to shape reality. From yoga’s two-thousand-year-old goal of “stilling the movements of the mind” to most any eclectic spiritual teacher of today, we are told that how we think is an essential constituent of the world we inhabit. Familiar examples of this truth are not hard to find. Think that a room full of strangers won’t like you, and you’ll most likely be withdrawn, suspicious, or a tad hostile, provoking a comparable response. Treat co-workers as if they deserve respect and kindness, and there’s a good chance you’ll get that back from them. Live in constant state of stress and you will burn out your immune system.

Even more, our values and beliefs color the entire fabric of existence. After all, if a pickpocket sees a saint all he sees are pockets. People for whom only success or wealth are important become blind to simple beauty, moments of tenderness, the ability to enjoy what they have instead of always wanting more. A glass is half empty or half-full not because of how much liquid is in it, but because of what we believe.

This all relates to meditation because meditation is a kind of yoga of the mind, doing for our consciousness what yoga postures do for our muscles and bones. With meditation we discover not only how much the mind shapes what we see in the world, but how much we ourselves can determine the mind’s contents. We realize that it is both crucially important and malleable. We can detach from it, examine it, decide what part makes sense and what doesn’t and act—or better think—accordingly.

The two main dimensions of meditation are awareness and focus. In the first, which is the core of the widely taught vipassanā or insight meditation that is a major component of integrative medicine, you simply sit comfortably and attend to your breath, allowing thoughts to come and go, learning to witness thought forms, bodily sensations, and emotional patterns. Extended practice of vipassanā can help us answer basic questions: What thoughts keep appearing, no matter what else is going on? How do we define the world for ourselves? How many of our thoughts really make sense and how many are simply unthinking, irrational, even destructive habits?

In my first extended experience of meditation I found myself in near agony sitting in a cross-legged position with strained my hips and aching knees. Being the Type AA personality I am, I kept myself in the position until the session ended. Then, with a blinding flash of insight (which any acquaintance could surely have told me!) I realized how much of my life was defined by setting goals, doing anything to meet them, and ignoring the unpleasant consequences to myself or (as the inevitable fatigue, irritation, or depression resulted) to others.

Perhaps the ultimate gift of simply watching one’s mind is the ability not—or not necessarily—to be moved by what one is thinking. Chronic anxiety, lasting grief, burning rage, even a maddening itch between the shoulder blades—all these can be witnessed, experienced, and understood without driving us to act. The constituent parts of emotions and sensation—where they arise, how long they last, whether they burn or throb, vacillate or stay the same—start to lose their power over us. Instead of doing something because we want a drink, are angry at our mothers, or are nervous about an upcoming test, we simply note the discomfort, study it, and let it pass. The result can be a precious inner calm, one that not only makes our experience a lot more pleasant but has manifold healing effects on our nervous system, glands, and soft tissues.

For most spiritual teachers it is a profound truth that, as Buddha taught: “Whatever harm an enemy may do to an enemy, or a hater to a hater, an ill-directed mind inflicts on oneself a greater harm.” Thus the second form of meditation — common in both religious tradition and contemporary, non-traditional spirituality — is focus: concentrating the mind on a thought or image, a desired virtue (kindness or humility), or a sacred figure (God or some inspiring teacher). Here “What kind of person do I want to be?” becomes for a time the question “What do I want to think about?” And so a Christian might meditate on an image of Jesus—a face of love and perfect forgiveness; or as He was blessing a repentant sinner. A Jew might take one line, or even one word, from a familiar prayer. Someone who finds the divine in nature might concentrate on the grace of a bird in flight, the healing powers of a forest, or the generosity of the web of life. A purely secular person could reflect on someone she particularly respects.

Through mental reflection we seek to absorb the qualities we want to manifest. Equanimity, gratitude, compassion, love—such things are not simply a matter of will, but of practice. And as we practice thinking about them, thinking of them, this practice can help us face disappointment, conflict, and danger in ways that promote a calm, energetic, and connected life.

For ultimately what we do on the meditation mat or the prayer room is of little consequence until it can be made real in work, family, and community. Can I recognize my agitation and respond skillfully when my kids act self-destructively? Can I face the mammogram results with acceptance and gratitude for what I have; or if the news is truly bad, can I accept my fear without trying to escape it? If I am a Christian, can I treat hostile people as Jesus taught me to? If Muslim, can I remember that only Allah is God, not money, fame, or the seductive delights of telling everyone how holy I am? If I am “spiritual but not religious,” can I face a decidedly non-spiritual world with the virtues that attracted me to spiritual life to begin with?

Attending to the mind, focusing on our highest values—we are more likely to answer such questions in the affirmative.

Can there be a single greater gift to our lives?

Professor of Philosophy (WPI) Roger S. Gottlieb’s most recent book is the Nautilus Book Award-winning Spirituality: What it Is and Why it Matters. You can read the Introduction on his website or his previous post on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Photo by Robert Bejil. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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By David Roberts

You’re a shy boy — inclined to blurt, shuffle and look at the floor — and you can tell from your father’s efforts on your behalf that he’s concerned. That makes things a lot worse.

From an early age, the private tutors crowd in. You’re sent away to study. When you’ve grown up a bit, the old man fixes you up with a grand tour of European capitals, opening doors into an old boys’ network of continental proportions. Reports of your improvement are, you suspect, inconsistently encouraging. You’re just too ill at ease to cope.

Still, with a quiet word here and less gentle persuasion there, he fixes you up with a seat in the Commons. Another lucky break, but it’s agony. When you give your maiden speech the other members can hardly believe it: an MP who can barely summon words for his big occasion. So father tries again, and a succession of German court appointments follows.

All this time, in fact for a period of over 30 years, he is pursuing another tack, desperate for you to attain the eminence of his own career as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Ambassador at The Hague, and His Majesty’s Secretary of State. His weapon? Letters: hundreds of them, full of worldly advice, suggestions about proper language, deportment, manners, diplomacy, politics, reading, society, relationships…

But for all their advice, the letters pray on your sense of inadequacy. He gets reports from friends of your conduct:

In company you were frequently most provokingly inattentive, absent, and distrait…you came into a room and presented yourself very awkwardly…at table you constantly threw down knives, forks, napkins, bread, etc., and…neglected your person and dress, to a degree unpardonable at any age, and much more so at yours.

His elegant comparisons tie you in knots of practical uncertainty:

Were you to converse with a King, you ought to be as easy and unembarrassed as with your own valet-de-chambre; but yet every look, word, and action, should imply the utmost respect.

Not content with an easy manner and confident knowledge, he demands a regime of exercise:

I hope you do not neglect your exercises of riding, fencing and dancing, but particularly the latter.

When he chooses, he can be straightforwardly brutal:

My object is to have you fit to live; which, if you are not, I do not desire that you should live at all.

What makes it all much worse is that you know you will never succeed not because your manner is gauche, your speech inelegant and your habits erratic. No: you are doomed to disappoint your father because of the way he fathered you. You are his son, but your mother is not his wife. Some opportunities are simply closed to you. He refuses to give up, of course. He may express sympathy with the villains of literature — with Turnus in The Aeneid or even Satan in Paradise Lost — but all the connections in Europe cannot unmake the prejudice against you. He is Sisyphus, pushing at the impossible boulder.

You have no choice but to make your own way in the world. Accept his fatherly patronage, his advice, his legion letters, but play your own game. Read his counsel about making a good match — as if the circumstances of your birth allowed — but make your own decisions. Do what he did to make you: fall in love. Find your own bride, regardless of station or convention. Have a family. Whatever you do, don’t tell him. You’re in Europe and he’s in London; he’ll never know.

But when you die young of a fever in Avignon, it turns out you underestimated him. Yes, he is shocked. No, he cannot believe that the son he had nurtured could have deceived him so, or married so far beneath the family dignity. He is alarmed to find he is, twice over, a grandfather. But his fatherly instinct revives. He provides generously for your grieving wife and begins his great project of education all over again with an allowance for your sons. Among all his words of advice, all his homilies to courtly conduct, perhaps the effortlessly civilised mind of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, keeps returning to the last sentence of the last letter he wrote to you:

God bless, and grant you a speedy recovery.

Professor David Roberts teaches English Literature at Birmingham City University. He has taught at the universities of Bristol, Oxford, Kyoto, Osaka, and Worcester, and in 2008/09 he was the inaugural holder of the John Henry Newman Chair at Newman University College, Birmingham. He has published extensively in the fields of seventeenth and eighteenth century drama and literature, and is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, as well as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. He has previously written about Daniel Defore in London and about disaster writing for OUPblog.

Praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching `the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master’, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters reflect the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift. The letters reveal Chesterfield’s political cynicism and his belief that his country had `always been goverened by the only two or three people, out of two or three millions, totally incapable of governing’, as well as his views on good breeding. Not originally intended for publication, this entertaining correspondence illuminates fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century life and manners.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, by unknown artist [public domain]. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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The first time I tried to read The Water-Babies I was 7 or 8 years old. I was sitting on a beach near Margate, during a summer when my other reading had mostly been American comics: Spiderman, Superman, and the rest. Then I opened up a strange story about a hidden underwater world, in which a young chimney sweep is transformed into a newt-like baby who swims around the world righting wrongs, and eventually discovers that the most important battles are inside him. He was like a tiny Victorian superhero.

The back of my comics usually carried an advertisement for ‘Sea Monkeys’: little marine creatures that (according to the somewhat fanciful illustration) were as exotic as mermaids and as orderly as the inhabitants of an ant farm. And The Water-Babies was no less confused and confusing; it was a scientific treatise, a fable about self-improvement, and a modern fairy tale, all crammed into less than 200 pages. I was hooked.

This year The Water-Babies is 150 years old, an event marked by a special anniversary edition published by Oxford University Press that will allow a whole new generation to dip into Tom’s strange underwater adventures. Celebrating the man who wrote it is slightly harder. Few writers are as puzzling and eccentric as Charles Kingsley, and trying to pin him down is like putting your thumb on a blob of mercury.

In some ways he was a pillar of the establishment, serving at various times as Cambridge’s Regius Professor of History, chaplain to the royal family, Canon of Westminster Abbey, and private tutor to the Prince of Wales. But he was also a bundle of contradictions. He was a shy extrovert. A no-nonsense sentimentalist. A mesmeric preacher who stammered. An apostle of healthy living who left pipes hidden in the bushes around his home in case the urge to smoke suddenly came on him when he was out walking. In public he fought for the rights of ordinary workers; in private he referred to the Irish as ‘white chimpanzees’. He was an enthusiastic hunter who once befriended a wasp he had saved from drowning.

At the same time, he had some fairly constant obsessions, which rippled away underneath everything else he said and did. He was especially anxious about dirty water, and fought a long campaign for better sanitation. So did many of his contemporaries, of course, but for Kingsley clean water wasn’t just a matter of health or hygiene. Being clean on the outside was the first step to being clean on the inside. Or, as he put it in one of his sermons, ‘If you will only wash your bodies your souls will be all right’.

In 1855 he published Glaucus, a guide to rockpools, named after the fisherman in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who grows a tail and fins and ends up living under the waves. For Kingsley he was something of a role model, because one of his own fantasies, when he stood on the beach, was ‘to walk on and in under the waves … and see it all but for a moment’. In one way his fantasy was bang up to date. That same year – 1855 – a French inventor was showing a diving suit in Paris that included a helmet fitted with portholes and heavy boots that allowed the owner to clump along the seabed at depths of up to 40 metres. But in another way, for Kingsley’s fantasy to come true he didn’t need science. He needed fiction. He needed to construct an underwater world out of paper and ink.

Eight years later, with the publication of The Water-Babies, that’s exactly what he did. When little Tom slips into the river and becomes a water-baby, he also slips into a parallel world of storytelling, where he can leave his dirty body behind, like a snake wriggling out of its skin. It is like a baptism that changes him inside and out. Kingsley had created a hero whose life from now on was to be one long, happy, cold bath.

Given how strange the story is, one might expect that its readership these days would be limited to historians and psychologists. Yet for such a small book it continues to have a surprisingly large cultural presence. There are films, adaptations and abridgements galore, not to mention dozens of modern parallels in novels such as Jacqueline Wilson’s Connie and the Water-Babies. In 1998 there was even a TV advert for Evian that showed some babies performing a complicated dance routine underwater. But why would anyone still want to read the original story?

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was writing the introduction to OUP’s new edition, this is the question that kept nagging away at me, and the best answer I can offer is closely bound up with my own childhood memories. Kingsley’s great skill as a writer is that he brings together absolute realism and absolute fantasy — two seemingly incompatible strains of thought that children love equally — and switches between them as quickly as someone spinning a coin. He describes the world as it is, and the world as it might look if the imagination was in charge, where if there is ‘sea-rock’ then why shouldn’t there be ‘sea-toffee’?

Above all, he asks us to be surprised by parts of the world we usually take for granted: spider’s webs, fish scales, soot, even children. ‘Look, again, at those sea-slugs’, he writes in one of his early papers on the seashore, and that’s exactly what his own writing does. He looks again at everything, no matter how tiny or ugly or ungainly it is. He finds a kind of awe in the ordinary.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is the author of Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), winner of the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and he has edited editions of Dickens’s Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor for Oxford World’s Classics. He has written the introduction and notes for the recently published The Water-Babies. He also writes regularly for publications including the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, TLS, and New Statesman.

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Images in the public domain, taken from The Water-Babies

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In 1934 William Carlos Williams famously published what seems to be a note left on the refrigerator for a spouse to read, only now set typographically to look like a poem. It’s called “This is Just to Say”.

I have eaten
The plums
That were in
The icebox

And which
You were probably
Saving
For breakfast

Forgive me
They were delicious
So sweet
And so cold

Like the ‘found object’ that an artist exhibits in the museum to raise the question “what is art?”, Williams’ ‘found’ poem seems to ask the reader, “is this a poem – and, if so, why?” We are invited to notice what we do when we read something as a poem. Perhaps we scrutinize it for an implied theme (“it’s really about temptation and forgiveness”, for instance); a poem is never “just to say” what it says. The space that Williams has left so abundantly around the words begs to be filled. “Forgive me” acquires a powerful resonance, all alone on the line, especially in connection with the temptation of fruit! Look what happens to the common, unremarkable words “sweet” and “cold” when you put some space around them. Williams invites us to wake up to the poetry of everyday speech.

Is “This is Just to Say” a characteristically modernist poem? Here’s another poem, written a good two thousand years before Williams’ poem, which also claims to be “just to say”. Williams was just saying sorry, and Poem 49 by Roman poet Catullus is just saying thank you.

Sweetest-spoken of Romulus’ descendants,
All that are, or have been, Marcus Tullius,
and all who will yet be in other times–
The greatest of thanks to you from Catullus,
Who’s the worst poet of all the poets,
By as much the worst of all the poets
As you’re the best of all the lawyers.

Or, in the original Latin:

Disertissime Romuli nepotum,
quot sunt quoque fuere, Marce Tulli,
quotque post aliis erunt in annis,
gratias tibi maximas Catullus
agit pessimus omnium poeta,
tanto pessimus omnium poeta,
quanto tu optimus omnium patronus.

All educated Romans had learned the art of rhetoric and eloquence was prized in all kinds of communication. Elaborate compliments and insults were honed, admired, remembered, and passed around. We sometimes speak of compliments, even insults, as being well-turned, as though they had been shaped on a lathe. So, there’s craft involved.

But is it art? Catullus published a number of well-turned insults as poems, and some compliments too, including this one. Why does he publish (and versify) this little thank you note? If we’re looking for an implicit theme, Catullus offers us little that would enable us to say “It’s really about….”. And what Catullus’ poem highlights is not so much significant words as grammatical and rhetorical forms: the superlatives, the amplified repetitions of a statement. Cicero was a great orator, and amplification was the name of the game in Roman oratory, so this might be a compliment to Cicero’s own verbal skill.

But can we be sure that it really is a compliment? In Catullus’ Latin, awkward jingles, bare symmetries, and a restricted and repetitive vocabulary all lend a dutiful sound to the string of superlatives (“most eloquent”, “best”, “worst”, “greatest”). It is as though Catullus wanted to give the impression that he was taking dictation. Even Cicero’s name, Marcus Tullius (Marce Tulli in the vocative case) is made to form a jingle with Catullus’ own name, two lines down in the same position at the end of the line. Such is the baldness and exaggeration of the comparison in the last three lines that an awkward silence seems to descend as the poem ends. Even Cicero, who was not a modest man, must have suspected that there was more to this than meets the eye.

Was Catullus parodying the orotund symmetries of his prose? There is a nice effect in the second and third lines, where each element of the tripartite division between past, present and future is longer than the last. Cicero’s speeches are full of this device, which is called a tricolon crescendo. But Cicero might also have suspected that Catullus was mocking his high opinion of himself. The great orator was notoriously self-important, and he was well aware of this reputation. Was Catullus trying to immortalise him as the sort of person who might swallow flattery this bald? Or were all these speculations paranoid imaginings, and Cicero should accept the compliment graciously? We readers are in much the same situation as Cicero, not sure whether we are in on the joke or not. Like Cicero, we do not want to be dupes, and so we return to the poem again and again, trying to catch a tone of voice. But the poem maintains its deadpan.

What do we learn about poetry from these two poems on the edge? Perhaps a poem is what you read again because it seems to means something other than it says (and vice versa). Williams’ poem, we feel, means more than it seems to say, but Catullus makes us hover over the possibility that his words don’t mean what they say at all. Williams and Catullus may be suggesting that there is a continuity between the care we take with the language of some of our everyday communications and the care with language that makes poetry what it is. But they are also asking us to notice what it is that kicks in when we write and read an utterance as poetry.

 William Fitzgerald is Professor of Latin at King’s College London and has taught at the University of California and Cambridge University. He is the author of several books on ancient literature, most recently How to Read a Latin Poem If You Can’t Read Latin Yet (OUP, 2013).

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Image credit: Catullus [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. 

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The research that went into my monograph was, like most academic scholarship, very specific: it focused on the ways in which Victorian poets drew on, contributed to, and resisted the development of the scientific discipline of psychology in the mid-nineteenth century. However, as is invariably the case with even the most recondite research, it also addressed larger issues. In this case, different ways literature and psychological science represent the mind, and the relationship between artistic and scientific approaches to human experience more generally. These issues are however necessarily subordinated to the detailed textual and critical analysis that forms the basis of academic literary study.

After The Poet’s Mind was published, and as I continued to research the intersections between literature and science in the nineteenth century, I kept thinking about how to combine detailed academic research with a consideration of the broader questions raised by that research. Hopeful that those questions would be of interest to a wide audience, I applied to the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinkers initiative, which offers humanities researchers in the early stages of their careers the opportunity to discuss their research on Radio 3’s Night Waves programme and at the BBC’s annual Free Thinking Festival. In May I was announced as one of the New Generation Thinkers for 2013.

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to share my research with non-academic audiences, but now that the initial thrill of excitement has subsided and I’m starting to think about my first broadcast, I find myself asking questions about the relationship between academic scholarship and public engagement. How can I share the ideas behind my research, clearly and engagingly, with a broad audience, without losing sight of the difficult intellectual problems which drew me to my subject in the first place? How can I reconcile the complex details and the big ideas which I see as equally vital to academic research?

Image credit: the 2013 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers, with Gregory Tate second from left, back row; provided by the BBC.

Shahidha Bari, one of the New Generation Thinkers for 2011, has examined the same issues. ‘Difficulty is what academics deal in,’ Bari writes, and she argues powerfully against the notion that this difficulty needs to be reduced to something more accessible in order for it to be palatable to a non-academic audience. The division between ‘difficulty’ and ‘accessibility’, Bari suggests, is a false one; the difficulty must be retained if the research is to make any substantive contribution to public debates. I support Bari’s comments resolutely, but there remains the practical issue that academic forms for disseminating research (monographs, journal articles, conference papers) and forms of public engagement (radio programmes, blogs) address different audiences, using different styles of language and speaking from and to different frames of reference.Bari’s piece highlights the difficulties of translating between these forms, but, nonetheless, a type of translation is perhaps what is required.Bari’s key point, though, remains unassailable: the process of translating academic research into public engagement cannot dispense with intellectual complexity, which is the essence of the research itself.

Forums in which academics can share their ideas with the public are proliferating at the moment: the launch in May of The Conversation, a news website written by academic researchers, is just one of the latest examples. The heightened focus on public engagement is a challenge for scholars committed to preserving the academic standards and intellectual integrity of their research, but it’s also an opportunity for us to demonstrate how our complex and original work can confront preconceptions, communicate new knowledge and new perspectives, and inform public debates. It’s an opportunity which humanities researchers, who perhaps have been less effective than scientists in publicly advocating the significance of their work, need to embrace while retaining their open-minded scepticism and determination to interrogate assumptions. Academics are skilled in communicating and discussing their ideas in the classroom, and we now need to continue the discussion outside universities as well.

My research on the complex links between literature, science, and psychology in the nineteenth century draws on an impressive body of work by a range of scholars. I strive to meet the high standards of rigour and attention to detail which characterise this work and academic research on literature more generally. I also hope, though, that my close analysis of nineteenth-century literature, and my consideration of its links to science, will be of interest to a non-academic audience, both in itself and because I’m convinced that an awareness of nineteenth-century views of the relation between literature and science can inform current debates about the place of the humanities and the sciences in education and culture. The question of how to combine these two aspects of research, the scholarly and the public, is a difficult one, but it’s also pressing and needs to be addressed. Luckily, academics are not shy about tackling difficult questions.

Gregory Tate is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. His book, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870, is published by Oxford University Press. You can follow him on Twitter @drgregorytate.

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Alexander the Great, Leader of the Macedonians, was born in 356 BC. After his death from fever on 10 June 323 BC, his dominion fell apart, the most lasting tribute to his achievement being the town of Alexandria, Egypt. We present the following extract from John Atkinson’s introduction to the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Alexander the Great by Arrian, which highlights the importance of Alexander’s reign in world history.

The relatively short reign of Alexander (336 to 323 BC) marked one of the major turning-points in world history. The Greek city states continued to function after his death, but the world order had changed and a new era began, which came to be labelled the Hellenistic period. For Alexander, like many an autocrat, departed without leaving a viable succession plan. The senior officers who had survived the normal hazards of war and Alexander’s paranoid suspicions were not united in purpose. Known as the Successors (Diadochoi), they acknowledged as king for a while Alexander’s intellectually challenged half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus and then too Alexander’s son by his Bactrian (Afghan) wife, born after his death. In 305 the leading Successors each took the title of king and demarcated his kingdom. Thus Alexander’s empire was divided into the Hellenistic kingdoms, each with its ruling dynasty, the one that lasted the longest being Egypt under the Ptolemies, which survived till the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 BC.

Head of Alexander the Great, by Leochares, ca. 330 BC

All this activity depends on a fairly limited amount of ancient source material. Textual archival material is virtually limited to a scatter of Greek inscriptions and Babylonian records. Contemporary memoirs are known only from fragmentary quotations and more substantial summaries or reworkings written some three centuries or more after Alexander’s death. To this group belongs Arrian, though it may seem strange to label a text of the second century AD a primary source for a chapter of history of the period 336 to 323 BC. However, Arrian’s concern to revive and justify the accounts of the most authoritative and true primary sources 3 gives his work special value. Comparison with accounts written in the century or so before Arrian’s Anabasis shows that Arrian broke with the fashion of fictionalizing history and was not loading his material with a secondary level of meaning. The title Anabasis Alexandrou (Alexander’s Expedition) indicates that this was primarily a military history, covering Alexander’s advance ‘upcountry’ or into the interior of Asia. The Indica, based largely on Nearchus’ account of his mission to take Alexander’s fleet from the Indus to the Tigris and Euphrates in late 325, is even closer to an archival record. Thus Arrian’s Anabasis, with its companion-piece the Indica, represents something of a time capsule, and is generally regarded as the most authoritative ancient source on Alexander’s campaigns.

One of the most distinguished writers of his day, Arrian represented himself as a second Xenophon and adopted a style which fused elements of Xenophon into a composite, artificial (yet outstandingly lucid) diction based on the great masters, Herodotus and Thucydides. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Alexander the Great by Arrian is translated by Martin Hammond, with an introduction and notes by John Atkinson. It includes both the Anabasis and the Indica.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, and the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Head of Alexander the Great, by Leochares, ca. 330 BC. Photo shared by Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA-2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Despite its controversial history, the Book of Common Prayer is an influential religious text and one of the most compelling works of English literature. How has this document retained its relevancy even after numerous revisions? What can it teach us about British history and the English language? We spoke with Brian Cummings, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer, about the importance of this text.

Why did you want release a new edition of this book?

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How did you choose the three texts used in your edition?

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Why is the text considered a part of literature?

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Can you tell us about the origins of the book?

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Brian Cummings received his BA at Cambridge University, where he also took his PhD under the supervision of the poet Geoffrey Hill and the church historian Eamon Duffy. He was previously a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge before moving to Sussex, and, from October 2012, the University of York. He was a British Academy Exchange Fellow at the Huntington Library, California, in 2007 and held a three-year Major Research Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust from 2009 to 2012. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter, Facebook, and the OUPblog.

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The modern idea of spirituality—divorced from religious tradition, dependent on a personal choice of creed, centered on feeling good and avoiding stress—easily invites criticism or even contempt. Many see it as an evasion of religious truth and moral responsibility, a narcissistic choose-your-own-at-the-mall self-indulgence that has nothing to do with serious religious, ethical, or political life.

I beg to differ. Of course there are many for whom spirituality is just what the critics accuse it of being. But this hardly settles the matter, for there are also many religious traditionalists who are sanctimonious hypocrites, many political liberals who are narrow-minded, and many self-styled ethical people who blissfully ignore their own failings.

Thus the question is not “What is spirituality at its worst?” but rather “Is there at the heart of spirituality a powerful, redemptive, and transformative idea?”

I believe there is, one that is simply expressed but often excruciatingly hard to put into practice. The idea is this: our lives will be far happier, in an enduring and deep way, and we will be a lot more fun to be around, if we seek to live by certain virtues. To the extent that we choose to be mindful, accepting, grateful, compassionate, and loving, our own contentment will grow and our interpersonal behavior will be increasingly caring, respectful, and just.

A quick glance at these virtues should make anyone who thinks spirituality is easy think again. Each time we face a life choice, cultivate one habit or another, or find ourselves in a morally confusing and painful situation the virtues come into play. We have to decide whether we can accept disappointment without obsessing over not getting what we so richly deserve; try to understand the experience of people who bore or frustrate us; take the time and attention to examine the contents of our own mind rather than act out of fear or rage; and look deeply into our society’s fundamental structures to how whether our personal lives reflect vast and impersonal forms of injustice.

If we focus on one particular spiritual virtue—compassion—we will see that while the spiritual life is tied neither to a literal reading of scripture nor religious authority, it is still far from a walk in the park designed for the lazy.

Compassion may be understood as both an emotional openness to the suffering of others and an active response which seeks to lessen that suffering, and can be found in religious tradition and contemporary spiritual teachings. It is a Mahayana Buddhist ideal (the Bodhisattva seeks to end the suffering of all sentient beings). God in the Hebrew Bible (Deut: 4:31) and Jesus in the Christian (Matt: 14:14) are described as compassionate. The term resonates with virtually all contemporary eclectic and non-denominational teachers.

Sometimes compassion is relatively easy. If we encounter a good person whose suffering is not his fault and is easily remedied (take care of him for an afternoon, offer a hug, give a small amount of money), then compassion may flow easily.

Kannon, Bodhisattva of Compassion

But think of Steve, who is always overspending: here he is again, desperately needing cash. And at the same time I am facing my own serious money troubles (family illness, stolen car). Now compassion may give way to impatience or irritation. “What about me?” I will think; or “For God’s sake, stop creating your own troubles.”

What if the suffering we encounter is part of the endless round of misery that accosts any well-informed person in today’s information overload society? Famine in Sudan, tornadoes in Missouri, pollution induced lung disease in China—and that could be just a single website on any given morning. Here we might develop what psychologist Kaetha Weingarten calls “common shock”—physical and emotional distress caused by witnessing the pain of others. We numb out and retreat, thinking “I just don’t want to hear about it.”

Here is the most difficult setting: can we have compassion for the perpetrators of crimes as well as their victims? After the Boston Marathon bombing, could we think of the killers as human beings marked by enormous emotional and moral disorientation, lacking the gift of being able to have an empathic connection to the innocent strangers they meant to kill? Can we think of cruel, selfish people as deserving of happiness? Can we, as Dante asked, have compassion for the damned?

To be compassionate even when we are needy or suffering requires that we observe our own distress without using it as an excuse to feel disdain for all those who “don’t really suffer like I do.” Dealing with common shock requires a vigilant awareness not only of all the terrible things happening in the world but of the effect of our knowledge of those things on our own minds and bodies. It requires the humility and self-awareness to admit “I simply cannot take in any more information now,” the faith that life is worthwhile even with all the suffering in the world, and the far-sightedness to see that despite all their pain human beings are more than the sum of their woes.

And the ruthless dictators, drug lords, and smiling CEOs who pollute? Don’t they deserve to be hated? Yet compassion asks us to recognize everyone’s suffering—even that of people who act very badly. The spiritual task here includes admitting our own moral weaknesses so that we can see what we have in common with the guilty; and also developing a moral clarity that allows us to act caringly against injustice without needing to be motivated by hatred.

Finally, we need to be open not only to other people’s suffering but also to their own understanding of their lives, to what we have to learn from those we would help as much as what we have to teach them. “Compassion,” insists Catholic priest Gregory Bolye, who spent decades intervening in Los Angeles gang violence, “is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals.” Anglican Archbishop Rowan William’s suggests that this covenantal relationship requires a loving attention which allows other people to develop, choose freely, and come to a better, truer life by their own energies. The great temptation, says Williams, is seeking to have the last word, to control what the other says and how they live. This may be relatively easy if the person is an innocent victim. The more they are complicit in their suffering (an addict, say), or a victimizer rather than a victim, the more difficult it becomes.

Thus, true compassion might well take a whole lifetime to get good at it, let alone master. And this is true for all the other spiritual virtues, which always require attention, energy, and a willingness to let go of old habits and attachments. Each day, every moment, I am invited to choose love over hate, gratitude over bitterness, confidence in my connection to people and the world over frightened isolation.

In this light, then, spirituality is not a relaxed or cheapened version of traditional faith, or an escape from social life, but a demanding and in some ways heightened version of both religion and social engagement.

Professor of Philosophy (WPI) Roger S. Gottlieb’s most recent book is the Nautilus Book Award-winning Spirituality: What it Is and Why it Matters. You can read the Introduction on his website.

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Image credit: Kano Motonobu, ”White-robed Kannon, Bodhisattva of Compassion”, c. first half of the 16th century. Hanging scroll. Ink, color and gold on silk. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Stewart who? That’s okay — I’m used to starting at the beginning.

(1)      Stewart Parker just might be the most important Irish writer you’ve never heard of. Born in 1941, he began his career as a poet, tried his hand at experimental prose, and eventually dedicated himself to drama. His plays for radio, television, and the stage engage with historical events to offer a range of perspectives on the political and sectarian conflicts in his native Northern Ireland, while managing at the same time to be vastly entertaining. His best-known plays include Spokesong about a Belfast bicycle salesman obsessed with his dead grandparents; Northern Star which focused on Henry Joy McCracken, one of the real-life leaders of the eighteenth-century United Irish movement; and Pentecost, set during the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike of 1974, in which four of Parker’s contemporaries share a house with the ghost of its longtime inhabitant.

(2)      He wrote the first regular pop music column for the Irish Times, introducing Irish readers to musicians and bands such as Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan. Most of his plays also feature music. Spokesong, for example, includes songs that evoke styles spanning eighty years. Catchpenny Twist centers on a pair of song-writers. Kingdom Come, co-written with Irish composer Shaun Davey, is an Irish-Caribbean musical set on a fictional island where the political configuration bears an uncanny resemblance to Northern Ireland’s.

(3)      He grew up in a Protestant, unionist family in industrial east Belfast. Many writers from this part of the island (C. S. Lewis, for example, whose birthplace lies within walking distance of Parker’s) neither consider themselves Irish nor are seen as such by others. Parker did regard himself as Irish, even an Irish nationalist, but his “British” background may help to explain why he has often been overlooked by people with an interest in Irish literature.

(4)      He took after James Joyce in his determination to capture the multifarious life of the city of his birth. Other things he appreciated about Joyce included his sense of humor, “verbal felicity,” “positive vision of life,” and penchant for “using actual information about things in a way that transcends documentary and gives you an insight into people’s lives, relationships and history.” All of these also characterize Parker’s own writing and make it worthy of close study.

(5)      He lost his left leg to a rare form of bone cancer at age 19. Living as an amputee gave him a greater appreciation than most of us of the things that human beings have in common, chief among these mortality. His consciousness of the frailty of human bodies and the finitude of human existence reinforced his intolerance of violence and the arbitrary distinctions that divide people from one another.

(6)      He belonged to the original Belfast Writers’ Group, founded by English poet and academic Philip Hobsbaum in 1963. Hobsbaum had a keen eye for talent, and he considered two members of the group especially promising. One of these, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, you probably do know something about. The other was Stewart Parker.

(7)      He spent five formative years in the United States. From 1964 to 1969, Parker taught at Hamilton College and Cornell University, both in upstate New York, and witnessed the civil rights and anti-war movements as an interested outsider. His American sojourn decisively shaped his political consciousness and sense of purpose as a writer, prompting him to return to Northern Ireland in order to be more than an observer of social transformation.

(8)      He arrived home in August 1969, the same week, coincidentally, that British troops were sent to Belfast to try to restore order there after days of sectarian rioting. Little did anyone know at the time that this round of Ireland’s periodic “Troubles” would last for nearly thirty years. Parker remained in Belfast until 1978, living through the worst of the violence there and storing up impressions that he would later draw on as a dramatist.

(9)      He died of stomach cancer in 1988 at the age of 47. His early and abrupt demise has been largely responsible for obscuring his achievement.

(10)  He was a fine person as well as a great writer. As even the most casual student of literature knows, the two do not always go together, but in Parker’s case they did. Having spent twenty years working on his biography, I should know. This book is dedicated “to the friends of Stewart Parker, old and new.” Maybe, soon, you will be one of them.

Marilynn Richtarik is an Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her two books, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 and Stewart Parker: A Life, are both published by Oxford University Press.

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Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selections while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 4 June 2013, author Jonathan Dee leads a discussion on Father and Son by Edmund Gosse.

Jonathan Dee. Photo by Ulf Andersen.

What was your inspiration for this book?
I would say a combination of Tiger Woods and John Calvin.

Where do you do your best writing?
In conditions of silence, with a pen and a legal pad, in the easy chair in my living room.

Which author do you wish had been your 7th grade English teacher?
Probably Edna O’Brien, or Clarice Lispector, or Sylvia Plath . . . Remember, I’m a 7th grade boy in this scenario.

What is your secret talent?
My daughter would say it is that I can talk like Donald Duck.

What is your favorite book?
Impossible to say. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, To The Lighthouse, The Good Soldier, The USA Trilogy, The Postman Always Rings Twice . . .

Who reads your first draft?
My first drafts are written in longhand, so no one else could read them even if they wanted to.

Do you prefer writing on a computer or longhand?
See above.

What book are you currently reading? (Old school or e-Reader?)
Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone. Old school always.

What word or punctuation mark are you most guilty of overusing?
The semicolon. Like duct tape for sentences. The worst part is how I scoff at other writers who have the same weakness I do.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
In my twenties I worked at The Paris Review, on the theory that if I didn’t make it as a writer, I would still want a professional foothold in some world where people valued the same things I did. So I probably would have been an editor of some sort, or an academic.

Did you have an “a-ha!” moment that made you want to be a writer?
Reading the short story “So Much Unfairness of Things” by C.D.B. Bryan when I was in the seventh grade. It was my introduction to the idea that a story’s job might be to make it harder, rather than easier, to judge the characters within it.

Do you read your books after they’ve been published?
Never. I can’t finish a page without coming across a sentence I want to rewrite, and it’s painful to realize that I’m too late.

Jonathan Dee is the author of five novels, including The Privileges, which was both a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a National Magazine Award–nominated literary critic for Harper’s, and a former senior editor of the Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His most recent novel is A Thousand Pardons.

Read previous interviews with Word for Word Book Club guest speakers.

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By Kirsty Doole

The great works of the Eastern world have provided inspiration for this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list. From those you have probably heard of (like the Kamasutra) to those you may not have (such as The Recognition of Sakuntala), these classic works provide a window on the classical worlds of India, China, and the Middle East.

Sayings of the Buddha, edited and translated by Rupert Gethin

Buddhist religious and philosophical beliefs derive from the teachings of Gotama the Buddha, a wandering ascetic in India during the fifth century BCE. One of the main sources for knowledge of his teachings is the four Pali Nikayas, or ‘collections’ of his sayings. Written in the ancient Indian language Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the Nikayas are among the oldest of all Buddhist texts.

This selection of the Buddha’s sayings reflect the full variety of the Pali Nikayas, covering the Buddha’s biography, philosophical discourse, instruction on morality, meditation, and his ideas on the spiritual life.

Myths of Mesopotamia, edited and translated by Stephanie Dalley

The ancient civilization of Mesopotamia was located between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The myths collected here, originally written in cuneiform on clay tablets, include the Creation and the Flood, and the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a man of great strength, whose heroic quest for immortality is dashed through one moment of weakness.

Stephanie Dalley, who translated and edited this volume for Oxford World’s Classics, may be familiar to readers as the author of The Mystery Of The Hanging Garden Of Babylon, a new book that questions whether the Hanging Garden of Babylon was really in Babylon at all.

Statue of Laozi in Quanzhou, China.

Daodejing by Laozi; edited and translated by Edmund Ryden; introduction by Benjamin Penny

The Daodejing by Laozi is one of the most important texts in the philosophical tradition of Daoism, and is one of the most widely-known texts in China. Also called the Classic of the Way and the Life-Force, it expresses the main beliefs of Daoism, and upholds it as a way of life as well as a philosophy and religion. The dominant image is of the Way, the mysterious path through the whole cosmos modelled on the Milky Way. A life-giving stream, the Way gives rise to all things and enables the individual, and society as a whole, to harmonize the various demands of daily life and achieve a more profound level of understanding.

The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa; translated by W. J. Johnson

The Recognition of Sakuntala is a play in seven acts originally written in Sanskrit in the fourth century CE. It follows the relationship between King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, as they fall in love, are separated by a curse, and are ultimately reunited. Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to a mystical experience.

Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, edited by Robert L. Mack

The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment is famous as being the first literary appearance of Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba, among others.

The Sultan Schahriar’s misguided resolution to shelter himself from the possible infidelities of his wives leads to an outbreak of barbarity in his kingdoms and a reign of terror in his court, stopped only by the resourceful Scheherazade. Scheherazade nightly postpones Schahriar’s murderous intent by telling him tales that have entered our language like no others. The stories contained in this ‘store house of ingenious fiction’ initiate a pattern of literary reference and influence which today remains as powerful and intense as it ever was.

Pañcatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom, edited and translated by Patrick Olivelle

The Pañcatantra is the most famous collection of fables in India and was one of the first Indian books to be translated into a Western language. A significant influence on the Arabian Nights and the Fables of La Fontaine, the Pañcatantra teaches the principles of good government through the medium of animal stories. Its positive attitude towards life and its advocacy of ambition and enterprise counters any preconceived ideas of passivity and other-worldliness in ancient Indian society.

The Bodhicaryavatara by Sanideva; edited by Paul Williams; translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton

Written in India in the early eighth century AD, Santideva’s Bodhicaryavatara became one of the most popular accounts of the Buddhist’s spiritual path. It takes as its subject the profound desire to become a Buddha and save all beings from suffering, enacted by a Bodhisattva. Santideva not only sets out what the Bodhisattva must do and become, he also invokes the intense feelings of aspiration which underlie such a commitment.

Important as a manual of training among Mahayana Buddhists, especially in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Bodhicaryavatara continues to be used as the basis for teaching by modern Buddhist teachers.

Kamasutra by Mallanaga Vatsyayana; edited and translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar

“When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.”

There aren’t many people who haven’t heard of the third century CE manual of erotic love. But it’s about much more than just sexual positions. It covers the topics of finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, and using drugs. Composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, it combines an encyclopaedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic, novelistic narrative of seduction, consummation, and disentanglement.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, and the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Statue of Laozi in Quanzhou, China. By Thanato [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons  

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Kenneth Holloway is Associate Professor of History and Levenson Professor of Asian Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Quest for Ecstatic Morality in Early China.

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By Thomas Dixon

The story of Doubting Thomas is a wonderful philosophical parable about seeing and believing, but what exactly is the intended moral? And what light does it shed on the relationship between science and religion?

The standard view portrays Doubting Thomas as a scientific hero demanding evidence and refusing to succumb to blind faith. Richard Dawkins has popularised this version since the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976. Last September he tweeted, “If there’s evidence, it isn’t faith. Doubting Thomas, patron saint of scientists, wanted evidence. Other disciples praised for not doing so.”

But this is not an entirely convincing interpretation either of the bible or of the nature of scientific knowledge.

In John’s gospel, the other disciples tell Thomas: “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas is not convinced: ”Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” A week later Jesus appears to all the disciples, and addresses Thomas: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas now believes, and Jesus comments: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Now, remember that according to Dawkins the story is told so that we should admire not Thomas, but the other disciples, “whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence.” What is wrong with that? Well, first of all, the other disciples believed in the resurrection not through blind faith, but because they saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes.

Dawkins is right that we are not supposed to admire Thomas’s refusal to believe, but he is wrong about the reason. Thomas’s behaviour really is a little irrational. What better basis for belief could he have had than the testimony of his most trusted friends? We all have to rely on testimony rather than first-hand experience for the vast majority of our knowledge.

Thomas’s sin was the refusal to believe reliable testimony. The English natural philosopher and theologian John Wilkins wrote about the Doubting Thomas story in the seventeenth century. Jesus’s saying ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ signified, for Wilkins, that it was ‘a more excellent, commendable and blessed thing for a man to yield his assent, upon such evidence as is in itself sufficient, without insisting upon more.’ The testimony of the other disciples should have been in itself sufficient for Thomas; and yet he insisted upon more.

Communal observation and testimony are central to both religion and science. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas (c. 1601-2) depicts a collective act of witnessing. Should we, perhaps, even think of Thomas’s finger here as a rudimentary scientific instrument? Is he making a digital measurement? Are the other disciples there to corroborate his observations? Rembrandt’s slightly later painting of an anatomy lesson (1632) can be seen as a transposition of this model to a scientific setting. In both cases, the body of an executed criminal is being probed — in the case of Rembrandt’s image, with forceps rather than just a finger — in front of a group of witnesses, and with the aim of producing knowledge.

The key point here is that these images depict acts of communal knowledge-production. Scientific knowledge, like religious belief, is produced by collaborative acts of observation which, in turn, rely on the observations, testimony and inferences of others.

Richard Dawkins suggests that Doubting Thomas should be the patron saint of scientists. In fact he is patron saint of the blind, which is perhaps more fitting. If Thomas does stand for the view that the true basis of knowledge is unaided individual sense perception, then his is indeed an unscientific world and a world of blindness — a world where, in a phrase of Galileo’s, “one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” Galileo admired those who believed in the sun-centred system before the advent of the telescope: “They have by sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sense experience plainly showed them to be the case.” Blessed, you might say, are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Returning to Caravaggio’s painting, we see Thomas, his hand being taken by Christ and placed in the wound in his side. Thomas’s eyes are dark, glazed, blank; he is gazing straight ahead, not at the wound. This is indeed a depiction of a blind man – a man being led by the hand towards something he cannot see. Caravaggio seems to say that the man who seeks to base all his knowledge on individual sense experience will see nothing. In both religion and science, the most important beliefs rest on a kind of seeing that cannot be done by an individual alone, that cannot be done with unaided human eyes, and that cannot be done without belief in an unseen realm.

Dr Thomas Dixon is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London and the author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, which won the BSHS Dingle Prize in 2009. You can find him on Twitter at @thomasdixon2013 .

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: Caravaggio [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Answers can be found by using a combination of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO)’s post “Mysteries around Marlowe” and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Marlowe, free to view until 30 June 2013.

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.

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Image credit: A portrait, supposedly of Christopher Marlowe. 1585. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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We’re planning to make several changes to the OUPblog this year to improve the site and your reading experience. Some of the first changes will be taking place over the next couple weeks.

We will change some of our navigation and categorization on the blog based on reader behavior: deleting, adding, shifting, and renaming several categories. For example, our current ‘dictionaries’ category will be renamed ‘language’ and sub-categories will better reflect the full range of our language publishing from lexicography to linguistics.

We will also migrate away from Feedburner, which currently delivers our RSS and email, to a new service. Feedburner has been unreliable and we believe Google is getting ready to shut down this service after they shut down Google Reader on 1 July 2013. If all goes well, your email and RSS notifications will not change. If not, please check back here and re-subscribe.

Remember you can find the raw RSS feeds on our Follow page.

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We know a few of the problems the site is experiencing and have great plans for improving it over the coming months. We of course welcome your feedback too and appreciate any comments that can be left in the box below.

Thank you for your loyal readership,

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The New Yorker’s predictably elitist and conservative review of Baz Lurhmann’s new movie has David Denby concluding with the following:

Will young audiences go for this movie, with its few good scenes and its discordant messiness? Luhrmann may have miscalculated. The millions of kids who have read the book may not be eager for a flimsy phantasmagoria. They may even think, like many of their elders, that “The Great Gatsby” should be left in peace. The book is too intricate, too subtle, too tender for the movies. Fitzgerald’s illusions were not very different from Gatsby’s, but his illusionless book resists destruction even from the most aggressive and powerful despoilers.

Two things should be said immediately.

(1)      Lurhmann has not miscalculated: the box office outstripped opening-weekend expectations by 25% and as of 22 March 2013 had grossed almost $100 million domestically. The “kids” apparently do not agree with “many of their elders”—surprise!—who think “that ‘The Great Gatsby’ should be left in peace.”

(2)      The Great Gatsby has hardly been left in peace. There have been several movie adaptations. It is one of the most critically-evaluated American books in existence. It might even be said that the “most aggressive and powerful despoilers” are the very critics and teachers who have upheld standard interpretations of the novel laid down in the immediate post-World-War II era (which is to say, at a particularly conservative moment, by literary experts with little interest in a historical understanding of literature), and who don’t like to see the book “re-interpreted” by outsiders, such as filmmakers.

In fact, the kids’ excitement about the Lurhmann movie might have something to do with the way the novel has been “laid to rest” and “eulogized” by the critics. I know something about the kids’ attitudes because I teach some of them at City College in New York. What they remember from their Gatsby classes in high school may not be a “flimsy phantasmagoria,” but it is nonetheless flimsy. They recall something about “the symbolic green light,” “the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg that overlook the symbolic valley of ashes,” “new money vs. old money,” and “the disappearing American dream.”  They have a very flimsy sense of Gatsby’s historical moment; most don’t even remember that he was a soldier in World War I.

When they begin to learn about the relevant historical context, the novel comes to life for them. They learn that “new money” was often a euphemism for ethnic as well as class inferiority. They learn how a poor German-American farm boy could become an officer in the US Army in a nation that was not only xenophobic but at war with Germany because the World War I army was quietly experimenting in an historically unprecedented manner with meritocracy. Baz Luhrmann isn’t an American Studies scholar, and the movie doesn’t provide a sense of the utopian moment that poor and ethnic-American Gatsby experiences at training camp in Kentucky. Neither does it convey a sense of the culture shock that greeted men like Fitzgerald when they watched ethnic-American men like Gatsby step in front of them and become their superior officers (men whom he would have met in some lowly service or “servant” capacity before the war).

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. (c) Warner Bros

But Luhrmann’s movie—with Leonardo DiCaprio masterfully giving us a living, breathing, vulnerable Gatsby—begins to give the kids a sense of Gatsby’s drastic longing to belong. This sense is dramatized not only in the fantastic lengths to which Gatsby goes to win over Daisy, but in DiCaprio’s magical ability to project—with just about every look on his face—the pathos of his exclusion from the inner circle of upper class America now that the war is over, the training camps are closed, and American racial and class normalcy returns with a vengeance. Now that, in short, his beloved past cannot be repeated.

What do the kids feel when they see the movie? I talked to one kid in particular, my daughter, who is still a year too young in high school to have read the book. She said that at the beginning, when she saw everything Gatsby had and first met him, she wanted to be Gatsby, but that changed when she realized the real poverty he had come from and the real prejudice he was up against. She was impressed with everything he had achieved.

When the middle- and working-class New York kids—at one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse colleges—first come into my class, Fitzgerald’s novel is pretty abstract for them, and pretty distant. But when they come to understand, as Tom Buchanan indicates with his racist rants, that in the novel’s historical moment an ethnic-American man like Gatsby (born Gatz) would not have been considered “white,” they begin to relate to the book and understand it through their own personal, if historically different, experience. Along these lines, Lurhmann’s casting of the Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan as the Jewish Meyer Wolfsheim has the effect, whether intended or not, of capturing the racism with which Jews were viewed in the 1920s. The audience perceives Bachchan’s Wolfsheim as non-white, while a Jewish actor, even one with a European accent, would no longer in today’s America register as racially other.

Jason Clarke as George Wilson, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. (c) Warner Bros

The novel begins to be very meaningful to my students, not by reading in something that isn’t there, but by becoming aware of the forgotten historical context that the self-appointed “guardians” of our “great literature” either aren’t aware of or particularly interested in. It is one thing to say of the novel, as Denby does, “that Gatsby’s exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failures. The strong, delicate, poetically resonant text has become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires.” But that is too euphemize a bit, in my opinion. It is another, and something much more concrete and immediate, to see the smug and ugly racism of Tom — and the more sophisticated racism of Nick Carraway — and to understand why The Great Gatsby was written when it was: after that first shocking if limited and short-lived American debut of meritocracy on a national scale. It was limited because, though it was open to poor and ethnic-American men, blacks were excluded.

Precisely because Fitzgerald’s novel has the status of “a kind of national scripture,” The Great Gatsby should not be left in peace, but open to new interpretations and fuller historical contextualization.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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All images from The Great Gatsby film copyright Warner Bros. Used for the purposes of illustration.

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Oxford University Press recently partnered with The Poetry Archive to support Poetry by Heart, a new national poetry competition in England which saw thousands of students aged 14 to 18 competing to become national champion for their skill in memorising and reciting poems by heart. OUP provided free content from OED Online, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the American National Biography Online to support students participating in the competition. Here, 18 year old winning contestant Kaiti Soultana writes about the experience.

By Kaiti Soultana

What impelled me to participate in Poetry by Heart? Like many of the other contestants, I wanted both to galvanize others and to be inspired myself. It seems that poets strive to enhance the minds of those reading and listening, and I find this so philanthropic. Though a cliché, it is true to say that although I won the competition, I would have won even if I had not gained first place; the experience was invaluable and truly irreplaceable.

What Poetry by Heart offered was an opportunity to deliver a poem aloud and consequently for me to retain it. What I think makes the spoken word superior to reading a poem silently is that delivering a poem aloud allows for both the poet’s and the speaker’s voices to truly be heard. Quite often you find that it is not only the words of the poem but also the sound of it that attracts us to it, even before fully understanding the message it is giving.  That is something I experienced when exploring the part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I chose to recite. As competitors, we were provided with an anthology of poems of two categories to choose from and recite: a pre-1914 and a post-1914 list. It was the work of that anonymous 14th century poet that aroused within me such delight, though amusingly I initially understood very little of what I was reading.

It was that yearning to learn, and to explore what would otherwise go unexplored, which I found so inviting about Sir Gawain. I took up the challenge to inspire others through this astonishing, demanding, and somewhat alien ‘old’ English language. The alliterative threads that bound the poem made it easier to immerse both myself and the audience in such an unfamiliar realm, and it was this, I believe, that made my recitation successful.

My choice of post-1914 poetry developed from a somewhat different quality that poetry as a medium triumphs in: the ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Elizabeth Bishop seemed to express such perplexed beauty in her poem The Fish, so much so that it established an abnormal yet completely natural and loving bond between myself as a reader and a mere fish.

I began preparing my recitations by acquiring as much basic contextual knowledge about both poem and author, attempting to understand what message each one was trying to convey, yet interpreting it personally and intimately. My progression in understanding each of my poems grew from a minimal surface reading to one where my own interpretation and ideas worked alongside that of the poet’s. I seemed to gain companionship with a person I had never met or talked with. I began to gain an insight into their minds, into the worlds they had constructed. It wasn’t just a poem by rote I had gained, but the appreciation and understanding of a poet’s imagination.

The competition itself seemed far more like a humble gathering of young literary enthusiasts. Through the stages – from school heats to county contests and finally the regional and national finals weekend – the rounds seemed more like a programme of complementary performances. They allowed for initial introductions to mature into lasting friendships – I have experienced the development of such friendships with people across the country thanks to Poetry by Heart.

Though enjoyable, I was unsuccessful in casting away the nerves I am often plagued with. However, it was participating in a competition that I sincerely valued and appreciated, that motivated and inspired me, and allowed me to at least control those nerves.

In addition to viewing others’ regional heats, Poetry by Heart’s organisers scheduled excursions for participants to the London Eye, the British Library and tours of the National Portrait Gallery, none of which I had been privileged to visit before. I was stimulated to explore a small part of London, an opportunity that was exciting, fun, and invaluable.

The weekend itself was nothing shy of extraordinary. It seems unanimous that what we had gained by offering ourselves as orators of the poems was more than just the memory of the poem itself. What I gained was far more remarkable; I discovered the importance of poetry to human beings, and how this importance has spanned generations. It continues to grow as a form of universal expression, and with great thanks to Poetry by Heart I have truly understood its often unacknowledged value.

Kaiti Soultana is 18 and studying A levels at Bilborough College, Nottingham.

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By Pat Rogers

There’s never been a shortage of readers to love and admire Alexander Pope. But if you think you don’t, or wouldn’t, like his poetry, you’re in good company there too. Ever since his own day, detractors have stuck their oar in, some blasting the work and some determined to write off the writer.  A noted poet and anthologist, James Reeves, wrote an entire book in 1976 to assail Pope’s achievement and influence. But it has never succeeded; Pope, a combative as well as a marvellously skilled author, keeps coming back for more. He produced more first-rate poems than anyone else in the eighteenth century, as we might guess from his fame across Europe and his huge appeal in America before and after the Revolution.

In truth, much of the hostility he faced in his lifetime had to with fear of his scathing wit. “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me,” he wrote late in his career. The stark clarity with which he states the idea must have made quite a few contemporaries shuffle another step backwards.

It doesn’t take much more to enjoy Pope than a reasonably good ear and a feeling for language. To read his works carefully will give anyone a grounding in how lines sing, how to make words bend and let meanings fold into each other. It will spare you a whole module on the creative writing course. Sound and sense are delicately adjusted, rhyme and rhythm subtly integrated, wit and wisdom dispersed with the utmost economy.

The most single brilliant item is The Rape of the Lock, completed in 1714 when he was only twenty-five. On the surface this relates how a brutal upper-class twit attacks an airhead socialite. You can find the tale amusingly retold by Sophie Gee in her novel The Scandal of the Season (2007). Actually the ravishing of a beauty in this ravishingly beautiful poem amounts to cutting off just one of her curls, but the text constantly insists that a more serious violation has gone on.

Queen Anne, whose court is satirized in Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’.

The main trick is to build up this critique from a phrase, a verse, a couplet, a paragraph, and a canto, all serving as fractals which contain within themselves the central paradox announced in the first two lines: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things.” The contrasting terms here form what we call antithesis, borrowing an expression originally used in classical rhetoric. Pope extends antithesis to his grammar, his versification, his metaphors, and his narrative.

A single bit of wordplay encapsulates this process. It comes in the famous pun that describes the queen’s routine at Hampton Court, where she “sometimes counsel take[s] — and sometimes tea.” In the previous couplet, British statesmen plot the fall of “foreign tyrants,” but also of “nymphs at home.” Everything from the tiniest unit up to the overall shape of the work is designed to enforce the same balanced oppositions between the grand and the slight. And none of it ever ceases to be funny.

Pope’s supreme technique meant he could excel in almost every genre available to him. His powerful satire The Dunciad makes mincemeat of the vapid scribblers in Grub Street. You don’t have to know who they were to get most of the jokes. An Epistle to a Lady might have been written as a set text for modern feminists, so provocatively does it raise issues on the gender front for debate and appraisal. An Epistle to Bathurst provides a telling picture of the repercussions of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. While Pope doesn’t forget the investors who lost everything, he bothers less about perpetrators in the financial industry than about the hypocrisy of a corrupt crew in government and parliament whose regulatory touch was so light as to be invisible.

For a long time An Essay on Man was about the most cited treatise worldwide on morals and metaphysics, while An Essay on Criticism wittily expounds – well, criticism. Pope’s version of Homer remains among the few translations of a masterpiece to constitute a major work in its own right when converted to the host language. He also wrote superb prose, for example in his good humoured but damning retorts to the scandalous publisher Edmund Curll.

In case you thought Pope sounds a bit remote, you might recall when you last heard someone use phrases like these: “To err is human, to forgive divine” ; “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” ; “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” ; “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” ; “A little learning is a dangerous thing” ; “Damn with faint praise.” We owe them all to one man. These and many more have entered the stock of colloquial language, an idiom Pope learnt to utilize in sparkling poems that explore the full range of the human comedy.

Pat Rogers, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, editor of The Major Works of Alexander Pope for the Oxford World’s Classics, and author of works on Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, and Austen among others.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Queen Anne by John Smith (1652–1742) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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