Spencer Brown
XAVIER GREENSPAN:
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM
Harvard is running out of Joyce
and Kafka; Rilke is all washed
up at Indiana. The Comstock Lode
of Hopkins is exhausted, and
Kenyon is beginning to refine the
low-grade ore of Milton. Scott
Fitzgerald is buried under book–
length monuments ; Melville and
James are through as Tommy
Henrich.
Thus the assistant professor's
revery.
If
only I could find, and plug
like mad, a writer as unknown as
H. Phelps Putnam, living around
the tum of the century, whose
style has influenced Mr. Eliot, ac–
ceptable in the sight of Schwartz
and Daiches and, with sharp res–
ervations, Yvor Winters-
Associate next year, with lec–
ture fees outside, and articles in
paying mags: after a year or two
we could afford a new car and
the hill farm in New Hampshire.
His head slid slowly to the of–
fice desk beside the typewriter
and files of cards. Then fairer,
more celestial cards, neat-typed,
flicked by his drowsy inner eye.
They told of
[FRANCIS] XAVIER
SYLVESTER GREENSPAN
b. 1874 (stock, Polish Jew and
Irish Catholic) , attended Har–
vard, rooming with Edwin Arling-
ton Robinson. The Yard still
echoes with their blank-verse con–
tests; their marathon of 1892 was
won by Robinson, twenty-six per
minute to twenty-three. When
Robinson left college, Greenspan,
till then a follower of Royce, be–
came an Anglo-Catholic, flirted
with the notions of the Wobblies,
and espoused a diction too
ad–
vanced for Robinson. Some cri–
tics read his philosophic quest,
others his scorn of outworn pro–
sody, in these prophetic lines
from the
Three Sonnets:
The bubbles of our elocution
pop,
A piz<:icato fidget and a fizzle.
Become a novice in an Angli–
can order, fierce-willed Green–
span bowed to discipline, and all
the early verse save the
Three
Sonnets
perished for greater glory
of the Lord. Aside from letters
to Gene Debs and Haywood (lost
during Debs's long term in At–
lanta) he wrote nothing again
till 1909
(annus illuminationis,
as
he dubbed it in his note to Ezra
Pound), when he left Canterbury
for Rome, announced his popping
of the bubble socialism, founded
an independent Catholic order,
began the angry correspondence
with Lenin (since burned by the
Nazis at Lwow).
It was in 1910 that Greenspan
wrote,
Shout, clamor, and rouse out.
But no noise comes.
Creeping silence instead invades
the head.
