Andrew Benson Brown’s first poetic collection, “Legends of Liberty,” was astonishing. It was not the usual fragile collection of lyrics—with acknowledgments of obscure magazines here and other murky acknowledgments there, from poets hoping for some sort of coherence. On the contrary, it was a full-on, fully realized narrative—indeed, a mock-epic telling the story of the American War of Independence.
The first work is assured, mature, imaginative, and scintillating. Indeed, to take one line from my review of the work, I wrote: “Here we have a true American poet who is totally non-mainstream but is using form to explore American democracy, to investigate and comment on the War of Independence (which, as a Brit, I like to call the English Civil War, part 2!), invoking classical literature and myths for serious and comic effects, and generally providing a text that is outrageously interesting, gripping, and very funny.”
We are all familiar with one-hit wonders and “where are they now?” But Mr. Brown, a contributor to The Epoch Times, has published “Legends of Liberty 2,” and we can now ask how this work stacks up against its predecessor. Is Andrew Benson Brown still a “true American poet”? And perhaps most importantly: Is “Legends of Liberty 2” still “outrageously interesting, gripping, and very funny”?
Qualifications of a Great Poet
To be a great poet requires several extraordinary abilities. First, as the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79) said: “It can’t be done, apparently, by willpower and study alone—or by being “with it”—but I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery and surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.”
In other words, you cannot will yourself to be a poet; there is a definite sense of vocation, that you are chosen: The Muse visits you, but not another. And one weird thing about being selected is that it can happen at any time and is independent of education, although that is not to say that being uneducated is an advantage.
Edwin Muir (1887–1959), from Scotland, did not start writing poetry until he was 35. And like Keats, Yeats, and Shakespeare, he had no university education, yet he wrote some of the greatest English-language poetry of the 20th century.
Today, in stark contrast, almost every other poet is a professor specializing in some topic (especially “creative writing”). Academic status supposedly qualifies these people as poets. History shows us that nothing could be further from the truth.
Beauty and Truth
First, as G.K. Chesterton observed: “The true poet is ultimately dedicated to beauty.” What is beauty? It is the realization in form of truth. The form of “Legends of Liberty” is precise and excruciatingly difficult to execute, especially in its rhyme requirements. The rhyme pattern is ababcdcdee, and its 10-line stanzas are generally in iambic pentameter, except where Mr. Brown wishes to achieve special effects. To carry this off without flagging, repetition, or dullness is a major achievement.
The form is beautiful but not for its own sake. It contains profound observations, witticisms, and truths that sparkle on every page.
Don’t censure missteps, just applause— All masterpieces have some flaws.
This is succinct and a way to buy off critics of his work. Mr. Brown is saying that no one writes a perfect work. At the same time, his words evoke three peers. First, the Latin poet Horace, who in his “Ars Poetica” noted that, second, even Homer made mistakes! Third, this was picked up by the satirist Alexander Pope in “Essay on Criticism.” The proverbial expression that “even Homer nods” comes from Pope’s poem, although what he actually wrote was: “Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.” (In other words, Pope contested that Homer made mistakes!) Nevertheless, folk wisdom agrees with Horace. Basically, Mr. Brown is saying: If Homer can make mistakes, give me a break. Yet how memorable is the line “All masterpieces have some flaws”!Consider the brilliance of his witty rhyming: Hymnal/simple; Ahem/phlegm; Randolf/handoff; Welsh/Belch; Poetry is silly/burning up in Philly. These rhymes aren’t what you find in rhyming dictionaries. As with Lord Byron’s choice of rhymes, they require intellectual reach and an ear for language. The “ear” is in the semantic as well as the phonic chiming. For example, hymns are generally considered a simple form of music. And when we “ahem,” is there not some small transference of phlegm in the throat? And so on.
Fecundity
This leads to the second feature of great poets: copiousness. We note it with Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Byron, and others. Their writings are abundant. They didn’t write little collections of 19 poems padded with generous spacing and sigils to make the pages look full.These poets were verbose and prolific. Shakespeare wrote at least 154 sonnets, not to mention about two plays per year for 20 years. Mr. Brown suffers from “river-of-plenty syndrome.” This is important.
Looking at the works of God, we see that he is perpetually generous: God didn’t stint on creation. Life is teeming, variety is everywhere—in the elements, building blocks of existence, and in the vast astronomical spaces. As with the Maker, so with the great poets. Indeed, the word “poet” is from the Latin and means “maker.”
As we read both volumes of “Legends of Liberty,” we sense a huge architecture of creation, not drivel-driven lines, random aperçus, right-on memes, political posturing, or free-verse meanderings that characterize much of what passes for poetry today. This is poetry that is creative and creating. It goes somewhere as it builds on its own abundant architecture of ideas and linguistic ingenuity.
Vast Imagination
This all leads to my third and final point. Great poems exhibit great imaginative inventiveness. I have talked of the fecundity that Mr. Brown demonstrates and the large architectures it leads to, but more needs to be said about his inventiveness. When we think about the two all-time great Western poets of the Anno Domini period (the last two thousand years), we have Dante and Shakespeare. Both exhibited astonishing inventiveness in their great works.
With “The Divine Comedy,” we wonder where Dante came up with 100 cantos that detail the journey from Hell to Heaven. Certainly not from Virgil or Homer. Any one of Shakespeare’s tragedies—for example, “Macbeth”—includes perfect dovetailing of the supernatural elements into a play about murder and naked ambition. Where did he get all that?
I do not claim that anyone today compares with these two titans, but great poets always invent. With Mr. Brown, I have only space here to give one example, which is my favorite, and it amazed me.
This poem is a mock-epic about the American Revolutionary War. It’s packed full of historical details, including famous characters like Benjamin Franklin and King George III, and famous incidents like the Battle of Bunker Hill.
But to return to my favorite scene: We find the poet Dante—the great 14th-century poet—ingratiating himself with Satan and doing his bidding because, like Orpheus for Eurydice, Dante is desperate to see Beatrice and only Satan can unlock the door for his visit. It’s an incredible reversal of all we know about Dante and Beatrice, but it has a bizarre psychological truth about it. It makes sense that the one thing to make Dante turn to the dark side would be his obsessive love for Beatrice.
This is funny, yet psychologically perceptive and disturbing. In the context of a civil war (which is what the American Independence War was initially), it is also profoundly appropriate. Who can you trust when taking a side can seem like treachery to the other?
To cite Muir: “Poetry too has its object, which is not knowledge in the scientific or philosophical sense, but the creation of a true image of life. We all help to create that image, for imagination is a faculty as natural to us as the desire to see and to know. … This means that the first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth, and that if he is to serve mankind, that is the only way in which he can do it.” In this profound sense, then, Mr. Brown acquits himself as a major American poet of our time.
