T. S. Eliot called them, "Critics With Gusto":
those who delved through the layers of dust so
the work of certain forgotten poets who had been obscured
in time or memory could be given a preferred
understanding, so that their poems might live, undeterred
by withering age or customs made rancid and stale
by the merest scribllers who would gladly impale
upon a stake of scorn the superior
poet in whose presense they are prooved grossly inferior.
Starward
[*/+/^]
Author's Notes/Comments:
The title and gist of the poem comes from T. S. Eliot's essay, "To Criticize The Critic." Old Possum was the appellation given Eliot by his sometimes faithless friend, Ezra Pound. The sixth line alludes to the very first line from Shakespeare that I ever learned, at the tender age of eight or nine years old, through its appropriation as a title for a horror story about mummies, and ancient Egypt, in that wonderful magazine, Eerie, which was a literate and polished as an English ghost story: the line is from the play, Antony And Cleopatra, Act II, scene 2. Like the character of Lord Byron said, in the prologue to Universal's 1935 film, The Bride Of Frankenstein, I used to roll the phrase, "Nor custom stale" off my tongue---much to the bewildered consternation of my parents. I miss those days of purchasing a copy of Eerie during my father's while my Father shopped for two weeks of groceries at the local store; then reading---no studying---its every word on Friday night, and again on Saturday, uintil, at 3:30, our area's second VHF channel, 16, broadcast a half hour of the Three Stooges, followed (and this was the climax of my weekend, in those years prior to my Sunday church attendance after I turned twelve) by Shock Theater, and a horror film from Universal between 1931 and 1945. Saturday night and Sunday seemed, after the conclusion of the film, to be a tremendous "let-down," which I ameliorated by reading my newest copy of Eerie, and its other back issues that had survived my parents attempt to stifle my interest in literate ghost stories.
Recovering some of the early archived work on postpoems, and commenting upon it, seems to me to be a similar process.
