Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
The Art of Consolation
By Christopher Benfey
Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats
by Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 137 pp., $19.95
Edgar Degas was dining one day, along with the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, at the house of Berthe Morisot. As a distraction from painting, Degas had begun to try his hand at writing sonnets—on dancers, racehorses, and Mary Cassatt's pet parrot, Coco—and, according to an account by Paul Valéry, he rashly complained to Mallarmé, the most fastidiously exacting of poets, of the difficulties of the task. 'What a business!' he cried. 'I wasted an entire day on one damned sonnet, without making any progress at all.... And yet, I have no lack of ideas...I'm full of them...I've got too many....' To which Mallarmé—'avec sa douce profondeur'—replied, 'But, Degas, it is not with ideas that you make a poem.... You make it with words.'
Review, 3790 words
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