Pg. 73 of David Markson’s copy of The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure by J. Dover Wilson:
On which Markson has written “Wm. W” next to the quote:
“Mighty poets in their misery dead.”
—
“Wm. W.” = William Wordsworth
Who, in the poem Resolution and Independence, wrote:
“My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
—Perplexed, and longing to be comforted,
My question eagerly did I renew,
‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’”
(Italics mine.)
On pg. 159 of his novel This Is Not A Novel, Markson wrote:
“And mighty poets in their misery dead.”
(Italics Markson’s.)
Pg. 40 of David Markson’s copy of The Failure of Criticism by Henri Peyre:
On which Markson drew a line in the margin next to the following sentence:
“‘Childish,’ ‘infantile,’ ‘silly,’ ‘affected,’ ‘drivelling,’ difficult of comprehension,’ ‘unintelligible,’ ‘bombastic,’ ‘obscure,’ ‘absurd,’ ‘nauseating’: such are the choice epithets with which contemporary critics characterized Wordsworth’s poetry.”
—
On pg. 6 of David Markson’s The Last Novel, part of this list is utilized in a longer section of how different writers were perceived by contemporary critics:
“Infantile. Absurd. Driveling. Nauseating.
Reserved for Wordsworth.”
Talking about his “personal genre,” as he termed it, in an interview at KCRW with Michael Silverblatt, Markson explains:
“What I do is essentially leave out most of the baggage of the usual novel: plot, character, dramatic incidents, dramatic scenes—which sounds as if there’s nothing much left (and some people probably think there is nothing much left). But these books are loaded with incidental odds-and-ends, intellectual snippets—whatever you might call them—about literary people, about artists, about composers, even sometimes sports figures. Quotations—sometimes attributed, sometimes not. However, they are tied together with certain themes. What they’re basically conveying is the nature of the artistic life. Most frequently its despairs and defeats, or sometimes even rotten reviews, and sometimes even from their peers (who should be kinder).”
Despairs and defeats.
Rotten Reviews.
Infantile. Absurd. Driveling. Nauseating.
Reserved for Wordsworth.
