on Chapbooks and Pamphlets

The Mandeville Press only recently issued a sequence of poems based on a Shakespeare play (John Gohorry's The Coast of Bohemia, which embroiders on A Winter's Tale) and now they are doing it again with Anthony Hecht's A Love for Four Voices which takes its characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream. The sequence is subtitled 'Homage to Franz Joseph Haydn' and we are supposed to imagine a Haydn string quartet, though it would be a peculiar quartet in which each instrument played solo in turn, as Hecht's characters willy-nilly must apart from the odd unison tutti; the analogy creaks a little. Besides, to my ear Haydn sounds a robust, no-nonsense, open-air sort of a composer able to make the simple virtues (like not straying too far from the home key) credible and touching; Hecht's tone is largely ironic, camp, self-mocking. As in a great deal of recent formal verse (e.g., on this side of the Atlantic, John Fuller's) there is an implication that we are all knowing aristocratic refugees from a lost and loved rococo (who are we kidding?); the vocabulary delights in words that relish their tasteful swagger - 'superb', 'aureate', 'bechrystalled' and the like - and in nudgingly clever puns, 'civilization and its discothèques', 'a tender Juvenal', 'post oak and propter oak' (though I cannot see what that last means). Haydn and Shakespeare, Auden's The Sea and the Mirror lurking somewhere in the background, a plethora of cultural references en passant, perhaps a glance at the notion ...