Good Night, Sweet Ladies: A Thought About Slightness

Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote a lot of minor work. O’Hara’s minor work is usually more fun, to me, than Dickinson’s, but either way, they are poets whose lesser poems are an integral part of their overall body of work. Everybody needs to write minor work. I read somewhere that the filthiest limericks were probably written by anthology-rank Victorian poets keeping their hand in for when the big stuff arrived. T.S. Eliot kept his hand in by writing Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His separation of light verse from the rest of his poetry makes major work like Four Quartets seem all the more oppressively sober. (As a semi-aside, imagine the glummest passages of "The Wasteland" without the tragicomic pub scene.) It’s hard to keep Cats in mind when reading “The Dry Salvages” but Emily Dickinson’s outhouse poem, #1167 (“Alone and in a Circumstance/Reluctant to be told/A spider on my reticence/Assiduously Crawled…”) seems of a piece with the lifework of the Amherst recluse. Same with O’Hara: His chat matters. Sure, the greatest hits are capital-G great—Dickinson’s #27 (“Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me”), O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.