When we last left off pioneering Canadian poet Bliss Carman he was audaciously publishing a collection of 100 lyrics by Sappho.  If you read that post you find that such a substantial book of Sappho required Carman to largely imagine what the ancient Greek poet wrote, since much of what survives of her poetry are fragments, often but a line or two.

One could shelve that effort next to Ouija board transcriptions, among literary frauds, or within the loose bounds of historical fiction. Still, the “Sappho” poems he published have their attractions. And there’s a greater reason to look at Carman’s work: he was writing these things in the generation between 1890 to 1915 before English language poetic Modernism fully emerged with new models and freedoms for poetry. Some younger poets then suspected that Victorian 19^th century poetry was overdue to be superseded. In England, William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites had done what segments of young poets, musicians, and artists sometimes choose to do: they rejected their current and parent’s generation and looked to older models of their arts for different forms of expression.

Imitating the ancient Greeks in English was one such idea. Carman went further by treating his recreations as translations, but he may have gotten away with it when English translations of Sappho were still a bit thin on the ground. Other early Modernist poets writing in English like H. D. and Edgar Lee Masters produced original works that echoed the tone and methods of Greek lyric poetry.

Those Sappho lyrics weren’t Carman’s breakthrough however. That happened in 1894 when he and American poet Richard Hovey* published Songs of Vagabondia, the first of a series of co-written poetry collections that sought to break the Victorian mold. For a mid-20^th century person like me, I sensed a rhyme in the appeal of these books as I read through them. Is it too easy for me to see them as the late 19^th century equivalents to On The Road  and beatnik bohemia?

How so? Though the Vagabondia  poems have variety in subject and tone, they extol carpe diem, wine, women, and song, along with non-itinerary wandering. Sensuality and beauty are self-rewarding. Respectability, career, and money are for others.

This song is fun to sing, so let me share the fun with a simple chord-sheet to encourage you to try it.

.

Carman’s “The Two Bobbies”  speaks to this literary and cultural moment. He jauntily compares the English Victorian worthy Robert Browning with the 18^th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. Silent on its now age-beiged page, Carman’s poem was just begging to be made into a song, so this week I came up with a simple setting for acoustic guitar and my voice of subjective quality. You can hear me hold forth with it using the audio player gadget below. No audio player?  This link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*And what of Vagabondia’s  co-author Richard Hovey? I have plans to present some of his work here soon. Rather than looking to the ancient Greeks or to 18^th century British poets, Hovey was steeped in another motherload of Modernist-influential poetry: certain French poets of the second-half of the 19^th century.