Mind Can Be Passionate Poem by gershon hepner

The mind can be a passionate
organ, scholarship’s
poetry. Imagine it
a tongue between the lips.

Inspired by the title of Daniel Mendelsohn’s most recent book, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily it Can Be Broken, taken from stage directions of Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Meangerie. G. W. Bowersock reviews the book in the NYR, November 6,2008. He recalls Mendelsohn’s review of Tom Stoppard’s play about Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman. Mendelsohn faults Stoppard for failing to understand Housman’s true nature:

For all their intellectual trimmings, indeed, you wonder whether Stoppard’s plays aren’t ultimately, anti-intellectual; he loves to show––and audiences love to watch––brilliant, anallystical minds humbled by messy, everyday emotions…You’d never guess from Stoppard’s presentation of Housman that the mind can be a passionate organ, too…

A very eminent Latinist of my acquaintance once told me that readint through Housman’s edition of the longm obscure and very difficult Latin poem of Manilius on astronomy on astronomy was the single most thrilling experience of his entire life. Obviously not everyone would react in that way, but it is to Mendelsohn’s tremendous credit that this really can happen. Poetry and scholarship are not incompatible.


10/22/08