The source of our problems: You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts.

The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the ’30s and ’40s, etc. with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today.

Winters’ problem would be the primacy he gives reason — in poetry but one suspects in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket in 1932.

Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? asked Winters about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason.

This idea was “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.” One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as Winters identified Hart Crane.

The crime of sentimentalism: This association of ideas idea seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.

Romantic poets — one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase “blithe spirit” — looked in their hearts and wrote (as the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney was advised by his muse when worried what he would tell his girl friend). Winters favored “a logical, plain-spoken poetic,” as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century poets, which is like preferring the plain-spoken Harry Truman to the oratorical FDR in political terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.

In his poem “Of Money,” Googe says he’d rather have money than friends because with the first he’d always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration:

Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, fare well they must away.

The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric “to the minimum required by the subject,” as opposed to “rhetoric for its own sake” as practiced by other Elizabethans.

Another of Winters’ favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own “creeping genius” was “more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit” and thus wrote for “those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.” An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.

In Winters, discontent: Winters’ own poetry was on the money in Greville terms. In his “A Grave,” he has this: “Life it seems is this:/ To learn to shorten what has moved amiss;/ To temper motion till a mean is hit . . . ”

And translating from the 17th-century French of Mme. des Houlieres: “Pathetic plaything of a witless chance,/ Victim of evils and of laws,/ Man . . . must suffer life’s impertinence.” Facing death, he is to “regard it with unhurried breath,/ And know this outrage for the last.”

Or the stunning motto on the back of a bicycling youngster the other day in River Forest: “It’s not the pace of life that bothers me, but the sudden stop at the end.” Only in River Forest.

Winters held feeling in suspicion and wanted it served up with restraint. This is art, to tell the tale, describe the experience, emotion and all, trying to understand it and then presenting it with the feeling it deserves and not a gulp more.

It’s the poet’s duty to take a fix on the feeling and put it in its place. He is to control emotion, “releasing it through constraint,” in Yezzi’s words.

An excess of emotion “obscured the experience” to be communicated, which is why we call sentimentalism sloppy. Bad poems are “slipshod” in their rendering of experience. They are inaccurate.

Ralph Waldo who? Winters clearly thought there was something to be said about the world. Unlike those theorists engaged in “the killing of history” as Keith Windschuttle tells it in his book of that name, he thinks we can get at the truth, or at least get close.

He defended an “absolutist” theory of literature, by which literature “approximates a real apprehension and communication of . . . objective truth.” This alone would get him laughed out of many a classroom today, if we are to believe higher education’s critics.

Interestingly, one of his absolute bad guys in the literary realm was Ralph W. Emerson, who said things like “No man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations.” Oh? This is somewhat like what current educationists say, “Every child can learn,” without saying what it is he or she can learn. But theirs is a slogan.

Emerson saw art, Winters said, as resting “on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment,” regardless (apparently) of what he is at that moment. Spit it out, and it’s good, because it’s you. Makes one wonder what did happen to the handsome Narcissus when he fell in love with his reflection in the pond. He pined away and died, that’s what.

The beckoning breach: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” begins Henry V’s stirring pre-battle exhortation. “Or close the wall up with our English dead!”

Thirty lines later, he concludes,

“The game’s afoot!

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,”

Cry, ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!'”

I thrilled to that, though I’d read it long before re-reading it of a Sunday at Einstein Brothers Bagels after Mass at St. Vincent’s up the street.

Meantime, I’d associated “the game’s afoot” with Sherlock Holmes, who says it to Dr. Watson when going after the criminal. Another lesson in how Shakespeare created our language.

Another language lesson comes when Exeter, Henry’s ambassador, asks the French king to “overlook” what he gave him, meaning to look it over – just the opposite of what we mean by the word. Four hundred years make a difference.

For the groundlings: Another aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is the pace of things. The scene right after the stirring exhortation mocks it. “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!” says Bardolph, a friend of the late Falstaff, the king’s fellow roisterer in his Prince of Wales days.

Bardolph and Nym and Pistol, two other roisterers, decide the hell with this fame and honor business, leaving the stage to the servant boy who thinks about it aloud, then decides to “leave them, and seek some better service.”

Later Bardolph is caught stealing from a church. Pistol tries to get him off, but Bardolph is hanged for discipline’s sake. The servant boy is one of those slaughtered by looting French soldiers while he guarded the baggage.

“We would have all such offenders so cut off,” says Henry of Bardolph. “And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages . . . for when lenity [leniency] and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” He intended to rule this land and saw no point in angering its people.

It’s part of the whole awareness of Shakespeare. He was so far from going whole hog imperialist a la Kipling or whole hog skeptic a la James Joyce, that he seemed to keep 19 possibilities in his head at once, touching base here, there, wherever it seemed good, to give us in one fell swoop a panoramic view of the proceedings, and all of course in a few extremely well chosen words.

Making fun and having it: In his “Requiem for a Noun, or Intruder in the Dusk,” Peter De Vries pictures “a cold brussels sprout” rolling off the page of the book and lying “defunctive” on his lap. It is held, furthermore, in a “fat, insolent fist” beneath a “bland, defiant face,” above which hung “the shock of black hair like tangible gas.”

He was doing Faulkner with “reverential amusement,” says Gilbert Highet in his 1962 book, Anatomy of Satire. Parody isn’t always reverential, needless to say. Highet tells of Arnold Bennett reading a Max Beerbohm takeoff on him and sinking from writing thousands of words a day to none, “until the shock of this operation wore off, and the scar of Max’s cautery ceased to throb.” Ouch.

So with writers in the U. of Iowa workshop in the ’60s. For quite a while after your work had been criticized by the group, you couldn’t write anything, a veteran told me.

It does take a strong heart, stomach, etc., to survive criticism. One needs a discerning view of readers and critics. Some are not good to listen to and must be ignored. In the after life, fine. Hear them out as angels sing in the background. But for now, find a muse and listen to her. She may lead astray but at least she leads.

Little noted item on Western reading habits: By the mid-18th century, more reading was being done in England partly because houses were warmer in winter and candles were better and gave more light. Thus has the race — human, that is, and in northern climes — developed good habits thanks in part to material progress. Take that, you Luddites.

Go to, you: Robert Benchley, the incomparable American humorist of the 1930s and later, having read in the Book of Proverbs, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise,” spent an afternoon in that pursuit and learned that when carrying a large crumb on his head, he should walk sideways.

You make-a me laugh: For the Roman poet Horace, the goal was to tell “the laughing truth,” which is bad translation of good Latin but instructive anyhow. He saw truth laughing at him and responded accordingly in his Satires.

Not very lawyerly: As if lawyers need any more potshots in their direction, Jonathan Swift in his Polite Conversation, the 3rd Dialogue has this: ” . . . he’s a concealer of the law.” Your turn, counsel. (all three items from Highet’s Anatomy of Satire)

Delaying tactic: Consider “anon.” In Shakespeare, as in “Henry IV, Part One,” it’s used by a waiter telling Falstaff he’ll be right there at once. “Anon,” he keeps saying but never comes. So we use it as “by and by” or “in a little while.” But it was short for “at once” and was used to put someone off, as in “right away” or “coming” when someone says, “Come on” and we don’t come because we’re busy. It’s a time-honored dodge.

Gilbert to (Oscar) Wilde to (Jack) Benny: Among “unkillable hymn-tunes” by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert’s partner, is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his “colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry,” said reviewer X.J. Kennedy in New Criterion, January, 1997.

The two didn’t get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by financial needs: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.

Gilbert invented the (comical) straight face, setting the stage for Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director George Bernard Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister.

The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford).

Gilbert died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. She’d been screaming but was not in danger. He drowned. His widow doted on fresh fruit and while on holiday had peaches sent her from his sumptuous estate.

Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, sometimes enervating, the whole package. It’s a jungle in there. Be careful.

So much and so little time: A great poem has “a general sense of compacted wealth,” says Wm. Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in. You needn’t know all of it or have it all in mind at once, no more than you have to know all the notes of a symphony. What you want is awareness of a poem’s “elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.” Just as I was saying the other night at the Ale House.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tried meditating in the ’60s, using a mantra, a Sanskrit word which he thinks may mean $85, what he paid for it. Later it dawned on him that “in our civilization” we meditate using “a medieval object, a book,” putting ourselves in touch with people in ages gone by. This kind of meditation, he says, gives “access to brains better than our own.”

Ah the mystery of it all. Some guy 500 years ago had a great thought, and it’s ours to ponder, with or without the Internet.

As for the joys of reading, Dr. Ken Cooper, the meditation-for-relaxation specialist of the ’70s, decided at one point that relaxation was as much obtained by quiet reading as by meditation-with-mantra. The maharishi came and went, and we still have reading.

Secret sharing: People say, “My, you do a lot of reading,” as if I steal from sleep or eating or prayer. It’s time for a little secret: I generally don’t watch the tube, that’s what. The tube I figure is for mind-vacating. A movie works that way too.

The time-snatcher television relates to schooling too. Kids who go for the tube with every free moment, reading only what’s required even in demanding school programs, are culturally deprived. TV, sedative or stimulant, is in any case a drug, sez I.

Some fairly complicated stuff: Harold Bloom touches on TV in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his unapologetic appreciation and promotion of what the West has given mankind.

Discussing “Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” he says “partisans of Resentment” object that only an elite can read in the way he recommends. Bloom isn’t sure even about that. It’s gotten harder to “read deeply” he concedes, adding that “even the elite tend to lose concentration.”

Wondering if his generation represents the last of the close-reading public, he asks whether his not owning a TV set until age 40 might be relevant. He wonders “if a critical preference for context over text does not reflect” impatience with “deep reading.” (I wonder in the same vein with reference to my years as a Jesuit, with little or access to the tube.)

“Context over text” refers to how critical theorists, his “partisans of Resentment,” tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom analyzes too, but their analysis is a peevish pecking away at things to satisfy a craving for upset, he says.

Armed with Freud, whom Bloom much respects, and far lesser lights such as the eminence noir Michel Foucault, whom he does not, they take off into a literary sky-blue yonder with anarchistic intent.

When times weren’t a-changing: We take it for granted that times are changing, but Shakespeare didn’t. Nor did his contemporaries, whom we call Elizabethans and Jacobeans, after Queen E. and King James, of Bible fame.

Therefore, Shakespeare et al. could talk of human nature as a timeless universal. They were not tempted to political correctness as we know it, incessant politicizing — or analysis of their society, which they took for granted.

Their times were changing, of course, and we can analyze them. But apart from recording the “rise of [merchant] families and their ambition to ally themselves with needy peerages and to acquire country estates,” Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had no sense of it, T.S. Eliot observes in his Selected Essays, 1913-1922 (London, 1950).

They were “blessed,” said Eliot, because it meant they could “concentrate their attention . . . upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences.” The same went for Dante and the ancient Greeks but not for writers “in periods of unsettlement,” as Petronius in the 1st century and Lucian in the 2nd.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans “believed in their own age,” as “no nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer of the greatest seriousness has been able to believe in his age,” said Eliot, whose “Waste Land” was no happy-ending Broadway musical. Eliot sounded wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

— More to come of these Observations of a Literary Bent —

Critical mass . . . There’s a literary theory, cynical and full of “Gotcha!” stuff, that says if you read for the pleasure of it, you’re missing the point. All this Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson is political tract material, you see. Take it apart and what do you find? Dictation from the ruling class.

So take it apart, the theory says. The story or poem was constructed; deconstruct it. Dissect it, you find nothing but worms and ants. If you defend its beauty, as whether the work can stand apart for a reader to love, you are a cultural conservative, fellow traveler with robber barons.

For some dissection of the dissectors, consider a review some years back in the Times Literary Supplement, which likened Literary Theory (reviewer’s capitals) to “uplifting tracts” as read by Janet in the George Eliot short story, “Janet’s Repentance.”

In this story Janet would hurry past references she could not imagine and get pleasure out of – “Zion,” “River of Life,” and the like — not in favor of “the minister’s pony,” “boots and shoes” and the like, images of everyday reality.

The Literary Theory folks want us to stop and savor such uplifting references. The reviewer likened these theory-lovers to 19th-century tract writers.

Let us now praise translation. It is not hack work but is crucial to transporting culture age to age, says Martin Greenberg in an essay, “A Defense of Translation,” in Against the Grain (Ivan Dee, 1995), collection from a New York-based monthly, “The New Criterion.” Almost as much genius is required of good translation as in doing the original, says Greenberg.

Where would we be if there had been no English version of Plutarch’s Lives such as Shakespeare read to learn about Julius Caesar?

Some translations live on their own. Don Quixote is one, Englished by the 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett, author of Humphry Clinker and other rollicking chronicles. Smollett’s Quixote lives today, same as his Clinker.

Same with Pope’s Iliad. Greenberg writes of “laughing out loud” as a teenager reading another 18th-century translation of Quixote, by Peter Motteux, whom he ranks with Smollett. On the other side are “pedants,” who revel in exactitude and end up writing stuff you can’t read.

The good translator dips into the sensibilities of another age or at least another language and passes sense and tone and manner of expression on to his own age in his own language.

That said, consider the 1996 Penguin paperback, The Psalms in English, edited by Donald Davie, who presents the Psalms in order of composition but also provides an index that allows you to read them in numerical order, first to 150th.

Fidelity to the original is crucial for him. He calls “most horrible” the translation that most went off on its own, a self-described “paraphrase” of the 137th Psalm by John Oldham in the 17th century. Davie admittedly prefered versions that reflect the Christian view. Such translations work for Christians, who appropriated them centuries ago.

The Psalms in English popped out at me from the neatly ordered, modest-sized new-book shelves of the River Forest public library, which reflect the relative orderliness (and affluence) of the town itself. My Oak Park library is bigger and bigger-budgeted, and ever there when I need it. It says a lot about where the two communities choose to put their tax money. This is the point of affluence, it seems to me, not that it’s there but what’s done with it.

From that RF library shelf also popped out at me a defense of capitalism by the philosopher Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (Free Press). And from this book’s pages popped out a defense of the supreme capitalist Andrew Carnegie, who sold off U.S. Steel in 1901 at age 66 and spent his last 18 years giving away the proceeds.

Carnegie is defended by Novak as a creator of wealth. Born poor in Scotland, in Pittsburgh he worked from the age of 12 to help support his family. With just four years of formal education, he eventually devised a way of making steel and running a business that changed how people live.

He is also blamed for hypocrisy and dishonesty in absolving himself of a role in precipitating and suppressing the Homestead Steel strike in 1892 — an action he spent much time and money atoning for. Novak in effect puts the question: are we better or worse off because of Andrew Carnegie?