The anticlimactic linebreak

It has been exceedingly long since the last post -- instead I have been tumbling, partly because this doesn't require one to write! -- but then it's been a busy semester. I am not sure this really merits a post but I have lately been struck by the prevalence (&, to my ear, strangeness) of the following device:

We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney.

(Stevens)

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

(Hopkins)

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue.

(Lowell)

Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand

Klein.

(Eliot)

I think it's crucial for there to be a metrical substitution right after the linebreak. Obviously the trick of emphasizing a word by sandwiching it between an enjambment and a period can be used (and presumably is in Milton) for serious purposes, but that isn't what's going on in these examples. Yet it isn't a full-fledged comic effect either: to my ear both Eliot and Stevens are going for a degree of silliness, Lowell is trying to sound prosaic, and Hopkins as usual (and in this he is very much like Wordsworth) is unselfconscious about sounding absurd. Of course I think it always sounds silly in practice. 

There are various other things that I meant to blog about at some point, but for now I'll just link to this delightful bit from a Keats letter:

On our return from Bellfast we met a Sadan - the Duchess of Dunghill - It is no laughing matter tho - Imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old Woman squat like an ape half starved from a scarcity of Buiscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the cape, - with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head - squab and lean she sat and puff’d out the smoke while two ragged tattered Girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her Life and sensations.

Cf. "the woman, and her garments vexed and tossed / by the strong wind." 

Two uncles one full-dress saber

Owls in flight are strangely photogenic (see also):

Here is Uncle 1, "as looney as ever" -- i.e., Yeats, introducing a book by random eastern mystic, as described by Eliot; really you should read the whole thing but I wanted to flag this bit for poss. future reference:

it does seem a pity that he tells some of the Holy Man's best stories over in advance in his own fashion but the Holy Man himself writes much better than Yeats for this sort of thing I mean. That [sic] is a good one about his scaling a mountain about 25000 feet and tumbling into a cave on top of a still Holier Man who received him with laughter and affection.

I'm not sure if the book was originally to be called "Mount Meru" -- as in the typescript -- but you might remember the late poem "Meru" (quoted in that most Yeatsian of novels, Sabbath's Theater) in which hermits in caves on mountains appear; the spirit of the anecdote also reminds me a little of Lapis Lazuli.

And here is Uncle 2, in what is now my favorite Clive James poem, esp. for the ending (it is attributed to "Robert Lowly"; am not sure if it was originally published under James's name):

Revised Notes for a Sonnet 

On the steps of the Pentagon I tucked my skull
Well down between my knees, thinking of Cordell Hull
Cabot Lodge Van du Plessis Stuyvesant, our gardener,
Who'd stop me playing speedway in the red-and-rust
Model A Ford that got clapped out on Cape Cod
And wound up as a seed-shed. Oh my God, my God,
How this administration bleeds but will not die,
Hacking at the rib-cage of our art. You were wrong, R.P.
Blackmur. Some of the others had our insight, too,
Though I suppose I had endurance, toughness, faith,
Sensitivity, intelligence and talent. My mind's not right.
With groined, sinning eyeballs I write sonnets until dawn
Is published over London like a row of books by Faber --
Then shave myself with Uncle's full-dress sabre.

As an irrelevant postscript, there is something pleasingly symmetric about the word "toponymy," quite apart from the pony hiding in the middle of it.

Red Cheshire, Red Plenty

1. T.S. Eliot ordering cheese (full passage here, incl. arguably juicier bits, quoted from the excellent Eliot chapter in The Pound Era; includes notes about "jugged hare" (I cannot abide cheese and do not usually come upon these assortments, but as of late last year I know what Kenner is talking about)):

With the side of his knife blade he commenced tapping the circumference of the cheese, rotating it, his head cocked in a listening posture. It is not possible to swear that he was listening. He then tapped the inner walls of the crater. He then dug about with the point of his knife amid the fragments contained by the crater. He then said, “Rather past its prime. I am afraid I cannot recommend it.” [...]

The Stilton vanished. After awing silence the cheese board arrived, an assortment of some half-dozen, a few of them identifiably cheeses only in context. One resembled sponge cake spattered with chocolate sauce. Another, a pockmarked toadstool-yellow, exuded green flecks. Analysis and comparison: he took up again his knife, and each of these candidates he tapped, he prodded, he sounded. At length he segregated a ruddy specimen. “That is a rather fine Red Cheshire … which you might enjoy.”

Have come to realize that "flecks" is one of my very favorite words; I attribute this to the part of my sensibility that is inherited from the fat boy in Dickens.

2. Yeats attempts to eat spaghetti, recounted by Richard Aldington (via Calista):

William Butler Yeats and his wife once dined with me at my hotel in Rapallo. Spaghetti was served, and a long thin lock of Yeats’s hair got into the corner of his mouth, while the rest of us watched in silent awe his efforts to swallow a bit of his own hair instead of the pasta. Giving up this hopeless task, in dudgeon he suddenly turned to me and said in a deep voice: ‘How do you account for Ezra?

3. Edward Gorey's literary tastes are like mine. (But it seems Zeitgeisty to like Browne -- perhaps because of Rings of Saturn? though in my case the actual stimulus was the epigraph to Styron's Lie Down in Darkness -- and Twitter has lately thrown up more links to Basil Bunting than one would expect absent a Trend of some sort...)

4. Crooked Timber is doing an event on Spufford's Red Plenty. (See here for previous local coverage.)

"A major / Prophet taken short"

Wittgenstein and Housman:

(Housman, qua Cambridge institution, comes up a lot in stories about people like Wittgenstein, Russell, G.H. Hardy and John Littlewood. I remember there being a delightful anecdote in Littlewood's Miscellany involving Housman but I've forgotten what it was.) This story is in a letter from Guy Davenport to Marjorie Perloff; the letter is worth reading in full, it cleverly juxtaposes Wittgenstein with Gertrude Stein, who might have liked the implied comparison. Davenport also has amusing things to say about Wittgenstein elsewhere; see a prev. post.

While on the topic of celebrity letters, I should link to Eliot's letter to Woolf that was posted on the Paris Review's blog today. And, while I'm free-associating on this topic, to Eliot's magnificent letter to Middleton Murry on his second (third?) marriage.

PS re title see here.

"Mad in pustule and in postgraduate so"

Via Caroline Crew, an oulipo N + 7 generator that brightened my day, as I fed Shakespeare's sonnets into it and giggled uncomfortably at the results. [Edit. Obligatory Wikipedia link.] A great deal of this kind of thing:

The seal, all waterproof, yet receives raisin still,
And in abundance addeth to his storm; [Sonnet 135]

The seagull, all watermark, yet receives rainstorm still,

The seahorse, all watermelon, yet receives raise still,

But perhaps the best results were obtained with the first sonnet I tried, "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Here is a complete version:

N+10

The exploiter of splint in a watchtower of share-out
Is mace in addict: and timpanist addict, mace
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of bleach,
Saxophonist, eyelet, rude, cruel, not to tuber;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past rebuke hunted; and no sooner had,
Past rebuke hated, as a sweater'd ballad,
On pusher laid to make the tambourine mad:
Mad in pussyfoot and in posterior so;
Had, having, and in quiet to have, eyelet;
A bliss in prophet,— and prov'd, a very wonderland;
Before, a juggler propos'd; behind a drift.
All this the wrapper well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heifer that leads mandrills to this hemisphere.

(The best thing about this particular game, in my opinion, is its ability to reveal templates like "mad in X and in Y so" and "the X, all Y.")

The opening of Prufrock also comes out quite well:

The muttering revamps
Of restless nightingales in one-nightingale checkpoint hours
And sawdust restrictions with pacifier-sherries:
Stretchers that follow like a tedious armadillo
Of insidious interchange
To lead you to an overwhelming quickie . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our vivisectionist.

Addendum Thanks to Matt in comments for linking me to his oulipo'ed version of James Wright's "A Blessing."

They bowl shyly as wet swastikas. They lumberjack each other.
There is no lotion like theirs.

Edith Wharton's Muscular Prose

Back from Atlanta, this time without a cold. DAMOP was dreary, despite being in some ways nicer than March meeting -- fancy hotel vs. convention center, fewer parallel sessions, infinitely more free stuff -- and I'm getting more and more reluctant to go to these things. I used to think they were useful: abstracts are due a long time before the meeting, so (I used to think) committing to talk about something you haven't yet done gives you a strong incentive to do it by a certain date. Unfortunately one gets quite good at damage control over time, so that the objective incentive to finish up by a certain date loses its force; eventually conferences and talk prep take up time that would have been better spent writing papers.

Glad to report that the Kindle has put an end to my habit of traveling with the wrong books. Two things of interest that I read (dept of free e-books): The Age of Innocence and Gissing's Odd Women. (Still have a small amount of the latter to finish, I meant to finish it on the train from Chicago last night but the train was sold out so I had to take the bus, which was too dark to read in.) I had avoided Wharton she always sounded like a Henry James clone, and was surprised, or more accurately disconcerted, by the actual book. What is most disconcerting is the disconnect between the ostensible plot (which is about subtleties, silences, etc. in the canonical Jamesian way) and the style, which is vigorous, heavy-handed, "broad" and ungainly. Sometimes it is a little like reading The Golden Bowl as rewritten by Dr. Johnson: the writing is strongest at the level of the phrase, but the arrangement is often monotonous ("Civic Virtue" is more like Wilde, but Wharton doesn't do paradox):

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.

The "thought" is good but it is expressed too monotonously, too many of the descriptors come in pairs -- a fault that is perceptible throughout the book. Then there is her fondness for lurid irrelevances, of which perhaps the best example is the running gag about Mrs. Manson Mingott's obesity:

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

(I like this sort of thing as a rule. But note the redundancy, the heavy-handedness of the first sentence.)

Wharton's description of Boston in summer is reminiscent of Eliot's in "Preludes," written around the same time (though Wharton's novel is set some years prev.):

The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom. ... every few moments the doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went by. He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels.

I am intrigued by her weirdly heterogeneous sensibility; I'll have to read more of her books.

Accessibility and the audience for poetry

Elisa Gabbert pointed out this interesting sociological experiment, a survey of MetaFilter users "who read widely but don't read poetry" on why they don't read poetry. Results anthologized in EG's post, though she omitted my favorite ("I want a story, or facts. I don't want little snippets of writing."); a majority of the answers are ignorant/silly rationalizations like

• Poetry--it seems to me--will only bring greater understanding of one particular person's inner thoughts and feelings: the poet.
• I have a strong sense that it is contrived.

Like all obvious rationalizations, these don't hold up well; they also tend to shift the blame onto "poetry"/"poets" in general, as though, if poetry were nicer to them, they'd give it a chance. The generalizations are grating -- e.g., "[random myth] is the blessing and the curse of poetry" -- but I don't want to dwell on this end of things. The real question with rationalizations is what's behind them: are the stated reasons stand-ins for actual reasons or for laziness and prejudice? (The answer is both, I imagine, but in what proportions?) Reading the responses charitably I can either understand or sympathize with 3.5 reasons:

1. (the half-reason) The poetry culture is off-putting, "poets sometimes recite their poetry in these hushed, reverent tones," etc. This is not a v. good reason but seeing that one has lots of things to do, it is reasonable to avoid whatever seems dreary. I, too, dislike poetry readings; it's hard to hear the linebreaks, you can't rewind, etc. -- it's often like doing a crossword from 1-across to 69-down. I'm not surprised that casual attendees come away baffled and bored.
2. Poetry is dense, slows you down, is demanding, etc. Reasonable in general but a little narrow-minded; one's reading doesn't have to be escape reading. (There is a case to be made that reading poetry impairs your ability to read certain sorts of thriller, when written very badly as they sometimes are. And maybe one gets a sense of accomplishment out of the sheer volume of what one has read...)
3. "I want a story or facts, not snippets of writing." / "I don't 'get' poetry." The more and less self-aware versions of not looking for, or not caring about, language as an end in itself. This is a respectable view; language has lots of perfectly good non-decorative purposes.
4. It's hard to find good poetry books, relative to (say) good literary fiction. You don't have the constant ambient buzz of critical judgments and recommendations -- word-of-mouth, NYTBR, etc. -- that you do with fiction and nonfiction. "You don't know where to start." I'd add that as poetry reviewers go there are no figures analogous to Dwight Garner or James Wood, whose approval guarantees an at least somewhat enjoyable book.

[An interesting feature of the replies: the "avid readers" screen basically worked. I approve of the screening: it is useful to separate the question of why people don't read poetry from that of why they don't read. The discourse that (e.g.) this post belongs to, though valuable, is different from why, say, Franzen readers don't read poetry.]

---

The Q. of where to start is an interesting one. Primary possibilities: (1) a class, (2) friends, (3) an anthology, (4) a review. I have no business talking about (1), but see Kathleen Rooney's comment. (2) and (3) are similar in that, as the reader isn't being guided through the poems, the optimal poem is one that reads itself. Which brings one to the question -- which I meant to blog about before the proem ran away with the post -- of what makes a poem an efficient enticement to poetry in general.

I do not think "accessibility" in the ordinary sense is the issue; Eliot's remarks (in the Jonson essay in The Sacred Wood) ring true to me:

Shakespeare, and smaller men also, are in the end more difficult [than Ben Jonson], but they offer something at the start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer poetry in detail as well as in design.... But the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity.

As a lazy adolescent I had my fatuity reflected at me by, say, Elizabeth Bishop and Frost and Yeats; I could "understand" the poems, but didn't see why they were supposed to be good. The first poems that really clicked -- in the sense of showing that there were possibilities that were essentially endemic to poetry -- were the poems in the first half of Prufrock, esp. "Prufrock," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody." (E.g. "The conscience of a blackened street / impatient to assume the world" -- I found it extremely neat that you could systematically get a certain kind of "effect" out of tacking the adjective onto the wrong noun.) Similarly e.e. cummings seems to draw people into poetry, and I've known early Stevens to work for some people. A lot of this is subjective: the reason (say) Dylan Thomas wasn't appealing to me as an adolescent was that I wanted to be reassured that poetry was "OK for boys," could be clever and cerebral, etc. -- I found it strangely reassuring that Bertrand Russell had had an affair with the first Mrs. Eliot. Others would have been turned off, and probably were, by precisely these things...

What emphatically would not have worked -- and I suspect won't work in general -- is unobtrusively brilliant phrasing as in middle-period Yeats; anything that can be missed will be missed if one is in the habit of reading things fast; any metaphors that can be taken "metaphorically" won't work. "Mackerel-crowded seas," for instance; it's not the expected verb but it's not unexpected enough either; there are mackerel in the seas; the evening as "a patient etherized upon a table" is a different story. I'd be very surprised if anyone used to high-volume prose reading got interested in poetry through Ashbery or Frank O'Hara. (On the other hand, it seems plausible that one might first get interested in poetry in a foreign language when one's learning the language, so that one hasn't zoned out the writing yet. This is one possible mechanism, btw, by which the demise of classical education might have assisted the general decline in the audience for poetry.)

PS: See David Orr on how Larkin was the first poet he understood. This might be a different question from the poet who first got you interested in poetry as a medium; I imagine Orr already knew how to read poetry when he got out of college. All the same, Larkin is often a fairly flashy writer ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad") -- though maybe not at his best.

The bike inside your heart

A couple of days ago Calista sent along a fascinating poem, "Thirty Bob a Week," by the late-Victorian poet John Davidson. It's got considerable documentary interest (e.g., "like a mole I journey in the dark / a travelling along the Underground" and "with your science and your books and your theories about spooks") but, like most Victorian verse, comes apart near the end when it tries to get serious. This passage caught my eye (RPO has a v. with notes):

I step into my heart and there I meet
   A god-almighty devil singing small,
 Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
   And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
 If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
   He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.

 And I meet a sort of simpleton beside,
   The kind that life is always giving beans;
 With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
   He fell in love and married in his teens:
 At thirty bob he stuck; but he knows it isn't luck:
   He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.

 And the god-almighty devil and the fool
   That meet me in the High Street on the strike,
 When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
   Are my good and evil angels if you like.
 And both of them together in every kind of weather
   Ride me like a double-seated bike. 

It is obvious why this would have appealed to McDiarmid. I'm surprised that Auden didn't include this poem in his light verse anthology; it was sufficiently well-known that either A. or the Doddses would almost certainly have read it, it meets the criteria, and the quoted passage is reminiscent of Auden's famous analysis of T.S. Eliot's sensibility:

T.S. Eliot is not a single figure but a household. This household has, I think, at least three permanent residents. First, there is the archdeacon, who believes in and practices order, discipline, and good manners, social and intellectual, with a thoroughly Anglican distaste for evangelical excess.... And, no wonder, for the poor gentleman is condemned to be domiciled with a figure of a very different stamp, a violent and passionate old peasant grandmother, who has witnessed murder, rape, pogroms, famine, flood, fire, everything; who has looked into the abyss and, unless restrained, would scream the house down.... Last, as if this state of affairs were not difficult enough, there is a young boy who likes to play slightly malicious jokes. The too earnest guest, who has come to interview the Reverend, is startled and bewildered in being handed an explosive cigar.

One possible diagnosis of what went wrong with Victorian poetry -- and more generally with Victorian writing -- is that the diction got stratified to such a degree that you couldn't sensibly talk about seas in the same register as tureens; the only ways around this were to write in dialect or at least in brogue, or to use images that were in some sense explicitly comic. Davidson's poem, in the parts that work, does a bit of both but I think depends chiefly on deniability-through-comedy; his use of the outlandish but up-to-date image is very like what Eliot does in the first few paragraphs of "Prufrock."

Dear John, wright and wrong, the aggression of "about"

1. C.K. Stead, in an interesting LRB article [gated] about T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, quotes this letter from TSE to Mansfield's then-widower John Middleton Murry:

My dear John,
You know it is impossible for me to come to your wedding, as I am in a bank and cannot get away at such an hour. I am sure that you have done the best thing for yourself in marrying again, but you know that it has always been impossible for me to understand any of your actions.
Ever yours
T.S.E.

2. A series of puns on W/right in a Google reader thread led me to look up the etymologies of right and wrong to find out why there's a w in wrong. The "original" meanings were straight/crooked; "right" is from the rect- root and "wrong" seems to have begun life as part of the conjugation of "wring" in the wrung-out-of-shape sense. [The first Mid. E. uses of "wrong" are in place names like "Wrangebroc" and "Wrongedichhundred" (a hundred is an administrative unit).] There seems to be no principle behind the w in wring/wrong; the Old Norse and High German forms are w-less. On the other hand the w in wright is there for a reason,"wright" having come from forms that had the form "worked" via the interchange of front vowels and r that is so common in Middle E. (cf. "bryd" for "bird" etc.)

Interestingly "wrong" once meant "oblong" -- a rectangle being, one supposes, a wrecked tangle.

3. David Orr encounters the law and literature movement in the form of an anthology on the Poetry of Law; re the preposition, he says:

And it’s comforting, isn’t it, to suppose that pursuits like law and poetry aren’t really “about” each other in the almost aggressive way that instruction manuals are about food processors, but rather are as delicately interrelated as sea and shore, or bees and roses.

4. Gaddafi's flamboyantly Elizabethan approach to spelling (Language Log; see also Johnson) and Elizabethanly flamboyant approach to dress (Vanity Fair). Discuss: is he the Christopher Marlowe of our age?

T.S. Eliot Prize

You can read poems by all the finalists here, though, having done so, I'd advise against it. It's a dreary selection this year (insert Waste Land joke). Heaney's new book looks forbiddingly bad. I read a good part of Derek Walcott's -- which won -- at a bookshop some time ago; it's what one expects from late Walcott, clever images flabbily drawn. The stuff by Brian Turner, "soldier-poet," is the worst of the lot: there is a poem ending "just to hear another human voice, just to breathe in the dark." I sort of liked Annie Freud's "The Carvery Experience," and Pascale Petit's ekphrastics on Frida Kahlo are also mildly enjoyable. One of these has the lovely couplet "I can hear the bone-saw / of the ocean on the horizon." By far the best single poem, in my opinion, was Robin Robertson's "At Roane Head," which begins like this:


At Roane Head
for John Burnside 

You'd know her house by the drawn blinds –
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry.
You'd tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it
from the sea and from the brief light of the sun,
and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door
where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap.

A fork of barnacle geese came over, with that slow
squeak of rusty saws. The bitter sea's complaining pull
and roll; a whicker of pigeons, lifting in the wood.
She'd had four sons, I knew that well enough,
and each one wrong. All born blind, they say,
slack-jawed and simple, web-footed,
rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I'm told,
though blank as air.
Someone saw them once, outside, hirpling
down to the shore, chittering like rats,
and said they were fine swimmers,
but I would have guessed at that.

Tumbling towards Bedlam; "30 Prufrock"

"With the inevitability of discoveries made late at night," I realized that I should start a blog of some kind called 30 Prufrock. An obvious obstacle was that I already have a blog, but then I read this article about the history and future of blogs and realized that I hadn't yet started a tumblr. Which I then proceeded to do. I discovered with some amusement that (a) line 30 of Prufrock could easily be adapted into a tagline, (b) one of Tumblr's free styles is called "inkhorn," which is appropriate on many different levels -- though I'm not particularly fond of the style itself. I haven't figured out what -- if anything -- I'm going to do with the tumblr yet, but its present format seems much better suited to a scrapbook than a blog. Maybe I'll use it for quotes or pictures I don't have much to say about...

I would treat the "blogs in 2011" article with some skepticism. At the top of the food chain, linkblogs are not dying at all -- Marginal Revolution and Andrew Sullivan are chiefly linkblogs -- and Yglesias's posts are as short and frequent as ever, though more often headed with pictures than they used to be. If it has become less sensible to maintain a link-blog for an audience of friends -- to my mind it clearly has -- this is due less to twitter than to Google Reader and Buzz. For me the decisive moment was when I realized I could pull out a paragraph from a magazine article and share it just by selecting it and clicking on the "note in reader" button on my toolbar.

Melancholy noise; swiving; middlebrows

Jenny Diski writes about Google n-grams:

Melancholy is virtually non-existent before 1570, but begins to rise and then falls until it drops off completely around 1625, about the time of the death of Dowland. It builds again to a great surge in 1650 (when, it says in Wikipedia, ‘the Age of Discovery ends’: reason enough), falls and then picks up, growing nicely and rising with the Romantics in 1800, and then declines gently before starting to increase again after 2000. Sting recorded a very terrible version of Dowland’s songs in 2006. [Ed. !!]  Fuck is quite absent from books until about 1590 when it jolts up the chart for about eight years and then plummets, before returning in the 1630s...

To see what's really going on one should run the search without smoothing:

So it's mostly just a signal-to-noise artifact that's due to small corpora. (Here's the post-1750 part expanded.) It is not credible that "fuck" was absent until the 1590s; late medievals and especially Scots -- Dunbar, Lyndsay, etc. -- were fond of the word, which for some reason was preferred in the north to "swive."

By the way, the gem-studded OED entry for "fuck" has this beautiful inadvertent alexandrine by Florio, defining "fottere" in World of Words:

to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.

(Note to self/others: use in parody of Tennyson's "Ulysses.")

Another n-gram I wanted to post, although I don't have the time to discuss it in detail, is the "brow" words:

As you can see they're all recent, not just middlebrow. All of them are coeval -- middlebrow perhaps exactly contemporary -- with T.S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" thesis. I suspect that the dissociation of brows had something to do with this. In particular there's a Church of Latter-Day Middlebrows that the modernists came up with, beginning with Dryden (I remember J.D. McClatchy actually calling Dryden a middlebrow) and running through Addison, Richardson, Johnson (but not Pope or Swift, who were playful and mad respectively), and Walter Scott, to the high Victorian period when the distinction between middlebrows and highbrows becomes imperceptible. This lines up nicely with Eliot's history of English poetry, in which all poetry after Milton and Dryden (until Eliot, of course) was either ethereal and goofy or businesslike and drab.

Update Jenny Davidson asks in comments about the "standard" history of highbrow, which is presumably a phrenology thing although I can't locate any reliable early sources of an explicitly phrenological character. Assuming that this is so, it's interesting that even highbrow dates from the later days of phrenology. Perhaps this is because the terms had no real, non-jocular application before the era of Bloomsbury and Eliot.