In browsing some of my favorite blogs this morning I came across this poem written by Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) and published in the June 28, 1947 issue of The Saturday Review
“O that our living literature could be
Our sustenance, not archaeology! . . .
My scholar shall be brilliantly forbidden
to dig old garbage from a kitchen midden . . .
Far better Alexandria in flames
Than buried beneath unimportant names;
And even Sappho, glory that was Greece’s,
Lives best, I blasphemously think, in pieces.
That Chinese Emperor who burned the books
Succumbed to madness shrewder than it looks;
The minor poets and the minor sages
Went up in smoke. The great shine down the ages.”
It's in today's posting by Patrick Kurp from Houston in his extraordinary blog, Anecdotal Evidence. Do check it out.