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AN EXPATRIATE IN BOSTON IAustin Warren In America today there are few readers of poetry, and fewer still with leisure for poets not our contemporaries . These few may well be advised to spend their days and nights with Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare-the inexhaustible. Unless one is an antiquarian who prizes objects the more in proportion to their rarity-why bother with minor writers who are, by definition, strictly irrelevant to the current scene and mind? One motive is that of the literary historian, for whom a minor writer is often more efficient than a major one, because characteristic of his age-less a "hero" than a "representative man." Another is that of the psychologist of art, curious to discover (if he can) the pattern of failure: why, whether by default of character, or deficiency of talent, or maladjustment to context, a writer lacked the one thing needful. Yet another is that of the critic, whom the "minor" and the "bad" persistently spur to the definition of excellence. And finally there is that special kind of temperament exemplified by Louise Imogen Guiney, who cherished a fond affection for small or incompletely realized poets such as Mangan and Lionel Johnson, Alabaster, and the "matchless Orinda"; who "was always listening, the generous band to the responsive ear, to echoes from 'forgotten or infrequent lyres,' " and for whom the least line or image of true poetry was too precious for oblivion. To all of these interests, the story of Thomas W. Parsons (18191892 ) has something to offer. His early years belong to New England's Golden Day; his latter to the Gilded, that age when the prophetic Concord and the didactic Cambridge disappeared; when art and religion had become separated from the conduct of business and politics. By virtue of his Anglophilism and Anglocatholicism, Parsons was an alien to the place in which he lived; and his devotion to Dante alienated him from his time. His own poetry, too, had its affiliation with vanished or AN EXPATRIATE IN BOSTON 135 vanishing idioms: in his satires, his theory of translation, and his lyric style, he was a poetic "non-juror," a conscientious survival from an earlier day, the late eighteenth century, when sentimental and neoclassic impulses held each other in check. Parsons was born at Boston in 1819, the birth-year of Lowell, of Melville, and of Whitman; he was ten years the junior of Holmes and Poe, twelve years the junior of Longfellow and Whittier. The poet's father, after whom he was named, was an Englishman who emigrated to New England and, after taking an M.D. at Harvard, practised medicine and dentistry. The family lived on Winter Street in Boston; worshipped at Trinity Church, then occupying, in its massive brick Gothic, the corner of Summer and Hawley Streets. In 1828, the son entered the Boston Latin School; and here, excelling in the classical languages, he tried his hand at translating Horace into English verse. For some reason, now unknown, he was not sent to Harvard: the substitute was a European journey, upon which, in 1836, his father conducted him. The ship which bore the Parsonses to Italy landed them on the island of Malta, where, in the course of a fortnight, the seventeen-year-old youth had his first perception of a world antithetic to the neat, shadowless land of the Yankee-a world of poverty, horror, age, and art. For young Parsons, Florence proved the memorable city. Accidentally meeting Signora Guiseppa Danti, he lodged with her during his stay; and, long after, he recalled: "There, in the venerable Borgo Sant' Apostolo, consecrated, in my imagination by a verse of Dante's, in the ancient House of the Acciaiuoli, and in the home of a learned lady who bore the name of the poet, I became enamoured of the Divina Commedia." He first became acquainted with Dante from the Paradiso; he memorized it and declaimed it as he walked the streets of Florence. The sights, sounds, and odours of Italy quickened his sensibility; and Italy offered, in her art and poetry, the instigation of a personal culture not incoherent but centred. In Boston once again, he commenced to study medicine at...

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