Progress Report

This my friends is genuine progress:

"The difference between the puzzle-poems’ posing of their clue and the lyricism of the more famous lines is easily recognizable...."  --MacDonald P. Jackson

MacDonald P. Jackson's appreciation for the evident LYRICISM of those splendid lines about moonlight and snow makes me warm and tingly all over. Boy was I wrong, Jackson does know how to read poetry! He's well on his way now to seeing the truth, that apart from meter, the delightfully clever poetry of the great American patriot Henry Livingston, Jr. has just nothing in the world to do with Clement C. Moore's poem "A Visit From St Nicholas." I'm so happy right now, I almost don't mind that Jackson says nothing in his ten-page Response about Louis Armstrong or Aaron Neville.

Melvilliana is here to help. Next assignment, due in my inbox on Valentine's Day: Find one "Homeric" or anywise extended simile in the entire corpus of Henry Livingston's known poetry, something remotely comparable to the following example from Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas":

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So, up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys—and St. Nicholas too.  --The Poets and Poetry of America

If you're playing at home, here's a serviceable definition from Encyclopædia Britannica:

Epic simile, also called Homeric simile, an extended simile often running to several lines, used typically in epic poetry to intensify the heroic stature of the subject and to serve as decoration. An example from the Iliad follows:

As when the shudder of the west wind suddenly rising scatters across the water,
and the water darkens beneath it, so darkening were settled the ranks of Achaians and Trojans in the plain.

Related posts:

• Two Homeric similes

• How we know Clement Moore wrote The Night Before Christmas
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-we-know-that-clement-c-moore-wrote.html