Giacomo Casabianca.

Mystified by the ear of a poet who would call a volume Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

La Vida Breve.

Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.

And was one of the few writers or artists aligned with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Like Dali.

Why is Reader always momentarily startled to recall that Keats was a fully licensed surgeon?

Does Protagonist even have a telephone?

Medieval legend says that Aquinas’s corpse was boiled and his bones preserved as relics. In actuality he was buried in Toulouse.

Ed Delehanty may have committed suicide. Having either jumped or fallen from a bridge at Niagara Falls.

El Greco would appear to have been almost impoverished at his death, though he left behind 147 canvases. Whether because he could not sell them, or would not, remains moot.

That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D. H. Lawrence.

Sue Bridehead.

Hugo van der Goes died insane.

Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.

Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.

Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever after drinking Paris tap water. Deliberately drinking it, to prove to someone it was safe.

I’m Captain Jinks of the horse marines.

Yasnaya Polyana. Max Gate. Rowan Oak. Thoor Ballylee. I Tatti.

New Place.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.

Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.

Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.

Two of Alma Mahler’s three husbands, Mahler and Franz Werfel, were Jews.

Axel Springer Verlag.

Euripides was more frequently quoted by both Plato and Aristotle than was any other playwright. Plutarch says that Alexander quoted him repeatedly also. At a banquet not long before his death he recited an entire scene.

When John Stuart Mill’s maid inadvertently burned the only manuscript of the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution, Carlyle had already destroyed his notes. He would tell Tennyson that rewriting it was like swimming without water.

Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.

Henry James said that Oscar Wilde was a fatuous fool. And an unclean beast.

Gropius.

Lou Andreas-Salome.

Before leaving New York: Protagonist wandering for some hours one afternoon along the Hudson River docks on West Street. Near Gansevoort.

Finding only that even the specific address no longer exists.

Vivaldi was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Alfred H. Hunter died in Dublin four years after the publication of Ulysses, forever unaware of his immortality.

Byron’s letters record approximately as many instances of gonorrhea as do Boswell’s journals.

Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.

A Girl of the Limberlost.

To place our purpose within definite limits, we must first investigate the nature and domain of sacred doctrine.

It is the same old druid Time as ever.

Jascha Heifetz. David Oistrakh. Nathan Milstein. Isaac Stern. Benno Moiseiwitsch. Emil Gilels. Odessa, all.

René Crevel committed suicide.

Who is speaking, and says, We were in study-hall, in the first sentence of Madame Bovary?

Like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives worked in insurance. Like Kafka.

Herder was an anti-Semite.

The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole.

Kneeling at the grave, or standing head bowed?

And why does Reader always envision dusk?

Irony and Pity, Inc.

Yvor Winters called T. Sturge Moore a better poet than Yeats.

And Elizabeth Daryush as good or better than either.

The Pali canon.

Remembering a Sarah.

And a Robin and a Beth.

And a Karen, who wrote verse.

Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

And over so many years.

Nonetheless.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

She?

This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

Wolfram von Eschenbach.

A letter of Baudelaire’s intimates that his mistress Jeanne Duval was sleeping with her own brother when the brother once moved in with them.

If die I must, let me die drinking in an inn, said Walter Map.

Patrick Kavanagh was married for the first time at sixty-three. And died the same year.

Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,

Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.

Good Master Schoolmaster, do not English this.

T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs’ mother walked to dancing classes together as children in St. Louis.

Along the way passing Prufrock’s Furniture Store.

General Jacques Aupick.

The phrase down these mean streets comes from an essay by Raymond Chandler.

And is an allusion to Tales of Mean Streets by Arthur Morrison.

René Magritte’s mother drowned herself.

At twenty-six, Ben Jonson barely escaped being hanged for killing a fellow actor in a duel.

Shakespeare was in the cast of Jonson’s first play the same year.

Paolo Veronese was called before the Inquisition because of clowns, drunkards, and other extraneous individuals in a version of the Last Supper. Veronese convivially determined that the painting was really of a different meal altogether.