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| My thanks to the Brigit Saint Brigit theater in Omaha for the poster |
The list of poems banned as
heresies, whether religious, political, moral or social, is too long for this
page. Noteworthy among them is Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria”, which upset the Roman
Emperor Augustus so much that he both banned the work and banished the poet;
the poem survived, until the monk Savonarola included it in his “Bonfire of the
Vanities” in 1497. Christopher Marlowe translated it into English in 1599, only
to find his version banned and himself imprisoned; and U.S. customs added it to
their list in 1930. The 1881 edition of Walt Whitman’s endlessly rewritten and
reprinted canonical “Leaves of Grass” was banned in Boston, though that city
now requires study of it as part of its Literature programme in secondary
schools; required reading and banning are of course both forms of coercion and
control. The French government suppressed six of the poems in
Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” and charged him with corrupting public morals;
the work was republished the following year and has never been out-of-print
since. The complete works of
Osip Mandelstam disappeared on Stalin’s orders, with the poet banished to
death-by-exile. Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” fell victim to an obscenity trial in
1957. “Education for Leisure” by the current English Poet Laureate Carol Anne
Duffy was banned in 2008 by the school’s examinations board AQA…plus ça change…
1642
at Arcetri
near Florence
under house arrest
working only under close policing
completely blind
censured by the ecclesiastical authorities
sentenced to death by Pope Urban VIII
(commuted at the personal behest of the Duke of
Tuscany)
on the 65th birthday of the Danish astronomer
Johannes Fabricius
(the man who actually discovered sunspots)
on the anniversary of the death of Marco Polo
at the age of 77
Galileo Galilei
died
broken on the rack of disappointment
Of his achievements we can list:
the inference
from the oscillations of a lamp
suspended in the cathedral at Pisa
of the usefulness of a pendulum
in measuring time exactly
the invention of a hydrostatic balance
a treatise on the law of specific gravity
the theory of falling bodies
the invention of the thermometer
and the proportional compass
the development of the refracting telescope
and its use in determining
the nature of the lunar landscape
the discernment of the structure of the Milky Way
the discovery of four satellites of Jupiter
the proof of solar rotation
based on the evidence of sunspots
the law of uniformly accelerated motion
the law of the parabolic path of projectiles
the law of virtual velocities
the law of inevitable weightedness
All these
science
or heresy
depending on your point of view
"Heresies" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
You can find David Prashker at:
Copyright © 2014 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press
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