To what purpose, April, do you return again?
     --Edna St. Vincent Millay

A boyfriend whose opinion really really mattered at the time used to denounce my habit of quoting others in my writing. He wondered why I didn’t just say what I wanted to say, and seemed to view epigraphs as crutches, as outside justification for an opinion I could not confidently own, or as a substitute for my own thinking.

The device, of course, is nether original with nor unique to me. Poets and thinkers far greater than I have invoked each other through the whole history of writing. One purpose of poetry, in fact, is to give people words they don’t themselves have to express what they find inexpressible. The danger in using another’s thought, however, is that the epigraph will be more memorable or more thought-provoking than the piece it inspires.

The other day I wrote, “When I screw my courage to the sticking post, I shall write to him about the Imprint group.” I meant that I needed to overcome some shyness in myself in order to approach a local figure who heads a writers’ group. I was making an allusion to a passage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, pulling the line up from memory. What I didn’t take into account is that my memory of this play has not been refreshed for more than a quarter century.

A reader wrote to tell me that it isn’t “sticking post,” it’s “sticking POINT.” Embarrassed at having made a literary blunder, I investigated, and learned that G.B. Harrison, regarded as the definitive editor of Shakespeare, gives the line as “sticking PLACE.”

Post, point, place -- the important issue, to me, becomes context. In the context of the play, Lady Macbeth is urging her husband to murder. His hesitation is not born of a lack of courage, but of a question of morality. Lady Macbeth has already rid herself of such scruples and is pursuing her own self-interest. It is she who is portrayed as the more evil of the pair, preying on Macbeth’s weakness of character to get what she wants.

I’ve always liked that line, “but screw your courage to the sticking-whatever.” It spoke to me of taking a deep breath and plunging forward with an action that was scary but ultimately rewarding. Need I consider that in its original context, the line urges pursuit of an immoral action that is rewarding in its most narrow sense? Is mangling context not what people do who justify race and gender discrimination and other assorted problematic behavior by bending scripture quotations to their own purposes?

So at the beginning of National Poetry Month I bring up the two most famous lines I know about April -- the Millay question given above, and probably the more well-known assertion from T.S. Eliot:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring 
Dull roots with spring rain.

It’s from a long work called “The Waste Land,” and like Millay’s work, I haven’t
reviewed it in a long time. But I did look it up, to get the lineation right. I found that I remembered the “memory and desire” part as coming before the “lilacs” part. I knew both poets well for the first time when I was twenty, and reading their words now takes me back to those spring afternoons in my American lit professor’s classroom which overlooked the river. 

I’ll be going down there for a visit soon, toting my collected Millay and my well-worn Norton anthology, a relic from those days. I’ll be visiting with old friends. I’ll let you know how it goes.