Frederick Seidel of St. Louis

Frederick Seidel of St. Louis, Missouri, is probably the last American decadent--certainly he is the most distinguished. The decadent is not a native species, and his posture of heavy-lidded exhaustion is at odds with our more wide-eyed philosophies. While the American is forever young, the decadent is already old:

Cold drool on his chin, warm drool in his lap, a sigh,
The bitterness of too many cigarettes
On his breath: portrait of the autist
Asleep in the arms of his armchair, age thirteen

These are the opening lines of Seidel's "A Dimpled Cloud," from These Days. They recall another of his poems from the same collection, about an art teacher with an exotic accent named Mrs. Jaspar: "We used to pronounce her name to rhyme with Casbah,/Mimicking her fahncy Locust Valley lockjaw." Taking the two poems together, though, the joke is less on Mrs. Jaspar than the speaker himself, who has learned to confuse the pronunciation of "autist" and "artist," an extravagance that even the most inveterate Long Island Brahmin would not reach for--or stoop to. Seidel's best laughs come at the expense of the self rather than its society: He is not a satirist, though he can be very wicked, and the comedy of his poems is not the comedy of manners. Instead, it is the more desperate, more affecting comedy of belatedness, in which the poet finds that his voice is only an accent, and that all accents are only echoes. What makes Seidel stand out among American poets, however, is not just his air of early-blooming ennui but the fact that he is uniquely contemporary.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.