A brief summary

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11 is one of the foundational texts of western civilization. No seriously. It gets referenced a lot, in art, poems, novels, etc.

The strange thing about the text is that it follows Genesis 10, the so-called “Table of Nations,” which already describes the splitting of peoples into nations and language groups. Now we get an alternative explanation.

Obviously the text isn’t trying to be the authoritative/historical explanation for the diversity of languages. It’s got bigger fish to fry.

The text explores the empire-building impulse. The people in this text are journeying, but this state of flux is unbearable, so they want to unite everyone around a building project. The building project (located as it is in Babel, i.e. Babylon) is a symbol of an empire-building project. Is it any wonder that empire-building and racism go hand in hand?

This text is intentionally juxtaposed with the introduction of Abraham. The Babel builders want to make a “great name,” and God says that he will give Abraham a “great name.”

There is too much to say about this text.

The rape of Dinah is filled with moral conflicts. Hamor rapes Dinah, but then in retaliation Dinah’s brothers murder every male in the city. Jacob, who had previously learned the power of forgiveness from his brother Esau a chapter ago Genesis 33:10, now sits back and does nothing to stop his sons from seeking revenge for their sister. On top of all of this, Dinah has no say on what goes on. So, is there anyone in this story who has the moral high ground?

In this poem Cummings mocks America’s consumerist culture, as well as the bland, superficial poetry he believed it encouraged. The title refers to “Earth Lover,” by Harold Vinal, which describes how nature is so beautiful that it brings the poet to tears.

According to critic Lewis H. Miller, Jr.:

“Cummings was quick to take an anti-acquisitive stance by insisting in ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal’ that America’s bad, anaemic poetry had much in common with the cloying appeals of America’s advertising. Both sprang from and contributed to a sterile, mechanized world which, as Cummings saw it, feeds on predictable, stock attitudes and responses. As an indictment of a consumer-oriented society and of the verbal and visual cliches which accompanied and promoted that society, ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal’ provides a unique antidote to the optimism of its time and to the consumer fetishism which continues to shape our individual and collective desires and goals….

“…Cummings' underlying comparison of bad poetry with the tired commercial phrases of his time is mischievously introduced by his selection of Mr Harold Vinal as a representative contemporary poet. Vinal, a New Englander like Cummings, had moved from his bucolic family compound in Maine to take up residency in New York City where he quickly became secretary of the Poetry Society of America and where he published his own poetry journal, Voices, a short-lived periodical to which Cummings applies the paradoxical, uncomplimentary modifiers, ‘radically defunct.’”

This poem is about the death of famous jazz singer Billie Holiday on July 17, 1959. The title is a play on her nickname “Lady Day.” When celebrities we love die, many of us remember where and what we were doing at the time. This is O'Hara’s story of what he was doing the day she died.