logotype

Robert Lowell

 

On Imitations

This book is partly self-sufficient and separate from its sources, and should be first read as a sequence, one voice running through many personalities, contrasts and repetitions. I have hoped somehow for a whole, to make a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry. The dark and against the grain strand out, but there are other modifying strands. I have tried to keep something equivalent to the fire and finish of my originals. This has forced me to do considerable rewriting.

Boris Pasternak 1 has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. Most often this has been a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment. I have tried to write alive English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America.

Most poetic translations come to grief and are less enjoyable than modest photographic prose translations, such as George Kay has offered in his Penguin Book of Italian Verse. Strict metrical translators still exist. They seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry. Their difficulties are bold and honest, but they are taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds. A better strategy would seem to be the now fashionable translations into free or irregular verse. Yet this method commonly turns out a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished, now on stilts, now low, as Dryden would say. It seems self-evident that no professor or amateur poet, or even good poet writing hastily, can by miracle transform himself into a fine metricist. I believe that poetic translation - I would call it an imitation - must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem.

My licenses have been many. My first two Sappho 2 poems are really new poems based on hers. Villon 3 has been somewhat stripped; Hebel 4 is taken out of dialect; Hugo's "Gautier" is cut in half. Mallarmé 5 has been unclotted, not because I disapprove of his dense medium but because I saw no way of giving it much power in English. The same has been done with Ungaretti 6 and some of the most obscure Rimbaud 7. About a third of "The Drunken Boat" has been left out. Two stanzas have been added to Rilke's 8 "Roman Sarcophagus," and one to his "Pigeons". "Pigeons" and Valéry's 9 "Hellen" are more idiomatic and informal in my English. Some lines from Villon's "Little Testament" have been shifted to introduce his "Great Testament". And so forth! I have dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas, changed images and altered meter and intent.

Pasternak has given me special problems. From reading his prose and many translations of his poetry, I have come to feel that he is a very great poet. But I know no Russian. I have rashly tried to improve on other translations, and have been helped by exact prose versions given me by Russian readers. This is an old practice; Pasternak himself, I think, worked this way with his Georgian poets. I hope I caught something worthy of his all important tone.

This book was written from time to time when I was unable to do anything of my own. It began some ten years ago when I read a parallel French translation of Rilke's "Orpheus," and felt that a much better job might be done in English. I had long been amazed by Montale10, but had no idea how he might be worked until I saw that unlike most good poets - Horace and Petrarch are extremes - he was strong in simple prose and could be made still stronger in free verse. My Baudelaires 11 were begun as exercises in couplets and quatrains and to get away from the longer, less concentrated problems of translating Racine's 12 Phèdre.

All of my originals are important poems. Nothing like them exists in English, for the excellence of a poet depends on the unique opportunities of his native language. I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them ring right for me.

(Imitations, 1961)

New England and Further 13"Emily Dickinson"

After a parade of unaccompanied males, a woman, an oasis - Emily Dickinson14. Colonel Higginson's "little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face with no good feature" - a woman who drained him more than any person he had ever met. She wrote in a letter on a window whose son had been killed in the war: "Poor little widow's boy, riding tonight in the mad wind back to the village burying ground where he never dreamed of sleeping! Ah the dreamless sleep!" Her writing was in the 1860's - the war no part in it. About her family she wrote Higginson: "They are religious, except for me, and at breakfast worship the great O they call God." When her father died: "His heart was pure and terrible, I think no other like it exists."

In the 1950's, Professor Thomas H. Johnson printed Miss Dickinson's entire text as she wrote and punctuated it; he removed the emendations of previous editors and he has raised, I think, a critical problem. Has anyone the right to retouch an author? (For myself, I have felt that Wordsworth's15 "Intimations Ode" could be made into his saddest, most finished poem if about forty of the most frivolous and ode-manufacture lines were left out. Having many times shown my cut versions to friends, I have never made even a momentary convert.) Hat to think what three professors from three different American universities might do revising Gray's16 "Elegy".

The new complete Dickinson text of 1.800 poems, a new Dickinson, great bulk, peculiar, and on fire, lines steadily alive and original - strangely like the late Henry James's17 recklessly strenuous prose. There are drawbacks to the bulk - the straying into shagginess, purposeless bad grammar, meaningless dashes spread like bird shot. The poems piled up unseen, some of them perhaps never looked at twice. Would she have mailed them in this state to a trustworthy editor? But who was trustworthy? In a nightmare, imagine correcting or rejecting her manuscript.

The Johnson edition gives an impression of greater energy; the edited editions had more unrumpled (almost) masterpieces. The "improvements," of course, did not always improve. Many will feel she is more in character when frayed and mussed and wilful. There was good editing, if such is to be allowed. (1) The last fine but structurally irrelevant stanza of "I felt a funeral in my brain" - cut by an earlier editor. (2) The Tulle and gossamer stanza from "Because I could not stop death" - also previously removed. (3) Stanza 3 in "There's a certain slant of light" - rewritten. Emendations of three of her greatest poems.

She brought poetry not only spoken language but her own self-speaking language. She can be said to have invented imperfect rhymes, a slight but earth-shaking discovery - all the stranger somehow because used to resurrect for serious writing the quatrains of the hymnal.

She knew how to plunder what was handy. Not a modern sensibility in our sense, but an atheist and heretic assailant filled with indignation, mockery, and terror of Calvin's God. The ladder she climbed points to godless eternity; its rungs were carve from Scripture.

A household spirit who wrote best - almost always when inspired - about death in the house, death real, death fore-experienced, death as a parting.

She lived a life of infatuated friendships, and once or twice or more must have had to survive the agony and crucifixion of lost love. Death, changing seasons, those shadows of death. A few partly humorous nature poems and too many pages of forced New England coyness - such were her subjects. A household ghost, the best female poet since Sappho, a precursor of more talented women poets than her own models - and now an omen of many more affirming the future with the arrogance and pleasantry of a prophet.

She revolutionized poetry, but no man or woman has learned much. Her divine waywardness, whose success is impossible to approve or condemn, separates her from the perfection of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. It was as if she had applied the subtleties of prose to the alien goal of poetry; she made the language of her contemporaries obsolete - if anyone had heard her.

(Extract from New England and Further, 1977)


1Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (February 10, 1890 - May 30, 1960) was a Russian poet and writer best known in the West for his monumental tragic novel on Soviet Russia, Doctor Zhivago (1957). My Sister Life, written by Pasternak in 1917, is arguably the most influential collection of poetry published in Russian in the 20th century. His parents were a prominent Jewish painter Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, who converted to Orthodox Christianity, and Rosa Kaufman, a popular concert pianist. Pasternak was brought up in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, his father's home being visited by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Leo Tolstoy. His father's conversion naturally affected Pasternak deeply, and many of his later poems hold overtly Christian themes. Inspired by his neighbour Alexander Scriabin, Pasternak resolved to become a composer and entered the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910, he abruptly left the conservatory for the University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Nicolai Hartmann. Although invited to become a scholar, he decided against philosophy as a profession and returned to Moscow in 1914. His first collection of poetry, influenced by Alexander Blok and the Futurists, was published later that year. Pasternak's early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Kant's ideas. Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favourite poets - Lermontov and German Romantics. During World War I he taught and worked at a chemical factory in the Urals; this undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later. Unlike his relatives and many of his friends, Pasternak didn't leave Russia after the revolution. He was fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities the revolution had brought to life.

2Sappho was an Ancient Greek lyric poet said by some to have been born in Eressos on the island of Lesbos. In history and poetry texts, she is most often associated with Mytilene, (now the capital city of Lesbos), which was a major city even in the 7th century BCE, when the island was a significant cultural centre. She was born sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC. Plato called Sappho The Tenth Muse, and the rest of the ancient critics agreed. She was one of the canonical nine lyric poets of archaic Greece, which meant that her works were studied by all those wishing to claim that they were properly educated. Older critics sometimes alleged that she led an aesthetic movement away from typical themes of gods to the themes of individual human experiences and emotions, but it is now considered more likely that her work belongs in a long tradition of lyric poetry, and is simply among the first lyric poets to have been recorded in writing.

3François Villon (ca.1431 - ca.1474) was a French poet, thief, and general vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison. It has been claimed that the villanelle is named after him, although few scholars today defend that theory. His question "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?", taken from the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis and translated by Algernon Charles Swinburne as "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", is one of the most famous lines of translated secular poetry in the English-speaking world.Villon was a great innovator in terms of the themes of poetry and, through these themes, a great renovator of the forms. He understood perfectly the medieval ethic, but he often chose to write against the grain of the courtly ideal, reversing the values and celebrating the lowlifes destined for the gallows, falling happily into parody or lewd jokes, and constantly innovating in his language. Still, Villon's verse is mostly about his own life, and it was not a happy life. The Grand Testament (1461), his greatest work, is in some ways a continuation of the Petit Testament (a.k.a Lais, 1456). The 2023 verses are marked by the immediate prospect of death by hanging. With a remarkable ambivalence, it mixes reflections on the passing of time, bitter derision, invective, and religious fervor. This mixed tone of pathetic sincerity stands in contrast to the other poets of the time.

4Johann Peter Hebel was a German short story writer and dialectal poet, most famous for his collection of "alemannic" tales Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes ("Treasure chest of the family friend by the Rhine").

5Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris, March 18, 1842 - Valvins, September 9, 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He worked as an English teacher, and spent much of his life in relative poverty; but he was a major French symbolist poet and rightly famed for his salons, occasional gatherings of intellectuals at his house for discussions of poetry, art, philosophy. The group became known as les Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays, and through it Mallarmé exerted considerable influence on the work of a generation of writers. His earlier work owes a great deal to the style established by Charles Baudelaire. His fin-de-siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page was explored. But whereas most of this latter work was concerned principally with form, Mallarmé's work was more generally concerned with the interplay of style and content. This is particularly evident in the highly innovative Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ('A roll of the dice will never abolish chance') of 1897, his last major poem.

6Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970). Along with Salvatore Quasimodo and Eugenio Montale, he was one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century. Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt by a family from Lucca in Tuscany (Italy). In 1912 he visited Italy for the first time on his move to Paris, where he studied for a few years. However, he did not take a degree and in 1914 he joined the Italian army. He fought in World War I and his traumatic experiences there shaped his most famous work of poetry, L'allegria (1914-1919). In the poems of this collection he explores pain and the sufferings of war with great delicacy and beauty. In 1921 he settles in Rome and writes his powerful Sentimento del Tempo (A Sense of Time, 1919-1935), focused on a deep awareness of time flowing. In 1936 he moves to Brasil as he was offered a chair in Italian language and literature at the University of Sao Paulo. His son Antonietto dies there in 1937 being nine years old. It was the source for his book Sorrow, published ten years later. In 1942 he returns to Italy and teaches at the University of Rome. In 1950 he publishes Terra Promesa (Promised Land), a book of poetry that delves into an aesthetic search into the very moment or instant trying to capture the light of the colors of stones. Ungaretti died in Milan in 1970.

7Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 - November 10, 1891) was a French poet, born in Charleville. He was born into the rural middle class of Charleville (now part of Charleville-Mézières) in the Ardennes département in northeastern France. As a boy Rimbaud was a restless but brilliant student. By the age of fifteen, he had won many prizes and composed original verses and dialogues in Latin. In 1870 his teacher Georges Izambard became Rimbaud's first literary mentor, and his original verses in French began to improve rapidly. He frequently ran away from home and may have briefly joined the Paris Commune of 1871, which he portrayed in his poem L'Orgie parisienne ou Paris se repeuple (The Parisian Orgy or Paris Repopulates). He may have been raped by drunken Communard soldiers (his poem "Le Coeur supplicié" - "The Tortured Heart" - suggests so). By then he had become an anarchist, started drinking and amused himself by shocking the local bourgeois with his shabby dressing and long hair. At the same time he wrote to Izambard and Paul Démeny about his method for attaining poetical transcendence or visionary power through a "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses" ("Les lettres du Voyant" - "The Letters of the Seer"). He returned to Paris in late September 1871 at the invitation of the eminent Parnassian poet Paul Verlaine, (after Rimbaud had sent him a letter containing several samples of his work), moving briefly into Verlaine's home. Verlaine promptly fell in love with the sullen blue-eyed overgrown light-brown haired adolescent, and shortly after they became lovers, leading a dissolute excentric life, rocked by absinthe and hashish taking. They scandalized the Parisian literary elite on account of the outrageous behaviour of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible and their pederasty. Throughout this period he continued to write strikingly visionary, modern verses. Rimbaud's and Verlaine's stormy homosexual relationship took them to London in 1872, when Verlaine left his wife and infant son (both of whom he used to treat badly in his alcoholic rages). In July 1873, Rimbaud had committed himself to journey to Paris with or without Verlaine, after which in a drunken rage Verlaine shot Rimbaud, one of the two shots striking him in the left wrist. Rimbaud considered the wound superficial and at first did not have Verlaine charged. After this violent attack Verlaine and his mother accompanied Rimbaud to a Brussels train station, where "Verlaine behaved as if he were mad". This made Rimbaud "fear that he might give himself over to new excesses", so he turned and ran away. In his words, "it was then I (Rimbaud) asked a police officer to arrest him (Verlaine)." Verlaine was arrested and subjected to a humiliating medico-legal examination, following the perusal of their compromising correspondence and the accusations of Verlaine's wife about the "nature" of their friendship. The judge was merciless and, in spite of Rimbaud having withdrawn the complaint, he sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison. Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing and a description of that "drôle de ménage" (odd partnership) life with Verlaine, his "pitoyable frère" ("pitiful brother"), the "vierge folle" ("mad virgin") of whom he was "l'époux infernal" ("the hellish husband"). In 1874 he returned to London with the poet Germain Nouveau and assembled his controversial Illuminations, which includes the first two French poems in free verse. Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in March 1875, in Stuttgart, Germany, after Verlaine's release from prison and his conversion to Catholicism. By then Rimbaud had given up writing and decided on a steady, working life, fed up with his former wild living (some say), or having decided to become rich and independent to afford living one day as a carefree poet and man of letters (some speculate). He continued to travel extensively in Europe mostly on foot. In the summer of 1876 he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch Army to travel free of charge to Java (Indonesia) where he promptly deserted, returning to France by ship. He traveled to Cyprus and in 1880 finally settled in Aden as a main employee in the Bardey agency. He had several native women as lovers and for a while he lived with an Abyssinian mistress. In 1884 he quit the job at Bardey's and became a merchant on his own in Harar, Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). He made a small fortune as a gun-runner. Rimbaud developed right knee synovitis which degenerated into a carcinoma, and the state of his health forced him to return to France on May 9, 1891, where his leg was amputated on May 27. Rimbaud died in Marseille on November 10, 1891, aged 37.

8Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 - 29 December 1926) is generally considered the German language's greatest 20th century poet. His haunting images tend to focus on the problems of Christianity in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety, themes that sometimes place him in the school of modernist poets. He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse pieces are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose pieces are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

9Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (October 30, 1871 - July 20, 1945) was a French author and Symbolist poet. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama, and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

10Eugenio Montale (October 12, 1896, Genoa - September 12, 1981, Milan) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Montale wrote a relatively small number of works. Four anthologies of short lyrics, a quaderno of poetry translation, plus several books of prose translations, two literary criticism books and one of fantasy prose. To these he accompanied an uninterrupted collaboration with the main Italian newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. The resulting absurdity of World War I (nothing was accomplished; and as General Foch said, the Treaty of Versailles, it was not the end, but only a temporary cease fire) took its toll in various parts of the world of the arts and it manifested itself in various ways; eg, Dadaism, de Stijl. In Italy, among the poets, it manifested itself in the form of the Hermetical Society; refer to Hermetism which was probably the inspiration for the society's name. The output of the poetry group was to create poems of total illogic; thus mirroring the absurdity of the "War to End all Wars". The rise of fascist regime influenced deeply, though at an unconscious level, his first poetry collection Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones"), which appeared in 1925. The strong presence of Mediterranean landscape of Montale's native Liguria was a strong presence in his first poems: the geographical limits of Montale's inspiration were therefore the outer face of a sort of "personal reclusion" in face of the depressing events around him. The social emargination of his social class, liberal and acculturated, sharpened his sensibility towards the nature's phenomena: the personal solitude generated a talk with the little and insignificant things of Ligurian nature, or with the far and evocative of its horizon, the sea.

11Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867) was one of the most influential French poets of the nineteenth century. He was also an important critic and translator. Baudelaire is one of the most famous Decadent poets, but before the 20th century, when his work underwent considerable re-evaluation, he was generally considered by many to be merely a drug addict and a very vulgar author. He is famous for his criticism of "usefulness" in poetry, and thought that poetry is only acceptable in a form of pure, superior beauty, never to teach something or to convey a political message (like Victor Hugo or La Fontaine did). He is now considered as one of the most important precursors of 20th century literature. His poetry and, to a lesser extent, his literary criticism, have had a very deep influence on the following generations of writers, both in France and abroad, which can still be felt today.

12Jean Racine (December 22, 1639 - April 21, 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the "big three" of 17th century France (along with Molière and Corneille). Racine was primarily a tragedian, though he did write one comedy.

13It is worth quoting here the following introductory words by the editor, Robert Giroux: "This essay [New England and Further], which was left unfinished and unrevised, has had a strange history. It was begun in the late 1960's, put aside until 1977, and taken up again in the final months before Robert Lowell's death [...] It was Lowell's intention to write about the authors of New England from Cotton Mather to Frost, Stevens, and Eliot. Both versions of the essay were written in Maine, where he was separated from his library. He had to rely on memory and planned later to check, expand, and revise for matters of style and expressiveness [...]" (Giroux, R. Robert Lowell: Collected Prose. London: Faber and Faber, 1987)

14Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Though virtually unknown in her lifetime, Dickinson has come to be regarded with Walt Whitman as one of the two great American poets of the 19th century. Her life has inspired numerous biographers and voluminous speculation, mostly about her sexuality, of which little is definitively known. Although she wrote (at latest count) 1789 poems during her lifetime, only a handful of them were published, all anonymously and probably without her knowledge. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family well known for their political and educational influence. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson (1775 - 1838), was one of the founders of Amherst College, whose campus stands less than a mile from the family's home. Her father, Edward Dickinson (1803 - 1874), was a lawyer and treasurer for the college. He was also politically prominent, serving on the Massachusetts General Court from 1838 to 1842, the Massachusetts Senate from 1842 to 1843, and the U.S. House of Representatives (to which he was elected as a Whig candidate in 1852). The poet's mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson (1804 - 1882) was quiet and chronically ill. William Austin Dickinson (1829 - 1895), usually known by his middle name, was her older brother. He later married Dickinson's most intimate friend Susan Gilbert in 1856 and made his home next door to the house in which Emily lived most of her life. Their younger sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson (1833 - 1899), often known as "Vinnie", encouraged the posthumous editing and publishing of her sister's poetry. Dickinson lived most of her life in the family's houses in Amherst. In 1840, Emily was educated at the nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys' school which had opened to female students just two years earlier. She studied English and classical literature, learning Latin and reading the Aeneid over several years, and was taught in other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology, and biology. In 1847, at 17, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which would later become Mount Holyoke College) in Sout Hadley. When she again became ill in the spring, Austin was sent to bring her home after less than a year at the Seminary, and she did not return to the school. After that, she left home only for short trips to visit relatives in Boston, Cambridge, and Connecticut. For decades, popular wisdom portrayed Dickinson as an agoraphobic recluse. New scholarship suggests a much wider circle of influence. Dickinson's possible romantic and sexual adventures are matters of great controversy among her biographers and critics. There is little evidence on which to base a conclusion about the objects of her affection, though Dickinson's understanding of passion is made clear by some of her poems and letters. Attention has focused especially on a group of letters addressed only to "Master", known as the Master letters, in which Dickinson appears to be writing to a male lover; neither the addressee of these letters, nor whether they were sent, has been established. Many biographers have been convinced that Dickinson might have been romantically involved with the newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles, a friend of her father's, Judge Otis Lord, or a minister named Charles Wadsworth. Biographers have also found evidence that Dickinson may have had romantic attachments to women in her younger years, a hypothesis which has grown in popularity, despite scant and highly ambiguous evidence.

15William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 - April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death (up until this time it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge"). Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

16Thomas Gray (December 26, 1716 - July 30, 1771), English poet, classical scholar, and professor of history at Cambridge University. Thomas Gray was born in London, and lived with his mother after she left his abusive father. He was educated at Eton College, and became a Fellow first of Peterhouse and later of Pembroke College, Cambridge. While a student, he met Horace Walpole, whom he accompanied on the Grand Tour. Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only later in his life did he begin travelling again. Although he was one of the least productive poets (his collected works published during his lifetime amount to less than 1,000 lines), he was, besides William Collins (1721 - 1759), the predominant poetic figure of the middle decades of the 18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. In 1768 he succeeded Lawrence Brockett as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, a sinecure.

17Henry James (April 15, 1843 - February 28, 1916), son of Henry James Sr. and brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author and literary critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his life in Europe and became a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for novels, novellas and short stories based on themes of consciousness. James contributed significantly to the criticism of fiction, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest freedom possible in presenting their view of the world. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, he published substantive books of travel writing, biography, autobiography and visual arts criticism.