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Seamus Perry · Pluralism and the Modern Poet: Pluralism and Poetry (www.lrb.co.uk)

submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/longreads@sh.itjust.works

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If, Chesterton speculated, you had asked Browning ‘Is life worth living?’ and asked him to give ‘the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul’, then Browning would have said, ‘as likely as not: “Crimson toadstools in Hampshire”’. Chesterton sounds quite mad, but he is thinking of some lines from Browning’s ‘By the Fire-Side’:

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged

Last evening – nay, in to-day’s first dew

Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,

Where a freaked fawn-coloured flaky crew

Of toadstools peep indulged.

That would seem a very good instance of what James called an ‘each-form’. Browning doesn’t think the toadstools stand for or symbolise anything, let alone the totality of the one: what matters is merely that they are one of what Chesterton calls ‘the great concrete experiences’.

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