An art not always understood …

… “All Progress Is Common to All of Us”: On Arthur W. Ryder, George R. Noyes, and the Art of Translation – Boris Dralyuk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

All three were influential teachers, and all three seemed to regard themselves as men out of step with their era. Compare Cunningham’s witty “For My Contemporaries” with the final epigram in Ryder’s pamphlet of translations titled Women’s Eyes, first published in 1919 and included in Poems:

The critics all were jealous,
The patrons full of pride,
The public had no judgment;
And so my poems died.

A good many years ago, after I had reviewed J. V. Cunningham’s Collected Poems and Collected Essays, I received a letter from him telling “it is always to be praised for the things one would like to be praised for.”