What makes a Christmas poem? It could be a drift of snow or some evergreen trees, a box of candy canes or the baby Jesus. The best-known poem attending to the holiday is probably “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with characters such as quiet mice, clattering reindeer, and toy-toting Santa Claus. My favorite poem of the season is the prologue to the Gospel of John, although it lacks stables and mangers and swaddled babes. “Christmas poem” is a capacious category, occupied by a wide range of poems and populated by a startling variety of poets.
I was reminded of this when I finally tracked down a copy of a book I’d long heard about but never read. “American Christmas” was first published in 1965; I now own a copy of the second edition of the anthology, published two years later, with some additional poems. The book is not only a what’s what of Christmas—its weather, rituals, trimmings, origins, and meanings—but a who’s who of poetry: W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and dozens more. Christmas turns out to be an excellent subject for a collection of poems: as a theme, it is more specific than “spring” and less obvious than “grief,” but like those two it is widely shared and regularly recurring, and seems to call for something more than prose.
Inherent to the definition of giving something a second chance is that that person or thing has failed you once before. But these books — my favorite books — had never failed me. In fact, they did quite the opposite. Looking back, I can now only appreciate the magnitude with which certain books have genuinely changed my life.
So why was I so averse to giving these great books a second chance, if they had never failed me in the first place?
In December 1818, the poet Shelley, with his wife Mary and stepsister-in‑law Claire Clairmont, climbed Vesuvius. Starting from the village of Resina (modern Ercolano), they stopped off at the hermitage of San Salvador where an “old hermit” offered refreshments. In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley described the ascent to the cone, whose “difficulty has been much exaggerated”. On the summit he surveyed with awe “the most horrible chaos that can be imagined … ghastly chasms … fountains of liquid fire”. The passionate poet confronting the essence of the sublime seems the acme of Romanticism.
John Brewer’s entertaining social history paints a rather different picture. By the early 19th century the climb to the summit was more well-organised tourist experience than daring psychic journey. True, Vesuvius drew admirers from all over Europe, and even the Americas, as a crucible for both science and art. Friendships and professional partnerships were forged in its shadow, reputations won and lost, discoveries made and debated. Less impressive than Etna, but much more accessible, it inspired paintings, poems and novels through the Romantic era and beyond. But a host of the lesser-known also trooped to the summit, scorched their shoes and drank themselves silly. It is these figures Brewer brings back to life.