Late in Edmund Wilson’s I Thought of Daisy (1929), a novel of Greenwich Village life in the 1920s that betrays the strong influence of Proust, the very Wilson-like protagonist travels to a quiet upstate town to visit the Daisy of the title and her current beau, poet Pete Bird. After a dessert of “golden canned peaches,” he asks the couple what they do for entertainment in the evenings, to which they respond:

“We just do this!” said Pete. “We read aloud,” supplemented Daisy. “We’ve read Bulwer Lytton’s novels almost entirely through.” “Is he any good?” I inquired. “Fine,” said Daisy. “Besides, he’s the only novelist they’ve got at the village library.” I was amazed at the idea of Daisy spending long winter evenings over Bulwer Lytton; but as I had talked to her, I soon discovered that she had always been addicted to novel reading and had very good sense and taste–it had apparently been only [her ex-husband] Ray Coleman’s reading aloud to her out of the Oxford Book of English Verse that she hadn’t been able to stand.

Perhaps only those who’ve lived in remote areas can understand that Daisy’s enthusiasm for her forced recourse to Bulwer Lytton is genuine; when you have but a few books at hand, you’ll gladly mine them for whatever pleasures they can offer.

I expect nonetheless that his limited charms might eventually begin to flag, at which point perhaps the Oxford Book, stripped of the stultifying imperiousness of her husband’s nightly recitations, just might be what she needs instead. On that night, I would recommend that she start with a poem from an anonymous sixteenth-century poet which, with its playfulness, is unlikely ever to have drawn Ray Coleman’s attention–though if he had read it aloud, he would surely have failed to notice Daisy’s nods of quiet agreement:

Suspiria

O would I were where I would be!
There would I be where I am not;
For where I am would I not be,
And where I would be I can not.