Word: bastardly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Education: Public school in Monroe and Portland, Ore. Joined Oregon National Guard in 1916 "without asking the old man" because "I liked to shoot." Won the Oregon National Guard's only appointment to West Point, graduated (1918) after 18 months with the accelerated "bastard class of World War I." Graduated infantry school (1920), advanced flight training (1924), Air Force tactical school (1936), Command & General Staff School...
Richard Savage, the poet, is almost a nonentity. But Savage as the friend of Pope and Samuel Johnson becomes a highly important figure in early eighteenth century English literature. And as the claimant to the title of "bastard son of the late Earl Rivers" he has created an aura of wonder which approaches an unfinished fairy tale...
Professor Clarence Tracy of the University of Saskatchewan has attempted to sort legend from fact in The Artificial Bastard. In a scholarly, dispassionate way, he weighs the existing evidence about Savage, reaches conditional conclusions, and in doing so reveals the social and literary environment of the eighteenth century. Like all Savage's biographers, Tracy is particularly concerned with His claim to nobility as it seems to be the key to Savage's complex personality...
Professor Tracy gives many examples of Savage's poetry in The Artificial Bastard, and his well reasoned interpretations of such passages show the stages of his subject's mind. In the Wanderer, Savage imagines himself a divinely inspired poet. The Bastard glorifies his illegitimate birth. Much in the same vein as Edmund in King Lear, he cries," Blest be the Bastard's birth! He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; no tenth transmitter of a foolish face...
Because The Artificial Bastard attempts to bring into one small volume all the known data about Richard Savage, it is slightly fact-heavy. But Clarence Tracy's straightforward, clear prose style does much to counterbalance this, and the facts are by no means jumbled. Sometimes, his dispassionate manner gets away from him, and he understates almost ludicrously. "If this charge had been proved it would have gone hard one Savage, in that age of disembowling...