‘Plutarch Redux: Parallel Poems in the Age of Trump’
By Robert Hamblin
Independently published, 74 pages

Plutarch’s parallel lives have long been a model for many biographers because of the way he pairs his subjects, using one figure to illuminate another in a series of character studies that remain relevant to the human condition.

Inspired by the poetic incisiveness of Plutarch’s accounts of men in power, Shakespeare borrowed plentifully from his predecessor, but with a piercing sense of psychology, in plays like “Coriolanus,” which captures the main character’s dignity, courage, and integrity while at the same time revealing his failure as a man and ruler who cannot reconcile himself to a world of pandering and compromise.

Plutarch elevated biography into a perennial source of understanding individuals as part of the world’s power complex. Rather than pairing specific contemporary figures, Mr. Hamblin writes free verse that has a timeless feel to it, as though what is happening now happened then — and we know that because what happened then is happening, again, now.

Mr. Hamblin’s tongue-and-cheek style is exemplified in “Coriolanus”:

Somebody should write a play
about a politician
whose monomaniacal ego, 
uncontrollable ambition,
self-serving lies and boastings, 
and refusal to compromise
or admit mistake
lead to class conflict,
conspiracy theories,
sedition, insurrection, 
and ruin to self and others.

The informal yet precise wording, the refusal to name the protagonist other than as Coriolanus, makes the poem a meditative tease, which ends in a very sly way:

Someone has already
written such a play, you say?

It’s the “somebody should” that gets to me, because it calls up everyday political discussions and precedents in history that lead to the moral exempla that Plutarch favored and that we still cannot do without. So the poem cautions:

Know too that service
must never be for self,
but for country.

The measured, dignified reserve of such poems functions as a kind of cleanser after watching, as I do, too much cable news. 

The poems are molds or templates that stand out from the way contemporary biographers study the climate, the culture, and the context of their subjects. Yet, like Plutarch, the poet still insists on the individual character who directs history. 

Here is a poem, “Electra,” that raises the issue of individual identity and history in a way that is beyond the reach of biography:

The whole world wonders 
about my relationship with my father, 
and sometimes I do as well. 
“Daddy’s Girl,” people call me, 
and even Daddy says 
he would like to have sex with me 
if I weren’t his daughter. 
It’s being said that 
he even told two of his lovers 
they reminded him of me. 
Then there are all those photos 
of him kissing or groping me. 
I joke about all these things, 
and I would never express 
my disappointment to Daddy, 
but his words and behavior trouble me. 
I try to forget it all 
by obsessing over business 
and clothes and jewelry, 
but I can’t. There are times when I think 
I could kill for him, 
and there are other times 
when I want to kill him. 
I would never say any of this to a living person, 
but since you and I and so many of us 
now inhabit a hell we can never escape,
I know my secrets are safe 
from the world.

A biographer would not dare to descend so far below the surface of the face and figure as shown in public and perhaps even in private life, the self that holds back what cannot meet the eye or ear and is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.”

Mr. Hamblin has a political bias, to be sure, but against that bias he counters with “Aesop”:

The donkey says 
to the elephant: 
“What an uproar 
you would make 
if I were doing that!” 
The elephant says 
to the donkey: 
“What an uproar 
you would make 
if I were doing that!” 
And both continue 
devouring the sheep.

Mr. Rollyson’s study of Plutarch is included in his collection, “Essays in Biography,” and his interview with Robert Hamblin can be accessed here.