Wait. Marlowe enjoys poetry? I’m a big Chandler fan, but nowhere near perfect recall. Still, I think the Wikipedia article BrainGlutton’s quoting maybe conflating Marlowe with Robert B. Parker’s Spenser character.
Or Exapno can come sap me down again. Whichever.
But I still don’t remember a scene where Marlowe is reading or quoting any Poetry.
Oh, wait. (again) Doesn’t He discuss T.S. Elliot with the Sternwood’s Butler or someone, and offer to buy a volume of the same verse for the Sternwood’s Chauffeur in the ‘The Big Sleep?’
For what it’s worth, here’s a sampling from Marlowe on poetry:
“The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.”
– The Big Sleep
“I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”
– The High Window
“I said roughly: ‘Her not giving you much salary is a characteristic touch and your owing her more than you can ever repay is more truth than poetry…’”
– The High Window
“I went on out and Amos had the Caddy there waiting. He drove me back to Hollywood. I offered him a buck but he wouldn’t take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T. S. Eliot. He said he already had them.”
– The Long Goodbye
“‘Might even be a graduate of the Sorbonne. Might even be mooning away in a measly small-town practice. Waiting and hoping. That’s one coincidence I’d like to eat. It has a touch of poetry.’”
– The Little Sister
“‘But me no buts. I’ll make a sop of you. I’ll drown you in a butt of Maimsey wine. I wish I had a butt of Malmsey wine myself to drown in. Shakespeare. He knew his liquor too. Let’s have a little of our medicine.’ I reached for his glass and poured us a couple more. ‘Get on with it, Karloff.’”
– Farewell, My Lovely
On Shakespeare in general:
“‘A very bad murderer,’ I said. ‘Like Shakespeare’s Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience, but still wanted the money, and in the end didn’t do the job at all because he couldn’t make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed–sometimes with blackjacks.’”
– Farewell, My Lovely
From The Illuminati Papers, by Robert Anton Wilson (Sphere Books Ltd., 1980), p. 129: HAIKU BY RAYMOND CHANDLER Police Woman
To say her face would stop a clock
would be to insult her.
It would stop a runaway horse. Silent Intruder
A wedge of sunlight
slipped over the edge of the desk
and fell noiselessly on the carpet. Los Angeles
One great big
sun-tanned
hangover. Another Lady
She had a mouth
that seemed made
for three-decker sandwiches. Actress
She smelled the way
the Taj Mahal looks
by moonlight. Pathos
Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper
like a mortician
asking for a down payment. Seascape
On the right the great fat solid Pacific
trudging into shore
like a scrubwoman going home. Malibu
More wind-blown hair and sunglasses
and attitudes
and pseudorefined voices and waterfront morals. Finale
I never saw any of them again
– except the cops.
No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.
Hmmm, if Wilson weren’t dead we could explain to him that haiku’s lines always have 5, 7, and 5 syllables. And that they normally contain a separation in which one part contradicts, undercuts, or comments on the other.
Cutting a sentence into three pieces makes it a haiku about as much as cutting a short story into three pieces makes it a trilogy.
Great lines from Chandler, though. Prose poetry is beautiful, even when idiots vandalize it.