In one of its many manifestations, baseball is a game that can be enjoyed from near infancy to great old age. So, 'fess up, Styles — What position did you play, where, when, and for how long? We, your loyal readers, hope that somewhere, somehow, you're still at it.

My Biographia Literaria? Well, if you insist, but this one is really tricky.

I will admit then to a brief, fun stint at third with the old L. A. Angels (a Little League team of the 1950s). Thereafter my career just tanked. For when coach Henry James (who coined the old phrase "the fields of light"*) told me how Billy Wordsworth could have replaced me even before he was born, I was simply crushed. Although I turned then to the tough task of designated hitting, when Sammy Coleridge came up and finally bumped me (as he may soon bump Seattle's own Ancient Mariner), I just quit.

I mean, with a coach like that, wouldn't you also say, "Nevermore!"

To put it straight, all the players old Hank liked were just "Out of This World."


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*The seer and the speaker [Hank said] under the descent of the god is the 'poet,' whatever his form, and he ceases to be one only when his form, whatever else it may nominally or superficially or vulgarly be, is unworthy of the god: in which event, we promptly submit, he isn't worth talking of at all. He becomes so worth it, and the god so adopts him, and so confirms his charming office and name, in the degree in which his impulse and passion are general and comprehensive — a definitional provision for them that makes [grammar wasn't one of coach James's strong suits, was it?] but a mouthful of so minor a distinction, in the fields of light, as that between verse and prose.