The Victorians, who were much taken with “progress,” were also, unsurprisingly, devoted to imagining its opposite: being left behind. In Tennyson’s poetry, abandonment recurs as the occasion for utterance: Oenone, Mariana and Angelo, Tithonus and Aurora, The Lotos Eaters (who would like to be left behind), Tennyson and Hallam, the speaker of Locksley Hall and Amy, the speaker of Maud…these are poems about people who … Continue reading 227. (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
In this third and last in a series of posts on Emily Dickinson and decorum, I’ll try to bring decorum into contact with another preoccupation of the blog in the last few months: the sustained awareness of the body that serves as limit and horizon for the an imaginative experience that, I’ve suggested, characterizes what we refer to as “literature” and even “art.” I don’t … Continue reading 224. (Emily Dickinson)
To begin with recapitulation and self-remonstration: poetry must, in F.H. Bradley’s persuasive formulation, get within the judgment the condition of the judgment. So much is true for Donne, Milton, Clare, Browning, and Ginsberg, to sample from all directions. The interpretive task of a critic becomes not an explication of meanings or “readings” but a working out of the judgments a poet makes in the choice … Continue reading 223. (Emily Dickinson)
This post is the second of a series of evolving sketches about “decorum” in poetry. This is the messiest of the bunch, conceptually and historically. Dickinson was the provocation rather than the central subject. But it gets to her in the end, as does the next post, which is again, on Emily Dickinson, hopefully in much clearer terms. One of the pleasures of Tudor poetry … Continue reading 222. (Emily Dickinson)
This post is the first in a series of evolving sketches on “decorum” in poetry; it leads into the next post, on Emily Dickinson, both of which are much refined and restated in yet another post on Emily Dickinson (223). Through all of these posts, I’m writing against and with Donald Davie, the critic best remembered for Articulate Energy and Purity of Diction in English Verse. None of … Continue reading 221. (John Keats)
They are almost “conversation” poems, but they offer too many explanations, the sorts of explanations of who the speaker is, of what they speaker refers to and knows; a conversation poem assumes familiarity with an audience. What makes Hecht’s poems seem so nearly conversation pieces is the fact of their being lyric expositions and narrations, rather than lyric dramatizations. The showing and telling, hearing and … Continue reading 103. (Anthony Hecht)
