I write as a novice, an initiate into Racine’s imaginative world, and I enter with just enough French to feel how ill-suited it is for the temperament of my Anglo-expectations. I have, for quite a long time, known the two obvious things to say about Racine, but only recently started to work out why they matter, and how they can explain the difference of Racine … Continue reading 250. (Jean Racine)
A friend of mine pointed out that semi-recent posts on decorum are a bit of a muddle and that I could have clarified more of what I meant by Arnold’s Platonism. The two are related, and I will explain how here. The post was written as a letter to a friend, but who wants to receive as dry and explicatory a letter as this: A … Continue reading 241. (Davie, Auerbach, Arnold)
Although it would be wrong to read John Berryman’s Dream Songs as a poem about the madness of a nation, since they are so achingly about the madness of a man, it is also to do them wrong as poems not to see that Berryman knows that to communicate madness and isolation as he does ought, if it is to feel fully realized, fully a … Continue reading 232. (John Berryman)
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)
