With Susanne's posts, the angle upon common sense has shifted, and, while I
still feel my send-up of the term yesterday was not uncalled-for, I want to
attempt saying somewhat about common sense in the light of poetic practice,
and I note that, as I consider this, highly complex relations appear.
Random Example 1. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" :
I havent gone to the OED to find when the phrase/concept entered the
language, but, had it by Shakespeare's day, or did an unnamed precursory
mindset obtain, I fancy this assertion (and the sonnet it introduces) would
be closer to it than to the poetic conventions Shakespeare was standing
upside-down.
But in a specialized sense, these conventions were a "common sense" of
poets, and, had he hewn to them, we would not have the transgressive
gesture of this sonnet. For which we would be considerably the worse.
Random Example 2. "Ode to a Nightingale" :
Best I can recall, the common-sense attitudes of Keats' day would have
dismissed the poem as flawed in that it took in earnest what it might
allowably take lightly (as a Fancy---"deceiving elf.") Again, though, a
special case of common sense among some poetic colleagues might have
welcomed the poem, even if surprised (so much the better!) by the manner in
which this common sense was obliged.
Further Examples :
With the advent of what we now term Modernism, examples abound whereby a
common common sense AND a specialized common sense are equally outraged.
People stand before canvases and shake their umbrellas at them. Some of
them (people, not umbrellas) are themselves artists. We are told that Les
Fauves et seq cannot paint, cannot draw, are drugged, are cases of arrested
development, are "drunken privy cleaners" (said of Cezanne), etc ad
nauseam.
Today, nobody (unfortunately) is shocked by these gestures. Common sense,
like a mighty river that flows mightily slowly, eventually sweeps anything
off its banks and absorbs it. But when a new poetry appears, it only
becomes noticeable by defying one or both kinds of common sense...for else
it would remain invisible, the same color as the river out of which it
didnt ewven think to climb. Which is to say, it would remain visible, for
just so long as the new remained invisible.
Me, I never for long found enjoyable a poetry I did not at first reject.
That [petry had to jolt me out of the Big Muddy of common sense and into
some passage, excuse the mixed metaphor, of the individuation process. With
this new poetry (new to me, Prospero, at any rate), I began to think for
myself. Until I went to sleep again. Or do I sleep as I write this?
David
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