>
>> Candice, I don't see how you can extrapolate from my statements the demand
>> that the philosophic yield to the lyric. Where do you find that?
>>
>> Henry
>
>
> I said "desire" (not "demand"), and I saw it in your sketch of "bombast"
>as intruding in a gap you see between "some initial, specific imagery" and
>"the wide, grandiose emotive-spiritual gestures the images are meant to
>trigger." You then go on to expand this gap, which becomes "huge," as it
>intervenes between "a particular image" (i.e., characteristic of the lyric)
>and "a big, abstract statement" (i.e., characteristic of the philosophic).
But rather than asserting a desire for lyric as opposed to philosophic
statement, I think what I'm pointing to here is one of the basic
complications of making poetry: the transmutation of both a worldview
or "philosophy" on the one hand, and the realia of actual experience
on the other, into poetry itself. And if the philosophical assertions
seem forced or overloaded, seem layered in a facile way over a set
of specific "poetic" images, then the thing will come across as
some kind of rhetoric perhaps, but not as convincing poetry. For
it to work as poetry, the reader needs to be moved by the actual
fusion of the actual & its intellectual/emotional reflection
(its philosophical formulation, if you will).
If you want to argue that my statements are part of a general anti-
philosophical trend, or an ungenerosity toward ambitious poetry,
that is one thing. Perhaps you're right. But your argument would
be strenghened by looking at the poems themselves, which is
the site from which I drew my conclusions. I could be wrong!
We all find different things in poems.
Henry
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