an interesting topic; a few thoughts ...
poetry as memorable speech ... a topic that the
New Formalists were/are fond of - that old essay
'The Neural Lyre' by Frederick Turner & Ernst
Poppel ventures unusually far into a discussion
of brain function, positing a 'foundations' for
meter
as for memory ... it's so pervasive a presence:
there are the monuments - from The Prelude to
the Pisan Cantos - and then there's the genre
Elegy which purports to deal directly with memory
- viz. 'In Memoriam' - but often turns out to
be loaded, from Milton in part mourning his
own imagined demise in Lycidas to Raine in the
recent 'A la recherche du temps perdu' lamenting
and romanticizing the life of a younger self
memory is itself a fictionalizing process
& verisimilitude to memory is a common literary
strategy (e.g. Roy Fuller's rondel sequence
'To X')
:david
|