Hi, Rebecca.

> Well, this seems too repetitive.

Yeah, we do seem to be going round and round -- circles of misunderstanding?

> I have heard the expectation that there should be some other authority
outside of the poem, some authority which whatever name it might be given is
dependent upon your possession of it, and ignores the reading of the poem in
favor of the assessment of the poet.

Well, I'm sorry if I gave that impression -- not my intention.

> No hard feelings, but I don't know as I care what Pope thinks about
anything, I don't know as I'd consult him on any matter of any significance
to me, so I might not mind if he were baffled.

Oh, fair dos -- I simply raised Pope as an index that the idea that a poem
doesn't mean anything outside itself is a (relatively) modern development,
and not (even now) universal. (And limiting, in that it excludes great
swatches of writing.)

> And if you are reading Shakespeare's sonnets as interconnected, then you
are reading them as one might read any sequence, as a single poem.

Yup -- I was cheating a little there. I was trying to think of a sharply
defined example, but that was a bad one.

> My view here is that the reading of the particular work is of primary
importance, that it's more important to read the poem than to measure the
poet (of which measuring the poet against the poem and vice versa are
variations)

I'd half agree -- certainly in terms of the priority of the poem over the
poet (the singer, not the song). I wasn't trying to suggest that attention
should be directed to the writer rather than to the work, but that (often?)
individual poems can extend themselves in the context of a larger group of
works by the same "person". I'd tend to distinguish, e.g. Philip Larkin
[the individual person] from "Philip Larkin", the name attached to a set of
poems within a particular book. (Ouch, the more I try to untangle what I
mean here, the less sense I seem to make <g>.)

... Rereading your sentence above, where we (seem to) disagree is that I'd
want to say: "it's more important to read the poem[s] ..."

> Well, the Fanthorpe poem, or this part of the poem, seems to me to be
sentimental and predictable. It is much _like_ the Duffy poem in that it
creates an unexpected pairing, the girl and the dragon, while keeping the
traditional romantic mode intact, if Duffy used Cartland like descriptions,
these seem equally cliched, that line
> "Well, you could see all his equipment
> At a glance." seems risible.

I'd agree with "risible", in the sense that it seems to me neatly funny,
both that image and the section as a whole.

Part of the reason I dumped it into the thread is that the Girl's words --
the second section -- coexist with the Dragon (who has the first section and
the best lines) and St George at the end. So there are three different
modes of speech in the poem, with the Girl and St George speaking in
(different kinds of) cliché, in contrast to the Dragon.

> Nor do I understand really how this meets those standards of no
'exclusions of the world', etc. Nothing much seems to be happening here.

Uh ... Mostly I think it's just a pretty funny poem. But one way it could
be seen to "engage with the world" (a cliché itself, that, and not something
I'd want to push +too+ far) is in the projection of contemporary modes of
speech (all three speakers in their different ways are of the now) backwards
onto and into what is usually seen as a nicely distant
myth/painting/whatever.

Anyway, I'm due later today to pick up three or four copies of Carol Ann
Duffy's books from my ex-wife, so if I go silent on the list, it'll be
because I'm working my way through her poems. Or not. <g>

Cheers,

Robin