Hi Christina,
Thanks for your comments. Well, it certainly wasnīt my intention to send you to St. Paul or the Corinthians. I suppose that in so far as I had an intention it was to list many of the totally contradictory images associated with romanticism. Why anyone would want to do such a thing is a question worth asking. My answer is that I was just so tickled with the play on `clash of cymals/symbolsī in the last couplet and I wanted to see how many clichés I could get into one poem. I have this compulsion to do things that most people generally agree should not be done. It drives my girlfriend nuts. One day Iīm going to grow up.
Best wishes, Mike
--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---
It's terribly early here, Mike and I'm semi-conscious and unable to give this
the attention it needs to make proper comments because I've just scanned
through but oh, it's already giving me problems because of all the lines you
use that have been taken from other sources (like untutored youth, seizing
the present hour, the clashing cymbals etc). I just don't think we can get
away with this sort of thing in contemporary poetry unless it's done in a
really fresh way. The problem (for me) is that I switch off and start
thinking about the original texts/ideas. So at the moment I'm thinking about
Paul's letter to the Corinthians. I don't know whether this is just a
personal flaw - an inability to focus on something that uses images or words
that echo other writing that I love - or whether it happens to other readers,
or whether it matters or even if that's your intention. It's simply what
happens to me and a problem I've had with quite a few poems.
bw
christina
> Romanticism
>
> But if a writer should be quite consistent,
> How could he possibly show things existent?
> Byron
>
> Romanticism is idealism,
> whatīs true of one may be said of the other.
> Romanticismīs change and revolution,
> opposed to aristocracy,
> the force of a new-born generation.
> It is medieval dreaming spires,
> the peace and harmony of natural order
> and the music of the spheres.
> It is love, and not the will to power,
> the natural love of natural man,
> living for the moment, seizing the present hour.
> Itīs the driving energy of brutal optimism,
> a therapy, the cure for our disease.
> It is self-assertion and primitivism
> and unity at the cost of individuality.
> Romaniticismīs moonlit ruins,
> the transcendent desire for infinity.
> It is spirit combined with chivalry,
> our escape from an industrial age
> to the ancient and historic, misty antiquity.
> It is reverie and homesickness,
> exile and nostalgia.
> It is darkness and the powers of darkness, a pervasive sense of irrational
> terror.
> Itīs a beautiful past remembered by the monotonous present,
> a pastoral idyll of timelessness and innocence.
> Itīs the new, the novel, the fleeting moment,
> a muliplicity, chaos and violence.
> Romanticism means the sane and simple pleasures
> of contented country folk.
> It is Celtic and Germanic,
> melancholy madness, decadence and death.
> Romanticism is untutored youth
> and teeming fecundity, the richness of life.
> Itīs a soul playing with itself in secret delight.
> Yes, romanticismīs idealism, and itīs drama,
> the clarion call to a great uprising
> of bourgeois values against bourgeois values
> when what might seem to be the clash of cymbals
> turns out to be a clash of symbols.
>
>
>
>
> Mike
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