Whatever CapitalOne may have been thinking when they put it on the card,
Monet's waterlily paintings have nothing to do with nature,and I can't aat
the moment think of any paintings of "nature" that he did. The waterlilies
were--still are--in his garden. He is a painter of cultivated places.
Mark
At 01:16 PM 3/8/2004 +0000, Michael Peverett wrote:
>Interesting discussion - I don't know of any dramatic advance on
>Wordsworth on this subject; maybe someone else does? (Ponge?)
>
>"pastoral" used today cannot help but connote "conservative pastoral",
>that widely-publicized description of British poetry; I think this phrase
>was meant to suggest glossy National Trust guides and other things that
>seem as irritating as possible to urban street-dwellers.
>
>Which is a vital theme in itself but maybe irrelevant to the seriousness
>and centrality of what Wordsworth proposed, which would seem to me to
>extend to all senses and to all external nature, regardless of context,
>drizzle and fumes.
>
>The only appropriate use of "pastoral" now, it seems to me, is to
>characterize a cultural "appropriation" of nature, e.g. Monet's water-
>lilies as pictured on my new CapitalOne card, or a photo of a verdant
>grove beneath a red cliff on a full-page ad for BP. But the real shape of
>the country, and the city, are something different from that. Something
>not contemplated at all, if possible (it's better for the biotech
>companies).
>
>Religious poetry is religious if you think it is. Personally I don't see
>any correlation whatever between a poem that seems devotional or reverent
>in a living way (groping for phrases here...) and the professions of faith
>of writers. Ashbery is my modern religious poet.
|