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POETRYETC  January 2006

POETRYETC January 2006

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Subject:

Matters of taste

From:

Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 12:30:19 -0600

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (1 lines)

>On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 14:25:40 -0800, Robin Hamilton wrote:

>Then resolve me, tell me aright
>        If Waller sang or Dowland played,
>
>   Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly
>    I may the beaute of hem nat susteyne

>And for 180 years almost nothing.

It's not clear to me what critical implications are being attributed
by Robin to the Pound passage.  My own interpretation is that by
"nothing" Pound means that after the last flowering of medieval lyric,
poetry lost its intrinsic relationship with song until the connection
was reestablished by the Elizabethans as symbolized by Dowland, who
set many of their poems to music.  (And I wonder if the "almost" is
meant to allow Dunbar and Wyatt to sneak in.)  Under this
interpretation Pound is comparing the early Elizabethans to Chaucer
not to bury them but to praise them.


>
>As a matter of possible interest, when I began reading the posted poem, I
>tripped and for a moment thought, "Who's posting a Greville poem?"  Both
>Sidney and Fulke Greville (early on) used that linked list technique
>

Though it's not exactly linked, I wonder if Shakespeare was parodying
this sort of thing in Hamlet (Polonius is speaking:)

"And he, repulsed—a short tale to make—	
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,	
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,	
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,	
Into the madness wherein now he raves,	
And all we wail for."

I don't know how well Shakespeare knew The Iliad, but I think Polonius
is strikingly like Nestor:  a tedious old fool whose advice is always
bad when it's not sheer bromide and whose only use to anyone is that
he sometimes manages to bore people out of being upset.

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 11:25:43 +0000, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>there's almost a defiance here: i'm talking about the muse, quite
>possibly a politically contentious issue, and i just don't care if it
>does offend you. as if i'm doing something naughty... you're right,
>daveb, debate is cut short

Please note that I'm being misquoted here:  what I said quite clearly
and specifically was that I would decline to respond to claims that
the poetry of the past and its sources were of no great interest, not
that I would decline to engage in a discussion on the nature of the
Muse, which would indeed have been an odd thing for me to say, since
that's exactly what I've been doing.  It seems to me equally odd to
complain that "debate is cut short" on this issue when at least half a
dozen list members are in the middle of a vigorous debate on it.

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 03:22:27 -0500, Rebecca Seiferle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> For I think the traditional western muse
>thrives on absence, that one glimpse on a bridge is enough to keep on writing
>Beatrice into paradise, even if the poet, and she, go on to marry and have a
>(separate) horde of kids. I doubt, seriously, that Dante would have
so written, if
>he'd seen the girl on the bridge grow up and marry, for, in my experience of my
>being muse, it has seemed that the presence of my reality disrupts the
>imagination that fills my absence with whatever lives in the poet. I
suspect the
>traditional idea of the muse accordingly, it relies upon the absence of a woman
>who can be filled with the poet's fantasy, true imagining perhaps but
still limited
>by the poet's histories and prejudices.
>

This strikes me as well said and a clear description of the psychology
(but doesn't the second sentence sort of contradict the first?)  My
impulse though is to take issue with the word "fantasy," not because
it's necessarily disparaging but because it's necessarily subjective. 
I would have said "vision," since it's experienced as something that
comes to you, not as something you generate, which is what "fantasy"
usually connotes.

But to come to the point I had in mind when I started this message and
put in the subject header (I'm trying out a new technique here,
digressing at the beginning instead of waiting until the middle,)  I
some time ago decided that there really is no accounting for tastes
and that I wouldn't worry about it.  I myself have never been able to
see much in Mozart except for some pleasantly hummable melodies -- he
strikes me in fact as the Paul McCartney of the 18th century -- which
most of my friends consider a shockingly barbaric failing.  If you
think that's bad, maybe I shouldn't mention that my feelings about
Wagner might be described as "hysterical loathing" without that
phrase's implication of underlying attraction.  (What do I like? 
Bach, Couperin, Chopin, anything Renaissance.)  So if I decline to
take sides in whether we should like Chaucer or Sidney better it's not
because I'm dodging the issue, it's because I don't think there is
one.

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