I haven't followed this discussion at all, so forgive me all if what
follows is simply non sequitur.
If by a false dichotomy you mean that ease of initial reponse or lack
thereof is not a determinant of quality, sure. But I think it should
be clear that Ben Jonson and Donne are doing different things and
demand different things of the reader. There's nothing mysterious
about the Ode to Charis except for its beauty, The Extacie is quite
enother matter. An important part of the pleasure of reading a poem
is learning how to read it, which is why the difficult so attracts
many of us. I would suggest that in some of your judgements you
haven't made that effort, and it would be a shame if you've decided
that most of Milton and all of Blake after 1800 aren't worth going
back to. But that leads to another mystery. There's something about
certain difficult poems that compels us despite their opacity, so
that we nag away at them, perhaps for years, before we get the lay of
the land, if we ever do: a sense that there's something there worth
finding. There's no canon to guide us: I'm passionate about some work
that you find empty, and vice versa. It may be that there are sets of
phenomena that act as markers whose meaning is differentially
understood, so that precisely what attracts me to late Blake, say, is
what keeps you away. It might be useful (this isn't a hallenge to you
in particular, Jon) to try to tease out what these markers, which may
signal the limits of an individual's taste or forebearance, are.
As to the intellectual content of a poem being junk, I'd guess you
mean the arguments in grammatically-structured language. There's
another way to understand intellectual content. For me the content of
the poem is in its entire structure, in the argument of its
happening. Read this way, Paradise Lost is one of the great
constructs of the human mind, as much so as the Sistine Chapel, and
not because they happen to share much of their imagery.
Mark
At 01:12 PM 3/22/2006, you wrote:
>I've thought about this and have reached a conclusion which I claim is
>universally valid for me: it's a false dichotomy. Campion is
>entrancing the first time you read him, and Donne is confusing the
>first time you read him, but they are both great poets. Blake's
>lyrics, which are accessible, are better than his epics, which are
>inaccessible. Early Pound is more accessible than late Pound but not
>as good. The first three hundred lines of Paradise Lost are a lot
>more accessible than the rest and a lot better. It works ever wich
>way without no correlation. It's not always even entirely clear what
>accessibility means. Emily Dickinson is quite accessible on first
>reading to any adolescent, but you have to read her for decades to
>understand what she's really doing.
>
>Some people may argue that accessibility means how easy it is to get
>behind the surface technique to a poem's intellectual content. But
>the intellectual content of poetry is always just a bunch of junk
>anyway.
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