Dear Spenserians,
If I may alter Professor Hamlin's intriguing but purely evaluative question--of how CCCHA could be considered the best pastoral of the 16th century--into a somewhat more intertextual issue: perhaps on its own CCCHA can't win an absolute-value contest, but reading Spenser's disillusioned little opus as a retrospective and self-evaluative second movement to the Shepheards Calendar renders Colin's composite time/landscape almost impossibly rich (if we want to evaluate, only Sidney's Old Arcadia can compete in 16th-c. England).
The question that has always interested me when reading CCCHA is, what is its relation to SC, and what does that tell us about Spenser's maturation as a poet? How has Colin aged? How have the queen and Rosalind aged? And how does CCCHA want us to understand the intervening years since that anonymous first poem: as the passage (or ruins) of time?; as travel abroad and/or homecoming (that trip to England)?; as work (FQ, Complaints); as laureate networking (all those patrons, fellow poets, and, look!, now imitators in CCCHA)? Of course, worrying about Calidore's later visit/invasion of this world in FQ VI further enriches this notion of a composite pastoral.
But is it even legitimate to think of CCCHA directly as a continuation of SC (and personally I'd be interested to consider including even the Daphnaida, with its anti-Colinesque persona, as part of the Spenserian pastoral landscape)? As Professor Burrow, fan of Petrarch's Africa and of CCCHA, implies with regard to David's original, thought-provoking question about pastoral--What do young men know about poetry?--at least such 1590s poems as CCCHA and (hey, why not?) the Daphnaida give us a Spenserian version of the older, wiser pastoral poet asking the same question. I haven't been able to follow the entire thread (certain advisorly Taluses have me dissertating nonstop!), so I hope I'm not rehashing, but personally I'd be very interested to hear what others think of how closely we are to connect the various states of Spenser's pastoral world, and what we might gain from thinking of a United States of Pastoral?
Thanks,
Dan Moss
----- Original Message -----
From: HANNIBAL HAMLIN <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 4:17 pm
Subject: Re: poetry & pastoral
To: [log in to unmask]
This is marvellous, Jim. I especially like the link between "Fern Hill" and Song of Songs, which is a revelation.<BR> <BR>Re. the question Marshall raises, the reception history of particular meters and forms is intriguing (the idea of ottava rima traveling from Ariosto and Tasso through Harington to Byron, for instance). This raises the quesion of whether particular meters have particular effects (due to the inherent quality of certain rhythms, say) or whether the effects are entirely dependent either on their history (eg., knowing that the <EM>Orlando</EM> is in ottava rima). It must be some combination of the two. Jim Norhnberg shows how sound can become sense in alliteration, but it can in meter too, as (famously) in the dactylls of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." Of course, some tweaking of "inherent" is in order, since the aural effect depends upon a semantic context -- dactyllic rhythms do not in and of themselves suggest h
orses, but in a poem about horseriding they probably do (just as alliteration on "d" might signify something different in a poem ducks or dopes).<BR> <BR>I've wondered about our own response, as critics and readers, to certain meters. Reading too much Sternhold and Hopkins can drive you buggy (sorry Beth!), but common meter can be lovely and even powerful in Houseman or Dickinson, not to mention the great eighteenth-century hymns of Watts, Wesley, Cowper, and such. Some sixteenth-century readers clearly thought very well of Sternhold as a writer. Were they wrong, or do we need to somehow adjust our metrical preconceptions? A more familiar case -- Pound (always firing off such statements) described Golding's fourteener translation of the <EM>Metamorphoses</EM> as the most beautiful book in the language. I've been reading it, and though there are plenty of good bits, the fourteeners seem crippling, making enjambment well nigh impossible for on
e thing. Yet Chapman and many others also wrote in fourteeners. Was this simply because they thought fourteeners ought to approximate the classical hexameter, or did they actually perceive it differently than we do?<BR> <BR>On a different note, getting back to pastoral, could Colin Burrow be coaxed to explain why <EM>Colin Clouts Come Home Again</EM> is the best pastoral in the 16th c.? (We're at a time in criticism when we can ask, was Milton better than Shakespeare, so why not!) I'm not hostile, just curious.<BR> <BR>Hannibal<BR> <BR><BR><BR>----- Original Message -----<BR>From: "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]><BR>Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 3:20 pm<BR>Subject: Re: poetry & pastoral<BR>To: [log in to unmask]<BR><BR>> 4 notes on recent postings:<BR>> <BR>> New wine in old bottles:<BR>> The notion that prior content freights a given, regularized <BR>> phonological <BR>> contour wi
th an allusion to the past (or conventional past <BR>> usage) seems <BR>> useful in explaining what Spenser is doing when describing <BR>> Redcrosse's <BR>> shield, "Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remain" (FQ <BR>> I.i.3). The <BR>> initial stanza has four "did"s in it, along with "dismayde" and <BR>> the d's in <BR>> the rime worlds shielde, fielde, wield, and yield. <BR>> Redcrosse hasn't used <BR>> the shield himself, but it is nonetheless battle-tried&true and <BR>> battle-worn. <BR>> The red-cross shield's dents are not only the history of <BR>> Christian combat, <BR>> but the ghostly dolorous voice and remains of the earlier <BR>> phonology. The <BR>> effect gets repeated in the knight's first stroke in confronting <BR>> Error -- <BR>> his glancing blow leaves the monster a bit stunned: "Much <BR>> daunted with that <BR>> dint, her sence was dazed." I.e., Redcrosse
has proven he <BR>> can dish it out, <BR>> as well as possessing a shield that can take it. It could <BR>> be argued that <BR>> Spenser has a mind to remind us of older, four-stress <BR>> alliterative verse, <BR>> which remains beneath lots of iambic pentameter, and also to <BR>> remind us of <BR>> previous heroic uses to which that verse was put, re his own <BR>> subject-matter:<BR>> <BR>> On crosse vpon Caluarye . Cryst toke the bataille,<BR>> Ageines deth and the deuel . destruyed her botheres mygtes,<BR>> Deyde, and deth fordid . and day of nygte made<BR>> (Langland, Piers Plowman, B <BR>> Passsus XVI, 164-68)<BR>> <BR>> But on his brest a bloudie cross he bore<BR>> The deare remembrance of his dying Lord (FQ I.i.2)<BR>> <BR>> I fel eftsones a-slepe . and <BR>> sodenly me mette,<BR>> That Pieres the Plowman .&n
bsp; was <BR>> paynted al blody,<BR>> And come in with a crosse . bifor the comune peple,<BR>> And rigte lyke in ale lymes . to owre lorde <BR>> Iesu (B Passus XIX, 5-8)<BR>> <BR>> Pastoral in epic:<BR>> Petrarch not only self-laureatized himeslf in the Africa (the <BR>> invocation and <BR>> principio to which Milton has not ignored), he wrote bucolic <BR>> songs where the <BR>> same scenario is found, in conjunction with Laura; and Spenser, <BR>> it is argued <BR>> sub Acidale in SpEncy., recreated nos. 3 and 10 for the climax <BR>> of his poem, <BR>> in a reinvocation of the scene of poet vocation, including the <BR>> vocation to <BR>> celebrate the poet's poetical mistress. "The inaugural <BR>> scene of Petrarch's <BR>> calling provides the valedictory for Spenser's: the poet who <BR>> wins his <BR>> laurels from others at the outset must nonetheless award t
hem to <BR>> himself in <BR>> the dénouement." The same episode centrally reincarnates <BR>> Colin's Rosalind, <BR>> the poet being eternally "vassal unto one" as per CCCHA -- the <BR>> beloved's <BR>> relation to the triune or three-in-one Belphoebe-Florimell-<BR>> Amoret is placed <BR>> at the center of that concentrized poem ("The beame of beauties <BR>> sparkled <BR>> from aboue, / The floure of vertue, and pure chastitie, / The <BR>> blossome of <BR>> sweet ioy and perfect loue, / The pearle of peerlesse grace and <BR>> modestie: <BR>> ... I hers euer onely, euer one: / One euer I all vowed hers to <BR>> bee, / One <BR>> euer I, and other neue none.").<BR>> <BR>> Pastoral in scripture:<BR>> "The Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral drama in the <BR>> Song of <BR>> Solomon, consisting of two persosn and a double chorus, as Orign <BR>> rightly <BR>> judges." --Milton, Reason of Church G
overnment, intro. to <BR>> Bk. II.<BR>> <BR>> E.g., ...thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead.<BR>> Thy teeth are a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, <BR>> whereof every <BR>> one beareth twins, and there not one barren among them. <BR>> (KJV Song 6:5f.)<BR>> <BR>> With:<BR>> <BR>> Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples (Song 2:5)<BR>> <BR>> Compare:<BR>> <BR>> Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs ...<BR>> And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns<BR>> (Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill)<BR>> <BR>> Old wine in new bottles:<BR>> It seems that once a poet has written or heard something (such <BR>> as pastoral) <BR>> memorably, he is condemned to write in its established traces <BR>> again, <BR>> recycling it, as it were, recapitulatively: once, once more, yet <BR>> once more. <BR>> See above example, and the following, for clinica
l evidence:<BR>> <BR>> In amnesias of the first type, which are nearly always the <BR>> result of a <BR>> violent shock, I incline to think that the memories which are <BR>> apparently <BR>> destroyed are really present, and not only present but <BR>> acting. To take an <BR>> example frequently borrowed from Forbes Winslow, that of a <BR>> patient who had <BR>> forgotten the letter F, and the letter F only, I wonder how it <BR>> is possible <BR>> to subtract a given letter wherever met with,—to detach it, that <BR>> is, from <BR>> the spoken or written words in which it occurs,—if it were not <BR>> first <BR>> implicitly recognized. In another case cited by the same <BR>> author, the <BR>> patient had forgotten languages he had learnt and poems he had <BR>> written. <BR>> Having begun to write again, he reproduced nearly the same <BR>> lines. &
nbsp; —Henri Bergson, <BR>> Matter and Memory<BR>> <BR>> Thus Lycidas:<BR>> <BR>> Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore<BR>> <BR>> with Paradise Lost:<BR>> <BR>> Down the great River to the op'ning Gulf <BR>> XI.833<BR>> The singer is ahead of the original conveyance of Eden by the <BR>> Flood. <BR>> --Jim N.<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:30:50 +0900<BR>> "Steven J. Willett" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:<BR>> > <BR>> >
On Jun 11, 2008, at 4:09 PM, J.B. Lethbridge wrote:<BR>> >><BR>> >> The second point, is that if we say that all talk, reading, <BR>> writing,>> criticism and what not is political (or all <BR>> experience is pastoral, <BR>> >> all<BR>> >> literature is pastoral ...), we run the risk of so broadening <BR>> the <BR>> >> use of<BR>> >> the term `political' that is has no meaning and no use. An <BR>> old saw.<BR>> >><BR>> >> But if our use of `political' is very broad, it is not <BR>> difficult to <BR>> >> say<BR>> >> that even metrical studies are political -- that is they rely <BR>> on <BR>> >> and reveal<BR>> >> a certain preference in a writer, and of course on <BR>> certain <BR>> >> assumptions --<BR>> >> just as much as a study of the role of minorities and so on. <BR>> This <BR>>
>> is easy,<BR>> >> and hard to escape, for all discourse relies on assumptions <BR>> and <BR>> >> preferences<BR>> >> of some sort. But whether it is useful?<BR>> > <BR>> > I keep hoping that someone will take my suggestion and provide <BR>> us with a <BR>> >concrete demonstration, using say "The Shepherd's <BR>> Calendar," to prove that <BR>> >versification is in itself political as opposed to the <BR>> content expressed <BR>> >in the versification. Instead we are still in the <BR>> realm of highly <BR>> >abstract analysis where critics can, like Humpty Dumpty, <BR>> makes words mean <BR>> >whatever they want. In the absence of any takers, <BR>> which hardly surprises <BR>> >me, let me play the devil's advocate for a moment and <BR>> then go on the <BR>> >offensive.<BR>> > <BR>> > 1. If a poet
working in the late eighteenth or early <BR>> nineteenth century <BR>> >should cast a poem on a military theme in heroic <BR>> couplets, the meter might <BR>> >be called a 'political' choice based on the tradition of <BR>> using the verse <BR>> >form for similar martial themes. It was no accident <BR>> that Pope chose this <BR>> >meter for his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. A <BR>> similar case is <BR>> >Eliot's suggestion of terza rima for the second section <BR>> of Part II in <BR>> >"Little Gidding." He specifically wanted to summon <BR>> up Dantean echoes and, <BR>> >taking Julian's broad extension of politics to <BR>> 'assumptions,' one can find <BR>> >quite a few cultural, moral and historical resonances in <BR>> the meter. <BR>> > Auden's decision to use ballad meter for "Miss Gee" <BR>> complete with tri
te <BR>> > rhymes and crude insouciant tone draws the sharpest possible <BR>> contrast <BR>> > between the romance of the ballad tradition and Miss Gee's <BR>> lonely, <BR>> > sterile and cancer-termed life. The same applies to <BR>> "James Honeyman" and <BR>> >"Victor." If we turn to "January" in "The Shepherd's <BR>> Calendar," the heavy <BR>> >dose of alliterations in the rather rough iambic <BR>> pentameter ababcc stanzas <BR>> >suggests something of the earlier alliterative tradition, <BR>> which was still <BR>> >close to Spenser, and underscores the clownish gifts of <BR>> Colin and his <BR>> >earlier avatar in Skelton. But all these are cases <BR>> where the meter <BR>> >carries overtones of an earlier content. It is <BR>> certainly true, then, that <BR>> >a tradition in which certain meters are deployed for <BR>
> certain themes can <BR>> >over time invest the meters with an aura that makes them <BR>> seem natural <BR>> >choices for newer poems of similar content. That <BR>> might be called the <BR>> >meter's political content. Marina Tarlinskaja has <BR>> shown that there are <BR>> > distinct semantic overtones associated with iambic and <BR>> trochaic <BR>> > tetrameter quatrains rhymed abab and asbb in the eighteenth <BR>> and <BR>> > nineteenth centuries. The two meters, in her study <BR>> "Strict Stress- Meter <BR>> >in English Poetry Compared with German and Russian" (U of <BR>> Calgary P, <BR>> >1993), exhibit thematic preferences and stylistic <BR>> particulars in <BR>> >elaborating the same themes (see pp. 125-28). She <BR>> only looked at 'god' <BR>> >and 'love,' but the study could be extended to many other <BR>> the
mes. What <BR>> >causes this difference between iambic and trochaic poems <BR>> in their <BR>> >treatment of the same themes? The answer lies in <BR>> the different origins of <BR>> >the iambic and trochaic meters. The trochaic meter <BR>> is associated with <BR>> >folk poetry, songs and ballads. The iambic meter <BR>> developed long after it <BR>> >and was generally linked with literary and bookish <BR>> associations. These <BR>> >associations were then transferred to the thematic repertoire.<BR>> > <BR>> > But these contrasting thematic associations only hold for <BR>> the contrasting <BR>> >meters and their differing historical origins. For <BR>> the main <BR>> >accentual-syllabic tradition, essentially just iambic <BR>> pentameter, <BR>> >tetrameter and trimeter, the meter is neutral. If <
BR>> you look at the history <BR>> >of the 'heroic' couplet, you will quickly see that it has <BR>> been used far <BR>> >more frequently for almost anything other than heroic or <BR>> military <BR>> >subjects. Keats used it for "Endymion" and "Lamia," <BR>> Pope for his Horatian <BR>> >satires, thousands of poets over centuries for an <BR>> enormous mass of <BR>> >romantic drivel, Johnson for "The Vanity of Human <BR>> Wishes," Goldsmith for <BR>> >"The Deserted Village," Donne for his satires among many <BR>> other poems, <BR>> >Dryden for translations and satires and on and on <BR>> covering an infinitely <BR>> >wide spectrum of thematic content. The very <BR>> capaciousness of the form <BR>> >shows that it contributes only flexible possibilities for <BR>> rhythmical, <BR>> >structural and rhetorical organiza
tion that the poet <BR>> exploits to say <BR>> >whatever he wants to say.<BR>> > <BR>> > 2. It is entirely wrong to call meter a 'discourse.' <BR>> Meter is a <BR>> > technique for organizing a language's phonology to achieve <BR>> rhythmical <BR>> > effects. The techniques vary depending on the <BR>> phonology. The Indo- <BR>> >European tradition down to Greece and Rome exploited <BR>> syllabic quantity; <BR>> >the Chinese tradition uses syllabic count, rhyme, tone <BR>> patterns and <BR>> >contrastive patterns in various combinations (see James <BR>> J. Y. Liu's "The <BR>> >Art of Chinese Poetry" (U Chicago P1962)); the Japanese <BR>> tradition uses <BR>> >syllabic count organized into a quantitative-- that is temporal-<BR>> -matrix <BR>> >that can be heard quite clearly if you know Japanese; the <BR>> Italian <BR>> >tra
dition uses syllabic count and rhyme, having just <BR>> missed the <BR>> >development of accentual-syllabic meters; the German <BR>> tradition uses <BR>> >substantially the same meters as English, but its greater <BR>> percentage of <BR>> >polysyllabic words makes it ideal for accentual template <BR>> imitations of <BR>> >classical meters; and the modern Russian tradition uses <BR>> accentual-syllabic <BR>> >meters, but once again, the very large incidence of <BR>> polysyllabic words <BR>> >usually means that the rhythms have fewer ictuses per <BR>> line than equivalent <BR>> >English meters and thus much less drive or forward thrust <BR>> than English <BR>> >poetry, though its inflectional system blesses Russian <BR>> poets with rich <BR>> >rhyme possibilities. That should be enough to show <BR>> that meter is not and <BR
>> > has never been a 'discourse' in any sense that makes rational <BR>> sense. For <BR>> >those who want to explore the European tradition in detail, <BR>> I would <BR>> >recommend learning Greek and Latin (followed by Sanskrit), <BR>> but in default <BR>> >of that, try M. L. Gasparov's magisterial "A History of <BR>> European <BR>> >Versification" (OUP, 1996). It is essential.<BR>> > <BR>> > 3. Up to this point, then, we can say that it is not entirely <BR>> absurd to <BR>> >regard some meters as carrying thematic overtones. <BR>> Those overtones can <BR>> >then induce a poet to use the same meter for the same <BR>> thematic topic. But <BR>> >the meter itself, as a linguistic structure, is devoid of <BR>> 'political' <BR>> >content with the possible exception of the iambic-<BR>> trochaic binary <BR>> &g
t;opposition. The political connection is a <BR>> posteriori, a consequence of <BR>> >the slow accretion of poetry with similar content and <BR>> similar or identical <BR>> >meter. If a poet has a political agenda in choosing <BR>> a meter, the agenda <BR>> >is historical, not linguistic. I am now going to <BR>> review some metrical <BR>> >forms that disprove the claim that meter is either <BR>> political or a <BR>> >discourse.<BR>> > <BR>> > 4. Let's step back to Horace. He will clinch my <BR>> argument. Horace wanted <BR>> >to create a Latin lyric poetic tradition that could stand <BR>> with the Greek, <BR>> >but felt that the metrical resources of Latin outside the <BR>> dactylic <BR>> >hexameter--a nonlyric form--were too thin. His method <BR>> was to adopt Aeolic <BR>> >metrical systems, the
systems used most famously by the <BR>> Lesbian poets <BR>> >Alcaeus and Sappho, along with a few other Greek <BR>> forms. He was most proud <BR>> >of his accomplishment as "princeps Aeolium carmen ad <BR>> Italos deduxisse <BR>> >modos" (CIII.30). The most common stanzaic forms in <BR>> the Carmina are in <BR>> >order the Alcaic and the Sapphic. He used both <BR>> forms without the <BR>> >slightest regard for content. The Roman Odes <BR>> (C.III.1-6) are in the <BR>> >Alcaic stanza, but he can use the same form for any <BR>> number of other <BR>> >genres, including the most trivial sympotic or erotic <BR>> poems, just as the <BR>> >Aeolic poets did. The Alcaic stanza dominates all <BR>> other forms. It has no <BR>> >political presupposition. We find the same metrical <BR>> indifference to <B
R>> >content in the Sapphic stanza. While he uses it in <BR>> some of his more <BR>> >acidic erotic poems, he also uses it for the "Carmen <BR>> Saeculare," the hymn <BR>> > commissioned by Augustus and performed by a chorus of 27 boys <BR>> and 27 <BR>> > girls, all freeborn with living parents, on June 3 as the <BR>> climax to the <BR>> >Centennial Games of 17BCE. At no point in his poetic <BR>> career as a metrical <BR>> >transposer did Horace think he was resuscitating the <BR>> themes, joys and <BR>> >sufferings of the Aeolic poets. He only wanted their <BR>> formal structures to <BR>> >lend Lain the sense of inevitability, of a rhythmical <BR>> natura naturans, of <BR>> >an irony that suddenly surprises its seriousness when the <BR>> meter least <BR>> >suggests it.<BR>> > <BR>> > 5. The most common meter in
surviving Greco-Roman poetry is <BR>> the elegiac <BR>> >distich. If any meter has the right to be called <BR>> perfect, the elegiac <BR>> >distich is that meter. The meter seems to have come <BR>> into existence as a <BR>> >flute song, possibly invented by Archilochus, but it <BR>> proved a form that <BR>> >could embrace absolutely any content over the nearly two <BR>> thousand years of <BR>> >its history. Aside from the astonishing directness, <BR>> strength and <BR>> >scurrility of Archilochus we have Callinus' call to war, <BR>> Mimnermus' eulogy <BR>> >to love and the beginning of the carpe diem motif, <BR>> Tyrtaeus, Solon, <BR>> >Xenophanes, Theognis and Simonides at the start of the <BR>> tradition--all as <BR>> >different as can be. The elegiac couplet is the <BR>> form of choice for the <BR>> >R
oman poets of love, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and <BR>> Ovid. The long <BR>> >history of the form had nothing to do with the <BR>> subject. The couplet <BR>> >consists of a dactylic hexameter followed by the misnamed <BR>> pentameter:> <BR>> > - u u | - u u | - || - u u | - u u | -<BR>> > <BR>> > The hexameter rolls out to its dignified, spacious end and <BR>> then permits <BR>> >the poet to fill the pentameter with pithy conclusions, <BR>> summaries and <BR>> >pointed expressions. The dactylic meter is just <BR>> slightly modified in the <BR>> >so-called pentameter, which is really two separate <BR>> metrical units<BR>> > (- uu - uu -) separated by the caesura (II above). The <BR>> couplet had the <BR>> >expansiveness of the regular hexameter for scope and the <BR>> pentameter for <BR>> >melody and rh
etorical punch. There was nothing the <BR>> elegiac couplet could <BR>> >not accommodate. I recommend some of the list spend <BR>> a few hours with "The <BR>> >Greek Anthology" to see what the elegiac couplet could do <BR>> in every <BR>> >possible thematic environment.<BR>> > <BR>> > 6. Syllabic poetry and radical free verse both undercut the <BR>> notion that <BR>> >metrical forms are a kind of political discourse however <BR>> one might want to <BR>> >define 'political.' Syllabic poetry of the sort <BR>> that Marianne Moore or <BR>> >Auden wrote has no thematic accretions to prioritize a <BR>> meter. All that <BR>> >matters is the syllable count. I recommend Auden's <BR>> stanzaic syllabic <BR>> >poetry and his couplets in 9:11 or 11:13 syllables to see <BR>> how their clean, <BR>> >transparent, ahi
storical rhythm permits him to explore <BR>> such a wealth of <BR>> >themes. Extreme free verse or riga verso has a <BR>> different problem. The <BR>> > most successful free verse is that which has the ghost of <BR>> >some simple meter lurking behind the arras as Eliot said, <BR>> the feeling that <BR>> >a familiar rhythm lies just below the threshold of our <BR>> consciousness. <BR>> > Profligate free verse destroys that and thus any sense <BR>> of being <BR>> > connected with a rhythmical tradition. Riga verso and <BR>> line-length or <BR>> > line-breath prosody do the same by sundering us from thematic <BR>> and <BR>> > prosodic traditions. The worst excesses of free verse <BR>> are usually <BR>> > defended by the claim that modern poets must create their own <
BR>> unique <BR>> > organic rhythms for what they want to say. This is <BR>> organicism. It <BR>> > divides poets into cells consisting of an adept priest <BR>> surrounded by <BR>> > followers (many of whom want to become priests). The <BR>> organic rhythms of <BR>> >each cell are nontransferrable and idiosyncratic, living <BR>> under their own <BR>> >special laws. No content can be put into the form <BR>> of another cell. Every <BR>> >cell is isolated in its gloriously sterile <BR>> originality. Naturally, the <BR>> >great advantage of organic rhythms is that no objective <BR>> rules can be <BR>> >applied to judge their success. If someone tries to <BR>> write blank verse, I <BR>> >can within a few lines determine if the poet knows the <BR>> tradition or not. <BR>> > With organic verse, one must ac
cept it at face value.<BR>> > <BR>> > 7. I return on our retracing course back to Michael Saenger's <BR>> bare <BR>> > assertion, never argued with any concrete examples, that <BR>> "The structure <BR>> >of poetry is itself often apolitical, but there is no way <BR>> to analyze it <BR>> >without participating in political structures." I <BR>> have just analyzed <BR>> >several metrical structures and shown that they are not <BR>> political and <BR>> >cannot be in any way I can see be called political. <BR>> We can formalize <BR>> >Prof. Saenger's assertion as "The structure of poetry is <BR>> only explicable <BR>> >by political structures." This is one of those <BR>> empty tautologies that <BR>> >seem to say something but on analysis lack any <BR>> verification test. OK, I <BR>> >am going to give Prof. Saenger an e
xample he can use to <BR>> prove his case. <BR>> > Here is Basho's famous haiku, ?? ????????? (furuike-ya kawazu <BR>> tobi-komu <BR>> >mizu-no-oto), or in English,<BR>> > <BR>> > Old pond,<BR>> > a frog jumps in<BR>> > the sound of water.<BR>> > <BR>> > Haiku, like the elegiac distich, can accept any content. <BR>> You surely know <BR>> >this haiku and can consult your Japanese colleagues if you <BR>> need linguistic <BR>> >help, but I doubt that will be necessary. All I want is a <BR>> clear <BR>> >demonstration that the haiku's metrical form is, by itself, <BR>> a political <BR>> >statement. If you don't like my example, choose your <BR>> own. I have already <BR>> >suggested "The Shepherd's Calendar," but any renaissance <BR>> poem is fine. <BR>> > Alternatively, something from Greek, Latin, Germ
an, <BR>> Italian, French, <BR>> >Russian, Japanese or Chinese should fit the bill. <BR>> Take your choice and <BR>> >cite in the original language.<BR>> > <BR>> > I have put all my cards on the table. I am thoroughly <BR>> tired of hearing <BR>> >critics spout grandiose, abstract, all-encompassing, <BR>> exception-free <BR>> >assertions that emanate from the more refined airs of <BR>> Marxism, a <BR>> >thoroughly dead and defunct economic philosophy, with <BR>> around a hundred <BR>> >million dead to its credit, which only lives in US <BR>> academia to the great <BR>> > amusement of Europe.<BR>> > <BR>> > I call.<BR>> > <BR>> > <BR>> > Steven J. Willett<BR>> > [log in to unmask]<BR>> > [log in to unmask]<BR>> > US phone/fax: (503) 390-1070<BR>> > Japan phone: (053) 475-4714<BR>> > <B
R>> > <BR>> > <BR>> > <BR>> <BR>> [log in to unmask]<BR>> James Nohrnberg<BR>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219<BR>> Univ. of Virginia<BR>> P.O Box 400121<BR>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> -- <BR>> BEGIN-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS<BR>> ------------------------------------------------------<BR>> <BR>> Teach CanIt if this mail (ID 607794171) is spam:<BR>> Spam: <BR>> https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=s&i=607794171&m=63f2ac197ed6Not <BR>> spam: https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=n&i=607794171&m=63f2ac197ed6<BR>> Forget vote: <BR>> https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=f&i=607794171&m=63f2ac197ed6----<BR>> --------------------------------------------------<BR>> END-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS<BR>> <BR><BR>Hannibal Hamlin <BR>Associate Professor of English <BR>The Ohio State University <BR>Book Review Editor and Assoc
iate Editor, Reformation <BR><BR>Mailing Address (2007-2009): <BR><BR>The Folger Shakespeare Library <BR>201 East Capitol Street SE <BR>Washington, DC 20003 <BR><BR>Permanent Address: <BR><BR>Department of English <BR>The Ohio State University <BR>421 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th Avenue <BR>Columbus, OH 43210-1340<BR><BR>
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