I think Davie was hard at work in academic English widening the canon that had
been narrowed by Leavis's Revaluation (1936), which was so hard on Shelley and
Milton and ...
Whatever Davie's achievement as poet, his criticism wherever I have sampled it
has an energy and often relish about it that engages me ...
Max
Quoting David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>:
> I never did read it when young and it has been a pleasure to do so now, I've
> also looked back at a lot of Shelley that I did find exciting when 14 and am
> rather thrilled that I can still feel those pinions beating in, say, the
> Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. It's as valid of its age as Beethoven sonatas
> or the slightly later Chopin. I can almost feel wooden ships at anchor, hear
> their timbers creaking.
>
> Yes, Julian and Maddalo does have a calmer voice in the narrator, its rather
> like a foretaste of Clough there, with the more Gothic and wilder Shelley in
> the voice of the madman. it's very kind of as puny a poet as Donald Davie to
> condescend to pat him on the head.
>
> 2009/7/9 Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
>
> > Thanks for both, Robin.
> >
> > My wife is rapt; she has printed out the whole poem, and says it speaks to
> > her
> > even more than her favourite Wordsworth passages.
> > She says she twisted her ankle part way through the Romantic poets course
> > twenty
> > years ago, and missed Shelley altogether!
> > I recall Donald Davie long ago ('Purity of Diction...') made a case for a
> > levelheaded rather than rhapsodic Shelley on the strength of 'Julian and
> > Maddalo'. But I guess it remains on the unread or under-read side of
> > Shelley.
> >
> > Max
> >
> > Quoting Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>:
> >
> > > Specifically:
> > >
> > > Most wretched men
> > > Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
> > > They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
> > >
> > > Shelley, "Julian and Maddalo", Line 544.
> > >
> > > Robin
> > >
> > > > "... in the preface to the collection [Elizabeth Barrett (Browning)]
> > > > insisted on the sorrow and suffering necessary to the poet, and she
> > quoted
> > > > from Shelley's 'Julian and Maddalo' to clinch her argument that 'we
> > learn
> > > > in suffering what we teach in song.' ... "
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> "A window./Big enough to hold screams/
> You say are poems" - DMeltzer
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
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