Oh God
I didnt want to offend but did want to write Whaaat on my favourite wall
I hadn't classified him though
I think my English teachers must have been ok
L
On 23 June 2014 21:52, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Oh yes Lawrence.
>
> And Rush rejoices in how Housman and Arnold were confined to a poetry that
> excluded Alexander Pope, Byron of 'Don Juan', et al!
>
> I recall my 1952 school text, the old Golden Treasury, which also ignores
> Donne and Herbert.
>
> This Christopher Rush, writing on the Felix Dennis website (Dennis's death
> is announced),
> comes on openly as a former secondary teacher now a full-time writer, so I
> was reminded
> of the handouts teachers compile hoping to 'kick-start' young students.
>
> It's like a page in a dictionary of quotations, or a website of handy
> quotes -
> something a few lucky people never need, having done their own reading
> already.
>
> I expect Andrew Burke, quondam writing teacher, to look down the list and
> say:
> 'I used to press six or a dozen of these on my groups -
> now here's a knockout very long list that I can use.'
>
> Are you there, Andrew?
>
> Max
>
>
> On 23 Jun 2014, at 11:22 pm, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > With respect, and friendship, these reminds me of why I wanted so badly
> to
> > leave the R C Church and could never bring myself to join a Marxist party
> >
> >
> > L
> >
> >
> > On 23 June 2014 13:42, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> Here then are my two dozen standing stones.[writes Christopher Rush
> >> http://www.felixdennis.com/subject/poetry-subject/poets-playlist/]
> >>
> >> (1) Poetry is more philosophical and serious than
> >> history. (Aristotle)
> >>
> >> (2) The truest poetry is the most feigning.
> >> (Shakespeare)
> >>
> >> (3) Poetry should be simple, sensuous, passionate.
> >> (Milton)
> >>
> >> (4) Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
> >> feelings. (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (5) Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.
> >> (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (6) Poetry is the best words in the best order.
> >> (Coleridge)
> >>
> >> (7) Poetry should surprise by a fine excess. (Keats)
> >>
> >> (8) If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a
> >> tree, it had better not come at all. (Keats)
> >>
> >> (9) Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
> >> (Flaubert)
> >>
> >> (10) Poetry is a means of overcoming chaos. (I.A.
> >> Richards, literary critic)
> >>
> >> (11) Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Frost)
> >>
> >> (12) Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
> >> (Frost)
> >>
> >> (13) Genuine poetry communicates before it is
> >> understood. (Eliot)
> >>
> >> (14) Poetry is what heals by cauterising painful
> >> emotion. (Felix Dennis - with apologies to Felix for my verbal
> >> shorthand)
> >>
> >> (15) Poetry is what makes you more human than you
> were
> >> before. (Rush)
> >>
> >> (16) Poetry is what makes you fall back in love with
> >> life when you have fallen out of it. (Rush again!)
> >>
> >> In addition to these landmarks, there were some general pronouncements
> on
> >> poets, all of which seemed to cast their various lights on my top-ten
> cull.
> >>
> >> (17) The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of
> >> imagination all compact. (Shakespeare)
> >>
> >> (18) The poet's task is to take this bronze world and
> >> make it gold. (Sidney)
> >>
> >> (19) To the poet nothing can be useless. (Johnson)
> >>
> >> (20) The poet must preside over the thoughts and
> manners
> >> of future generations as a being superior to time and place.
> >>
> >> (21) The language of the age is never the language of
> >> poetry. (Gray)
> >>
> >> (22) The language of the age is always the language of
> >> poetry! (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (23) A poet is a man speaking to men. (Wordsworth)
> >>
> >> (24) Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
> >> world. (Shelley)
> >>
> >> There were others that sprang to mind. But life is short - and weekends
> >> shorter. There were, however, two passages about poetry which I've
> always
> >> kept on a bedside cabinet composed of little grey cells on the left-hand
> >> side of my brain. One is from The Cave of Making by another old bugger,
> >>
> >> W.H. Auden:
> >>
> >> After all it's rather a privilege
> >> Amid the affluent traffic
> >> to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
> >> background noise for study
> >> or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
> >> cannot be 'done' like Venice
> >> or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly insists upon
> >> being read or ignored.
> >>
> >> The second passage is from a lecture given by A.E. Housman at Cambridge
> in
> >> or around - I think - 1932. Housman said there was such a thing as sham
> >> poetry, a counterfeit deliberately manufactured and offered as a
> >> substitute, the best example of it being the kind of verse written
> between
> >> Samson Agonistes in 1671 and the Lyrical Ballads in 1798: the kind
> >> dominated by intelligence, which involved, as Matthew Arnold also wrote,
> >> 'some repressing and silencing of poetry ... some touch of frost to the
> >> imaginative life of the soul'. The eighteenth century poets wrote not
> out
> >> of the depths but out of their heads, and poetry does not come out of
> the
> >> skull but out of the gut or soul. If poetry came out of the head the
> >> Augustans would have written it rather better. And when you look at the
> >> four eighteenth century poets who did write it better - Collins, Smart,
> >> Cowper and Blake - you see at once why they did so, why they were able
> to.
> >> You see the only thing they all had in common - they were all mad!
> >>
> >> Aha! Remember Plato? 'He who without the Muses' madness in his soul
> >> comes knocking at the door of poetry, and thinks that art will make him
> >> anything fit to be called a poet, finds that poetry he indites in his
> sober
> >> senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.'
> >>
> >> It's dangerous to offer examples, but perhaps the last obvious madmen to
> >> write true poetry were Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas - both Welsh! Larkin
> >> put himself into a most effective poetic straight-jacket, successfully
> >> creating the impression that he was almost sane. But he wasn't. He
> >> wasn't simply the intelligent Hull Grump. He had the madness in his
> soul
> >> that Plato talked about. I read many contemporary poets on the other
> hand,
> >> and find them dismayingly sane. They have something to say but can't
> say
> >> them in the way that will move as Milton once moved.
> >>
> >> What is it about those six simple words of his - Housman asks - that
> >> almost draws tears?
> >>
> >> Nymphs and shepherd dance no more
> >>
> >> Is it that they evoke a sense of that older England which Felix writes
> >> about in one of my chosen poems?
> >> Housman gives the only answer he can:
> >> 'I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to
> something
> >> in men which is obscure and latent, something older than the present
> >> organisation of his nature.'
>
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