Keston wrote:
>Alison -- not sure if it's moralism, perhaps so -- but in any case, a
>misunderstanding isn't any less negative simply because it's productive;
>it's the Hegelian catch-all clause, -positive untruth-; I don't argue that
>what he thought stopped him writing good poems, just that those poems (and
>the prose more conspicuously) were rhapsodic to a key fault: no dialectic.
>If we define myth as inherently dialectical, as we might, then by virtue
>of that definition Olson is a dialectician -- but by no other virtue, and
>at the cost of suppressing the evidence of his own manifest reflective
>tendencies and outright statements.
Some of my - not accusation, but question - about moralism comes more
from private cogitations about the contemporary trammelling of art, than
from anything you said. The insistence that art be right, or more than
that, correct, and so to me a loss in joyous and _necessary_
irresponsibilities of making, exemplified magnificently in Shakespeare,
but elsewhere everywhere. Reading your questions, my first and insistent
thought was: why _should_ Olson think that? Why is he obliged? Who sez?
What puzzles me most is your statement that he has no dialectic. I'm on
shaky ground here - I can't pretend at all to intimacy with his work. He
seems more polyvocal than that admits (and isn't there also, in the
rhapsodic, an implied dialectic of the reader/listener?) - but maybe
you're talking of something else, and I'm simply not understanding.
Best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
PO Box 186
NEWPORT VIC 3015
Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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