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Get on with your essay :-) >From: Edmund Hardy <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and > poetics <[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: Re: Help! The grass is singing >Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:13:45 +0000 > >>Why do we think of W.C. Williams as happy, and Eliot as not. > >because we think of all that weight bearing down on Eliot, & of all that >lightness & airiness just sort of rushing through Williams? > >Shakespeare's an upper because it's just delirious, all these people >speaking in this incredible way > >I find Frank O'Hara a downer, but most people seem to think he's an upper > >then i find Kafka and Beckett and Thomas Bernhard to be uppers; but I find >the plays of Noel Coward to be mostly downers, outright tragedies... Blithe >Spirit > >>It is a curious subject, 'happiness' - somebody was talking about a >>country >that now does an annual Gross National Product index for "happiness". > >there's an interesting ethnography, gladwin & sarason's Truk: Man In >Paradise (from the 50s) about a small-scale society on the island of Truk >(a place known now for scuba-diving) where all material needs are supplied >- plenty of fish, no nearby aggressors - but the society is torn by fights >& accusations & psychological insecurities of all kinds - It's a stumbling >block for a political theory of happiness... > >Edmund