-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 19, 2016 4:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Why Shakespeare Matters debate

I could happily lose the Debate in Heaven (3-4), Chatting in Eden (7), War in Heaven (?),  and Instant History (11-12), despite the occasional good bits here and there.  I think the best of the poem -- Books 1-2, for example, the central Eden books, etc. -- condemns the rest.  The narrative/lyric balance  slips.  As to PR, I never reached it -- I finished Samson, but not with enough enjoyment to continue rather than return to the best of PL.  With Spenser, I was in at the death of the Blatant Beast, but unlike (the best of) Paradise Lost, I can't imagine ever returning to it.  Small beer, compared with Milton, but an easy read.  The first few lines of PL -- Of man's first disobedience and the fruit etc.-- for me point the way to where the meat in the egg is at.  Shame Milton didn't keep his own opening words in mind as he went on.

Narrative technique gets just a bit called into question in the various sonnet sequences , from Sidney and Greville through Shakespeare, and that's I think, what a lot of later poets pick up on.  Or perhaps I'm only thinking of Edwin Morgan.

Pound, well ... a monstrous genius, in the various senses of the term, both the man and the Cantos.  My feelings towards it tend to be awe mixed with despair ...

Robin

On 19 October 2016 at 20:45 Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I'd hate to see a word lost from Paradise Lost or for that matter Paradise Regained.  I more than suspect that the only reason the later writing is considered inferior is that no one wants to be bothered reading it.

I don't know about Spenser. Perhaps he just got bored. You can't say he lacked a narrative technique though, and so was capable of a true ending even if he didn't reach it. 

As for epic and lyric, the final words of Paradise Regained are--

                                hee unobserv'd

Home to his Mother's house private return'd. 

PR

On 19 Oct 2016, at 18:02, Robin Hamilton wrote:

Peter:

Because, I suppose (this is a desperate attempt) both the language formulations and the poetical resources are "lyric" in a wide sense, and, having deliberately cast aside a known set of working techniques for narrative poetry, they then want to tell the story of the world and have nothing in their hands but chips. With various loads of documentation dumped on it. Neither of these works has any progressive *line*, they are diary entries, adding each day what you experienced, learned or invented and in that way the work accumulates. There is thus no reason for either of them to end, and indeed they don't.

I'm here insisting of course on poetical concepts which were chucked out of the window long before.

P

Long, long ago, in this case, since Spenser's Faerie Queen ends, incomplete, with the Mutability Cantos, and the lyric vs narrative question is pertinent to Paradise Lost.

For all of me, both Paradise Lost  and The Cantos are flawed masterpieces which would benefit from the pruning of a sympathetic editor -- and I'm not talking about the hackwork that Bentley inflicted on Milton, but something comparable to Pound's intervention in the composition of The Wasteland.

Robin
 

 

<[log in to unmask]>