Concur.  Entirely. 

(Well, *almost* entirely -- I nearly got diverged into a Sartrean offshoot over, "What is Literature? said Pontious Pilate, refusing to wait for an answer.")

Added to which, the Nobel, especially in the softer areas of human activity, is a political gesture as much as anything else -- "It's 2016, so it's time to give the USAmericans a Literature Prize."

Robin. 

On 24 October 2016 at 15:38 Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

How about this? In some times and places people sang poems, in others they didn't. Some poems are more amenable to being sung than others, but sometimes people sang the less amenable ones anyway. And the Nobel Committee didn't care about any of this, because they weren't awarding a prize for poetry or song.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Hamilton<[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 24, 2016 10:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: a bit much

Dogs and cats and elephants are only superficially different -- they're all mammals with four legs and a tail after all.

Difficult to tell them apart.

Robin

On 24 October 2016 at 13:13 David Lace <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


My point exactly, Jamie.

For me there can be no separation, as the aesthetic mode is the common aspect that decides the matter -- that songs and poems are the same aesthetically, and if so, in what manner, apart from the very superficial and obvious formal ones you and Peter point out, do they differ. Again, for me they don't.






-----------Original Message-----------


Jamie McKendrick wrote:

I can't meaningfully separate the formal qualities of a poem, or of a song for that matter, from its aesthetic mode.