well yes it's all really about the 'words on the page' & too much
biography can be downright harmful but the fact is that the further you
go back the more you do need to know about the determinations of those
words & a good deal of that is down to biography & circumstantial
evidence. Shelley was a closed book to me until I got interested in his
life; maybe I now read him with an over-personalised slant but at least
I've learnt a way of reading & I hope to some degree understanding him.
Frankly I'm a bit dubious about David's claim to read Blake with the
merest skeletal anecdotal background - even the songs which can seem
merely pretty lyrics if divorced from B's non-conformist background, the
C18 hymn tradition & what have you. Not to mention, for all B's work,
contemporary shenanigans like the French Revolution. I think what
happens in fact is that with relatively recent poetry, Romantics on, we
bring far more background knowledge to the work than we probably
acknowledge to ourselves. Go back a bit further & you'll find a poet as
good as Charles Churchill whose work is now virtually illegible without
knowledge of contemporary political life & his involvement in it. But,
bring it nearer too: the work that Peter & others have done to resurrect
poets from the 1940s is very much a recontextualisation, a placing of
the work in the lives of those poets & the cultural life of the time.
Non? Je est un autre: but both the 'je' & the 'autre' have a life &
times. Best, A
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