Am not a Pound scholar (don't I wish!) but have just chased up the passage 
Robin quoted and am intrigued to see that it is titled in the margin as: 
'libretto'. Presumably we are therefore to consider the subject of words as 
set to music.

All I can illuminate are the musical references. Lawes is almost certainly 
Henry rather than his brother William, because though both were composers of 
vocal and instrumental music, Henry wrote the incidental music for Milton's 
Comus. Jenkyns is John Jenkyns, better known for his viol fantasias, hence 
presumably the reference to Dolmetsch. And here we are probably talking 
about Arnold (1858-1940), viol maker and player, and father of the 
pioneering early-music authenticity clan, rather than his son Carl, who was 
better known as a recorder player. Dowland was a virtuoso lutanist, and 
judging by his songs must have had one hell of a voice himself -- I'm 
guessing at a very sexy counter-tenor!

I'm assuming those of you who know all this already do not object too much 
to a re-run.

joanna

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2006 5:13 AM
Subject: Re: Matters of taste


From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>

> >On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 14:25:40 -0800, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>
>>Then resolve me, tell me aright
>>        If Waller sang or Dowland played,
>>
>>   Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly
>>    I may the beaute of hem nat susteyne
>
>>And for 180 years almost nothing.
>
> It's not clear to me what critical implications are being attributed
> by Robin to the Pound passage.  My own interpretation is that by
> "nothing" Pound means that after the last flowering of medieval lyric,
> poetry lost its intrinsic relationship with song until the connection
> was reestablished by the Elizabethans as symbolized by Dowland, who
> set many of their poems to music.

I wonder too.  Taking 1385 as a possible start for Chaucer, we get to 1565.
Hm.

The references to Waller and Dowland suggest to me that Pound is restarting
the line *after* Sidney.  I can't think of anywhere he mentions him.

> (And I wonder if the "almost" is
> meant to allow Dunbar and Wyatt to sneak in.)  Under this
> interpretation Pound is comparing the early Elizabethans to Chaucer
> not to bury them but to praise them.

Interesting.  Pound mentions Gavin Douglas favourably in +The ABC of
Reading+, but not (I think) either the more obvious Middle Scots poets
Dunbar and (my favourite now I'm [almost] growed up) Robert Henryson.

But is there a Pound scholar in the house could illuminate this?

> Though it's not exactly linked, I wonder if Shakespeare was parodying
> this sort of thing in Hamlet (Polonius is speaking:)
>
> "And he, repulsed—a short tale to make—
> Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
> Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
> Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
> Into the madness wherein now he raves,
> And all we wail for."

It's a list, but not a linked list, nah?  I'd agree it's a parody of
something, but maybe not this.

> On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 11:25:43 +0000, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>there's almost a defiance here: i'm talking about the muse, quite
>>possibly a politically contentious issue, and i just don't care if it
>>does offend you. as if i'm doing something naughty... you're right,
>>daveb, debate is cut short
>
> Please note that I'm being misquoted here:  what I said quite clearly
> and specifically was that I would decline to respond to claims that
> the poetry of the past and its sources were of no great interest, not
> that I would decline to engage in a discussion on the nature of the
> Muse, which would indeed have been an odd thing for me to say, since
> that's exactly what I've been doing.  It seems to me equally odd to
> complain that "debate is cut short" on this issue when at least half a
> dozen list members are in the middle of a vigorous debate on it.

The Muse thing is tricky once we start to historicise it.  I wondered about
dave bircumshaw's suggestion that Lesbia/Claudia was Catullus' muse.  I
think it's a different thing at issue there.  My own sense is that the
"modern" sense of the Muse begins with the dolce stile nuovo, then Dante,
Petrarch, and onwards -- an unattainable *human* figure who is both
inspiration of and material for the poems.  Perarch as the locus classicus
here (and obviously onwards to Sidney's "use"/treatment of Stella/Penelope
Rich).

Dead wives, in this context, make useful muse-figures -- we have this even
today with Douglas Dunn in his +Elegies+ and Peter Porter in +The Cost of
Seriousness+ and +The Wether Level+.

Robin

(Jon -- could you elucidate something you said in an earlier post:

"Philologists tell us her name is derived from the Indo-European root mna,
found in e-grade as Latin mens (cf English mental,) zero-grade in Greek
mnemosyne (cf. amnesia, mnemonic,) and a postulated o-grade (IE or early
Greek?"

e-grade, zero-grade and o-grade go past me.  Splits from an Indo-European
original?

R.)