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.)
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