Read: These Emily Dickinson poems (linked by first lines on the wiki page HERE):
A Bird came down the Walk
A faded Boy in sallow clothes
A Spider sewed at Night
A sepal, petal and a thorn
I cannot dance upon my Toes
Read: Walt Whitman--p.675 first 145 lines of 1855 Song of Myself (through page 681) Compare to p. 63 (first 155 lines of the 1891 "deathbed" version...)
Here is my blog entry for "I cannot live with You"
Your blog is your own (I will be checking it during week 4 or 5 to make sure you are being both diligent and thoughtful).
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Friday, June 24, 2016
Emerson's The Poet - much edited down and numbered (for your/my convenience). Read/PO and notate.
The Poet
from Essays: Second Series
(1844)
A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
ESSAY : The Poet
1. Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons
knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for
whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and
whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish
and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood
in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of
the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment
of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof
of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our
amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence
of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy…
2. The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is
representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises
us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. The young man reveres men of
genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive
of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to
the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows
at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his
art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men
sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In
love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter
our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his
expression.
3. Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate
expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter; but the
great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession
of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with
nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the
sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar
service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our
constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall
the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill.
Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation
what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have
sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick,
and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in
whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and
handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience,
and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive
and to impart.
4. For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which
reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether they be
called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune;
or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call
here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the
love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three
are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be
surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others
latent in him, and his own patent.
5. The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is
a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or
adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some
beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe…
6. For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are
so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is
music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we
lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and
thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences
more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of
the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is
reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and
deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions,
and actions are a kind of words.
7. The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces
that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells;
he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance
which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary
and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry
and skill in metre, but of the true poet… (Here
he describes lesser poets… mere singers… form without contenet… but he is not
speaking of those. –KK)
8. For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a
poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or
an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new
thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the
order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought:
he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him,
and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age
requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet…
9...
10. But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope,
observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to
his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things,
which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when expressed… "Things more
excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through
images." Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol,
in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand, has
expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius…
11. The Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the
life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and
therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and
chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the
retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus,
"exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of
intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with the unapparent
periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, science always goes abreast
with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics;
or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in
nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it
is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
12. … Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who
live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they
express their affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of
words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in
horses, and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him, he
holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no
definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels
to be there present. No imitation, or playing of these things, would content
him; he loves the earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and
iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end
of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body
overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites.
13. The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of
every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are
not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our
political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball
which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions,
Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the
cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the
cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies,
leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit
God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the
ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most
conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all
poets and mystics!
14. … Thought makes every thing fit for use… We are far from
having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use
them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be
long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we
use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that
the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan,
blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.
15. For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God,
that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the
Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to
nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes very easily of the most disagreeable
facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that
the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are
not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the
great Order not less than the beehive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature
adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she
loves like her own… The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the great
and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to
which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of America, are alike.
16. The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the
poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates,
and absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which
it is named, — yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and inhabit
symbols; workman, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are
emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the
economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by
an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old
use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate
object… He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form.
This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation,
and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs.
He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with these flowers we
call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals,
with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses
of thought.
17. By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or
Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after
their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby
rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets
made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if
we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of
our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained
currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker
and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a
brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent
consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made
up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to
remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees
it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other…
18…
19…
20. This insight, which expresses itself by what is called
Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but
by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit
of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of
things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will
not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, — him
they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his
resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and
accompanying that.
21. It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns,
that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable
of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the
nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there
is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his
human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through
him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder,
his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants
and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he
speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with
the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all
service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the
ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with
the intellect inebriated by nectar…
22. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics,
coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other
species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they
can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end
they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres,
travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal
intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes
for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer
to the fact… Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live
generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent
unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not 'Devil's
wine,' but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands
and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses,
withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the
sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys.
So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the
common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of
the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be
tipsy with water…
23. If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in
other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use
of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We
seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like
children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open
air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.
Poets are thus liberating gods. (I kept
this last line in just for Kenneth).
24. The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards
had for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the
world." They are free, and they make free… I think nothing is of any value
in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary…
25. There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The
fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in
a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of
man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The
inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you
come near to it, — you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are
farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison.
Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode,
or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He
unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.
26. This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart
it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of
intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to
that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his
exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of
its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few
imaginative men.
27. But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to
freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their
meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects
exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the
mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a
moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all
language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are,
for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists
in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one… The
history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in
making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of
the organ of language.
28…
29…
30. I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with
sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life,
nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day
with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield
us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler,
whom all things await… Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our
fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the
wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the
southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and
it will not wait long for metres…
31. But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must
use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to
the poet concerning his art.
32. Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or
methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist
himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The
painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all
partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly,
not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain
conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures;
the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as
each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new
desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with
wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with
the old painter, "By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." He
pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses
in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but
by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him.
He would say nothing else but such things…
33. Doubt not, O poet, but persist…
34. O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures,
and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard,
but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not
know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but
shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by
funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding
tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that
thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others
speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy
and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions
also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and
apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a
long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his
well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the
names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And
this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions
of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome,
to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and
manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others
are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet
in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into
celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty,
plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world
over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Read this for Thursday June 23 (1/3 of actual size)
from Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1821). Excerpted. (The ellipses [...] mark excised material).
…
Poetry, in a general sense, may be
defined to be “the expression of the imagination”: and poetry is connate with
the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and
internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind
over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But
there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient
beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone,
but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to
the impressions which excite them.
...
...
In the youth of the world, men
dance and sing and imitate natural objects observing in these actions, as in
all others, a certain rhythm or order….
But poets, or those who imagine and
express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of
music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the
institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of
the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the
invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are
allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of
false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in
which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world,
legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.
For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those
laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the
future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense
of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the
spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry
an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to
his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which
express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction
of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring
it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s
“Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact,
if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of
sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, color, form, and
religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of
poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the
effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense
expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language,
which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within
the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of
our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate
combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to
the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is
arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone;
but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations
among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression.
The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which
enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame
of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the
great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that
of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of equal skill
will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators
and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to
exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a
question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross
opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged
to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word
poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most
perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the
circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have
relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a
perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with
a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of
poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound,
without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to
the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without
reference to that peculiar order.
…
A poem is the very image of life
expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a
poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other
connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the
creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The
one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain
combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and
contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions
have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the
beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry
which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes
have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A
story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is
distorted.
…
Having determined what is poetry,
and who are poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon society.
… A poet is a nightingale, who sits
in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors
are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they
are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
… The whole objection, however, of
the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which
poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges
the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes
examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines
that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges
the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended
combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the
world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it
reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its
Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once
contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which
extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great
secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification
of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not
our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure
of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with
thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and
assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new
intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry
strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the
same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to
embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his
place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.
…
We have more moral, political, and
historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more
scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just
distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of
thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals,
government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than
what men now practise and endure. But we let I dare not wait upon I
would, like the poor cat in the adage. We want the creative faculty to
imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we
imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception;
we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which
have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for
want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the
internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to
the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is
to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labor,
to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it
arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to
the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is
the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
…
The functions of the poetical
faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power,
and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and
arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the
beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired
than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle,
the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the
power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has
then become too unwidely for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine.
It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which
comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is
at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is
that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world
the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the
perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and
the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the
form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.
What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful
universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the
grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to
bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of
calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be
exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will
compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation
is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious
portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its
departure.
…
A poet, as he is the author to
others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought
personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious
of men. As to his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of
any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is
the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue,
of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of
their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard
those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be
found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a
moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in
our own persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that certain
motives of those who are “there sitting where we dare not soar,” are
reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Vergil was a
flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon
was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet
laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living
poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to.
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if
their sins “were as scarlet, they are now white as snow”; they have been washed
in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous
chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the
contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is as it
appears—or appears as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye
be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs
in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active
powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary
connection with the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that
these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in the
mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its
effects upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be
frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the
sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live. But as he
is more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure,
both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
one and pursue the other with an ardor proportioned to this difference. And he
renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the
circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have
disguised themselves in one another’s garments.
But there is nothing necessarily
evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions
purely evil have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the
lives of poets.
…
The first part of these remarks has
related to poetry in its elements and principles; and it has been shown, as
well as the narrow limits assigned them would permit, that what is called
poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of
order and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its
object an application of these principles to the present state of the
cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern
forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative
and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development
of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the
national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In spite of the
low-thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a
memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philosophers
and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last
national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial
change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an
accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and
impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The person in whom this
power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have
little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to
serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is
impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the
present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within
their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human
nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their
spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an
unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity
casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence
which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Syllabus
Professor:
Kirsten Kaschock
Office
location: Stratton 103C
Office
hours: T 1-2 (and by apt)—in office or at Joe’s coffee… text if you are
dropping by
Email:
kjk42@drexel.edu
Phone:
215-285-6955
ENGL 320 – Major Authors
Whitman and Dickinson: Uncommon Verse
“Nadia... I am coming. Expand, contract, expand.”
–Mike
Myers, So I Married an Axe Murderer
Course Description/Goals
In this class, we will look at
two North American poets creating revolutionary work during a period of intense
historical upheaval. In the mythic sweep of Whitman’s prophetic and psalmic
self-promotion and the gemlike facets of Emily Dickinson’s un-common verse, we
find the essential forces of modern poetic action: contraction and expansion.
We will examine the larger
American Romantic historical context that these writers are both exemplars of
and defectors from. We will look to their autobiographies and libraries…
particularly to delve into their potential understandings of the role of the
poet (a role each felt called to). By extension, we will learn how their unique
embodiments of those roles inaugurated the modern era of American poetry.
This class will engage
*primarily* with Whitman and Dickinson’s poetry (rather than prose… her
letters, his essays and a novel, or other ephemeralia). Because of this, our
own writings/reflections will be in the style of close readings… an essential
tool of literary (and all other) analysis. Susan Howe’s magnificent My Emily Dickinson, one of the required
texts of the class, is an extended, fully-researched and poetic meditation on
Dickinson’s work that we will look to as a model of just what is possible in
this form.
Course Texts and Materials
My Emily Dickinson Susan Howe
The Complete Poems of Walt
Whitman ed.
Francis Murphy
MANY online resources, pages of
which must be printed out for in-class annotation
THE CLASS BLOG—must be consulted Wednesday and Friday
afternoons each week for links to class readings… clarifications and
explanations of assignments… helpful summaries of classwork… and things I
forgot to say because I am tangential.
YOUR Reading Blog—is to be
created on the first day of class and fleshed out according to your brilliance.
This is the place that you will record your own trip down the rabbit hole.
Grades
Because of the
discussion/lecture nature of this course, no absences are preferable. Two
absences will be permitted with minor penalty. A third absence will lower your
grade substantially. A fourth absence will result in failing grade. Plan your
illnesses accordingly.
Final
paper:
33%
Second Paper: 25%
First Paper: 20%
First Paper: 20%
Reading Blog: 12% (or more)
In–class Participation: 10%
You
should feel free to see me in my office hours or make an appointment to review
at any time your progress in the course. We will review the work you have done
so far and I will be able to give you an approximation of the grade you would
receive, should I have to grade you at that time. Otherwise, you will receive grades/responses
on your first two papers and and likewise in response to your final paper and
reading blog.
Field Trips
I will
offer two separate field trips during this term… one to the Walt Whitman House
in Camden, NJ—accessible by public transport… and one to the Barnes
Foundation—to understand what was going on simultaneously in European fine art
as Whitman and Dickinson were producing their distinctly American work with
words.
Use of Student Writing
It is understood that participation
in this class presupposes permission by the student for the instructor to use
any student work composed as a result of this course as classroom material.
Class
Participation and Attendance
ENGL 320
is primarily a lecture and discussion course, so attendance at all class
sessions is very important. I cannot repackage an hour-and-a-half long class
into an email if you miss the class. This should be obvious. Attending class is
a basic requirement. If you miss, please contact peers for notes before approaching
me. PLEASE TAKE NOTES DURING OR IMMEDIATELY AFTER CLASS (the blog is for this).
Please email me at least a day in advance if you know you necessarily must be
absent from class. University sanctioned activities are excused, but they must
be cleared beforehand and the work that is otherwise due completed before the
absence. If you miss two classes early in
the term, I will send you a note suggesting that you drop the course and
take it when you are more able to be present. I encourage you not to miss ANY classes. Significant absences
and lack of in-class participation will significantly affect your
grade.
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE (changes may
occur/check blog on the regular)
Week
1: Introduction
T— Intro to Whitman, Dickinson, to One Another, the Class
Th— Enlightenment,
Romanticism, Modernity
read/PO:
Shelley’s Defence of Poesy, poems
assigned on blog
Week 2: American Strains
T—
American Romanticism: the Transcendental and the True
read/PO:
Emerson’s The Poet, poems assigned on
blog
Th— Autobiography: myth and
remyth
read/PO:
poems assigned on blog
Week
3: Puritan and Prophesy
T—
The things they read and things they said
read:
My
ED—Intro through Part 1 (p 28)
WW
741-62 (Preface to LoG)
Th— The things… cont.
read/PO:
poems assigned on blog
Week
4: Melancholia and Manifest Destiny
T—
Interiority and Expansivity in Dickinson and Whitman
read:
My ED—Part 2
Th— FIRST CLOSE READING DUE
IN CLASS: W or D
Week
5: Word and World
T— The era of the dictionary – lexicon and lists
read/PO:
pieces assigned on blog
Th— Geography and Nature in
the 19th century
read/PO:
pieces assigned on blog
Week
6: Self-Promotion and Self-Preservation
T—
Th— SECOND CLOSE READING DUE IN CLASS: (the other one)
Week
7: Civil War—the Political is Personal
T—
Th— 1-page PROPOSAL for FINAL PAPER/PRESENTATION due.
Week
8: Fascicles and Reprints/Queering Production
T—
Th—
Week 9: Influence and Confluence
T—
Th— Any final presentations
(rather than papers) due in-class.
Week 10: No class. Email me
fully-formal final papers by Tuesday at MIDNIGHT.
Technology
Expectations and Tech Support
You need
to be able to access Blackboard Learn, and you also must have an active Drexel
email account. If you are having problems accessing Learn, setting up your
email please contact http://www.drexel.edu/irt/ or call the Help Desk at
215.895.2020.
Academic Integrity
In
essence, by academic integrity we mean not pretending that others’ words are
your own. When you use other people’s word in your work, you’re expected to
tell your readers that these are someone else’s ideas and words, not your own.
Citing in this fashion often works to your advantage: you can document that
you’re not the only person with these strange ideas. You can check out Drexel
Universities’ policies on plagiarism on the following
website: http://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/studentaffairs/sccs/FINAL_StudentHandbook2012_1213.ashx
Drexel University Writing Center
The
Drexel Writing Center (DWC) is staffed by Peer and Faculty readers who will
help you develop as a writer through one-on-one consultations on current
writing projects. The DWC website has more details:
www.drexel.edu/writingcenter. www.drexel.edu/writingcenter. The DWC is located
in 0032 MacAlister Hall and can be reached at 215-895-6633.
Drexel Office of Disability Resources
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)