Keats and Fancy, Lauterbach and Choice

From Stanley Plumly’s “Between Things: On The Ode,” an essay from Graywolf Press’s Radiant Lyre: Essays On Lyric Poetry (emphasis mine):

John Keats perfects the instrument of the ode and in doing so creates the modern lyric, the poem that both acts out and contemplates itself–“the form of lyric debate that moves actively toward drama,” as Walter Jackson Bate puts it in his great critical biography of Keats. By drama I think Bate means literally a form of theater–a soliloquy perhaps, but more likely an internal dialogue with self involving a third thing: a bird, a goddess, a Grecian urn–a distracting object*.    …

What happens in Keats is that he takes the assumed energy and capacity of the mind and heart of the classic ode and refocuses its appeal to structure, balance, and gesture toward something more like texture, compression, reiteration. Keats fills out–or fills in–density; he transcends structure through the senses. As if structure were invisible, “form transparent before its subject,” as Bate puts it. The length of the ode in Keats is in its depth, its richness, its thickness, its concentration. Keats, in his way, invents the vertical reading of poetry, its interiority of music and meditation. (114-115)

From a discussion of Coleridge on fancy from “The Introduction Of Fancy Into Hopkins’ Poetry” (emphasis mine):

Coleridge sets imagination and the human subject above fancy and the object in Chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria. While imagination concerns the active mind, will and reason to fuse the object, fancy concerns the fixity of the object and understanding:

‘Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE‘. ( BL I 305)

Ann Lauterbach on art and choice:

All artworks are, at the most basic level, simply an accrual of relationships that are the result of choices: this, not that…

When we are moved by an aesthetic object, a poem or a piece of music or a painting, we experience a dual gladness: that the artist has made these choices and, by extension and analogy, that we, too, are capable of making choices…

Art serves no practical purpose, but to engage with it fully is to acknowledge the (pleasurable, if often difficult) consequences of choice at the crux of human agency. I want to suggest that artworks can disrupt the degradation of choice as the site of, and synonymous with, commodification (consumer preference) and (re)align it with the rewards of independent determinations of value—processes of aesthetic discernment and critique seen as part of a continuum across individual, social, political terrain. Choice confined to the marketplace endangers the very core of participatory democratic processes. (7)

Link Roundup: Weil, Wordplay, Dark Hopkins

After that mad rush of a previous entry, I’m going to take a breather before thinking my way through Jack Spicer’s “A Lecture On Practical Aesthetics.” For now, a link roundup showing some (other) recent preoccupations.

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SIMONE WEIL AND POETRY

First up is a blog entry that contains in its entirety James Lindroth’s 1987 essay “Simone Weil And Wallace Stevens: The Notion Of Decreation As Subtext In ‘An Ordinary Evening In New Haven’.”

I’ve yet to go through it fully since I severely lack context: I’ve never read Stevens’s essays from The Necessary Angel (an unforgivable insight, I know!), and my only encounter with Simone Weil is how she figures in Anne Carson’s Decreation (another review here).

Speaking of oversight, that’s the only Anne Carson book I’ve read. I’m somewhat interested in the way she uses Keats in The Beauty Of The Husband and her exploration of the theme of desire in Eros The Bittersweet, but I’ve yet to buy copies of those.

While looking through reviews of Decreation to use as a hyperlink, I found a critical review-essay on Carson’s book and Jorie Graham’s Overlord that also uses Weil’s notion of decreation through Stevens’s treatment of the idea: “Prayers To An Absent God: The Poetic Revealings Of Simone Weil.”

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PARONOMASIA, PUNS, AND WORDPLAY

Wordplay was not only how I rediscovered Stevens; it’s also a recurring device in the kind of poetry I’ve been writing for my MA, for better or for worse. (Someday, I’ll talk about how Northrop Frye’s “Charms And Riddles” works for the writing I do.)

Eleanor Cook has appeared here before, particularly for her work on, yes!, riddles, so it was a thrill to have discovered these essays yesterday, especially because of all the responses that followed:

1. Cook, Eleanor. “From Etymology to Paronomasia: Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Others”
2. Hecht, Anthony. “In Reply to Eleanor Cook, ‘From Etymology to Paronomasia'”
3. Vaught Brogan, Jacqueline. “From Paronomasia to Politics in the Poetry of Stevens and Bishop: A Response to Eleanor Cook”
4. Rosu, Anca. “In the Line of Wit: A Response to Eleanor Cook”
5. Bahti, Timothy. “Palm Reading (A Response to Eleanor Cook)”
6. Hollander, John. “A Note on Eleanor Cook, ‘From Etymology to Paronomasia'”
7. Cook, Eleanor. “Paronomasia Once More”

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HOPKINS: DARK, TERRIBLE, DESOLATE

Although I love to read “The Windhover” aloud like Kwame Dawes, I’m pretty much a Hopkins n00b. While reading “The Introduction Of Fancy Into Hopkins’ Poetry” (an essential resource for my thesis), I noticed a reference at the bottom of the page to his “dark sonnets.” A couple of search results later, I learned he wrote these “Dublin sonnets” from 1885-1886.

Since I’ve just read “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” for the first time, after I read about it in Cook’s article, and so was still reeling from the deliriously wonderful poem Hopkins once called “the longest sonnet in the English language,” I’m going to link to those sonnets Hopkins wrote during what seems, by all accounts, a dark night of the soul:

1. “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life”
2. “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”
3. “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief”
4. “My own heart let me have more have pity on; let”
5. “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;”
6. “Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray”

Yes, those are their respective first lines, even if the next-to-last poem is already commonly referred to as “Carrion Comfort.” I’m going to read them later, ALOUD.

Desperately Seeking Sources

Based on the critical project I’m currently exploring, having to do with my own personal poetic participation in the dismantling of the opposition between Romanticism and Modernism in order to embrace them both (call it postmodernism, or maybe not), I wish I could find the full texts of:

• Bob Perelman’s “On Jeffrey Robinson And The Retrieval Of Fancy”
• Randall Jarrell’s “The End Of The Line”

For that matter, I also want Howard Nemerov’s “The Difficulty Of Difficult Poetry” in full. The libraries I have access to over here? Not so helpful, unfortunately.