2.20.2006



Hope to pull together an essay sometime on affinities between Bachelard, Mandelstam, Wallace Stevens.

M's Acmeism, humanism, "domestic hellenism", "teleological warmth". (Hellenism with a very Jewish warm kitchen feeling.)

The idea that poetry is part of the project to humanize and civilize the earth. Poetry breathing life into stony reality.

Steven's joy in the beautiful "idea" of a thing (or: the idea of Mankind).

Bachelard's lyric phenomenology.

Imago. Imago. Imago.

(I would toss an old Byzantine element into the mix. For me there is just one incandescent idea : imago Dei.)

To "pioneer", wherever you are.

Polish scholar Ryszard Przybylski expounds on some of this quite eloquently, in a book titled An essay on the poetry of Osip Mandelstam : God's grateful guest. (The subtitle an allusion to M's Acmeist credo - in one of his early essays.)

Joseph Brodsky, out of that (Petersburgian) tradition : "Mankind was put on earth for one purpose : to make civilization." [rough quote from memory]

No comments: