Sent this comment to the 2nd in a series of long posts from a work-in-progress by Daniel Tiffany, conveyed by Don Share at his blog (Squandermania) :
"Very interesting subject.... & Mr. Tiffany covers a lot of ground, reconfigures a lot of received notions about kitsch.
Not sure I would want to identify the "poetic" so directly with the values of kitsch, however. Kitsch - in the sense of a mindlessly-manufactured product of mass commercial appeal, which reproduces (simulates) authentic art - ie. the binary kitsch/art - seems analogous to Coleridge's binary fancy/ imagination, in that the products of fancy are somewhat superficial & calculated rhetorical ornaments - frills, let's say - as opposed to the organic-formative-substantial structures of imagination. And for Coleridge the synthetic (as in "synthesis", not "artifice") power of the imagination to unite disparate aspects of experience into meaningful intellectual wholes is the essential mode & purpose of poetry. Poetry exhibits a vivid vitality which stems from its emotional empathy with that which is depicted - powers of ethos & pathos which are absent from many streams of analytical prose.
This whole discussion might well be framed by attention to an incisive study of 40 yrs ago by Harold Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion. Fisch begins with a critique of Eliot's rendering of the famous "dissociation of sensibility". The real split between poetry and prose occurred BEFORE the 18th-cent. flowering of bourgeois literature, which is the period of Tiffany's focus. The split began under the impact of dual 17th-cent. phenomena : 1) Baconian scientism, with its suspicion of language in general and of rhetoric and poetry in particular, and its desire to supplant them with a mode of "pure" scientific observation; 2) Puritan iconoclasm, with its emphasis on virtuous "plain speech" as opposed to the snares of flowery rhetoric, luxurious poetry. As Fisch demonstrates, when Baconian scientism melded with Puritan suspicion of language, a tremendously powerful anti-poetic animus was infused into the intellectual-cultural make-up of English-speaking society : an ironic situation which involved the elision or avoidance of the main stream of poetic sensibility and eloquence (the King James Bible). The repercussions of this fundamental divide are in very clear evidence in the stance and ideology of William Blake, for one example, with his "prophetic" attacks on Locke & Newton, etc.
This, it seems to me, is the locus of the real battle between poetry and prose, even today : it has less to do with the maneuvers of "fancy" (kitsch) than with the ontological (& social) status of the imagination."
Showing posts with label Coleridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coleridge. Show all posts
8.31.2011
6.13.2005
Spent some more time over the sultry weekend with Stephen Prickett's dazzling book (Words and The Word) mentioned a couple days ago.
He's getting into the relation between Romantic & Victorian poetry, & the 19th-cent. movement toward cultural centrality of prose fiction & realist novel.
He does this in terms of the paradoxes & problems of Biblical translation, & the enormous impact, on British poetics & romantic poetry in general, of Bishop Lowth's studies of Hebrew poetry in the 18th cent.
Sounds rather abstruse, I guess. But it's not. His focus is on Wordworth, Blake, GM Hopkins, & esp. Coleridge. Tied into a remarkable reading-back of the various translations of the story of Elijah's encounter with the "still small voice" in the cave. (I have a little old poem along that line, which I will post here later.)
Coleridge's emphasis on the power of the imagination-intelligence to shape perception; of human language as a "subordinate logos" of the (divine) "communicative act" which is Nature itself; & the corollary - the necessity for imaginative participation (re-making) in any reading.
How the trinitarian formula of transcendent Logos united with incarnate person contains a logical paradox (like the "set of sets which contains itself", or however it goes : the infinite God appearing inside "his" own finite creation). (Prickett illustrates with the Saul Steinberg sketch (taken from Escher?) of the two hands, holding pens, sketching each other.) And how any literary representation of reality comes up against a similar paradox.
The prose realists evaded these paradoxes by simplifying the problem of representation. The stories are cast in a form of (desacralized) "objectivity" which reifies the world. (cf. George Eliot's humanist recasting of religion via Feuerbach.)
I thought I noticed faint echoes of some of these issues in Ron Silliman's latest attack on "School of Quietude" representational poetry (remarks on Clark Coolidge, etc.). He sets up a false dichotomy and a false choice between representational and non-representational poetries. If we inhabit some form of Coleridge/Hopkins "communicative cosmos" - within which particular things in nature speak their meaning or Adamic name - then the basic motive of poetry-making - whether "abstract" or representative-narrative - will be to communicate.
When I was working on the long poem, I thought of it as anti-prose, anti-novel. The ghost-shaman Bluejay mixes in with real places & local history. Stubborn Grew narrates the crisis-collapse of its own narrator. I think I have always been aligned with Coleridge & Blake - that there is some mission for poetry which merges with religion & the sacred. Breaks through aesthetic & cultural categories.
sorry, I'm really rambling this morning. back to work...
He's getting into the relation between Romantic & Victorian poetry, & the 19th-cent. movement toward cultural centrality of prose fiction & realist novel.
He does this in terms of the paradoxes & problems of Biblical translation, & the enormous impact, on British poetics & romantic poetry in general, of Bishop Lowth's studies of Hebrew poetry in the 18th cent.
Sounds rather abstruse, I guess. But it's not. His focus is on Wordworth, Blake, GM Hopkins, & esp. Coleridge. Tied into a remarkable reading-back of the various translations of the story of Elijah's encounter with the "still small voice" in the cave. (I have a little old poem along that line, which I will post here later.)
Coleridge's emphasis on the power of the imagination-intelligence to shape perception; of human language as a "subordinate logos" of the (divine) "communicative act" which is Nature itself; & the corollary - the necessity for imaginative participation (re-making) in any reading.
How the trinitarian formula of transcendent Logos united with incarnate person contains a logical paradox (like the "set of sets which contains itself", or however it goes : the infinite God appearing inside "his" own finite creation). (Prickett illustrates with the Saul Steinberg sketch (taken from Escher?) of the two hands, holding pens, sketching each other.) And how any literary representation of reality comes up against a similar paradox.
The prose realists evaded these paradoxes by simplifying the problem of representation. The stories are cast in a form of (desacralized) "objectivity" which reifies the world. (cf. George Eliot's humanist recasting of religion via Feuerbach.)
I thought I noticed faint echoes of some of these issues in Ron Silliman's latest attack on "School of Quietude" representational poetry (remarks on Clark Coolidge, etc.). He sets up a false dichotomy and a false choice between representational and non-representational poetries. If we inhabit some form of Coleridge/Hopkins "communicative cosmos" - within which particular things in nature speak their meaning or Adamic name - then the basic motive of poetry-making - whether "abstract" or representative-narrative - will be to communicate.
When I was working on the long poem, I thought of it as anti-prose, anti-novel. The ghost-shaman Bluejay mixes in with real places & local history. Stubborn Grew narrates the crisis-collapse of its own narrator. I think I have always been aligned with Coleridge & Blake - that there is some mission for poetry which merges with religion & the sacred. Breaks through aesthetic & cultural categories.
sorry, I'm really rambling this morning. back to work...
6.10.2005
Latest reading : Words and The Word : language, poetics, and biblical interpretation, by Stephen Prickett (English prof. at Australian National University). Cambridge UP, 1986.
This is a really brilliant analysis of the shifting inquiries and debates around the nexus defining poetry, historical philology, biblical translation & interpretation. Starting with Longinus' distinction between sublime & beautiful. Through the poets, philologists, theologians, philosophers of the 18th-20th cent. The book is not an historical survey, but a critical interpretation in its own right. I'm only on the 2nd chapter, but finding it very helpful. Full of good quotes, too.
Touchstone : ...I would the gods had made thee poetical.
Audrey: I do not know what 'poetical' is : is it honest in deed and word? is it a true thing? (As You Like It)
Also an interesting etymological fact : our word "soothing" is a kind of lightweight tangent from its prior meaning : "to soothe" meant to verify or confirm as true. "Sooth" meant true or truth. ie. "forsooth". So "to confirm something as true" gradually blended with "to comfort or soothe".
I could identify with this passage (p. 45) on many levels:
"Coleridge's theory of the imagination stressed that all knowledge was acquired by an active integrating mental process; the passive receptivity assumed by the Lockeian and empiricist notion of the 'tabula rasa' model of the mind was an impossibility. Thus in reading poetry we are not receivers of the word, we are, by definition, participators in it. When Coleridge wrote of the Bible that in it 'there is more that finds me than in all other books put together', he is deliberately using the biblical image of dialogue, the process of call and response that is the hallmark of God's dealings with man from Genesis to Acts, as a metaphor of the process of reading itself."
(But, just to be clear, Prickett is not offering his own argument here : I haven't gotten to that myself yet. He goes on to discuss the influence of Vico, who had a very different estimate of poetry & the poetic. While prudently leaving aside the whole issue of biblical scripture and divine revelation, Vico argued that poetry is an expression of the primitive mind, which projects its own fears & desires into highly-colored imaginative symbols - and then falls down to worship its own creations.)
This is a really brilliant analysis of the shifting inquiries and debates around the nexus defining poetry, historical philology, biblical translation & interpretation. Starting with Longinus' distinction between sublime & beautiful. Through the poets, philologists, theologians, philosophers of the 18th-20th cent. The book is not an historical survey, but a critical interpretation in its own right. I'm only on the 2nd chapter, but finding it very helpful. Full of good quotes, too.
Touchstone : ...I would the gods had made thee poetical.
Audrey: I do not know what 'poetical' is : is it honest in deed and word? is it a true thing? (As You Like It)
Also an interesting etymological fact : our word "soothing" is a kind of lightweight tangent from its prior meaning : "to soothe" meant to verify or confirm as true. "Sooth" meant true or truth. ie. "forsooth". So "to confirm something as true" gradually blended with "to comfort or soothe".
I could identify with this passage (p. 45) on many levels:
"Coleridge's theory of the imagination stressed that all knowledge was acquired by an active integrating mental process; the passive receptivity assumed by the Lockeian and empiricist notion of the 'tabula rasa' model of the mind was an impossibility. Thus in reading poetry we are not receivers of the word, we are, by definition, participators in it. When Coleridge wrote of the Bible that in it 'there is more that finds me than in all other books put together', he is deliberately using the biblical image of dialogue, the process of call and response that is the hallmark of God's dealings with man from Genesis to Acts, as a metaphor of the process of reading itself."
(But, just to be clear, Prickett is not offering his own argument here : I haven't gotten to that myself yet. He goes on to discuss the influence of Vico, who had a very different estimate of poetry & the poetic. While prudently leaving aside the whole issue of biblical scripture and divine revelation, Vico argued that poetry is an expression of the primitive mind, which projects its own fears & desires into highly-colored imaginative symbols - and then falls down to worship its own creations.)
3.21.2005
Feeling a change in the weather. Must find a way to reduce my own cacaphony, amid the general cacaphony. This is probably a symptom of homesickness for poetry.
(Why am I telling you this. Blogging is weirdly un-private. Or, I am just weirdly blogging.)
I've never learned how to discipline myself, or to negotiate the worlds of writing & publication. & blogging makes an easy substitute for that. Like email for correspondence.
Maybe the poet labors only to reflect back, in a mirror, the pleasure received from reading/hearing other poetry. A closed circle, an artifice, a garden. What you read is a rough translation of what I heard before. (& you try to refine out the noise, in the process of finding the right words.)
But that leaves no room for making something really new, never done before.
Maybe it's both. You make something new in order to close the ring, draw the circle again.
The creative unity which Coleridge looked for in the poetic process. An integration of what you intuit to be the best words, in the best order - with as much of reality as you can manage. This also is to forge the ring, close the circle (on another plane).
But with so much talk & noise & distraction everywhere now - it seems to call for even more discipline & restraint, if you want to sharpen your message & refine your poetry. (of course I include myself among the noisemakers!)
(Why am I telling you this. Blogging is weirdly un-private. Or, I am just weirdly blogging.)
I've never learned how to discipline myself, or to negotiate the worlds of writing & publication. & blogging makes an easy substitute for that. Like email for correspondence.
Maybe the poet labors only to reflect back, in a mirror, the pleasure received from reading/hearing other poetry. A closed circle, an artifice, a garden. What you read is a rough translation of what I heard before. (& you try to refine out the noise, in the process of finding the right words.)
But that leaves no room for making something really new, never done before.
Maybe it's both. You make something new in order to close the ring, draw the circle again.
The creative unity which Coleridge looked for in the poetic process. An integration of what you intuit to be the best words, in the best order - with as much of reality as you can manage. This also is to forge the ring, close the circle (on another plane).
But with so much talk & noise & distraction everywhere now - it seems to call for even more discipline & restraint, if you want to sharpen your message & refine your poetry. (of course I include myself among the noisemakers!)
12.17.2004
Seems that among the Chicago School notions I've been following, the one that interests me the most is this concept of the poem as an artificial-imitative construct. RS Crane makes it clear that Aristotle, anyway, is being very specific in the Poetics - is not talking about all kinds of poetry. And "imitation" does not equal "realism" - does not mean an attempt to "faithfully reflect" a stable external reality. Mimesis in poetry is a verbal artifice or autonomous creation, reflecting the poet's inner concept of an action (the plot) and its consequences & implications. Part of the interest (pleasure, etc.) derived from such a production does involve our ability to identify & understand the action, and the characters involved - thus it requires an element of verisimilitude (the characters are either "better than us" (epic, tragedy), "worse than us" (comedy), etc.). But there is no simple equation of experience and the art work; the poem is a selection & recreation of events - real or imagined - in a completely artificial medium.
We might be able to extrapolate, from the ways an audience absorbs & responds to a dramatic poem or an epic poem, to the action(s) or purposes of poems in general. This seems to be what's happening when Elder Olson or RS Crane talk about how the diction & verbal texture are only one element - and perhaps not the most important one - of a poem's structure. They refer to Coleridge's criticism - the way he balances considerations of verbal effects with the nature of the poem's argument, theme, "thought" - the images & concepts evoked by the words. Like Aristotle, Coleridge thinks about poems as imaginative wholes or unities - this unity as being perhaps the foremost structural element, the formal resolution, of its overall beauty, radiance, claritas. Here the notion of fitness or decorum comes into play: the verbal texture in each of the poem's parts must relate fittingly to the subject-matter & contribute to the total effect. (Coleridge distinguished poetry from prose as having pleasure, rather than truth, as its end, and as being beautiful, not only as a whole, but independently in each of its parts.)
A "didactic" poem does not imitate an action. But mimesis plays a role in all poetry, lurking in the imaginative indications, implications, inferences, suggestions of every figure & trope.
So if we start thinking about poems as imaginative/conceptual/mimetic wholes - representing & imitating actions and "mental actions" (choices: decisions about things) - then, it seems to me, this opens up new ways to read. & I mean read whatever little book of poetry you have in front of you.
We might be able to extrapolate, from the ways an audience absorbs & responds to a dramatic poem or an epic poem, to the action(s) or purposes of poems in general. This seems to be what's happening when Elder Olson or RS Crane talk about how the diction & verbal texture are only one element - and perhaps not the most important one - of a poem's structure. They refer to Coleridge's criticism - the way he balances considerations of verbal effects with the nature of the poem's argument, theme, "thought" - the images & concepts evoked by the words. Like Aristotle, Coleridge thinks about poems as imaginative wholes or unities - this unity as being perhaps the foremost structural element, the formal resolution, of its overall beauty, radiance, claritas. Here the notion of fitness or decorum comes into play: the verbal texture in each of the poem's parts must relate fittingly to the subject-matter & contribute to the total effect. (Coleridge distinguished poetry from prose as having pleasure, rather than truth, as its end, and as being beautiful, not only as a whole, but independently in each of its parts.)
A "didactic" poem does not imitate an action. But mimesis plays a role in all poetry, lurking in the imaginative indications, implications, inferences, suggestions of every figure & trope.
So if we start thinking about poems as imaginative/conceptual/mimetic wholes - representing & imitating actions and "mental actions" (choices: decisions about things) - then, it seems to me, this opens up new ways to read. & I mean read whatever little book of poetry you have in front of you.
12.14.2004
"Ain't it a little late in the day," you ask, "to bother with criticizing the "'New' Critics?"
First of all, you shouldn't use "ain't" unless you need a rhyme for plaint. Secondly, this here Chicago School, it seems to me, clears the ground, enlightens the region, establishes some first principles, or reminds one of existing principles for which you don't need to re-invent the refrigerator magnet.
Relevant it is indeed to such contemporary issues in this wee corner of Blogistan such as:
1. how the heck can I ever read all them poetry books?
2. how can I get around that current can of ards which asserts that poets today ain't got no theory?
3. how can I get beyond this plague of simplistic labels, pigeonholes, clubs & sandwiches?
4. what is a literary critical method anyway?
5. can I be a critic too?
6. what is the relation between poetry & reading public? is it really a closed system or "guild"?
What RS Crane, for one, emphasizes, is that both Aristotle & Coleridge established grounds for evaluation on several bases, & in so doing, allowed for a criticism which resists reduction to some totalizing analogy or reductive principle (ie. Empson : poetry = linguistic ambiguity; New Formalists : poetry = traditional metrics; Language School : poetry = denatured diction). So there's a lot of poetry out there. Say you find something that grabs you, and you want to read it with certain practical purposes in mind, like mapping its territory or explicating its virtues. With some of the knowledge provided by the Chicago critics, you can begin to develop your own means & methods of evaluation & appreciation - on a vastly different, & independent, philosophic &/or aesthetic basis.
First of all, you shouldn't use "ain't" unless you need a rhyme for plaint. Secondly, this here Chicago School, it seems to me, clears the ground, enlightens the region, establishes some first principles, or reminds one of existing principles for which you don't need to re-invent the refrigerator magnet.
Relevant it is indeed to such contemporary issues in this wee corner of Blogistan such as:
1. how the heck can I ever read all them poetry books?
2. how can I get around that current can of ards which asserts that poets today ain't got no theory?
3. how can I get beyond this plague of simplistic labels, pigeonholes, clubs & sandwiches?
4. what is a literary critical method anyway?
5. can I be a critic too?
6. what is the relation between poetry & reading public? is it really a closed system or "guild"?
What RS Crane, for one, emphasizes, is that both Aristotle & Coleridge established grounds for evaluation on several bases, & in so doing, allowed for a criticism which resists reduction to some totalizing analogy or reductive principle (ie. Empson : poetry = linguistic ambiguity; New Formalists : poetry = traditional metrics; Language School : poetry = denatured diction). So there's a lot of poetry out there. Say you find something that grabs you, and you want to read it with certain practical purposes in mind, like mapping its territory or explicating its virtues. With some of the knowledge provided by the Chicago critics, you can begin to develop your own means & methods of evaluation & appreciation - on a vastly different, & independent, philosophic &/or aesthetic basis.
4.27.2004
This notion of fitness & the imaginative grasp of the "whole image": relates to Wallace Stevens (drawing on IA Richards' version of Coleridge on Imagination) in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, "It Must Be Abstract" (ie. the poem is an imaginative whole, an "abstracted" image of reality). Mandelstam, somewhere: "Acmeism loves 'the idea of Man' more than men themselves." (quoting from memory) Mandelstam is not saying that the acmeist is either inhumane or naively idealistic. He's saying that reality is grounded in a beautiful concept. In another place (in a poem) he put it something like this: "It's not Rome, the city, which endures through the ages: it's Man's place in the universe." (cf. Stevens' "the McCullough", or "Major Man".)
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