REFLECTION AND A COMPLEX MILIEUX
The sonnet led directly to Dante whose epic poetry focusses on personal-
spiritual growth, on a spiritual-intellectual vision and is designed for visionary and private readers. They are readers interested in poetry and in the concerns of the poet. They are literary-minded. The poet here is interested in writing for the sake of poetry, or the sake of God.
This is not for performance,1
no visual thrill, story-line, plot,
fixitive of entertainment, no
lovely ladies or action shots: ‘tis
an instrument of reflection, meditation,
going back to 1225 and a contradictory
cultural milieux.2 A literature of the self,
for privacy, silence, total control, stopping
and starting at will, flexibilities, twists, turns,
implications, beyond the hurried attention
of the eye on its fast track, into complexity,
a novel way of handling the ordinary,
deep paradox, the mind revealed for all to see,
its intensity, light and inward speech.
Ron Price
9 November 1996
1This poem deals with the history and purpose of the sonnet which was first written in about 1225 AD. See: Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Oxford UP, NY, 1989, p.22.
2 Sicily is considered part of the home of the sonnet. Sicily was, at the time, the home of Normans, Arabs, Jews, Byzantines, Saracens, Greeks, intellectuals from all over Europe: often seen as contradictory cultures.(ibid.,p.14)