Romantic Poetry and the Qajar State

A NEW CREATION

Keats died in Rome in 1821 of tuberculosis. Shelley drowned at sea in 1822 and Byron bled to death in Greece in 1823. A brief incandescent epoch in English literature came to an end while the candle of Wordsworth burned on for more than two decades. There was an underside to this intellectual flame, an underside with scars; the flame burned fiercely and often people got scorched. -Ron Price with thanks to Paul Johnson, “Shelley, or the Heartlessness of Ideas”, Intellectuals, Harper and Rowe, 1988, pp. 28-51.

Some great burning, flames higher,
caught the light from a distant fire.
Half a world away in a decadent
Qajar state the heat was turned up
and the whole creation was stirred,
revolutionized, to its depths, shaken,
divided, separated, scattered, combined
and reunited...disclosing....entities of a
new creation.1 Astonishing single-minded-
ness, genuine self-revelation-a rare gift-
great bliss and lives filled with pain,
suffering and confusion gave to their
poetry and metaphor, steeped in the activity
of living, a force as powerful as religion.

Ron Price
12 October 1996

1 Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.295.

6 months after the above posting, I add the following additional reflection from a book on Romantic poetry.
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AN IDLER FISHING IN THE STREAM

Poetry is a counter to the naturally indolent mood. It is the antithesis of ease and slumber. It is labor, effort, a product of the will. Some poets sadden at the thought of too much idleness. -Willard Spiegelman, Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art, Oxford UP, NY, 1995, pp.96-7.


Writing poetry, active playfulness
and there must be play in life.
Something comes in play, something
ex nihilo, fortuitous, unsought,
to the idler fishing in the stream
of time, half-dream, delicious,
wandering alone in the streets,
among the trees, the books-and
then to write, such nutrition, such
a working home for life's shadows
giving them a glory, amidst that
happy stillness of the mind and
its receptivity, productivity,
ripeness and repose.

Ron Price
8 August 1998

And let us not forget the Qajars:
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THE MACHINE

Poems aren’t made of beautiful thoughts; poems are machines made out of words. -William Carlos Wiliams, found on The Internet.

I have long wanted to try to summarize Iranian history in a poem. I have read about Iran and talked about it for years, as one inevitably does, being a member of a religion with its origin in Iran. Not being a specialist, a historian, or even someone particularly versed in that history, I have tried to take what I know and forge this knowledge into some expression, some machine, that puts the nearly three millennia of its history into focus, at least an initial focus for future revision and elaboration. The exercise is not unlike making a ‘machine’: to forge 3000 years into twenty-five lines is indeed a machine-like exercise. The exercise is impossible artistically-aesthetically; it needs the efficiency of a machine to make such a coldly efficient, but somewhat crude, attempt. -Ron Price, 4:15 pm, 9 January 1996, Rivervale, WA.

Your civilization, culture, nation,
has been nibbling at other civilizations
for millennia(or been nibbled), as far back
as the Assyrians some 2700 years ago and
before then beyond Turkestan or the Caucasus.

Your first dynasty of kings, the Achaemenid,
had its origin in a semi-mythical king nurtured
by an eagle. But then you conquered(no nibble)
all the four great powers of the middle east:
Egypt, Babylonia, Media and Lydia.

You provided, under Cyrus, a unifying empire
and you gave peace to Western Asia for 200
years(550-350 BC), before the Seleucids and
the Sassanians ruled you and then another
story begins under the Arabs and Byzantines.

And on-and-on past: Turks, Mongols, Safavids
Qajars and Pahlavi: long, tortured centuries,
until you produced a King of Kings Whom
you exiled to that once great city, Baghdad
and then to Constantinople, the end of the jetty.*

Installing Him in that prison city Akka
to finish out His days, you seemed to lose
all greatness. Cyrus’ old dream of unity
will be realized in your lands. Billions
will come to you, revering His sacred places.

Some mythological-metaphorical eagle
will again ensure your greatness, nurturing,
as he has, the origins of a spiritual dynasty
that will last half a million years over the
entire surface of the Earth: O Persia!

Behold and wonder!
9 January 1996

* Constantinople is sometimes referred to as the end of the ‘jetty’ of Western Asia.
Modern Turkey, as you can see on a map, sticks out like a jetty from the continental landmass of Asia.