Jozanny: You really need to get intouch with you feelings. Criticizing Roethke for his editorial restraint...you know, that has been a kind of background music. I'll go with that.
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Jozanny: You really need to get intouch with you feelings. Criticizing Roethke for his editorial restraint...you know, that has been a kind of background music. I'll go with that.
I am too in touch with them already and have no idea what you are intending to rebuff with this sentiment.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Was I doing that?Quote:
Criticizing Roethke for his editorial restraint...you know, that has been a kind of background music. I'll go with that.
No rebuff intented, Jo. I totally get your response and wish for the fist occaisonally.
I will add... that like Jozy I also thought almost immediately of bear-baiting with Roethke's image of the caged and dancing bear. Considering the Renaissance source of inspiration I somewhat suspect that he was not unaware of the allusion himself. Should he have been more forceful... the fist... the kick in the groin? Perhaps that is better left to Bukowski. Seriously I do agree that formalism can get rather dry and leave you wanting something more... but then again I'll take the formalism of Wilbur and Hecht over the "expressionism" of Sexton, Plath, Bukowski, and Ginsberg any day. But we are speaking of Roethke. While he is not Yeats or even Eliot I do find that he is not some effete formalist afraid of stepping on any toes. There is a certain muscularity there. If anything he may be too indebted to his predecessors.
Before this discussion wanes... and hopefully Petrarch shows up to offer some of her thoughts... I would like to suggest that it might make sense to begin thinking about possibilities for the next poet of discussion. I believe Octavio Paz and Anna Ahkmatova (sp.?) were tied for second in the original poll. I would certainly be for renominating them as potentials for future discussion. I'm throwing out this idea now in order that we might have time to make nominations, hold a poll, and actually get the needed book(s) without a lot of down-time.
Why does *force* have to be associated with Bukowski's cheap theatrics? Look at Donne:
Death Be Not Proud
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
John Donne
He is beloved for more than being Elizabethan.
Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,--
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
This stanza has a force beyond most others; I see Roethke on a height overlooking the purgatorial doings of the human race if only temporarily and while composing this poem.
I agree, that was a remarkable passage.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
I've been meaning all week to put down a few comments in relation to Davies' Orchestra and the Roethke, and at last find myself with that most precious of all possessions, a bit of spare time.
St. Luke's pointed out earlier in the thread that the focus of Davies' poem is the musica universalis or the music of the spheres, and the universal dance that accompanies that music. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of the music of the spheres, I put a little basic information and a few pictures in a blog entry awhile back, which might prove helpful:http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=4861). Again, as St. Luke's has already said, the opening lines of Roethke's poem:
refer to this old way of understanding the workings of the universe in terms of a universal music and a universal dance. The lines might also be a criticism of our current culture. Is there something wrong, something lost to an age that no longer can "think the universe could hum?" I think that in some ways this relates to the number of questions in the Roethke that Virg. has been attending to. Orchestra is a poem that, in many ways, provides a cohesive vision, a delightful answer to the workings of the universe. It suggests the way everything is connected to everything else by means of the cosmic dance. Roethke's poem not only questions whether we can still imagine such an answering vision, but also, if it is no longer possible to think the universe could hum or that everything is connected in a delightful universal dance, then he questions what it all means. We see things dancing, but don't know the wherefore, don't know the prime mover: "What's the cue?" (Roethke, "The Partner" ln. 17) Of course the questions in the Roethke don't neccessarily have to imply a criticism of the modern age. They do, however, suggest a mind wondering, inquiring into the meaning or lack of meaning in the world. What are the living? What happens in the animal movements of bears and men? What happens when two bodies meet? "Did each become the other in that play?"Quote:
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
One of the loveliest things about Davies' Orchestra is the way it lightly plays with, and intertwines thoughts about both love and the cosmos. The framing story of Davies' poem is a classic carpe diem pitch from one of the suitors of Penelope (Odysseus' faithful wife from the Odyssey). He invites her to dance, which she obviously interprets as at least prelude to a sexual advance, and prudently denies. What follows is his defense of dancing starting with the origins of the universe and the dancing of the cosmos as ordained by love. In the context of the frame story, there is obviously a certain bias of the poem to calling upon love as being central to the universe, with the goal of getting the girl to give in. Yet the pleasure of the poem, like many of the best poems in the same period (there's a very Spenserian feel to Orchestra) is that, while it never transcends erotic love, never leaves the body entirely behind, it none-the-less broadens into much more than that. While the poem starts with erotic love as it's theme, it continually moves ("moves" of course, being a key word for both the Davies and the Roethke) back and forth between physical love and physical movement, and a wider universal sort of love, and a movement of the mind and, ultimately, of the soul. Every imaginable thing: sun, moon, planets, plants, animals, gods, graces, words...is a part of the dance, which in turn owes its origins to love, but exactly what sort of love shifts gracefully and seamlessly throughout the poem. At times dancing seems like a metaphor for love; at times both seem like a metaphor for erotic love. At other times all of the above merge into an inclusive vision of universal movement. At one point he even alludes to a specifically erotic tale, that of Venus and Mars caught in Vulcan's net, only to claim that they were simply engaged in an innocent bit of dancing :
This cleaning up of a familiar lusty myth is partly just a flirtatious bit of fun. Taken within the framing story one could read it as the suitor telling Penelope..."see they were only dancing and we should dance just like Venus and Mars ":brow: It's also just another example of the way the poem dances around the themes of love, sex, physical movement, and the way they all relate to one another. What seems to be an amorous entanglement may in reality be a dance. In other places, what would seem to be merely movement takes on amorous overtones: the sun loves the earth, there are even hints that rhetoric can make words a bit "licentious":DQuote:
This is the net wherein the sun's bright eye
Venus and Mars entangled did behold;
For in this dance their arms they so imply
As each doth seem the other to enfold.
What if lewd wits another tale have told,
Of jealous Vulcan and of iron chains?
Yet this true sense that forged lie contains.
Roethke, of course picks up on this playful and delicate blurring of the lines between love and sex and dancing and divine vision, and in turn produces his own nuanced lines entwining them all. In Roethke's poems, however, while there is a similar degree of movement between the various shades of love and experience, there is, in places, less assurance about how all these things relate, anf more unease; less lightheartedness in the play.Quote:
For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray
In looser numbers teacheth her to range,
VVith twentie tropes, and turning euery way,
And various figures, and licentious change:
My personal sense of the mind behind Roethke's poem is one that is troubled and has been taking comfort in that delightful and moving vision of the Renaissance poet. There's something comforting, perhaps cathartic, in his obvious attachment to the beat, the meter, of the poem. There's something about the way he frames his questions that makes it seem as though the writing of them is in some sense providing him answers. The poem seems like a pleasant but fragile break in a time that otherwise has been filled with profound uncertainty. I think one of the central lines has to be that in the Dante stanza of "The Vigil":
This is a description of love, but could just as easily be a description of poetry. Part of what Roethke seems to desire to do is to "summon a vision and declare it pure," but it is uncertain whether that is entirely possible to a mind that may no longer be capable of thinking the universe can hum; it may not even be desirable in a world "for the living. Who are they?" Certainly part of Roethke's poem seems to be an even more explicit version of the carpe diem elements of Orchestra. He suggests that "The flesh can make the spirit visible," and the answer to the question who are the living, could certainly be that they are those who die; the answer to life is in le petit mort at the conclusion of the poem. Another part of the poem is an attempt to form some sort of pure vision, while still acknowledging on a certain level, the impossibility of doing so, either in life or in poetry.Quote:
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
I would also add that to anyone who has been reading a lot of Renaissance poety, the idea of a "fate" as an allegorical human figure is likely also at play, giving the term body the potential for a slightly more literal valence.Quote:
Roethke in describing the "body" of his fate intends to speak of the multiple fates which comprise a life, perhaps his life up to this point. Is the next line adjoined to this one? The light which alters the "light" is the metaphor for each small fate illuminating the next as he (we) moves through a life. So it might follow that Roethke doesn't view fate as a predestined end but one shaped and formed by all influences, definitely including a poetic ancestry.
Petrarch offers an orderly collegiate analysis, while I return to my tireless percussion of "yes but this isn't enough to save Roethke for me..."
It is not because I am channeling the confessionalism of the Beat generation, as luke and quasi attributed to me yesterday, so much as I am channeling Donne, Dickinson, Bishop, and even Robert Frost. The modernist Shakespearean who taught me to be honest with my own work and to eschew formalism if I had to, also taught me something about mastering formalism to the degree that you could transcend it. Bishop's work, still so fresh, and so vogue, does this. As her TNR critic pointed out, "One Art" her one and only villanelle, might have just as easily been Shakespeare's, or Donne's, and yet is an absolutely perfect signifier of the 1970's.
To now channel Calvino, Roethke loses me with his signifier(s). His dialectic is Eliot? Well, Eliot's most famous rebels bulldoze Roethke's romantic naturalistic tropes, but no wait, his dialectic is Yeats modernist irony through which he yanks the Renaissance design configuration (and nostalgia for it) from its grave? Frost shuts all this groping down with one eloquent American compliment and contrast in "Fire and Ice".
Back to Roethke:
Did each become the other in that play?
She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in;
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay;
When glory failed, we danced upon a pin.
The valley rocked beneath the granite hill;
Our souls looked forth, and the great day stood still.
Charming, but why hide yourself in the cliche of angels on a pin when you have the skill enough to defy expectations? I want to like the guy, I really do, but he is neither over-arching enough nor presents himself with a muted originality so that I can adopt him within my own poetic affection.
I agree Jozy the cliche of angels on a pin could have been left out, but look at the brilliance of the lines before that:
I love those lines!! I really do think that Roethke is an outstanding poet.Quote:
She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in;
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay;
And kudos to Petrarch for that analysis. It enlightened my thinking of the poem.
:lol:Petrarch will now attempt a disorderly, non-collegiate analysis, but may fail miserably:Quote:
Petrarch offers an orderly collegiate analysis, while I return to my tireless percussion of "yes but this isn't enough to save Roethke for me..."
Jozy--While I appreciate your criticisms of Roethke--he's hardly being a shattering rebel and iconoclast in a poem like this--I also think the estimation of this poem very much depends upon the needs and expectations one brings to it. Your criteria for appreciating the poem seems to be linked with whether it is sufficiently innovative, and I'll certainly agree that it doesn't achieve the kind of innovation you're pointing to. It is not fresh in the way you describe the work of other poets being, and I'll state now that I fundamentally agree with you that this poem is not up there with Donne's "Death be not proud," or the top of of Frost's or Dickinson's works, but then that is a rather high bar to set.
So, I agree that this poem is not, perhaps, at the very height of poetic production and certainly that it isn't shattering any boundaries. All the same, I cannot help but wonder if "they also serve who only stand and wait"? The poem may not be bursting forward, but there's more appeal to it than simply that it scans well. There's some real talent there, not just at the formal level of producing smooth iambs, but in his ability to create layers of meaning in a single line, to create a certain kind of play between the words and the ideas. Some of those lines, including those the ones Virg. pointed out above, are really outstanding and both effective and affecting (not simply affectations) in their own right. Yes, he's intentionally channeling the past in this poem, but I think it would be grossly unfair to characterize this as a poem that creates a hollow echo of the past devoid of feeling. If one comes to it with the expectation of finding a great and ground breaking piece of verse, then there's bound to be some disappointment, but if the expectation is to find some pleasure in a piece of verse that uses its language well to convey certain images, thoughts and emotions, then I think it will not be a disappointment. Take this stanza:
There's an obvious Ovdian/Yeatsian touch to this stanza, and yet I don't think its only merit is that it is imitative. I get the same sort of pleasure from the metamorphoses of this stanza as I do from parts of Ovid (perhaps not the pinnacles of the Metamorphosis, but some of the good bits). I respond, not just because it sounds like Ovid, but because in its own right it conveys the same feeling just as well as some of Ovid's passages, or Yeats' passages. I could know nothing about the earlier poets and still find this effective, whereas hollow imitators dependent on form alone for their effect usually fall very far short of being able to provoke any kind of emotional response independent of a response to them as a shadow of the past they imitate. While this may not be one of the all time "great" poems (and again, I am not claiming it is), I think it would be a disservice not to appreciate and enjoy the very real qualities it does have to offer.Quote:
What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore?
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more.
It was and was not she, a shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.
This is to say that I sense some real substance here, some genuine pleasure to be had in this poem apart from a mere reliance on nostalgia and formalism. At the same time, it would be remiss to say that nostalgia plays no part in the poem, and I think to try to punch a fist through it, so to speak, would likely ruin part of what it has to offer. As I said in my previous post, my feeling is that part of the function of this poem is as a kind of comfort, a fragile yearning for something the poet is trying to find and yet not quite certain ever even existed. I think this quality in itself is both real and moving in the poem. His attempts to re-create "that first fine careless rapture" of high moments, both in the poetic past and in the past of his own life, may not ultimately be successful in all places in the poem, but there is something inherently moving about the attempts themselves.
Of course, it may not just not be your cup of tea, and there's nothing wrong with that. Figured I would put my 2cents worth of defense in though.
Thanks, Virg. Glad if my thoughts on the poem could be helpful. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
A very fine apologia:). Bravo! But it may point to the difference between a poet's rivalry with his or her predecessors, and a critic's ability to illuminate for a mature readership; I am not sure. Eliot would no doubt object, since he negotiated the full terrain. When I do sit and read my betters, which isn't often, I ask what I can steal if it is profound enough. Roethke is new to me, didn't floor me, and occasionally rumbles my digestion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
I'll maintain an open door policy in the meanwhile.
Thanks.Quote:
A very fine apologia. Bravo!
I figured you were reading it with the mining eye of the poet, since that's usually the perspective that what most desire some sort of innovation. As for reading like a poet, versus reading like a critic, it's an interesting question. Though I certainly can see they are two different modes of approaching a poem, I personally find it very hard to think of them as entirely separate modes, and impossible to think of them as mutually exclusive. Absolutely the reason I ended up in literary criticism was because at a young age I began reading poems with an eye to writing poems. It was not the reading of poetry but the writing of poetry that made me want to study it, to read it with the goal of seeing how it ticked. I was, as you say, floored by certain things and interested in what worked and how it worked with an eye toward using it myself and to experimenting with how to make it new. I make no claims to being a poet of any worth (which I'm not), but writing, for writing's sake, is still often something at work in my mind when I'm reading poetry: how does this work? How could it be reproduced? Improved upon? (Though I have also since found other reasons to analyze poetry, the most important being to teach it or open it up for others). I also write poetry in order to produce criticism. Any significant critical work I've done has also involved producing hundreds of lines of poetry in imitation of the poet(s) I'm working with. I need to have that first hand insight into how the poetry is working, what the rules the poet is making and breaking are, how they play out. I have trouble understanding how some of my colleagues can be literary critics without ever having any kind of interest in writing poetry, and how poets could have little interest in analyzing it, though I don't question that both can do their jobs very well without taking the other into account; I just can't personally identify with how one functions entirely without the other. I suppose I must, in this respect, have some sort of mindset in common with T.S. Eliot as you mentioned above, though naturally with no claims to anything approaching his level of skill as either a critic or a poet. :DQuote:
But it may point to the difference between a poet's rivalry with his or her predecessors, and a critic's ability to illuminate for a mature readership; I am not sure. Eliot would no doubt object, since he negotiated the full terrain. When I do sit and read my betters, which isn't often, I ask what I can steal if it is profound enough. Roethke is new to me, didn't floor me, and occasionally rumbles my digestion.
When it came to this poem, I think I had both my poet's cap (which looks for great stuff to use) and my critic's cap (which is primarily interested in detached judgement) conveniently off and was appreciating the experience provided by the poem with relatively little detachment. Read for appreciation's sake I thought it worked quite nicely, though this could also simply be a matter of taste, and clearly you just weren't taken with it, which is fine. Thanks for the thoughtful posts you've been providing. :)
Henry James said the following:
What he means is that an artist be allowed his subject matter. It is his choice and his perogative. How we judge him is by what he does with the subject matter.Quote:
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Petrarch... You raise an interesting question. Does a writer/poet read in a manner inherently different from a critic/academic? Certainly we might suggest that a critic/academic reads in a manner somewhat different from the common reader, so is the poet's eye still different yet?
I raise this question wondering from my own position. I have had my differences with Mortalterror (among others) in my preference/admiration for certain forms of literature in which the narrative is not the central issue. Undoubtedly this owes much to my own perspective as a visual artist. While narrative exists in visual art it is commonly frozen and assumes a recognition of the story by the audience. If not... the "narrative" is often quite ambiguous... or open-ended... or of little real importance as opposed to mood, atmosphere, "feeling", etc...
In art one regularly hears of the painter who is referred to as "a painter's painter"... suggesting that while he or she may have a certain acceptance within the larger audience of art lovers, painters tend to recognize some real depth and ability that is perhaps not more commonly recognized. Are there not poets referred to as "a poet's poet"? At the same time, might one not assume that there is something of Bloom's "anxiety of influence" involved in any artist confronting the work of a predecessor? The art lover or poetry lover can approach a marvelous painting or poem without the least anxiety... without a sense of a bar set too high for one to ever master... without a sense of hostility directed toward the masterful (read authoritative) work that seemingly challenges all that one values or struggles toward in one's own work.
One last post on “FOUR FOR SIR JOHN DAVIES.” I would like to really explore the last section, “The Vigil.” But first notice how he gets to the last section.
The first section could be summed up as the poet’s search for a theme that reflects the universe’s “hum.” Why he finds it in the dancing bear I can’t figure out, but so he does, and the central facts I think of that first section are the master that coordinates the dance and the solitary experience of the poet. Here he tries “to fling his shadow at the moon.”
The second section can be summed up as the making love and how that interweaves with the humming of the universe. We see this in the lines “We played a measure with commingled feet” and “Who's whistling up my sleeve?” and “O what lewd music crept into our ears!” And the solitary consciousness is replaced by “we” and other “she.” “She kissed me close, and then did something else” and “I gave her kisses back, and woke a ghost.”
The third section can be summed as the aftermath of the love making and try to understand the love’s relationship to the hum. “We two, together, on a darkening day/Took arms against our own obscurity.” and “The flesh can make the spirit visible;/We woke to find the moonlight on our toes.” The question then arises if they transcend into the Platonic ideal of perfect love within the universe’s motion:
And so we come to the final section where we find the narrator not in the heavens but as Dante just before entering Paradiso on the “purgatorial hill.” The question becomes can the physical love of the two transcend into the perfect form of love. The poet trembles at the moment and ponders it:Quote:
What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?--
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore?
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more.
It was and was not she, a shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.
Can the two make the leap from Purgatory to Heaven? Ultimately it’s not the single ego of the poem who strives but the two, “we.”Quote:
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,--
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
Then he has a moment of individualism:Quote:
Though everything's astonishment at last,
Who leaps to heaven at a single bound?
The links were soft between us; still, we kissed;
We undid chaos to a curious sound:
The waves broke easy, cried to me in white;
Her look was morning in the dying light.
But notice how the central “I,” the ego of the first section is weakened now, just “shards” and discarded as in the past, “I thought that once.” The central ego has been fragmented and the we is quickly reconstituted and the forces of disintegration “mocked.”:Quote:
The visible obscures. But who knows when?
Things have their thought: they are the shards of me;
I thought that once, and thought comes round again;
And finally central ego is completely dissolved into the female form, and word “form” is quite key.Quote:
Rapt, we leaned forth with what we could not see.
We danced to shining; mocked before the back
And shapeless night that made no answer back.
Notice how all four sections of the poem have the motif of "leaping" somewhere in the section. It sets up the final leap, the leap to the heavens of the fourth section. Their love has reached the Platonic form, and all this through “word” of poetry.Quote:
The world is for the living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when wind was in my way;
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
This posting is not meant to preclude any discussion of Roethke. I mean to update participants that the following poets have been mentioned for the next discussion: Octavio Paz, Ana Ahkmatova, Eugenio Montale and Mebdh McGuckian. We need at least one more, hopefully an English or American poet for balance. That is all.
What about Elizabeth Bishop, she was mentioned the first time around. Hah, I would say Plath, but I seem to be the only one who likes her.
Muse: Consiser Bishop and Plath added to the list. At some point we'll have a proper vote.
Eh, I would not say you were the only one DM. I think "Blackberrying" is one of her more powerful efforts; I would however, sit out a Plath discussion, despite the fact that I have her hubby's Collected Poems, and read The Bell Jar. I am weary of the Plath saga, the romanticism-as-tincture to her illness. My mother was bipolar, untreated and undiagnosed for a long time, and what this does to families is neither prophetic or particularly charming. Plath's emotional instability is too closely married to any analysis of her contribution to the canon. At least Bishop's small if near perfect output can stand by itself, despite the fact that all of the poets entrenched in this era seemingly loved their mood disorders and sinus pressure.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Now, quasi has politely hounded me to introduce Roethke's "Epidermal Macbre" which I selected in post 200, but here is the link again because I can waste myself til death if I like.
Even though I am less than sold on Roethke's trinket jangling with his schemes and couplets, and this post made me miss part of The Newshour, for which I will hold quasi responsible (glares sternly), what I like about the piece, is what this annotation states eloquently:
I can relate, and like the metaphor of the body as an ill-fitted suit which is malevolent in its own right:Quote:
Much of Roethke's poetry stemmed from what W. H. Auden described in a review as "the experience of feeling physically soiled and humiliated by life." For Roethke this began with his own physical ungainliness. Many of his readers identified with his poems describing the pursuit of spirituality, continually hampered by a sense of the obscene, the earthly, and the mundane. The Roethke contingents among us provide a counterbalance to the Whitmanesque celebrants of the body and should remind caregivers to be respectful of modesty and shame.
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
I like Syvia Plath. I like Elizabeth Bishop too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Well at least I am not completely alone. Usually whenever I mention her name, people have a tendency to look down their noses at me, like I am such unsophisticated pauper because I happen to enjoy her work. Or they presume that the only reason I must like her is because it is just the cliche thing to do based upon the popularity given to her life story and past, and that I could not just genuinely happen to enjoy reading her work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I do not think everyone must like her, but I am tired of others pulling the snob card out, just becasue I do.
"Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them." T.S. Eliot in his Nobel speech. I'm quoting Eliot on how poetry seperates people, at least in an appreciative sense...also Eliot is referring to the local nature of poetry; and in Roethke's work as JoZ has so eloquently commented, he never got over his sense of province. Or his physical sense of self. The point about poet's various states of mind, or lack of, and how that can temper your enjoyment is well appreciated. No one could pay me to be in John Berryman's head, even for a second.
Really? I've known lots of sophisticated poetry readers like Plath. I studied her in college.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Well, her life story does grab some people. But I think her poetry stands up pretty well.Quote:
Or they presume that the only reason I must like her is because it is just the cliche thing to do based upon the popularity given to her life story and past, and that I could not just genuinely happen to enjoy reading her work.
Ah, don't worry. She's a fine poet. Died way too young. Actually she's better than her husband Ted Hughes.Quote:
I do not think everyone must like her, but I am tired of others pulling the snob card out, just becasue I do.
Here here to that. I tried reading Hughes work, and it really did not do it for me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
The rest of you can do as you like. I go in and out of things, and I am out right now on the forums, and the only reason I stopped by this evening was so quasi would cease pming me. I am not feeling well and I have been trying as best I can despite ailing to get back to *my* work. I am tired, stressed, and my brother and sister are whining that they want me to pay their damn mortgages and I'd like to bust both their heads.
I know all the regular posting voices here pretty much, including mine, and I am bored with it, for now. Have fun, good luck, happy holidays, and see you all around.
JoZ, this might not be polite, and I am not without empathy, especially about your siblings, but sometimes you are absolutely hilarious.
Jozy I understand. I will always look for you here on lit net. :) I liked the Roethke Macabre poem you highlighted. I just need a lttle time to think about it before I say anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
That's what they tell me old man ;), but I am taking time off from my distractions here, just for a little while. I will probably be back before turkey day. I do not hate Plath; her tropes are just same old same old, like Eliot. I'd rather do an author more under the radar, but not just now.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Smooches:p:p
I well consider all that ye haue sayd,Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be:
Forgive my obtuseness, but the Ovidian nature of the poem is not so obvious to me. The Yeats is straight forward enough. Roethke is careful to cite it. He fairly beats us over the head with his allusion and it would be tough to miss in any event. Where my comprehension breaks down, what I don't quite get, is how besides the passage you've already quoted above Roethke reminds you of Ovid.
I'm not sure you are misinterpreting Roethke so much as I fear you may be misreading Ovid. Truly, there is a metamorphosis in the passage described, but let's not confuse any topoi with the writers who wrote them best. We say of a sonnet that it bears the stamp of Petrarch, but is Petrarch to be defined or confined to a sonnet? Was he not first a writer of latin epic? Should his letters to classical authors be dismissed out of hand? Ovid wrote several books: historical, pedagogical, epistolary. His finest was The Metamorphoses. Indeed, it was. But even The Metamorphoses is not solely about metamorphoses. What was Ovidian about The Metamorphoses were the narratives, the humor, the emphasis on love, not the metamorphoses themselves. There are many writers of sports and hunting which do not remind me of Hemingway. It is rather the manner of his treatment which so characterized his stories, a particular view of the world. Consequently, not every change of state is an overt reference to Ovid.
The structure of the Roethke poem reminds me a bit of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, with it's seemingly disconnected parts containing an overriding theme; but there the resemblance ends. Roethke's method is his own and not Eliot's. His conceits, his interests, his style, as well as the places he draws on for inspiration are all very different. I wouldn't call this an Eliotic poem, especially because I don't think that The Wasteland represents the quintessential Eliot mode.
I don't mean to belabor the point, but as I already said, I don't quite get what you mean when you call Four for Sir. John Davies Ovidian. If you have other reasons for doing so besides the brief transformation passage I would love to hear more about it. I'd especially like to know what parts of Ovid you are likening it to; since my copy of The Metamorphoses is nearly 400 pages long with many transitions and conversions.
Hi Mortal--I think this can all be cleared up pretty quickly. I didn't mean to claim at all that the poem as a whole was Ovidian, which I don't think it is. I was merely bringing out the metamorphosis in the passage by Roethke which seems to have Ovid lurking around behind it (albeit in a very simple way), and saying that I got a similar sort of pleasure out of the way Roethke handles a metamorphosis bit as I do out of some of those described by Ovid (I hasten to emphasize the "some," since there are many metamorphosis descriptions in Ovid that far surpass what is offered in the Roethke passage quoted). I was just trying to get a small point across about imitation in poetry with a specific passage. I did not in any way intend to claim that this meant the entire poem had direct parallels with Ovid and certainly did not intend to claim that an allusion like this summed up the works of Ovid which, as you rightly point out, have a great deal to offer beyond a few descriptions of metamorphosis. I should probably also point out right now that, even in the passage I quoted, I don't really want to claim that Roethke is reaching the full, rich, heights of Ovid, that he is a particularly Ovidian poet, or even that the passage itself is intensely Ovidian. I think, as I believe I said in my original post, that it has something of an "Ovidian touch" which in my opinion works nicely. The Roethke passage clearly could not reach the kind of full effect that the best bits of Ovid have because, among other things, it lacks the framework, the overall vision that supports and builds up to the best passages. That overall narrative, the way Ovid's poem moves and shifts as it progresses, is, of course, one of the great pleasures of the Metamorphoses, which could not possibly be captured in Roethke's small play in this passage.Quote:
Forgive my obtuseness, but the Ovidian nature of the poem is not so obvious to me. The Yeats is straight forward enough. Roethke is careful to cite it. He fairly beats us over the head with his allusion and it would be tough to miss in any event. Where my comprehension breaks down, what I don't quite get, is how besides the passage you've already quoted above Roethke reminds you of Ovid.
This is true, but I think in that particular passage he is making a slight Ovidian reference. This would be especially unsurprising given that in the poem as a whole he's responding to the poetry of the Elizabethan age, which is jam packed with Ovidian references.Quote:
not every change of state is an overt reference to Ovid.
As a postscript I'd like to add that it warms this Spenserian's heart to see the Mutability cantos being quoted. :) Now if we wanted to have a serious talk about some poetry that really and fully imitates, even rivals Ovid...Quote:
I well consider all that ye haue sayd,
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be:
From Plath to Ovidian imitators. Gotta love you people. Even though my harried middle age wars to reduce my pleasure in discussion, I will nominate someone who I feel would reward me as a poet most, and that would be Allen Tate. The little I've picked up on him is tantalizing and full of intrigue.
Petrarch: I enjoy your arguments for Roethke much more than I enjoy the samples of his work presented to me, with the possible exception of "The Shape of Fire"; the best way I can say why, in the moment, is because I sense Roethke uses formalism much like a straight jacket is used to control the disruption and the danger in the delusional patient.
And for myself, I ask, why not take the risk? Why not leap and see what kind of brush fire your manic state leaves behind? You want to, and have the appreciation of Yeats and Eliot in the fumes of your aspiration, and yet, you hold yourself in.
And thus far, that is my argument with him, which remains unanswered. Do I have to square this with my argument that Plath's biography is too tied to her output? Hehe! :)
Oh, most certainly - none of the really popular Plath poems were even published in her life time, and I think if she didn't kill herself, people would realize how pretentious, and outright insulting her most famous "Daddy" really is. To be honest, I still find it insulting how some bourgeois girl, who had everything given to her whole life, and great opportunities, could have the nerve to compare herself with a Jew in a concentration camp. What justification does she have even, for the less controversial, but still as depressing poems? Lets be honest, none. Most people in this world go through harder times than she did (her husband didn't love her, oh well), and most don't kill themselves. I think she merely took Robert Lowell, and tried to become him, leading to a failure within her life, as everything crumbled around her, until her eventual suicide.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
As for the verse, I find it like going to Bedlam on tour, but all the bedlamites are mere actors, putting on a show. But, perhaps that is just me.
Thanks to mortalterror for joining the discussion. And JoZ, Allen Tate jumps out as one of the best suggestions for the next poet. I have to admit only a passing familiarity but the Poetry Foundation, something of an overly-austere group, had this to say of Tate: One of Tate's preoccupations was indeed "man suffering from unbelief." His modern Everyman, however, faced a more complex situation than the simple medieval morality tale hero. Michigan Quarterly Review contributor Cleanth Brooks explained, "In the old Christian synthesis, nature and history were related in a special way. With the break-up of that synthesis, man finds himself caught between a meaningless cycle on the one hand, and on the other, the more extravagant notions of progress—between a nature that is oblivious of man and a man-made 'unnatural' utopia." Even though he had periods of skepticism himself, Tate felt that art could not survive without religion. Pier Francesco Listri wrote in Allen Tate and His Work: Critical Evaluations, "In a rather leaden society governed by a myth of science, [Tate's] poetry conducts a fearless campaign against science, producing from that irony a measure both musical and fabulous. In an apathetic, agnostic period he [was] not ashamed to recommend a Christianity to be lived as intellectual anguish."
So if someone comes from an Upper-Middle class background, they can only write nice happy little poems?Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I get your point JBI; it coincides with JoZ's take on Plath. But Muse also makes a point...when I read something like "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"...there is definately a poet there. The pretensions about the holocaust; well, where do you go with that?
From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
THE REPLY
I'm neither out nor in
Before that simple tune
As cryptic as a rune,
As fresh as salt-drenched skin.
This shivers me, I swear
A tune so bold and bare,
Yet fine as maidenhair,
Shakes every sense. I'm five
Times five a man; I breathe
This sudden random song,
And, like you, bird, I sing,
A man, a man alive.
{last two of three stanzas}
No, but they can't say,Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
To be honest, as a Jew who had his whole families past history wiped out, I find this highly insulting.