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First thing . . . I laughed so hard while reading the intro to Auden’s article that I almost passed out. I have come across some memorable quotes before in academic work, but Auden’s assertion about young people who say they want to be writers as follows, “Among these would-be writers, the majority have no marked literary gift” (379) is by far one of the most memorable things I have read, and those words will not leave me soon. I shudder to think how many dreams have been shattered upon those uncompromising rocks of his words.

Something is not making sense. Mallarme’s assertion that if language were perfect, verse would not exist because all speech would be poetry (Genette 409) seems to me to be flawed. By his reasoning, could not all of us who talk and write very simply speak in verse and convey our thoughts in poems, and ultimately circumnavigate our languages’ innate imperfection? Also, if one says that a theoretical “perfect language” is spoken in verse, then that must, by logic, also mean that “verse is perfect language.” So something perfect (verse, poetry) can be seeded in a soil of our everyday languages that are corrupt, organic and imperfect. In that argument, alone, I do not see the logic.

I am wondering who it was that said, “I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet,” to Langston Hughes. Hughes take on what the statement really meant (“I want to write like a white poet,” and ultimately meaning “I want to be white,”) was well thought out, but I think he maybe should have talked longer with the young poet to see what lay behind his words. The young man may well have not been afraid to be himself (a point central to Hughes’s main point), but simply did not want race to be a part of his affect (or identity as a poet). Maybe the young poet’s identity did not conform with the (stereotypical?) black identity, and he simply wanted to be himself despite his color. These are all possibilities.

Apologies for posting after class, but when I tried before, I messed up and lost my whole post.

The very first part of McGann’s article got my attention, more specifically, when he was talking about how Yeats was comparing poetry (and maybe the poet) to a “foul rag and bone shop” (3). I knew not what such a thing was, but McGann digs up a description by a Henry Mayhew that such a place is piled with rags and bones in a (implied) disorderly fashion. A “sickening stench” is said to inhabit the area as well.

Bernstein caught my attention with his question "What can a poem absorb?" from a compositional point of view (22). Certainly (and as he points out in rapid succession) vocabulary, syntax and reference. That he explained well. But that got me thinking of his definition of artifice and the title of his article, "Artifice of Absorbtion." If "Artifice" refers to the measure of a poem being resistant to being read as a sum of its devices and subject matters (9), then that opens me up to consider that a perhaps a poem can have contradictory meanings. I remember the last class's discussion on how different meanings can still be in some kind of harmony, but this new observation looks to me to disagree. I was thinking at first perhaps that one part of a hypothetical poem, maybe a reference, could say one thing but the syntax might hint at something else, even something that might be antonymic (please, God, let that be a word) to the reference. But, if one thinks of a strict contradiction, then the notion of some kind of sarcasm is introduced, and the two parts ot the poem become unified, in contradiction to the definition of "artifice" as I understand it. Neverless, I am left wondering if a poem can absorb two meanings that don't compliment or agree with each other in any way (refer to page 22, where Bernstein says exactly, "Poems can absorb contradictory logics, multiple tonalities, polyrhythms"). I'm not closed to this new idea, but I am having trouble with it.

Now that the heavy stuff is out of the way, allow me some fun with Baraka. When he says that "The imitator is the most pitiful phenomenon," I can't help but try to historicize that comment. Alot of music that is popular has origins in the black culture. And it's now just now when one can see affluent, suburban white kids driving around with rims and blasting bass-heavy rap music from half-blown trunk-speakers. In the 1960's, white groups like The Four Seasons and The Beach Boys were dabbling in soul and blues, which until then was primarily black music. They were becoming popular, but their black counterparts, who originated much of this new kind of music, were not getting credit or popularity. I think this fact was one of the reasons Baraka said what he said. He was reacting to a trend he saw that was not even acknowledging those who had a hand in the origins of those particular art forms. They just became popular and were performed by somebody else (whites).

I was startled by the history of Modernist poetry in Jarrell's article. Until I read it, I thought Modernism was a Joycean invention and had its abode in time in the early twentieth century. So I was shocked to learn that the Modernist movement could be traced back into the 1870s (and perhaps further). I also thought that Modernism was strictly a response to nineteenth and twentieth century industry and commercialism, and although that may still be partially true, the fact that it was nurtured in France as early as it was, and without the industrial advantages that England had (271) which allowed the Victorian or Romantic age to hang on as long as it did.

Although I always knew in a subliminal way that modernism was related to romanticism (as post-modernism is to modernism), and also knew that they were somewhat related, it did surprise me that Jarrell was able to point out the similarities of theme and content to both styles. I am used to thinking that Modernism is related to Romanticism by being a binary opposition, like the discarding of poetical forms that the Romantics so adored, but when Jarrell notes similarities like "pronounced experimentalism," "a great emphasis on details," "irony," ect (272), I can see the value of the argument he is trying to make.

I might be confusing Romanticism with Victorianism. I was thinking they are of the same time period, and thusly synonamous. I feel, somehow, that this is a wrong assumption.

Forrest-Thomson hits upon an interesting idea in her chapter about the limits of language and the limits of perceiving the world through language. Initially, I have difficulty grappling with this idea, not because I disagree with it, but because I just don't like to think of my perceptions of the world being limited by words that have come to symboize ideas and conceptions of things we observe. But then, this kind of limit does show itself readily whenone thinks about Plato's concept of perfect forms. Each of us has our own ideal image of words like "water," "car," and "frisbee." So, what is perfect in our minds will lose degrees of perfection when we try to communicate these images, so Wittgenstein seems to be correct in what she says, that our world, or our perception of the world, is related to our language, but I would make the addendum that this fact is related to our own images we put with words.

The above is very important to poetry, because poems often deal with visions or settings (think about "Ferry" and "Nothing Gold can Stay." Even though we will all get a very different vision from Zukofsky's "Ferry," we still make the images the words convey "perfect" in our own minds, and thus will each have a different "perfect," compound vision of the scene in the poem. If the poet is skilled, the visions, even though subject to modifications specific to every reader, will have some kind of atmosphere, or, and I hate to use the word, meaning.

Although I know that all languages have their natural rhythms and flow, I am struggling with the ideas put forth in Easthope's chapter four about the naturally occuring pentameter in English. On one hand, I wonder, why does a pentameter (usually iambic) satisfy the English psyche so? I wonder if it is the influence of Chaucer that paved the way for this particular meter. Then with the examples Easthope gives (p. 55) one can see the stress is falling naturally on the second syllable, so then the mystery for me clears a bit.

But when the argument is made that the Iambic pentameter was "invented," I question it. I like to consider poetry as a natural thing (perhaps some of this course's earlier readings have made that much of an impression upon me) that the idea of inventing a way to communicate poetry seems foreign to me. Or maybe it's just experience saying that the art must flow though the artists and not be controlled by the artist. Maybe I'm just saying what Derrida claimed when he said that the poet can never be more than an "effect" on discourse (Easthope 30).

The connections between poetry and music, as made by Lowell seemed specifically poignant to me. I have always heard this comparison before, escpecially involving strictly "sing-song" poetry, but Lowell made observations that gave the poetry (related to) music ideas a new freshness.

For instance, her observation that the layman does not take home a Chopin or Debussy score (71) to read at his own pleasure, but the score must be interpreted by musicians who well-skilled and specially trained, gave me pause as to thinking about the need for professional poetry readers/performers. Of course, I will agree with Lowell of the inherent danger of over-acting or over-expressing a poem. Even my most favorite poems, if overdone, will seem hokey to me.

I will say that the article covers much more than just that. When Lowell began, she talked about how most of us have a much more well-developed visual imagination as opposed to an aural imagination (70). This lead to her argument about how poetry, like music, is a hearing art as opposed to visual. Lowell, feels that poetry's true "beauty" (apologies for lacking a better word) is in sound and the printed form should matter as much to us as music notes on a score; or so much so that music notes matter to those who can't read music.

Leavis’s claim that “Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is more alive than other people, more alive in his own age,” (195) started me thinking. His take on poetry as something meaningful, or an encapsulation of a mind that is growing seems in contrast to the well repeated line, “A poem should not mean/ just be.” But, he does make a convincing argument with his example on the O’ Shaughnessy poem doing the opposite, which I found to be hilarious, if not depressingly so. Still, I find myself not at all resistant to Leavis’s definition, and will apply it in some form or another as to the poetry I read from here on, because I too, believe that poetry should aspire to something more than “just being.”

Leavis’s example from T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland” helped me get the full sense of what he was trying to say. He makes the comparison between the natural budding of lilacs out of barren land to the sterility and disgust associated with sex. Since I do not know at what time T.S. Elliot wrote the poem, I cannot say certainly what epoch of human experience Elliot was referring to (perhaps the Dustbowl and depression of the 1930s), but whatever it was, Leavis made the metaphor between plants and human beings clear.

Leavis seemed not to care so much about form as he did about the content (consciousness) of a poem. Apparently, and I could be mistaken, Leavis is simply looking for a poem to “move” him in some way, to get at the heart on his argument about consciousness.

Something that stood out to me in the reading was the issue of rhythm in Cook (6-9). I must say that I enjoyed the very differing opinions of Pound and Mayakovsky. Pound likened strict meter to a “sequence of a metronome” (a constant ticking device that musicians use to keep time). Pound’s argument carries weight (pun intended) with me, because I also believe that poetry should not be solely confined to certain rhythmic patterns, like iambic pentameter, although, far be it from me to say that a poem with a strict meter is being “forced” or is“substandard,” as Pound implied of the nineteenth century poets.
Mayakovsky sounded like a fellow I’d like to meet. His use of the term “other people’s measurements” made me smile deep down inside because I like a good, headstrong rebel, but as the same time, any poet following Mayakovsky’s preferences would be inventing and reinventing meter. Basically, Mayakovsky thought that each poem should have its own meter and not conform to any other kind rhythmic pattern. However, I’m not familiar with Mayakovsky outside of Cook’s text, so I am probably making a dangerous assumption when I feel to say that he did value rhythm, just not the common forms that everybody uses.