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I really got into the Adorno more than the other two readings for the week. Admittedly this may be less because it was intreging and more because I worked with the term "lyric" for this week and so ended up doing a lot of research on the subject. But more on that in class.

I really enjoyed Adorno's idea of the lyric poem and it's relation to society. I like the idea of the poem transcending meanings to represent that which is missing in a society. I especially liked how Adrono reminds the reader that the content of social protest must come from within the text and not from the author's personal ideals. I really didn't expect to connect with adorno in this way as my previous exposure to him was only that he said in response to the poem "Death Fugue" that "it was barbaric to write poetry after auschwitz." I was surprised that he would feel this way as he states that "lyric poetry is always the subjective work of social antagonism" and the usefulness of this type of poetry to represnt a discord between it and the occurances of society.

I have to say this week's readings were not my favorites of the sememster. Kristeva was a little over my head. I found the article intersting, but I read it several times and I'm not quite sure I grasped the concept.

While I found DuPlessis to be quite interesting, I'd have to say that I preferred the readings found in PIT, especially the Langston Hughes essay. While I have read some of his fiction and poetry I hadn't read any of his theory. From what I've read of him though he certainly remains consistent with his desire to accurately portray his culture, the black culture, through his works. His push for the evolution of the literary forms to more accurately portray his sub-culture within American Society intrigues me. I suppose I could still just have Eliot still resounding in my head, but while I do see the value of accurately depicting a culture through it's literature I'm not sure that a complete break from the literary cannon is always necessary. Acknowledging the works that came before by using their forms and language allows for a gradual evolution of a society. What Hughes proposes is a break from what came before in favor of something entirely new. In this way I can see why Hughes desires this new representation of black culture and their position within American society.

Reading the McGann intro really affirmed my interest in the effects of the physical appearance of poetry on the meaning of poetry. I would have to agree with McGann that the format does effect what is signified by the language of any work. I also agree that editing errors or revisions regarding spacing and line content certainly affect the message of the work. Actually this question came up for me when working on the poem for this week, but that's something Betsy and I will discuss in class tonight. I believe that the physical appearance of words, in such extreme cases as Blake's illuminated works or the stylistic choices made in editing Dickinson's poetry, have an effect on the signified due to our standard expectations for language written in a specific form. The words obviously don't change but because of the influence of societal conventions we expect or allow language to do specific things in specific formats.

Sorry guys I'm having some trouble getting this to formatt the way I want it to on the wiki. I wanted everyone to have access to the poem that Betsy and I will be working with for next class though, and it seems that more people view the blogs prior to class anyway, than do the wiki.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornass al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo

Let us go the, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering Retrated
Of resless nights in one-ight cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyeter-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-
panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-
panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot the falls from chimneys,

Slpped by the terrace, and made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a sof October night,
Curled at once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a fact to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and creat,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which ina munute will reverse.

For I have know them all alreday, know them all -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voiced dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a father room.
So how should I presume?

And I have know the arms alreday, know them all -
Arms braceleted and white and bare
(but in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shwl
And should i then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusck through narrow
streets
And watched the smoke that rised from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of win-
dows? . . .

I should have beena pair of ragged clows
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the eveingin, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothe by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
aStreatcehd on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slighly bald)
brough in upon a platter,
I am no prophet -and here's no great matter;
I have seen themoent of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,
and snicker.,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, ater all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porelain, among some tlak of you and
me,
WOuld it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
TO have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming questions,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all' _
If one, settling a pilllow by her head,
Should say,: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,
WQould it have been worthwhiel,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled
streets.
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that
trail along the floor -
And this, and so much more?-
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns
on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or thrwing off a shwl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.'

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, starte a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
FUll of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At time, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall ware the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the
beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves.
Coming the white hair of th ewaves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreated with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I found the Burstein reading to be the most intriguing of the three due for tonight. At first it was difficult for me to grasp the concept of how antiabsorbative techniques can be used toward reader absorption. However, his explanation of how elements like footnotes in The Ancient Mariner allow the reader to understand the context and thus more fully absorb the poetry understood his argument. However, on page 44 Bernstein’s argument against Lanz and Forrest-Thomson that sound is not separate from meaning I do not necessarily agree with. As with most "always" statements regarding poetry I believe there are examples that discredit this statement. For example any of the sound poetry we've discussed would seem to support Lanz's argument that the "poetry is called upon to save the physical element of words and bring it to our attention in the name of art."

Secondly, I love the format of this article. I think Burstein accurately portrays some of the antiabsorbative techniques that he is describing by using them in the writing. I truly appreciated this style as the explanations of the techniques were a bit abstract. I found in interesting that I was so enthralled with this technique in the article while I found the first reading of the semester, Hollander's Rhyme's Reason so difficult. I think it is perhaps because in this case the technique really helped me gain a better understanding of the reading.

Lastly I’d like to say that I liked the Baraka reading, but I found his argument regarding the natural/unnatural a bit confusing. I understand that he values the artistic process over the artifact created however, when he states that “bad art” is strictly artificial “i.e. it seems as if it could not exist without being made by a man.” This statement really threw me off of his line of argument.

While I don't know if I necessarily disagree that modern poetry is based or evolved from romantic poetry. I found Jarrell's argument to be less than persuasive. It seemed incomplete to me. While the characteristics of the two types of poetry were clearly outlined, that is where the argument stopped. I think a more in-depth comparison is necessary in order to successful link the two styles.

I found Perloff to be a very interesting read. Since she quotes Esthope it's less than surprising that this article is closely related to the reading from "Poetry as Discourse." I agree with her argument for the evolution of free verse. She closely connects it with the societal factors which, I think is a much more accurate summary of events rather than last week's reading's assumptions about the start of and the purpose of free verse.

While I agreed with most of Perloff's agreements regarding the structure found within free verse. However, I'm not sure if the mode of writing directly affects the style as she asserts in her discussion of Williams. I don't know if his use of a type writer affected the poetry in the manner she said. I do agree that he is a poet of an age of turbulent technological advancements and that this is certainly reflected in his poetry. However, I don't like the direct connection between the use of the type writer and the meter of his poetry.

I also agree that free verse is a misnomer as no good poetry is truly free of form and structure. However, I think the distinction between other forms of poetry is that the form is left up to the poet who is influenced by society. Free verse while not being truly free does allow for a variety of representations of poetry, which allows for a more accurate representation of not just society's influence as a whole, but the influence of particular sects of society has on the poet.

At first the Forrest – Thomson article really confused me. I wasn't sure where she was going with her argument. But then I think I got a feel for it. I do agree with her that writing prose in poetry format does create a new work and definitely influences the meaning of what we're reading. I read a poem recently by a holocaust writer who had taken a journal account of the Holocaust and put it almost verbatim (one sentence was removed) and put it in poetry form. The effect of the words was changed. It was for several reasons that Forrest-Thomson points out. We as a culture expect the genre of poetry to convey universals. The symbolic meaning of a word becomes important. Line breaks influence importance. On all these points I thoroughly agree with F-T. I did question her assumption that free verse “was developed in the first place: to make us aware of the poetry in our prose, of the imaginative alternatives that exist even in ordinary language. I agree that free verse accomplishes these things most of the time, however, I don’t know if I agree that that is why it evolved. With our reading from last week, and the amount of influence society had on the popularity of iambic pentameter, my guess is that this is an over simplification on the part of this critic.

Also I found it interesting to compare the views of F-T and McLaughlin. While they had similar views on many of their points their opinions on where poetic/figurative language is used seemed to diverge. I agree that language is more figurative in poetry, however, I don't know if the distinction that F-T made that made the difference between the language of poetry and the language of the everyday is as cut and dry as it would appear. The e reading for tonight would seem to disagree. I think it's interesting that he found poetry in advertising, or not necessarily poetry but a similar use of language.

I liked McLaughlin’s article as it was nice to have a review of the basics in the reading (personification, metaphor, simile etc.) This article really would be really helpful in learning how to do a close reading of a poem. His argument regarding "The Lamb" was very comprehensive and would be a great model for how to analyze a work.

I thought that the idea that the meter of words discerned whether a work was considered poetry was interesting. Also that the type of meter used in the work would classify it as good (poetry of the cannon) or bad/common (vulgar, or poetry of the lower classes) also struck me as something that holds true. I think that in contemporary society that the poetry of the masses can be found most often in the form of song. Often written in 4/4 time with 4 stresses in a meter or line. While the poetry of the cannon is composed of more complex meters, often as the text points out, iambic pentameter. In thinking about it this way I agree with the text that meter, even if not the most effective way to holistically describe poetry is certainly used to judge it and is most definitely a social construct.

I also had never thought of iambic pentameter having variation within the meter of the line. I had always thought of it as a concrete construct allowing little room for deviation. However, the examples found in the reading made me understand that the overall effect, far more than just the stressed syllables, created the effect of iambic pentameter even if all the lines didn't follow the pattern if read individually.

I found this week's Brooks reading to be especially insightful at points. I feel that in these chapters he lays a good ground work for evaluating and thinking about poetry. I agree with Brooks that a poem cannot be summarized. I think his analogy of the scaffolding that a critic or student places around a poem when analyzing it is an accurate one. It is important to remember when doing a close reading of a poem that while particular word, sound or structure choices the poet made when writing the work can certainly add to the value of the poem the value of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think this is what brook is saying regarding taking into account the biography of the poet or the allusions made in the work is important, but that one must also remember that the poem itself cannot be boiled down to any particular meaning separate from itself. In other words, summarizing a poem, even if the reader gets the meaning correct, if a correct answer is even possible, will never communicate the message of the poem in the same manner as the poem because of the lack of meter, rhyme or whatever other modes of language the poem contains.
I think that understanding poetry in this manner requires a change in the way that the average beginning poetry reader thinks about poetry. I think that as a future teacher of poetry that the analogies found in the Brook text will be especially helpful to me in a class room setting. Brooks’s comparison of poetry with the genre of drama at first caught me off guard. However the explanation that Brooks provided seemed especially insightful to me "The dynamic nature of drama, in short, allows us to regard it as an action rather than as a formula for action or as a statement about action...the least confusing way in which to approach a poem is to think of it as a drama" (204). This way of thinking about a poem really connected with the idea of paradox from the Brooks chapters we read for last week. Thinking about the poem in this way encourages finding the word play, paradox, irony, rhyme scheme and all the other elements of the poem and understanding how they all work together to create a whole. Also it seems to minimize the tendency of many readers to consider outside influences like biography and authorial intent since meaning can only be found within the poem itself rather than outside sources.
It is this responsibility of the poem to communicate that I found most interesting in the Leavis reading. Leavis states that "poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is more alive than other people, more alive in his own age. He is, as it were, at the most conscious point of the race in his time" (195). I agree with Leavis that the purpose of poetry should be to communicate the essence of reality. If this is true then outside influences like biography, historical placement and even authorial intent, which all still ma be taken into consideration, take a back seat to the message of the poem itself, and the mode the poet chose to convey that message.

I for the most part really enjoyed the reading for class tonight. I had read the essays before, but The Well Wrought Urn was new text for me. I loved Brook's explaination of how to read and understand poetry. The terms imaginative understanding and referring to the poem as organic especially struck me. I was familar with the term "close reading" but the previous two were new terms to me. I think the term imaginitive understanding is an excellent description for the way we think about poetry. Due to the language of paradox, which Brook discusses heavily, it is necessary to employ imagination when attempting to understand poetry.
I also really enjoyed reading the combination of Brooks and Eliot for the same class. It seemed like Eliot was looking backwards at understanding the history of poetry while Brooks was uring the reader to look forward, while still embracing the past. I think that Eliot places a little too much responsiblity on the poet. I agree that knowledge of past poetry and all literature and history that has come before is important, but not always essential in creating "good poetry."
Brooks really gave me a renewed appriciation of Wordsworth. I like that on page 140 when critcizing Wordsworth's VII stanza as weak that he does take into account authorial intent. However, along this same line of thinking I think he takes authorial intention a bit too far on page 71 when he states, regaurding Herrick "Herrick the Anglican parson who lived so much of his life in Devonshire and apparently took so much interste, not only in the pagan literature of Rome and Greece, but in the native English survivals of the old fertility cults." I like Brook's reading of Herick's work, but unless he knows for certain that Herick studied pagan practices, which he does not indicate, I don't think that it has a place in the reading of the poem. I do agree that poetry is organic and that the inturpretation of it is constantly evolving, but I don't think that the reader has a right to assume that a writer has or has not studied a specific subject unless a known fact.

I feel badly saying this since everyone seemed to have enjoyed it so much but the Hollander reading didn't click for me. I know that I need a review in the classic forms of poetry. However, the way Hollander wrote in the form he was attempting to define really confused me. I became more accustomed to the style as I read it, but I would have preferred examples to be separate from the definitions. The work did have some positive elements form me. I felt that the evolution of the poetry genre was well covered. The issue that this reading brought up for me is the question of the effect that form has on poetry. Does writing a poet in ballad or free-verse change the message of the poetry in some way? Obviously, there are forms that require a specific subject type, i.e. limerick, but I'm interested to know the class's feedback on the issue of the effect of form on the message of the poem.

As I read the poetry assigned for tonight form and technique was an issue that came up for me again. At first glance R. Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay” seems like a simple poem, maybe because of the length and the rhyme scheme. However, the theme of the cycle of life and the fragility of beauty are anything but trivial. I have a tendency to associate poetry with a less complex structure with less serious topics. I'm wondering if this is true for others in the class.