Poetry & extra Flashcards
Ovid
Mission is ‘docere delectando’ (to teach by delighting)
Horace
A poem is ‘a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight.’
Sidney ‘apology for literature’ 1580
Separates literature from other writing bc literature has at its primarily aim the giving of pleasure to the reader, any moral or didactic element is necessarily subordinate
Language doesn’t ‘reveal’ reality, it…
Shapes and creates it, so that the whole of our universe is textual. Further, meaning is jointly constructed by reader and writer. Not just there, it requires the reader’s contribution go bring it into being.
Key ideas about theory:
- Politics is pervasive
- Language is constitutive
- Truth is provisional
- Meaning is contingent
- Human nature is a myth
Thomas Mann on Time
In the Magic Mountain: ‘time has no divisions to mark its passage. There is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year’
Pope (18th c) On sound
‘The sound must seem an echo to the sense’
Pound Canto 81
‘To break the pentameter: that was the first heave’
Derek Walcott
‘Unexplored, unuttered theatre’
Phillip Sidney
‘Look in thy heart and write’
Paul Muldoon
‘History’s a twisted root
Arts it’s small, translucent fruit’
Marvell in To His Coy Mistress
‘Had we but world enough and time’ (compared to prufrock - there will be time)
Prufrock lonely men
‘The smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows’
Pretty How Town (Cummings)
Celebrates two lovers living beyond everyone’s and no ones - immortalised bc they are both sexual and spiritual; not the Neoplatonic lover who climbs up ladder leaving earthly body behind & ‘sow their isn’t’ and ‘reap their same’ and ‘slept their dream’
Rhythm only exists in and across time
The present moment paradoxically includes the immediate past and future
