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
Goodman on Metaphor
‘Where there is metaphor, there is complex’
Ricouer on metaphor
‘A bringing together of terms that first surprises’ ‘& bewilders’ which then enables the reader to ‘finally uncover a relationship’ and solve ‘the paradox’
Jack Gilbert (American poet) in The forgotten dialect of the heart
‘How astonishing it is that language can almost mean /
And frightening that it does not quite. Love we say /
God we say’
Samuel Johnson on what is poetry
‘Why, sir, it is much easier to say what it is not.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history’
Poe on The Philosophy of Composition
Argues length, unity of effect, and a logical method are universal rules. Contrasts with spontaneous creation explanation of Coleridge.
Dickinson on poetry - in a letter to to Thomas Wentworth Higginson
‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me then I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know it is poetry’
RD LAING SELF AND OTHERS 1917
‘All identities require an other - some other in and through and in a relationship with whom self-identity is actualised’
Robert frost stay
‘Poetry as a momentary stay against confusion’
