tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72044829019061559652024-02-20T12:13:46.909-08:00Angles on PoetryTakingTheAngleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11656581881063459181noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7204482901906155965.post-22303437580871976592013-08-31T08:56:00.049-07:002020-08-21T04:53:12.933-07:00OSCAR WILDE'S POEMS IN CONTEXT<div style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">[Caveat for readers: this post is longer than previous ones]</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i> . . . that fiery heart, that morning star</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i> Of re-arisen England, whose clear eye</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Saw from our tottering throne and waste of war</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>The grand Greek limbs of young Democracy </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Rise mightily like Hesperus and
bring</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>The great Republic! him at least
thy love hath taught to sing,</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>And he hath been with thee at
Thessaly</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i> And seen white Atalanta fleet of foot</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>In passionless and fierce
virginity</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i> Hunting the tuskèd boar, his honied lute</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Hath pierced the cavern of the
hollow hill,</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>And Venus laughs to know one
knee will bow before her still.</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>And he hath kissed the lips of
Proserpine,</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i> And sung the Galilaean’s requiem,</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>The wounded forehead dashed with
blood and wine</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i> He hath discrowned, the Ancient Gods in him</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Have found their last, most
ardent worshipper,</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>And the new Sign grows grey and
dim before its conqueror.</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Spirit of Beauty! tarry with us
still. . . </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>[from Wilde's poem ‘The Garden of Eros’: explanation
below]</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Apart
from the famous <i>Ballad of Reading Gaol</i>, Oscar Wilde’s poems are probably still among the least
read of all his writings. There is nothing too surprising about this: even the
editors of the modern scholarly edition of the poems don’t claim that they
represent his best work. But for anyone interested in Wilde generally, the
poems are well worth getting to know, or at least getting to know <i>about</i>,
since they provide many clues to his complicated personality and the
development of his thought. Also, with Wilde now much more famous than many of
his literary contemporaries, the poems offer something of a gateway into the
lush, ornate world of late Victorian poetry. (For many people I suspect this is
a bit of a poetical ‘dark age’, lying between the better-known Romantic poets
and ‘modern' poetry.)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Wilde’s
poems are nearly all early works, most appearing in his first published book, <i>Poems</i> (1881). Thereafter, following a period as a literary journalist, Wilde
switched his main efforts to the stories, plays, and essays that made him
famous. After 1881 he published only a handful of poems, culminating in <i>The Ballad of Reading Gaol</i> written after his imprisonment. <br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Wilde’s
1881 <i>Poems</i> had a
generally unenthusiastic reception when published. ‘Thin’, ‘mediocre’ and
‘derivative’ were among the terms applied to the volume. I suspect that the modern
reader’s initial reaction is more likely to be simple bafflement. Most of us
today are simply not in a position to spot unaided many of Wilde’s allusions,
or the points where he is imitating or plagiarising other poets of his time.
Certainly this was my experience when as a teenager I acquired the standard
one-volume Collins edition of Wilde’s <i>Complete Works</i>. For me the poems were largely a blank
area, a section I skipped over
while I was looking for his more appealing writings. It was only after Richard
Ellmann’s critical biography of Wilde appeared in 1987, followed by the
scholarly edition of the poems in 2000 (see Endnote), that comprehension of the
poems for modern readers became somewhat easier. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Before
exploring the context and content of the poems further, some biographical
background about Wilde. Born in 1854 in Dublin, with a distinguished eye surgeon for a
father and a prominent literary figure for a mother, Wilde studied classics at
university, first at Trinity College Dublin (1871-4) and then at Oxford
(1874-8), after which he moved to London. He published individual poems in
magazines from 1876 onwards. His 1881 <i>Poems</i> gave him enough reputation to land him a
year-long tour lecturing on poetry and art in the United States. (Ironically,
this was largely organized to publicise the US tour of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera <i>Patience</i>, which satirised ‘aesthetic’ poets.) <i>Poems</i> (1881) was Wilde's first published book.
Further lecturing, journalism and story-writing followed, culminating in his
greatest period of fame from 1890-95, which encompassed the publication of his critical essays and his novel <i>The Picture
of Dorian Gray</i>, and </b></span><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><b>the production of the famous plays. </b></span> Sentenced
in May 1895 to two years’ hard labour for homosexual offences, Wilde lived
abroad after his release. <i>The Ballad of Reading Gaol </i>was his only completed post-imprisonment
work. He died in 1900 in Paris.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>THE KEATS STRAND<br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Although the world of nineteenth-century
English poetry is vast, I think it can be useful to regard Wilde as belonging
to a distinct and major tendency that one might call the 'Keats strand'
- by which I mean a way of writing poetry, inspired by John
Keats, that lays emphasis on ideal beauty and on elaborateness of poetic
expression.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Keats (1795-1821)
was undoubtedly the greatest poet of the nineteenth century so far as Oscar
Wilde was concerned. In contrast to most other writers he discusses, Wilde never criticizes Keats: his remarks, whether in prose or poetry, are always
complimentary, often adulatory. Indeed, Wilde makes Keats the starting point
for the movement he labelled ‘The
English Renaissance of Art’ in the lecture of that name he gave across America
in 1882, the year after his <i>Poems</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> were
published.</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Since
the ‘Keats strand’ encapsulates a very different attitude to poetry from the
way we’re used to today, I think it’s worth examining in detail.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>The
English Romantic poets, and their Victorian successors, were arguably trying to go
forwards by going backwards, seeking inspiration in earlier forms of English
and European poetry. They generally saw themselves as in revolt against
‘artificial’ and ‘unpoetic’ modes of eighteenth-century poetry. Keats made a
point of returning to the ornate style of the Elizabethans, to Shakespeare and
especially Edmund Spenser (hence Byron’s jibe about Keats belonging to ‘the
second-hand school of poetry’). This reaching backwards is also a feature of later
poetry of the nineteenth century.</b></span></div>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Keats's </b></span><span style="font-size: small;"><b>early death at 25 (‘the youngest of the martyrs’ Wilde calls him in a
poem) probably added to his myth in later Victorian times. Personally I have reservations about the poetry Keats
actually completed, though I enjoy his personality as expressed in his much-admired letters. I suspect he would have become a greater and somewhat different poet
if he had lived longer. <br /></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Keats was mauled in reviews during his lifetime,
and these maulings have usually
been held against those reviewers, but it must be remembered that the worst
reviews were of his long sprawling romance <i>Endymion</i> (famous first line: ‘A thing of beauty
is a joy for ever’), which even the poet admitted was an immature work. Keats
had a robust character, with many loving friends, and he clearly desperately
wanted to live, to write more poetry and to marry his sweetheart Fanny Brawne.
I have no doubt he died of the tuberculosis that had already killed his
brother, and not of career disappointment or anything else. But as regards the subjects of his works, many, apart
from his purely narrative poems, are in effect ‘poems about writing poems’, and
there’s perhaps a limit to how much one wishes to read about that. Also,
despite the titles of some of the poems, I don’t regard Keats as a nature poet
like Wordsworth or John Clare (if one defines ‘nature’ as ‘the real non-urban
outdoors’): the worlds he describes are too idealised for that. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>An
important if curious belief that Keats held is that one should conceal
rather than express one’s own personality in poetry. This viewpoint may have had a deleterious effect on some of his Victorian successors.
Such an attitude is all very well for epic or dramatic poets such as Homer and
Shakespeare, but when it comes to short lyric poems, our attitude today is
surely almost the opposite - we <i>welcome</i> honest personal expressions of thought and feeling on the
part of a poet. (The 'Ode to a Nightingale' admittedly reads as quite personal, and Keats breaks his own precepts completely in his
late poems of love and jealousy addressed to Fanny Brawne -- although
he might never have wanted these latter published.) There are indications in Keats’s
later letters that he was thinking of turning more to the ‘real world’ rather
than continuing in the ‘never-never lands’ of romance. But he did not live to
do this, and it was the ‘romantic’ Keats, with his professed devotion to the
‘principle of beauty’, which made him a hero for poets later in the century
who advocated ‘art for art’s sake’. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>FROM KEATS TO WILDE <br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>After a few years of posthumous neglect,
Keats’s poems were taken up enthusiastically by the young Tennyson and his
undergraduate friends around 1830. (Tennyson thought Keats the greatest
poet of the century, and was much influenced by him, although Tennyson’s
melancholy gives his own poetry a rather different flavour.) The big
breakthrough came in 1848, when a member of Tennyson’s circle,
Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton) published <i>Life, Letters and
Literary Remains of John Keats</i>.
Independently, at the same time, the young D. G. Rossetti discovered Keats’s
poetry, and his pre-Raphaelites associates (including William Morris and A. C.
Swinburne) became enthusiasts for Keats. As painters they used scenes from
Keats’s narratives as subjects, while as poets they emulated Keats’s reaching
into the past and his creation of exotic worlds. The worlds of the sagas and of
medieval French and Italian poets were explored, and Swinburne in
particular employed verse forms and vocabulary that had not been used for
centuries. Sometimes the meaning of the poems became secondary to their
‘beautiful’ form. And despite Wordsworth having denounced artificial ‘poetic
diction’ at the beginning of the century, archaic vocabulary such as ‘thine’,
‘hath’, ‘methinks’, and so on flourished during the period. Victorian poetry, arguably, thus navigated itself into a giant
escapist cul-de-sac, separate from the real world –– from which a revolution,
partly influenced by French poetry, was required at the end of the
nineteenth century to break free. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Wilde's enthusiasm for the poets of the ‘Keats strand’ shines
through his early poetry and other writings. His long poem ‘The Garden of
Eros’, published in the 1881 <i>Poems</i>,
anticipates the critical line he took in his American lectures, celebrating Keats and the pre-Raphaelite poets who succeeded him. The stanzas
quoted at the beginning of this post, for example, all celebrate Swinburne, and
allude to several of Swinburne's poetical works including 'Atalanta in Calydon' and 'Laus Veneris'. (Wilde does not name Swinburne: the
reader is supposed to be able to recognize him by description.) D. G. Rossetti
and William Morris (as poet) are praised by Wilde in succeeding passages in the
same poem.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Sadly
there is one obvious name Wilde misses out, both in 'The Garden of Eros' and his
American lectures. That is Christina Rossetti, who was a much more prolific and
surely also a better poet than her brother Dante Gabriel. Indeed, in my opinion
Christina Rossetti put the ‘beautiful’ pre-Raphaelite poetic style to its best
use, marrying it with intense expressions of love, sadness, and Christian hopes
and fears. Since Wilde later called some of her poems ‘exquisite in their
beauty’, her absence unfortunately probably shows Wilde conforming to the
sexist assumption of his age that, in a general survey of poetry, somehow only
male poets ‘counted’. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><b>ASPECTS OF WILDE'S POEMS</b></span> <br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />
There was a practical side to Wilde’s publication of his <i>Poems</i> in 1881. When Wilde graduated in 1878,
he was ambitious (and his mother was ambitious for him) but what he was
actually going to <i>do </i>was
unclear. Classics scholar, archaeologist, school inspector and even Member of
Parliament were all career options he considered at this time. So was a
literary career, although monetarily that was far more uncertain. The editors
of the modern scholarly edition of Wilde’s poems argue that, although poetry was
much less commercially profitable in 1880 than at the beginning of the century,
it retained its place as the most prestigious literary form, and so it was
still worth ‘launching' oneself with a book of poems. Wilde had already
published many shorter poems in magazines, and it was towards 1880 that he apparently
began to write longer ones to provide the bulk to fill out a whole volume.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>As
mentioned above, my main interest in Wilde’s poetry is in what it tells us about the
man himself and about the poetic times he lived in. Technically it is polished, but it's not difficult to deride aspects of it as padded or
insincere. A friend of Wilde’s reported seeing him at his desk
with a botany book looking for flower names to pad out one of his poems: this story accords well with ‘The Garden of Eros’, which begins with twelve
fairly unnecessary stanzas about woodland flowers before it gets to its main
point. Many of Wilde's poems have pretentious French or Greek titles when they could perfectly well
have English ones, while some of the opinions expressed in the poems may have
been to please eminent readers. (Wilde sent inscribed copies of his <i>Poems</i> to Robert Browning, Swinburne, and
Matthew Arnold, amongst others.)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Nonetheless, it's clear that Wilde put a lot of effort into
presenting his volume as a neat and coherent whole. The shorter poems are gathered
into groups by subject and placed between five longer poems including ‘The
Garden of Eros’. There are poems about theatrical performances, political poems
praising liberty and democracy, travel poems, imitation medieval ballads, and
poems expressing vacillation and indecision. A few impressionistic descriptive
poems, perhaps French-influenced, strike a more modern flavour. A risqué
element of the Swinburne variety is introduced in the long poem ‘Charmides’,
about a young man who makes love to a goddess’s statue, is killed for it, and
is himself made love to when dead by a nymph. (Surprisingly, it manages a happy ending.)
One group of poems is reputed to record Wilde’s unhappy love for ‘professional
beauty’ Lily Langtry (Wilde's inclinations seem to have been bisexual in 1881,
his first gay sexual experience not taking place till several years later.) </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>There
are two major omissions from Wilde’s poetry that I don’t recall having seen
remarked upon, although they are really rather glaring. The first is the
absence of anything Irish. Wilde spent many childhood summers in beautiful
parts of Ireland, which would surely have furnished material for poetic
descriptions and narratives if he had felt so inclined. Instead the poems are
full of expressions such as ‘Our English land’, which offended at least one of
his Irish editors (Wilde’s early poems were mostly published in Irish
magazines). It’s all too clear that Wilde, on the make in the English
metropolis, saw his Irish background as a disadvantage and deliberately
suppressed it, just as he had deliberately lost his Irish accent at Oxford.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>The
other omission is humour. Wilde is one of the wittiest men in history by
reputation, and yet as far as I can see there is not a single glimmer of humour
in his entire poetic output. No comic verse, no parodies (even in manuscript
form), not even an ironic line to raise a smile. Wilde could be humorous in
prose about other poets, but the writing of poetry itself he seems to have
regarded as a solemn, even a po-faced activity. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>One theme present, though half-hidden, in Wilde’s poetry is made much of in
Richard Ellmann’s biography: Roman Catholicism. One of the
strangest aspects of Wilde’s 1881 volume is that it contains poems both
strongly defending and strongly attacking the Pope and the Catholic Church. One
could write a whole post just on this aspect, but in essence Ellmann traces the origins of these poems
to a period of anguished soul-searching in the late 1870s when Wilde felt
spiritually rootless and wondered whether he should convert to Catholicism. In
the end he did not, and Ellmann’s conclusion (which I find convincing) was that he instead decided to live
with his inner contradictions and make a virtue of them. Hence the subsequent
difficulty in working out what Wilde ‘really thought' about anything –– and hence, perhaps, his success as a playwright.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>There
is one belief that Wilde, following Keats, seems to have maintained consistently
throughout his life, and that was the paramount importance of beauty; in
particular, that the object of art was to create beautiful things, and not
anything else. <i>The Ballad of Reading Gaol </i>seems to go against this, having in part a reformist
agenda, but Wilde, though he
obviously thought the poem was worth writing, later expressed uneasiness about
it: ‘a denial of my own philosophy of art in many ways’, he wrote in a letter.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>The
circumstances in which we use the word <i>beauty</i> have changed since Wilde’s
time. Today it would be difficult to imagine someone being praised as being our best
poet because the poems they wrote were more <i>beautiful</i> than anyone else’s. It is, perhaps, the
high importance attached to the concept of beauty that most separates late
Victorian poetry from that of today.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>NOTE:
Texts of older editions of Wilde’s <i>Poems</i> are visible in full online at Hathi Trust, the archiving
website. The modern scholarly edition of all Wilde’s poems, <i>Poems and Poems
in Prose </i>(ed. B. Fong
and K. Beckman, OUP, 2000), prints the poems in order of composition as far as
this is known. The text of Wilde’s American Lecture ‘The English Renaissance of
Art’ can be found by online searching.
The standard critical biography of Wilde remains Richard Ellmann’s
(1987). <i>Keats and the Victorians</i>
by G. H. Ford, originally published 1945, gives much detail about Keats’s
posthumous reputation. There is also a paperback edition of Wilde’s poems
published by Wordsworth Editions.</b></span></div>
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TakingTheAngleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11656581881063459181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7204482901906155965.post-44499845444892327902013-07-31T05:24:00.001-07:002013-08-31T08:51:39.458-07:00AN APPROACH TO AUDEN<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></b></i>
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">A child may ask when our strange epoch passes</span></span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">During a history lesson, 'Please, sir, what's</span></span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">An intellectual of the middle classes?</span></span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Is he a maker of ceramic pots,</span></span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Or does he choose his king by drawing lots?'</span></span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">What follows now may set him on the rail,</span></span></b></i><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i>A plain, perhaps a cautionary, tale.</i></span></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I’ve been interested in W. H. Auden’s works
since I was a teenager, but my opinion of their worth has fluctuated considerably over that time. Sometimes I’ve thought that, if the 20th century were to be represented by just one writer, it should be him. At other times
I’ve taken the more pessimistic view that his output was mainly a
clever intellectual game, not particularly moving for the most part, and of little ultimate value to people at large. At yet other times I’ve felt
that his real genius was for vivid phrases and one-liners, so that one way to
make his works live would be to convert them into a multi-volume quotations
book arranged under categorized subject headings. (Auden was interested in
practically every subject going, from science to arts to philosophy to
theology.)</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The obstacles to developing a balanced view of Auden are considerable. He was a
prolific writer all his life, not only of individual poems but also of
large-scale dramatic and semi-dramatic works, not to mention prose
criticism. His tone of voice can
vary from comic to preachy to lyrical to totally obscure, sometimes within the same poem. Where does one start?
In practice, are most people just going to know him by a handful of individual
poems that happen to become well known, such as ‘Stop all the clocks’ (not
actually one of his more interesting poems in my opinion, although brilliantly
deployed in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Four Wedding and a Funeral</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">)?</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">A relatively straightforward route into Auden that I've come to favour recently is via his long comic poem ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, from which the stanza
above is quoted. Written in 1936 when Auden was in Iceland for the summer, it’s one of the most accessible of his works. It is a long poem, 159 stanzas in its shorter final version, written
in the style of Byron’s sprawling satiric masterpiece </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Don Juan</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">. (See the Endnote to
this post for further details.)</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is not given a great deal
of critical attention in the works on Auden I’ve perused, perhaps because it’s
thought too straightforward and obvious compared with his more ‘obscure’ or
‘serious’ works. (It does contain a number of topical allusions to people and
places of the 1930s, but in this day of the Internet these can easily be
tracked down.)</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">One way in which 'Letter to Lord Byron' is highly typical of
Auden generally is in its imitation of the style of another writer. As
Katherine Bucknell’s 1994 edition of Auden’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Juvenilia</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> demonstrates, Auden became a poet – from an almost instantaneous start at age 15 –
by imitating the styles of other writers, starting with Wordsworth and Thomas
Hardy and progressing to a whole host of others. He ultimately achieved an
astonishing technical fluency in practically every verse form in the English
language. Although one would never mistake an Auden poem for a poem by one of
his models (he says things in a way that the original would never say) it does
explain why it seems impossible to write a general parody of Auden’s style –
all one can do is pick one of his many styles and parody that. </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is not an exact technical
imitation of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Don Juan</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">: Auden uses the seven-line 'rhyme royal' stanza, whereas
Byron uses ottava rima which has one more line. But both stanzas lend
themselves to comic observation rounded off by a punchy couplet (such as
Byron’s famous ‘But - oh ye lords of ladies intellectual!/ Inform us truly,
have they not henpecked you all?’).</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The four sections of Auden’s poem are: an
introduction explaining why he’s chosen to write it; a topical update for Byron’s benefit about 1930s Britain, complete with Surrealist Exhibitions,
chromium-plated furniture, Sir Oswald Mosley and much else; a section on the
arts, especially Auden’s reservations about the Romantic movement; and finally
a mainly autobiographical section, including the stanza quoted above.</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">There’s one attractive way in which ‘Letter to
Lord Byron’ is </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">not</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">
typical of Auden’s poetry. Auden often writes in a preachy, impersonal manner
(‘the preacher’s loose immodest tone’, as he called it), but in this poem
he adopts an engaging, self-deprecating persona which he rarely uses elsewhere
except in the lesser-known poems of his last years. Of course preachers can
have interesting things to say, but one trouble with Auden’s preaching is that
he was always changing his views, sometimes even by the time a particular
‘preachy’ poem was published.</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Which takes us on to the subject matters of Auden’s
poetry, and their relative importance to him. Psychology and psychoanalysis
were major areas of interest permeating his early verse, not only Freudian but
the views of a whole range of lesser figures. By 1936, when he was 29, he’d already passed through his
most intense period of interest in such subjects, and was able to joke about it
in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ as a largely a phase in which a friend had ‘fed/ New
doctrines into my receptive head’. </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Auden was also thought of as a political writer
in the 1930s, but while the era virtually forced writers to take some interest
in politics, and while Auden’s technical flair allowed him to write memorable
political poems, he was not in my opinion really a political animal, being much
more interested in the ‘human condition’ in the abstract. In particular,
despite hints that he was drifting towards communism in the earlier 1930s, he
makes fun of this in the original version of ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, by
claiming that his left-wing friends predicted he would remain ‘a selfish pink
old Liberal to the last’.</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It would be wrong to claim that ‘Letter to Lord
Byron’ covers all of Auden’s preoccupations. Not much is said about personal
love, for example, while the poem was written before his later return to the
High Anglican religion of his childhood. </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Nonetheless, the poem does cover what I’ve come
to regard as perhaps the centre of Auden’s being, his intense emotional bond to
certain places and landscapes. This seems to have come before all his other
interests – before sex, psychology, poetry and history, for example. He
constantly reuses favourite landscapes throughout his writing career, sometimes
disguised or employed as
psychological allegories, but always with a real personal feeling for them. </span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">As a child, and perhaps afterwards too, Auden
seems to have been some way along the Asperger’s spectrum; he later wrote that
in childhood ‘people seemed rather profane’, in comparison with places and
things. Unlike Wordsworth’s landscapes, Auden’s do not involve untouched
wildernesses, but have to be marked by a human element, preferably industrial,
to give them meaning (although the people themselves are usually absent).
These landscapes include the bleak lead-mining areas of the Durham moors,
visited in childhood holidays, with their flues and chimneys and engine houses,
and also the urban industrial landscape of Birmingham’s black country, near where
Auden grew up, with its tramlines and slagheaps. ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ again:</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></span></b>
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">On economic, health,
or moral grounds</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It hasn’t got the
least excuse to show;</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">No more than chamber
pots or otter hounds:</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But let me say before
it has to go,</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It’s the most lovely
country that I know;</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Clearer than Scafell
Pike, my heart has stamped on</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The view from
Birmingham to Wolverhampton.</span></i></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">In a later poem about love, Auden similarly wrote:</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></span></b>
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Love requires an
Object,</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But this varies so
much,</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Almost, I imagine,</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Anything will do:</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">When I was a child, I</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Loved a
pumping-engine,</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Thought it every bit
as</span></i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Beautiful as you.</span></i></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Among all his massive oeuvre, that is one of
the few passages that can still bring tears to my eyes.</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">NOTE: This post obviously will make more sense
after actually reading ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. In its final revised form, the
poem can be found in Auden’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Collected Poems</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> and also his </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Collected
Longer Poems</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">.
It was originally published as a longer five-section poem in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Letters from
Iceland</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">
(1937), a book written jointly with Louis MacNeice. This original version was
reprinted in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The English Auden</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> (1977). Auden’s revisions to his poems are
often controversial, but in this case it was mainly a question of cutting
weaker stanzas. So I would recommend starting with the more concise revised
version, and then exploring the original version later if desired.</span></span></b></div>
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TakingTheAngleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11656581881063459181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7204482901906155965.post-18151119142392394992013-07-13T04:33:00.003-07:002013-08-11T02:36:04.965-07:00WORDSWORTH & MODERN TRANSPORT<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">As mentioned in my <a href="http://anglesonpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/an-angle-on-wordsworth.html">previous post</a>, I’ve come to
admire Wordsworth for his insights into sightseeing and travelling, where I find him much more down-to-earth than
his popular image of solitary ‘communing with nature’ suggests. In his
later groups of poems particularly - written in connection with individual tours that he
made through Britain and Europe - he packages his reflections into
conveniently short poetic modules, mainly sonnets. This post hopes to be one of several that focus on the different things he has to say in these ‘tour’
poems.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">First, I should be honest about what I
do/don’t get out of reading Wordsworth Three things I appreciate most
about poetry generally (when I can find them) are: its melodious or ‘singing’
quality; its capacity to touch the heart suddenly and unexpectedly; and its frequent wit and
humour. I have to say I rarely find any of these qualities reading Wordsworth! For me,
especially with the later poems, it’s the reflective <i>content</i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> of what he says that
interests me. </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In fact, I’d probably be just as happy to read
Wordsworth’s travel reflections if they were in prose - indeed, he himself
provides many prose reflections in his notes to his own poems. On the other
hand, Wordsworth in his later years
had become highly practised at crafting sonnets, which lend
themselves to concentrated expression of thought. So since he went to the trouble of writing sonnets, I’m more than happy to read them. . .</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Not everyone likes the sonnet as a form,
A.E. Housman for example regarding it as 'more often a substitute than a
vehicle for poetry’. Wordsworth’s sonnets take after those of John Milton, a
leading influence in turning the sonnet from a love-poem into a form used for
general reflection. Wordsworth’s lifelong self-assurance and his lack of humour
can give his sonnets a pompous air - that comes with the territory with
Wordsworth - but once one gets into the habit of reading them
they’re not difficult to understand. Wordsworth is usually saying what he
thinks perfectly straightforwardly, without the puzzles and ambiguities that
one finds in Shakespeare’s sonnets for example. </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">So after that preamble, here’s a first sample of
his ‘travel’ sonnets, one which surprised me when I first read it a couple
of years ago. It comes from a set connected with his tour to the Isle of
Man and Western Scotland in 1833, when he was 63. The sonnet focuses on the ‘motions and means’ that were making this tour possible:</span></b></div>
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<i><b> </b></i></h5>
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<b> <i style="font-weight: normal;">STEAMBOATS, VIADUCTS, AND RAILWAYS</i></b></h5>
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<i></i></h5>
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<i><b></b></i></h5>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Motions and Means, on land and sea at war </span></b></i></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">With old poetic feeling, not for this, </span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!</span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar</span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar </span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense</span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Of future change, that point of vision, whence</span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">May be discovered what in soul ye are.</span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In spite of all that beauty may disown </span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In your harsh feature, Nature doth embrace </span></b></i></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time, </span></b></i></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother
Space, </span></b></i></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Accepts from your bold hands the proffered
crown </span></b></i></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer
sublime.</span></b></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Although Wordsworth didn’t use railways on his
trip (they were only just getting going in 1833), voyages in steamboats
were essential for making it happen, as he recognised. How many of us since
Wordsworth’s time have felt an uneasy conflict between loving the great
outdoors and fearing that the transport we use helps spoil it? This sonnet boldly offers the consoling argument that steamboats and railways can be seen as natural because they’re the offspring of something
natural (Man) - and moreover, they represent the triumph of one aspect of nature over
another.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">If this sonnet were by John Donne, one might
interpret it as elaborating a deliberately bogus argument for the amusement of
readers! However, since it’s by Wordsworth, that seems much less likely, and
one must assume that he did mean it seriously at the time.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">What I find most interesting is that, although
Wordsworth did later oppose the encroachment of railways on his beloved Lake
District, he was by no means in blanket opposition to their growth, or to other forms of modern
transport, even on aesthetic grounds. A prose note that he wrote for the above poem even celebrates a ‘magnificent viaduct’
thrown over the River Eden near the Lake District as part of the
Newcastle to Carlisle Railway.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s therefore wrong to imagine that
Wordsworth was some kind of Luddite anti-technologist. He was too sensible, and
too honest, for that.</span></b></div>
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TakingTheAngleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11656581881063459181noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7204482901906155965.post-34445368010693610942013-07-11T04:21:00.000-07:002013-08-11T02:37:17.725-07:00WORDSWORTH: AN OVERVIEW<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: justify;">
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I’ve often felt
there’s an undercurrent of half-hidden doubts and conflicts associated with
viewing the outdoors: ‘Do I really
think this view is beautiful, or do I just say so because it’s expected of me?’
‘There’s been a change to this landscape
- am I cool about that, or should I be objecting?’ ‘I’ve finally got to
my destination, and actually I’m rather disappointed’; and so on.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In Britain especially, our views have been
significantly influenced by one man, William Wordsworth, whose attitudes as
expressed both in his poetry and prose have seeped into our national way of looking
at the outdoors. In particular, his views were influential on the setting up of
national parks, and also inspired the creation of the National Trust.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Until recently I tended to think that Wordsworth’s
dogmas were part of the problem when it came to the uneasiness we may
feel in relation to the countryside. But reading him more closely in the last
couple of years, I’ve come to realise that he’s much more ‘on our side’ than I
previously imagined. </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">This perhaps all sounds quite abstract so far,
so I should explain that this post is in part intended as a reference point, to
give me something to refer back to from future posts on specific poems.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The reason I thought Wordsworth was ‘part of the
problem’ is that he sometimes writes as though the mere act of seeing a natural
object such as a rainbow or a wild flower automatically brings joy. And
because of Wordsworth’s prestige, one might be inclined to feel apologetic or
even inadequate if one doesn’t react in the same way. Personally I’ve always
been sceptical about such sweeping claims about nature, which to me beg many
questions, including: If natural objects are so powerful, why not just go
straight to them rather than reading poems about them? Do <i>all</i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> natural objects tend to
create joy (a bee, an acorn, a slug...)? What about being in low spirits -
don’t nature’s beauties tend to mock one’s own unhappiness rather than
alleviating it? And, in general, just why <i>should</i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> an object’s merely being
natural cause joy in a person?</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">However, closer inspection of Wordsworth’s works
show that he is often more down-to-earth and realistic than famous poems such
as ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ might suggest. To take one example: sapling
Scots pines are entirely natural objects, yet Wordsworth in his prose <i>Guide
to the Lakes</i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">
is firmly critical: ‘The young Scotch fir', he writes, 'is less attractive during its youth
than any other plant.' (He does add that it can grow into a ‘noble
tree’ if given room to spread its arms.) Many examples can be given where
Wordsworth applies critical or aesthetic judgements to natural objects and
scenes, and does not just accept them as beautiful and inspirational simply <i>because</i></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> they’re natural.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Although so far I’ve used ‘natural’ in the sense
of ‘not created by humans’, we often use the word nature more loosely to mean
‘the non-urban outdoors’, including traditional farmscapes as well as untouched
wildernesses. Wordsworth was keenly interested in nature in this broader sense,
and about the positive contributions that human activities can make to the
landscape. He is a great poet of place and places - a subject which many of us
have just as deep feelings about as we do about ‘nature’ in the abstract. In
his later poems especially, he has many acute things to say about the
psychology of sightseeing (and Wordsworth was a great traveller throughout his
long life). Topics he deals with include: our possibly overvaluing a sight
because we come across it by surprise, or after travelling through dull
country; the disadvantages of visiting somewhere in a large group; the slight
guilt we may feel about ignoring places on our doorstep; our tendency to
speculate about natural phenomena without coming to any conclusions; and so on.
</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">A final tentative thought for now about Wordsworth’s ‘development’
as a poet. In his earlier and better-known poems he tends to treat nature as a
single mystical entity or ‘Power’ (one of Wordsworth’s favourite words, usually
capitalised). This view tends to be less visible in his later poems, with more
emphasis being given to different varieties of experience in the context of
real sightseeing tours. People have often suggested that Wordsworth’s poetic powers declined in later years. Personally
I don’t see that, unless perhaps it’s ‘power to believe certain things’.
Perhaps the older Wordsworth simply no longer believed so strongly in the
validity of a mystical approach to nature; it may also have smacked too much of
animism or pantheism to be compatible with the orthodox Church of England
religion that he increasingly gave at least lip-service to. In any case, whatever the
exact truth, I believe there’s plenty to interest and even amuse in his later
poetry, and I hope to explore some of its richness in future posts.</span></b></div>
TakingTheAngleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11656581881063459181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7204482901906155965.post-29248328008096736232013-07-05T04:11:00.002-07:002013-08-11T02:44:52.071-07:00THE REMARKABLE MR SWINBURNE<span style="background-color: white;"></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">I was once thumbing through a tattered poetry book in a library when some
opening lines caught my eye:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: small;">From
the depths of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of
nebulous noonshine</span></b></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Pallid
and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as
they float. . .</i></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">I
read on. A few lines down, and the alliteration had increased even further:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Surely
no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses</i></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Sweetens
the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a
sigh</i></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">not
to mention:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: small;">Made
meek as a mother whose bosom beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a
balm-breathing baby</span></b></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">The
poem, titled ‘Nephelidia’ (‘little clouds’) was by the Victorian poet A.C.
Swinburne. I already knew a little about Swinburne, and that he had a
reputation for elaborate versification. But even so, how could <i>anyone</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> bring themselves to
write poetry <i>quite</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
so over-the-top?</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">The
answer to this is explored below, but first, a little about the man himself:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Swinburne was such an extraordinary character that a list seems the best way to introduce
him briefly: Son of an admiral; very short but with a long neck,
large head and auburn hair; constantly twitching hands possibly due to brain
damage at birth; lifelong interest in flagellation from his Eton schooldays
(both writing about it and being whipped himself); close friend of D.G.
Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites; critic, linguist and classical scholar;
disapproving of male homosexuality but enthusiastic about lesbianism; claimed
to find the Marquis de Sade’s writings hilariously funny; champion of French
poets, especially Baudelaire; rescued from an alcoholic bachelor existence at
the age of 42 by a male friend; lived quietly in Putney for the rest of his
life, developing an innocent interest in babies and writing many poems about
them.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Swinburne
was admired for his astonishing versifying skills by all his poetic
contemporaries, including the Poet Laureate Tennyson. On the other hand, even
his own mother criticised his verbosity, while Robert Browning complained of
his ‘never using one word where 100 will do’.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">But
people certainly took notice of him. His first major collection <i>Poems and
Ballads</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">,
published in 1866 when he was 29, scandalised the Victorians with its allusions
to lesbianism, sadomasochistic sex and other matters. <i>Punch</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> magazine christened him
‘Mr Swine-born’ – though there’s an irony since Swinburne might well still
have been a virgin when his book was published.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Swinburne
robustly defended his poems, and never sought to suppress them afterwards. Yet
he seems to have quickly lost interest in risqué matters: subsequent volumes of
poetry choose entirely different subjects such as liberty, the sea, historical
and patriotic topics, and of course babies. </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">More
discussion of Swinburne in future posts, I hope. But, in the meantime, how does
‘Nephelidia’ contribute to getting to know him? It was some time after my first
reading that I discovered its simple secret: it’s a <i>self-parody</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">. Swinburne was fully
aware of his poetic idiosyncrasies, even if he chose not to rein them in, one
of these being a particular
fondness for triple rhythms (<i>one</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> two three, <i>one</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> two three. .). He also
spread alliteration on with a trowel at the best of times, and so had to go to
extreme lengths to parody himself – hence the remarkable lines quoted above. </span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: small;">I like to think the poem offers a ‘taster’ of Swinburne while excusing
oneself from asking what he might be <i>saying</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> under all the verbosity
– because the answer in the case of ‘Nephelidia’ is, more than likely, Nothing at
all.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">[The
full text of ‘Nephelidia’ can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174566. </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">(Although
there’s plenty of academic interest in Swinburne today, when if ever he becomes
a household name again remains to be seen. . .)]</span></b></div>
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