William Wordsworth Wanders Lonely

[luka]

I've been reading some this morning.

 

[luka]

There are quite vivid easily available pleasures and there are aspects which repel.
I don't always find the metre straight away, I stumble in the voicing fairly often, partly because I've got no knowledge of the convential forms. Often the sentiments seem too straightforwardly moralising or sententious but there's one simple trick you can do, a shift in perspective that makes a virtue of that forthrightness and simplicity of speech.

There's a very concrete, very embodied, sensual presentation of the world. Slothrop's extract is a god example of that. The birds around me hopped and played.

I also think that this kind of auditing of The Moods of Man is very important and valuable.

Even in the steadiest mood of reason...

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

 

[luka]

I've just realised Gus is viewing The Romantics as a Brooklyn Cultural Mafia.

 

[luka]

I also think that this kind of auditing of The Moods of Man is very important and valuable.

Even in the steadiest mood of reason...

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

The different windows onto the world they offer. What is accessible, what thoughts engendered, what are we cut off from and forbidden. How they exist in contrast to or sympathy with the wider moods of society (eg the French evolution and aftermath) or of nature, ooh it's spring how lovely

 

[luka]

I also like that Mark Fisher line—"Romanticism is the dressing-up of Teenage Ontology as an aesthetic cosmology. Teenage Ontology is governed by the conviction that what really matters is interiority: how you feel inside, and what your experiences and opinions are."

Based

Which is why I think this is repellantly trite and, ironically, incorrigibly teenage.

 

[luka]

I'm not always convinced by the passage of his thoughts, how it clambers steadily upward through cloud-cap towards some sublime peak

 

[luka]

That's not necessarily a criticism more a registering of a resistance I find in myself as I read

 

[luka]

I like a lot of his stuff in the Lyrical Ballads, much of The Prelude but one of my favourites is Intimations of Immortality which may well appear to Dissensus types.

@Corpsey he's talking about you

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 

[luka]

I've always taken poetry to be, in some respects, an Instruction Manual. This is how you open out your senses, this is how you come alive, this is how you dial up the intensity and the vividness, this is how you break out in the wide open spaces.

 

[luka]

This awareness and attention lavished, this tenderness and concern

 

[luka]

And these are things we need to keep being reminded of, the walls starts closing in again, horizons shrink, we brutalise ourselves.

 

[luka]

You have to carefully calibrate your attitude towards phrases like

The consecrated works of Bard and Sage

That kind of language, like a Royal Proclamation. That Rhetoric. My natural response to gloss over it, it registers as redundancy and I filter it out unless I remind myself not to

 

[luka]

Part of reading particularly this old gear, is to not be so certain of our own prejudices. At the very least not so certain of them that we cease to be aware of them

 

[luka]

The time-barrier thread is all about this. Identify a resistance, examine it, is it ideological? Is it irrational, is it time-bound, have we inherited it from someone else etc etc

 

[luka]

Tremblings of the heart
Immortal being
Such garments
Child of Earth
Weep to have
Depressed forlorn disconsolate
Inward throes
Her pleasant habitations
Old ocean in his bed
The living presence
The meditations of mankind
Adamantine holds of truth
A soul sublime
Wrought by men
Oh! why hath not
Lodge in shrines so frail
Errant knight

 

[luka]

All those gathered from a single random page of The Prelude.

 

[jenks]

Appeal?

yes, appeal - fat thumbs over breakfast

 

[Corpsey]

@Corpsey he's talking about you

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

I certainly prefer the stuff that rhymes.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Why? Not sure about this. I've never quite grasped why the Prelude, e.g., should be poetry rather than prose. Perhaps because Wordsworth dispensed with a lot of the traditional poetic diction, so it reads 'prosaically'. I'd never ask why Paradise Lost had to be poetry.

Obligatory handwringing here about my inability to understand poetry that doesn't rhyme.

When it doesn't rhyme, when it doesn't appear poetic, I'm constantly asking myself "why is this poetry?" Or I'm scanning for some sort of insight or image that arrests me, because the iambic rhythm alone isn't enough.

I read that book about prosody a few years ago and it quoted a passage of wordsworth and demonstrated how incredibly skilful he is at varying the metre for dramatic effect. So I'm not saying the reason to be poetry isn't there. It's just not something that naturally occurs to me.

 

[Corpsey]

 

[luka]

Why are you so bothered about whether a given piece of writing is 'poetry' or not. What difference does it make?