10/09/09
Take Wyatt and Surrey as poets. Describe their similarities and their differences.
If I had to pick a characteristic Wyatt poem, I would pick the lines he translates from Seneca, about the dangers of the court life. These are lines that Marvell--and Cowley, I believe--would later translate (I spent quite some time trying to figure out if I could detect the influence of Paradise Regained in Mavell's use of the word "pinnacle.")
I think this poem is interesting for a few reasons: first, the first-person perspective, both intellectually outside the political situation he describes and affected by it. Wyatt often in his amorous poems seems to be writing after apocalypse--his Petrarchanism comes as an externally imposed disaster, and his Stoicism comes through in his decision to be himself despite pain, or female dishonesty. It doesn't surprise me that the five-stanza poem Surrey wrote w/ the first letters of each stanza spelling his name begins in Petrarchan disarray, imagines that the speaker thinks about classical Troy, and then resolves to live, though the poem's ending claim--if that sacrifice was worth it, this one is--is far more Surreyian than Wyattalicious. Second, as I have hinted, the poem's Stoicism--Wyatt is certainly not a pure Stoic, but he shares many of their ideas, and in Farewell Love he references Senec's precepts as one reason for his change.
Wyatt's poetry weaves a thin thread of self through the compromises of being a relatively low-level courtier.
I'm exhausted, but I have to keep typing, to get my time down. I'm going to switch to outline form, for my own benefit.
Surrey:
narrative of Petrarchan paradox
logical organizational structure--WIATT poem as Sessions says is a syllogism
(Sidney and Shakespeare will compress this structure even further)
intense use of rhetorical effects
more even rhythm, and deliberate use of caesura, reversed feet
organizational structures that outline the relation of lines to each other, with lines
that are loosely connected w/o those structures
use of lists that create the sense of a unified observer behind those lists (the aesthetic approach of a patron!!)
more use of pathetic fallacy and of the landscape--Wyatt can be deeply
claustrophobic.
a slight ability to turn the English landscape into the stuff of romance--at least Chaucerian romance.
a profound ability to ventriloquize--the poems by women missing their husbands are incredible
innovative rhyme and verse forms
a more concrete vocabulary, away from the words of 15th c. chivalry
a slight discursive tendency, within his forms, in which he repeats himself with a new image
a social stake in building a new English vocabulary and poetic--many Surrey poems invite response or treat stock situations
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
9/10/09
I'm worried about generals, and so I'm trying to commit myself to doing more freewriting, as a way of turning all this reading that's in my head into words. I really don't know what I'm going to talk about for two hours--I feel totally devoid of ideas, even though each individual text seems weird and productive.
In an effort to get some one last thing done today I turned to the Apology for Smectymnuus and to the Reason of Church Government and looked at the passages that Springarn suggested as ltierary criticism. What struck me is that Milton, despite his deeply original and entirely synthetic mind, is either reproducing or presenting the ideas of Sidney, with a slightly different focus. Milton shares the idea that poetry should be didactic, that it should provide the apparel of truth, that it should aid listeners towards virtue, and so on. He even shares the sense--that shocked me in Alexander, but that I found in Sidney when I looked more carefully--that any moment of impropriety, even any moment in which a hero or villain is not the best that they could possibly be, is a failure of the poet.
Milton, however, takes living so as to be able to write such a poem as a goal. He, I suspect, is benefitting from a higher status of poetry--Sidney would not have done well, suggesting that his highest end was to write a divine poem. Milton is also more literal about treating Scripture as poem; his readings in the Fathers and his attention to critical debates and to the texts have left him convinced that Scripture is literally poetic.
If I had to clarify the differences between the two, I would begin from Milton's description of his amorous phase in the Apology. There he is incredibly conscious of this as a phase of his youth that he has outgrown--in general, Milton is more careful about poetry being predominantly a youthful activity, except for those inspired by God. Milton's model of what one learns from poetry is deeply idiosyncratic--following what he says in Areopagitica, as a wise man, he learns his own sort of wisdom from a bad book. Where Milton's theory is a phase theory--he finishes various things and moves past them--Sidney leaves a theoretical hole with his apostrophe to love. (I WONDER: if any lapse from perfection on the part of a character is a lapse on the part of the author, isn't Astrophil's lapse of control an admission of Sidney's lack of control. It offers us a way of reading out of the poem into biography, perhaps. I wonder how far I can push William Alexander in this generals exam... Does Stella's proposed compromise--love but not any food for desire--reflect on Sidney's sense of what a love poet has to do? Does Spenser do a better job of this in his Amoretti?)
Inspiration is the next difference. Spenser, of course, treats divinely inspired poetry as the first of his three categories of poetry, but his treatise puts both that and heathen philosophical verse in a distinct category. For Milton, on the other hand, the true poet is the Davidic poet, touched with the fire of God's Seraphim. Milton does believe that a few in all nations are given this talent--presumably, that is, non-Christians may also be inspired--but only a very few. Related to this is Milton's conception of the "poetasters": he means the "libidinous" poets and playwrights, and libidinous here largely means secular; talentless amateurs certainly aren't in his good poet category, but they are not really his concern. For Sidney, on the other hand, the difference between poet and bastard-poet has something to do with style (post horse to Helicon) and form (ballad, accentual, etc--the old ballad he talks about moving him despite being rough), and learning (in his mind a pretty good related measure is class.)
In an effort to get some one last thing done today I turned to the Apology for Smectymnuus and to the Reason of Church Government and looked at the passages that Springarn suggested as ltierary criticism. What struck me is that Milton, despite his deeply original and entirely synthetic mind, is either reproducing or presenting the ideas of Sidney, with a slightly different focus. Milton shares the idea that poetry should be didactic, that it should provide the apparel of truth, that it should aid listeners towards virtue, and so on. He even shares the sense--that shocked me in Alexander, but that I found in Sidney when I looked more carefully--that any moment of impropriety, even any moment in which a hero or villain is not the best that they could possibly be, is a failure of the poet.
Milton, however, takes living so as to be able to write such a poem as a goal. He, I suspect, is benefitting from a higher status of poetry--Sidney would not have done well, suggesting that his highest end was to write a divine poem. Milton is also more literal about treating Scripture as poem; his readings in the Fathers and his attention to critical debates and to the texts have left him convinced that Scripture is literally poetic.
If I had to clarify the differences between the two, I would begin from Milton's description of his amorous phase in the Apology. There he is incredibly conscious of this as a phase of his youth that he has outgrown--in general, Milton is more careful about poetry being predominantly a youthful activity, except for those inspired by God. Milton's model of what one learns from poetry is deeply idiosyncratic--following what he says in Areopagitica, as a wise man, he learns his own sort of wisdom from a bad book. Where Milton's theory is a phase theory--he finishes various things and moves past them--Sidney leaves a theoretical hole with his apostrophe to love. (I WONDER: if any lapse from perfection on the part of a character is a lapse on the part of the author, isn't Astrophil's lapse of control an admission of Sidney's lack of control. It offers us a way of reading out of the poem into biography, perhaps. I wonder how far I can push William Alexander in this generals exam... Does Stella's proposed compromise--love but not any food for desire--reflect on Sidney's sense of what a love poet has to do? Does Spenser do a better job of this in his Amoretti?)
Inspiration is the next difference. Spenser, of course, treats divinely inspired poetry as the first of his three categories of poetry, but his treatise puts both that and heathen philosophical verse in a distinct category. For Milton, on the other hand, the true poet is the Davidic poet, touched with the fire of God's Seraphim. Milton does believe that a few in all nations are given this talent--presumably, that is, non-Christians may also be inspired--but only a very few. Related to this is Milton's conception of the "poetasters": he means the "libidinous" poets and playwrights, and libidinous here largely means secular; talentless amateurs certainly aren't in his good poet category, but they are not really his concern. For Sidney, on the other hand, the difference between poet and bastard-poet has something to do with style (post horse to Helicon) and form (ballad, accentual, etc--the old ballad he talks about moving him despite being rough), and learning (in his mind a pretty good related measure is class.)
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