6/15/08

It's father's day--I need to call my Dad again. I tried, but got the machine. I guess they're still--out to lunch or something.

I ended my last post by posing the question of how it was that genre was both a transhistorical phenomenon and a generational one--that is, there seems to be something balladlike in all ballads, and sonnetlike in all sonnets, and so on, but which genres are popular at any given time seems, if I believe Helgerson and (kinda) Love, has to do with what earlier poetry was trying to accomplish. Helgerson notes the pendulum swings back and forth between poetry invested in interiority and poetry that aims towards the social--the sonnet--satire--tribe of Ben sequence and the Cavalier lyric--Rochester satire progression both suggest this. One way of answering this dilemma is to point out that the sonnet at any given moment has a lot to do with the tradition, and each generation changes the tradition somewhat. That is, people return to old forms precisely because they want to do the work that they think (they think being key) the old form did, or better yet, some of the work old forms did.

If we wanted to follow up on that, we'd read how a given generation was interpreting old forms a s a guide ot how they thought about the versions of those forms they were producing. I suspect this works well for the Romantics, who thought very intensely about old forms. Does it work for periods that aren't as absorbed by their own relation to tradition, or who thought differently about that relationship?

What does it mean that Marston and Hall weren't influential? What sorts of formal features might one look to in order to determine that? What's at stake in influence? Is it just that satire moved away from the rhyming pentameter couplet? Is there a side-current of Juvenalian-translation that we might consider indebted to them? Has someone studied this?

Sorry--that's just a pet peeve of mine. I need to stop writing rhetorical questions, though--I don't think they help me figure out anything, except when they're about specific things I could look up, like the economic model of balladry. I should study the epigram, too--I wonder if what I'm interested in is the history of epigram impugning upon other forms, as it enters the sonnet and the satire at approximately the same time. Well, Shakespeare's sonnets. Or maybe I want to know the history of rhymed couplets as applied to externally focused writing.

I'm less interested in the middle chapters of the Love book, if only because I don't know who these people are and don't really care what it is they say about each other. Surely it'll get better again if I just keep at it. But I'm reading to start reading lots again--this German and work together are wearing me out.

I must reply to the Mosaic folks today or tomorrow--and keep track of how much I need to bill--I worked 4 hrs, 20 mins on Thursday, 7 hrs on Friday. And no time this weekend yet.