7/1/2008

It's bedtime now, and I'm typing here merely to keep up the habit. I love doing this, but I helped Blythe with an email this morning and took a break after seeing Stuart this afternoon and now I'm exhausted.

That's okay. I'm /allowed/ to feel exhausted. What has to happen now, though, is that I have to let myself feel that way and slowly go back to work.

I read a few poems today--I realized the best way to do what I wanted to do was to read slowly through the New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse and think about what I was reading. I can move on to books when I have more energy. For now, I just want to get a hold of my to-do list, my time, and my energy.

I couldn't stand reading the Fulke Greville. I'm very much not interested in the sorts of things that he thinks poetry should be doing. Well, that's not quite true--I liked the sonnets, of course, particularly LV from Caelica which seems a sort of proto-metaphysical/cavalier job. They were published in 1633, years after FG had died. At some point I might like to look up FG's history. (I made a separate note on an index card that I should look him up. I think I'm going to do that more generally--keep a list of facts I want to know by my computer for when I'm procrastinating. It may cost me more time than I want to spend, but that's okay.)

Chapman, though, was much more interesting, and reminded me that I like poetry. Even the long lines didn't bother me--I did notice that he deploys enjambment strategically--it's not all like the Continuation; the piece on Justice, for instance, basically doesn't use it.


I'll keep an eye out for homoerotic bits, but something tells me they won't be included in here much--I guess it was edited in 1991, but still. It feels really old-fashioned!

Oh! the introduction I found very interesting in talking about the re-use of genre and the creation of lines of poetic lineation. Poets emulated each other, all the time. and this is related to the effort to recuscitate classical genres in modern language. I wonder how striving with a predecessor relates to Bloom's influence theory--it's certainly an important way influence works, but..

Hmm--that's an interesting problem--how does competitive emulation work in literature? Presumably it makes you write better, because you have someone to beat, but how does literature imagine the encounter? Is it like the friendship fight in Spenser's version of Chaucer?

The tribe/sons of version imagines one's peers as siblings. The peers of one's predecessors, then, can only be...uncles.

I'm less convinced that 17th century people couldn't claim certain people as forebears because their models for succession didn't offer them a way to have that many forebears. but hmm.