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Unread 11-29-2011, 02:37 AM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
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Location: Lazio, Italy
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Fabulous stuff, Steve and Andrew, and I’m glad you’re interested Nemo and Cally! I agree with that statement in Steve’s post, that it’s a mistake to write off Gascoyne’s post-surrealist work, which is the work that made him famous. All his work was for salvaging the imagination in a world that doesn’t want it. This is from his Short Survey of Surrealism:

Quote:
Confined from early childhood in a world that almost everything he ever hears or reads will tell him is the one and only real world and that, as almost no-one, on the contrary, will point out to him, is a prison, man—l’homme moyen sensuel—bound hand and foot—not only by those economic chains of whose existence he is becoming ever more and more aware, but also by chains of second-hand and second-rate ideas, the preconceptions and prejudices that help to bind together the system known (ironically, as some think) by the name of ‘civilization’, is for ever barred except in sleep from that, other plane of existence where stones fall upwards and the sun shines by night, if it chooses, and where even the trees talk freely with the statues that have come down for ever from their pedestals—a world to which entrance has generally been supposed, up till now, to be the sole privilege of poets and other madmen.
I copied this from Kathleen Raine’s essay on him (which is how I first found his work), “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role,” in her book of essays Defending Ancient Springs. She was a main champion of Gascoyne’s work, and a close friend.

Gascoyne was a visionary in a time that generally doesn’t believe in visionaries. But he was low key not doctrinaire or bent on proselytizing his views. These are quotes from a review I wrote of his Selected Prose:

Quote:
“Anything like ‘the bardic tradition’ is apt at present [1987] to be regarded with misapprehension as representing an outdated mode of idealism. . . . To the nihilist the concept of timeless value is of course meaningless, and it is our affliction to live in an age of unconscious nihilists.” But Gascoyne expresses in another prose piece: “The last thing I want is to appear to be making the arrogant suggestion that poets should be writing in any other way than that which spontaneously occurs to them. If I choose to think of our time in terms of a metaphor such as the World’s Midnight . . . that is my own affair.”

Last edited by Andrew Frisardi; 11-29-2011 at 03:28 AM. Reason: correction
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