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  #1  
Unread 06-28-2014, 05:37 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Default Nobel Lit Laureate, 1948, said this. What does he know?

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
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Unread 06-29-2014, 06:14 AM
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Who said it? Sounds about right to me. Slushy poetry is what we have far too much of.

Eliot said it. Give the man a coconut.
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Unread 06-29-2014, 09:33 AM
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Yes, it was Eliot.
Every time I hear the word coconut, I reach for my castanets. Do you actually think he needed something brought down from 'the palm at the end of the mind'?! I admit it's hard for me to think of someone you would like less unless it were, perhaps, John the Revelator, or Mervyn Peake, or Mother Shipton. But that's not the point.

It's very anti-confessional, very anti-Romantic, anti-Shelley, anti-gush (gosh, I feel so, so, swept) --- it's anti-that.

Last edited by Allen Tice; 06-29-2014 at 09:37 AM.
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Unread 06-29-2014, 09:59 AM
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I like Mervyn Peake when he draws or writes poetry. Novels.. not so much.
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Unread 06-29-2014, 11:40 AM
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I was referring to Peake's mordant fiction (not the feeble attempt at filming it), which (in small doses) has sometimes amused my American taste. One of his characters, "Steerpike," has a name I see now and then used by a columnist, but I don't always read it. His poetry didn't make it onto my shelf.

Eliot suggests artifice is paramount. Is it?
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Unread 06-30-2014, 06:29 AM
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IMO, Eliot makes the inverse mistake of the confessionals. Poetry is not logic; work that neither originates in a man’s personality, nor connects with another’s emotion, is not art. To convey the universal by the particular, that is the talent.

Compare what Hannah Arendt said wrt Auden: “Poets are the only people to whom love is not a crucial but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.”

And Frost’s famous likeness of good poetry to artisanal cheese: it’s locally made, but prized everywhere.
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Unread 06-30-2014, 07:46 AM
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Of course artifce is paramount. Show me a poem without artifice.
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Unread 06-30-2014, 08:03 AM
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Did Frost say that?

I know Auden did, “A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.” I quoted it when I read in Caerphilly.

Who said it first?
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Unread 06-30-2014, 08:42 AM
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Oh, Ann, you are surely right. Thanks.

I bet I got it from Davenport-Hines's bio of Auden years ago, now that I think about it.

Well, Frost could have said it!
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Unread 06-30-2014, 08:51 AM
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I'll bet he did. Even I said it.

It's interesting that Auden referred to a "valley" cheese, which means that here in South Wales we pretend he must have meant Caerphilly.

Mind you, it's good cheese - light, crumbly and a little on the salty side. I wouldn't mind my poetry being so described.
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