Eratosphere Forums - Metrical Poetry, Free Verse, Fiction, Art, Critique, Discussions Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art

Forum Left Top

Notices

Closed Thread
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Unread 10-21-2003, 03:26 PM
Larry Hammer Larry Hammer is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Posts: 205
Post

Over the past year, more than once I've been startled when someone mentions the "grandeur" in something I've written, not the least because I certainly didn't set out to include any, but I'm not even sure I'd recognize some if I saw it. So questions for the magistri loci.

What is grandeur, anyway? Is it a reproducible result? If so, how? What are the contributing factors? Can one become alergic to it, and if so, what treatments are available? Can it be trapped or is a rifle more effective?

I bow at your feet, awaiting your answer.

---L.
  #2  
Unread 10-23-2003, 08:30 AM
Larry Hammer Larry Hammer is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Posts: 205
Post

If I may speculate a self-answer: my wife read over my shoulder and burst out, "Oh -- it's voice." Being a writer of middle grade/young adult novels, she knows something of voice, but I don't think grandeur is a voice, but rather voice is a contributing factor. My theory: grandeur requires gravitas.

Am I close?

---L.

[This message has been edited by Larry Hammer (edited October 24, 2003).]
  #3  
Unread 10-23-2003, 06:03 PM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
Lariat Emeritus
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
Post

Larry, I think grandeur is a stranger to most modern and almost all contemporary poetry. I don't find it in Frost, Hardy, Robinson, or Auden. There's lots of it in Yeats, but at my age his grandeur is growing a little tiresome:

We were the last Romantics, chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness.
Whatever's written in what poets name
The Book of the People, whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme--
But all that's changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood.

There's grandeur in Hopkins, Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, tons of it in Milton. But I think it's pretty out of sorts with our current temperament. Hecht's Sarabande at 77 and Wilbur's For C are the only recent poems I can think of which have any convincing grandeur:

Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven

...."The harbingers are come. See, see their mark,
....White is their colour, and behold my head."

Long gone the smoke and pepper childhood smell
Of the smouldering immolation of the year,
Leaf-strewn in scattered grandeur where it fell,
Golden and poxed with frost, tarnished and sere.

And I myself have whitened as the weathers
Of heaped-up Januarys as they bequeath
The annual rings and wrongs that wring my withers,
Sober my thoughts and undermine my teeth.

The dramatis personae of our lives
Dwindle and wizen; familiar boyhood shames,
The tribulations one somehow survives,
Rise smokily from propitiatory flames

Of our forgetfulness until we find
It becomes strangely easy to forgive
Even ourselves with this clouding of the mind,
This cinerous blur and smudge in which we live.

A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,
The stately dance advances; these are airs
Bone-deep and numbing I should know by now,
Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs.

--Anthony Hecht

For C.

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say goodbye-
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life foregone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.

--Richard Wilbur
  #4  
Unread 10-24-2003, 11:44 AM
Larry Hammer Larry Hammer is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Posts: 205
Post

So it's not scale that gives grandeur -- . But what does? Both of those have gravitas, certes, but not, I note, pomposity. Is that the magic mix?

Grandeur, grand statements, grandstanding -- no, not concepts with Modernist sympathy.

Of course, if I'm not careful, soon I'll be asking about sublime and then the nice men in white jackets will be inviting me to a stay in a quite hotel.

---L.
  #5  
Unread 10-24-2003, 02:21 PM
Chris Childers's Avatar
Chris Childers Chris Childers is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Middletown, DE
Posts: 3,062
Post

Tim,

So grandeur's something you outgrow, as an individual and a people? That's very interesting, and might explain why I'm so attached to it at this point. The Yeats you quoted is one of my favorite poems, and I would certainly add Vergil to your list, who is currently my favorite author and probably will be for some time. Homer is another pretty grand poet, and the Iliad's a grand work: can we just not sustain that anymore, and not being able to sustain it, do we lose the stomach for it, like what Nietzsche said about Wagner, who turned ascetic at the end? (I think Yeats said something similar, too, about the modern inability to write epics.) Or is it an advancement of sorts: perhaps we no longer need it, or we've evolved beyond it in some way? Or perhaps grandeur just isn't very democratic, as irony doesn't become a timocracy, where they die with their hair beautiful; and in some ways democracy is an advance, and in other ways, a decline? Maybe I'll understand better when I'm older.

Larry,

I know you didn't ask my opinion, but I think scale is a part of it, either in a huge epic-length undertaking or in tackling Big Themes, loftiness of thought, etc., which is part of gravitas, I suppose, or High Seriousness, a Vergilian attribute. Seems to me both the Wilbur and the Hecht anchor their grandeur through the moral weight of age; the Hecht reminds me of the famous bit from Yeats, "An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing..." The Wilbur has a great sweep of vision, all those wide-angle shots of the huge office building and the huge night sky and the huge sea, and the smallness of the lovers beside them; but for him, too, it seems all that belongs to the young... though he does invoke the cathedral and the firmament as an analogy for his own love. I could go on rambling, but I'll cease for now.

Chris
  #6  
Unread 10-25-2003, 06:18 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
Lariat Emeritus
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
Post

Interesting subject which I'm moving to General Talk.
Closed Thread

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump



Forum Right Top
Forum Left Bottom Forum Right Bottom
 
Right Left
Member Login
Forgot password?
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Statistics:
Forum Members: 8,399
Total Threads: 21,841
Total Posts: 270,805
There are 1324 users
currently browsing forums.
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Sponsor:
Donate & Support Able Muse / Eratosphere
Forum LeftForum Right
Right Right
Right Bottom Left Right Bottom Right

Hosted by ApplauZ Online