Thread: Poetic Genres
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Unread 01-04-2002, 09:48 PM
David Mason David Mason is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Colorado
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While no scholar of classical rhetoric, what I remember most of Longinus is his defense of craft over spontaneity, his suggestion that some elements of art could be learned, not just inspired. I've plowed through a lot of Tate's prose, but have forgotten the argument you cite, though I'm quite willing to believe it. I rather think that the best ekstasis comes with a good dose of techne, if you know what I mean, and I'll bet at least two romantics, Goethe and Keats, felt very much the same way. I have the sense that the great poets working outside the lyric have been those who could give visionary breadth to their creations precisely because they had strong art. Artifice without much drive, whether from passion or the intellect, is a rather moribund affair, and one can find it in any of the poetic camps now bandied about. But this domination of the irrational in poetic discourse is indeed a problem--just as much a problem as the absolute domination of the rational would be.

I'm rambling, of course. I meant to say that Anthony Hecht and Seamus Heaney have both recently written eclogues, and that I hope you are familiar with the great, Swiftian recent poems of Derek Mahon. They can be found in his Collected Poems, published last year and available from Amazon. I'd type some in here, but one of my brighter students has borrowed the book. I have some of Mahon's earlier poems by heart, but these recent works are fierce in their intellect--and about as bleak as anything I've run across in quite a while.
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