[Philip Quinlan]

Prompted by some other threads on these pages (and a failed attempt to start one of my own a little while ago), as well as a rather good article in "Poetry", http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=182786 I went back again to G M Hopkins.

My return visit was a delight I have to say.

I had (almost) forgotten what it was like to read poetry that was so "meant" in the sense of conveying the poet's own genuine delight at simply being in the world.

I guess that all poetry cannot be like that, nor would we want it to be. But it does seem to me sometimes that craft and technique have almost (in some arenas) ousted "feeling" as an acceptable motivation for writing poetry.

Hopkins was no doubt ahead of (and hence misunderstood in) his time. There is no doubting his technique or craft but somehow it is used in service of something else - the desire to convey, as well as he might, truthful emotion.

I have heard poetry called "a fictive utterance" and have even heard poets say that one "shouldn't let the truth get in the way of a good story" (which is the same thing really, only more crudely put). However there is no substitute (in my conception) for that mysterious alchemy by which a poet conveys that he is in fact "telling the truth" emotionally. And if the language must be bent a little to accommodate the alchemy - so be it. It is (as I have said elsewhere in these pages) the servant, not the master of the muse. Sometimes that happens, paradoxically, when you allow the words to simply "have their way" with you.

I have put this in General Talk just as a statement of belief. However if anyone is interested in developing this thread it might be better placed in MoM.

I, for one, would welcome more discussion about the aforementioned alchemy with reference to the great exponents of it (whether formalist or not - which seems a pretty sterile distinction in this context). Not by any means to decry discussion on form or technique.

I write as an unashamed lover of "the ecstatic voice" in poetry, and one who would like to hear it a little more often at least.

Two recent, wonderful examples in these pages were:

Mary Meriam's - Leaf

and

Cally Conan-Davies' - Netted

No doubt I have missed more in the past.

Philip

[Mark Allinson]

Interesting, this lack of response to your thread, Philip.

Is it possible that the ecstatic voice is a little embarrassing for some of us? A little too earnest for our tastes?

The dominant tone today seems to be one of reserved irony. Or as Edna Millay says in Sonnet clxv:

It is fashion now to wave aside
As tedious, obvious, vacuous, trivial, trite,
All things which do not tickle, tease, excite
To some subversion, or in verbiage hide
Intent, or mock, or with hot sauce provide
A dish to prick the thickened appetite;
Straightforwardness is wrong, evasion right;
It is correct, de riguere, to deride.

So when we see a blast of pure ecstatic emotion, we feel embarrassed by such a display.

I don't. I love the ecstatic mode.

Like this passage from Whitman, on his responses to music:

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music - this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent
waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of
death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

============

The ecstatic mode involves the self beyond itself (ex-stasis) - a transcendence through powerful emotion. The poetry of Mysticism is full of ecstasies, such as in St. John of the Cross.

Does the ecstatic mode embarrass us today?

[Janet Kenny]

Mark asked:
Does the ecstatic mode embarrass us today?

No. But some of it's alleged expressions do. The real thing reduces most of us to respectful silence.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa is, for me, the most wonderful sculpture ever. I remember when I first saw it, in an art book, and I had to photocopy it, and that tattered page has been with me for years. My great art dream is to see it, in the flesh so to speak. I was baptised on her feast day, and given her name as my second one. Is this a case of nominal determinism?? My ecstatic nature has always made me feel somehow wrong. I wish I knew what to do with myself!!

Cally

[Janet Kenny]

Cally, it is beautiful and alive. I love Bernini's work. But I don't think that that work is the best of his or anywhere near the best sculpture.

There is so much sublime sculpture that resolves its tensions into a stillness past understanding.

I guess ecstasy takes different forms.

[David Anthony]

Not to forget Hopkins's dark night of the soul, of course.
Take a look at Carrion Comfort or his last sonnet:

http://www.sonnets.org/hopkinscomm.htm

He has never been too popular among the generality of neoformalists, more fool them.

Best regards,
David

[Richard Meyer]

Perhaps many people in the modern world have been formed, or have formed themselves, to be less available to the ecstatic experience. In addition to the basic meaning of "feeling overwhelming happiness or joy," ecstasy carries the sense of "mystic self-transcendence."

Some lines form Wordsworth come to mind:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

When a culture's dominant emphasis is materialism and consumerism and things and self-absorption and banal electronic entertainment and fluff and stuff and fluff and stuff, where is there a place or possibility for the ecstatic vision?

Richard

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Oh, Janet - I didn't mean it objectively! Only meant it is my own favourite. For that look on her face - given over, overwhelmed, - pleasure or pain? Both. The thing about ecstasy - again, for me - is that it's as close to laughter as it is to tears! It's so magnanimous - as laughter is, as all genuine feeling is.

Wonderful Hopkins sonnets, David. And Richard, perhaps instead of giving our hearts away, we should simply give them.

ps I meant to say, going back to Whitman, that I love 'From Pent-Up Aching Rivers' - that one sweeps me away every time!

[Janet Kenny]

Originally Posted by Cally Conan-Davies

Oh, Janet - I didn't mean it objectively! Only meant it is my own favourite. For that look on her face - given over, overwhelmed, - pleasure or pain? Both. The thing about ecstasy - again, for me - is that it's as close to laughter as it is to tears! It's so magnanimous - as laughter is, as all genuine feeling is.

Cally,
And there I was thinking you meant the drapery ;-) Actually I do think the ecstasy is in the drapery.

[Philip Quinlan]

Originally Posted by Janet Kenny

Mark asked:
Does the ecstatic mode embarrass us today?

No. But some of it's alleged expressions do. The real thing reduces most of us to respectful silence.

Janet - I am genuinely (hopefully you know me well enough to accept that) interested in what you hint at here.

1) Examples of alleged expressions which embarrass us?
2) As someone who has experienced ecstasy in a rather singular way I find the idea of being silent about it difficult to understand.

But as for poetry in general. I think it is unreasonable to expect the reader to get out what you did not put in. Not everyone wants the reader to experience ecstasy - and that is fine. But if you do want that response there is no way in the world to craft it into being - you have to genuinely feel it.

To have one's poetry of that kind judged by others, though, is in a way to "put one's self on offer". And that is the difficult, albeit rewarding, bit.

If one sets out merely to obey the rules of craft and form then one only stands to be judged by one's success at adhering to them. Which to me feels safer. But adherence to rules of form and craft by no means excludes the expression of true emotion or ecstasy. Hopkins was most certainly a formalist.

I think there is a very genuine sense in which people these days are embarassed, as Mark says, to say what is in their heart (although I imagine it is no longer OK to speak of the "heart" as the seat of emotion in the same way that, as I was recently advised in these pages, it is no longer "good form" to speak of the "soul" as the seat of other sensibilities).

Chinese and Japanese (classical) poetry are great examples of how ecstatic emotion can be conveyed simply and without reort to wailing or chest-beating or free-form confessional. What is a haiku but the ecstasy of the moment encapsulated in what is a very exact and demanding form? Ecstasy doesn't have to declare itself from the rooftops, it can be inherent in a quiet (if not silent) and reverential way

Regards

Philip

Edited in to say: of course one can be stunned into silence by the truly beautiful, but later (when it is recollected in tranquillity perhaps?) there is very often a case for saying something about it.