Wykład Literatura 19.04.2011
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Life:
Father- a professor of Old Testament, literature and theology, his mother - a Church organist
He was born in Pittsburg
at the age of 15 was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German (educated in boarding schools in Europe)
Robinson was also highly educated in the USA studied medicine and forestry
lived on the coast of California, where he built a granite house and a tower on cliffs facing the sea
Poetry:
Flagons and Apples (1912)
Californians (1916)
Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954) moving eulogy to Una Call Kuster with her in California, his muse and partner
Poetry of R. Jeffers
Beauty of his descriptions of the natural world - early environmentalist, perhaps the first to grasp the devastating extent of the charges of human technologies and populations had on the rest of earths biological life
Some pessimism of human culture is destructive and out of control
He wanted us to rediscover our relationship with the foundations of nature
He insisted that human kind should acknowledge the superior value of the instinctive life
“Inhumanism”
Jeffers's assertion that mankind was too egocentric, too unmoved by the astonishing beauty of things”
“The Double Axe” - defined 'inhumanism' criticized the Allie's role in WWII - putting Roosevelt and Churchill on the same moral levels as Hitler and Mussolini
“Divinely Superfluous Beauty”
Vision of the spontaneous energy running through all things
Wish to be identified with this energy, to become one with what is “divienly superfluous”, “The incredible beauty of joy. Stars with the fire the joining of lips.”
“My Burial Place”
Union between himself and nature complete
“put me in a beautiful place far off from men, No cemetery... I should be pleased to lie in one grave with'em” (the quick deer, the lonely puma)
The human animal is absurd and pretty, everything appears small in contrast to the enigmatic beauty, the intrinsic perfection of nature. We have to return to earth, our origin.
Jeffer's impact
depends upon PERSPECTIVE.
Human life seem from an immense distance, as it were placed within the larger dimensions of earth, sea and sky.
Colloquial speech, first conflict, then union between human nature and nature.
Recognition of the needs and limits of the human character.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Life:
He was a son of poor Swedish immigrants. He had to quit school at thirteen to begin working
He roamed over Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado working as truck handler, harvest hand, dishwasher, brick maker, porter, janitor, milkman among other jobs
He worked as a war correspondent during Spanish - American War
He completed four years at Lombard College in Galesburg but did not graduate
In 1908 he became a political organizer for the Social Democrats. He served as the secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee. He went back to the newspaper work
Poet, folksinger and journalist
Sandburg's Poetry
He spoke for the common man and woman
The Chicago Poems (1916) followed by
Cornhuskers (1918) raised to a position of leadership among the Chicago Renaissance group (Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson)
He traveled about the US and collected folk songs, which he published in The America Songbag (1927) containing 280 songs and ballads which he collected from convicts, cowboys and farmers
He was an admired of Abraham Lincoln and published a monumental biography of his hero. (The Prairie Years, two volumes, The War Years, four volumes)
Subjects of his poems:
His poems celebrate:
work and worker
men and women alike
Arrogance, coarseness and vitality of a young nation
The People, Yes (1936)
“Chicago”
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,
for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer
Yes, it is true I
have seen the gunman kill and go free to Hill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:
On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this
My city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud
To be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. […]
best-known poem
It was first published in Poetry Magazine in 1914
It is filled vigorous imagery which bombards the senses of the reader
“Happiness”
I ASKED the professor who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Saturday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
“ANNA IMORTH”
CROSS the hands over the breast here - so
Straighten the legs a little more - so
And call for the wagon to come and so will her sisters and brothers
But all the others got down and they are safe and sound
this is the only one of the factory girls who
wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire broke
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes
“Fog”
THE fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
He was trying to be 'a lamp', an entertainer with bardic ambitions
He walked through America giving recitals and lectures and selling copies of his poems
He recited and sang poems
Vachel Lindsay's poetry
The change the oldest style of recitation, the chant, Lindsay would incorporate whoops, yells, booms, cheers - all the exuberant noises and rhythms he found in American life
He was interested in blending music, dance, art, poetry, film and performance to reach younger potential poetry readers
Vachel Lindsay
… “Now let there be here recorded,”
Lindsay wrote next day in his diary,
“My conclusions from one evening, one hour of peddling poetry.
I am so rejoiced over it and so uplifted I am going to do it many times.
It sets the heart trembling with happiness.
The people like poetry as well as the scholars, or better.
He was not after money. He was seeking love, understanding, brotherhood
The reading tours were chances to meet and understand the American masses he was coming to love with a truly religious favor
His interest was not in academics or literary critics or the poetic aristocracy, but Americans in general and high school and college students in particular
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Misleading
One of the most well-known American poets of the 20th century
His poems, which are often about the woods and farms of the New England and are written in rural everyday language constitute a body of writing that looks a good deal like folk wisdom
This image is misleading on two counts:
It has lead to a certain amount of scorn for Frost's work among literary critics
his easy going poems differed radically from those of the great modernist T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their work was learned, difficult and highly wrought; it alluded to earlier cultures; took a pessimistic view of life and was overtly international
Conclusion: those who liked Frost did not like poets of modern literature in general
he was accused of being facile and philistine
the more serious criticism of Frost is that he neither delves inward very fast (as, say Dickens does) nor offers a panoramic view of his nation (as, say Whitman does)
Finally, in 1959, Lionel Trilling paid homage to Frost on his 85yh birthday, declaring that the war between Frost and New York was over, and that Frost indeed belonged in the great iconoclastic tradition
It is important to recognize that Frost belongs n the front ranks of poetry, because he deals with the same crises of beliefs that Eliot, Pound and Stevens do
Despite their homely manner and materials, Frost's poems are large propositions, bidding to reconfigure who we are and where we live
The difference lies in Frost's approach to these issues:
not expressed in 'high brow'
by dint of vision that is short with sardonic wit and wry pragmatism
mater-of-fact poetry is compatible with rich vision of language and passion even with fantasy
his outlook on nature even though it harks back to Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson in its pursuit of spirits has an ominous dark side with which we need to come to terms
celebrates the meaning of work, measures our investment in the rhythms of life
he chose New England as the sufficient base and prism for examining life
his most well-known poems are considerably more open-ended and less settled than is usually thought
Robert Frost and the Spirit of New England
1913 A Boys Will - first collection of Frosts poems
His poems are bristling (najeżone, pełne) and unsetting:
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”
We are lulled by the sing-song rhythms
The setting seems to be idyllic and soothing at the first glance
Yet at the end, the piece announces a tug-of-war between the ethical and the natural realms of life the horse wants to go on, but the man is hypnotized and wants to stay
The first line is about the ownership; not who owns the wood, but whether the woods own the speakers, whether the human subject can maintain self-ownership
There is the feeling of dissolution of letting go
The woods themselves are seductive and alluring. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”
There is a desire to dissolve in nature -0 throwing over all kind of social or responsible thought
Wykład Literatura 9.05.2011
FROST IS CAPABLE OF RINGING CHANGES ON THIS THEME OF NATURE AS ENTICEMENT (pokusa).
“Come in”
he comes to the “edge of the woods”, it is dusk, it is dark there, there is the treat of the woods contained there
the poem terms the woods “dark”, and the “song” is allied to the darkness as well, as if all poetry had its source in darkness
Dying light is shown to be the bird's message, the song of the bird. This equation is suggestive: Light produces song and song produces light
nature is “pillared” , as if it were a cathedral; yet it is also a temptation for losing oneself. Darkness here is like the deathlike darkness.
the speaker rejects the dark woods because he is “out for stars”. How do we assess this? Is he looking for safety, retreat, a divine plan?
the laconic closing remark about not being asked is Frost's signature. Humans are outsiders, whatever natural reveries they have. This admission that we are not “of” the woods gives closure to the piece.
“But no, I was out for stars” the sights of the poet are not, in this poem, going to be on the woods and darkness, but beyond and above the stars themselves.
Frost can present encounters with the dark woods in ways that are still stranger, sometimes bordering on horror.
“THE DRAFT HORSE”
These dark woods match anything that Hawthorne could produce in the way of horror.
The encounter with violence seems to be I keeping with the design and directives (two Frost's concepts) of higher authority. We have no privileged spot in the world, no particular wisdom.
Frost definitely has a black side- apocalyptic, drawn to cataclysm, focusing on the theme of human abandonment and alienation.
“BEREFT”(POZBAWION, OGOŁOCONY, OSAMOTNIONY)
Virulence of nature
Nature's personal attack on the human subject
“ I was in the house alone… I was in my life alone…I had no one left but God”- systematic loss of support, an increasing sense of being bereft.
“ACQUIANTED WITH THE NIGHT”
Portrait of abandonment and alienation
Humans have no “home” whatsoever
“ I have been acquainted with the Night. I've walked out in rain and back in rain. I have out walked the furthest city light”.
He hears a cry, but `not to call me back or say goodbye'.
Sees a clock:
“One luminary clock against the sky proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right”- out of phase, out of sync, out of time, no correlation between motions, your life and official, public schema.
FROST IS AWARE THAT THE MOST DEVASTATED AND DESOLATE SITES ARE ON THE INSIDE
“Deserted places”
The mobility, the acceleration, of the piece is initially striking; there is no stability.
The woods seems to have taken over entirely
Frost depiction of emptiness as whiteness
-his closing tone is splendid, like the child with his back against the wall: “They cannot scare me”.
-true devastation and emptiness are on the inside; here is the view of the human soul that is supremely inhospitable.
-there is also a strange kind of pride, as if the human condition could match the horrors of nature any day of the year.
“Deserted places”
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
FROST TRIES TO GO PAST THIS “NOTHINGNESS” ON TH INSIDE OF PEOPLE, AND SET HUMAN SIGHTS HEROICALLY, RESOLUTELY ON THE NATURAL SCENE.
“The Wood Pile”
the speaker has no direction, no plan
the story is of the human lost in the hostile woods
Evocation of the bird's “vanity” (próżność), its error in thinking that the natural word is self-related. We think that world responds to our picture, our safety and human condition; whereas in fact world is indifferent.
the woodpile - is the finite, unsymbolic world; it's the world of things,
the woodpile signals an abandoned human project, the woodpile has been cut several years back and still exists here, it was cut to burn in a fireplace.
“The Wood Pile”
Nature seems to have taken over, to have proven the futility of human doing.
“Leave it here, far from a useful fireplace,
To warm the frozen swamp as best as it could
with the slow, smokeless burning of decay.”
“The Wood Pile”
The woodpile signals an abandoned human project. It has been cut several years back and still exists here. The woodpile was cut to burn in a fireplace.
The speaker muses about motivation. Why would one abandon this woodpile and go on to “fresh tasks”? Is this a reference to poetry?
The brilliant end enigmatic final notation causes us to reconsider our notion of utility
Is this a triumph of human achievement after all? Does all human labor have unforeseen real consequences?
“Birches”
The boy's game with the birches, symbolizes rites of passage.
Ascending “toward” heaven, moving toward flight and release, an ideal education for the poet.
Fine attempt to possess both heaven and earth, to rise and fall.
The poem is about love, about process of being “ good both going and coming back.”
“The Most of It”
We are alone and unsponsored.
The only noise we hear is echo.
At the end of the poem- a great vision- not just the “counter-love” sought by the speaker.
Is this the appearance of God? Is there something grand and noble about being in the world without human form?
“ Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same”
Male speaker trying to evoke a vision of love and beauty.
Human song composed of love and laughter enters nature and becomes bird song.
Going back to Eve and Adam, re-telling the story of family, of the enduring love.
The mythic “garden” becomes the familiar “woods.”
Song changes the world, human love and human poetry become part of phenomenal realty, endure over time, and are appreciated by poets, readers, and lovers.
ROBERT FROST AND THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH
Frost writes about:
Man's interaction with the earth, human being the eternal cycle of life.
Living in the country (rural community experience): chopping wood, building houses, doing gardens (when Adam was expulsed from the Garden of Eden work was born- labor sweat, pain) Frost celebrates work:
-human labor-the process which appears to be over when the product or the task is completed; open ended and future-bound in ways that no one plan or anticipate
-diverse kind of labor: tilling the soil, picking apples, making love, writing poems- makes us understand unsuspected reach and grandeur of such activities
Frost is interweaving agriculture, love and poetry in his poems about working the soil.
“Mowing”
facts are precious, labor as a voice, labor as a future bound,
human implements (narzedzia) become “lingual”, have a strange speech of their own, which the poem seeks to interpret
reconceives our notion of “dream” - suggests that it has elements in common with facts and work- “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” dreams have to do with our contact with elements, facts of life are the highest thing we can know,
the poem never loses sight of the particulars involved in mowing.
“Moving”
there is no separation; things can exist in a love relationship to us, and the relationship I labor; moreover labor knows, is a form of knowing; knowledge is something vigorous; work/life becomes poetry here.
Ends with reference to “long scythe” a classic symbol of death and time, yet it whispers “life” here, “left the hay to make” - ongoing growth and development, continuous “production” beyond our finite efforts.
It is not easy to measure what we have accomplished, production cycle continues (grass, cutting, hay…) alteration and change and result. The view of labor has a sense of futurity. We don't know the final consequences. The same is true about poetry- poet dies, poetry lives. What looks over is not over, what looks fixed looks fixed.
“Putting in the Seed”
planting crops, making love and creating poetry
man-wife connection; merging of death and life (planting petals along with seeds insists on their togetherness),
The poem becomes incandescent (żażący sie, płonący)
Closes with slow motion, account of the miracle of creation (making love and poetry)
“the sturdy seedling with arched body corners shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs”- human lovemaking, human production, the seed is clearly personified.
a warm poem with slow, dignified motion
“After Apple Picking”
strange, offers us a surreal, hallucinatory evocation of the human condition, going back to the Fall
the description of “two-headed ladder” sticking through the trees; the ladder- a conduit (kanał) to other realms, a set of parallel points and tracks
Speaker's fatigue and drowsiness, which sets the stage for dreaming and slipping
“essence” applies to apples and to the underlying core of meaning; this labor will be followed by a sleep that is like hibernation.