Oh whoa. We just had a really hard, exciting Renaissance Lyric class. At least, it was really hard for me.
The truth is, I don’t think I really got very much training in poetry at all. Lyric poetry anyway. I like to think that I’ve spent some significant time on dramatic poetry, but as far as really minute, New Critical-type intense immersion in poetic form and structure? I know about enough to recognize a synecdoche and to do some fairly detailed metrical analysis (and enough to realize that said identification and analysis are of necessity debatable) but to go beyond that to examine what makes this poet’s manner of creating or using synecdoche particularly interesting and in what way that delays metaphorical sense or, even more complicatedly, becomes complicit in linguistic perpetuation of a time-unspecified poetic act, independent of narrative? That’s something else.
It seems to me that when you really get into serious formal analysis, independent of historical or biographical concerns and only on the largest level connected to thematic and generic issues, when you really begin examining the way in which the poem produces its effects or works its words – then you’ve almost entered another critical language. No, another critical language family, even.
It’s like the times that I’ve been exposed to math advanced enough that it begins to show how incredibly complicated and structurally beautiful the mathematical reasoning underlying our most simple assumptions – that 2+2=4 but 2-2 does not = 4, for instance – are. We take addition and subtraction as given actions – you can do them within the world of numbers; just as we take metaphor or time-specification as given actions within the world of poetry. But in fact underlying the use of those things is a complex, highly theoretical world – in terms of poetry, the calculus of style and sense.
I suppose that’s what I’m getting at – I often see the phrase “the calculus of” so and so, but I’ve rarely been forced to learn that calculus in the way that I learned some mathematical calculus. Or maybe I’m just saying that I’m fundamentally in the business not only of questioning assumptions but of mapping them.
Or maybe I’m just saying lyric poetry is hard. But, I hope, eventually rewarding
The truth is, I don’t think I really got very much training in poetry at all. Lyric poetry anyway. I like to think that I’ve spent some significant time on dramatic poetry, but as far as really minute, New Critical-type intense immersion in poetic form and structure? I know about enough to recognize a synecdoche and to do some fairly detailed metrical analysis (and enough to realize that said identification and analysis are of necessity debatable) but to go beyond that to examine what makes this poet’s manner of creating or using synecdoche particularly interesting and in what way that delays metaphorical sense or, even more complicatedly, becomes complicit in linguistic perpetuation of a time-unspecified poetic act, independent of narrative? That’s something else.
It seems to me that when you really get into serious formal analysis, independent of historical or biographical concerns and only on the largest level connected to thematic and generic issues, when you really begin examining the way in which the poem produces its effects or works its words – then you’ve almost entered another critical language. No, another critical language family, even.
It’s like the times that I’ve been exposed to math advanced enough that it begins to show how incredibly complicated and structurally beautiful the mathematical reasoning underlying our most simple assumptions – that 2+2=4 but 2-2 does not = 4, for instance – are. We take addition and subtraction as given actions – you can do them within the world of numbers; just as we take metaphor or time-specification as given actions within the world of poetry. But in fact underlying the use of those things is a complex, highly theoretical world – in terms of poetry, the calculus of style and sense.
I suppose that’s what I’m getting at – I often see the phrase “the calculus of” so and so, but I’ve rarely been forced to learn that calculus in the way that I learned some mathematical calculus. Or maybe I’m just saying that I’m fundamentally in the business not only of questioning assumptions but of mapping them.
Or maybe I’m just saying lyric poetry is hard. But, I hope, eventually rewarding
Labels: early modern, poetics
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