Poetry and Tradition

Yesterday I gave a talk on 'Kathleen Raine and Tradition' at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, with my colleague Claire Tardieu, who wrote her thesis on the poet in the 1980s. A big thank you to the Atelier Poem, chaired by Sarah Montin, who welcomed us so warmly.

John Clare: ‘its only bondage was the circling sky...’

A little difficult to find a moment to post something! But as we will soon be looking at Romantic poetry in class, John Clare came to mind this evening. He is a truly great poet in the Romantic tradition, lesser known unfortunately. A man of little formal education, and humble peasant origins, he lived in the time of England’s brutal Enclosures, a ‘land grab’ by the wealthy, confiscating the open Common Land of the people of England, and leaving it in the hands of exploitative private owners. This was a traumatic experience for hundreds of thousands of country folk at the end of the eighteenth century, as they were thrown off their ancestral land, or forced to pay extortionate rents. And one which John Clare, with his poetic hypersensitivity, never got over. It had a deep and terrible effect on this man, who as a boy enjoyed roaming the free open spaces around his village which were now enclosed by fences and hedges. We all surely have an innate sense that this Earth is for us all to share; we look up at the wide open sky, and take in the magnificent views of our countrysides, and the heart leaps in freedom and the knowledge that this is no-one's and everyone's: ‘its only bondage was the circling sky...’. 

Poetry and Philosophy

Here is an excellent essay (click on the link below) written by my friend Joseph Milne, Honorary Lecturer at the University of Kent.

With great clarity, he explores the distinctive characteristics of poetry and philosophy, the inherent tensions between them, and how they complement each other as modes of knowing.

Insurgent poets

Thank you Cécile and Stephan, for your very interesting contributions! (see comments on the Poe post below).  I’ll put a reply here. I’m not sure what Poe means by placing this story within his story. What is clear, as you have said, is that the creation of the painting has been brought about at the expense of its subject and, I would say, through the disconnection of the artist from his source of inspiration. Is Poe saying this is the nature of art itself, that it is a danger to our relationship to reality at the same time as being a representation of it ?

Poe’s imaginative world is in many ways close to Baudelaire’s. As was said in a previous post, Nature in its broadest sense, the phenomenal world, from being a place of succour for the Romantic, and in much traditional Western art before the modern age, a reflection of spirtual presence, even a theophany, has become ‘sublimated’ into an imaginative world. This imaginative world in Baudelaire becomes ‘artificial’, a place of refuge from a reality perhaps too difficult to bear, or at least too grey and one-dimensional, a place of disenchantment. In this sense, finding le fleur in or from le mal is the act of sublimating what is ugly, sinister, bleak, into a new creation - as Poe does in this story, through his description of the castle and the telling of the tale within the tale. It is an act which fails in the incipit of The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator, facing the terrible house at the beginning of the story hopes, ‘It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression’. But the small lake in front of it only reflects back, inverted, the same horror.