Poem for class 811

Here is the poem, or extract of a poem, to prepare for next week. It is one of the most famous examples of Romantic verse. Do your best and use your own ideas and own interpretations, not what you might find on the Internet. It can be easy to tell!

Click on the link to access the pdf document, and print it out if you can:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GAVZ-krWZGO1D2IeB-gViUr46BUXROVl/view?usp=sharing

Have a good weekend.
AJ

Victor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

This perhaps has nothing ostensibly to do with literature, and shouldn't be on a literary blog... But no matter. In fact, I think it does, and should, because our search for meaning - those blessed moments of life, when we connect with something deep and fulfulling - leads us to the poets, playwrights and novelists, because they can disclose the deeper meanings to existence. This of course was the official or unofficial manifesto of the Romantics, and of most evolutions in literary production. 

So here is an extract by a remarkable man, Victor Frankl, who was a psychologist and psychoanalyst, practising in Vienna before the second world war, and because of his Jewish background, found himself, along with his family, in several concentration camps. He survived, incredibly, and this experience, as he recounts in his bestselling work Man's Search for Meaning, which I strongly recommend, did not leave him in despair, but reinforced his conviction of the ultimate meaning of our lives. It is a powerful message he translated into a new school of therapy called 'logotherapy' which he mentions in this extract of Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. Frankl is not concerned with clever-sounding theories, but our actual lives. It is an existential approach. I think the examples he gives here are powerful. In this time of upheaval and deeply disturbing political, social and ecological developments in a more and more mechanically organised, purely profit-based society, when it is all to easy to lose sight of hope and meaning, it is salutary to consider this extraordinary voice.

Click on the link below to access the document:

Roger Scruton 1944-2020

Roger Scruton, who passed away on Sunday 12th January, was a remarkable philosopher, and one of Britain's leading intellectuals. An often controversial figure - always a healthy sign - he wrote with great integrity, and a love of wisdom. He would often lament the fact that our time has lost a sense of Beauty, and he would articulate this brilliantly, and hold up Beauty as an essential part of what it is to be human. He had, as the obituary says below, published in the magazine The Spectator, immense culture, including a love of music. He was also an accomplished pianist, and farmer.

A bower quiet for us...

The Romantics sought for a place where we can come back to ourselves, to essentials, away from the hustle and bustle of the world, and the mechanisation of life itself - which we surely still experience, in different ways today, and as intensely, if not more so, than at their time.

Keats reached the heights of poetic inspiration in his very short life. Some of his most extraordinary, and famous, lines come at the beginning of his long poem Endymion. Here they are:

Burly

Thinking about poetry, and the words chosen by our great poets, it seems that we have lost much of the traditional vocabulary and references that give the deeper resonances to life. It is a truism to say that the average number of words we each use has declined, and become, perhaps through the standardising influence of the Internet, and mass media, much flatter and less able to suggest nuance than before. With the decline, even the extinction, of age-old communities and their close-knit network of references and meanings, words disappear. 

The Tempest

In these tempest-tossed times, what better way to begin the new year than with a dynamic interpretation of Shakespeare's late play The Tempest. Here is Valentin Gerlier in the Lincoln Centre in London, giving us insights into the ways Shakespeare's incredible dramas work, how they unfold and affect us so deeply. He considers A Midsummer Night's Dream too, as an example of how Shakespeare uses the world of the Imagination as a transformative phenomenon in an otherwise rational, legalistic world (as Valentin describes the world of Athens in A Dream, before the moonlit magical world of the forest and the fairies gets to work). 

Click on the link below and listen, and no worries if you have not yet read the plays. The talk opens up all sorts of things, and will make you want to see or read them, again or for the first time: