Alec Guinness reading 'Journey of the Magi'

For those who don't know the connection between Star Wars and T.S. Eliot...

Here is a reading of Journey of the Magi by the English actor Alec Guinness. He can also be heard in a famous recording of Eliot's Four Quartets. He has quite an old style of delivery, but full of subtlety and delicate feeling for nuance. 

Alec Guinness is one of Britain's greatest stage and screen actors. He was a favourite of the director David Lean, who gave him star roles in his 1940's cinema adaptations of Dickens' Oliver Twist (playing Fagin) and Great Expectations (as Herbert Pocket), as well as the epic Doctor Zhivago. Then came fame for a new generation of cinema goers when he played the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first ever Star Wars film released in 1977. 

Click on the video link below to hear the poem:

Journey of the Magi - T. S. Eliot

Happy Christmas to all visitors!

 Whatever our beliefs, we can hardly fail to be moved and simply struck by the greatness of T.S. Eliot's poem Journey of the Magi, published in 1927. It is a monument of Modernist poetry, a monologue by one of the Magi journeying from Palestine to visit the newborn Christ-child; a story of alienation, pain, exile, and curious homecoming where nothing can be as before. The Modernists wanted to break with tradition in the early 20th century, but it could never happen entirely. Eliot was one of the many Modernists whose culture embraced hundreds of years of Western tradition, which he reworked and integrated in brilliantly original ways; in free verse, modern existential questioning,  and an idiosyncratic conversational tone combined with lofty poetic speech. Here is the complete text:

Yeats, the last Romantic?

Can't resist, it's Yeats again! I have loved for so long the magnificent poem "Coole Park and Ballylee 1931", which is a tribute to his Patron, Lady Gregory, written during the last months of her final illness. Coole Park is her estate, a grand ancestral house in Ireland, and her decline and death coincide, for Yeats, with the demise of wider traditions, including romanticism. The line "We were the last romantics", so simple, resounds in the heart and mind, and stays there. Here is the final verse:

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Because the theme recently has been country folk, and because in class at the moment we are looking at the Romantics, I thought it a good idea to post an extract from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a seminal piece of writing which has come to be regarded as a kind of 'manifesto' for the Romantic poets - although they did not think of themselves in terms of a distinct movement of that name at the time. 

Wendell Berry on the Land

Following on from thoughts of enclosure, Hardy's England, and country folk...Here is an interesting essay, from the other side of the Pond, by the remarkable Kentucky farmer, essayist, thinker, ecologist and poet, Wendell Berry. He is regarded by many as a visionary, but with his farmer's feet firmly on the ground. And he speaks his mind, which I like a lot. Click on the link below:

Hilaire Belloc's 'Tarantella'

Hilaire Belloc, who wrote The Servile State quoted in the post below, was a popular poet in his day, and is famous for collections for children, including The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, More Beasts (for Worse Children), The Modern Traveller and Cautionary Tales for Children.

When I was child, I was given this poem at school, 'Tarantella', to learn by heart and recite in front of the class. I remember the sensation distinctly; I think it was the first time I really connected with poetry, because it is so musical, almost incantatory, and the rhythm in the middle part so vigorously expresses the movements of dance. I loved it, and still do!

Thomas Hardy's country folk on the roads

Following on from the last post on the gradual privatisation of England's land, and the resulting dispossession, here is the opening to Hardy's great novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' in which the protagonist Michael Henchard,  and his wife and child, are walking the country roads in search of seasonal work. The turnip-hoer they encounter relates how the village Weydon-Priors is on the decline, its houses being pulled down due to economic forces beyond their control. It is typical Hardy; a melancholic autumnal setting, estranged people, here an estranged couple, small dimished human activity on a backdrop of grand natural forces at work since the dawn of time. 

The Land Grab (suite)

In the post below, on the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare, I spoke of the traumatic effect on the inhabitants of rural England of the accelerated privatisation of the Common Land of the country. John Clare himself never got over this, and some of his most moving poems were written in response. This process of Enclosure gathered pace in the eighteenth century, and later, in the Victorian Age, the novelist Thomas Hardy would depict and lament the situation of the rapid disintegration of rural communities and their ancient customs, which came about when country folk were thrown off the land. In Hardy's novels, it is common to see people walking the country roads in search of seasonal employment and habitation. Yet this process began much earlier...

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. 

The Moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven...

This week I went with friends to the wonderful Moon exhibition at the Greenwich Maritime Museum, celebrating fifty years since the first moon landing:

"The Moon is the UK’s biggest exhibition dedicated to Earth’s celestial neighbour.

Charting the cultural and scientific story of our relationship with the Moon, the exhibition features over 180 objects, including artefacts from Nasa's Apollo 11 Mission.

Reconnect with the wonders of the Moon through artefacts, artworks and interactive moments, and discover how it has captivated and inspired us throughout history."

 (from the Museum webpage)

Poe, Baudelaire and the break with the Romantics

Poe stands out quite starkly from his Romantic predecessors. The Romantics see Mankind as essentially good, especially the children before society has corrupted them. ‘Redemption’ would come from reconnection with Nature from which we have become estranged. Nature provides solace and strength, and epiphany lies in seeing its spiritual goodness, and the healing that can flow from it. The poets, like Wordsworth or Coleridge, wanted to show the spiritual significance of simple, even banal things by elevating the ordinary. Poe breaks radically from all this. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and not a source of succour and goodness at all. In many ways, and this is why Baudelaire must have been so drawn to Poe, both men share a common ‘anti-Romantic’ vision. Baudelaire does not reject the spiritual, but the Rousseauian belief that man is by nature good. He admires Poe for declaring ‘the natural wickedness of man’ :

La plupart des erreurs relatives au beau naissent de la fausse conception du dix-huitième siècle relative à la morale. La nature fut prise dans ce temps-là comme base, source et type de tout bien et de tout beau possibles. La négation du péché originel ne fut pas pour peu de chose dans l’aveuglement général de cette époque...La nature ne peut conseiller que le crime… [Dans] toutes les actions et les désirs du pur homme naturel, vous ne trouverez rien que d’affreux.

(Eloge du maquillage)

Here is an Arte four minute video version of The Oval Portrait. It captures something of Poe's unique atmosphere:

Edgar Allan Poe

We are studying one of Poe's many remarkable short stories in class; a lesson in how to write in compressed form! The artistry is extraordinary, it is Gothic in atmosphere, completely mysterious, full of suspense, and a reflection on the creative act. Below is the story, and below that, Charles Baudelaire's translation. It would be interesting to consider the great French poet's choices when putting Poe's writing into French.

Charles Taylor on the development of art - Romanticism, Modernism

Following on from considerations of the previous post, here is an extract (click on the link below) from Charles Taylor's excellent Sources of the Self (Cambridge University Press,1989). It comes in the middle of a much wider reflection on the development of subjectivity in artistic expression, but I think it is understandable on its own. It does of course need some real engagement when reading it; it is complex, and yet very clear at the same time. The overarching idea is that of the "epiphany", which is common to much art over the centuries; the opening up to a deeper meaningful dimension to life, beyond the day-to-day more one-dimensional experience we have. And why ideas of epiphany have so changed over the years. This could be religious, or in a time of unbelief, more generally a sense of transcendence, going beyond habitual limits. It might be useful to comment further on this in future posts. It does take us through some of the important shifts over time in thinking and feeling.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LLFVJm8HbaGl3PkEC9Tn4QQcghbchVCG/view?usp=sharing

Art and mutability

It is all too easy in our times, and just looking back in time, to see humanity as a blot on the landscape, our history a story of crime. The twentieth century, in spite of ideas of human progress, brought the two most terrible wars we have known. And now we are faced with new unprecedented ecological and economic disaster. What have we done, what are we doing, to the Earth and to each other? Yet, how resilient we are, how essentially loving and creative we can be, ceaselessly rebuilding in the face of all odds, creating too in the arts in spite of or perhaps because of the odds.

It has always struck me, when looking at our artistic creations, how exciting this human adventure is, and has always been, how courageous and often so beautiful. We should sometimes stop the self-flagellation and condemnation, and look at our 'monuments of magnificence', the wonder of our creations. 

Never one for seeing things in categories, I think nevertheless it is difficult not to make out grand movements, and overarching tendencies, or yearnings. Above all, the human spirit battles on: ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight’, said Blake. There may be differing, even conflicting schools of thought, points of view, especially in modern times, when unity of culture can seem all but gone. Yet we look back at the Renaissance, the Romantics and what they tried to do in all their indefinable complexity, then the Victorians, and the Modernists of the last century, each moment often opposing and upturning what had gone before - and what abundant creation resulted for us all! Often at great personal cost for the artists. But what was going on, what were the undercurrents bringing such upheavals in style, in vision? What has happened to us, what meandering, daring often tortuous paths have we taken? I am not sure, today, we are quite aware of what they exactly have been - these paths, and why we have taken them - from the isolated fragmented perspective of our time, which more than any other time in history is cut off, divorced from the traditions which have upheld our civilisation for millennia. 

Kathleen Raine poem

The extraordinary thing about poetry is it cannot leave us feeling indifferent. If we make the effort to engage with it, whether we like it or not, it shakes up our way of seeing the world. What does it bring up in us?

It would be good to hear from those out there who connect to the site, and read it. Whatever you think or say is precious! Feel free to leave a comment. 

So here is a poem by Kathleen Raine. It captures something of those precious moments of aloneness when we can connect with what is beyond the usual daily restricted sense of self, and open to greater spaces. Music is the perfect comparison here. It can happen when we listen to music, and generally when we listen to the depth of life. 

 

                                 As a Child Forgotten... 

                                                               For Herbert Read

As a child forgotten in a room filled with dusk

Sitting before a mute keyboard strikes one piano key

Then listens as the throbbing note diminishes and vanishes

And into silence passes with the sound,

So those who listen after with a longing that goes beyond

The dying away for ever of the most beautiful and dear

May follow the heard into the unheard, into the stillness

Of incorporeal mental spaces unbounded, the heavens

Whence and whither the fleeting music of the world is speeding.

                       Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)

'Women in Love'

D.H. Lawrence is one of the great artists of the industrial age. In his writing his characters feel the urge to question the life-denying mechanised forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century, where we still are, and enjoy a new-found freedom in communion with the deepest human instincts, and the natural world. He will give us characters who are on the edge of something bigger than themselves, far beyond the petty defining notions of modern society, something they don't understand but which disturbs, and draws them on.

In Women in Love (1920), two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, venture out into a colliery town and see the working class world of coal dust, hard labour and poverty. Although amused and detached in their superior middle class ways, we can sense their greater malaise regarding themselves; Ursula cursing her familiar home surroundings, as she is drawn to the streets of the industrial coal-mining Midlands. There is a dark beauty in the description of these ‘ugly’ surroundings : ‘hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air’.

The young women appear to be more imprisoned in themselves and their petty judgements than the more natural folk around them : ‘No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all’. It makes Gudrun think. Although she sounds detached in her amused observations about everything being ‘a ghoulish replica of the real world...’, the experience brings home to her the restricted narrow life she leads. Being out here is like a ‘violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world’, leading her to ask, ‘then what was her own world, outside?’ Her own clothes feel out of place, artificial, like a thick suit of armour separating her from a greater reality she has always shut out, the gritty world of working people :’She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour.’

As the sisters move out of and beyond the colliery town into the countryside round about, Lawrence paints a striking picture of the gradual fading of industrial dirt and pollution, ‘Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and wooded hills...’, followed by complete freedom, from both middle class and industrial constriction, the glorious inimitable Lawrentian description of bushes and flowers bursting forth with life! Such delicacy of observation, as if he can feel the essence of the vital, natural life he describes. 

Here is the extract: