"A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf - broadcast on BBC Radio 4

The HK class have been writing a commentary on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This morning while listening to BBC Radio 4 over breakfast, I heard they are going to be broadcasting a dramatisation of her major work, A Room of One's Own. Interestingly, it was recorded during lockdown with actors and production team all in rooms of their own. It should be very good.

Virginia Woolf's funny, provoking and insightful feminist text on female creativity dramatised for radio by Linda Marshall Griffiths.

Part of Electric Decade: classic titles that influenced and characterised the 1920's.

It is 1928, a woman is asked to talk of women and writing. In the university town of 'Oxbridge' she is refused entry to the gardens and library and discovers the poverty of the one female college there. She searches the British Museum library for proof that women even existed in history.

You will find the link below to click on and listen. It will be available shortly after broadcast tomorrow 31st May:

'Passage to Modernity' - evolution of the self, of language, and literary forms

In previous posts I have published thoughts on artistic creation from philosophers and poets. What interests me in particular is the evolution in our sense of selfhood over the centuries; because how we conceive of ourselves today is radically different from how our ancestors did, in the Classical world, in the Medieval Age, the Renaissance and the Early Modern period. It can be enriching to think of these things, because they allow us to see our own confused and difficult times perhaps at one remove, putting them in healthy perspective.

It is difficult to introduce such thinking without making inaccurate generalisations. Yet we could say that in ancient societies there existed a sense of the self not just in relation to itself, or the collective, but the cosmic; that the individual was not seen as a discete, atomistic entity with its private desires and concerns in isolation, but as a part of a cosmic whole, with its God or pantheon of gods, its mythologies, its cosmologies, cosmogonies, astronomy and astrology, and its ancestors. When we read poetry, epic or shorter poems, watch plays or read novels, rarely do we see these phenomena as quite unique and special, and lying within a long evolution of the human story. Shakespeare seen in this way is revolutionary, Hamlet, hugely modern, the novel, a recent invention inconceivable until relatively recent times. The question is, Why?

The modern period is characterised by the increased significance given to the individual, while the cosmic sense has withdrawn entirely, to leave mankind thrown back upon himself, with quite different existential and artistic questions from before. 

The extract below, from Louis Dupré's excellent work Passage to Modernity (1993, Yale University), traces, from this wide perspective, the ways in which our sense of self and the world have changed, and thereby changed the very literary forms we now take for granted. 

Dupré also, necessarily, considers how our conception of language itself has changed fundamentally with this shift towards the discrete individual.

Dupré's is dense thinking, but wonderful to grasp. I think that giving it time and staying carefully with it can reap very great rewards!

Click on the link below to download the pdf document:

'O sweet spontaneous...': e e cummings (HK)

e e cummings was a leading figure in the American Modernist movement. Like the manner of writing  his name, his poems are idiosyncratic; lower-case letters and an absence of punctuation. He nevertheless, like most Modernists, remains traditional on many levels along with being avant-garde; his themes of love, use of the sonnet form, and a shared affinity with the Romantics. 

You will find one of his most famous poems, 'O sweet spontaneous...' by clicking on the link below. We will be looking at this in class.

Poetry by Vernon Watkins - for HK and anyone who loves a good poet!

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was a Welsh poet, translator and painter. During his lifetime he was highly regarded, though never at the height of fashion. He has since been rather neglected, unlike his friend and fellow Welshman, Dylan Thomas. Watkins took poetry very seriously, from his ealiest years: "I was already writing poems when I was seven or eight, and between that age and twelve bought the English poets one by one". These early years were marked by great ambition and determination to become recognised, but he came to care little, if not at all, for fame or recognition, only for the vision and craftsmanship needed in all good poetry. This is grounded, in Watkins' verse, in an uncompromising modernity, at the same time as drawing on tradition. As he said: "The fountain, what is it? What is ancient, what is fresh".

Here is a sonnet he wrote about poetry itself, from Fidelities (1967):

The prose purveyors of doubt, the dismantlers of

Ecstasy, who traffic without a god

In broken metre, would have their Pegasus shod

Wth discord, not strict numbers. At love they scoff,

And then, in the revolution of anti-love,

Unsheathe chaos, the death of the period,

While a new Sibyl, shrieking above her tripod,

Proclaims transformation, treachery, trough.

Yet even the disenchanted, disordered, fret

For lost order. Breakers recall rhyme,

Anchors weighed, and divine proportions set.

As hawk hovers, as compass needle in time

Flies unswerving, steadied, where the stars climb,

Fixed laws hallow what none can forget.

to curry favour: "flatter, seek favour by officious show of courtesy or kindness"

Through the miracle of association, which can lead you all sorts of places, I got to thinking about this rather wonderful and strange expression in English: to curry favour. I found, remarkably, that it has nothing to do with either Indian spices, or 'favour'. 

It all began while reading Les Trois Mousquetaires, when I recently came across some colourful verbs like 'ferrailler' and "étriller un cheval". Not knowing much about things equestrian, I wanted to find out the English for "étriller", which is (specialists might correct me) 'to curry', or 'to currycomb' a horse. This led in turn to wondering what brushing down a horse had to do with one of my favourite dishes, so I began an investigation into 'curry', and this is what I found in Skeat's exciting (no irony intended) etymological dictionary:

The Culture of Modernity - Charles Taylor (HK/KH)

In a much earlier post, I put up a chapter from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's excellent work, Sources of the Self. I have chosen another chapter to put on line for you, which I think is particularly interesting and useful, from a literary point of view. It comes in the middle of a long enquiry into the evolution of a sense of self, from the Middle Ages to this point in his study: the eighteenth century. So it might not be fully understandable at the outset. Be patient, it is a good read! And Taylor has the virtue of being clear and intellectually integral.

His approach here is quite literary, because he refers to the growing trend and development of the novel at this time, particularly in Britain, but with references to France, for example Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. He mentions Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), two epistolary novels (a fashionable form at the time) by Samuel Richardson, and of course Daniel Defoe's works, which all embodied the new sense of importance given to 'sentiment', and the moral value of 'noble and good' sentiment within the context of relationship, especially marriage. It was also the time in which greater validity was given to childhood, as a distinct period in life. We can see future elements of Romanticism in embryonic form.

Upmost in this thinking is the growth of the private sphere, along with the importance given to 'the ordinary life', all of which we now take for granted. He articulates this as a major shift from 'archetypal' vision to the subject being the locus of meaning, particularly in its quality of instrumental, reasoning subject. The new understanding replaces the traditional cosmology based on hierarchy. Whereas before (and we can see this in Shakespeare) Nature corresponded to and found an echo in human being through a cosmology structured around hierarchies which could be disrupted, now what counts is the effect Nature has on us, the locus of feeling, and the way it reflects our feelings, our mood. This developed over a long period, and the novel, with its attention to the detail of ordinary life, expressed and reinforced this.

You will find the chapter by clicking on the link below:

Owen Barfield on poetic language (Kh/HK)

Here are some interesting thoughts by Owen Barfield, friend of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and one of the Inklings. This chapter, ‘Language and Poetry’, comes from his major, highly influential work Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning.

Barfield here considers the stages through which poetry and poetic vision have passed, and the accompanying changes in language and thought. He begins, in a necessarily simplistic way, with the ‘concrete vocabulary’ of the world’s first mythologies, to Greek mythology as vector of meaning alongside living Nature, to the language of modernity. 

Particularly interesting are his remarks on the ancient Greek language of Homer being ‘looser’ than our more usual ‘architectural’ linguistic and poetic forms: ‘a living, muscular organism rather than as a structure...’. This move from an ‘organic’, ‘fluid’ type of poetry to the ‘architectural’ he places more or less in English from the seventeenth century onwards, for instance in Milton and the Metaphysicals, not so much in Chaucer or Shakespeare. The more ‘fluid’ types of verse are made for reciting, the more ‘architectural’, for reading, for seeing on the page.

He draws out the inherent tension between the ‘rational’ and the ‘poetic’ in the history of poetic utterance; the ‘rational, abstracting, formal principle’ and the ‘primal flow of meaning’. It is surely in a great poet like Shakespeare that we find the perfect balance; the great intelligence of an organising principle working with the ‘flow’ of life.

Compare the extracts of Shakespeare we have studied with Milton or John Donne, for example. The seventeenth century really is a watershed. Think of Milton's highly elaborate poetic architecture, the latinate syntax. I think in the twentieth century T. S. Eliot gave much thought to this, and brought back in a modern way the organic forms of poetic utterance in the context of Modernism.

Click here to download the chapter in pdf format:

'Fell' - let's look at a word

It is always healthy and interesting to stop for a second and look at a word. On this blog there are several posts on words (if you look at the categories on the left), on their origins, their etymology. When you start looking, you can see how each word is special, whereas before, probably, we just skimmed over it (as we only can most of the time). But each word is exciting, even the most apparently ordinary, and contains a whole history. 

In the post below I mentioned the 'fells' of Cumbria, a beautiful part of North West England which I recommend for anyone who likes walking, hiking and the great outdoors. 

So, apart from being the preterit of the verb to fall, what does fell mean, and where does today's word come from if it's a noun? 

This is what an etymological dictionary tells us, as we peer through the mists of time...:

BBC Radio 4: 'Yeats and Mysticism'

BBC broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg explores the strange and mystical world of the poet W B Yeats.

You will find the link below to the 2002 episode of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on Yeats. Yeats, one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, was naturally drawn to many sources of spiritual knowledge, all of which nourished his extraordinary verse. We don't have to "believe" in these things of course, but they are part of him, and his complex character and deep soul.

Reading a novel by Patrick Modiano today, I came across a quotation ('I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake') from one of Yeats' most celebrated and powerful poems. Here it is, with the following lines. This is part of a much bigger poem. It is both apocalyptic in its images, and immensely gentle and loving:

He Bids His Love Be At Peace

I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:
O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

Click on the link below to listen to the BBC Radio podcast:

Review of Achill: The Island - by John F. Deane

There are still many very good poets writing today. One of my favourites is the Irishman John F. Deane, who is greatly influenced by Kathleen Raine herself, and by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, the Romantics, and many more besides. I would highly recommend this beautiful collection inspired by his island of birth, off the coast of Ireland. It contains twenty-five remarkable poems, illustrated by John Behan.

A Tribute to Kathleen Raine, her work and vision - Paris, March 2021

We are organising an international event around the work of the poet Kathleen Raine which will take place in Paris in March 2021. It will include guest speakers from France and abroad, talks on her poetry, her essays and autobiographies, her work on Yeats and Blake and other poets, as well as "tables rondes" on translations of her work into French and the Temenos Academy, which she founded in the early nineteen nineties. Here are the links to the Sorbonne pages for further information:

The Art of English - Fowler & Fowler

There is a strange idea around that English is somehow "easy", and that most people on Earth speak it, or at least "get by", which is apparently all you need in our globalised world of communication...

Because of historical events, it is true that English has spread enormously, aided by the British Empire followed by post-war American global domination. The downside to this is a certain cultural hegemony, a sort of globish, which helps trade and easy travel perhaps, but there must surely be more to communication, to the infinite richness of English, than trade, profit and mere usefulness.

English is above all beautiful, by its very nature. And certainly not easy! The great writers have risen to the challenge of English, and so in our way should we. It has its rules, its quirks and eccentricities. It has its nature, which has shifted over the centuries, and continues to shift. I think we need to live closely with its nature, "fit into it", like a pair of shoes, let it tell us what is best.

What makes for "good English"?

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:

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: