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What is Poetry?. If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing. The poet puts language in danger. --Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space . Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens. Poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

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Page 2: What is Poetry?

What is Poetry?

Every word is a fossil poem. Poet was all written before time was. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Page 3: What is Poetry?

What is Poetry?

If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing. The poet puts language in danger—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Page 4: What is Poetry?

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines, For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough )they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 5: What is Poetry?

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 6: What is Poetry?

[Poetry] is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavors to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. . . . Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose—a train which delivers you at a destination. —T. E. Hulme

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 7: What is Poetry?

A poem is not so much heard as overheard.—John Stuart Mill

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 8: What is Poetry?

I don't believe in a tame poetry. When poetry hears its own name, it runs, flies, swims off for fear of its own life. You can bet your boots on that. Jean Cocteau said a poet rarely bothers about poetry. Does a gardener perfume his roses?—Frank Stanford

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 9: What is Poetry?

[Poetry] gives knowledge of the chaos and confusion of the world by imposing order upon it which leaves it still the chaos and confusion which it really is.—Archibald MacLeish

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 10: What is Poetry?

Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for.—Jean Cocteau

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 11: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

What is Poetry?

Page 12: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

What is Poetry?

Page 13: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

What is Poetry?

Page 14: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.

What is Poetry?

Page 15: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

What is Poetry?

Page 16: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

What is Poetry?

Page 17: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

What is Poetry?

Page 18: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives—if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary. Like light, it adds nothing, except itself.

Page 19: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives—if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary. Like light, it adds nothing, except itself.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

Page 20: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

What is Poetry?

Page 21: What is Poetry?

What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

In books like The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and The Map of Misreading (1975), the legendary American literary critic and theorist Harold Bloom established definitively his influential understanding of what Eliot once deemed “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” According to Bloom, the writer aspiring to a prominent place in history (his own special focus is, of course, directed at poets) must engage in an “antithetical” struggle with antecedent “ancestor texts” in order to establish a new text on the block as a worthy new additions to the canon. Such an individual—deemed by Bloom an “ephebe” (for the ancient Greeks, a callow adolescent, aspiring to membership among adults)—is always “belated,” always coming up against the historical wind of precursors who have already established themselves, always already having accomplished the Herculean task the ephebe must now replicate.

Page 22: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Though inherently “defensive,” the ephebe’s work, according to Bloom, involving as it does the “strong,” valiant establishment of an “illusion of priority,” sets out to confer the misleading impression of originality. The “anxiety of influence” the ephebe experiences necessitates “misprision,” a misreading of the work of the patriarchal predecessor in order to establish a “revisionary space” in which “new” works can live and thrive—and become tomorrow’s ancestor texts, ready now to be contested by tomorrow’s ephebes.

What is Poetry?

Page 23: What is Poetry?

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

So, according to Bloom, if you are Virgil (70-19 B.C.) and want to become the new king of the epic, Homer must be slain (Bloom’s method is very much under the sway of Freud’s ideas on father murder) in order for The Aeneid to be brought into the world and stand on its own two feet.

What is Poetry?