Wrong poetry
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2010.499663
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I'd like to thank Josh Kotin and the Poetry and Poetics Workshop at the University of Chicago who were the first audience for the paper that was revised into this essay, and my friend and colleague Nicholas Royle for his helpful comments on an earlier draft. Notes G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977), p. 35 [translation emended]; Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede (eds), Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980), vol. 9, p. 41. Marx introduces the 'Kleinbürger' in a withering footnote to Das Kapital. Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe [MEGA] (Berlin: Dietz, 1975), II.8 (1989), p. 98. Brecht's famous 'Verfremdungseffekt' is precisely a technique for exposing a too kleinbürgerlich audience to 'die fremde' in Hegel sense. Phenomenology of Spirit. 49; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 56. The famous expression 'way of despair' [Weg der Verzweiflung] is Hegel's graphic epithet for the progress of knowledge towards its goal, that is, towards 'the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself'. Phenomenology of Spirit, 51. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1987), p. 70; Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), vol. 4, p. 78. Cf. Walter Benjamin, 'Experience' in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), vol. 1, p. 4: '…the philistine, you will have noted, only rejoices in every new meaninglessness. He remains in the right'. Adorno, 'Presuppositions. On the occasion of a reading by Hans G. Helms' in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), vol. 2, p. 97. For the history and theory of 'immanent criticism', see Walter Benjamin's early book, in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism [1920]. Selected Writings, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 116–200. Immanent critique is possible, writes Benjamin, 'if there is present in the work a reflection that can unfold itself, absolutize itself, and resolve itself in the medium of art' (pp. 159–160). My point in my comment on Adorno is that Selbsterhaltung and das Rechtbehaltenwollen have the power to eliminate that 'reflection' from the artwork. Phenomenology of Spirit 51, 50; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, pp. 57, 56. Phenomenology of Spirit 49 [translation emended]; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 56. Phenomenology of Spirit 17, 51; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, pp. 25, 57. Emerson uses the phrase in his essay 'The Poet', in the context of a passing rhapsody on the advantages of narcotics and alcohol for poets. Drugs and drink are 'auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space…they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed'. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York, NY: The Library of America, 1983), p. 460. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, in W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds) (Oxford: OUP, 1974), vol. I, p. 139. Marx distinguishes between more easygoing experiences of truth and 'die heiße Leidenschaft der Wahrheit', the hot passion of truth, in his early 'Debates on the Freedom of the Press'. Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), vol. 1, p. 157; MEGA 1.1 (1975), p. 145. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 216–217; Gesammelte Schriften, p. 247. Phenomenology of Spirit. 49; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 56. On shame, cf. John Wilkinson, 'Mouthing Off', The Lyric Touch. Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Cambridge: Salt, 2007), p. 175. 'I've come to believe that shame attaches increasingly to ways of being which resist final translation into objects out there and their manipulation…Shame resides in the remnant, what we have been unable to leave behind or to consume cleanly'. 'The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us'. Minima Moralia, p. 57. J.H. Prynne, Poems, Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2005), p. 307. Minima Moralia, p. 217 [translation emended]. 'The decline of giving is today matched by a hardening against receiving. What this adds up to is the renunciation of happiness itself, and it's this renunciation that alone permits men to cling to their sort of happiness'. The German word here translated as 'renunciation' is Verleugnung. This is Freud's term, too, as Adorno must surely have known. Jephcott's translation of Verleugnung as 'denial' deletes the implicit reference to Freud. On 'real, active men' (as opposed to 'men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived') as the proper subject of a materialist philosophy, see Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, C.J. Arthur (ed.) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), p. 47. Adorno, like Marx before him, has emphatically literalised Hegel's thinking, displacing 'knowledge' from the propositional role of subject and replacing it with 'real, active men'. 'There is no way out of the game of culture; and one's only chance of objectifying the the true nature of the game is to objectify as fully as possible the very operations which one is obliged to use in order to achieve that objectification. De te fabula narratur. The reminder is meant for the reader as well as the sociologist'. We might add: for the artist, too. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 2006) [1st in French, 1979], p. 12. Distinction. 7. One consequence of this view for poets is that clear-eyed or 'materialist' recognition of the social communicative and invidious functions of 'past' poetical forms is not by itself good enough grounds to abandon them, however obnoxious their history of application, just as the abandonment of form is 'nowhere near enough' to a true sublation of it. The imaginary transcendence of the invidious European history of genre and form by a radically democratic and undifferentiated 'writing' believed in by U.S. Language poets is on this view really an instance of sentimental Freudian 'substitution' or Nachfolge. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Thomas Sandler (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1869), vol. I, p. 482 (May 9, 1815). I'm grateful to Ruth Abbott for telling me about this passage, and for all our illuminating conversations about Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads, R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones (eds) (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 71. Cited in Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, John Kerrigan and Jonathan Wordsworth (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 39. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, George Watson (ed.) (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), p. 195. Stephen Maxfield Parrish, '"The Thorn": Wordsworth's Dramatic Monologue' [1st 1957; revised for this collection]. Wordsworth. A Collection of Critical Essays, M.H. Abrams (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 75–84 (77). Helen Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: OUP, 1962 [1950]), pp. 43–44. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 141. James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 168. Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 113. Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence. Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 53. Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, p. 10. The citation is from Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford: OUP, 1963), p. 54. Ricks wrote of Samson Agonistes that it contains phrases 'which ought to be metaphorical', but which are used by Milton 'with a feebleness that keeps them merely words'. The Questioning Presence, p. 58. Wordsworth. A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 83–84. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Ernest de Selincourt (ed.) (Oxford: OUP, 1965 [1944]), vol. II, p. 241. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. I, p. 160. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. I, p. 31. Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth's Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 29. Wordsworth's Philosophic Song, p. 28. Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, p. 39. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory. Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 99. As E.P. Thompson wrote in his brilliant 'Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon', Wordsworth's 'rejection of Godwin was accompanied by a rejection of a mechanical psychology and an abstract enthronement of reason, but not by any rejection of republican ardour'. Power and Consciousness, Conor Cruise O'Brien and William Dean Vanech (eds) (London: University of London Press; New York, NY: New York University Press, 1969), p. 150. Disowned by Memory, p. 94. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. I, p. 139. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Early Years 1787–1805, Ernest de Selincourt (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 355.
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