Poems By Robert Frost And William Carlos Williams-The Poet And The Crowd: Sunday Timewaster

Maybe I’m just confusing two human pursuits (poetry and politics), and doing justice to neither.  

I’d love to hear some comments though:

Neither Far Out Nor In Deep:

The people along the sand 
All turn and look one way. 
They turn their back on the land. 
They look at the sea all day. 

As long as it takes to pass 
A ship keeps raising its hull; 
The wetter ground like glass 
Reflects a standing gull. 

The land may vary more; 
But wherever the truth may be— 
The water comes ashore, 
And the people look at the sea. 

They cannot look out far. 
They cannot look in deep. 
But when was that ever a bar 
To any watch they keep

-Robert Frost

And now what about going to a baseball game, that fairly individualistic, uniquely American (descended from cricket), and usefully civilizing (fun) sport?:  William Carlos Williams focuses on the crowd:

“The Crowd at the Ball Game”

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty
the eternal -

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut —

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —

The Jew gets it straight – it
is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly —

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

————————————————————-

Are we witnessing a certain kind of nihilistic influence on Williams here (a progression from Schopenhauer’s will to Nietzsche’s will to power to most 20th century art?) that we don’t see in Frost?  Aside from the meter and rhyme, do you like one poem more than the other?

I’ll just put up some quotes I’ve put up twice before:

“Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.”

-Abraham Lincoln

See Also On This Site:  Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’   Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

Repost-Giordano Bruno In The New Yorker: The Forbidden World By Joan Acocella

Full review here.

Where mysticism, metaphysics and heresy meet?

“In this system, there were three main ideas:

“heliocentrism”

“an infinite cosmos, consisting of innumerable heliocentric worlds”…

and…

“that the universe was a vast, wheeling, unknowable thing, and that all theories about it, including his own, were not descriptions but merely approaches—“models,” as we would call them today.“

None of his ideas were completely original, apparently, but they were advanced, and woven into a metaphysical system that directly challenged chruch doctrine.  The church was not pleased.  In her review, Acocella also claims:

“Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme…“

This also seems to have contributed to the church’s decision to burn him at the stake. 

See Also:  A poem about Bruno by American poet Heather McHugh: What He Thought by Heather McHugh

More Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘What Should Colleges Teach-Part 3′

Full post here.

Perhaps it’s necessary to teach (drill?) a series of highly abstract rules that deepen a student’s understanding of his/her own language?
Fish points out:

“By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all“ 

 There’s a lot of truth to this.  Fish, of course, goes after the usual targets:  The people who have put ideology above what may be higher goals:

‘“We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.”’  

 Yet, how do you pursue those higher goals?  Aren’t there the forces of excessive egalitarianism and individualism at work here as well?(we’re still a young, fairly uncivilized nation with a lot of open space).  

Fish’s answer is pedagogical:

“You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.“  

————————————————–

As a side note, a commenter (the 3rd comment) notes:

“Your arguments make sense, if one wants to become a secretary. But if I want to write well, then being forced to write by the rules destroys my creativity just as much if not more than what it teaches me.” 

 Yet, maybe housing creative writing in universities doesn’t help creativity much either.

See Also On This Site:  Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Fish suggested keeping politics out of academia during the Ward Churchill affair:  From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux

Does it have to be political, or is that putting the cart before the horse?  Martha Nussbaum tried to tackle the humanities problem a while back: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

From The NY Times Via A & L Daily: Helen Vendler On Wallace Stevens ‘The Plain Sense Of Things’

Full review here.

Vendler reviewed John Serio’s new “Selected Poems”  of Wallace Stevens.

“Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future.”

and

“Stevens’s poetry oscillates, throughout his life, between verbal ebullience and New England spareness, between the high rhetoric of England (and of religion) and the “plain sense of things” that he sometimes felt to be more American…”

See Also On This Site:  Trying to stick something against his poems: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man…Friday Poem: Wallace Stevens And A Quote By David Hume

Saturday Poem: From Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird By Wallace Stevens

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

-Wallace Stevens

He was an insurance executive and a very fine poet.

“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.“

Sunday Poem: Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird”

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would sing and be as other birds,
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
is what to make of a diminished thing.

-Robert Frost

Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Full article here:

So what’s lacking in the humanities?  Roger Scruton has some keen insights:

“The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart”

So forget the recent, and rather desperate, attempts to make the humanities into a science  (however…it’s been done before with some success).  Scruton suggests it’s been a long slide for the humanities to arrive where they’ve arrived:

“In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they.”

And now that we’re left with somewhat balkanized and politicized departments of English, these departments have become a target of the political right, dragging many people into a nasty fight that eats up political capital:

“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”

So how to restore the vision? Scruton advises to restore (and not eschew) judgment:

” Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty.”

This is deep insight and I think the better part of Scruton’s thinking in the article comes when he resists his own political (anti multi-cultural, pro-conservative, pro-church of England conservatism) impulses.  Here are the last few lines:

“It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.”

One could argue that this is necessary though how to arrive there is in doubt.

Here’s a quote from George Santayana:

 ”The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”

———————————————————————-

On another note:  Despite the importance of beauty, the refinement of our experiences through poems and prose, the difficult work of cultivating”taste” for ourselves as well providing a rite of passage for our youth:  Aren’t we still attaching the humanities to something else?

We know the humanities will never be a science.  Politics is always in conflict with the arts.   Much philosophy is indifferent to the humanities at best.   In fact, Plato banned them from his republic (good overview here).

One target here may be somewhat political as well:  anti-social constructionism and anti-multiculturalism, though I am speculating.

Just some food for thought.

See Also On This Site:  Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily says the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Martha Nussbaum says the university needs to be defend Socratic reason and still be open to diversity:  From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’ 

Stanley Fish also says keep politics out of academia: From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux…

Scruton again has deep insight, but will Christian religious idealism have to bump heads with Islamic religious idealism?: From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism 

Thanks to iri5

Re-post: Elizabeth Bishop-Chemin De Fer

Chemin De Fer

Alone on the railroad track
I walked with pounding heart.
The ties were too close together
or maybe too far apart.

The scenery was impoverished:
scrub-pine and oak; beyond
its mingled gray-green foliage
I saw the little pond

where the dirty old hermit lives,
lie like an old tear
holding onto its injuries
lucidly year after year.

The hermit shot off his shot-gun
and the tree by his cabin shook.
Over the pond went a ripple
The pet hen went chook-chook.

“Love should be put into action!”
screamed the old hermit.
Across the pond an echo
tried and tried to confirm it.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Is this a reason to love?  Not to love?  Can you give reasons?  and so it echoes….

And what does any of this have to do with the railroad?

Thursday Poem: A Postcard From The Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls, 

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

-Wallace Stevens

A little authoritative and paternal, but a romantic poet. A modernist, brilliant with language but precise in meaning, abstract, somewhat philosophical.  They say he had a deathbed conversion. Here’s another line of his:

“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.“

And then just to frustrate matters more:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

-David Hume

See Also:  Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…and while I may not agree with his conclusions, Denis Dutton knows aesthetics pretty well and philosophy too:  Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

From Bloggingheads: Shakespeare and The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

Full discussion here.

Literature and poetry are deep, and of obvious lasting importance.  Perhaps the current platform upon which great works are read in our universities is lacking…but I also wonder what the direct comparison of literature with the natural laws hopes to achieve?

An ancient debate.

See Also On This Site:  Hasn’t the study of literature already modeled itself on the natural sciences? How To Study Literature: M.H. Abrams In The Chronicle Of Higher Ed

What should a liberal education consist of anyways?:

From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’   Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

An example of where I think the NY Times went wrong: mixing race, current events, politics and literature in the same shallow pan.  Please let works of art be deeper than that:  From The NY Times: A Brief Interview On Toni Morrison’s New Novel.

-Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’