Thursday Poem: Walt Whitman

Facing West From California’s Shores

Facing west, from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western Sea—the circle almost circled;
For, starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia—from the north—from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south—from the flowery peninsulas, and the spice islands;
Long having wander’d since—round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again—very pleas’d and joyous;
(But where is what I started for, so long ago? And why it is yet unfound?)

-Walt Whitman

Sunday Poem-W.B. Yeats: When You Are Old

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, 
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, 
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 
And loved your beauty with love false or true, 
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars, 
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled 
And paced upon the mountains overhead 
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

-WIlliam Butler Yeats

From The Boston Globe: Literature Needs To Embrace Science

Full article here.

The patient is etherised upon a table…or so suggests our author. It’s now time:

“…[to] spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and “market share” they have lost to the sciences.”

Copy “science” and regain “market share?”

“So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.”

Well, this should come as no surprise. Shakespeare and Melville were artists. Studying them gives pleasure, enhancing linguistic expression and understanding within the scope of their creative imaginations. I suspect most literature students want to be great artists as well.

The scientists are…well…doing science.

As Camille Paglia has pointed out, many literature departments have gone the way of cultural relativism.  Too often do they confuse literature with politics and current thinking.  As a result, they’re particularly aimless right now…

…with consequences for all of us.

Market-share?

See Also: How To Study Literature: M.H. Abrams In The Chronicle Of Higher Ed… Should You Bother To Get A Liberal Arts Education? Allan Bloom, Camille Paglia and Anthony Kronman.

by kinkazzo  Poor Old Harold Bloom

Addition: Andrew Sullivan has more here with a link to Literary Kicks here. 

 

Highbrow Timewaster

1.  American poet Wallace Stevens looks at clouds:

On The Manner Of Addressing Clouds

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

2.  Which might remind you of Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold. 

3.  Which could possibly remind you of this disturbing eccelesiastical fashion show from Fellini’s Roma:

4.  Which might perhaps remind you of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor Scene  from the Brothers Karamazov.

which might remind you of…

…Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is Dead?  Christianity is empty in the middle?  21st century art needs some new ideas?

A non-existent prize for your best suggestion.

Charles Murray In The New Criterion: The Age Of Educational Romanticism

Full post here.

A few key quotes:

“The first strand in explaining educational romanticism is a mythic image of the good old days when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three R’s.”

“When I was your age we walked uphill both ways…” Is that going anywhere?

“The second strand in explaining educational romanticism is the periodic discovery of magic bullets for raising classroom performance.

and…

“The third and probably most powerful strand for explaining educational romanticism in the last quarter-century has been Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, introduced in Frames of Mind (1983).”

Gardner’s book here.

On the positive side: Charles Murray has stood for the IQ test actually measuring something and reminding us that the black/white achievement gap is statistically valid…He has become an active and important educational reformer, wresting it away from people and ideas who can do more harm than good.

On the negative side: I would question whether or not Murray achieves this criticism by adhering to certain libertarian political principles…sometimes even adhering to current political thinking. As an active reformer, what is the endgame? Politics? Education?

See Also: Race and IQ: Malcolm Gladwell On The Flynn Effect and since when did romanticism become a bad word?: Roger Sandall: Marveling At The Aborigines, But Not Really Helping?

 by rsmoffat

Tuesday Poem–Robert Frost: Dust Of Snow

Dust Of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

-Robert Frost

Monday Poem: Walt Whitman

When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. 

-Walt Whitman

Addition: The Chronicle Of Higher Education has a piece about Whitman.  The old poet-prophet theme.

Friday Poem: Nantucket By William Carlos Williams

Nantucket

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains—
Smell of cleanliness—

Sunshine of late afternoon—
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying— And the
immaculate white bed

-William Carlos Williams 

Tuesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Of Mere Being

Of Mere Being 

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

-Wallace Stevens

I admire him for going to the edge of his song and looking out, and down; and this giving of himself.

But maybe that’s not all there is to it…

Lunar Eclipse And A Wednesday Poem: Matthew Arnold

Tonight, the lunar eclipse happened between 7:01 PST and 7:51 PST here in Seattle, and fortunately for us, it was a clear night.  In the penumbra of the earth’s shadow, there was just some darkening, but then the moon appeared inky black in direct shadow, and an overall reddish color for a few hours.    

Here’s a NASA page, which includes some great photos. 

For some reason I was reminded of a Matthew Arnold poem (which barely mentions the moon, and now that I look it, mentions a love, which is creepy in this context) as I stood in wonder and talked with a Muslim friend, who kept suggesting that such events were foreseen in the Koran.  Honestly, I was thinking of gravity, and the simplicity and depth of those laws.   It’s a strange life, sometimes. 

Dover Beach 

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-Matthew Arnold