from Robert Motherwell's 'Elegy for the Spanish Republic' Series (mid-century)

Robert Motherwell, series paintings 'Elegy for the Spanish Republic'

Dylan Thomas published this poem in 1946 and in it, we can see the same linguistic disjunctions and manipulations that Valery says are really the charge of the poet who wishes his language to 'dance' as opposed to 'walk' like prose. We also see the same suspension of the natural, the futility of human thought and action, and the objectivity and lack of pathos in nature -- a throw back to the Naturalists at the turn of the century. But here we also see the poet writing the futile self, the self purposely making himself inert, impotent, calm in the face of rage. He will not 'blaspheme down the stations of the breath/With any further/Elegy of Innocence and youth.' Does nature, itself, become emblematic of mourning here? Is there a transitional event that allows the speaker to transcend what 'was' to what 'is' and does what 'is' have some consequence in the life, the attitude, the vitality of the speaker as he gropes to understand the world after this transition, after the elegaic event? There is, of course, 'the futility of the water' but doesn't this futility also reflect the futility of the speaker? Lodged in nature, do we finally see death as the way we become part of a continuum? Is the moment the speaker enters ' the round/Zion of the water bead/And the synagogue of corn' mark that moment where, contrary to the Naturalists, the 'I' exists within a subtle heaven of mundane, everyday things? And does the child, who resides now 'with the first dead' and who is 'Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,/Secret by the unmourning water' find some absolute being-ness in this forever-ness of her death? Does this speaker appear trapped within the transitional moment, unable to move past it (as we've revisited in some of the work of Fritz Goldberg, Emanuel, Celan, and Char-- even Valery who speaks of the poet's power of manipulation within the context of the futility of that act) or is this speaker imagining the 'now' after transition and coming to understand the present as a post-lapsarian reality to which he must become accustomed, to which he needs to find his own way of living, and going on? Tell me about it ...

Stein, Cubism, and (Un)Defined Definition

Stein's work on "Composition as Explanation" posits, among other things, that composition is fluid and constant, that it is a process that occurs not within the writer or artist exclusively, but in every person, every day, as images and thoughts intersect, as the world flows into the mind and the mind makes sense of the world.

Her ideas were very much in a continuum as well, influenced not only by her friends who came to her famous Paris Salon, but of the changing world around her. For Stein, environment itself was the basis for composition as we are unable to separate ourselves from the involuntary interpretation of our surrounding(s).

Additional Notes and Links on the Elegy

Poetic Form, Elegy, and Duende:

The elegy began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is traditionally written in response to the death of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy: the epitaph is very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose.

The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace. These three stages can be seen in W. H. Auden’s classic "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" .

Other well-known elegies include "Fugue of Death" by Paul Celan, written for victims of the Holocaust, and "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, written for President Abraham Lincoln.

For Lorca's essay on Duende, which constitutes a use of elegiac tone to underscore the 'song' of lyric, see the inclusion of this essay in our course reader, or find an online version here.

Some of the images Lorca evokes in the essay on Duende are Descartes' Nude Descending a Staircase, Rousseau's Apollinaire and His Muse, the work of Goya (which is interesting considering his own descent into the 'grays' Lorca speaks of from a bright and optimistic palette in earlier work such as La Vendimia), St. John of the Cross (here, Dali's depiction), the images as well as the spirit of Flamenco, English paintings of roses (most likely 19th century), the work of El Greco, the work of Antonello da Messina, the work of Masolino da Panicale, and the work of Filippo Lippi.

Many modern elegies have been written not out of a sense of personal grief, but rather a broad feeling of loss and metaphysical sadness. A famous example is the mournful series of ten poems in Duino Elegies, by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As Rilke says in the First Elegy:

For beauty is nothing but / the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure

Other works that can be considered elegiac in the broader sense are James Merrill’s monumental The Changing Light at Sandover, Robert Lowell’s "For the Union Dead," Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern, and the work of Czeslaw Milosz, which often laments the modern cruelties he witnessed in Europe.

Elegy also very often crosses over into the Eros poem, the Love poem, and vice versa. We'll discuss some of these instances in class.

Guston in Grasmere: The Poem-Pictures

... misunderstood and castigated by the art world, he sought the company of writers and poets, amongst them his Woodstock neighbour, Philip Roth and the poets Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, William Corbett, Stanley Kunitz, and Guston's wife, Musa McKim. From these friendships came an astounding series of collaborations: the result was not illustrated poetry, but a hybrid art-form of intermingled words and mysterious images, which were called 'poem-pictures ...

from
Dove Cottage: Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery

Additional Reader Links:

Paul Celan
Fugue of Death

Bernadette Mayer
Ode on Periods

Bruce Weigl
Home

Alice Fulton
Fierce Girl Playing Hopscotch

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to the West Wind

Online Readings and Recordings

Online Readings:

Essays:
American Poetry in the New Century, John Barr (canon formation)

Marjorie Perloff, from RADICAL ARTIFICE: "cage: chance: change"

Lives of the Poets: rodrigo Toscano, Jason Boog (labor and activism)

Beat America: What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac,
and Allen Ginsberg?, Aram Saroyan

Sound Poetry - A Survey, Steve McCaffery

The Great Greek Lyric Poets (Antiquity)

Greek Lyric

Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tradition)

Charles Baudelaire/Arthur Rimbaud
Baudelaire
Rimbaud “Illuminations”

Federico Garcia Lorca (Deep Song)
Gacela of the Dark Death

Rene Char
“René Char - Resistance in Every Way”
Collected Poems of Rene Char

W.S. Merwin
Thanks, On the Subject of Poetry, Yesterday

Benjamin Saltman
The Deck

Neelofer (Contemporary Performance, British)
Street Magic, White Doves, plus more

Harry Owen (Contemporary Performance British)
Nibbling, Insecticide

The Morris Quinlan Experience
In the Beginning