The Art of Poetry: final thoughts....

I find Poetry difficult to understand. It really is a personal interpretation of the lines which are affected by your own life experiences and understandings. So is there ever a 'wrong' interpretaton?

Poetry is about expression and is an opportunity to delve into yourself and explore your feelings and emotions.

Andre Breton, 1924, photo booth shot.


Recently I visited the Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. It was here that I learned that this artistic movement was founded by a French writer and poet; André Breton. André Breton decided (along with the Dadaists) that rational thought was at fault for the world’s problems and that change could only come about through the subconscious mind.

The one thing I now really appreciate about poetry is its effect upon Visual Art and vise-versa. Being an Visual Arts student this subject has helped to further my knowledge and understanding abut the different eras; from Romantic to Contemporary.

Throughout the blog I have included some pictures of art that have helped me to better understand my research on these periods from a Visual Arts perspective.

I am also currently completing my Bachelor of Learning Management and I have also found this very uselful as a cross curricular reference that I can incorporate in my Visual Arts and English lesson plans.

Why am I not a Painter?



'Sardines', Michael Goldburg, 1955, inspired O'Hara's 'Orange'.

Many contemporary poems in this week's selection seem to focus on concerns (eg the essential self) and forms (eg the sonnet, the elegy) which pre-date modernism. Discuss drawing on a number of poems/poets.
O'Hara's work is a first person narrative poem, conversational and casual in tone. "Why I Am Not a Painter (1957)," in fact, like many of O'Hara's poems, reads as if O'Hara had simply improvised it off the top of his head. Inspiration from the arts- visual arts.

"Why am I not a Painter" utube link.

Koch’s ‘Permanently (1961)’ is the same in that it uses a narrative, conversational and casual tone. It is quite quirky, drawing inspiration from the arts- literature.

A Wilbur poem is insightful and enjoyable, humorous and touching. He avoids any grand historical or hysterical private adventures in his poems, believing that the lyric poem was never intended to bear such weight. “Junk” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, each line is alliterated and broken into two halves, the second of which is indented, making each full line two-tiered.

Howard Nemerov has a reputation for his poems being witty and playful in their form.

Reference:

thecourthostess, 2010, "Why am I not a Painter", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3LtDb0Jgik

Alec Derwent Hope, 'Australia', published 1972.

'Death of Constable Scanlon', Sidney Nolan, 1946, ripolin on board.

Hope's ‘Australia’ is characterised by the kind of counter-nationalistic ambivalence seen in the poetry of E. E. Cummings ‘next to of course god America I’ or Lawrence's ‘The English Are So Nice!’. Discuss.

A D Hope ‘Australia’.
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: ‘we live’ but ‘we survive’,
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

And her five cities, like five teaming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.

Hope’s ‘Australia’ is in opposition to the devotion to the interest of Australian as a culture and nation. In the first five stanzas, his description of the land is ‘drab, desolate, endless, worn away, an empty dying earth with teaming sores for cities populated by criminal second hand Europeans’.
He creates an image of an old country, ‘a woman beyond her change of life’ with a ‘dry womb’, a land in which you cannot live but merely survive. He calls Australia’s people stupid and devoid of culture. He is condemning the state of Australia’s modern culture. This description is horrible, however he then opposes the feelings and attitudes towards Australia in the last two stanzas, admitting he turns ‘gladly’ away from the modern thoughts of the ‘chattering cultured apes’ from ‘civilisation over there’ (the cities dotted along Australia’s coastline). This juxtaposition is a common feature of satirical writing, of which Hope is best known for. His initial negative descriptions of Australia’s features are in fact the very things that the artist approves of. Hope’s link to Modernist poetry is in his satirical slant, its greater purpose to draw attention to shame individuals and society into improvement; to be proud of our poetry, music, literature, song and dance, our people, climate, vastness and to build a culture that fits this uniqueness.

T.S. Elliot & Ezra Pound, 1920's.



Piet Mondrian, Gray Tree, 1912.

Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called ‘luminous details’, Pound’s Ideogrammic method of comparing concrete instances to express an abstraction, such as representing the abstract concept of ‘red’ with concrete imagery of ‘rose’ or, ‘cherry’, is similar to Cubism’s manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.





Compare and contrast two poets from the Modernist Era.

Similar subject in title only, both poems are considered to mark the beginning of their careers as influential poets. Both poets are American born however moved to Britain and became known as the forefathers of the Modernist poetry movement. Many art lovers in London in the 1910s were interested in art that was outwardly attractive but not deeply beautiful, all style and no content, immediately pleasing but not enduringly rewarding, and both of these poems seems to deal with the poets ‘growing up’ and profound changes in their poetry due to world events (WW1). They focused less on imagery (Romantic era) and more on clear sharp language to present values in directness, presentation and economy of language. Both poets have experimented with poetic forms throughout the structure of their poems, which is quintessential to the poetry of the Modernists and the Imagists.

T. S. Eliot: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 1920.
· Dramatic monologue.
· A stream of consciousness.
· Seems to be full of frustration- sexual, life, society.
· Not sure who the author is talking to (someone else or himself?).
· A theme of time span throughout the poem- a single day.

Ezra Pound: 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', 1920.
· Autobiography.
· Deals with large time period.

'The Second Coming', William Butler Yeats, 1919.



Life in the Gyre, Valerie O'Flynn, 1996.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


This poem confuses me as it seems that there is no real iambic pentameter with a lose meter. I find it hard to spot anything that rhymes and it feels violent. What are the things that are ‘falling apart; the centre cannot hold’? I am guessing that it is the state of the world and I take the happening of World War 1 into consideration here- the world did fall apart. ‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world’ I link to the falcon out of hearing of its falconer and on its own flight path. I am not sure what the falcon might be a metaphor for; maybe human kind or religion or the state of the world?

'The Scholar Gypsy', Matthew Arnold, 1853.

George Cole, Harvest Rest, 1865.

Late Romantic poets still rely heavily on nostalgia, but they long for things very different from their Romantic forefathers. Discuss using Matthew Arnold's ‘The Scholar-Gypsy’ as a base.
The late Romantics were not only longing for nostalgia, but also a return to what was important to them: imagination, creativity, nature. Arnold’s poem is heavily based upon a nostalgic story about a scholar who takes up with a band of gypsies to learn all he can about the ancient art of traditional knowledge based around the power of imagination. Throughout the poem he accounts the rumours that the Gypsy Scholar is seen from time to time in the area. It makes me believe that the Gypsy Scholar is a metaphor for traditional knowledge unappreciated by many in the full swing of the Industrial Revolution, and that perhaps the ‘glimpses’ of him is a suggestion of hope that the respect and passing down of traditional knowledge/imagination has not been lost. Arnold imagines the Gypsy Scholar as a shadowy figure, a nice description of the view of traditional knowledge/imagination, even claiming to have seen it once himself. He entertains the thought of the Gypsy Scholar’s still being alive after two centuries, but shakes off the thought. He cannot of died. This is a hopeful statement where the poet reveals his belief that imagination is still alive, waiting to be found.

'To Autumn', John Keats, 1820.

William James Neatby, Illistration for 'To Autumn' 1899.

Keats' poem ‘To Autumn’ constitutes song of praise which is some senses is an exemplar of the Romantic obsession with nature. Discuss using Keats' poem as a springboard.
 'To Autumn' describes the life span of the season, and of the day. The first stanza describes the poet's delight of the sights he is seeing while on a walk of this year's season's warmth and 'fruitfulness' through beautiful descriptions of vines and tree's branches bending with the weight of their fruit, and busy bees still stock piling pollen from late blooming summer flowers; 'And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells'. The day begins with a mist and a 'maturing sun' and the morning continues with the business of the bees.


The second stanza sees Keats personify the season having autumn sitting carelessly, with soft hair and sleeping and giving it the feeling of drowsiness; 'Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies...' The feeling of tiredness is personified in autumn which indicates that the season and the work day is drawing to a close through the 'last oozing' of the cider of the day; 'Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours'.


The 'soft dying day' is described in the third stanza using the sense of hearing to describe the sounds of evening; 'wailful choir the small gnats mourn', 'Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft, The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies', and sight in the rosy hue cast over the plains from a sunset.


Keats was greatly concerned with translating the emotive responses of the individual's experiences (Lombardi, 2011). He searched for awe-inspiring real moments, as well as the beauty found in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world, which is exemplified in 'To Autumn'. The poem is a unique experience: a day, which is also a part of a larger experience: life. The Romantics were drawn to the ballad and to lyrical poetry, particularly the classic ode (poetic pieces performed and accompanied by symphonic orchestras), because of their natural sing-song nature as a means to express their theories of literature and life, even developing their own romantic meditative ode (Masterworks of British Literature, 2010).



Lombardi, E 2011, Romantic Period: where did it all begin?, viewed 28th August 2011, http://classiclit.about.com/od/britishromantics/a/aa_britromantic.htm


Masterworks of British Literature 2010, ‘John Keats: high Romantic and ode on a Grecian urn’, viewed 28 August 2011, http://masterworksbritlit.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/john-keats-high-romantic-and-ode-on-a-grecian-urn/