Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
16 - Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
Summary
The individual, even the concept of the individual, the notion that individuals even exist, has been under fresh attack for at least the past 20 years. Psychologists worshipping at the shrines of Lacan and Derrida, and deconstructionists attempting to argue that literature is simply an expression of ideology, dispute the existence of authors as well. Shakespeare is not really Shakespeare. He is a collection of social forces. The old wrangle over whether Shakespeare's plays were not in fact written by Christopher Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth is thus resolved with delicious perversity: no one wrote Shakespeare's plays at all. Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth could not have written them because they too did not exist. In fact Shakespeare's plays are not plays. They are texts, or artifacts, or discourses— social impulses mysteriously articulated through ghostly human figures that merely called themselves Shakespeare or Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth. Sitting at shaky, candlelit desks, these shivering apparitions allowed the ideologies of their day, and occasional critiques of them, to distill their ghostly powers through their nonexistent shimmering bones.
Genius too is denied. All men and women are presumed to be equal, not only before the law but in all possible abilities, with the differences that clearly arise among them described as purely social in origin. To maintain this bizarre idea, a great many facts are conveniently ignored. When it is claimed, for instance, that both Darwin and Wallace discovered evolution, it is forgotten or ignored that only Darwin offered the proof of evolution and laid bare its actual process— a scientifically crucial point. When it is urged that had not Newton discovered the law of gravity and the presence of colors in beams of light, someone else would have done so, it is blithely ignored that no one but Newton did so, and this after millions of years of human development. Einstein's and Max Planck's discoveries of the relations of mass to energy and of quantum mechanics are ignored as unique contributions to human knowledge, with no evidence to show that without these two scientists others would have made the same discoveries. But could anyone but Joseph Conrad have written Joseph Conrad's novels? Could anyone but Langston Hughes have written Langston Hughes's poetry? Could anyone but Sylvia Plath have written Sylvia Plath's poems? Do we not all have different fingerprints? Or voiceprints? Or genetic “fingerprints”?
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- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 117 - 122Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020