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
12 - Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
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
Modern surrealism, starting with Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the word back in 1917, usually promises more than it delivers. If the promise, to quote André Breton's surrealist manifesto, is art and poetry full of “previously neglected forms of association,” brimming with magic, leaps beyond reason, and hallucinations, the delivery, more often than not, is either trite or incomprehensible. “Automatic writing,” another “method” favored by some surrealists, frequently combines perfectly trivial insights with failed grammar. These lapses are more apparent in surrealist poetry than in the painting, where the technical mastery of the artist— Max Ernst, say, or Duchamp or Dalí or Klee— plus sheer intelligence and wit, may manage to steer what could be merely puzzling away from the totally private, the brutally introverted, the adolescent. In surrealism, the danger always matches the invitation. On the one hand, a dull talent may produce art or poetry that is pure showbiz dazzle, and about as powerful in the end as the timid Wizard of Oz, a charming knave full of bemused self- pity. On the other, there are Bosch and Rimbaud to be considered, geniuses anticipating surrealism, who invented realms of color, energy and cleverness in which the subconscious plays with its torments and finds freedoms undreamed of in Horatio's philosophy, in which the miraculous “more” of things, their special mystery, appears in marvelous new ways.
Plainly too, as in any art that focuses exclusively on the “self,” an imagined self really, the attitudes of the surrealist artist, his attitudes toward himself, determine the range and value of the art. This is not the case with other sorts of artists, who may use the startling, bizarre paradoxes of surrealism as possibilities, while remaining committed to reason. Shakespeare's attitudes toward himself play no role in his writings. Dante's despair, at the beginning of the Inferno, is cushioned by faith in God and faith in poetry. Whitman's celebration of himself is really a celebration of everyone else. Emily Dickinson allows her absolute trust in the discipline of the quatrain form, in which she nearly always writes, to transmute her private griefs into the gold of a public vision, and her hopefulness into an idea of the sublime, reaching far beyond herself. Dylan Thomas, at his surrealistic best, loses himself entirely in his devotion to the magic of words and the English language.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 101 - 104Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020