/lit/ - Literature

>>15426861

A lesser poet would have clung to one or two chief discourses: “Man, once born onto the earth, crawls to maturity, but at that very moment falls, finding his strength failing him”; or “Our sun, once in its dawn of light, ascends to its zenith, whereupon crooked eclipses obscure it.” The inertial tendency of language to remain within the discourse-category into which it has first launched itself seems grandly abrogated by Shakespeare. Yet we know he was aware of that inertial tendency because he exploited it magisterially; every time a discourse shifts, it is (he lets us know) because the mind has shifted its angle of vision. Unpacked, the three lines above from sonnet 60 show us that the speaker first thinks of a child’s horoscope, cast at birth; then he thinks of dawn as an image for the beginning of human life, because the life-span seems but a day; then he reverts to the biological reality of the crawling infant; then he likens the human being to a king (a dauphin perhaps in adolescence, but crowned when he reaches maturity); then (knowing the necessity of human fate) he leaves the image of a king behind (since the uncrowning of a king is contingent—on, say, a revolution—but death is a necessary event) and returns to the natural world. We assume the speaker will predict, as his emblem of necessity (as he does in 73), the darkness of night overtaking the sun that rose at dawn; but instead, feeling the “wrongness” of death’s striking down a human being just at maturity, the poet shows nature in its “wicked” guise, as the eclipse “wrongfully” obscuring the sun in the “glory” of his noon. Yet, remembering how death is not without struggle, the speaker shows the man being “fought against,” not simply blotted out, by the dark. If we do not see each of these shifts in discourse as evidence of a change of mental direction by the speaker, and seek the motivation for each change of direction, we will not participate in the activity of the poem as its surface instructs us to do.”

See pages 31 to 37:

https://engleskaknjizevnostodrenesansedoneoklasicizma.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/sonnets.pdf

W.H Auden on writing poetry:

"To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish."

Derek Walcott sobre poesia:

"Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which seems as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past"

>>15426937

>>15426952

>>15426961

This is from “The Poetry of Shakespeare’s Plays”, by F.E. Halliday.

>>15427034
>namedrops his own theatre
>critic misses it
just lol

This is from James Wood's essay on 'The Road.' I edited it a bit for the main points, but it's wonderful summary of his style, just laid out plain and simple.
>McCarthy’s prose combines three registers ... He has his painstaking minimalism ...
>The second register is the one familiar to readers of 'Blood Meridian' or 'Suttree', and again seems somewhat Conradian. Hard detail and a fine eye is combined with exquisite, gnarled, slightly antique (and even slightly clumsy or heavy) lyricism. It ought not to work, and sometimes it does not. But many of its effects are beautiful--and not only beautiful, but powerfully efficient as poetry.
>When McCarthy is writing at his best, he does indeed belong in the company of the American masters. In his best pages one can hear Melville and Lawrence, Conrad and Hardy.
>Yet McCarthy’s third register is more problematic. He is an American ham. When critics laud him for being biblical, they are hearing sounds that are more often than not merely antiquarian, a kind of vatic histrionic groping, in which the prose plumes itself up and flourishes an ostentatiously obsolete lexicon. Blood Fustian, this style might be called.
>Still, as in Hardy and Conrad, who were both at times terrible writers, there is a sincerity, an earnestness, in McCarthy’s vaudevillian mode that softens the clumsiness, and turns the prose into a kind of awkward secret message from the writer.

>>15427034
jc that is outdated i hope you are not using that for anything other than critical historiography

>>15427270
Those two pages do not necessarily represent everything the critic can say or knows about those lines.

>>15427330

I didn’t understand your post.

>>15427330

What’s “jc”?

>You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.

>>15427922
jordan ceterson

The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays, by B Ifor Evans.

>>15427922
>>15427785
It means Jesus Christ. That criticism is outdated and wouldn't really be acceptable by todays standards. Im not saying it's bad or wrong, but it reeks of a critic educated by Richard's Practical Criticism, wouldn't be surprised if the author went to cambridge in the late 20's. Since New Historicism, ideas about (especially older) texts tend to be based much more in historical research etc etc. I'm not saying 'this way is better' (i could never stand some of my supervisors who seemed to worship Greenblatt), but you would be mocked for suggesting these ideas in this way nowadays, especially with the research on contemporary productions etc. I might suggest Dillon's Shakespeare and the Staging Of English history. It expands upon some of the ideas presented here, but in a more thorough way. Again, not saying the critic you posted is bad or wrong, it's just not very wise to base all of your readings of such an important author on older criticism.