/lit/ - Literature

>>19391099
>standard narrative
>peppered with esoteric details
Sounds like Bloom, the self-proclaimed Gnostic. Let me guess, you're a Guenon-poster too?

>>19384482
John Ford. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. You can thank me later.

>>19390699
I haven't read that book in over ten years, so in a certain sense it's as if I have never read it. But due to the obscurity of Shakespeare's life it is ridiculous to build these theories, especially the idea Bloom has that Shakespeare somehow invented the modern mind and that it trickled from England into the rest of Europe. The most credible theory I've heard is Foucault (yuck) saying the Third Lateran Council is responsible for that. But go right ahead, read Bloom, then read Greenblatt, then read the Oxford and Bacon theories and whatever other fluff attracts your attention.

As for Bloom himself, the idea he has of a Western Canon is not consistent with the trajectory of the nation states from the Reformation to today. We can speak of an English canon, a French canon, or even a Medieval canon, but there's no such thing as a Western canon unless you begin with the Greeks and end with roughly Chaucer and Dante's generation.

>>19389059
>Secretum Secretorum
>Loke wysely how thou playest or bourdest with thy frende (or other) with thy handes or with thy mouth, for yf thou do hym harme, harme may come to the. With sportyng with handes cometh angre and murdre, whyther it be thy brother or frende. For yf thou hurt hym or wryng his hande, or cast hym downe, or smyte hym otherwyse, it shall greve hym, & shame hym in his mynde, albeit that he be lytell and weyke, for eche in hym selfe counteth hym stronge, bolde and fyers, and yet he wyll prayse hym selfe thoughe he be a cowarde and nought. And yf thou mocke hym, thou shalt spyte hym to the hert, for he wyll thynke that thou dyspysest hym, & that thou reputeth hym at nought. And yf thou mocke hym before people, thou doost hym yet more spyte, & he cometh angre and grete hate, though it be thy brother or other frende. But thou ought to pastyme with fayre wordes, and to shewe goodly auctorytees and reasons to drawe theyr love to the, for by that pastaunce thou mayst come to the goodnesse, love and curteysy of people.

Wow, deep stuff here.

>>19390584
Shakespeare and Chaucer in modern spellings whaaaaaa you gotta go to the sauce for that my dude, even if they do take more effort. There are good hypertexts of the Canterbury Tales if you don't mind reading on the computer. One of my favorite recent discoveries is reading early editions of 17th and 18th century books on archive.org. Reading writers like Daniel Defoe in the original print is tedious at first, but eventually you stop seeing those long s's as f's and get used to the seemingly irregular capitalizations. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a great underrated classic from this era and the way it was printed originally makes it so much more fun to read.

But you have much respect from me for reading what you do considering you're doing a STEM degree. I switched majors later in life to STEM so I understand your pain.

>>19390578
I save audiobooks for walks. That's how I worked through about half of Leaves of Grass. I found him very easy to listen to compared to other poets because if I tuned out for a bit it was not hard to tune back in. Felt strange walking in public and hearing the Calamus poems in public though.

>>19390538
I was gonna suggest what you said here to that other anon. Reading a Fagles translation is much easier than Pope wrt the Classics. Modern translations often just read like versified prose.

>>19390514
I'm impressed by your dedication anon. I personally just find that the older I get the less inspired I get to finish epic verse, and the same holds true for novels. I found Middlemarch an almost herculean effort to read earlier this year but it was well worth the effort. But when I was about 22 or 23 I read Ulysses, Anna Karenina, etc. in about a week. I might have done the same for the epic poets but they were low on my radar at that time.

But as for Spenser, he is deliberately archaic so perhaps even his own contemporaries would have found him difficult. He's the sort of writer I pick up now and again and I'm continually astonished by what I read. It's almost too much! I know Conrad was a lover of Spenser and I can believe it given his style.

>>19390508
Still angry about General Sherman?

But I've been on here since 2005. For every Poe and Faulkner there are a dozen northerners who are usually better than them. The South never has and never will produce someone as refined as Henry James because it's always been a cultural backwater.

>>19390387
It's in a sense the newest part of the US and it wasn't settled at the time the US was still producing great literature.

>>19390141
But Fitzgerald was a lapsed Roman Catholic. John Updike is a great chronicler of the decline of the WASPs. That term only became popular at the time of their decline and the rise of Catholics and Evangelicals in the US. I believe it was a sociologist named Digsby who devised that acronym.

>>19390180
I don't even know who Bullough is, my point is that the ones who have some big theory to propose about Shakespeare are usually working with scant evidence and therefore end up blowing a lot of hot hair. The idea that he invented the modern mind is an example of such hot air.

>>19390188
I promote Leavis for his views on the novel. His criticism should be the objective standard there. However, for his criticism of poetry, I look to him to understand the why's and wherefore's of modernist verse. I don't take his criticism of Milton seriously. Instead, I look to him to understand WHY the modernists rejected Milton. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are the incomparable masters of English verse. I have no desire to dispute that. As for the novel, I completely agree with Leavis that Austen, Eliot, James, and Conrad are the best but I am hesitant to agree with him on Lawrence.

>>19390222
The Faerie Queene isn't easy reading. I believe I've only read Book I in its entirety. There isn't a requirement to read everything by a poet because it's not like a novel.

Though I champion Leavis, I personally don't care much for his champions in verse, Pound, Eliot, and Hopkins. Again, I just like how he explains WHY modernists innovated in verse. I have never read such a description that fit the bill so well.

>>19390188
Leavis is definitely not forgotten by academics since he played a big role in establishing the English canon. He's vital in the history of English literary criticism, just as you often see E. M. Forster quoted in reference to theories of the novel or Ian Watt on the rise of the novel. There's never been a critic widely read by the general public, not even H. L. Mencken.

>>19385131
Masschusetts, New York, and California in that order. Southern literature is marginal.

Been forgetting my trip.

>>19390133
Whenever Spenser's name is brought up I always recommend this site: http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/

Spenser is definitely for the discerning patrician of English letters. The argument for Milton is usually based on his crisp and even prosody. I believe Newman says Pope played a strong hand in tempering the Miltonic style further.

>>19390137
Pound definitely preferred Chaucer.

>>19381037
Have you actually read the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock aloud? What is astonishing about the poem is how musical it is despite having the tone of bored, educated spoken speech. You have completely ignored my quotes from Leavis that compare Eliot's poetic effects with early modern English theatre.

Your association of Hopkins with the limpwristed decadent school is also quite curious. He was hardly a provocateur like Swinburne, Wilde, Beardsley, Huysmans, etc. His method of going back to pre-Miltonic style actually puts him much closer to Eliot and Pound, even if his verse is dissimilar to them. He just had a different canon to them. Eliot had the Elizabethan theatre, Pound took from Browning's monologues which ultimately also come from the English stage, and Hopkins from even more ancient sources, especially Old English. By fusing these ante Milton influences with a modern sensibility, they were able to create something altogether new.

>>19385023
Plath is a great poetess. Not sure why this anon has such a big bone to pick with her. Her tragic life and the association of her life with her work is no different from say Lord Byron. There are plenty of other examples. Juxtaposition of fatherless with starless is actually great.

>>19386452
ESL is just a meme like the other anon said. There have been quite a few great ESL and FSL (French) writers of prose. Conrad is universally recognized as one of the GOATs. I am not a big fan of Nabokov but you cannot doubt that his composition demonstrates a mastery of English. Latin poetry however was written by LSLs for a long time. If you take the study of English poetry or some other language very seriously there's no reason why you couldn't have native competency or better.

She never posts in highbrow canonical works threads. Maybe the fact you keep finding her in your threads and interests is a reflection of yourself and you dislike it.

>>19377222
Is Manny our Scaruffi?

Oops, forgot Connecticut Yankee. That goes between Huck and Pudd'nhead.

>>19374530
Read them in this order. Tom > Prince & Pauper > Huck > Pudd'nhead. His travel writing is also fun to read a little bit at a time say when you're on the toilet or taking public transportation.

>>19377750
You serious? What is English and German literature?

>Ahab hooked up with every whale from friends’ belugas to countless young sperms. He once asked his friend Starbuck if his only purpose on Earth is “to put my harpoon in as many Cetaceas as possible.”
Droppeddddddd.... I don't see how I can relate to anything this Melville guy wrote, so much for that

I am astonished my thread is still up. I kinda thought it would just get a few replies and then get archived. I will reply to some of the responses tonight or tomorrow.

>>19377757
I appreciate your psychological take on how these movements came about, such as confessional poetry being in response to World War II and feeling a need for absolution. Perhaps it could even be said the sort of post-Romantic Victorian dreamscapes were even a case of sticking one's head in the sand when leading up to that catastrophe. When we consider the absence of satirical verse during the 19th century, which acted as a corrective in previous eras, that is also relevant to our time and it would be interesting to see satire come again on the scene. That could shake things up a bit. There is a translator of Dante named Anthony Esolen who does work like this but he comes off as just preaching to the choir, along with his other peers. So I have yet to see potential along this line.

Your concept of weltpoesie is interesting and to some degree that has been explored by poets, especially here in California. Jerome Rothenberg is a name that comes immediately to mind. It seems inevitable given the status of English, but what makes English so different as a lingua franca compared to Latin or French is that there is no particular level of refined speech you are expected to emulate e.g. Frederick the Great speaking courtly French. I think you are right that there is potential for development in this direction building off what we see in The Wasteland. This might be the only thing that breaks up the monotony of what you described earlier concerning individualists blending into collective voices.

Again, thank you for your imaginative post anon. Leavis has some other good criticism on English novels I recommend, especially the Great Tradition. Conrad is a great example of an ESL doing the kind of work you have in mind but for prose. We'll see if such things happen in poetry.

>>19377757
>>19377848
In the event that this thread dies before I can form a cogent response, I want to thank you for your effortpost. Your first one has a lot of cogs turning in my head and I am eager to read part two.