Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category
Form as delimiter
In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem [posed in the octet] is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shift of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy.
- Paul Fussell, *Poetic Meter and Poetic Form*, chp 7
form as crucible
It is possible to think of scheme not as a mold of form into which meaning is poured, but rather as a sort of crucible in which trope is cooked and which then is itself consumed in the cooking.
- John Hollander, Melodious Guile, ch. 1
Early English broadsides resource
Here: the English Broadside Ballad Archive, no subscription required. The archive contains high-quality digital versions of the ballads collected in five volumes by Samuel Pepys. It also includes what they call “facsimile transcriptions” – digital representations of the broadsides which attempt to retain the feel of the original, while replacing the text with more legible, modern type.
Wow.
Piozzi on the young Samuel Johnson’s first reading of Hamlet
…he was just nine Years old when having got the play of Hamlet to read in his Father’s Kitchen, he read on very qu[i]etly till he came to the Ghost Scene, when he hurried up Stairs to the Shop Door that he might see folks about him. This Story he was not unwilling to tell as a Testimony to the Merits of Shakespear.
- Hester Lynch Piozzi, Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The ‘Anecdotes’ of Mrs Piozzi in their Original Form (1786), ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto & Windus; The Hogarth Press, 1984), 6-7.
Samuel Johnson lived in another world
But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world and exhibited only what he saw before him.
- Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765). I take my text from W. K. Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960)
“Ralegh” vs. Ralegh
But if we consider that the “purest,” eighteen-line version of the poem survived only in a single manuscript, and the twenty-four or thirty-line versions of the poem were historically more important, what is the sense of editing “Ralegh” in a way that denigrates nonauthorial variants or that encourages historical erasure in the name of rescuing an authorial archetype that is allegedly prior to historical vicissitude? The “Ralegh” that emerged within the transmission and reception of a body of verse that was a mixture of authorially sanctioned work, additions and revisions to these texts, and the incorporation of texts by other writers is, finally, an authorship sign that makes sense historically in terms other than those of verifiable canon.
- Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 145-6
an old poem
My wits my wealth, my learning is my lands
My gownes my goods, my bookes for buildings stand,
Arts are my acres, tongues my tenements,
Pens are my ploughs, my writings are my rents.
- a poem (partial?) transcribed in a Christ Church, Oxford manuscript anthology. Poet unknown, but the experience is common among graduate students. Found in Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, ch 1.
