Tekstanalyse og –historie (Spring 2008)

1. Tekstanalyse og –historie(Spring 2008) Session Four: Poetry I

2. Agenda What is Poetry? (According to Sylvia Plath) • American Poetry After 1945 • Group Work: Sylvia Plath, ”Lady Lazarus” • Group Discussion

3. What is Poetry? (According to Sylvia Plath) • Taking ”Daddy” as your point of departure, define the genre of poetry • Find contrasts and similarities with other genres (narrative, drama) • Interpret the poem

4. Romanticism, Modernism and American Poetry After 1945 • The poem in relation to the poet and the moment of feeling: Temporal relations: emotion and composition (Romanticism) • The poem in relation to the nature of feeling: Relations of significance: public – private, universal – personal (Modernism) • Confessional and provisional poetry (After Modernism)

5. Romanticism • ”I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” William Wordsworth, ”Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd Edition (1800)

6. Modernism • ”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” T.S. Eliot, ” Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1922)

7. Modernism • ”The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” T.S. Eliot, ” Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1922)

8. American Poetry After 1945 • The poem represents ”feeling at the moment of composition” (NAe, 2643) • The poem is ”a chronicle of its occasion and the act of composing it” (NAe, 2643) • ”The poem is, at last, between two persons in stead of two pages. […] In all modesty, I confess that it may be the deat of literature as we know it.” Frank O’Hara, Personism: A Manifesto (1959). Quoted in NAe, 2643.

9. American Poetry After 1945 • Frank O’Hara and the diary poem: ”A Step Away from Them” • Who is a step away from whom in the poem? Who is O’Hara, the poet, a step away from • Why? • What does it mean to be a step away? • How is the poem a diary? • How is the poem a poem?

10. ”A Step Away From Them” • It's my lunch hour, so I gofor a walk among the hum-coloredcabs. First, down the sidewalkwhere laborers feed their dirtyglistening torsos sandwichesand Coca-Cola, with yellow helmetson. They protect them from fallingbricks, I guess. Then onto theavenue where skirts are flippingabove heels and blow up overgrates. The sun is hot, but thecabs stir up the air. I lookat bargains in wristwatches. Thereare cats playing in sawdust.[…]

11. Group Work: Sylvia Plath, ”Lady Lazarus” • What did Plath mean by the remark, ”I cannot sympathise with those cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife. … I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying … with an informed and intelligent mind” (NAe, p. 2968) • Find examples of her ability ”to control and manipulate experiences”