proximoception | (no subject)

Funny how little Borges cares about Shelley, "Defense of Poetry" excepted. I guess he was one of his father's gods, as he was of Yeats' father - but of course of Yeats as well. And Borges took over all his father's other idols - Whitman, Keats (luke-warmly), Fitzgerald.

When I told my father I thought the Rubaiyat must be the best poem in the world - having read few others yet - he directed me to Herbert.

I guess the reliable Byron-Shelley-Keats, Swinburne-Rossetti-Whitman reading phases of young modernists had as much to do with atheism, or anyway un-Christianism, as literature. And the disavowal, always hitting Swinburne hardest (all the cheap, ubiquitous talk of him meaning nothing), next Shelley, next Whitman - is that religion coming back? Even Keats recedes politely into some polished odes, some chaste blank verse. But Keats was as headlong as the others in most of his writings, as addicted to a poetry making him and you forget to breathe - maybe he wasn't as good at that as some were but it's what I like best in him, and it's the heart of him even where he's canaling himself into respectability. The waters stay turbulent.

What was I talking about: religion coming back? No, some of it is the fall into age. There's an immediacy of response you need to handle Swinburne and Shelley and Whitman, a pretty much physical broad, sensitive threshold of response age decays in most pretty quickly. It's not that they give you more than any others (though more than almost any), just more all at once. Whitman's different poem and line lengths allow some warming up, so maybe he stays acceptable the longest, but even American poets speak of him like some memorable dive or climb back in their youth. Swinburne's verse invariably assumes you're already agitated, apprehensive, outraged - most of his poems are a kind of rest while running, a maniac's zen. Shelley's...Shelley you're not reading right unless your throat's freezing from the upsuck of oxygen into your brain.

What had I intended to think about. An atheist poet tradition in the 19th C., the ones Thomson and after him Levy honored, the ones you'd go to to feel like you weren't alone in it. Goethe, Shelley, Leopardi, Keats, Emerson, Fitzgerald, early Swinburne (Melville and Dickinson being unknown yet), for reasons slightly less clear Browning, Heine, Novalis, Rossetti, Blake, Wordsworth. Browning is ultimately all about heresy, rather like Borges and Yeats, about where religion and unbelief tangle or fight or trade places, but unlike them usually from the Christian side of it. Wordsworth kept his fingers crossed while flying out past tiny Jehovahland. Might be why he crashed, you need your fingers free when flying. And your brain clear while typing, so I'll stop.

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Which Levy?

I think this is a great post. But yours all are: this one is one where I particularly recognize myself. Swinburne and Shelley might take returning to. I mean Swinburne's no Shelley, but he is pretty remarkable, and part of the return to him would be reading him with the requisite stamina. Same of course with Shelley, same with Keats. Same, I must say with Goethe. Poets whose intensity almost never flags, but which is the kind of intensity that feels fulgurant. So you read an amazing line of Swinburne's, and you want it to echo as you kind of half take-in the next lines. And he lets you half take-in all of them: that's when his poetry seems to turn into background music to itself, ear-candy. Except every line is amazing, and the neural fatigue that makes us deaf to that isn't his fault.

So for all three or four of those people, getting into mental shape -- decades or at least lusters worth of work for me -- was required to get the necessary stamina. In Browning you know you need the stamina, so you can rest a lot. For the others, you can read them fine without it, but then you miss almost everything.

Amy. She's not great, but these were her people.

Neural fatigue is exactly it, is the kind of phrase I was failing to find.

With Browning I'm going to stop, and often, but his problems can always be worked through and the bus feels like it's in the same place when I get back on it. More like solving a puzzle, somehow - one fails the arch-Romantics not by not understanding but by refusing to feel what they're feeling (which leads to not understanding, but happens first).

I like her. I came across her only when I started doing my LRLOTP^TM (low rent lives of the poets, in which you're acknowledged). I like good city poems. I think I talk about three or so of hers.

Day late dep't: ha! fulgurant! "...Fulgurant, [something] and free/ While da-da-da da-da-da da-da/ Makes soap of the sea." Armipotent armsway! I [?] with armipotent armsway make soap of the sea.

Fulgurant, fragrant and free? Awesome.

Good post. It's been a while since I've really thought about this tradition, and I like the way you frame it: "the fall into age."

i went back to Witch of Atlas after your dreampost, still can't get carried on it. I have this problem with reading Shelley. Though I love what I can read, the odes, triumph, parts of Prometheus (mostly the first act). I'd hoped it would come with familiarity. I still hope.

Think of it as the biography of intellectual beauty - suffused with the wistfulness of that, since it can never stay with us. Also draw little pictures like you do. It inspires many little pictures, there's a scheme.