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14. The Road (3rd)
15. Shame
16. Chaste Maid in Cheapside
17. Gallathea
18. The Roaring Girl
19. Gulliver's Travels
20. Great Expectations
21. Essential Blake (Nth)
22. Pedlar/Tintern Abbey/Two Book Prelude (Nth)
23. Waiting for Godot (3rd or 4th)
24. Jew of Malta (2nd)
25. Thomas Gray (Everyman, 2nd)
26. Doctor Faustus (A-text, 3rd or 4th)
27. To His Coy Mistress etc. (Dover, Nth)
28. Duchess of Malfi (3rd)
29. Four Quartets (2nd)
After Dickens a rereading deluge, which I'll probably continue with.
The Gray/Marvell contrast was interesting, and seemed reflected in their names - each with similarly tiny bodies of work, and with two poems greatly overshadowing the rest (Mistress and Garden, Elegy and Eton), but Gray's best only rival Marvell's average efforts, while Marvell's best rival next to nothing. Well, maybe slightly more than two for Marvell - there's a secret continuation of The Garden near the end of Appleton House, and the faun poem still fascinates me, and not just because I can't quite nail down the euphemisms.
Faustus is similarly mostly valuable for scattered passages, but I'd forgotten how neat The Jew of Malta is. Marlowe's the founder of counterculture literature, among other things, and after the Middletons and Lyly it was good to remember Renaissance drama didn't only have Shakespeare. Marlowe may not be profound, but here he amuses me profoundly.
Malfi is always fun too - exciting, atmospheric - but probably beneath analysis. Julie was writing a paper about it around the time I met her, and we still laugh about it because all she could talk about was Good and Evil. Not a lot of original thought in Webster, but he reproduces a lot of the color and formal qualities of a Shakespeare tragedy.
I read a lot of these guys at c. 20 (excepting Lyly, him I'm new to) and developed an especial taste for Fletcher, who isn't on the list, in part because he clearly didn't take his job seriously. But that's part of what I admired about him, that these commonplaces weren't part of his actual mind, as they clearly are of Middleton's, Webster's. Marlowe had a mind, Shakespeare something more, but the rest of the mob are usually just television, mostly without knowing it, and television's what I respond to in them. Eliot condemned Beaumont and Fletcher because, unlike the others, they knew better, but that very perspective let them make television I enjoy more. Drama's the hardest genre to bring about literature in, maybe for the same reason it's the easiest to make amusing.
The Quartets were more moving this time, I guess because I can better sense the estrangement from gnosis behind the forced efforts to define and sermonize it. These are crisis poems with false, schematized completions - hence the need to write several of them, I guess, as lies don't actually help. And each is also several: there's hardly more unity among the sections than there is among the four. I think apart from the Yeats encounter with its moving, if parabolic, apology for Eliot's antisemitism, I liked best the opening of East Coker, lines which get disavowed in the same poem as a return to a tired mode. Opaque, only subtly suggestive description is what he was best at, which he doubtless knew. The observations of someone wondering what he feels, where the things observed are somehow the answer. Probably bearing out Stevens' attack on him as someone unable to tell his desire from despair, but we've all been there, whereas I can't recall visiting a suffering-purified peace just outside of time. Though perhaps one wouldn't if one had.
15. Shame
16. Chaste Maid in Cheapside
17. Gallathea
18. The Roaring Girl
19. Gulliver's Travels
20. Great Expectations
21. Essential Blake (Nth)
22. Pedlar/Tintern Abbey/Two Book Prelude (Nth)
23. Waiting for Godot (3rd or 4th)
24. Jew of Malta (2nd)
25. Thomas Gray (Everyman, 2nd)
26. Doctor Faustus (A-text, 3rd or 4th)
27. To His Coy Mistress etc. (Dover, Nth)
28. Duchess of Malfi (3rd)
29. Four Quartets (2nd)
After Dickens a rereading deluge, which I'll probably continue with.
The Gray/Marvell contrast was interesting, and seemed reflected in their names - each with similarly tiny bodies of work, and with two poems greatly overshadowing the rest (Mistress and Garden, Elegy and Eton), but Gray's best only rival Marvell's average efforts, while Marvell's best rival next to nothing. Well, maybe slightly more than two for Marvell - there's a secret continuation of The Garden near the end of Appleton House, and the faun poem still fascinates me, and not just because I can't quite nail down the euphemisms.
Faustus is similarly mostly valuable for scattered passages, but I'd forgotten how neat The Jew of Malta is. Marlowe's the founder of counterculture literature, among other things, and after the Middletons and Lyly it was good to remember Renaissance drama didn't only have Shakespeare. Marlowe may not be profound, but here he amuses me profoundly.
Malfi is always fun too - exciting, atmospheric - but probably beneath analysis. Julie was writing a paper about it around the time I met her, and we still laugh about it because all she could talk about was Good and Evil. Not a lot of original thought in Webster, but he reproduces a lot of the color and formal qualities of a Shakespeare tragedy.
I read a lot of these guys at c. 20 (excepting Lyly, him I'm new to) and developed an especial taste for Fletcher, who isn't on the list, in part because he clearly didn't take his job seriously. But that's part of what I admired about him, that these commonplaces weren't part of his actual mind, as they clearly are of Middleton's, Webster's. Marlowe had a mind, Shakespeare something more, but the rest of the mob are usually just television, mostly without knowing it, and television's what I respond to in them. Eliot condemned Beaumont and Fletcher because, unlike the others, they knew better, but that very perspective let them make television I enjoy more. Drama's the hardest genre to bring about literature in, maybe for the same reason it's the easiest to make amusing.
The Quartets were more moving this time, I guess because I can better sense the estrangement from gnosis behind the forced efforts to define and sermonize it. These are crisis poems with false, schematized completions - hence the need to write several of them, I guess, as lies don't actually help. And each is also several: there's hardly more unity among the sections than there is among the four. I think apart from the Yeats encounter with its moving, if parabolic, apology for Eliot's antisemitism, I liked best the opening of East Coker, lines which get disavowed in the same poem as a return to a tired mode. Opaque, only subtly suggestive description is what he was best at, which he doubtless knew. The observations of someone wondering what he feels, where the things observed are somehow the answer. Probably bearing out Stevens' attack on him as someone unable to tell his desire from despair, but we've all been there, whereas I can't recall visiting a suffering-purified peace just outside of time. Though perhaps one wouldn't if one had.