(no subject)

[proximoception]

Speaking of russian dolls one of the main problems with my idea of a dramatization of The Visionary Company following a sort of inspirational venereal disease (bit like La Ronde) from Wordsworth to Keats and then back again, with each slightly younger poet's death providing the second wave of impulses, is Wordsworth himself. The nested lifespans are an interesting bit of trivia but structurally they leave you trying to squeeze something out of late WW that just doesn't seem to be there, even in "An Evening of Extraoridnary Splendor and Beauty" and the more interesting Prelude revisions. Maybe the solution would be to fabricate a revival, some last poem or poetic idea, that he then turns against and destroys, explaining both why that effort never reached us and how the Romantic impulse died, at least for a time. Not the most inspiring ending to a story, though.

Having Blake serve as Lindsayan commentator - true to the book, though not to Bloom's layer ideas or any of mine - might leave room for a "vision" ending, where something about WW is reborn outside himself, the way Browning sent his younger self to heaven. Browning and Tennyson's refigurings of the Romantics as respectively Carolingian and Arthurian knights might suggest an alternative frame. Combining the two just sounds creepy, though - Blake as Merlin, oy.

Comments

Great idea!

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I love the idea.

Couldn't you do something with his conversations with Fenwick? As he's pushing the death penalty -- so many he's loved have died! -- he talks to her and remembers and spurns and is overwhelmed by that past. Intimations of mortality from recollections of early poems about intimations of immortality?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yeah, maybe. Did have the idea of his dictating his words about Shelley, and when the scribe breaks his pen tip in surprise adds that qualification - "one of the best artists of us all - I mean in workmanship of style."

Or something could be done with each second-half impulse being a thought of the original inspiring poet, not just of the recently deceased (how the end of Don Juan thinks of Christabel, say, long after all the Shelley has drained out of the poem); that other living one keeps something going for each, but Wordsworth lacks Blake (to the extent he ever had him).