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Nov. 27th, 2005 12:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception4. Poetry is polytheism, Bloom's saying now, and one remembers a few of his '70s pieces where Shelley and the main American poets are identified as Orphic. Love, death, power, fate, maybe one or two other things, are celebrated, defied, compared, confronted, escaped from, merged with and that's a poem. Shelley has special classes on the roof of this School because he actually collapses them together, by twos or alls. Think of the Ode, of Adonais' conclusion, of the boat journeys in Alastor and Prometheus. Explosion, but "achieved dearth of meaning". Pinning his foot to the ground to master everything that can be done through personal gesture, had Shelley closed off all other possibilities for himself? I don't really see Keats getting farther, frankly; and Browning, Yeats etc. in running all over space and time so seldom get somewhere new. But what's relevant: was Shelley himself in a cul-de-sac?
Was Shakespeare, for that matter. Instantly I think "no". But why no? Drama? Escape through Aeschylus' second voice (or was that third)? Shelley and Rousseau are as different as Dante and Virgil: a real but controlled difference. Uncontrolled difference has to come from somewhere though. Observation, I suppose, whatever that reduces to.
Polytheism. The forms of life. The sexes, the stages, the junctures, the starts and stops and changes exchanging glances. Engine Summer and Little, Big. But even there, things taper to something Shelleyan. In Hamlet things taper to something Shelleyan. Ulysses doesn't but knows to not, knows too to keep flirting with that no-return point. There is a happy foot that wiggles its toes in mirrors, has no care for what moves it about or why, and lives forever. Then there's that other foot that takes the step, climbs the stair. Novelty, hierarchy, possibility, impossibility. Definition as movement, as the only movement. Bedtime.
Was Shakespeare, for that matter. Instantly I think "no". But why no? Drama? Escape through Aeschylus' second voice (or was that third)? Shelley and Rousseau are as different as Dante and Virgil: a real but controlled difference. Uncontrolled difference has to come from somewhere though. Observation, I suppose, whatever that reduces to.
Polytheism. The forms of life. The sexes, the stages, the junctures, the starts and stops and changes exchanging glances. Engine Summer and Little, Big. But even there, things taper to something Shelleyan. In Hamlet things taper to something Shelleyan. Ulysses doesn't but knows to not, knows too to keep flirting with that no-return point. There is a happy foot that wiggles its toes in mirrors, has no care for what moves it about or why, and lives forever. Then there's that other foot that takes the step, climbs the stair. Novelty, hierarchy, possibility, impossibility. Definition as movement, as the only movement. Bedtime.
