I read Zora Neale Hurston's essay "What White Publishers Won't Print." In this essay she takes a look at the stereotypes white publishers place on minorities which they use as excuses for not publishing works about different ethnic groups that actually have substance. She argues that white people do not recognize that minorities have feelings like they do because they don't look like them. I feel like this argument is not all sound. It seems a little extreme to say that white people don't think that minorities feel a certain way. I know this essay was written over 50 years ago and that racism was a big deal then and still has its issues today, but I find it hard to believe that statement.

She says that any romance story involving a minority where there is no struggle with race does not appeal to white publishers. It seems that minorities had to fit into a specific mold just to find their place in books. If they didn't fit into the stereotypical role or caused racial tension in the book, then there was no place for them.

Reading this essay after having read Dr. Powers essay about how we are reading less and less and its impact on ethnic literature. It seems like we have worked so hard to get to a point where ethnic minorities are integral part of the literary community, but now since we aren't reading as much ethnic literature is not receiving the exposure it deserves.

The exercise we did in class with the proposal to make Messiah's English curriculum more cultural focused and Christian focused does put a different spin on Ngugi's proposal for an African Literature department. It does seem a little hypocritical for us to not want a more cultural Christian literature department but support the idea of an African studies department in Ngugi's school.
It kind of reminds me of the movie Spanglish. I was watching it the other evening, and the main character Flor (a Mexican immigrant) becomes upset with the family she works for because Deborah (the wife) interferes with her daughter. Flor doesn't approve of they way her bosses liberally give her daughter money for collecting sea glass on the beach and taking her daughter to interviews at prestigious schools. Flor doesn't like these lavish "gifts" because she doesn't want her daughter thinking these things come easily to people.
On the other hand, Flor has intervened in Deborah's daughter's life as well. Deb bought her daughter clothes that were too small saying that she could work off the weight to fit into them. Flor is horrified by this because the daughter isn't overweight; she just isn't the idolized skinny size. Flor alters the clothes without telling anyone and tells the daughter to "Just try on."
This interference seems like a good one from Flor's perspective and the audience's perspective. Compared to Deborah's seemingly poor parenting skills, Flor's kind actions seem justified. But really she is still interfering with another person's child. But we still see Deborah's intereference as worse because her parenting skills seem to harm her children rather than help them.
In a similar way we seem to approach Ngugi's argument. We see it as the Flor to Deborah's European imperalist influence, valuing British and european studies more than indigenous African studies. We see the Christian cultural studies proposal as kind of Deborah's interference. Too much of a good thing. Of course it is not extreme like Deborah's behavior, but our attitudes approaching it seem to be that way.
Is our attitude toward a Cultural Christian studies department justified? or are we just being hypocritical by justifiying Ngugi's argument but not conceding the point for the other argument?

Ngugi's essay "On the Abolition of the English Department" seems to bring up the old question of what is literature? And more specifically what literature should be taught in African schools? When Ngugi wrote this essay English literature was the dominant subject whereas he argues that there should be more than just British writings being studied. They argue that there should be a whole African literature department because it is the roots of the African people studying at the university.
I see this as a justified argument. It makes sense for them to want this kind of depatment because here in the united states we study American Literature as well as other types of literature as well. It makes sense for them to study their own literature especially because of Africa's history of colonization. With European forces influencing African education systems, it makes sense that Ngugi would want to get away from imperalized systems and bring more of the indigenous roots out in the education system.

Hughes’s essay begins by describing the attitude of blacks to poetry and artistry. They didn’t want to be defined as “Negro poet[s]” but just as “poet[s]” (Hughes 1313) which Hughes takes to mean they want to be “white poet[s]” (1313). The Negro (to use Hughes’s term) culture defined good literature as white literature because that is what society has taught throughout history. Not only did whites subscribe to their own literary superiority but so did blacks. They would not recognize any blacks as great artists unless they were published by white magazines or recognized as significant artists by whites. “The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people” (1313). Colored artists felt like they had no freedom to truly write what they wanted if they were to be recognized in any way. Societal constructions built narrow parameters around what was considered good literature written by blacks.
In a similar way Annette Kolodny identifies “literature as a social institution, embedded not only within its own literary traditions, but also within the particular physical and mental artifacts of the society from which it comes” (Kolodny 2149). That social institution is traditionally a male society where literature uses the language of men. But if women have their own language with which to write, then it may be difficult for men to understand this language since they are used to their own. As Kolodny points out, if men are not able to understand this writing, then they will “dismiss those systems as undecipherable, meaningless, or trivial” (2150). If men do not accept women’s writings in their own language, then they will have to use male language which would still play into those social constructions unless women writers manipulated that language enough to stay true to their feminist ideals. In order to be accepted into literary circles, women must navigate “minefields” because they are not readily welcomed into that society.
Both Hughes and Kolodny recognize the difficulties of establishing new social constructions within the arts and more specifically literature. While Hughes might not have to navigate a minefield, he still has to climb a mountain and struggle to make whites, as well as colored people, realize the value and the good creative artists that are “Negros.” Kolodny struggles to bring acceptance in the literary circles and the literary canon for female authors who write with women’s language. Hughes and Kolodny write against the dominant white male culture that has defined literary history. Not only has this dominance affected white male approaches to literature, but it has also affected the communities that Hughes and Kolodny write about.

I read Barbara Smith's essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" in which at the beginning she cites the history of how Black women's literature has been perceived in literary circles. Many talented black women writers have produced fantastic work depicting life in the slums and relationships between race and environment. But these writers have been criticized for not making their work more accessible to broader subjects like class and environment. The critics making these comments belittled the issues of race that these authors were dealing with.

Smith goes on to say that biggest "mishandling of Black women writers by whites is paralleled more often by their not being handled at all, particularly in feminist theory" (2305). When race and feminism are discussed in literature they are usually separated. The two are rarely discussed together, and this especially applies to lesbian black women.

Smith seems to make her point that in literary criticism a black lesbian woman never exists. She may be written about by black women writers, but critics tend to glaze over them and focus on more talked about issues like mainstream feminism or racism without taking into account the significance of a black woman character and her relationship to other women.

Annette Kolodny seems to be a voice of post modernism as well as feminism. She implies that we approach reading by the way we are taught. We are molded by different social constructions and learn to read with those constructions forming our thoughts. The introduction says that "Literary criticism matters to feminists because they insist that literature embodies social beliefs, conventions, attitudes, ad ideologies that operate powerfully throughtout the whole of society" (2145). If we apply this to Cixous, it makes sense to say that literature has been phallocentric because that has been the culture surrounding literature throughout history.



She talks about women's writing which tries to circumnavigate language culturally instituted by males. Women use their own language in writing and give it new symbollic meaning in order to escape the political and cultural associations with traditionally male language. The problem then becomes men's interpretations of that language (or lack of interpretation). They cannot decipher the language and so they disregard it as meaningless. This in sorts presents a catch-22: in order for women to communicate and for men to appreciate their writing women must use their language, but by using men's language women are still playing into the male literary constructions.



Kolodny tells a story of one of her colleagues who denounced Kate Chopin as an author worth reading. "'If Kate Chopin were really worth reading,' . . . 'she'd have lasted - like Shakespeare.'" (2152). This made me think of Virginia Woolf's "Shakespeare's Sister." Maybe if Shakespeare's sister had actually been educated and possessed the same talent as her brother and had been allowed to write, Kate Chopin would also possess that same lasting quality. (I think today she does because we read The Awakening in my American Lit. class). It's absurd to think that a book so highly acclaimed today was only a few decades ago still looked at as something inferior just because of its womanish language.

When reading Helene Cixous, I can see how she relates to Virginia Woolf. Cixous talks about male writing on pg. 2042 of her essay, and says, "I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural - hence political, typically masculine - economy." I see this in relation to Virginia Woolf's argument that women are depicted literature on in their relationships to males. Since historically men have been the dominant writers, writing has been subjected to their conventions. If men are driven to write by their libido, as Cixous seems to suggest, then it makes sense for women in literature to be connected only to males, especially when the women tend to be primarily lovers of the men.



Cixous observes that literature has a history of being phallocentric and that women are usually repressed by this and feel awkward when they try to write. Women have written in secret and then have felt

Feminists pose an interesting question. Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own" especially the section titled Shakespeare's Sister seeks to answer the question are women given the same opportunities as men? From her essay it seems that women are not, but this was an essay written how many years ago? Is this essay still relevant to our culture? I mean, I had no trouble going to college being a woman. Nobody stopped me or acted like I was committing a social sin.

I think one area where feminism might have some relevance is in the church. Some conservative churches still do not allow women to be ordained pastors. For me this is a little upsetting because I think the church should be a front runner for women's rights and give them the opportunity to lead a church. Afterall, the first people Jesus appeared to after he rose from the dead were the women.

Does your education and class distinction affect your tastes? I believe Bourdieu would say yes, and so would I.

Let's face it folks, I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, and when I read some novels or essays (like these highly interesting oh so amazing literary theory essays...) I need some help understanding them. Once I understand them fully, I can learn to appreciate and like them. I can develope a taste for them. This appreciation of mine I fear was made possible only by my educational background. Yeah that's right, if I had decided not to go to college I would not even have known that Marxist literary theory even existed! (Like I said, I'm not the brightest light bulb in the pack).

I think you have to be exposed to something before you can develop a taste for it, and I think a lot of that exposure comes through education. People who do not have access to higher eductation may not be familiar with the works of Flannery O'Connor let alone appreciate them.

Are the highly educated defining society's view of good literature? Are some works considered classic just because "they" categorize them as such? Who decides what books should belong to the literary cannon? I really am curious to know why certain books are considered so great.

Take, for example, Cathcher in the Rye. Now I read this book in high school and though I may not remember all the details, I do remember that I was not impressed with it. Of course is was part of a summer reading assignment, so I was not inclined to read it from the beginning. But even so, I thought it was stupid and kind of annoying to read about some bratty teenager (was he a teenager? I don't remember exactly) being upset with the world.

I'm sure if I read the book now I may find different qualities to enjoy which were not so apparent the first time around. (Because my personal economy has now changed ;)). Yet I can't help but wonder if I would even think of returning to this novel if it was not so highly esteemed by literary circles.

I guess this kind of comes back to the question of must we as English majors learn to appreciate different works of literature even if we don't like them? If I was a good and proper English major I would probably say yes, but now that I am staring at graduation which is less than two months away I am going to say no. Inspired by my bout of senioritis, I declare that I will make my own canon of literature which will include all the books I actually like to read. Among them will sit great writers like Jane Austen or William Faulkner, but I will also include childhood favorites such as Beverly Cleary and Zane Grey from my middle school western novels phase.

No more of this pressure to try to like and appreciate authors and books that I don't really care about (Sorry Emerson, this includes you). Still, I must refer to the ultimate literary canon for suggestions of what to include in my own creation; exposing myself to new literature is still key, but if I don't like something or don't understand it, I am not going to feel guilty about it.

Sometimes I feel like to be an English major one has to appreciate and like everything that is considered good literature and hate everything that is "bad" literature. Some say that is too much to ask and only require you to appreciate without having to like it but still hate the bad literature. I say just expose yourself to it and learn about it and leave it up to yourself to decide if you like it or not. If it's good and you don't like it or appreciate, fine. If it's bad but you still like it, I say embrace the badness of the plot and style and its overused cliche's. As long as you can recognize it and understand your own tastes, I think you're justified.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property dominates English majors' lives. We constantly have to be aware of what we are writing and being aware of any potential plagerism problems. Especially when writing research papers. We constantly have to cite where we found information and who provided it. Any concept that we paraphrase also has to be properly cited. I have no idea how a writing world without intellectual property functions.

I know in some Eastern cultures intellectual property still does exist. My brother works for a big engineering firm, and he said that his company has to be careful when they hire somebody from Asia because they have no problem with taking any confidential ideas and sharing them with any other company they work with.

I also experience this within my internship. I edit news articles for a website news company and they use an Asian freelance writer. I always have to double check his sources to make sure he does not plagerize because plagerism is not a crime in his country.

The idea of intellectual property is definitely a Western one. I think this concept definitely feeds into our culture's emphasis on the individual. As writers we are always trying to come up with unique and original ideas or writing styles. I think it is more difficult to be a successful writer in a Western culture than it probably is in Eastern cultures.

I wonder if in third world countries storytelling is more prominent than it is in first world countries.

Storytelling does not have the same meaning in our culture today as it did in cultures existing before the technological age. As we talked about in class, storytelling today usually revolves around family or friend get-togethers. My family is not really big on storytelling, but I have a number of friendships that have grown closer based on times spent hanging out and telling stories.

When I studied abroad, our group of American students became really close through telling stories (usually about embarassing moments or hilarious situations) to each other. I remember this one story my friend told to a group of us about getting his foot stuck in an escalator back in middle school when he went with his friend to a toy store. He started screaming and everyone looked at him as the escalator stopped and the mechanical display of toys jammed because it ran off the escalator's power. He was also wearing his infamous stinky purple windbreaker and bowl-cut hair-do.

Obviously writing about this story on this blog does not nearly have the same impact as it did hearing the story first-hand. The inside joke of the stinky purple windbreaker does not translate to an outside audience, and there is no way I can adequately describe in writing the imitation my friend did of the mechanical toys stopping and the escalator becoming jammed. I feel like storytelling is no longer an artform. It does exist today but I feel that if our society was more of a storytelling one I might have better succeeded at relaying the above story. Of course I am only speculating and may just be trying to blame my poor storytelling ability on an outside source.

If we lived in a storytelling culture, I might feel inclined to pass my friend's story off as my own. I might substitute myself for my friend's character and no one would really care. I always feel like a failure whenever I try to repeat a funny story that someone else told and no one really thinks its funny. It's kind of like telling a joke and then forgetting the punch line. It just doesn't work as well unless it personally happened to you.

I read another blog about poetry that came from someone who is outside of our class blogs. His take seemed a little biased against poetry as he gave a small history on poetry. This blogger made the observation that poets usually have some sort of neurotic disorder or have a "tortured soul." The sarcasm behind the observations saved this blog from becoming a rant against poetry, but I think it makes light of what people perceive poetry to be. He jokes about how a poet needs to die in another country like Italy to truly become famous.

He runs down the list of different periods of poetry, picking out a few poets from each. For the Romantic period he writes, "This era begins when Jean-Jacques Rousseau finds that he cries more than other people, especially in forests. Lots of people live off their parents' estates, have mistresses that are close relatives, wear their collars open, catch colds and die young." As I read how he has stereotyped the Romantic era, I couldn't help but laugh because it pretty much sums it up (if disregard all the intellectual stuff).

It was refreshing to read something lighthearted and not really serious related to our class. And although it's interesting reading all the theory, at times its fun just to read another person's theory about poetry.

Barthes talks about the death of the author not in a way that means the author is not important but in a way that means when you associate a work with an author, that work is limited by that author's name. The text has lots of different meanings; it's not just a voice for the author. I think he has a valid point because sometimes I read books just because a certain author wrote them, and then they don't live up to my expectations. I always wonder who decided which authors were the authority on literature.

We kind of discussed this in class about Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling. Culture has dictated that Shakespeare is an authority while Rowling is still just considered a children's author (a popular one but still a children's author. Who knows who will be a great authority fifty years from now?

Tzvetan Todorov's "Structural Analysis of Narrative" essay seems to take a stab at the New Critics who only focus on the work itself. The New Critics only look at the internal things of the poem and nothing external like the author's life or reader response. Todorov reduces the work of the New Critics to a paraphrase of the original poem: "the result of his efforts will be a paraphrase of the work, which is supposed to reveal the meaning better than the work itself" (2100).

I think this may be a little harsh considering that the structuralist statements he's been making seem to not go much further. From how I'm understanding it, the structuralists look for common, universal links that connects works of literature. He seems to put a lot of emphasis on the science behind it. They concentrate on the methods behind the work. The example Todorov explores is the plot. But how does this bring more meaning to the text? Is this way of looking at things still valid for today's audiences? We always seem to put a lot of importance on what makes a work different or what makes it unique. Does structuralism address these things or does it only look for the common links behind works?

I have read an article about Monroe Beardsley and his criticism of Kilmer's famous opening lines of one of his poems: "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree."

Now I'll have you guess what Beardsley thought of this. Yeah, he didn't like it so much. He thought it too simplistic as it placed nature over art (a very Romantic thing to do). He of course valued art more than nature. Kilmer's poem epitomizes the outpouring of emotion that the Romantics are known for, so I can imagine how Beardsley would criticize him. I think he would disdain him for putting nature above art.

I think Wimsatt and Beardsley and other formalists kind of echo the decadence with Oscar Wilde and his art for art's sake. All they seem concerned about is the poem itself and nothing outside of it kind of like Wilde and his obession with beauty. For Wilde, it's only about the beauty of things. And I wonder if for Wimsatt and Beardsley it is all about the beauty of the poem or at least the poem as it is (whatever that means)? Maybe that's not exactly the right language, but I am still trying to figure out what they would say makes a poem.

As I was telling you about in my last post, my high school English teacher had some pretty formalist ideas about interpreting poetry. I would always become frustrated when I had to interpret something because I would try to relate it to the world I know but the poems always seemed to be about communism or something strange to me. One of the famous quotes I remember my teacher always saying is, "you can interpret a poem in any way you want as long as you can support it from the text."This seems, for me, to relate to Wimsatt and Beardsley's affective fallacy. You can't just talk about how the poem made you feel, but had to talk about what the poem "is."

We weren't allowed to talk about what the poem means to us in our situation because that delves into water of relativism. Analyzing poems in that way feels so scientific. Breaking down each line, each word and examining the significance of each word seems to reduce the brillancy of a poem. And it is confusing as to what exactly Wimsatt and Beardsley mean by what a poem is. I can distinguish what a poem does (what emotion it evokes, the reader's response), but knowing what a poem is is difficult especially when you take away the author's intention. If the reader's response does not give significant meaning to the poem and if the author's intention doesn't either, what exactly does give it its meaning?

The intentional fallacy. Does the author's intention really matter? I think in some cases it does help to know what the author was thinking and going through when they wrote the poem. You can maybe get one interpretation from just looking at the poem itself, but sometimes knowing where the poet was at helps to bring a new interpretation or deepens the one we already had. I think that having as many layers as possible in a poem is what makes a poem interesting, and having the author's intention adds another layer.

Of course, Wimsatt and Beardsley would greatly disagree with me. For them and other Formalists it is about the poem itself. The author's intention doesn't matter because if the author did their job successfully then we would be able to figure out their intention in the poem itself. They say we should not assign the words of a poem as coming directly from the poets mouth, but from the dramatic speaker. This reminds me of my high school English teacher who would always mark off points in our essays for writing that "the poet says" when analyzing poetry instead of "the speaker of the poem says." That always annoyed me because I was like, "Well the poet wrote the poem...." Maybe a good compromise would be "the poet had the speaker of the poem say..." but that could get long and complicated.... I don't know. I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore.

I definitely think my high school English teacher ascribed to formalist views because she would just hand us a poem with no explanation, no dates as to when it was written and say "interpret this." Now, I was not the most clever of students when it came to interpreting poetry (and still am not), but I would try to write what I thought each line was saying even though I didn't know half the words. I was always frustrated because I would come to a line and be like "if this poem was written in last century I would think it would be referring to this, but if it was written last year I would think it was referring to that." I was a very confused child, and usually I picked the wrong interpretation and always got the 6 out of 9 points. (She always used the 9 point scale for grading essays and it bugged me to no end).

Now, I don't think that all poems should be written in a romantic style as an outpouring of emotions inexplicably linked to the poet, but when poetry is written like that I see the value in knowing a little bit about the poet. I also see value in looking at poetry as a craft or an art form rather than just a means of expressing inner most feelings. But ultimately I see value in the postmodern view of situatedness, where a person has a certain way of seeing things and that view will ultimately find its way into their work or into their interpretations of poems.

I just finished reading Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" about a man who travels to a warm climate, and while he's there, he loses his shadow. He was sitting on his balcony and couldn't help but notice the building across the street. It looked like nobody lived in it, but there were beautiful flowers that grew there that had to be constantly watered. That night he made his shadow go into the door (which was ajar) in that opposite building to find out who lived in that house. But the shadow never came back.



A few years later the man has moved back north and someone knocks at his door. He answers it but doesn't recognize who it is. It turns out that the man at the door is actually his shadow. The shadow slowly becomes more of a man, and the shadow's man slowly falls into the role of the shadow. The shadow eventually becomes so much more humanlike that he establishes himself as a man. And when the original man threatens to tell everyone that the man is actually a shadow, no one believes him. And the shadow has him executed.



One thing that struck me that really made this story relevant to our class was that when the shadow went next door the thing that he found living there was poetry. And it was through reading all the poetry in the world that the shadow learned and became more like a man. "I remained there three weeks, and it was more like three thousand years, for I read all that has ever been written in poetry or prose; and I may say, in truth, that I saw and learnt everything."



This statement seems to convey the idea that you become more human when you read. Reading brings you knowledge that you might not ordinarily receive. When the shadow enters the door, the room he goes into is filled with light and fire. I remember Shelley and Emerson using fire images to describe the creative process and poetry. Poetry seems to act as the illuminating light which dispells any darkness or ignorance.

T.S. Eliot seems to be somewhat of an opposite to Romanticism. He puts more emphasis on tradition and reading past poets than Wordsworth and Coleridge did. Romantics focused more on the individual and creating something new while Eliot seems to say that you must read past poets because you will be compared to them. Eliot says, "No poet, no artist of any art, has ahis complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (1093). A poet must know the forms of poetry and develop skills before their work can become unique. We have to be aware of the poetry of the past so we can create our own tradition.

Unlike the Romantic poems, T.S. Eliot does not see poetry as a spontaneous outpouring of feelings and emotion, but sees it as a collection of emotions and images stored up over time. Eliot says, "If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark" (1096). If I remember anything from Romantic class its that the sublime was the big goal. It was like the holy grail for Romantic poets. Now, I kind of like the notion of the sublime, where you see or experience something so beautiful that you just can't help but try to capture those feelings in a poem. It's a nice notion, but I know I've never experienced something that intense in my life, and if I did, I know I would never be able to capture it in words in a way that would make people want to read it over and over again. So, I also like Eliot's notion of poetry. I think it's more attainable than what the Romantics write about.

Eliot takes the approach that a man's experiences are not necessarily reflected in his poetry. It's the "medium" that's important, not the "personality." And the emotions in the poetry may not really be important to the poet. The poet should not have to strive for the sublime, for some new incredible emotional experince. "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinay ones and , in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.

For another class I had to read Vladimir Nabokov's "Good Readers and Good Writers," and I thought it pertained to what we are talking about in lit. crit. Nabokov has certain ideas about reading and how one should approach reading. He thinks that to fully appreciate the text and to get the most out of it you should leave all preconceived notions about the text at the door before you read it.

One shouldn't come to a book and only focus on its elements of social commentary because you'll miss other aspects of it. Nabokov says you should "fondle [the] details" of a work. We should enter into the world of the book or novel and forget our world, and we shouldn't rely on those works to give us a complete picture of the real world.

Nabokov says a good reader should have "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Both Nabokov and Percy Shelley place importance on imagination. Similar to the romantics Nabokov thinks the reader should bring his or her imagination to the work. Reading shouldn't just be a passive activity. It's an active activity that should engage the mind.

But I think Nabokov has more elements of Modernism in his theory. He places a lot of emphasis on the artistic sense and seems to detatch the author from the work. The reader has to detatch themselves from their world and use an "impersonal imagination" to read the text with.

a little music, anyone?

I read an essay about Emerson and the Aeolian harp which made me think about the British Romantics and their value of that same harp. The Romantics, as we all know, valued nature, and Emerson had this Platonist view of things, thinking that there was an ideal realm to try and capture in poetry.

Well, the Aeolian harp is a box with strings that sits in your open window, and when the wind blows through the window and the harp, the harp plays music. This music is, as far as I can tell, supposed to be that idealism played out by nature. I think most of the Romantics equate it to that spiritual experience that occurs in perfection. It tries to capture nature’s soul, a soul of goodness and perfection.

Emerson finds ideal beauty in nature and considers the harp the most beautiful instrument, so it makes sense why this Aeolian harp is such a big hit. It unites the beauty of nature’s wind with the harp creating beautiful music. Everything in the earth is a symbol of another world including everything in nature, and through the Aeolian harp we get an aural manifestation of the ideal world.

Shelley and Arnold each seem to strive for a type of perfection in their writing. For Shelley, perfection can never be written down into a poem. A moment of inspiration (or I might interpret it as perfection or sublime as we called it in Romantic class) comes but by already starts receding before the poet can record it.

Arnold just keeps on reaching for perfection. He writes that Culture is the way to perfection; it has “its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection” (826). Culture entails all the good things like helping your elderly neighbor with her groceries, getting up early in the morning to help your dad repaint the basement, “diminishing human misery”… you know, stuff like that. Arnold defines culture as the best that is known and thought which should propel us into doing good. The pursuit of perfection should bring about beauty, for beauty is just as important as goodness.

Culture brings about “the two noblest things, sweetness and light” (832). Sweetness and light refer to beauty and intelligence (or goodness). Poetry for Arnold links this sweetness and light better than a formal religion. The beauty of poetry and its strive for evoking perfect humanity falls into culture, making it Arnold’s substitution for religion.

Shelley’s definition of poetry echoes closely to Arnold’s culture: “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (714). It seeks to capture a moment of perfect beauty. It “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity” and exposes something beautiful out of something ordinary.

The perfection comes in that moment of beauty, but similar to Arnold’s strive for perfection, Shelley’s poetry “is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet.” (This line also echoes Emerson’s concept of the poets who try to write those “primal warblings” down but cannot produce a perfect copy because our human imperfections keep interfering.)

I guess what I’m trying to conclude is that poetry in its ideal form is perfection and poets try to capture that perfection so it can better mankind, but in reality the poet’s humanness interferes causing the poem to be notches below the poem’s ideal form. Yet, the poet still strives to capture that ideal and to reach that perfection.

a little something about Emerson

Some Emerson (Ralph Waldo that is)

Since in class we’ve been talking about what is an author, what is literature, reading and such, I thought about those things as I read today’s assignment.

Emerson seems to place a lot of emphasis on creativity and original thoughts. From what I understand, which may not be much, there is a right way and a wrong way of reading. On page 722 from “The American Scholar” Emerson says, “Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading.” The reader should be able to take something out of what he reads. “One must be an inventor to read well” (723). For me that means you have to work to get something out of it. You have to go beyond the surface text.

Sometimes, what we read affects what we get out of the text. According to Emerson we can “be fed by any knowledge” (723), just as the body “can be nourished by any food” (723). But if what we read is not as nourishing, we have to work harder to feed ourselves.

In Emerson’s essay “The Poet” we find Emerson’s theory about what it means to be a poet, and in my interpretation I link the word author with poet. For a poet to be a true one he/she must “announce that which no man has foretold” (726). Again this idea of originality and creativity come into play. One illustration Emerson gives is about starting a fire. You can’t just rub some sticks together and create smoke, you have to create something that will last and give off something, like fire. For Emerson it is not the artistic craft of meter and rhythm that give a poem its meaning. A poet creates a poem where the argument or content comes alive and speaks to people.

The poet also seems to observe the world and “articulates” its contents. He studies nature and sees the symbols in it. From what I gather the poet is supposed to take the tangible thins of this world and translate it into man’s soul, so that when he reads a poem he feels it and it moves him.