By Henry Gifford
This ebook (comprising 4 lectures offered at Trinity university, Cambridge in 1985) is anxious with the functionality and standing of poetry within the 20th century, and is very involved to distinction attitudes in Britain and the United States with these within the USSR and japanese Europe. starting with the functionality of poetry at the present time, Professor Gifford is going directly to reflect on the character and validity of 'poetic witness', the matter of the poet's solitude and his relation to the neighborhood, and at last the query of the way a long way the 'international code' of poetry should be understood through those that take care of it heavily of their personal language. the writer, who has released on many points of twentieth-century poetry, has tried an 'apology for poetry' in an age which wishes, yet has a tendency to disregard, this artwork previously on the centre of eu civilization. among the poets mentioned are Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Cavafy and Seferis.
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Extra info for Poetry in a Divided World: The Clark Lectures 1985 (Clark Lectures, 1985)
Sample text
The incident has been transformed into a profound visionary experience, enacted in the depths of the poet's mind as he narrates it. He has indeed put his own construction on what he saw, yet in that solitude which his imagination has claimed for itself Wordsworth is enabled to recognise with the most poignant simplicity what lies ahead of him. ' In 1802, when Wordsworth wrote this poem, his powers were 29 Poetry in a divided world still at their height. But in The Prelude of 1805-6 already he could expect the failing of those powers: I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all [.
There are two things to be said on this observation. The first is that, in the final poem of 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', for example, in which Yeats denounces the spreading of violence as 'evil gathers head', he seems not only appalled by the 'thunder of feet, tumult of images', but fascinated by it. In another poem of that period, 'Ancestral Houses', he speculates whether the greatness of the ancestors who built them could be admired without some respect for their violence: 42 The nature and validity of poetic witness .
For poets since Wordsworth's day the most serious problem has been how to sustain their advance from one decade to the next. There is surely an undertone of envy to be caught in Eliot's comment on 'the last and greatest canto' of the Paradiso, where he feels Dante has achieved 'the real right thing' and displays 'the utmost power of the poet'. ' The shock of great wars and upheaval on many sides has compounded the disadvantages of the modern poet. Wordsworth may have lamented the passing away of'a glory from the earth', the decline of visionary power.