[lit-ideas] Re: Preferring the culture that produced Dante?
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 19:03:27 -0800
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Donal McEvoy
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 3:00 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Preferring the culture that produced Dante?
>Why pay any attention to Eliot now?>
Dnl wrote, “Does this mean to his criticism or his poetry? Btw, both are surely
worth studying - and it is hard to fully understand the poetry, especially Four
Quartets, except against the background of Eliot's views of literature - for
his poetry seeks to exemplify the 'truths' of his literary criticism.”
LKH: To some extent it means both. I don’t think Frye is concerned here with
studying or understanding his poetry, but from the 50s when Eliot was the
determiner of taste in poetry his influence has steadily declined (per Bloom).
As to his poetry, I don’t recall anyone ever saying he was a major poet but
perhaps some think so. Interestingly, in Bloom’s introduction to the Modern
Critical Views: Wallace Stevens, he writes that Stevens is considered by a
majority of American critics to have surpassed Eliot – probably as a poet and
not a critic.
But why pay attention to Northrop Frye’s “Antique Drum”?
“The First World War discredited the view that northern, liberal, largely
Protestant cultures of England and Germany were, with America, the architects
of a new world..."
Dnl: Did it (sorry can't get italics off)? How so? It was hardly
"liberal...cultures" that were responsible for the World War but illiberal and
militaristic ones. Surely it is sweeping, sententious sentences like the above
that should be regarded as discredited (even before we unpack the self-regard
implicit for "largely Protestant cultures" and then note how this self-regard
has very little to offer as explanation for the War - and so how can the War be
taken to discredit what does not explain it in the first place)?
I’m pretty sure Frye is doing little more than saying (in his own way) that the
First World War destroyed the predominate evolutionary optimism that prevailed
up until that time.
Lawrence
On Monday, 17 November 2014, 19:20, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Consider this from Northrop Frye’s “Antique Drum”:
“The First World War discredited the view that northern, liberal, largely
Protestant cultures of England and Germany were, with America, the architects
of a new world. Latin and Catholic Europe began to look like a cultural as
well as a political ally. The essay on Blake in The Sacred Wood is full of
anti-Nordic mythology: Blake’s prophecies ‘illustrate the crankiness, the
eccentricity, which frequently affects writers outside the Latin tradition.’
So although Eliot’s view of literature is ‘classical,’ his Classicism regards
Latin medieval culture and Dante in particular, as the culmination of the
Classical achievement. Dante’s greatness is partly a product of a time when
Europe was ‘mentally more united than we can no conceive.’ At such a time
literature achieves its greatest power and clarity: ‘there is an opacity, or
inspissation of poetic style throughout Europe after the Renaissance.’ So
Eliot explicitly prefers the culture which produced Dante to that which
produced Shakespeare.”
Why pay any attention to Eliot now? As Bloom writes on page on off Modern
Critical Views: T. S. Eliot, “. . . anyone adopting the profession of teaching
literature in the early nineteen fifties entered a discipline virtually
enslaved not only by Eliot’s insights but the entire span of his preferences
and prejudices.” I was a few years behind Bloom and don’t recall an
enslavement but Eliot was taken very seriously. But since that time for me was
the Unabomber who believed fervently that we should return to an earlier time,
a time very much like Frye says Eliot preferred. It is also indicative that
(as Bloom I think writes elsewhere) Eliot was opposed to the idea of evolution.
There is no “evolution.” We aren’t getting better and better we had best look
back to an early perfect or at least better time and strive to return to that.
The Unabomber would have us abandon our technology and return to simpler ways
of doing things. Eliot would at least have us exalt an earlier simpler time
and the literature that was produced then. Literature produced later is cranky
and eccentric. On the other hand evolution is still at work. Richard Leakey
in one of his books predicted that Homo Sapiens wouldn’t last much longer than
any other species, but he is reasoning from the past and not from ideas the
products of evolution are opening up to us. How long will it be before homo
sapiens is living in the Moon, Mars and elsewhere in the universe? Some humans
eventually will not be subject to the damage done or about to be done to this
earth.
And what is the impact of evolution upon poetry. We can’t draw any conclusions
but we do know that our minds have been impacted by technology, software,
information. There is now something “new under the sun.” We are dealing with
matters not conceived of by Dante. We are doing things with our minds we never
did before. Is the crankiness and chaos that produced Shakespeare really such a
bad thing? Is it impious to predict new sorts of poetry, and poets at least as
good as any who have gone before, maybe in a few hundred years, maybe sooner?
Lawrence
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