[lit-ideas] Re: The individual nature of "startle"
- From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2014 22:39:04 +0100
On 03 Dec 2014, Lawrence Helm wrote:
> I did have a problem when Lowell’s “poetry” seemed little more than “prose.”
> If you can do it in prose, why call it poetry?
And then on 09 Dec 2014, Lawrence wrote:
> I opened Mariani’s book this morning and read, “... I can still remember
> standing in the stacks of the library one dreary rainy afternoon soon
> afterwards and, as I read that poem, feeling as if the top of my head were
> coming off.”
Isn't it a little 'startling' to read in a book written about 20 years ago a
direct answer to a question that you posed just last week?
Why call what Lowell writes 'poetry'? Mariani answers that question by quoting
Dickinson.
In a letter written in 1870, Emily Dickinson once defined poetry this way: “If
I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is
poetry. ... Is there any other way?”
I'm really enjoying your poems and the discussion of poetry you've initiated,
Lawrence, and regret that constraints prohibit commenting a little more fully.
(Hopefully these will soon be lifted.) Thank you.
Chris Bruce,
keeping an eye out for
the thing with feathers, in
Kiel, Germany
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
