This essay takes the motif of ruin as an entry point for a foray into the subject of the commons. It engages Garrett Hardin’s nearly unknown discussions of literature and poetry to shed critical ...light on his famous idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and on the general relation of the commons to questions of language and measure. To summon resources for thinking against enclosure, the essay follows an itinerary that constellates historian J. M. Neeson, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the poet and theorist Fred Moten, and the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth.
The author suggests that the full significance of Clare's contribution to English literature is found not in his social criticism, but in his refusal to dissociate himself from his past or to become ...assimilated into the mainstream of English culture at the expense of his class-identity. She argues that a clear set of aesthetic principles informs his finest work and provides the first thematic and structural classification of his poetry. Focussing on the major vocational poems and selected passages from the prose, she shows how Clare formulated the creative ideas and rhetorical techniques that allowed him to give unified expression to both his social and literary concerns. Clare's deep involvement with nature and rural England was not only the basis for his poetry, but also enabled him to articulate beliefs which opposed the inhumane values of his time.
Renowned Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Charlotte Turner Smith, and John Clare were obsessed with love, human emotions, and how the natural world works to influence and inspire these ...sensations of the human experience. Common muses featured in these authors' works often include bodies of water-such as the River Wye, which inspired William Wordsworth-or animals-like the nightingale, a creature which inspired many poets including Charlotte Smith and Samuel Coleridge to write such poems as Smith's "To a Nightingale." In using these muses to construct nature, most Romantic poets played with the idea that the natural world could positively or negatively influence a person's psyche. In short, through their work, Romantic poets tended to make a point of explaining how scenes like the River Wye or the nightingale or a sunny Spring day affected their own perceptions of the human experience; however, some other poets, opposing this entwinement between human and nature, offered another view. Pieces like John Clare's "The Nightingale's Nest" and Samuel Coleridge's "The Nightingale" sought to paint nature and the human experience as separate entities, thus exposing the practice of linking the two as a selfish one, particularly in the case of Wordsworth and Smith, who Clare and Coleridge's pieces suggested had a habit of selfishly constructing nature as a serene, peaceful and unassuming presence merely as a means to highlight their own unhappiness.
Field Guides Pearson, Mike
Performance research,
10/2018, Letnik:
23, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this article, Mike Pearson challenges what Guy Debord suggests is 'the primary urban character' of the dérive. Following a memorable encounter with a pair of European Nighjars, he reflects upon ...how birds might occasion, guide, lead and dramaturgically orchestrate drifting and upon choreographies of bird watching. How, in their quest, birds engender expectation and urgency, necessitating preparation - going equipped with specialist optical tools, clothing, footwear - and precipitating heightened senses of attention and concentration. How their appearance and encounter sets and punctuates the tempo and rhythm of the excursion. How this leads to adjustments: of timings - halting, lingering, waiting, rushing to follow; of ways of seeing - negotiating looking up and out simultaneously, getting one's eye in, accustoming it to colour and movement in this terrain, oscillating between near and far, scanning, rapid shifting; of listening - cocking an ear, focusing direction. Above all, of posture, gait and locomotion: moving in slow motion, walking sideways, holding the body at odd angles, crouching, crawling, twitching. Conjuring improvised responses of concealment and revelation in relation to a landscape: of becoming attuned and absorbed - another feature of this place. How it prompts memories of similar occurrences here, of this place at different times, of these birds in other places ...
'Field Guides' points of reference are J.A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967) in which the author trails the raptor across the flat Essex marshes; Mark Cocker's Crow Country (2012), the memoire of a 'rook-following man'; John Berger's essay 'Field' (1971) in which 'Finches chasing each other from bush to bush' might constitute a 'first event' - that fixes ones attention and that then leads you to apprehend further events within a field; and the hypotactic conflations of optic and haptic in John Clare's poetry - 'With every smell and sound and sight beguiled' ('The Village Boy').
Asylum
presents the kind of journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he'd been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Lola Haskins starts out with as ...little sense of direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering all over the map, she too finally reaches her destination. The four sections in this book are where she rests for the night. The first looks tenderly at the cycle of human life. The second renders the world around her as if she were painting it. By the third, having lost her way, she turns to the supernatural and in the process is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The book ends as she finds it again and arrives in her dear north-west England, having learned from John Clare that she "can be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere."
Please remit $40 per person, payable by check or credit card through the following web page: www.johnclare.org/ WCA SESSION 64: POETRY AND ILLUSTRATION IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM Program arranged by the ...Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Presiding: James McKusick, University of Missouri-Kansas City Thursday, January 4, 1:45-3:00 p.m. 1. "The Game of Human Life: Late Romantic Amusement, Social Class, and Illustration," Rosetta Young, University of California, Berkeley
Edward Thomas and the Imagination Brooks, Martin
English literature in transition, 1880-1920,
01/2020, Letnik:
63, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
THIS ARTICLE describes Edward Thomas’s theory of what the imagination is and demonstrates how his poetry represents that theory. Before his death in the First World War, Thomas (1878–1917) was a ...prominent literary critic who had in late 1914 begun to write lyric poetry. He attempted to write, as he puts it in his poem “Words” (26–28 June 1915), “As poets do.” The ideas of what “poets do” that he had developed as a literary critic form the foundation of his poetry. How and why poets use their imaginations is a key topic in his criticism. What follows demonstrates that it shapes his lyrics.
Rather than treating American poets as the happy or rebellious children of European romanticism, Fletcher uncovers a distinct lineage for American poetry. His point of departure is the English writer ...John Clare - he then centres on the radically American vision expressed by Emerson and Walt Whitman.
PDF
