(no subject)

For reasons too varied to get into here (heat, writer's block, mortality, future shock, personal obsolescence, questions I cannot answer), I've been feeling a trifle grouchy lately. Less Melville's desire to "knock off people's hats" than to throw something big and expensive out a window. That, or join a monastery and grow lettuce.

Probably it would be healthier to write down some definitions of poetry I found in a high-school text book:

"Poetry is a stringing together of words into a ripple and jingle and a run of colours. Poetry is an interplay of images. Poetry is the iridescent suggestion of an idea."

That's Lawrence. Here's Bryant:
"[Poetry] is the art of exciting the imagination and touching the heart by selecting and arranging symbols and thoughts."

Coleridge simply put it like this:
"the best words in the best order"

Not sure I buy that one, but I see his point.

Anyway, tomorrow we'll be looking at poetry at I hope to God I won't be one of those teachers who turn poetry analysis into strip-mining. Being able to tell a quatrain from a sestet, identify a triple rhyme, point out the euphony and understand the metonymy are all fine and good, but can so easily become ends in themselves. It's vocabulary that can begin to attempt to describe the emotional impact of this abstract art form, but ye-gods don't go thinking it can unearth "meaning" like some vein of coal!

Fates forefend I should ever teach such as those documented here:

https://aeon.co/essays/metaphors-grow-the-mind-and-feed-the-soul-dont-lose-them

It grows late! I must retreat. . .