Transcript Tekstanalyse og –historie F06

Tekstanalyse og –historie
(Spring 2008)
Session Four: Poetry I
Agenda
What is Poetry? (According to Sylvia Plath)
 American Poetry After 1945
 Group Work: Sylvia Plath, ”Lady Lazarus”
 Group Discussion
What is Poetry? (According to
Sylvia Plath)
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Taking ”Daddy” as your point of departure,
define the genre of poetry
Find contrasts and similarities with other
genres (narrative, drama)
Interpret the poem
Romanticism, Modernism and
American Poetry After 1945
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The poem in relation to the poet and the moment of
feeling: Temporal relations: emotion and
composition (Romanticism)
The poem in relation to the nature of feeling:
Relations of significance: public – private, universal
– personal (Modernism)
Confessional and provisional poetry (After
Modernism)
Romanticism
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”I have said that poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
emotion is contemplated till by a species of
reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears,
and an emotion, kindred to that which was
before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced, and does itself actually exist in the
mind.” William Wordsworth, ”Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd
Edition (1800)
Modernism
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”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape
from personality. But, of course, only
those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to want to escape
from these things.” T.S. Eliot, ” Tradition and the
Individual Talent” (1922)
Modernism
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”The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet
cannot reach this impersonality without
surrendering himself wholly to the work to be
done. And he is not likely to know what is to be
done unless he lives in what is not merely the
present, but the present moment of the past,
unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but
of what is already living.” T.S. Eliot, ” Tradition and the
Individual Talent” (1922)
American Poetry After 1945
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The poem represents ”feeling at the moment of
composition” (NAe, 2643)
The poem is ”a chronicle of its occasion and the
act of composing it” (NAe, 2643)
”The poem is, at last, between two persons in
stead of two pages. […] In all modesty, I
confess that it may be the deat of literature as
we know it.” Frank O’Hara, Personism: A Manifesto (1959).
Quoted in NAe, 2643.
American Poetry After 1945
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Frank O’Hara and the diary poem: ”A Step
Away from Them”
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Who is a step away from whom in the poem?
Who is O’Hara, the poet, a step away from
Why?
What does it mean to be a step away?
How is the poem a diary?
How is the poem a poem?
”A Step Away From Them”
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It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.
[…]
Group Work: Sylvia Plath, ”Lady
Lazarus”
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What did Plath mean by the remark, ”I cannot
sympathise with those cries from the heart that
are informed by nothing except a needle or a
knife. … I believe that one should be able to
control and manipulate experiences, even the
most terrifying … with an informed and
intelligent mind” (NAe, p. 2968)
Find examples of her ability ”to control and
manipulate experiences”