Subject
PF poem (quality of)
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I don't think this or any list is likely to disambiguate time-tossed terms
such as 'prose' and 'poetry.' And harder yet if we add 'good' or 'bad' to
the equation. BB is right. The criteria of EFFORT or EASE seem irrelevant.
We judge the final results! Can we distinguish 're-working' from
'worrying-into-existence?' The extreme cliché is of Mozart's carefree,
spotless, spontaneous scores compared with Beethoven's angst-ridden,
scarcely-legible re-scratchings! They both produced some quite promising
stuff! As Prof L Donnegan used to say: "It takes a worried man to sing a
worried song ... I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long' (meaning he
laughed all the way to the bank after the recording session.)
If you visit the Keats House in Hampstead you get to see manuscripts
somewhere between the Wolfgang/Ludwig extremes -- odes that we think of as
deathless, poetic perfection turn out to be the covergences of neat, busy,
worried corrections. (Note the unemotional verb: 'worry' -- to work away at
a problem.) U Eco had fun with this notion, claiming to have found an early
Rev T S Eliot version: "April is the cruellist month -- And May ain't that
much better either."
Was it not Boileau who urged us to 'polish, polish -- until the polish
disappears?' Ben Jonson spoke of Shakespeare's 'unblotted' scripts (is that
a fact??), to which G B ('Better than the Bard!') Shaw replied to the effect
that WS really should have re-worked and blotted his plays a bit.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
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such as 'prose' and 'poetry.' And harder yet if we add 'good' or 'bad' to
the equation. BB is right. The criteria of EFFORT or EASE seem irrelevant.
We judge the final results! Can we distinguish 're-working' from
'worrying-into-existence?' The extreme cliché is of Mozart's carefree,
spotless, spontaneous scores compared with Beethoven's angst-ridden,
scarcely-legible re-scratchings! They both produced some quite promising
stuff! As Prof L Donnegan used to say: "It takes a worried man to sing a
worried song ... I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long' (meaning he
laughed all the way to the bank after the recording session.)
If you visit the Keats House in Hampstead you get to see manuscripts
somewhere between the Wolfgang/Ludwig extremes -- odes that we think of as
deathless, poetic perfection turn out to be the covergences of neat, busy,
worried corrections. (Note the unemotional verb: 'worry' -- to work away at
a problem.) U Eco had fun with this notion, claiming to have found an early
Rev T S Eliot version: "April is the cruellist month -- And May ain't that
much better either."
Was it not Boileau who urged us to 'polish, polish -- until the polish
disappears?' Ben Jonson spoke of Shakespeare's 'unblotted' scripts (is that
a fact??), to which G B ('Better than the Bard!') Shaw replied to the effect
that WS really should have re-worked and blotted his plays a bit.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm