by Dante Alighieri
Third volume of the Divine Comedy, focusing on the narrator’s ascent into the height of religious truth, mystery, beauty and goodness. This volume suffers from an interest issue compared to the previous ones in that there’s a direct absence of drama or real striking, and lends itself to a staleness that usually occurs in an attempt to intimately describe the ultimate good, whether it’s God, utopia or heaven. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen in this work, and the result proved itself actually quite engaging. It wasn’t flawless, and in the early sections particularly was rather slow in pace, seeming to drift somewhat and struggle to find the proper balance between description and speeches. Another persistent point of irritation was the stopping of the heavenly focus to have some character deliver a pointed Take That against a corrupt politician or pontiff of Dante’s time. Of course a large purpose of the Divine Comedy had been to threaten and torment people that Dante didn’t like. At least it was the main point in Inferno, here the drawn out condemnations feel redundant and jarring. Similarly, the views on politics don’t emerge as hugely productive, seeming at once over conventional and too dated by the context of the time.
Ultimately the volume works on the strength of its poetry and the way it’s able to energetically imagine what it insists is beyond imaginable. This structure builds up a surprisingly effective source of dramatic tension, between the format offered by aesthetics and the effort to explore religious summit. Ultimately while I’m thoroughly not a believer and found the whole Christian labeling rather irksome there are a lot of scenes of great emotional energy and literary talent. It scopes about explicitly eternity, and offers an attempt at working in ultimates that is quite powerful.
Better than: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Worse than: Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
So Forth: Poems
by Joseph Brodsky
Nobel laureate. Now, this one is more like it. The poems here have a crispness, intensity and basic clarity sadly lacking in Eliiot, and it gives them a great range in bringing to life specific situations. In the format most of the poems are attached to a definite situation or story, making them more like very short fiction that happens to be beautifully and strangely expressed, rather than a whole reflection of literature on literature that I found ultimately alienating about the Wasteland.
And that’s it. Not surprisingly I find it even more difficult to comment substantively about poetry that I like than to criticize it. I do think that Brodsky merits the Nobel Award he received,, and I could be interesting in seeing his other writing at some point. It also makes me interested in what other great literary poets are like, and the type of range that might be developed in mining this field more.
Better than: The Wasteland and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
Worse than: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Nobel laureate. Now, this one is more like it. The poems here have a crispness, intensity and basic clarity sadly lacking in Eliiot, and it gives them a great range in bringing to life specific situations. In the format most of the poems are attached to a definite situation or story, making them more like very short fiction that happens to be beautifully and strangely expressed, rather than a whole reflection of literature on literature that I found ultimately alienating about the Wasteland.
And that’s it. Not surprisingly I find it even more difficult to comment substantively about poetry that I like than to criticize it. I do think that Brodsky merits the Nobel Award he received,, and I could be interesting in seeing his other writing at some point. It also makes me interested in what other great literary poets are like, and the type of range that might be developed in mining this field more.
Better than: The Wasteland and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
Worse than: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Wasteland and Other Poems
by T. S. Eliot
Nobel Laureate. Very difficult to approach with a clear setup or even as a fair reader. One, I don’t generally read poetry, and I enjoy it even less. Two, Eliot’s work is really too famous to engage with, and has been alluded to or quoted in part so often that it’s difficult to factor through the connections to the actual writing. I was always going to be a hard sell on this particular text. And, unsurprisingly, I can’t count myself highly moved, enlightened or entertained. There are good elements in here, with the obvious control over language on display, and some striking imagery. On the whole, however, I found it dull, awkward, overly dense to follow and not delivering appreciable insights when parsed. In part this issue comes round to Eliot’s distasteful politics and simplistic religious endorsement that I find displeasing, and which it’s hard to disentangle my view. In either case, though, ther seems to be a fundamental limitation in the vision of what to say with the poems and how to say it, a type of writing that at points seems to purposely distance itself from ready access.
Above all what struck me was how upper bound it was, how insistent Eliot’s poems were in citing earlier classics as the ground for becoming classics themselves. It’s overwhelmingly elitist, increadibly focused on an education available to few and which was accessed by even fewer in Eliot’s time. That makes for a fitting, is aesthetically deflating, pattern in the fame and widespread literary allusion to which the poems, and especially the Wasteland, have been subject. Reading it felt often like a closed book, it was so heavily bound up in referring to previous literary classics, and had been so often alluded to in a similar fashion, that all the nicely craften literary quality seemed self-contained. It’s a well formed exercise, and one can easily see how it gives generations of scholars work in parsing and interpreting. Beyond that, though, it seems to be self-contained and purposefully detached from possible application for the world in a manner that I do not see with most literature.
Worse than: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Nobel Laureate. Very difficult to approach with a clear setup or even as a fair reader. One, I don’t generally read poetry, and I enjoy it even less. Two, Eliot’s work is really too famous to engage with, and has been alluded to or quoted in part so often that it’s difficult to factor through the connections to the actual writing. I was always going to be a hard sell on this particular text. And, unsurprisingly, I can’t count myself highly moved, enlightened or entertained. There are good elements in here, with the obvious control over language on display, and some striking imagery. On the whole, however, I found it dull, awkward, overly dense to follow and not delivering appreciable insights when parsed. In part this issue comes round to Eliot’s distasteful politics and simplistic religious endorsement that I find displeasing, and which it’s hard to disentangle my view. In either case, though, ther seems to be a fundamental limitation in the vision of what to say with the poems and how to say it, a type of writing that at points seems to purposely distance itself from ready access.
Above all what struck me was how upper bound it was, how insistent Eliot’s poems were in citing earlier classics as the ground for becoming classics themselves. It’s overwhelmingly elitist, increadibly focused on an education available to few and which was accessed by even fewer in Eliot’s time. That makes for a fitting, is aesthetically deflating, pattern in the fame and widespread literary allusion to which the poems, and especially the Wasteland, have been subject. Reading it felt often like a closed book, it was so heavily bound up in referring to previous literary classics, and had been so often alluded to in a similar fashion, that all the nicely craften literary quality seemed self-contained. It’s a well formed exercise, and one can easily see how it gives generations of scholars work in parsing and interpreting. Beyond that, though, it seems to be self-contained and purposefully detached from possible application for the world in a manner that I do not see with most literature.
Worse than: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Better than: Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Purgatorio
Dante Alighieri
The second volume of the Divine Comedy. I’d read Inferno back six years ago at the end of high school, as part of assigned reading for AP English. At the time and in subsequent years I felt very little drive to read the other two volumes. Partly because my general lack of engagement with the earlier poetry, partly because I felt some reluctance to gong onto the equally judgemental and less sensational and famous portions. There seemed little inherent virtue to entering into Dante’s system of vindicate and absolutist judgement for its own sake, and the lack of much real story inhibited a lot of the qualities of interest thta might drawn me in. Likewise, while the work clearly had valuable tools as an historical document, in its influence upon later literature and its reflection of rich political detail from the time, it wasn’t an era that ended up as myh specialty. Nevertheless, here I am reviewing the second volume some time after reading it. I changed my mind partly because despite the above the idea of rounding out the project has been on my mind for quite sometime. As well, of late I’ve had a bit more interst in exploring poetry as a writing form, and Dante’s pattern is a well known and conceptually vivid form of it. Finally I didn’t want to be one of those people who had just read the Inferno and not the rest of the Divine Comedy, instead aspiring to be one of the few that had read the entire thing.
Where on the tiers of afterlife do you think Dante would place me for that bit of pride?
I found Purgatorio rather engaging, actually. Yes it’s highly judgemental, a bit too drawn out and features little happening except Dante’s characters preaching different forms of his moral notions. Yet despite that it worked, on an literary level, Dante was ultimately a talented enough writer to make his writing engaging and even mesmerizing despite the above. It works as poetry, the form by which meaning is expressed being inseparable from the meaning. Even in translation there’s a clarity and power to the langugae chosen that makes it rather beautiful. As well, while the story is slow and plotless by the standpoint of most novels, as a poem it’s unusually concrete, well anchored and tightly structured. This aspect works to give real balance and sense of certainty to the writing, and helped to make for a directly readable experience more than a lot of classics.
As to the content expressed in the work, it’s not as bad as I expected. In contrast with Inferno it’s not all that vengeful and sadistic in the end, and it helps that Dante expresses a lot of his moral vision in terms of justice and political equity rather than just a condemnation of heathens and exhaltation of believers. In that sense this centuries past work has more moral complexity than a lot of contemporary religious writing. It’s also not just a work about religious, and the meditations on beauty work quite well. Another virtue to this book as a piece of writing involves its centering of place, the way it invents a whole unique geography that directly expresses the story structure and theme of the work. In the end a lot of Dante’s successs lies in the elements that make it somewhat like a proto science fiction account. Not fantasy, science fiction, with the focus on a major metaphysicla world-system that encompases and goes beyond known societies. It’s a vision at once epic and intense, that works to a surprising extent to delivering an enduring classic.
Better than: Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Worse than: Far North by Marcel Theroux
The second volume of the Divine Comedy. I’d read Inferno back six years ago at the end of high school, as part of assigned reading for AP English. At the time and in subsequent years I felt very little drive to read the other two volumes. Partly because my general lack of engagement with the earlier poetry, partly because I felt some reluctance to gong onto the equally judgemental and less sensational and famous portions. There seemed little inherent virtue to entering into Dante’s system of vindicate and absolutist judgement for its own sake, and the lack of much real story inhibited a lot of the qualities of interest thta might drawn me in. Likewise, while the work clearly had valuable tools as an historical document, in its influence upon later literature and its reflection of rich political detail from the time, it wasn’t an era that ended up as myh specialty. Nevertheless, here I am reviewing the second volume some time after reading it. I changed my mind partly because despite the above the idea of rounding out the project has been on my mind for quite sometime. As well, of late I’ve had a bit more interst in exploring poetry as a writing form, and Dante’s pattern is a well known and conceptually vivid form of it. Finally I didn’t want to be one of those people who had just read the Inferno and not the rest of the Divine Comedy, instead aspiring to be one of the few that had read the entire thing.
Where on the tiers of afterlife do you think Dante would place me for that bit of pride?
I found Purgatorio rather engaging, actually. Yes it’s highly judgemental, a bit too drawn out and features little happening except Dante’s characters preaching different forms of his moral notions. Yet despite that it worked, on an literary level, Dante was ultimately a talented enough writer to make his writing engaging and even mesmerizing despite the above. It works as poetry, the form by which meaning is expressed being inseparable from the meaning. Even in translation there’s a clarity and power to the langugae chosen that makes it rather beautiful. As well, while the story is slow and plotless by the standpoint of most novels, as a poem it’s unusually concrete, well anchored and tightly structured. This aspect works to give real balance and sense of certainty to the writing, and helped to make for a directly readable experience more than a lot of classics.
As to the content expressed in the work, it’s not as bad as I expected. In contrast with Inferno it’s not all that vengeful and sadistic in the end, and it helps that Dante expresses a lot of his moral vision in terms of justice and political equity rather than just a condemnation of heathens and exhaltation of believers. In that sense this centuries past work has more moral complexity than a lot of contemporary religious writing. It’s also not just a work about religious, and the meditations on beauty work quite well. Another virtue to this book as a piece of writing involves its centering of place, the way it invents a whole unique geography that directly expresses the story structure and theme of the work. In the end a lot of Dante’s successs lies in the elements that make it somewhat like a proto science fiction account. Not fantasy, science fiction, with the focus on a major metaphysicla world-system that encompases and goes beyond known societies. It’s a vision at once epic and intense, that works to a surprising extent to delivering an enduring classic.
Better than: Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Worse than: Far North by Marcel Theroux
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)