RE: "We Live For Love" a Pat Benatar lesson...
July 11, 2019 at 6:39 am
(This post was last modified: July 11, 2019 at 6:41 am by Belacqua.)
(July 10, 2019 at 5:46 pm)Brian37 Wrote: I simply get pissed off at morons who think all art is about perfection and meter.
If art was meant to be all farting rainbows then it has no business being called art. That is not art, that is just masturbation.
I agree with you that meter is far from the most important thing. And I really have no desire to read about farting rainbows.
Are you engaged with the history of poetry at all? I think that from your perspective this would be an interesting topic. By far most of the well-known poets in European history have been Christian, and even the explicitly atheist ones like Shelley tend to be soaked in Platonism or other ideas that I suspect you would dislike.
For example, your hatred of religion would mean that Eliot and Auden would be your enemies. But there are modern poets who were writing during and after the influence of A.J. Ayer, who posited that any sentence about God is just nonsense. They were actually writing, in part, to free poetry of religion. They knew its symbols and its power, however, so they knew how to engage with the need to expunge religious nonsense. Maybe the best example of this is William Empson, who was fantastically knowledgeable about literature but also despised Christianity. He was a contemporary of Eliot and Auden, a friend of Ayer, and an original thinker. His example shows me how poetry is more than a record of how I feel today, written in lines that don't go all the way across the page.
Here is a good example of an Empson poem. Note that he's writing about Bacchus, a god he doesn't believe in, as a contrast to Christianity.
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Bacchus III
The god who fled down with a standard yard
(Surveying with that reed which was his guard
He showed St. John the New Jerusalem;
It was a sugarcane containing rum
And hence the fire on which these works depend)
Taught and quivered strung upon the bend
An outmost crystal a recumbent flame
(He drinks all cups the tyrant could acclaim;
He still is dumb, illimitably wined,
Burns still his nose and liver for mankind)...
It is an ether, such an agony.
In the thin choking air of Caucasus
He under operation lies forever
Smelling the chlorine in the chloroform.
The plains around him flood with the destroyers
Pasturing the stallion in the standing corn.
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In other poems he is eager to show that a logical positivist view of the world can appear in poetry as profound as the religious type.
