Fitzgerald's TN

[Markekohut]

Wonderful riff, almost critical lyricism, but ultimately too broad as applied, in my estimation.
Keats, Fitzgerald and many others are on some kind of opposite poles than Donne, Eliot
And Pynchon, say, NOT in quality (for,this discussion)

See Schiller 's distinction in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry in which one way to reduce his rich reflections, and I know it is an oversimplification and that the polarity is not binary, is to see/
sort many writers into those with " natural" metaphors and few literary/notional allusions and those self-consciously full of such.

That is the kind of crammed into every sentence meaning I was referring to re Mackin's observation. 

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 6, 2012, at 9:57 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Cramming meaning into a few words, what some poetry books call
> "compression", does not begin when Hemingway meets a man-woman in
> Europe and as a vision of an iceberg nmethod, but is an American
> tradition that we can trace to our Puritan roots. It is a funny thing
> to read Puritan Poets, Bradstreet for example, with people not so well
> versed in this tradition. f Bradstreet is a puritan how come she
> doesn't write in the plain style that the puritans advanced and
> advocated with religious zeal? But she does. And Emily hiding in the
> house, though a romantic,cpmpresses words as well. The romantics, like
> Dickenson and Hawthorne, though they too semm verbose, i.e. Whitman,
> and the Puritans, though they seem loaded up with allusions, are the
> true founding fathers and mothers of the new-romantics like Pynchon.
> The man who connects them all, of course, is Emerson; he who started
> and led the parade. That Pynchon playfully pushes Wigglesworth, author
> of our fist American epic, The Day of Doom, into his fist novel is
> telling. Wigglesworth, popular and on the tongues of infants in
> Puritan America, is an important root in our literary declaration of
> independence, something that we have to wait for Emerson to lead, but
> we should not so much contrast him with Blake's infants of Innocense,
> as see the ironic words later put in the mouths of babes by romantics.
> Got any gum, chum (GR. down in a hole somewhere).
> 
> When Bradstreet's House burns, she thinks it the day of doom, but, as
> the chapter and verse audience, steeped in the allusions biblical
> would know, and as the readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, where fire
> and ice move through the town and whee the kids build there balck and
> white, adrogynous smowman, would not, the twinkling of an eye, the
> blasting of the trumpet, remains eyes wide shut and muted.
> 
> Compression is skill we can learn, but the kind that Keats has or
> Fitzgerald or Pynchon or Heaney or Yeats....I think its the luke of
> the Irish cowboy; a gift that poetic people are born with. It can't be
> taught.
> 
> http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand