Fitzgerald's TN

[alice wellintown]

I'm quite familiar with it, but can't make out what you mean. The egg
of Columbus, an allusion that Fitz used in Gatsby is all I can do with
it....but....



On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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