Fitzgerald's TN

[Markekohut]

Drops. The.Mic. Visiting lecture a failure. 



Sent from my iPad

On Oct 6, 2012, at 11:50 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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