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Thinkers Concerned with Sound, Thinkers Concerned with a Critique of…
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Chris Nealon - The Matter of Capital, or Catastrophe and Textuality (2011)
- Critic
- The subject matter of poetry matters immensely (which opposes Vendler)
- Synthesizes the views of Vendler (context doesn't matter) and Jackson & Prins (context is essential) on how to read poetry
- Argues that poetic utterance is affected by period, even if one need not know every single detail of a period to understand a work
- Form mimics content, even as it tries to get away from said content (ex. poetry that critiques capitalism plays into capitalist notions of immediacy and commodity)
- Critiques new criticism which ignores the capitalistic state of poetry and sees poetry as an escape from politics (escapism framed as liberty)
- Poetry with political subject matter is essential
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Helen Vendler - Introduction, Soul Says (1995)
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- Formalist
- All poets have something original to say which can be revealed through close reading
- Subject matter isn't significant to a poem, which makes poetry different from prose (which is interested in the "self" and identity construction)
- The lyric must act as a mirror to emotion
- The abstracted voice gives rise to the "soul" through the use of the "I/you"
- This abstracted voice takes on the quality of not grounding a poem in the here/now and allowing anyone to read themselves into it
- Multiplicity in poetry permits poetry to encompass a wide range of experience
- Vendler's notion of the abstracted voice which allows for universal readings of the "self" overlooks the deconstructionist view of language's imperfection
- Rich diametrically opposes Vendler's statement that "subject matter isn't important"
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Adrienne Rich - Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1984)
- Feminist theorist
- Authority, patriotism, and nationalism are all linguistic concepts. We must fight language with language if we are to revolt against these oppressive philosophies which commodify language
- Opposes the notion of the universal lyric and stresses the importance of the context of a work
- Concerned with personal identity in poetry
- "The personal is political"
- Directly contradicts Vendler's disinterest in content
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In their own ways, Shelley, Schiller, and Kant viewed poetry as an ESCAPE from society's obsession with production and industry/capital
Plato prioritizes reason above emotion, and thus science above art
Richards, and Césaire prioritize emotion, and thus art above science
Lowell, Olsen, and Zukofsky argue that there is no such thing as "free verse" and advocate for the necessity of poetry's sonority
Césaire uses his argument against science and its classification to justify his divorce from the referential function and it's calcifying nature
Walcott's conception of history directly opposes that of Baraka. Walcott points out that views like Baraka's hinge upon repetition of past cycles of racial tensions without truly solving anything
While Vendler stresses the importance of the abstracted voice in place of the lyric "I", Jackson and Print point out the flaws with this Romantic ideal of the universal lyric and explores the origin of such an ideal
While Stein wishes to de-calcify language via the use of nouns, Baraka wishes to do so via the use of verbs.
While Plato only concerns himself with Truth, Richards disregards it in favour of pseudo-statements preparing us for real-life scenarios
Frye reconciles the binaries of science vs art and emotion vs reason by presenting them both as useful and mutually bound
Genette affirms that sonic parallels (and not simply conceptual parallels) are intrinsic to Poetry as an art
Moore embraces both nouns (like Stein) and verbs (like Baraka) in poetry's renewal, and instead rejects adverbs due to their imprecise nature
Genette and Derrida both view the gap between signified and signifier as generative spaces in which art can be created
Yeats does not concert himself with the science vs art binary, though he divides the symbol into the emotional and the intellectual and states that they are mutually bound
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Lowell, Zukofsky, and Olsen's concern with sound all play into formalist understandings of poetry, for the concern of SOUND is necessarily a concern of FORM
Perloff and Bernstein advocate for new forms of poetry that will fight against and break out of the state's commodification of language
In their own ways, Nealon, Bernstein, and Rich critique using poetry as a way to escape capitalism (a scheme which inherently hinges upon language) instead of COUNTERACTING capitalistic schemes
Vendler asserts that the lyric form is essential to our ability to place ourselves into the "I" of a poem
Jackson and Print and Nelson affirm that one cannot — and should not — isolate a work of poetry outside of its contextual and historical framework.