Baudelaire: the intangible becomes tangible

Baudelaire is my favorite poet at the moment. What I admire most about his work is his transcendental awareness of something bigger than himself, and his devotion to expressing that in words and providing us with concrete imagery that will make that awesome something real. A man of highs and lows, the scope of his poetry is cathartic. Further, he has a taste for the beautiful and the magical that makes his work very intoxicating. At times his work takes a strong turn towards hedonism, but it always feels tethered to an awareness of good verses evil. His poetry is complex in a real, human way. I love it.

Shakespeare: the language of the heart

I recently read (and reread) an excerpt from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. What impressed me the most was the dramatic flair of the writing. Every stanza was devoted to fleshing out the fiery passions of Venus, bringing her to life for us like a prima donna on stage. Shakespeare seems to be most interested in the emotional and the irrational and how those urges translate themselves into action. In this poem and in the plays I've read so far, the characters are all driven by passions which result in actions which may or may not have desirable consequences. But the characters never worry about things like consequences. Hearts are on fire, the gestures are grand, characters get tangled up with themselves and with life . . . just the perfect recipe for a great play. It's Shakespeare: would we expect anything less?

Gerard Manley Hopkins: nature and God

In his lifetime, Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, which explains the preoccupation with religious themes in his poetry. From what I've read so far, Hopkins is primarily interested in the divine origins of nature and the divinity that links us with nature and with God. Like Keats, he has a transcendental temperament. Unlike Keats, however, his mindset is religious as opposed to secular. Where Keats turns to beauty in and of itself for inspiration, Hopkins turns to beauty because it manifests God's love and existence. As a result, his poetry has a jubilant, peaceful tone. Hopkins has a quiet certainty about the cosmos . . . Keats, on the other hand, is somewhat burdened by a divine vision of reality that he feels unable to completely comprehend and understand. Keats is on a spiritual quest while Hopkins has spiritually arrived. Hopkins's "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe" manifest a joy in religion I rarely encounter.

As a quick side note, Hopkins loves alliteration and assonance almost to a fault. But the result is a unique style. He also likes to play with punctuation and structure, but not at the expense of the beauty and readability of the poem.

Keats: Sleep and Poetry, a unique world of words

Every now and then, (or not so every now and then), one comes across a writer who's way with word is so particular that they construct a unique universe out of language. Keats is just such a writer. While reading Sleep and Poetry, I was astonished by the uniformity of the aesthetic. Keats created a mood of otherworldliness without dropping the ball once for pages on end. Every word contributed to the grand tapestry of the whole.

Purposefully cutting ties with reality, Sleep and Poetry weaves in and out of interior monologues and dreamscapes. We experience Keats's dreams with him and experience him talking to himself about his dreams . . . dreams both in the sense of sleep dreams, and dreams in the sense of life ambitions and goals. We learn about Keats's never ending quest to create great art and his sense of despair at not having achieved that goal, at which point he escapes into his sleep and dreams.

One of the most surprising things about Sleep and Poetry was that it was more philosophically robust that I expected it to be, and Keats came off as being more intellectually restless than I remember. I had him stereotyped as a fluffy, pretty poet. I mean, who would write a whole poem about a vase? Sleep and Poetry, however, was a sophisticated investigation into the meaning and purpose of art and life. For all it's surface beauty, it had an urgency and despair, even an aggressiveness, that gave me something to sink my teeth into.

A dilemma Keats grapples with is how to live with himself, how to handle his dreams and passions. On the one hand, he wants to push himself to climb that artistic mountain so to speak and translate the ineffable into poetry. At the same time, he shies away from that burden and extolls a simpler, perhaps more hedonistic approach to life. He rhapsodizes about nature and romance and yes, even sleep.

Certain tendencies associated with romanticism proliferate, particularly the romanticization of nature and romance, transcendentalism, and morbidity. The mood is passionate and vital, but there is a tone of despair. The poet seems convinced that there is more to life than he is somehow able to comprehend; only in art (and sleep) can he experience the euphoria and grandeur of it all. Woe betide that he should die before experiencing and expressing it all.

Beowulf: favorite moments . . .

From Beowulf's fight with Grendel, the monster:

"Then out of the night
came the shadow-stalker, stealthy and swift . . .
. . .
In off the moors, down through the mist-bands
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
The bane of the race of men roamed forth,
hunting for a prey in the high hall.
Under the cloud-muck he moved toward it
until it shone above him, a sheer keep
of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time
he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar's dwelling. . .
. . .
Spurned and joyless, he journeyed on ahead
and arrived at the bawn. The iron-braced door
turned on its hinge when his hands touched it.
Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picturing the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their their flesh; but his fate that night
was due to change, his days of ravening
had come to an end."

Is it just me, or is Beowulf so Eminem's Relapse? I love both . . .

Grendel's wounded retreat:

"His fatal departure
was regreted by no one who witnessed his trail,
the ignominious marks of his flight
where he'd skulked away, exhausted in spirit
and beat in in battle, bloodying the path,
hauling his doom to the demons' mere.
The bloodshot water wallowed and surged,
there were loathsome upthrows and overturnings
of waves and gore and would-slurry.
With his death upon him, he had dived deep
in his marsh-den, drowned out his life
and his heathen sou: hell claimed him there."

WOW!

Try the King's description of where Grendel's mother dwells:

"A few miles from here
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
the hart in flight from pursuing hounds
will turn to face them with firm-set horns
and die in the wood rather than dive
beneath its surface. That is no good place.
When wind blows up and stormy weather
makes clouds scud and the skies weep,
out of its depths a dirty surge
is pitched toward the heavens.

Beowulf: a glimpse into a dignified era

Beowulf was one of those reads I picked up to satisfy my desire to start at the very beginning with my study of English literature. To my surprise, I enjoyed reading it more than anything else I can remember reading since E.M. Forster's Room With a View.

The most astonishing thing about Beowulf was the quality of the writing. The poet's deft and innovative way with figurative language took my breath away. Pains were taken in every case to describe things in new terms. In addition, this careful attention to diction was combined with passion for drama and good storytelling. The resulting effect? Flawless. I can't count how many times I paused while reading to marvel at the perfection of it all.

With every work of art I enjoy, I always ask myself why I think it was created. In this case, I believe Beowulf was created for multiple purposes including the preservation of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon pagan culture and genealogy; an exploration of language in the spirit of art-for-art's sake (the Beowulf poet famously invented words that were never used in any other manuscripts from the period); and sheer entertainment. However, the beating heart of this work, in my opinion, is the poet's desire to explain the divine order of things. Fate determines every outcome and fate is controlled by God. People who live virtuous lives have God and fate at their side; mortality, however, guarantees that everyone's luck will run out at some point . . . in the vast scheme of things, we are all in God's hands and will return to our maker. For the virtuous, death is not be mourned. Beowulf, the virtuous and heroic king, dies a "majestic death."

That phrase really caught my attention. How glorious, to die a "majestic death." And wouldn't it be even more glorious to believe that such a thing existed? The faith of the Beowulf poet intrigued me. His utter trust in the cosmic order of things felt, well, not of this world.

I wish I could meet the Beowulf poet for lots of reasons. I'm impressed by his craftsmanship and touched by his preoccupation with the noble and the good. Last but not least, I admire his imagination. According to the introduction, he worked hard to resurrect the customs and language of an era that was obsolete to him. He wrote in the 10th century about the 5th or 6th centuries . . . what passion!

Beowulf, the sine qua non of poems. Now one of my all-time favorite reads.