The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making
Susan Stewart
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0226773876
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.
Expanding—forms of hymns and odes prove endlessly adaptable to such needs. As the eighteenth-century and Romantic odists met with religious enthusiasm and a Romantic aesthetic of emotional expression, they frequently use the form not only to praise but also to self-scrutinize, as the period’s numerous odes to such emotions as Fear, Pity, and Dejection attest. Hegel describes how the odist comes to master his or her own sub- 52 chap ter t wo jective enthusiasm. The weight of the topic is.
Argument of the Dejection Ode develops and especially how, although the poem does not closely follow a Pindaric three-part progression of turn, counterturn, and stand, Coleridge makes extensive use of the Greek form’s openness and irregularity. In overall structure, the speaker charts a path from dejection to joy, and along the way he narrates the progress of a raging storm that eventually produces a sense of calm in the speaker himself.8 In the initial strophe the speaker waits for such a night.
Several different accounts of the creation of humankind. Acknowledging these multiple versions, Ovid tentatively begins, here in A. D. Melville’s translation: . . . perhaps from seed divine Formed by the great Creator, so to found A better world, perhaps the new-made earth, So lately parted from the ethereal heavens, Kept still some essence of the kindred sky— Earth that Prometheus moulded, mixed with water, In likeness of the gods that govern the world— And while the other creatures on all fours.
Consciousness in ani- Forming 115 mal, vegetable, and inanimate forms variously humanizes the nonhuman world. If the inner life of the nonhuman is something that cannot speak to us across the noumenal-phenomenal divide, it is in Ovid something that can be imagined as more than animate. In book 5, the nine daughters of Pierus challenge the muses on Helicon to a singing contest. This is an affront in itself, but the lay singer who begins starts with the story of the wars of the heavens and.
Himself, thus presenting original and singular works of art as if they were products of mass-manufacture, the “reframing” is not yet over and Duchamp, as he had the first laugh, has also had the last.15 In contrast to those craft traditions that speak to fellow practitioners, art practices informed by invention and singular originality lead to conditions of reception that are at once both more idiosyncratic and more open; such art practices will have an impact beyond their particular modes or.