Poesia Modernista Anglonorteamericana, Apuntes de Poesía

¡Descarga Poesia Modernista Anglonorteamericana y más Apuntes en PDF de Poesía solo en Docsity! The beginning of Modernism is dated around, the late 19th century, 1890 (known as Pre-modernism), and the beginning of the 20th century (1905). Some pre-modernist authors are Henry James, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, or Joseph Conrad. From 1905 until 1919 (when the First World War started), was period of development of Avant-Guards. But was between the 1920s - 1930s when Modernism was more essential, was the “peak of Modernism”, a time of high expression of it; but during those years the movement was not completely fixed. In 1922 appeared 2 of the most paradigmatic works of what is modernism: in poetry The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot, and in fiction Ulysses by James Joyce. During the decade of the 1930s until 1945, the conception of modernism changed drastically due to the rise of the fascism and the Second World War, it was much darker. Therefore, the world was changing but it is considered late modernism. There is concern for the present and consciousness of the present, “modern is modo”, now. Modern is something that is in the present. Modernism is a literary movement that is worried about the historical time when it occurs, there is horror and crash. The Great War was something that the Western civilization did not expect, those years was a conflicted period. But it was also a time of revolution, the world was changing, and it could not be the same anymore. There was scientific advancement, commercial culture, or arise of technology. But there was also a concern of capturing the present moment, the poem captures the present moment, receive reality in the present and capture it in a poem. Modernism breaks with what came before. Therefore, it is non-conventional (newness). Literature is transformed and freed the beginning anxiety of not seen anything in a first reading, as an abstract painting of the time. Artists, at this point, were much aware of the fact that they can’t use art/language in a representative way. People cannot escape from language, so authors no longer trust the capacity of language to represent reality, a conventional use of language. This is why some of the characteristics of Modernist poetry are: the non-conventional verse, that evolve in the use of the free verse as a way to break with the tradition; there is a tendency to the individualism, especially to the subjectivism influenced by psychology and the inner life and the stream of consciousness (influenced by Freud). Also there was a great use of symbols and the confrontation between mass culture and high-brow culture (intellectual elite). Critics do not include Modernism in the singular but in the plural, they include many voices (not only straight white men, as it was). At the end of the 19th century (progress) the roundedness of Victorian values started. The next century was known because of the revolution. Non-convention becomes non-representational, it does not try to represent reality. Modernism, also, was a period of scientific development. Scientific knowledge was evolving, it was used as a tool created to help humans to try to understand reality (much larger than we actually can conceive). I want a holophrase NORD-SUD ZIG-ZAG LION NOIR CACAO BLOOKER Black-figured vases on Etruscan tombs RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET) SOLFERINO (DUBONNET) CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine DUBONNET The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening St John at Patmos Vous descendez Madame? QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE CONCORDE I can’t I must go slowly The Enlightened Man thought to be out of reality and using science and reason you could reach reality. But the Romantic Man thought he could reach reality using imagination and, in this way, you could fully access to reality. And the Modern Man thinks that consciousness only allows him to access to a little part of the reality, and he cannot trust his capacity to know reality because his perceptive is bias. The crisis of knowledge, why? It is the consequence of a historical trend that leads to catastrophe and all the ideology behind that doctrine of progress, the way world was understood fall into pieces. The IWW is significant, even more than IIWW. The changes of science and philosophy lead to the ideological crisis. The philosophy suspicion: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. They challenged the dominant values, rejected the ideals of reason and progress, questioned the subject (freedom, subjectivity…) and denounced illusion, a false perception of reality. There is suspicion in the capacity of ourselves to understand who we are or what this world is. Scientific/epistemological uncertainty with the astronomical/subatomic knowledge because there are small things that we cannot even knows. The Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg is based on the idea that there is a part that humans cannot see because they do not have access to it. Physics also took an important role. Colour perception, seen in Monet’s Rouen Cathedral Series (1892-1894), is appreciated in the change of the colour of the Cathedral, depending on perception (e.g., by the moment of the day). Perception is always subjective, changing (changes continuously, depends on the moment), the representation of reality is unreliable; our knowledge is partial, incomplete, subjective, and changing. The world was unknown, and we only know a part that is constantly changed. Science is a language/tool we build to explain or understand the limited, subjective, variable, personal and partial part of our reality. The problem of the language that comes with linguistic structuralism (Saussure). The theory that the sign has three components (Sign, signifier, signified). Since these are symbols there is no real connection with the reality is just a mental notion that we have. Non-representational invalidates the lexical and the grammatical meaning. So, if there is an invalidation, reality is nor represented, but the system is accepted because of the arbitrariness of language. Paris by Hope Mirrlees ANALYSIS The poem is about the poetic voice, “I”, trying to define Paris in one word. There is one speaker who is looking for something, to express a complex idea in just one word. It is known that the speaker is a woman (“madame”), who is in the subway. The poetic voice wants something; the verb to want could be interpreted as the desire of something she does not have, and the missing (lack) of something. The “holophrase” is a word that can itself express something complex, and it is a sort of linguistic tool, therefore, this portrays the incapacity of language. It is not possible to express something in just one word, so there is no holophrase. There is the desire to solve the problem, want, but the impossibility of it, can’t, so “must go slowly”. Metro’s Stop Modern Ads The general pattern of the poem is an iambic pentameter (although in some cases there is iambic tetrameter) in blank verse. The poem is divided into two parts the first one is a description of the old man and the second one is a dialogue between the poetic voice and the old man. The two first lines are not focus on the old man; they are focus on the birds that lead to a focus on the man. The description of the man reveals that the old man does not move with pain, but he feels it; the poetic voice cannot feel what the traveller feels, the speaker transmits what he sees and makes assumptions. The fact that the traveller is old is relevant because the speaker expresses that living a long life make him feel patience, he is nature led to peace. The young one, is the speaker, one who feels envy from the old man. The speaker’s subjectivity about what he expects of being old (serenity, patience and how the old man is peace). Although the old man seems to be in peace, and not feeling pain, he is. He is suffering because he is going to say goodbye to his dying son. The speaker is judging by appearance, assuming. His desire of peace is being projected by the old man. It is about the old emotional experience of the speaker. The subjective perception and unreliability because the speaker does not know the real situation of the man. It is a blank verse and emphasized elements of description, dialogue, etc. John Keats On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, December 1817 The concept of negative capability is based on the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty and therefore, there are no absolute truths. The duty is to accept this and create within this frame without looking for absolute truth; it is to write poetry beyond the limits of knowledge. The aesthetic mastery requires abandoning cognitive mastery and rational, scientific understanding of truth. A good poet has the capacity of imagination; which is the rejection of the truth by the rational scientific method; beauty becomes more important. There is the belief that if you are a good poet, you could express beauty beyond the limited having knowledge, as there were expressed things that haven’t been experienced. There is a connection with impersonality, if the poet has to write from a point of view in which there is no absolute truths, the poet will have written from the other’s point of view. There is a crisis of representation in modernism, as beauty is beyond the limited knowledge of the poet. Read me a Lesson, Muse and speak it loud It is a poem about a person standing in the night in a mountain, looking down (stones) and upwards, transmitting in a negative perspective, the idea of the limitation of human knowledge. The poetic voice is calling for his muse. The ideas are structure following a clear structure. The poem as a whole is a volta, divided into three quatrains and a couplet. Each of them represents a stage; lines 1 and 2 give the solution, lines 3 to 5 ("I look") represent hell. From 5 to 7 ("mist"), heaven; from 7 to 9 mankind and from 10 to 14 is the conclusion. The little hedge-row birds, That peck along the road, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step, His gait, is one expression; every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought -- He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten, one to whom Long patience has such mild composure given, That patience now doth seem a thing, of which He hath no need. He is by nature led To peace so perfect, that the young behold With envy, what the old man hardly feels. -- I asked him whither he was bound, and what The object of his journey; he replied "Sir! I am going many miles to take "A last leave of my son, a mariner, "Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth, "And there is dying in an hospital." The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet, composed by 14 lines in iambic pentameter, with an antirhythmitic beginning as a rebellion against to the traditional pattern. The rhyme pattern is ABABCDCDEFEFGG. The ground is the representation of hell. While what it is upwards, the sky, represents the heaven. “Before the earth, beneath me” references the mankind. Lines 10 and 11 is the acceptation of the lack of knowledge. The two last lines is the confirmation, the poetic voice explains the allegory of the “mist”, referring to the idea that people cannot see/talk anything in relation to science but also in relation to real knowledge. Walt Whitman ANALYSIS The poem is about the celebration of himself, the poetic voice in this case Whitman, and the celebration of the Nation (transcendentalism), it is a celebration of being. It is a poem written in free verse, with 1 idea per line, the punctuation is also important, related to the enjambment2 used; the syntax of the poem is freed from the traditional iambs, there are no determined iambs. Use of simple language (to be easy to understand by everybody, it is the language of the American nation, it is not ornamented as the European), use of repetitions as a way to achieve rhythm, and anaphora. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d This poem is an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln, who death in 1867, after the end of the Civil War. Is a poem about the beginning of spring and the poetic voice morning someone. Is a poem written in free verse. 2 When the author is not forced to separate a phrase but do it because it has meaning. Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist! I look into the chasms, and a shroud Vapourous doth hide them, — just so much I wist Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead, And there is sullen mist, — even so much Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread Before the earth, beneath me, — even such, Even so vague is man’s sight of himself! Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,– Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf, I tread on them, — that all my eye doth meet Is mist and crag, not only on this height, But in the world of thought and mental might! Song of Myself I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself And what I asume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. → Nation → Genealogy = connotation Alliteration → Repetition of sounds Alliteration Repetition In the 3rd part there is a hopeful vision of the returning of spring. Also, it can be found a semantic rhyme, two structures meaning the same (“tall-growing / rising delicate”). The idea of the return of spring is going to be shattered by modernists. Walt Whitman was an American author who spoke for everyone, he wrote Leaves of Grass (1855), a compilation of rhapsodies that included Song of Myself, and in it, Whitman tries to find the American literary tradition. Emily Dickinson This poem is about the moment of death of the poetic voice. The poetic voice is in the dead bed. It is a narrative poem, a description of what is happening (“and then”), with no plot but with introduction, development, and markers. It is a poem written in ballad stanza; an iambic tetrameter followed by an iambic trimeter. With a slant rhyme (coincidence of some sound). But there is also, a chiasmus. Which is a literary figure where an structure (could be also a word) is repeated but with the order altered. The first stanza is written in ballard stanza, composed by iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. The first line is written in past but is settled in the future to explain what happened. She is still alive, as the two first stanzas indicate, and “For that last Onset” reinforces; she is not dead yet. In addition, King/witnessed refers to death, which is power, authority; is seen as a male god (religion), a majesty; this is a transcendental image of 1 When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love. 2 O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul. 3 In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break. Eye rhyme I Heard a Fly buzz-when I died (591) I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air - Between the Heaves of Storm - The Eyes around - had wrung them dry - And Breaths were gathering firm For that last Onset - when the King Be witnessed - in the Room - I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away What portion of me be Assignable - and then it was There interposed a Fly - With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz - Between the light - and me - And then the Windows failed - and then I could not see to see - The image of the spring means what it represents. The spring is always coming again, as happens in the poem in the 1st part comes back in the 2nd stanza. Here, form and meaning becomes one, Spring is a cyclical phenomenon, and this is represented in the poem. There is a prominence of the feeling of the speaker. The “O” it is an apostrophe, a lament, an invocation. It complies with the tradition, as it is an elegy. The pathetic fallacy is present in the fact that nature reproduces the inner feeling of the poetic voice. 4a 3b 4c 3b between best/worst is political moral image; an inversion, where the worst is in control, provoking chaos, conflict. Also, the worst means faith. All these images reelaborate the idea of L.3. The second stanza is the lose of Irish Period Transition of disruption, not only semantically but in structure. In Greek, Apocalypse means revelation. L.9 is a direct reference to the Scriptures of Revelation (or the Apocalypses by Saint John, book of the New Testament in Christian Religion). The Second Coming is hopeful. In L.10 the poetic voice is sure of what is going to happen. “Time of Tribulation” comes from gospel. Ls. 9&10 share structure (“Surely … hand”). In L.14 a sphinx appears, but also the poetic persona is noticed. The sphinx is not a woman but a man and is pitiless; is not like Christ (Ls.14-15). In L.17, the desert is a wasteland, the periphery; and the birds is the connection with the Falcons, bird hying in circles. There is process of disintegration. It has become a nightmare, the culmination of the gyre, although it was supposed to be hopeful. Christ is substituted by the Devil (Ls.21-22), and the Devil substitutes the Second Coming. The term beast is a reference to the Devil, but Slouches/Bethlehem are things that reptiles do (arrastrarse), another reference to the Devil, as him became a snake to tempt Eve. Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917) was not an imagist, but he settled the basis of the movement; he was the precursor of it. When imagism was full developed, he was already death. Hulme was a scholar concerned with the issues related to time, in the philosophy of Bergson; he worked as a commentator for him in “The New Age”, that deals with the issues of time, consciousness, so the new theories of the consideration of time at the beginning of 20th century. And mostly he understood that consciousness as you cannot truly make a sequence out of consciousness. So, he spoke about how humans experience time though perception. When someone sees something for the first time, the second time his/her consciousness activates the background or previous knowledge. He distinguishes certain terms such as intellect, intuition, and language. Intellect creates a sequence to understand it. It makes it linear. In the present time, it is perceived simultaneously to intuition. Intuition is opposed to intellect. Intuition creates duration. To process it, intellect turns it linear. And it imposes a linearity on our understanding of time. In poetry, it is used language, and language is linear. A sequence of images results in an intuition of reality. Recover the original visual effect of perception: FRESH METAPHOR → UNDERCUTS ROMANTIC/POETIC ASSOCIATIONS → FOCUS ON THE PHYSICAL THING. To find a different use of language to portray perception. There are new metaphors to describe things that erase the traditional associations to literature. From “Lecture on Modern Poetry” (1908) In his essay, Hulme talks about images, saying that there should be two images juxtaposed. Syntactically, it is a relation or both correlated clauses, one is not dependent of the other. They have united with no conjunctions, which specify the relation of the 2 clauses, it does grammatical meaning that connect the two clauses. Stanza 2 Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? → GYRE → cuna Juxtaposition defers from coordination in that the relation in meaning is obscure, ambiguous. It creates a blank space, uncertainty. The text says the juxtaposed images should be in different lines. This is due to the visual perception of poetry; it is a way to play simultaneously; defying the idea of linearity. The metaphor of the shell of the egg is used to justify free verse. At an early stage, metric was needed. But this new content needs to be feed of the strict metrics. Finally, beauty is related to perfection, the perfect meter. But now, perfection is not needed; and beauty and perfection are relative. It should not be the goal of poetry. Poem about the poetic voice going out for a walk and sets the moon and stars. Written in free verse. The speaker is seeing. The first image is “ruddy moon”, the second one is “red-faced”. The adjective “ruddy” is weird to refer to the moon. Relation of similarity (“like”), but not fully juxtaposed. Exist 2 possibilities, (1) sees the moon and links it to the idea of the farmer. The poem is trying to represent a moment of perception; the perception of the moon and the ideas that it brings the moment of confusion when two things are combined in your mind. That matter is the physical aspect of the moon. We experience the same perception of the speaker. Poem written in free verse, follows a nursery rhyme. This occurs when sometimes free verse adopts the rhyme to transmit. The rhyme pattern is AABB. Supposedly he sees a balloon and thinks is the moon. But empirically he would not be able. It is a visual description. The process of perception tries to describe on object as it is perceived, providing two images. It captures the present moment of perception. Poem about two lovers that they love each other so much, but they are not together. The moon is white and chaste white is how it looks usually. The mean standards for purity, chastity, and the idea is reinforced by white. The use of a chaste is very conventional. It insists on the possibility of the lovers to be together. The point is to convey and explain the feelings of the lovers though the conventions of the moon. The term “burning” is related to desire/passion; and it is in opposition to “moon”. Ezra Pound was the founder of imagism as a movement in 1914. He published the anthology Des Images, with H.D. Imagism as a movement has three characteristics: 1. The use of free verse. 2. Linguistic concision: the imagist poems are very brief and little and necessary language only4, in order to avoid the literary language. 3. Metaphorical condensation. A lot of images in very few words. 4 Linguistic tissue is included. Autumn A touch of cold in the Autumn night— I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children. Above the Dock Above the quiet dock in mid night, Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play. Image by Edward Stoner Forsaken lovers, Burning to a chaste white moon, Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought. “In a Station of the Metro” is the most famous imagist poem. It is a poem about perception. It is linguistically concise, composed by 2 lines and a lack of conjunctions (juxtaposition), there are no verbs, to avoid literality. And it is written in free verse. The poem illustrates how life it is in the city. Captures the moment of perception and represents how life it is. It is a poem talking about an instant (“apparition”), settled in a metro station, where is mixed the metropolitan setting, a modern city (“crowd”), with a nature image that represents the multitude (“petals” = “faces”). The faces appear out of darkness. The speaker sees the crowd on the bough after being under rain. The faces are lighter and stand at the mental image that the reader has. He is not physically seen petals, but they are in his mind. It breaks with the literality, and with the timeline. It is a break with the present by representing how life is in the moder city, looking them in present. “The Encounter” is a poem about an encounter, a conversation that embraces the linearity of language and the description of language. It is a poem written in free verse, the first line longer because it expresses the same semantically (for a long-time people were talking about morality). Language about sex conveyed in free verse. Between lines 2 and 4 there is a parallelism where she sees, and she touches. And in Ls. 4&5 there is a force enjambment, due to the separation in two lines of the sentence. This is used as a way that tries to make the verse longer. The tissue as the last word of L.4 emphasizes the sense of touch. It is so specific and long that extends the sensory experience, so sensual… “The Pool” is a poem written in free verse, where each line is a whole sentence; syntactic principal of the line (the sentence/line will be as long as is required). That is why sentences are too short. They are juxtaposed, not coordinated. There is metaphorical condensation. The speaker talks to a “you”. In L.3 it is logically to think that the poetic voice touches an insect. But it is not the case, it could be water because of the moment and the reader know there is water: the sea-fish dying. L.4 is transformed into a more obscure metaphor. And L.3&5 have the same image, all is provoked by touch. The poem starts and ends with a question, not clear answer; the ending is open. There is a lack of move, don’t know if it is alive. Touch it to know if it is alive (=material experience). L.3 is a description of movement. By the tittle it can be known that the body in in the water. There is no fish nor net in reality. In order to have a quivering fish is necessary a net; L.4 continues the metaphor of L.3. Why banded one? The literal meaning is a banded fish or could be also when something is covered with a net, bands are seen. But also, when water is touched, bands are created. The image of the poem is a reflection. When you see your reflection, it doesn’t move; when you touch it, moves like a fish. And the net comes by the touch of the reflection, because the touch and the move create bands. The description of what the poetic voice sees when looking at a pool. The reader is seeing the thought process. Amy Lowell In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in a crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. The Encounter All the while they were talking the new morality Her eyes explored me. And when I rose to go Her fingers were like the tissue Of a Japanese paper napkin. The Pool by H. D. Are you alive? I touch you. You quiver like a sea-fish. I cover you with my net. What are you —banded one? What is the current? The first stanza describes electricity by its sound. The textile industry used electricity and how cloths are done, the swaging machine functions by electricity. The electricity is created by the friction of cloth. It is describing the pattern or the shape of the dress when it is hit by wind. “Crackle” is both the sound of the dress being made or the wind. It gives a clue on the fabric. The second stanza associates “current” and “wing”. The poem is describing several things at the same time. The first line shows the length of the dress, how long it is. The shape of the poem is the shape of the dress. In the third stanza, the colour doesn’t exist. As the dress makes, light hits in different ways. The line of the dress is the only thing that remarks. The colour cannot be known for sure as happens with the cathedral of Monet. Futurism is an Avant-Guard from 1910s., highly popular in sculpture. Was started and mainly developed in Italy (Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti). Futurism is expressed from different forms of art. The problem is that later on will be appropriated by fascism. The focus on futurism is speed, technology, strength, vigour, violence. The focus of the movement and what it defends is on the progress, modernization of technology, and scientifical advances, but also introduces values as, the before mentioned, strength or vigour; to the point in the led to violence. The energy of futurist art is related to all these characteristics. The anglophone representative of the movement is Mina Loy. Mina Loy Mina Loy was born in London but moved to New York. She started her career in Europe, where she lived in Italy. She admired Ezra Pound. Her work was recovered in 1996. Loy was a painter, an actress, a poet, dramatist, novelist influences by futurism, but at the beginning of her career was influenced by impressionism. She wrote a Feminist Manifiesto, where she expressed an energetic, violent way of expression of ideas (e.g., different use of typology). She defended the idea that if women don’t want to be loved, they were freed. She tries to debunk the idea of romantic love, by separating love and sex. For her sex is good and love is a trap, as it is the way to subjugate women. Between 1915-1917 she published Song to Joannes, a collection of 34 poems where a woman is singing to a man. These poems are independent but all of them are about love and sex. In 1915, she published sections 1 to 4 of “Love Songs”, with Amy Lowell, but as they are very explicit poem, provoked a scandal and Lowell refused to continue publishing Lowell. In 1917, Loy published the rest thirty poems of the collection. Poems from: Songs to Joannes I Love poem. The speaker is saying what she desires but how her morals conventions make her have to do somethings. Romantic love is deromanticize and is expressed in material experience, i.e., sex, “Pig Cupid” is a reference to oral sex. The poetic voice is looking for an explosion, an orgasm. I would = what desires, what wants to do I must = moral obligation, what it is expected to do Sex = Body Romantic love = Fantasy, Myth Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage “Once upon a time” Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane I would an eye in a Bengal light Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva These are suspect places I must live in my lantern Trimming subliminal flicker Virginal to the bellows Of Experience Coloured glass Saliva residuos II The poem is written in free verse, with an irregular length lines. There is a lack of verbs (mostly missing), the first part of the poem, the verbs are in a non-personal form. This poem is about a description of a man, but what it is described is his body, not his personality. The poem can be related to the tradition of sonnets, where the blazon, a kind of poem belonging to courtly love where female bodies are described by pieces, as a way to romanticize love. The poetic voice is twisting gender roles, by breaking the gender structure. She reduces the man to his genitals (“skin-sack”). But also, deromanticize courtly love, the traditional sonnets, when she separates love and sex, and desire. Because what she wants, is sex. She gets pleasure, not reproduction (L.4). L.6-8 is another’s point of view, someone of the outside observes with desire, is not a participant. With the use of personal forms, there is a change of perspective, that may describe that his genitals run at a different pace as her different times at arriving to the orgasm. She also vindicates the human connection in the action of sex, but debunk and rewrite courtly love by the non-romantization of the body (L.10 &12) T.S. Eliot is an American-born poet, from Missouri, but who died as an English poet. He had studied philosophy, poetry and literature. He moved to Europe, and because of the war, he could never return to the USA to finish his PhD. Eliot lived in London, got married, and worked as a schoolteacher and at a bank. He was a friend of Ezra Pound, who helped him get published. In 1917, Eliot published his first collection of poems. His success was immediate. He wrote literary criticism too. In 1919, he published a second collection, and in 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land, a long post-war poem that belongs to high modernism. In this poem, he used the technique of collage. It is a poem about Europe and Western after the First World War, and the spirit it left. The Waste Land greatly influenced novels such as Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (1939) or The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a very significant part of literature. After it, Eliot published Four Quartets and Ash Wednesday. CRITICISM: “ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH” The novel Ulysses, written by James Joyce, was published the same year as The Waste Land, in 1922. But it was very well known before its publication, as everybody had read it. The novel narrates the story of a journey, as the original Homero’s narration, but those Greek adventures are very different from Joyce’s one. There isn’t much in Ulysses that resembles Odyssey; in comparison, it is a parody. The source is transformed; the contemporary text draws mainly from the source. Ulysses cannot be understood without the Odyssey. For example, Moly is the rewriting of Penelope, she would not have meant if she is not compared to Penelope. The Mythical Method is the expression of the contemporary experience after the war (“a panorama of futility and anarchy”). The myth produces order and meaning. But no longer could it trust in the personal knowledge of the world, but also it could not understand or trust in the capacity to represent that part of reality. Language does not have the full power to represent reality or for people to see it, so it is necessary to manipulate myth and The skin-sack In which a wanton duality Packed All the completion of my infructuous impulses Something the shape of a man To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant More of a clock-work mechanism Running down against time To which I am not paced My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair A God's door-mat On the threshold of your mind v o lt a reality. Ulysses has little to do with the Odyssey because the points are different. After all, it represents modern and contemporary consciousness. The collage (the structure) of The Waste Land comes together thanks to the myth; they share meaning. The myth of the poem is the Fisher King, a character of the Arthurian circle. He was wounded in a battle between the thighs, a castrating wound. His sexual impotence was transferred to the land that transformed into a wasteland. The king has a mythical connection with the land (what happens to the king, happens to the land/kingdom). There, the divinity of kings was expressed. In the original version of the Fisher King, in Perceval (1180) by Chrétien de Troyes, the king is living in a castle and is served something in a grail that keeps him alive. The important point is that he isn’t healthy, so there is a wasteland. The Waste Land I. INTRODUCTION — NOTES: To understand the poem, people should read From Ritual to Romance (1920) by Miss Jessie L. Weston It is about Holy Grail texts. She hypothesises that medieval myths come from magical rituals. The Golden Bough (1890) by Sir James George Frazer, is a recollection of religious rituals, ancient and tribal rituals. He hypothesised that all myths came from rituals. And all rituals are different versions of the same ritual: The Kill of the Divine King, a hypothesis from 1898, in which it is the representation of the killing of the divine king in order to restore the prosperity of the land/kingdom, i.e., the king had to be killed by the crew's old to not affect the land. In western culture, the origin of the Holy Grail stories is the evolution of the rituals of killing the king. The story of the Grail is an Arthurian myth. The grail is part of the medieval Arthurian circle. The Grail is a magical container, it is the only thing that is have been known.; and people want to find it. Chretien de Troyes (1180) wrote Perceval or the Story of the Grail. A story where the fisher king was wounded in between the thighs and needs to die because his sterility is expanded to the land. So, the grail is needed to help the king get to heaven. In later versions, the king is called the Maimed king. II. TITLE The Waste Land is a myth and a governing metaphor. The myth appears in the Fisher King, in the Grail, in the Quest and the Knight, and the proper wasteland. This myth comes from a ritual based on vegetation rites, the sacrifice of the divine king and fertility magic. The wasteland is a kingdom that needs to be regenerated, it is a reference to the medieval myth of the Holy Grail. This myth has four mythemes: the fisher king (a castrated king whose sterility is extended to the land), the knight (Perceval), the waste land and the Grail. The Waste Land is a poem focused on the land, because the objective is to regenerate it. And due to is a poem wrote after WWI, it is about what happened to Europe after war, and how Europe is going to be regenerated. It is a poem about the aftermath and the consequences of the world. III. THE EPIGRAPH The poem begins with The Epigraph, which combines two things, (1) eternal life and (2) degeneration, so the main theme of the poem is the eternal degeneration. This is the base of the whole poem; it is the meaning of the whole poem. It is a poem about lament after the War, about how life continues after the War. Explicit presence of myth, which functions in the same direction as the poem. The Sibyl (one of the prophetic figures of Ancient Greek) asks the god Apollo to have eternal life, but she forgets to ask for eternal youth. She is in a jar because her body is progressively degenerating. She lives eternally in a state of degeneration. This is related to kings that have artificially kept alive but sick. It is, also, about eternal life (time of the seasons, the poem begins in the Spring) but each year, each new iteration of the life cycle, condemns the living to a perpetual state of degeneration. The Epigraph is written in four languages: Latin (the narration), Greek (character’s conversation), English (inner monologue) and Italian (the dedication to Ezra Pound). IV. ETERNAL DEGENERATION in the beginning of the poem, it is because they are a survivor. They had participated in a horror and therefore are “dead in life” (because you are spiritually dead, with no hope for redemption). Both soldiers discuss about the war and make a reference to Mylae which is a reference to the Punic War (this is the anthropological temper element). ❖ Anthropological temper: is a narrative technique used during modernism. In it, references to past times are used to identify present events. I.e., authors do references to past historical events that are parallel to present events. In the poem, this is used with the reference to “Mylae” (a reference to the ancient war between Rome and Carthage) to identify the First World War. The speaker is integrated into a crowd, this crowd is identified with Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. In Dante’s they are dead. In L.63, they had done nothing right nor wrong, there is nothing to be saved for. L.63 refers to people without baptism. The speaker asks Stetson about the corpse that he planted last year, which means the body that he buried. The land is so full of dead bodies that the dead bodies have become the seeds of the land (when someone kills somebody is planting a corpse, and that corpse bloomed). Dead people are planted in the poem (L.71) which is linked with the initial part of the poem (the lilacs). This is the new life cycle; new life is being born out of the dead lives. When spring comes, new life is being born but that new life is fed by millions of dead bodies. That’s the cruelty. There’s so much death that new life is born swollen with death, like part of the dead bodies come into the new life (no resurrection). Alive people are compared to people that could not be saved, and soldiers who had survived by killing. They did nothing wrong but could not be saved, they are half alive – half dead; their soul is dead and has no salvation. Dead people are not fully dead and alive people are not fully alive. Alive people live as ghosts. All of them, alive and dead people live all together in the Waste Land. The living part of the Waste Land is infected by these deaths. Life is coming from millions of deaths. The living and the dead are undistinguishable, they are victims of the cruelty of a system that perpetuates live in the waste land. V. LOVE AND SEX IN THE WASTE LAND CANTO III. THE FIRE SERMON (173-186) Starts with the presentation of River Thames, in London, so the setting of the poem is London, but in three different periods of time. A Mythical London, an Elizabethan London, and a Contemporary London. The presentation of three times simultaneously is part of the collage technique. All places represent the wasteland that takes different forms. Elizabethan London is presented by “Sweet Thames”, a reference to the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spencer, a poem that celebrates marriage. Contemporary The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. London is presented by the rubbish (L. 178), with references to colonialism, indicating that there is a postcolonial period, but more specifically, a post-war period (as after war, authors started to talk about colonialism). Finally, Mythical London, as Prehistoric times. These prehistoric times are there because of the nymphs (mythical deities of nature and vegetation), and because of the description done in the first lines (173- 175). There are presented simultaneous images of the three times; in Mythical London there aren’t things that are in Contemporary London. What continues all the themes are the nymphs that in Contemporary London are young women. There has been an encounter between the nymphs and the “heirs” (young males). The nymphs won’t be able to find them as they “left no addresses”. There is a lack of (emotional) responsibility from the powerful men; their encounter was careless sex. Besides leaving no addresses, they dirty the river; this is an irresponsible approach to sex, to human connections. The Leman (Lake Geneva) was a place to be cured. The poetic voice compares his position in the lake like theirs (heirs + nymphs) in the river. The speaker is an “I” and he is sick. The poetic voice is the Fisher King, due to the last two lines (185-186). He is in the Waste Land because of the description. The consciousness articulated is from a mythical and contemporary London; Elizabethan London stands as a foil of Contemporary London. CANTO II. A GAME OF CHESS (77-110) It starts with the description of a woman in a place/room of luxury. That woman is Shakespeare’s character, Queen Cleopatra, from his play Antony and Cleopatra. She is waiting for her first encounter with Mark Anthony, that creates expectation. Cleopatra, a very powerful woman, a queen, is described with the verb stir. This is significant because this verb appears at the beginning of the poem when talking about the spring. Here, the verb is describing the kind of physical and emotional state of Cleopatra waiting for Antony. The way the poem describes her hair, how she is savagely stirred, that she is waiting for somebody in tension, we get the sensual tension, the expectation of their passionate encounter. The reader is waiting for them to meet and feed their passion. The reader is still waiting. Something noticeable is how that sensual tension is presented in the description of Cleopatra at the end of the fragment and through the references to Shakespeare’s play; how that is either mirrored or opposed to the description of the room. The room is described by materials and textures that are in it. The repetition of the materials, the elements, emphasizes the artificiality of everything that surrounds the queen. The image presented is artificial, even the doors are synthetic. Things are still but light makes them seem to be stirring. “Even elements deny nature”, it is a room full of representation of natural living things, but all those things are fabricated, artificial. There’s an artificial representation of life, therefore a lack of life (things are apparently living but they aren’t living, they’re not alive). Cleopatra is stirring there, still part of the landscape. The reader knows she is alive due to the final lines of her waiting. Cleopatra is in somehow the same position as the corpses on The Burial of the Dead. She is alive by desires. It is the same state between life and death presented at the very beginning. It is a wasteland; life seems to be impossible. But creates an expectation of regeneration, in this case the future sexual encounter between Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. However, the setting is a place that denies life, imitates life, so it kind of frustrates those expectations. They are in a place where no life seems possible. This seems to force the expectations of a romantic encounter. One of the things that it can be found for the first time, is the representation of Philomela’s rape, which will become a leitmotif in the poem. Before the expectation of the romantic encounter, there is Philomela’s rape. Philomel is a classic mythological character who was raped, mutilated, and silenced by her brother-in-law. Despite that, she uses art to tell the story of what she suffered. She has no voice, but she is not silenced as she has the capacity to create a tapestry where everything is expressed. Her sister found out and decided to take revenge and kill Tereus’ son and he eats him and when he found out he wanted to take revenge against his wife and Philomela and the gods intervene and they transform them into birds to stop them, and Philomela becomes a nightingale, known because of their singing except for the female nightingales, her sister a swallow and Tereus became a hawk, a predator. Revenge is an important element in Elizabethan drama. It is the beginning of a violent circle, and when it starts, everyone ends up dead. To avoid this final, only the power of gods could stop it, because humans will not stop the violence. What the poem does is present the expectation of a sexual encounter and then it introduces this counterbalance, which is the impossibility of life in this place and also the thread of sexual violence, so we are expecting a romantic, passionate, sexual encounter between Antony and Cleopatra, but that expectation is stopped by the denial of life and the thread of sexual violence. The possibility of regeneration, in the vignette, is the sexual encounter. And the choice of this myth is a foreshadowing. THE FIRE SERMON (214-256) The before scene continues on L.214 (“At the violet hour…”) in The Fire Sermon; and end in L.256. In this part, the expected sexual encounter finally happens. First, the poem talks about when and where the encounter occurs. It’s at the end of the day in a modern city where people are occupying their days with mundane jobs (there’s a typist and a clerk), the mechanization of life that entails living in the modern city holding these mundane jobs (they have become machines → human engine waits). The throbbing waiting, which could be parallel to Cleopatra waiting for Antony, here is something that a taxi does, what people are experiencing is associated in this text with what machines do, mechanizing life and people becoming inanimate, so again a kind of appearance of life that denies life. In that context, what we have is a woman in her home and a man arrives and he is sick (sickness, dehumanization, machine...) and we have the sexual encounter we have been expecting since A Game of Chess. Apart from the typist and the clerk, there is a third character, Tiresias, acts as a sort of narrator, s/he is the speaker. Tiresias is a classic mythological character who was a both a man and a woman (again, traces of someone being thrown between two lives), “Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (L.218). Because he had this knowledge of being a man and a woman, there was a dispute between gods about who had more sexual pleasure and they asked Tiresias who experienced more pleasure during sex, men or women, and Tiresias said that women experienced more pleasure during sex, this provoked Hera’s anger, who made him blind; but Zeus gave with the capacity of seeing the future. In short, the important thing about Tiresias is that he had the wisdom to know who enjoys sex the most and that he acts as an oracle. So, he has the capacity to see the scene from the outside, without being there. The reader is going to know what is going to happen thanks to Tiresias’ vision of the future. At first, he knew about female sexual pleasure, and now he knows about sexual frustration. This encounter is passionless. The clerk can be a Fisher King, as he is sick, due to the impossibility of human connection as endemic in this modern city. They are actually an office girl/typist and a clerk. He cannot control, he is dehumanised, like an animal. He doesn’t care about her pleasure and comfort. He is careless. Tiserias is transported to that scene from her past life. It is unknow if it is a rape of not. As it is not explicit consent in contemporary times it is a rape. However, in the time it was written the poem, it is a very explicit representation of a sexual encounter in which there is no desire, connection, or love. It is a kind of continuation of the scene of A Game of Chess, which was already a warning for the reader that that kind of passionate encounter couldn’t be possible in a place where no life is possible and there’s a constant threat of violence, so the sexual encounter is dehumanization, sickness, mechanization... Sex in The Waste Land is characterized by violence, carelessness, and illness. If life comes from sex, this life is a little life, born in a form of sickness. It is a sexual scene that ends in a song, girl’s silence becomes a song (“autonetic hand … gramophone”). The gramophone becomes an extension of the typist, as well as Philomel’s tapestry; both are silenced but they found their voice through art, Philomel by the tapestry, the tryst by the gramophone where music is reproduced. It is a reference to Philomel’s story in the tapestry, that marks the beginning of the scene with Cleopatra and ends with the woman of the office. provokes the impossibility of the land’s regeneration. The great knight that should resist temptation to heal the king and restore the Waste Land is a lechered, who is spying on Mrs. Porter and her daughter. The fisher king knows this, he knows there’s no possibility of restoration for him. VI. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RESURRECTION THE BURIAL OF THE DEATH (L.43-59) There’s a fortune teller, Madame Sosostris, reading somebody’s future using Tarot. She is the poetic voice of the vignette; she is also sick. The characters can be the readers because they have been exposed to that reading. And she starts showing the cards to see the future of that person and the first thing we have is a note by Eliot. These cards coincide with other characters that will later appear. And all these cards will coincide with other character that will later appear. The poetic voice is somebody whose fortune is being told by a fortune teller who uses Tarot as a way to see the future. The issue with this specific use of the Tarot cards that Eliot specifies in a note of line 468. What Madame Sosostris is seeing is not the real Tarot, those aren’t real Tarot card, those are fake cards so it’s a fake Tarot. What Madame Sosostris doesn’t see, is The Hanged Man. Eliot says that The Hanged Man is a card that was in the original Tarot card, and he has kept the original card for 2 reasons: one because he associates it with The Hanged God of Frazer and because he associates The Hanged Man with the hooded figure of the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. When in the poem is said: “I do not find the Hanged Man” it means “I do not find Jesus Christ”. The Fisher King is also a divine figure supposed to save humanity. When he says God is the same thing as saying king. Here appears the myth of how the king is a divine, trivial creature and he’s sterile because the fertility is on the land, the king is dying, and a new young king has to come and replace him to guarantee the fertility of the land. The point is that from the perspective of myth ritualism which is the perspective followed by this poem is when a character in the poem is representing The Hanged God of Frazer (the trivial king) that character also represents the fisher king, because the fisher king is understood as just the narrative evolution of that sacrificed, trivial, divine king. If the Hanged Man that appears in Madame Sosostris’ card is the sacrificial victim in a fertility rite, then the Hanged Man is also the fisher king (the king has to die to guarantee the rationality of the land). The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant are two cards that Madame Sosostris has, and they correspond with 2 characters that will appear later in the poem (The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant). It is a kind of way to identify the poetic voice with the Phoenician Sailor because Madame Sosostris says “Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor” and what is happening to the Phoenician sailor in these lines is that he is the victim in Canto IV. Death By Water, and “Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!” is Ariel’s song. This is another leitmotif in the poem. It is a leitmotif that recalls Ariel’s song in The Tempest which is a song that Ariel sings to Ferdinand to make him think his father has died, and the meaning of this leitmotif is the transformation of life into something that is perpetually lifeless. The point is the Phoenician Sailor is also the fisher king, a fisher king that is going to be drowned but that death isn’t going to bring regeneration. This is clearer with the line “Fear death by water” because that’s the point, if there is supposed to expect regeneration after the king’s death and it is known the king is going to be drowned, it should be celebrated death by water, but Madame Sosostris warns us to fear death by water, so we know that death by water isn’t going to be a regenerative death. There is a symbolic mechanism, there are different characters in the poem and the different characters represent either the Fisher king himself or the sacrificed God of Frazer which is like a different version of the Fisher king. One of the most common ways for these fisher kings to die in the poem is death by water, but water is presented as something to be feared. The readers found themselves in a situation in which this fortune teller is telling them 8 El pasaje de los discípulos de camino a Emaús narra cuando una figura encapuchada se les aparece. Dicha figura es Jesucristo resucitado. Por lo tanto, Eliot ve al Colgado (The Hanged Man) como Cristo. death by water and not have hope in death by water, but the question is if they can trust on death by water. There are two things working simultaneously: the Tarot is fake, is a made-up Tarot so originally we destruct her, this represents the debasement of ritual in Contemporary society so it has lost the magic that had in the past, the loss of magic in the Contemporary world but as we read the poem we find that these are the characters in the poem as well as situations in the poem, so Madame Sosostris’ reading is true, she foresees what is going to happen in the poem, so we have to trust her when she warns us to fear death by water. These two are compatible because the fact that this Tarot is fake means it can’t effectively predict the coming of the waters, the powerful regeneration. One should have to fear death by water and not hope for the raising of the waters. Most of the characters are representations of the fisher king. The One-Eyed Merchant of The Fire Sermon is identified with the fisher king. It is one of the characters that appeared in Madame Sosostris’ cards. CANTO V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID Canto IV is the story of the Phoenician sailor and the death of the Fisher King. And Canto V is about the consequences of it. The first stanza of this canto (L. 322-330) is the description of the Passion of Christ; it is the trial, imprisonment, torture and killing of Jesus Christ. It is a text close to the description of gospels. It describes the moment when Christ is killed (crucified). Christ is a divine figure who was been sacrificed for the regeneration of the community. “Of thunder of spring” sets the moment of Christ’s suffering while being in the cross. It is the first- time thunder is heard, the sky becomes dark, an index of future rain, a rain of spring, there is a storm while Christ is dying. The following two stanzas (L. 331-365) are written in free verse, this passage is a description of a desertic landscape. The speaker is walking across a desert, a literal wasteland, and the poetic voice wishes for water. The way is used free verse has meaning, there is a clear division into two parts, and it is used to contrast the description. While the first part is written in longer lines than the second part. There is a clearer view of articulation (syntax) in the first part, it contains many details, and is a more elaborated description of the desert. This represents the change of state, while in the first part, the speaker’s expression capacity is bigger, in the second one the speaker has less capacity to express, the speaker starts to be incoherence, sentences start to be incomplete and the consciousness starts to deteriorate because of dehydration and the hard conditions of the walk, besides the anxiety and fear it produces. “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” is a delusion, the speaker believes that there is water, however in the first part knows that no, but he desires (“If there were water”, L.346). This description is key to understand the third part of the canto. L.359 “the third who walks beside you?” and L.362 “another one walking beside you”: Two people are walking, but one of them sees there is a third one more; the hooded figure (third man) in the gospel represents resurrected Christ, however, could be a delusion, and as Eliot’s headnote indicates, it is a reference to the explores of the book South by Shackleton (a Victorian explorer) who wanted to go to the Antarctic but never arrived, and the survivor explores, at the end of their strength had the constant delusion that there was one more member. In L.385 appears the Perilous Chapel, which is a chapel that appears in many medieval romances. It is the place found in the stories about the Grail Knight/Grail Quest. The Perilous Chapel is the end point of the grail’s quests. In the vignette the speaker is walking and reaches the chapel, there is only wind and bodies. It is empty in a graveyard (Waste Land as a graveyard). There is no grail, what they are looking for, supposed to find, is not there. However, when he arrives, it starts to rain. Finally, there is rain. It is the end of the quest. In L.423 the speaker is the Fisher King, a clear “I”. There are three different types of I. 1st he is fishing, 2nd he has lands, and 3rd are ruins/fragments. This means that the poetic voice is fishing (1st), who is a king because he owns lands (2nd), but of a ruined kingdom (3rd). I.e., he is the fisher king speaking at the end of the poem, and he is at the wasteland. In L.426 the modern city is in a state of collapse. L.427 is a quote from Dante’s Purgatorio. This is related to the idea of the expectation of redemption. As Purgatorio is a like a waiting room between Heaven and Hell, where there is a suspension of salvation. L.428 is a reference to the myth of Philomel, as the swallow is the bird that her sister, Procne, became; and Philomel became a nightingale. The myth is the representation of the endless circle of violence. In L.429 the figure of the king (prince) is among the ruins of his -medieval- kingdom. The process of inheritance does not solve the problem: The prince, who is the future king, is among the ruins. In L.430 “These fragments” refers to lines 426-429. These lines are fragments of the poem. The voice comes out of the text and summarizes and orders the poem with it. The poem is an exercise of redemption. The poetic voice is looking for redemption through art, through poetry. In L.431 there is a Mad King. It is a reference to the Spanish Tragedy, which has a plot similar to Hamlet. The stored revenge tragedy of Renaissance drama. It is related to the endless cycle of violence. The king is mad, is sick, and his son has been, so there is no inheritance, and there is no restoration for the land. There is again the same story in The Waste Land. Those fragments explain the line before about using art and words as a way and tool for restoration. The land has been destroyed in the war. The progress is covered by millions of corpses. The old world had collapsed. The world is a new place, and life continues, but because there are millions of bodies feeding the land. The way to redeem that is to try looking at art, and by that looking at myth. Eliot is trying to make art out of violence. L.432 is written in Sanskrit. What the thunder said is “Da” (L.399) and started raining. But the problem is the interpretation; gods hear “Damayata”, which means control because they are naturally unruly, they have to restrain themselves. Men hear “Datta”, which means give as they are avaricious, so they need to be more generous to be safe. And the demons hear “Dayadhvam”, compassion because they are cruel (note 3, pg 18). Their interpretation means the way each one should redeem themselves, but this is what the thunder said. They are the representations of the different groups when they believe the thunder is speaking to them. Meaning is elusive, the reader doesn’t know the truest meaning (modernist conception), the problem of interpretation. The poem anticipates the possibility of redemption/regeneration: the thunder says and you interpret what you need to do to redeem yourself. In L.433, the last line of the poem, says “Shantih, shantih, shantih”, and Eliot translated it as “The Peace which passeth understanding”. Shantih is a secret book in Hinduism/Sanskrit. It doesn’t mean anything. It is supposed to have religious or magical meanings. But all the reader has are words and their meaning (descriptions). But that meaning is disconnected from the consciousness that writes the poem. If the reader discards the magical meaning, s/he only has words. Eliot describes it as a “water-dripping font”. The onomatopoeia of water falling (rain, at this point of the poem, is raining). Association of the mystic redemptive knowledge and the actual rain. The problem with the redeeming meaning of the thunder is that it is martial. If peace passes understanding, it cannot be understood peace. L.433 is water coming down, the thunder represents the rain, but also means indecipherable words. The Waste Land is not craving rain because at the beginning is already raining. The issue is that after Winter, the Spring comes and life is restored, the restoration of life. Because rain guarantees that life goes in the wasteland, it restores its fertility, but it is a problem. It is the return to the beginning, “April is the cruellest month”, a restoration of life means a continuation of it, but also a continuation of death in life, a life that is violent, where there is no hope for redemption, where there is no more love, human connection and exist communication problems. There is a continuation of violence, and sickness forever. Because it will always come again, April, the rain, and the regeneration. There is a cycle of eternal life in eternal degeneration where doesn’t exist possibility of redeeming. situation that was taking place. In a way, he’s using those values of the past and updating them. There’s a celebration of a hero that should be recovered and we can recover that hero thanks to literature, emphasizing some aspects of his life, like his heroic capacity and his exile, he’s disdained by society (solitary hero) and his values go against the dominant framework of the community and in a way, you have to recover the values of those who were marginalized in the past. The ending of the poem connects the first and second parts of the poem. The translation ends with “...here made to stand”. That wall is falling apart, and he connects that part of the translation with new lines that he included to shape the meaning of the translation. The wall is falling apart and is a contemporary wall in which the past is falling apart, that art that made Venice Paradise, that art that allows readers to see the values of the past represented by Mio Cid is falling apart (disappearing) because in the present are rejected those heroes because they are degenerated, degraded. The connection between the 1st and 2nd part of the poem is the last lines, that art that made Venice Paradise is lost, is falling apart in the last line. Mantegna is a Renaissance artist. What the Renaissance art represents is the same values that the Cid represents, and it can be accessed to those values through art, but art is falling apart: the painting in the world, the values in art, knowledge of the art... are disappearing in the Contemporary world and Pound is trying to bring them back to the present. Art is the road to Paradise, because lets to reach those values. William Carlos Williams (1883-1968) He was born and died in New Jersey. Since high school wrote poems, and apart from a poet, he was a small- town doctor, a paediatrician. He wrote a very American Poetry, Carlos Williams was the inheritor of Whitman’s ideas and poetry. The idea of the American National poetry, vernacular and cut of British and European cannons. Rejected things as iambic pentameter, there is an emancipation, also on context. He wants to be democratic; poetry should not leave anything out of the scape. Not all poetry and its topics should be elevated. Existed a new (different) kind of mind-set, American modernism is more based on nation, where the use of a colloquial vocabulary goes hand in hand with the context of the poem, representing American speech. Minimalist speech. He met Pound, who helped him publish. W.C. Williams lived in Europe but differently to his contemporaries he returned to America. He was influenced by Imagism and later rejected the later poetry of Eliot and Pound (complex, multilingual...), which was too close to European culture and conventions, and it was disconnected from America. The fact that his poetry was so different made him kind of over shadowed due to the popularity of The Waste Land (Eliot). That changed later because he’s considered the main influence of the Beat Generation and was celebrated during the 50s. although he wasn’t as popular as Pound or Eliot, he was a very prolific author. Some of his works are Al Que Quiere (1917), Sour Grapes (1921) and his best considered work, Spring and All (1923). After Modernism, during the 1960s, he published Pictures from Brueghel (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1962) and Patterson (1963) which contains prose, letters, newspaper clips... and shows how American life was, hybrid texts, a kind of USA epic. The main characteristics of his poetry are the influence of Imagism, especially with the use of free verse; the colloquial speech, used to capture the natural rhythm of American spoken English, Williams wanted his poems to sound like real American people speaking. He writes about ordinary people and everyday events and they are presented as an image or snapshot of ordinary life, but as oppose to Imagism which was about trying to capture that present moment of perception, in this case he’s trying to present an image of a real object, ordinary life, but there’s something hidden, something that is revealed in the image after analysing it, finding a hidden meaning of the object. Another characteristic is the radical use of free verse, he uses enjambments that are very strong and forced, and he breaks the lines into short verses (breaking syntax) and individual lines don’t mean anything, therefore you have to read more lines to get what he’s saying (this is what influenced the Beat Generation the most). He uses free verse in a different way to Whitman. Williams takes imagism and goes a stop further and creates objectivism, which its aim was to capture a snapshot of. This capturing was supposed to express something bigger a revelation of a universal beyond the poem. The motto of the movement is “No ideas, but the things”. He wants to strip away everything symbolic from objects or words. Ended with the tradition of symbols and connections (metaphors…); Williams wanted to move away from the European literary tradition. The Red Wheelbarrow The poem is the XXII of Spring and All. It is the representation of an object poetically. The reader does not know what depends upon the wheel. It is written in free verse, with no capital letters and no punctuation (no conventional use). There are references to colours and textures, in order to evoke perception. It is a poem composed by 4 stanzas of 2 lines each one, where the first line is composed by 3 words and the second by 1 word (enjambment). These four stanzas seem to be just one sentence. The single word line is the object described by the 3 words-lines. It is an unusual main object effected by a natural element located in a rural setting. By this, W.C. Williams wanted to vindicate the importance of those objects. The colours are the same as the American flag (red, blue -rainwater- and white). The enjambment in the poem is used to isolate two elements (3-words lines) and unite them with 1-word lines. It shows down the rhythm and the sensation of perception, emphasis on physically (objects), both rain and water, both white and chicken. The poem is vindicating the importance of what is normally considered unimportant. This is Just to Say (1934) This poem is a note that someone leaves to another person. It is a poem about a poetic voice (I) who eats the plumbs of someone else and apologies about that. It is written in free verse. The structure of the poem is chiastic, stanzas 1 follows the pattern 3232 (in terms of length) and 3 follow the pattern 2323. While stanza 2 is irregular, 2313. There are 2 different sentences, two stanzas (1 & 2) dedicated to the 1st idea, the first part is slow. And 1 stanza to the 2nd idea, which is faster. The distribution of the poem points the focus in three different points: the 1st stanza is about “I”, the person writing the note; the 2nd stanza is about “you”, the person who is going to read the note; and the last stanza is about the plumbs (“they”). There’s a radical use of free verse, for example in the verses “that were in; the icebox” the preposition is left hanging and the “icebox” is isolated in the next line. The same happens with the verb phrase “were probably saving” which is broken and left the word “saving” isolated in a verse. And the same things with the adjectives of the last stanza, one per verse (delicious, sweet, cold). The poem evokes a domestic household where an “I” and “you” live together. They are a married couple, because of the time it was written the poem (couples who lived together were married). The poem takes place during the morning, because the person who eats the plumb leaves a note for the person who is still sleeping before leaving the house. The person leaving is the husband (he leaves to work) and the person who stays at home is the wife (they don’t see each other). It is a domestic scene of the domestic life of a couple. They are a middle-class marriage because they have a fridge (icebox). When the wife wakes up, the husband has already left. The title of the poem suggests that it’s a note left by someone (husband) to someone else (wife). The conflict of the poem is in the characters, the differences between the husband (“I”, who eats the plumbs) and the wife (“you” who saves the plumbs). The third stanza conveys the speech act of apology, but only the 1st verse says, “Forgive me” and the rest of the verses are a description of what the husband experienced while eating the plumbs. What the husband experiences while eating the plumbs is pleasure, satisfaction (plumbs as source of pleasure). The two characters of the marriage have two different attitudes towards pleasure: the husband can’t contain himself and indulges in immediate gratification and pleasure (even if that hurts the wife) and the wife has a more restrained attitude towards pleasure and satisfaction (she contains that desire). The poem represents is a separation and conflict between the characters, a marriage, who have different approaches so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens Expectation, something important comes later Natural element Main image Human made; technology simple but important in certain contexts Location: Rural / Provential setting (farm) Relational meaning → emphasis to pleasure and that translated to a marriage represents a separation and a conflict in the way they deal with pleasure, a dissonance in the way they understand pleasure, a difficulty in their marriage. The fact that this is a note emphasizes that there’s a separation between them because they communicate across distance, with a note. The “I” is taking for granted that he is going to be forgiven. Vindication of prosaic subject matters worthy of being represented with vernacular language. “I – eat” / “You – save” / “They – delicious”: The “I is indulging in the pressure the act of eating the plumbs give him, instead of carrying for the actions of the “you”. He is not able to delay the sense of pleasure and disrespects her efforts. That is presented in a very minimal way but presents the relationships dynamics. e.e. cummings (1894-1962) He was known by his strange grammar and punctuation. He was born in Cambridge; his father was a Harvard professor. He studied modernist writers and movements as he was younger than the other. He was accused of espionage. In 1923 published Tulips and Chimneys. And presented his very eccentric poetry. Is 5 (1926), ViVa (1931), No Thanks (1935). He has a very chaotic way of describing experiences and very visual approach to poetry, how are they approached visually rather than about reading. He was popular at the time and continues to be popular nowadays, but at the same time, he’s usually not included in Modernism studies because critics didn’t have high regards for his poetry. He’s a very illustrative example of some of the main concerns of Modernist poetry. Cummings was worn in a small household of Massachusetts, in a family who was very supportive. He graduated in Harvard, and he was responsible for the commencement address to his fellow graduates and the topic was the artistic innovations of Modernism (Modernism existed before the work, Modernism is the literary equivalent of a Vanguard in painting). He was very interested in the artistic innovations of Modernism that were happening in that moment. He was also a painter in the style of Cubism and he used a lot of free verse. In 1917, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in the war, so he fitted much better the paradigm of the Modernist author: he was born in America and moved to Europe to be part of the world. He was held prisoner during the war, he was accused of espionage and wrote that in The Enormous Room (autobiographical account, 1922). However, in contrast with other Modernist authors who left America to go to Europe and never came back, he went back to the NY when the war finished. He published in magazines like The Dial. In 1923, he published Tullips and Chimneys, which was his first collection of poems and was very popular and successful. These poems were influenced by Stein (cubism, linguistic experimentation) and Amy Lowell’s Imagism (using images to create and evoke emotions). His poetry describes immediate experience in a chaotic way because he’s continuously playing with form and language. What we find in his poetry is a deliberate end of spoken lyric, the idea that poetry shouldn’t be read out loud or sang, the poem has to build itself three dimensionally in the reader’s mind as a kind of sculpture because when you read the poem, you experience the poem, you experience what you are reading. He does this with a constant deconstruction and reconstruction of language (grammar, punctuation, spelling...). His poetry went from a celebration of a life towards a critique of the American life and culture (No Thanks, 1935). Even though he was very popular, his popularity was never matched by his critical reputation. He was accused of being too naïve and sentimental, despite his verbal and visual inventiveness. r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r poem about a grasshopper jumping. Visual approach to poetry as the poem can only be understood when looking at it. The grasshopper can only be seen once it stops at the end. I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold intellectual poetry, which William Carlos Williams loved, even though he wasn’t interested in the poetry of Eliot and Pound. She used the technique of the collage (use of pieces from other writings and puts them in the poem), as well as precise language and simple, compact images in which one, according to WCW, can feel “great events” (images that reveal something). Marriage She wrote Marriage in 1923. It’s a long poem. She claimed she wanted to “offend people”, so it was controversial. She used the technique of collage: using quotes from friends, magazines, books... and she does this in a way that satirizes authority which is mostly what the poem is about. It presents marriage as an excuse to talk about language and power. She uses many voices, with 2 character that incorporate voices from different people, so there’s a constant change of perspective. There are assembled fragments, lack of union, lack of coherence... and this is because those are the themes that are connected with the idea of authority and with the idea of marriage as a lack of union, of coherence... The fact that the structure of the poem looks like an assemble of different elements put together is significant because it mirrors how it’s portrayed marriage, as a necessary disunion because, since marriage is the union of two people it can’t be one thing, there’s at least two things. There’s a dialectical structure in which characters speak and reply to each other and it incorporates (in the discussion and the commentary of the narrator) myths, symbols, and thoughts about marriage. There’s irony, a satirical approach to authority. But in the end, there’s no clear answer, there’s not a closure to this dialect that’s open, there’s no one meaning that closes the poem. There are many voices, tones, emotions... but overall, there’s a discussion on power and language which is expressed as an opposition between a kind of private speaking, in which what you want, feel... and a different side to language which would be the public speaking used to persuade people, to execute authority over other people. Critics have placed this kind of poetry in which the use of collage is so specific within the trend of Dadaism which is another Vanguard movement in visual arts, which could be translated in poetry by explaining how collage works in this kind of poems, in ready-made poems, which are poems that include writings from different poems and the author puts those pieces of writing together, the authors assign meaning to texts that they haven’t written. Marriage is about who has the authority to assign meaning to language. The concept is collage as a ready-made poem. The technique is connected to the main discussion of the poem: authority, language... which is how we assign meaning to words and the kind of power we use to do that. The 1st section analysed goes from lines 1-17. During this part, the poem presents the dichotomy between public and privacy, between public promises and private obligation, it says good and bad things. It’s not presenting the situation as gaining something and losing something, but at this point, it says that if you promise something publicly, you are committed to something. The thing with marriage is that it doesn’t happen if there aren’t people witnessing, it’s an action that you do yourself, but somebody has to witness that. Marriage is first described as an institution, as a social reality, something that articulates social life, society is organized by dividing individuals into families, so they aren’t alone, and they have smaller communities that imitate larger societies. Marriage is a way of ordering society that corresponds with a system of believes which are commons to the whole society. Marriage compromises the individual, the individual is going to have to let something go, he’s going to be forced to do something by society, the community: marriage is an obligation and once they are married, people are expected to fulfil the public promises they made. In a way, marriage has a social function, a political function, and it compromises individuals: marriage is about how individuals have to enter society in a kind of order way, your commitment is to society, not your partner. The important thing is how this is said, how the language is used. The language in the poem isn’t aesthetic, it’s not the language that we would expect in a poem, it’s the language that we would expect in an official document because it’s what it’s describing. The language imitates the content. The repetition of “one” is significant because that’s the point of marriage, you lose your oneness, your individuality is committed and compromised, and one becomes two but if they are two they can’t become a unity because a unity means one and that’s the conflict, how do you reconsize two people becoming one, you can’t because there’s still two people, and that’s the open conflict that the problem never resolves, that’s why this harmony is important in the poem, in the end there’s no one single meaning. What we are going to see in the poem is Adam and Eve discussing issues related to marriage. When wondering about what Adam and Even think of “it”, it refers to marriage and is described with an extended metaphor that continues in the next lines. The symbol of the marriage used in the metaphor is the wedding ring (firegilt, golden, circular). The ring is very hard, it cannot break, it’s golden and shines so it’s beautiful, but it’s also a manifestation of a tradition (you exchange rings, but it doesn’t give you anything) and an imposture, which is something you do for others because it’s a public ceremony. The collage technique (ready-made) appears with the quote “of circular... spoils” because they weren’t written by Marianne Moore (Fancis Bacon wrote them), but she uses them and gives them a new meaning in her poem (previously they meant war but now they’re about marriage). The spoils are kind of the damage done in the world, and with that the language of war is incorporated in the poem and related to the description and conflict of marriage and the last line talks about avoiding the damage done by either war or marriage, more likely marriage. The poem then introduces the premise of Adam and Eve, and from line 21 to 34 is Eve and her description. Eve is presented as somebody who is in command of language, she’s clever because she can write simultaneously in different languages while talking, so she has a good command of language but also, she is capable of executing power, or at least getting her will be done using language. When the narrator met Eve in the past, she was handsome, clever, she had a great command of language and no problem of expressing what she wanted and always having those desires respected. However, something changed, one day she used language to express her desire to be alone and the visitor (Adam) replies he wants to be alone too so why not be alone together. What happens in these last lines is that he changes the meaning of what she says, he assigns meaning to her words, she says she wants to be alone and he replies he wants to be alone together so they could be lone together but that’s not what alone means (being along doesn’t mean being with someone else), so he’s taking her words and changing the meaning of her words, assigning a new meaning to her words. He has the power to change the meaning of “alone” and therefore he sets a rhetorical trap for her, manipulating language by assigning meaning, changing the meaning of words using his power. The marriage is a patriarchal institution that gives authority to the husband over the wife, that means that Adam is in a position of power, and he uses that power to change the meaning of her words. He manipulates language using his power, he imposes his own desire on her manipulating language. This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one's mind about a thing one has believed in, requiring public promises of one’s intention to fulfill a private obligation: I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time, this firegilt steel alive with goldenness; how bright it shows — “of circular traditions and impostures, committing many spoils,” requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity to avoid! Wedding, in a marriage witness are necessary rings F. Bacon (war) private  public show Eve: beautiful woman — I have seen her when she was so handsome she gave me a start, able to write simultaneously in three languages — English, German and French and talk in the meantime; equally positive in demanding a commotion and in stipulating quiet: “I should like to be alone;” to which the visitor replies, “I should like to be alone; why not be alone together?” Adam is the master, Eve is powerless Power over language + Power through language Then the poem describes Adam’s speech (lines 73- 102), how is Adam’s language in the poem. One of the main characteristics is that he can’t see beyond himself, so he’s certain of the things that he believes to be true because he can’t see beyond himself (one of the main topics of Modernism). There’s also power and violence. The first line implies that words are a huge part of himself, sort of what defines him and keeps him alive, what gives a sense to his existence. The cymbal means that he has a lot of words within himself and he’s ready to burst them out. When he starts speaking and how he speaks is described with a metaphor of the industrious waterfall and is described as speedy-stream and violently bears, which means that his words are many words and the way they come out is strong and powerful until becoming a violent outburst of words, a violent speech. He is kind of reckless in the use of language, he doesn’t see that he may be putting himself in a position of danger (which is an instinctive manifestation is unsafe). He’s forgetting (forgetting that there is in woman) the quality of man of Eve, he’s forgetting Even and her use of language and power, he can only see his own language and can’t see beyond that. During the lines “past states... to promote one’s joy” he is talking about history, society, morality, religion. He is speaking about the things that philosophers speak about, he’s not speaking about private issues or individual thoughts. He’s using language to pontificate and talk about the great issues which is the kind of discourse uttered by those who have a position of authority. His use of language is used to distinguish good-evil, Heaven-Hell... He uses language as a person in authority to construct language and define history, culture, religion... The way he’s using language is in a way setting the conditions for the whole of society, he’s presenting rules of behaviours, moral actions... He’s forgetting Eve and her power. He gets so carried away by the force of his discourse and language that he is deluded into thinking that the authority of his language has given him unlimited power. He is the one in power in the marriage, the one with the authority to say what’s right and wrong, and he gets so much carried away with this power that he comes to the conclusion that he’s an idol for her. There are also quotes that weren’t written by Marianne Moore (ready-made): and how...the wind; on the...a spear; of past...state; he...joy. These quotes correspond with Adam, Adam as a philosopher, as an authority, and the quotes belong to people who have an authority. The text also talks about a nightingale which represents Eve. The reference for the nightingale is related to the story of Philomela and her sister’s husband (he raped her and to keep her quiet, he cut her tongue and after some events seeking revenge, God turned them into birds and Philomena became a nightingale because they can’t sing). Eve is presented silence as a kind or parallel with Philomena, the result of a violent situation, Adam is silencing Eve and by doing this, he’s executing a form of violence, and at the same time that doesn’t mean that Eve can’t fight back, as Philomena did. The fact that she refuses shows that Adam can’t control Eve, she just ignores him and he’s afraid that she’s going to leave him. His power can't control her, her response is silence, and the poem very quickly, very clever, says “Unnerved by the nightingale” means Eve's silence, her way of executing power without language, which is what Philomena does in the myth, “and dazzled by the apple is Alive with words, vibrating like a cymbal touched before it has been struck, he has prophesied correctly — the industrious waterfall, “the speedy stream which violently bears all before it, at one time silent as the air and now as powerful as the wind.” “Treading chasms on the uncertain footing of a spear,” forgetting that there is in woman a quality of mind which is an instinctive manifestation is unsafe, he goes on speaking in a formal, customary strain of “past states,” the present state, seals, promises, the evil one suffered, the good one enjoys, hell, heaven, everything convenient to promote one’s joy.” There is in him a state of mind by force of which, perceiving what it was not intended that he should, “he experiences a solemn joy in seeing that he has become an idol.” Adam his speech not notice sth (threat, element of danger) Academic language (formal/legal) History + politics religion morality philosophy Adam’s state of mind. Overconfidence, misguided: believes he is bigger than what he really is Main fields of knowledge It is an entire poem created by her, so it’s not completely a translation. This poem redefines the notion of translation. It’s a longer poem (the other had 4 lines and this has 54). This poem has a speaker, it’s no longer following the perspective of Hermes. Hermes is a statue, he isn’t moving. The person welcoming wayfarers is Hermes, not the speaker. The statue is facing the beach, the sand, and on his Easter side it has an orchard protecting him and, on the West, it has the sea, and in front of him there’s the sand. These elements of the landscape are connected between each other with the statue of Hermes. He’s described as dubious because he’s facing three ways, it means that he receives travelers that come from different places. In the other version of the poem, nature is described as violent. In this poem, nature is described as playful, peaceful, it’s in a way kind of flexible. It’s not as harsh and violent as it was in the previous poem. While in the previous poem Hermes just was stood there, in this one he waits, welcomes, in a much gentler way. He’s providing the same service for travelers but in this one Hermes and the service are described softer. The nature kind of answers, but not to the speaker, it seems to answer the wind, the different sound of the wind, which helps in the way of describing nature as not violent. In this poem there is no clear “I” and it is not the god speaking written in free verse. The speaker of the poem is a traveler and he’s coming from the sea, we know this because he says the grass is around his ankles and that means he’s coming from the water. The last thing that the speaker does in this part of the poem is come out of the water. It is a poem about description of a natural landscape. The poem seems to be describing the same previous hostile setting, but gently. Is still hostile but there is a gentleness on how the landscape, in origin difficult, can be soft. The poem illuminates its softness, it can be playful and gentle. There is a lexical difference on the description of water “gushers” vs. “flowing” (gentles). There is a subjective description of the landscape from the speaker, how he feels (he comes from the sea) the landscape is hostile, but he is a good state of mind and sees everything playing and so. The semantic change of verbs no longer emphasizes the strength of Hermes, but now welcomes and waits for travelers, the outlook is much friendlier. And nature is not so violence, the sand is presented in a kind soft way. The climatic conditions are still harsh, the natural conditions are not so good, but the presentation is kinder and more flexible. And Hermes is humanized he is welcoming. The orchard is protecting the god. There are three paths leading to the statue of Hermes: the one coming from the west (the orchard), from the east (the sea) and in front is the beach. Nature and Hermes are presented in a gentler way. The second part of the poem begins with the traveler drinking from the spring of fresh water that’s offered to the travelers. He encounters the statue and the spring and tastes the water which is sweet and it’s gentle (while in the other poem it was also described as violent). The orchard is described as it is less than perfect: apples are too small, the trees are twisted, the leaves are too small... But still, that less than perfect description of nature (because there are a lot of elements that difficult the growing of life in that area), nature perseveres. A fruitful orchard isn’t a Paradise, it's not the Eden, it’s not perfect, but still they offer something that’s not perfect but it’s better than the shadow that he got when he was on the sea. He describes his experience on the sea before he went to the shore, he had been in danger during his journey in the sea (Hermes...shore-grass). In this part, there’s a trace of the violence of the other version. This is the harsh part, the sea is the violent experience, described with a metaphor as if it was a monster (Gnashed its teeth about me) but Hermes has waited for him where sea ends and land begins. He’s describing his dangerous experience on the sea and the comfort he feels when he reaches the shore and finds Hermes, who is the protector of travelers and has protected him of the dangers in the sea. What really matters is what H.D. does with the notion of translation. It translates some of the key concepts of what Hermes does as well as the experience of the traveler. The poem isn’t translating the text as it’s written, it’s translating the experience of the person who is reading it. H.D. translates the feelings that the person is truly experiencing. It places the speaker and recreates the consciousness of the person who reads that description, because that also gives information of what the stone says. It’s translating the text through the consciousness of a person who is reading the text. To experiment with translation as a creative recreation, as a form of writing, instead of translating the text, H.D. tells the story of a person reading the text and therefore translates the same thing but through the consciousness of a person. This poem introduces a human subject (instead of the words of the god) and therefore introduces a subjective experience, an individual consciousness. The way nature is described informs the reader of the physical and psychological experience of the speaker. For example, for Hermes in the other version the wind and the water were violent and, in this version, what was violent for the speaker is the sea, and this is because for Hermes in the other poem, the wind was always against him because he’s a statue, and for the traveler in this version, the wind isn’t violent because this means he’s safe now, what is violent for him is the storm that almost kills him during his journey on the sea. This was important during Modernism, the subjective experience and partiality. This creative way of translating through the consciousness introduces a human subject, a human consciousness, and therefore changes perspectives (nature isn’t violent now, the sea is). The images of nature are used to represent consciousness and subjectivity. Helen This poem was written in the late 1920s and it also deals with the re-writing of the myths. This poem is about how Greece (generalized) hates Helen. Helen is represented in the poem beautiful, pale, pure, and innocent. The structure is deliberately flouted, with kind of free verse that tries to accurate to regular stanza and rhyme (couplets). Imitation of traditional stanza form, sometimes disrupted, imitating, in the use of rhyme. Traditional rhyme but it does not work, almost mocking element. The length of the stanzas becoming bigger, the 1st stanza has 5 lines, the 2nd has 6 and the 3rd has 7. It represents that something growing; it is related to the idea of progression, therefore it’s going to lead to a consequence, there’s a build-up of something which is the last thing described in the poem, Helen’s death. This progression leads to her death, which isn’t very literal even though it’s represented as such. I The hard sand breaks, And the grains of it Are clear as wine. Far off over the leagues of it, The wind, Playing on the wide shore, Piles little ridges, And the great waves Break over it. But more than the many-foamed ways Of the sea, I know him Of the triple path-ways, Hermes, Who awaiteth. Dubious, Facing three ways, Welcoming wayfarers, He whom the sea-orchard Shelters from the west, From the east Weathers sea-wind; Fronts the great dunes. Wind rushes Over the dunes, And the coarse, salt-crusted grass Answers. Heu, It whips round my ankles! II Small is This white stream, Flowing below ground From the poplar-shaded hill, But the water is sweet. Apples on the small trees Are hard, Too small, Too late ripened By a desperate sun That struggles through sea-mist. The boughs of the trees Are twisted By many bafflings; Twisted are The small-leafed boughs. But the shadow of them Is not the shadow of the mast head Nor of the torn sails. Hermes, Hermes, The great sea foamed, Gnashed its teeth about me; But you have waited, Where sea-grass tangles with Shore-grass. D es cr ib es t h e st at u e hostile create gentleness hostile hostile b u t p la y in g after then, stand & keep more humanized playful strength of the wind conversation of this elements playing The two environments interact and brings back to the description of the landscape where all play together violence again recover the idea v o lt a The speaker is a sailor whose ship has changed direction or wrecked comes from the sea with difficult conditions. The violence that is abandoned in other descriptions before, is presented in the sea. Little description of the orchard the water is a good thing not a positive description the trees aren’t great nor green opposite idea of a paradise The poem is not describing the feeling of some individuals that have been hurt by Helen, it’s describing the feeling of the whole Greece, the whole country hates her. Greece hates Helen by worshipping her beauty, what the poem describes is how beauty worship is a form of hate, misogyny. We know this because of the description of Helene, the tradition of the blaze song, in traditional love poetry you sing a song describing the beauty of the beloved and by singing the beauty of the beloved, you take the beloved and cut her into pieces. The way Helen’s body is described, describe what they hate about her, her beauty. It has the form of a blazon in content and format; as her body is cutting into pieces and describing its beauty, but in that way, it exposes the violence, considering the woman an object of beauty. There is an insistence on its whiteness, in the 1st she stills, 2nd wan (paleness), and 3rd coldness/cold. The final image connects whiteness with death and the laid maid. There is an ideal of beauty on Helen, as she is becoming more white. Her growing whiteness transforms Helen into a statue, a body only. Helen, as a mythical character, represents the paradigm of the female individual as an object of beauty. Helen is mostly known as beautiful and in her story is treated as an object. First, the kings fought over her and when Menelao won, all men vowed to protect him because he had Helen, so they went to war against Troy. The entire history of Helen treats Helen as a thing, and this is what the poem does. In the 1st and 2nd stanza, even though she’s presented as more white as the poem progresses, she’s kind of alive, and in the 3rd stanza, there are different parts of her that are still described in terms of beauty, but this expresses how that side of Helen as beautiful is an expression of hate that would only stop once she is dead, which is the final image of the poem, Helen dead. Helen as an archetype of a woman as an erotic object is an objectification of Helen, and this is presented in the myth as a description that progressively describes Helen from woman to statue, from living thing to death thing, and that progression from living thing to death thing is represented in the poem in a way that mirrors how Helen is objectified in the original Greek myth. The poem is materializing a reification of Helen, a transformation of Helen into an object. Any poem with Helen as the object would transform her. H.D. is intendedly “killing” Helen, she is becoming more object and less person. She is subject of dismembering, emphasizing the idea that you are killing her. This is how the myth is re-written. H.D. adds to the original myth that all Greece hates Helen because the form of beauty worship, the fact that they treat her as an object is a form of hate and that hate will lead her to her death, because it dehumanizes her and transforms her into an object, and that form process of objectification is represented in the poem like progressively presenting Helen first as a woman and growing into a statue. What tradition considers a tradition of love (blazon and the reification) is actually a tradition of hate. “All Greece” refer to culture, mythology, tradition, history, discourse, the myth of Helen, the story of Greece, is of hate. It is a tradition of violence against women. H.D. transforms the tradition of love poem into a hate poem of women. Reveals that the myth is volent making it explicit. It is a revision of the myth. All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the lustre as of olives where she stands, and the white hands. All Greece reviles the wan face when she smiles, hating it deeper still when it grows wan and white, remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees unmoved, God’s daughter, born of love, the beauty of cool feet and slenderest knees, could love indeed the maid, only if she were laid, white ash amid funereal cypresses. blazon livelyhood She is alive but whiteness is increasing pale deliberate ambiguous Reason for the hate lack of compassion Ironic (connection to the poem Leda) death funeral statue (Greece) who: Greece/Helen Anecdote of the Jar This poem is about a jar on a hill. It is a poem with an almost regular meter, but no rhyme. And about a jar placed in the wilderness and what happens, i.e., is a poem about the jar vs. wilderness. There are three elements or characters in the poem: “I” the speaker who performs an action which is leaving a jar on the top of a hill, he places it deliberately; the jar; and the wilderness. The jar is round, and it makes the wilderness surround that hill because the wilderness kind of acquires that shape once the speaker puts the jar. The jar is described as tall and imposing and takes dominion over the wilderness instead of the other way around. The jar takes dominion over the wilderness, which gives a sense of power. The 3rd stanza is different from the other two and it says the jar is grey and bare and it doesn’t give life (“give of bird or bush”), the jar is lifeless, and it doesn’t have the capacity of nature to grow and be alive. This is an aspect of nature that isn’t transferred into the jar. In the last lines, everything changes. At the beginning of the poem the wilderness is slovenly but then it acquires the shape and sense of border when it surrounds the jar, so it’s no longer wild, it’s a border around the jar but it’s completely different from the jar, the jar takes dominion of the wilderness because it provides a shape and a sense of order from the wilderness but it doesn’t change a significant part of what the wilderness is. The poem morphologically, insists on the world round (appears at different times) because the shapes of the jar and the wilderness are important and significant. The wilderness wasn’t surrounding the jar until the jar was put upon the hill. That means that from the circular perspective of the jar, wilderness becomes round. This, in terms of power, means that the jar imposes the shape that it’s familiar to the jar, the shape to the jar knows, to an external element (wilderness) and that is why it’s expressed in terms of power and dominion because it’s the jar imposing its own shape to nature. The jar symbolizes something made by man, a form of art, art in the sense as something that humans can create, manipulate, and give a shape to, therefore, a man-made product. The jar signifies art as the capacity of man to create things so art is almost in the sense of everything that is man-made, things that can be built and controlled by men. You place the jar, you place art on nature, something that is outside of human’s control, but what you can do is put art on nature and use art to give a sense of order to nature and therefore to give a specific shape and meaning to nature if you put the jar on a hill then the wilderness which was shapeless now acquires a shape, the shape that you provide and impose, a shape that is familiar to you. The artistic object takes dominion over nature, it assigns a meaning to nature, it makes nature not wild anymore and provides a sense of order to nature. But in the 3rd stanza we see those aspects of nature that are different from the jar (the things that jar, art and nature don’t have in common) and what we see is that the jar is sterile (gray and bare) but the wilderness grows and provides life. What matters is we are seeing nature beyond the jar, things that exist in nature that are outside the influence of the jar. Art can give a meaning to nature, but nature cannot be used in art itself, you can’t take from nature the capacity to give life and put that into art. They can remain separate, there’s a part of nature separate, and there’s a part of nature that will always resist the influence of art. The capacity of art to interpret the world, to give a specific shape, order and meaning to the world is limited and it depends on perspective, the perspective of the speaker in the poem’s case, the human who has decided to put the jar on the hill, therefore I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. The Poetic Voice does something (place a jar) The jar does something This power has limits, art can give a new vision of life but cannot create life. Only nature has that capacity. Art imitates/transforms life. giving meaning to nature. The speaker is the artist who puts the jar on the hill but if he changes his perspective (places the jar somewhere else), the meaning that is assigned to the world, the order of the world is going to change. This means that we interpret the world, we give shape and meaning to the world from one perspective, but that perspective is arbitrary, temporal, and partial. This is where the aesthetic and epistemological ideology of the poem connects with the idea of Modernism in which we can only create meaning and order for the world through art, but that’s limited to our perspective. The dominion that art or imagination have over reality is partial, it creates one specific reality with one specific shape and meaning but that is only limited to one perspective (different perspective, different meaning). Reality is something larger than what we can account for. Harlem Renaissance took place during the mid-20s. and 30s. It is also knowns as The New Negro Movement because of the anthology of black writers. Awareness of a new black consciousness and community. It is not a political movement but aesthetic; it had literary, artistic, and intellectual sides but it wasn’t political. The point of the movement was to find a way of expression for the community that was their own, a characteristic way of group expression. They were based on group expression and self-determination. After the ending of slavery, black communities were not fully emancipated, they were marginalized and in the beginning of the 1920s, this came as a way of sort of a new birth aesthetically, to take pride in their own identity as a community, to give a voice to express their community, so the whole community could express in an aesthetic way that was their own, in a characteristic way that defined them as the African-American community. The parallels development in music are not considered as part of the Harlem Renaissance because it was like their own movement, which was the development of jazz music. This aesthetic movement vindicated a new, authentic form of expression, and they were really concerned about how that specific way of expression affected racial critics. The Great Migration influenced to the creation of the movement. It was an exodus of black people from the south moving to the north. A new literary scene was born. Its literary characteristics include most of the works have the topic of life in the modern city. They are concerned with the vindication and representation of black culture, language, … Material that was not considered to be worthy to write before. A celebration of the identity of the community. The black language is represented. It is not a standard English. Artist incorporated music to their poetry (jazz and blues). Add some of its rhythmic features. Fire!! was a magazine that published many of the poems of the Harlem Renaissance. When this ended in the 1930s, it was ignored by critics, however it was later reclaimed during the Civil Rights and after that, it became deeply influential for African American authors. The center of the movement, the most important publication was New Negro (1925) by Alain Locke which included many different writings from different African American authors. Even though this movement was born in Harlem, it spread to other cities of the country that were centers of black immigrants coming from the South to the states. The elements that are present in this Modernist poetry, the Harlem Renaissance poetry, especially in Langston Hughes poetry, are experimentation (incorporation of jazz and music to poetry) and a certain kind of linguistic innovation. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) One of the most famous figures, he was born in Missouri in 1902, later than the other modernist authors who were born in 1880s; but Hughes wrote at the same time as them, as he started writing when he was very young. Hughes lived and moved with different family members and ended up in NY at Columbia University. He managed to travel the world (Africa and Europe) as a seaman and in 1924 he moved to Washington. In 1921 he published The Negro Speak of Rivers. His earliest collections of poetry are I, Too, Sing America (1925) and The Weary Blues (1926), both very famous. In 1930 he wrote Not Without Laughter with which he won a Harmon Gold Medal. He also wrote plays, short stories, and essays. He was extremely prolific. In this poetry, he portrayed black life in terms of suffering, language, love of music, laughter and happiness, endurance and dignity, what they went through and how they came to the other side with dignity. He engages with jazz in poetry (experimental element) and a characteristic of his poetry is how he openly addresses black people, speaking for a large audience. He is the most important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He was introduced to Web DuBois, writer of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), DuBois helped to move in the scene and helped him to publish The Weary Blues (1926), that mixed poetry with jazz and blues. He also published an unofficial manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. He was very prolific. He is concerned with the proud representation of black life and conventions. He incorporated black vernacular speech and the rhythms of black music. His individual poetic voice represents the community on its whole. The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain It was a manifest from 1926. In a society where whiteness was the standard, he discusses that these people wanting to be “poets” are rejected their community. The black identity was opposed to the American identity. Hughes claims that people should not reject their identity but embrace it. Racial individuality refers to the idea of a single voice, are from an individual spelling about the whole community. Vindication for the racial individuality. The main idea of the first fragment (first paragraph) is that he’s talking about black art, black people who want to be artists of different kind and he says that one promising poet told him that he didn’t want to be considered a Negro poet, he wanted to be considered a poet, and he thought that was a pity because behind that statement there was the desire to be white, to write like the write men write instead of his own experience. He wanted to be considered a poet, but the concept of “poet” didn’t include minorities like black men. This continues to be a debate nowadays. The point of the author is to know you are never going to be a great poet if you assimilate because you are running away from your own identity. The concept of racial individuality cannot refer to one individual, it refers to a whole group. When he says racial individuality what he’s doing is creating the sense of one communitarian identity, and identity shared by all the member of the group ad he is arguing for the necessity of the art of this community to express the characteristics of this shared identity. Hughes also celebrates the lower class, as it is the higher class trying to adapt to the white standard, they had to accept their own identity, but it’s not an individual identity, it’s a group identity. While the lower classes celebrate their culture and would be able to create black art and poetry. They shouldn’t be afraid to be their selves, and to express what they are in art, and they are a specific way of living life. He’s distinguishing those people who are well-fed, well-educated, from the common people who aren’t afraid to work as they do, enjoy as they do, enjoy their own religious expressions and not be ashamed about them, and all those elements (music, dancing, their way of expressing those religious believes...), all those elements that characterize their daily life are to be expressed in the art. He talks about spontaneity and their different experience (dance, music, rest). He wants to celebrate has distinctive that community is. They are joyful have a different vision of religion. They rest also (against the American Dream) and have their own music and dances. They are different from the rest of Americans. The beauty of the black community is something to be celebrated to. There is a new kind of poetry that truly expresses how these people live and who they are with no shame. They are working class people as opposed to those middle or high-middle class people who to prosper, they abandon their own group identity, they stop behaving as their group does. He’s criticizing artists who want to assimilate. The assimilation from the point of view of the minority isn’t a good thing because the consequence is that you are going with the culture of the dominant group, the white group, and abandoning your own. A minority culture is lost in assimilation, if the young poet assimilates, he’s not going to be a great poem because he won’t express his identity. The Negro Speaks of Rivers He wrote this poem when he was 17 years old. There are elements of Walt Whitman poetry in this poem. How the poem imitates Whitman’s poems: the similarities between Whitman’s poetry and this poem are the kind of “I” as poetic voice and the connection with nature (identification of the speaker's soul as part of nature, being part of nature and being connected connecting people and land and nature, that transcendental notion that appears in Whitman’s poetry). Hughes uses rivers to depict black history. A vindication of black history. He uses free verse as same the way as Whitman did in Song of Myself, respecting the syntactical principle of the line, each line is one syntactical unit, sometimes short and others long. This is the opposite use of free verse that authors like WCWilliams used but it’s the use of free verse that Whitman started. The kind of “I” used in the poem refers to the whole Elizabeth Bishop is not a canonical modernist author, as she was born in 1911, and her contemporaries were born in the late 19th century. She belongs to a later generation, but she’s included because she wrote Modernist poetry. When the poetry in the US was kind of transforming into a different poetry and separating itself from Modernism authors (Eliot, Pound, Moore...), Elizabeth Bishop continued writing about the typical concerns of Modernism, using the style of Modernism, as well as being really close to Marianne Moore. She was born in Massachusetts and lived in different places with different family members (her dad died when she was 8 months old, and her mum was mentally ill and institutionalized). When she moved with her aunt from her mum’s side of the family, her aunt introduced her to Victorian poetry. She was ill during most of her child and youth. She wanted to be a composer, but performance anxiety made her turn to English. She went to college and there, she found a magazine and started writing and publishing. She met Marianne Moore, who was her most direct influence and had a close friendship that lasted their whole lives. They exchanged correspondence. And in their poetry, there are some intertextual references between their poetry. She also met Robert Lowell, and, in a way, he was very influenced by Elizabeth, even though their styles of poetry were very different. She inherited a lot of money, and because she didn’t have to work anymore, she travelled the world and moved to live with her friend Louis in Florida. She travelled to Brazil where she engaged in a passionate relationship with a woman who was very influential in Brazil (architect). Bishop published her first collection of poems in 1946, called North and South. Later on, in 1959 she published a second extended edition, North and South – A Cold Spring. In 1965, she published a third edition, and in 1979, the final edition. Questions of Travel. Collected Poems (1969, National Book Award), Geography III (1977). She didn’t publish a lot, she published infrequently, but her works were very successful, and she was very much recognized. Bishop was a very popular author, who had won a Pulitzer Prize. Her figure is very interesting as she continues with modernist poetry in a period of time where other trends were developed such as Confessional Poetry (she had a great influence in Robert Lowell’s beginnings), which was the dominant style within the 50s, but her style was very different. Her style was highly detailed, objective and distant, in the style of Modernist impersonality. It’s kind of mirrored, developed, continued, the interest in impersonality that was in Modernist poetry (preoccupation with representing personality, avoiding confessional writing). She is an example of the still existence of post-symbolism (at that time). She presents the doubts on language presented/studied during the course. The Fish It is a poem written in 1940 but published in 1946. The poem is written in free verse. This poem is about the speaker, the poetic voice catching a fish and then holding it at a distance and observing it, and the setting is a boat. After that, most of the poem is the description of the fish. We have a detailed description of the fish in which we learn he’s male, kind of disgusting... it seems to be a description that is not beautifying, it’s telling every detail about the fish even if the details are unpleasant. Later, he starts comparing the fish to something else (Like ancient...) using images, it introduces similes. The 1st description is kind of objective, even though there are subjective adjectives (venerable) but battered and homely seem to be describing how the fish looks. Then the description stops being so objective, and becomes something different, it becomes imaginative. The objective description is a prosaic, external description of the fish, it’s read almost like prose, and it hasn’t got rhythm (the rhythm is introduced later, with the similes). There’s an imaginative engagement with the fish and this changes a few lines into the poem. The poem is about an imaginative description of the fish. While reading the poem, we are presented with an objective description of the fish and we think the fish is ugly and unpleasant, but the fish is ugly and unpleasant presented in an imaginative way. First Section (Lines 1 - 21) This first section is about an explanation of how the poetic voice has caught a fish and describes it. There is a first-person poetic voice (“I”) who first catches the fish and then holds it. The language used in the first lines is not beautiful, it sounds very prosaic, both due to syntax and vocabulary. There is no assessment nor value in the first excerpt for it being tremendous. Lines 5 and 6 add rhythm, and the language starts to become poetic, as they are a repetition. These lines also create mystery: Why the fish “hadn’t fought at all”? Line 7, once the fish is caught, the language becomes more subjective. There is no description of the speaker. But the “I” becomes “He”, and presents a description of the fish, becoming less neutral as it goes. The simile is used as a strategy, it is marked with the use of the word like. From line 9 the outside (appearance) of the fish; its colours, its scales and its skin. It is described as a simile of wallpaper. It gives a sense of faded beauty and decay. “hung in strips” the skin is somehow broken and will be described afterwards. They add depth to the description of the fish, and it also takes the fish further away from the eyes of the speaker, and we are sharing the vision of the speaker, so we are no longer seeing the fish, we are seeing roses on a wallpaper and then the fish. The similes refer to things that can be found in the domestic area. With these similes we also get information about the speaker. The information we get about the house, provides information about the speaker, about the experience and life of the speaker. In the description of the fish, there’s a penetration of the speaker. We are not seeing the fish, we are seeing elements of the speaker through the imaginative description. The speaker may be a woman and we know this because of the information about the filter that is filtered into the poem, which refers to the domesticity area, specifically to the ornamentation of the house, it speaks about a woman’s world. The wallpaper’s pattern is roses, while in the fish, those roses are the barnacles attached to it. From the fish hangs both skin and seaweed. The colour of the fish is brown, as well as the aged wallpaper, which gives a sense of decay. The colour and the texture have been described through the description of the wallpaper. It is an imaginative description. The speaker is probably accustomed to domestic environments. That is why it is possible to say that the speaker could be a woman, who is describing a fish as something she knows. It is a very subjective description of the fish, but the poem is conscious of it. The reader is looking at the wallpaper, and the wallpaper is an obstacle that prevents him from seeing the fish. The simile is a rhetorical device based on language. The reader is seeing the language, which has always been an obstacle between consciousness and the object that it is trying to see. It is a wallpaper because it is not possible to go away from the speaker’s consciousness, and this is something the reader learns about the narrator. Second Section (Lines 22 - 44) The second section moves from verbs of action to stative verbs of perception. The description changes. Now, there is a description of the gills. The fish is suffocating, it can’t breathe (he’s out of the water). They are described as “frightening” while oxygen is described as “terrible”, they are not neutral and descriptive adjectives. For something to be frightening it is necessary for someone frightened. It is the speaker's perception. Oxygen being terrible is probably a wrong assumption from the poetic voice. The description is very subjective, the speaker’s fear is projected onto the fish. Following, the poem described the flesh of the fish (its entails, the swim bladder). the speaker describes the inside of the fish, and this is significant because the speaker is describing something that she’s not seeing anymore. She knows what the insight of the fish looks like, probably because she had fished before. The reader is learning about the speaker through her knowledge of the fish. It is not possible to know about the fish, as the reader is in the realm of the speaker's consciousness, looking at the fisher looking at the fish. There is an imaginative description of the skin of the fish, comparing it to objects that can be seen; some parts of the fish are described as ornamental pieces of nature that can be found in the domestic sphere and make it beautiful. It is much more explicit because it is not what the speaker is seeing, it is what the speaker is imagining and the references are still related to nature, these are significant parts of the life of the speaker “feathers” and flowers (“big peony”). They are not ornamental nature, so it is a metaphor that is similar, in the same anthropological theme, of the wallpapers, in the world of ornament, again information of the life of the speaker in the description of the fish. Then, the description changes when the speaker looks into the eyes of the fish. The eyes are described. There a change, from imagining (I thought) to seeing it (I looked). They are described in comparison to her. The poem covers twice the eyes of the fish but is not really there. As the wallpaper, there is a barrier that does not allow us to see the eyes. The speaker is looking for eye contact, for a connection between the fish and her; but there is no connection, the fish remains an object, it doesn’t return the stare. The fish is kind of outside of the speaker and the speaker can’t connect with the fish. Because the speaker is always putting themselves in the description of the fish, in the end we aren’t seeing the fish, we are seeing the speaker and the speaker when she sees the fish, she sees herself in the fish, or putting herself in the description of the fish. This happens in the lines “and packed with... scratched isinglass”, with metaphors that separate the eyes of the fish from the speaker, and the metaphors provide information about the world of the speaker, so this attempt to describe the fish is also a failure, because we are seeing metaphors of the life of the speaker, so in the end all we have access to are metaphors that eventually refer back to the speaker and not the fish. The problem that we have is that by trying to describe the fish, all we have is a linguistic construction of the fish, similes and metaphors that don’t give information about the fish, the information is about the speaker. It’s as if the speaker gets lost in a maze of metaphors and similes and can’t present the reality of the fish, it can only project its own subjectivity in the form of language. The fish remains as an eternal object. By referring to the connection, the fish is indifferent to the speaker and is marking the separation between the fish and the speaker's consciousness. The reality remains outside. Third Section (Lines 45 - 76) In the last section of the poem, the speaker “admires” (its meaning encompasses a combination of "look" and "thought"). This section makes evident what the speaker feels. the speaker realizes the fish had been caught and set free many times before and decides to let it go. The way this is described continues with what’s important during the whole poem: this is a poem about who someone who sees a fish. The poem ends in the opposite way as it begins: it begins with the speaker catching a fish and ends with the speaker letting the fish go. When talking about the lips of the fish, the poem recognizes the limitation of language. The poetic voice recognizes that she is not seen clearly, as she is not sure; it’s recognizing the limits of description because she, in her own experience and vision, identifies that with a lip but it’s possible that that isn’t a lip, so imposes herself and her own vision into the fish, but recognizing that there’s a limitation. When she says “hung five old pieces of fish-line; or four and a wire leader” she doesn’t know which one is it, although it is an objective description; so, the uncertainty is becoming more explicit, the speaker is becoming aware and realizing how she isn’t seeing the fish clearly, the element of uncertainty in seeing the fish and knowing the fish. The fish has been caught before; it is the sixth time it has been caught. The poem describes the mouth that has at least 5 hooks. She describes the fishing tools it has attached to its mouth. L.61 is a simile, while L.63 is a metaphor, linking both things. This interposes the two rhetorical figures (language) on the perspective of the fish. The simile is not enough to describe the perception, and it is necessary to add another rhetorical device, the metaphor. Broadens the distance between the consciousness and the object. A linguistic representation of the consciousness of the speaker. ribbons, frayed and wavering) and metaphors (a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw). The simile and metaphor appear together because the capacity of language to construct the fish is endless, she continues the description of the fish in the realm of the imaginative. This part compares the mouth of the fish with both, the medals of the simile and the beard of wisdom of the metaphor. What happens after the speaker moves from describing the mouth is that the speaker changes the subject because she changes what she’s looking at. The poetic voice stops looking at the fish and starts looking at the boat, doing a description of it. “Where oil had spread a rainbow”, could be related to the idea of the mixture of oil and water which doesn't create a uniform colour. However, there is no rainbow, as it is a metaphor for colours. The boat is old and dirty, and yet it is described as “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” This line is very poetic, in contrast to the beginning. As the rainbow is a metaphor, it means that if all is “rainbow”, all is a metaphor, beautiful, and a poetic language, that is not possible to escape, and not go beyond. At the end, she surrenders, looks away and lets the fish go, stop trying to see and know the fish because to know something means to dominate something, so if she can’t know the fish, she can’t master the fish, so she lets the fish go, both literally (lets the fish in the water) and metaphorically (stop looking at it and trying at it). The last lines (“let the fish go”) mean to give up the attempts to describe and see the fish. The fish cannot be caught (as it has been released 5 times before). Letting the fish go means looking away from the fish, she looks at the boat and sees the stains of oil and describes them as rainbow and the line of the poem “was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” seems to be a celebration of metaphors (the metaphor of the victory which could be about the fish because he’s back in the water or the victory of language in the sense that you can’t see the fish nor go beyond your mental constructions to express language) and at the end you just have rainbow, metaphor, which is