Master's Thesis: The Abandonment of Mainstream Values and the Scientific Revolution by the American Literary Establishment
MASTER'S THESIS: The Abandonment of Mainstream Values and the Scientific Revolution by the American Literary Establishment
THE SLAUGHTER OF THE MUSES
THE DEATH OF URANIA THE MUSE OF SCIENCE
Eliot is a great poet because he purified the word of the tribe in novel, beautiful and many-meaninged ways, not because he extended the field of subject matter available to poetic treatment: he didn't. And this is true of most of his poetical successors. From their writings you would be hard put to it to infer the simple historical fact that they are contemporaries of Einstein and Heisenberg, of computers, electron microscopes and the discovery of the molecular basis of heredity, of Operationalism, Diamat and Emergent Evolution. --Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science.
These scientific subjects are so crass,
Pedantic, boring, and obtuse. Who cares
If this Uranium has three small mass
Things less. Emotions please--loves, hates, despairs!
Human emotions, thoughts and feelings, real
Life situations, personalities,
Confessions, Truth, something with mass appeal,
And passion shades and delicate degrees.
Let Science Fiction keep her far away
Somewhere with monsters, robots, dust and stars,
Delayed, delayed, delayed for another day,
More isolating than proud prison bars.
To mainstream writing Science shan't apply,
Urania, the very first to die.
These scientific subjects are so crass,
Pedantic, boring, and obtuse. Who cares
If this Uranium has three small mass
Things less. Emotions please--loves, hates, despairs!
Human emotions, thoughts and feelings, real
Life situations, personalities,
Confessions, Truth, something with mass appeal,
And passion shades and delicate degrees.
Let Science Fiction keep her far away
Somewhere with monsters, robots, dust and stars,
Delayed, delayed, delayed for another day,
More isolating than proud prison bars.
To mainstream writing Science shan't apply,
Urania, the very first to die.
THE DEATH OF CALLIOPE THE MUSE OF EPIC POETRY
The real issues presented by American poetry in the eighties will become
clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric;
the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a
meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative; and the denial of musical
texture in the contemporary poem.--Dana Gioia, "Notes on the New Formalism"
Turn inward poet. Turn to your own heart.
The autobiographical, the song
Of yourself--that is Truth, the place to start.
Forget the past. The NOW's where you belong.
Write what you feel and know, the simple man
Or woman, simple lives and deaths and joys
And pain and grief. Forget the cosmic plan,
The scientist's odd gadgets, little toys.
They wrote of plain New England provincials,
Of housewives, lesbians, of true confession,
Of gays, the new accepted credentials;
And concocted a lucrative profession.
If only glorious C a l l i o p e
Were still alive and here to disagree.
clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric;
the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a
meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative; and the denial of musical
texture in the contemporary poem.--Dana Gioia, "Notes on the New Formalism"
Turn inward poet. Turn to your own heart.
The autobiographical, the song
Of yourself--that is Truth, the place to start.
Forget the past. The NOW's where you belong.
Write what you feel and know, the simple man
Or woman, simple lives and deaths and joys
And pain and grief. Forget the cosmic plan,
The scientist's odd gadgets, little toys.
They wrote of plain New England provincials,
Of housewives, lesbians, of true confession,
Of gays, the new accepted credentials;
And concocted a lucrative profession.
If only glorious C a l l i o p e
Were still alive and here to disagree.
THE DEATH OF CLIO THE MUSE OF HISTORY
Henry Brooke [1706-1783] was perhaps the most "scientific" generation. Who
now reads Universal Beauty? --Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse
The past, the past, cut off the past. How great
Our Freedom grows. Walt Whitman sang the song
Of himself. Echoes still reverberate,
And shatter crystalline form, from that gong.
The song of yourself he said you should sing,
And cut the shackles English bards begat,
And Freedom sounds so sweet. Let Freedom ring
Across the land and steamroll structures flat.
The war was fought and won. The rebels cleared
The field of form. Free verse became the norm.
More Freedom, cut the past they loudly cheered
So Freedom killed our Clio and her form.
How long O Rose of Poetry can you
Survive, who on the bush of Culture grew?
posted by Thomas Newton at 5:53 PM
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