T.S. Eliot

Sleep to Wake and Wake to Sleep: A comparison of “Prufrock” and “Nightingale”

by Joe Weil November 30, 2011 Poetry and Poetics
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What draws these poems together is simulation of death-states in relation to the afflatus of night and song—of rising or sinking to the occasion.

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The Four Functions and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

by Joe Weil April 20, 2011 Academia
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As Kafka said: “The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens; doubtless this is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows.”

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Thoughts on “Mock Orange” and Minimalism

by Micah Towery July 14, 2010 Poetry and Poetics
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Minimalism is not about powerful messages about the nihilism or poverty of the human condition (though it’s certainly easy to think so!). Instead, minimalist art creates a framework through which you view the world. It gives you the bones of the skeleton and then you fill out the flesh. But watch out! The minimalist artist still controls the bones (and hence the body that you have put on them). Minimalism is as silent as the movie frame.

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Terrible Eyes: On a Newly Discovered Photograph of Arthur Rimbaud

by Adam Fitzgerald April 18, 2010 The Other

I followed deadpan Rivers down and down,
And knew my haulers had let go the ropes.
Whooping redskins took my men as targets
And nailed them nude to technicolour posts.

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Blogging through Grossman, Part 3: Poetic Promiscuity.

by Micah Towery March 2, 2010 Art
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We recent poets have two great tools at our disposal: freedom of poetic license, and freedom of publishing. Generally, we can say whatever we want, and get a significant number of people to hear what we have to say. The question is whether this freedom has led to better poetry or degeneration. Perhaps that’s not the best way to put it. The question should be, even if somebody is doing something amazing and new in poetry, would we even see it? Will we travel all this way to find that we really did need the gatekeepers of poetry??

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Keats Revisited: “It’s Not a Well-Wrought Urn, it’s a Well of Ashes and Wine”

by Adam Fitzgerald February 21, 2010 Academia
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That urn is cold. I find it strange that several poets and scholars speak of the beauty-truth equation as the last lines of the poem. That equation has called forth so much fuss – its bald assertiveness is immensely persuasive at first hearing, then almost instantly the mind rebels against the symmetry of identity.

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Some Books on My Mind, or {Potential} Purchases of Imperishables

by Adam Fitzgerald February 21, 2010 Art
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Hands up, anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Thucydides! And Saint-Simon? And Cardinal de Retz? But even the great nineteenth-century cycles of novels are more often talked about than read.

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The Ill-Wrought Urn? A Literary Critical Debate in Truth & Beauty, Part 1

by Adam Fitzgerald February 13, 2010 Academia
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Let’s begin with a recording of Ode on a Grecian Urn recited by Richard Howard, which was taken on 2/12/2010 through my iPhone. Ode on a Grecian Urn Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: [...]

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