I read the first half of ch.5 HTRAP today and felt like I was reading about the organs and functioning systems of how poems live and breathe. To me they really seem like living creatures: The human has a mind and a body...and somehow they are interconnected by some spiritual, nonphysical soul. Similarly, a poem has physical body structures like meter, rhyme scheme, syntax and language. And all these organs are linked with tone, mood, connotation and "feeling." Another statement reminded me a lot of Fanny in Bright Star: "It is also hard to see why we should think of our emotions as being "inside" us, and so shut off from public view." Today in discussion we almost ridiculed her outward expression of emotion and how she was helpless without Keats. But why shouldn't she feel that way? Our emotions don't have spatial locations like the organs in our body do. Nor are they meant solely to exist in the private. So we don't have perfect control over them. On the same note, Eagleton states that "tones and feelings are quite as much social matters as meaning." Why is it so hard for people to admit they are emotional nowadays? Odds are somebody else in the societal sphere has had similar experiences. Is this a result of being exposed to the deepness and complexities of poetry in a formulaic and mechanical way that our school system provides? The meaning of a poem couldn't possibly be a "private process" because the author of the poem doesn't always experience that process personally. And that doesn't mean they are restricted from writing about it.
1 comment:
The class discussion of Bright Star was interesting, perhaps one of the most heated arguments our class has had. I have never thought about emotions and feelings as something that does not have a storage place, but I do like this idea. Feelings are meant to be expressed (to a degree of course). It is brilliant how similarly the body and poetry function.
Post a Comment