All poetry is autobiographical- sometimes you just have to look a little harder
Great to see you back, ETE. I don't know about that one. I take a narratological view of the agency of the 'author' in a text; I see it as a disembodied writing effect at a textual level, prior to the level of authorial narrator or speaker. If we do look out of the text to who determines its meaning, we might find that it's difficult to determine original intention in a work that goes through so many hands and eyes in shaping what it is. I think literature is a social product and it can't help but reflect the material and ideological conditions in which it is produced. Jelsoft/vBulletin, Kat/Sea (and the designers of this board with its subforums, the context of this post), Pearl Jam themselves, the audience who read and interpret the piece from whatever geographical or political viewpoint: all contribute to the construction of a poem's unstable and multiplicitous meaning here, either by providing the material and textual contexts for its reception or in reception itself. Therefore, I don't think that the autobiography of the 'actual' author is privileged in generating the text. Check out Jerome J McGann on Google and read his interesting ideas on literature as a social product.
I wonder, to what extent is The Iliad autobiographical? Analysts who think The Iliad was multi-authored, or Unitarians who think that there was one author who consolidated about five hundred years of oral tradition to tell the story of the Trojan wars (1250 BC?) in his own time (c. 725 BC), would have to stratify the composition of the text almost like an archeological site to find the most contemporary, iron age references and similes that point to a writer* relating a bronze age story to his own people. Also, they'd need to look for linguistic clues as to where this poet likely lived. (People think either the Greek island of Chios or nearby Smyrna in northwest modern Turkey.) Even then, we're getting references to the writer's broader social world and we're not obviously getting clear pointers to an single, inner psychology here.
* I say writer, but the earliest extant written examples of The Iliad are from the time of Peisistratos (602 - 527 BC).
Having said that, a poem such as Yeats's "Easter 1916" inevitably provokes biographical contextualisation (though maybe only because Yeats's personal history engages in a complex relationship with the public history of the Irish War of Independence).
Great to see you back, ETE. I don't know about that one. I take a narratological view of the agency of the 'author' in a text; I see it as a disembodied writing effect at a textual level, prior to the level of authorial narrator or speaker. If we do look out of the text to who determines its meaning, we might find that it's difficult to determine original intention in a work that goes through so many hands and eyes in shaping what it is. I think literature is a social product and it can't help but reflect the material and ideological conditions in which it is produced. Jelsoft/vBulletin, Kat/Sea (and the designers of this board with its subforums, the context of this post), Pearl Jam themselves, the audience who read and interpret the piece from whatever geographical or political viewpoint: all contribute to the construction of a poem's unstable and multiplicitous meaning here, either by providing the material and textual contexts for its reception or in reception itself. Therefore, I don't think that the autobiography of the 'actual' author is privileged in generating the text. Check out Jerome J McGann on Google and read his interesting ideas on literature as a social product.
I wonder, to what extent is The Iliad autobiographical? Analysts who think The Iliad was multi-authored, or Unitarians who think that there was one author who consolidated about five hundred years of oral tradition to tell the story of the Trojan wars (1250 BC?) in his own time (c. 725 BC), would have to stratify the composition of the text almost like an archeological site to find the most contemporary, iron age references and similes that point to a writer* relating a bronze age story to his own people. Also, they'd need to look for linguistic clues as to where this poet likely lived. (People think either the Greek island of Chios or nearby Smyrna in northwest modern Turkey.) Even then, we're getting references to the writer's broader social world and we're not obviously getting clear pointers to an single, inner psychology here.
* I say writer, but the earliest extant written examples of The Iliad are from the time of Peisistratos (602 - 527 BC).
Well the first part of your argument hinges on the social forces behind restrictive publication methods, which most poets on an internet forum don't suffer from, you could argue they fear the wrath of Kat and Sea if they ever dropped and N-bomb or some vulgar language, but I think that's a shaky argument at best. Another part of the argument suggests that the audience we present our material too somehow restricts our natural personality traits and subconscious feelings from escaping into our creation by the very nature of our tendency to speak to an audience rather than speaking to ourselves and letting the audience catch up with the conversation, I think you are lying to yourself here, you've posted quite a few pieces which you know damn well are going to use allusions and metaphors that are going to fly over the heads of the average forum reader, and even undergraduate English majors have to scramble to the norton anthology every once and a while, because those are the pieces of your life that float in the words of dead authors and the power of that connection can't be dumbed down in the slightest. Dan Brown and Stephen King and even Shakespeare may be social products, they all have their publishers and tyrants to contend with, but I think for the sake of argument the things published here, even as "persona" pieces (a term I hate) still carry with them by the sake of their very source pieces of the author in even the most subtle ways.
Well the first part of your argument hinges on the social forces behind restrictive publication methods, which most poets on an internet forum don't suffer from, you could argue they fear the wrath of Kat and Sea if they ever dropped and N-bomb or some vulgar language, but I think that's a shaky argument at best.
My argument is not concerned with "the social forces behind restrictive publication methods" in the sense of censorship. (My emphasis.) My argument is much more benign: It concerns who determines the material or virtual appearance, form and contexts of literature in various kinds of publication. In print culture, editors, typesetters, printers, paper manufacturers, bookbinders and sellers all contribute to the semiotics, social appearance and market of a text. In cyberspace, Text is not free of modes and contexts of production. You still type your data into a reply box on a Pearl Jam message board: your work is contextualised hypertextually with A Moving Train and All Encompassing Trip and all the other poems here, and inevitably the meaning of your work isn't contained in a vacuum as a closed work but gets altered by context. My argument isn't concerned in the slightest with the issue of censorship but with demonstrating that on the Internet the means by which poetry is produced and received involves an interaction of material and human resources. These resources together lessen the privileging of the "individual author" in the production of text.
Here's a fascinating argument that McGann's rationale of hypertext ironically emphasises rather than transcends the notion that Internet text, like printed hard copy, is shaped by the material form of its virtual production, software, website owners (who provide the medium in the first place) and environment:
Another part of the argument suggests that the audience we present our material to somehow restricts our natural personality traits and subconscious feelings from escaping into our creation by the very nature of our tendency to speak to an audience rather than speaking to ourselves and letting the audience catch up with the conversation, I think you are lying to yourself here,
I suggest no such thing. The author's consideration of audience has nothing to do with my argument. My argument is about how language occludes the physical reality of the Subject. Textuality constructs personality as a language effect: You can't put the signified reality of one's being physically into a work because one's actual being is something non-linguistic. You can only hope to construct a version of yourself in language, or at best, hint at the unsayable self in pre-linguistic sound. (Poetry is good for conveying what Julia Kristeva calls our pre-linguistic physical drives and desires, through sound equivalences that communicate in vibration. This level of communication is prior to the semiotics of lexis and syntax.)
but I think for the sake of argument the things published here, even as "persona" pieces (a term I hate) still carry with them by the sake of their very source pieces of the author in even the most subtle ways.
I believe as a Marxist that social being determines consciousness and so therefore, I think that an author's class and socio-economic or geopolitical background and environment will inevitably determine the form and themes of a work. If I were looking at a writer's biography, I'd probably do so in a broadly social rather than speculative psychoanalytical fashion.
I'd conclude, though, that it would be very difficult, for example, to make claims such as "ah, Fielding in "A Passage To India" must be at some level EM Forster because he's a genteel, liberal imperialist with Bloomsburyesque ideals of refining Englishness abroad", since Fielding is not an embodied entity but an effect of writing. And even if an authorial narrator were to introduce themselves as, say, "EM Forster" and say, "See that character there, that's a displaced version of me", the authorial, self-referential narrator "EM Forster" would be no more the actual EM Forster than the character Fielding."
Here's a good link on Narratology that covers a lot of the ground:
I believe as a Marxist that social being determines consciousness and so therefore, I think that an author's class and socio-economic or geopolitical background and environment will inevitably determine the form and themes of a work. If I were looking at a writer's biography, I'd probably do so in a broadly social rather than speculative psychoanalytical fashion
even though you are more learned than I am Fins, I have to disagree with you on this general point.....how would you look at my biography......in terms of class, socio-economic or geopolitical background and environment........I am a child of the world.....a woman and mother with no fixed abode.....who has made every shore her own and who is mutable enough to shift between classes......
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
even though you are more learned than I am Fins, I have to disagree with you on this general point.....how would you look at my biography......in terms of class, socio-economic or geopolitical background and environment........I am a child of the world.....a woman and mother with no fixed abode.....who has made every shore her own and who is mutable enough to shift between classes......
Well, a literary critic would look at the class preoccupations, assumptions and conflicts of what you wrote, to see how these factors register in your work. I suppose some biographical contextualisation is inevitable but it isn't the ruling determinant of critical practice. A trained critic today might be looking for gaps and silences in the ideological discourse of a text - "the text says what it does not say" - in order to find different views destabilising and internally dialogising the perspective of the work.
but Fins, I may not be a poet, but I am completely honest, and I never omit to give the audience detailed accounts of my current and past conflicts/crises....dilemmas/foolishness......my complete self is my poetry......I can only think of it as the brother to my son Torin, it was born just like him, and it has all my traits, and no-one else's.......I could be completely reconstructed through my peoms.....I may not be quite the artist you both had in mind, but somehow I think I might be very similar to my old fellows......those artists of teh English canon (poetry/literature).....I really think that an artist puts some of him/herself into their poetry.....in my case, I put all of myself in there.....and more......but in others......I can feel Tennyson, Kipling, Orwell......I know who they are.......you could walk around Reine Sofia Gallery in Madrid, and you would get deja vu, because my ghost would be there
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
I really think that an artist puts some of him/herself into their poetry.....in my case, I put all of myself in there.....and more......but in others......I can feel Tennyson, Kipling, Orwell......I know who they are.......you could walk around Reine Sofia Gallery in Madrid, and you would get deja vu, because my ghost would be there
Good point.
Here's a question. Even if we can feel the voice of the speaker in this old poem, is it essential to our appreciation of the work that we know the biography of the actual poet?
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet I am, and live—like vapors tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept—
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
And is there any hint at a historical context in the poem that sets it at a certain time that might have caused the speaker's sense of ontological upheaval?
no, but I put it to you that Thomas Wyatt meant exactly what he was saying in this poem......
Wyatt was knighted in 1535, but in 1536 he was imprisoned in the Tower for quarreling with the Duke of Suffolk, and possibly also because he was suspected of being one of Anne Boleyn's lovers. During this imprisonment Wyatt witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn on May 19, 1536 from the Bell Tower, and wrote V. Innocentia Veritas Viat Fides Circumdederunt me inimici mei. He was released later that year. Henry, Wyatt's father died in November 1536
THEY flee from me, that sometime did me
seek,
With naked foot stalking within my
chamber :
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember,
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand ; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.
Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better ; but once especial,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, ' Dear heart, how like you this ?'
It was no dream ; for I lay broad awaking :
But all is turn'd now through my gentleness,
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking ;
And I have leave to go of her goodness ;
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served :
How like you this, what hath she now deserved ?
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
Though I don't adhere wholesale to the practices of the New Critics, they would deliberately hand students poems without any contextual info, to see if they could determine the 'meaning' of the pieces. There's a hell of a lot that I'd say was wrong with this practice, but for a good while it was nonetheless very influential in arguing that you don't need to know anything about the authorship and context of a piece to understand it deeply.
I'm not going to be dragged in to verifying or nullifying the merits of your argument......suffice to say.....I disagree......I don't want to send my brain to silly-town right now....and read that shit.......just take it from me (without qualification, and even though it may not be true of you), I think most of the great artists......have done some kind of alchemy involving diluting their emotions for the greater good.....(I know you'd like to lock horns with me, and get into a true debate, but all I have is my gut feeling)........heheheehehe.....(but at the same time Fins, you are the equivocator par excellence, nad you always have an idea.....so if I don't inflame you with the fires of hell, maybe you could tell me what you think when I say Gerard Manley Hopkins was a really tortured priest with a wonderful mind at his disposal who never shied away from giving us the full picture.....and who has been an influence on you, me, he, she.....
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
when tempers flare
everyone stares
and shouts 'fight, fight'
but Fins and I could never be cross
how ever hard we might
try and however trying we might
find each other
it's just too much bother
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
"Q: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
M: Well, I was told outside that...
Q: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!
M: What?
Q: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
M: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Q: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.
M: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Q: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
M: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.
Q: Not at all.
M: Thank You.
(Under his breath) Stupid git!!"
Comments
Great to see you back, ETE. I don't know about that one. I take a narratological view of the agency of the 'author' in a text; I see it as a disembodied writing effect at a textual level, prior to the level of authorial narrator or speaker. If we do look out of the text to who determines its meaning, we might find that it's difficult to determine original intention in a work that goes through so many hands and eyes in shaping what it is. I think literature is a social product and it can't help but reflect the material and ideological conditions in which it is produced. Jelsoft/vBulletin, Kat/Sea (and the designers of this board with its subforums, the context of this post), Pearl Jam themselves, the audience who read and interpret the piece from whatever geographical or political viewpoint: all contribute to the construction of a poem's unstable and multiplicitous meaning here, either by providing the material and textual contexts for its reception or in reception itself. Therefore, I don't think that the autobiography of the 'actual' author is privileged in generating the text. Check out Jerome J McGann on Google and read his interesting ideas on literature as a social product.
I wonder, to what extent is The Iliad autobiographical? Analysts who think The Iliad was multi-authored, or Unitarians who think that there was one author who consolidated about five hundred years of oral tradition to tell the story of the Trojan wars (1250 BC?) in his own time (c. 725 BC), would have to stratify the composition of the text almost like an archeological site to find the most contemporary, iron age references and similes that point to a writer* relating a bronze age story to his own people. Also, they'd need to look for linguistic clues as to where this poet likely lived. (People think either the Greek island of Chios or nearby Smyrna in northwest modern Turkey.) Even then, we're getting references to the writer's broader social world and we're not obviously getting clear pointers to an single, inner psychology here.
* I say writer, but the earliest extant written examples of The Iliad are from the time of Peisistratos (602 - 527 BC).
Well the first part of your argument hinges on the social forces behind restrictive publication methods, which most poets on an internet forum don't suffer from, you could argue they fear the wrath of Kat and Sea if they ever dropped and N-bomb or some vulgar language, but I think that's a shaky argument at best. Another part of the argument suggests that the audience we present our material too somehow restricts our natural personality traits and subconscious feelings from escaping into our creation by the very nature of our tendency to speak to an audience rather than speaking to ourselves and letting the audience catch up with the conversation, I think you are lying to yourself here, you've posted quite a few pieces which you know damn well are going to use allusions and metaphors that are going to fly over the heads of the average forum reader, and even undergraduate English majors have to scramble to the norton anthology every once and a while, because those are the pieces of your life that float in the words of dead authors and the power of that connection can't be dumbed down in the slightest. Dan Brown and Stephen King and even Shakespeare may be social products, they all have their publishers and tyrants to contend with, but I think for the sake of argument the things published here, even as "persona" pieces (a term I hate) still carry with them by the sake of their very source pieces of the author in even the most subtle ways.
My argument is not concerned with "the social forces behind restrictive publication methods" in the sense of censorship. (My emphasis.) My argument is much more benign: It concerns who determines the material or virtual appearance, form and contexts of literature in various kinds of publication. In print culture, editors, typesetters, printers, paper manufacturers, bookbinders and sellers all contribute to the semiotics, social appearance and market of a text. In cyberspace, Text is not free of modes and contexts of production. You still type your data into a reply box on a Pearl Jam message board: your work is contextualised hypertextually with A Moving Train and All Encompassing Trip and all the other poems here, and inevitably the meaning of your work isn't contained in a vacuum as a closed work but gets altered by context. My argument isn't concerned in the slightest with the issue of censorship but with demonstrating that on the Internet the means by which poetry is produced and received involves an interaction of material and human resources. These resources together lessen the privileging of the "individual author" in the production of text.
Here's a fascinating argument that McGann's rationale of hypertext ironically emphasises rather than transcends the notion that Internet text, like printed hard copy, is shaped by the material form of its virtual production, software, website owners (who provide the medium in the first place) and environment:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm
I suggest no such thing. The author's consideration of audience has nothing to do with my argument. My argument is about how language occludes the physical reality of the Subject. Textuality constructs personality as a language effect: You can't put the signified reality of one's being physically into a work because one's actual being is something non-linguistic. You can only hope to construct a version of yourself in language, or at best, hint at the unsayable self in pre-linguistic sound. (Poetry is good for conveying what Julia Kristeva calls our pre-linguistic physical drives and desires, through sound equivalences that communicate in vibration. This level of communication is prior to the semiotics of lexis and syntax.)
I believe as a Marxist that social being determines consciousness and so therefore, I think that an author's class and socio-economic or geopolitical background and environment will inevitably determine the form and themes of a work. If I were looking at a writer's biography, I'd probably do so in a broadly social rather than speculative psychoanalytical fashion.
I'd conclude, though, that it would be very difficult, for example, to make claims such as "ah, Fielding in "A Passage To India" must be at some level EM Forster because he's a genteel, liberal imperialist with Bloomsburyesque ideals of refining Englishness abroad", since Fielding is not an embodied entity but an effect of writing. And even if an authorial narrator were to introduce themselves as, say, "EM Forster" and say, "See that character there, that's a displaced version of me", the authorial, self-referential narrator "EM Forster" would be no more the actual EM Forster than the character Fielding."
Here's a good link on Narratology that covers a lot of the ground:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm
even though you are more learned than I am Fins, I have to disagree with you on this general point.....how would you look at my biography......in terms of class, socio-economic or geopolitical background and environment........I am a child of the world.....a woman and mother with no fixed abode.....who has made every shore her own and who is mutable enough to shift between classes......
Well, a literary critic would look at the class preoccupations, assumptions and conflicts of what you wrote, to see how these factors register in your work. I suppose some biographical contextualisation is inevitable but it isn't the ruling determinant of critical practice. A trained critic today might be looking for gaps and silences in the ideological discourse of a text - "the text says what it does not say" - in order to find different views destabilising and internally dialogising the perspective of the work.
Good point.
Here's a question. Even if we can feel the voice of the speaker in this old poem, is it essential to our appreciation of the work that we know the biography of the actual poet?
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet I am, and live—like vapors tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept—
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
And is there any hint at a historical context in the poem that sets it at a certain time that might have caused the speaker's sense of ontological upheaval?
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/vclass/pracrit.htm
Note the poem featured in the site's "first class"!
everyone stares
and shouts 'fight, fight'
but Fins and I could never be cross
how ever hard we might
try and however trying we might
find each other
it's just too much bother
Is this arguments?
No this is insults...oh
You know we can't keep up with you anyway but it's just as fun to poke around in the dark and hope we hit something
http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/sketch.htm
(Walks down the hall. Opens door.)
"Q: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
M: Well, I was told outside that...
Q: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!
M: What?
Q: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
M: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Q: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.
M: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Q: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
M: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.
Q: Not at all.
M: Thank You.
(Under his breath) Stupid git!!"