Kubla Khan Continued 1 is here.
[This is part 2 of an occasional, and I'm perfectly aware pointless, series, in which I body-forth a possible completion of Coleridge's famous ‘Kubla Khan’. You know the story: out walking in the Somerset countryside, STC stopped off at a local farm (Adam Nicolson thinks it was Withycombe Farm in the village of Culbone, near Porlock) troubled with an attack of ‘dysentery’. He took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with, so he claimed, ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head. Straightaway he began writing the poem out, only to be interrupted ‘by a person on business from Porlock’ who ‘detained by him above an hour’, such that ‘on his return to his room [he] found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’. There is some reason to doubt the absolute verisimilitude of this account. And indeed, if we're honest, there are two ways, and not a third, of apprehending ‘Kubla Khan’ as a poem. One is to say, with Harold Bloom, that it's not only not a fragment, it's actually one of the most perfectly finished and perfect poems in English. The other is to take a more, let's say, Thomas McFarland approach and say: yes, it is a fragment, but its fragmentariness is integral to its effectiveness, and the urge to ‘complete’ it does a kind of violence to the text's evocative distinctiveness. Both possibilities exclude the notional third, that it's a fragment worth continuing. Still, here we are. Unable to offer any kind of defence of my actions at this point, in this place (although I do have a nascent Notes Towards a Theory of Aesthetic Defragmentation brewing) I shall step discretely back into the shadows, pausing only to note that I take my cue as to the possible direction Coleridge would have taken this poem, had he completed it, from this old post.]
PART II
The Khan’s Armada jostled in the bay
Barge, Warship, Doww,
Each keel, each prow
And chiming hollow hull
Clanging flank to flank
Innumerable in rank:
Whilst the tide strains full
Red marks the grisly sky at break of day
And gongs make signal to speed the boats away
Cutting sea as earth is cut by plough.
Depart! Depart!
For the far Nipponian shore
And war!
Anchors upstart!
In long procession, more and more.
The last boat lingers on the breaking tide.
Three soul-expanding shouts the skies divide;
Three wild, responsive cheers re-echo wide.
All sweet vibration
Tremble in the ear
As if in holy fear
Approaching the human mind
The Khan’s Armada jostled in the bay
Barge, Warship, Doww,
Each keel, each prow
And chiming hollow hull
Clanging flank to flank
Innumerable in rank:
Whilst the tide strains full
Red marks the grisly sky at break of day
And gongs make signal to speed the boats away
Cutting sea as earth is cut by plough.
Depart! Depart!
For the far Nipponian shore
And war!
Anchors upstart!
In long procession, more and more.
The last boat lingers on the breaking tide.
Three soul-expanding shouts the skies divide;
Three wild, responsive cheers re-echo wide.
All sweet vibration
Tremble in the ear
As if in holy fear
Approaching the human mind
In humblest prostration.
The last delightful sounds they'll ever hear!
Still the white signal, fading, strains the eyes,
Still the lorn lover with his hand replies:
Till melting into air—the object lost
And duty sternly calling to his post,
Twixt him and joy th'eternal curtain's drawn,
No more of bliss to know returning dawn.
The last delightful sounds they'll ever hear!
Still the white signal, fading, strains the eyes,
Still the lorn lover with his hand replies:
Till melting into air—the object lost
And duty sternly calling to his post,
Twixt him and joy th'eternal curtain's drawn,
No more of bliss to know returning dawn.
Sailing a stilly sea, the fleet as one
Turns backward stern upon the setting sun.
How beautiful this ocean night!
Dewy stars supply the light,
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of sky.
In full-swarmed glory starlights now
Flit firefly-like about the prow
As Kubla’s fleet skim silvery by:
Close hugging every warlike ark
The ocean’s bosom girdled with the dark.
How beautiful is night!
But, eye, descend, O descend!
To where the depths of water end
Bitumen-black bed of ocean's ground
Unlit, unseen, opaque to sound:
Descend!
Leave far above the never ceasing roar
Of titan-waves whose grip will break the shore
From rock to boulder and so to sand.
Descend to where air, sky and land
And merely phantasmic dreams:
To where all drowning bodies tend
To where hot seabed chasms rend
In utter silence and dark
Descend!
Blackening in ultimate deep
To where a timeless oozeing swells
To where ebon Atar, spirit, dwells
Compressed of ancient malice, half-asleep
Half-dreaming of all ruin’s creep
That spreads a boneless tentic arm
And wills man’s harm.
Ancestral spirits, they that drave
And urged proud Kublai on to war
Appearing flitting-wise in dreams
That sank, as all sinks, through ocean’s streams
Down to the monster in its cave
Within his dreaming dire and huge
With magick power of subterfuge
And mingling with the roar
Of the portentous tides
That under upper waters pour
Water slides and aye backslides.
Atar half-woke to half-declaim
In abysmal growl a spell infame:
He pronounced the deep unholy name.
Pronounced it thrice, pronounced it dire
To stir a whirlpool in that mire
That rose to where the waves aspire.
Whence enmity arose between
Th’ancestral powers of Xanadu
And this far-sunken power marine
None can tell the story true.
We only know Atar stands gainst
The Chinee empire pressing east:
And makes their coast impermious fence
Barring imperial ambition hence
Vowing they never be released.
Summoned by deep art, storms appear
Swift from the breezy north's assertive gales:
A raging hurl of tidal atmosphere
T’impel the course and swell the yielding sails
A rush the trembling craft past power to steer.
How beautiful this ocean night!
Dewy stars supply the light,
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of sky.
In full-swarmed glory starlights now
Flit firefly-like about the prow
As Kubla’s fleet skim silvery by:
Close hugging every warlike ark
The ocean’s bosom girdled with the dark.
How beautiful is night!
But, eye, descend, O descend!
To where the depths of water end
Bitumen-black bed of ocean's ground
Unlit, unseen, opaque to sound:
Descend!
Leave far above the never ceasing roar
Of titan-waves whose grip will break the shore
From rock to boulder and so to sand.
Descend to where air, sky and land
And merely phantasmic dreams:
To where all drowning bodies tend
To where hot seabed chasms rend
In utter silence and dark
Descend!
Blackening in ultimate deep
To where a timeless oozeing swells
To where ebon Atar, spirit, dwells
Compressed of ancient malice, half-asleep
Half-dreaming of all ruin’s creep
That spreads a boneless tentic arm
And wills man’s harm.
Ancestral spirits, they that drave
And urged proud Kublai on to war
Appearing flitting-wise in dreams
That sank, as all sinks, through ocean’s streams
Down to the monster in its cave
Within his dreaming dire and huge
With magick power of subterfuge
And mingling with the roar
Of the portentous tides
That under upper waters pour
Water slides and aye backslides.
Atar half-woke to half-declaim
In abysmal growl a spell infame:
He pronounced the deep unholy name.
Pronounced it thrice, pronounced it dire
To stir a whirlpool in that mire
That rose to where the waves aspire.
Whence enmity arose between
Th’ancestral powers of Xanadu
And this far-sunken power marine
None can tell the story true.
We only know Atar stands gainst
The Chinee empire pressing east:
And makes their coast impermious fence
Barring imperial ambition hence
Vowing they never be released.
Summoned by deep art, storms appear
Swift from the breezy north's assertive gales:
A raging hurl of tidal atmosphere
T’impel the course and swell the yielding sails
A rush the trembling craft past power to steer.
Before the sightless breeze the vessels fly
Clambers the mountain sea, t’approach the sky
And plunge again into the wave-trough nigh.
That now the refluent fleet evades the sight,
High-briny peaks and plunging water vales
Or thund'ring down the depths that foam below,
Ploughs up the surging brine with dashing prow.
The rattling cordage whirls, the sail-yards strain,
The winding pipe re-echoes o'er the main:
Firm in their stations ply the obedient crew,
To trim the lines, and strain the rudder
Haul on the beating sheets with sinew'd force,
Wrestling the vast machine’s unsteady course
Whist wind and magic make the beams shudder
And darkness palls
As wind heaps walls
Of water side on side to block all view.
A mast is rent
A keel is cracked
And down is sent
Ruined and racked
Warship and barge, small and large.
As gales crash in and fierce rebound
Ship after ship staggers and is drowned
*******
Far round the globe
Th’Abyssin mantissa rolls to white her eyes
And moans a magnifying chant.
She seats herself upon the earth,
Bows her head, tucks tight her robe
While hairgirt dwarfs their queen attend
Keeping holy distance til the trance doth end.*
Phantoms of sublimity flit
Death and rebirth
A vision of a mighty fo'csle split
And crashed into the ocean
Reverberating through the depths
She sees how the winds bursting through
From ev'ry point are whirl'd, and still renew
Their circuit: rapid torrents gushing spray
In rivers that their tribute to the Ocean pay,
Whose vast will never overswell its shores.
For strait, in vapours, by the Sun exhaled
Or through Earth's secret caverns, it restores
All back again in misty cloudhead veiled.
So does the maiden’s hymn
Encircle back into its source
Web'd mystic beauties brim
Paths intricately retrouse.
The circled dome, the whirlpool’s grip!
Lamenting each engulféd ship.
He who crossed the waters
For rich Nippon’s land
With his many Sons and Daughters
And Armies to command.
Found them all the Children
Of one great Lord of Love
Whose Mercy from a thunderhead
Strikes scorpion-lightning in a spread
White antlers from above.
What the meed of her Song?
That the ceaseless on-flow
And myriad Echo
Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure
Repeats and works ever to prolong
Each difference Tone all meanings Just
Until in still-harmonious notes all crumbles into dust.
What the meed of her Song?
That the ceaseless on-flow
And myriad Echo
Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure
Repeats and works ever to prolong
Each difference Tone all meanings Just
Until in still-harmonious notes all crumbles into dust.
----------
* ‘In the middle of Abyssinia there are men called Pyganmies, who speak the same language as the other inhabitants of the country. They are very short, the tallest being only two cubits in height, most of them only one and a half. Their hair is very long, going down to the knees and even lower, and their beards are larger than those of any other men. When their beards are full grown they leave off wearing clothes and let the hair of their head fall down behind far below the knees, while their beard trails down to the feet in front. When their body is thus entirely covered with hair they fasten it round them with a girdle, so that it serves them for clothes. Their sheep are no bigger than lambs, their oxen, asses, horses, mules, and other beasts of burden about the size of rams. 3000 of them attend on the monarch of Abyssinia.’ Ctesius INDIKA
The author here favours us with verse of a most exotic cast. If by "Firm in their stations" he intends "firm to their cause" then certain adamantine chains would be broken. "Th’Abyssin mantissa rolls white her eyes" for a couplet worthy of Geraldine, and the poem entire innovates in a manner so wild as to cultivate every contemplative faculty.
ReplyDeleteThank you for these kind words.
Delete[1] I could say more, in the decent obscurity of this buried blog-comment, about my fascination with defragmentation.
ReplyDelete[2] I have form: some years ago I quote-unquote restored three Euripidean plays: "Hypsipyle", "Phaethon" and "Telephus". Why did I undertake such a labour, you ask? Well: my first degree, back in the depths of the last century, was English/Classics and it was on that course that I first really encountered and fell in love with Attic tragedy. After that I did a PhD on Browning and the Classics. That thesis, and later research, involved quite a lot of detailed work on RB's translation of the "Agamemnon", as well as his versions of the "Herakles" and the "Alkestis". In addition to the extant plays, Browning (like Shelley, Arnold and Swinburne) was intrigued by the surviving fragments of Greek tragedy, and began a reconstruction of his own: probably a speculative version of Euripides's "Hippolytos Stephanophoros" (Ἱππόλυτος στεφανοφόρος, ‘Hippolytus Crown-wearer’) although in the event all he produced was a prologue, published in 1842 as ‘Artemis Prologizes’. My fascination with the fragmentary dramas has stayed with me, and the reason why that's so raises interesting (for me at least) questions about my larger aesthetic fascinations, as a writer and a critic. At any rate, my reconstructions of those three Euripidean plays were set to be published by a London-based small press ten years or so ago, but the company went bust and I haven't done anything else with them—I should go back to them, actually.
DeleteAnyway: with my right hand I write crticism and academic scholarship and so on, and most of that has to do with the Romantic and Victorian periods (my job title at Royal Holloway, University of London, is ‘Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’). I do view the contemporary age as in crucial ways ‘post-Romantic’, in that I think Romanticism revolutionised literature and culture in ways that still shape things today. There are various (big) ways in which this is true, I think; but for now my interest is in the way Romanticism valorised the fragment as such. I'd say we're still living with the consequences of that conceptual and aesthetic celebration.
Very broadly: there was no particular cult of the fragment before the German Romantics, but from them, and Schlegel in particular, a fascination with the fragmentary spread to English Romanticism. This had, amongst other things, to do with the invention of archaeology in more-or-less its modern form in the later eighteenth-century, and the habit wealthy Grand Tourists got into of bringing partly-broken statuary and the like back from Greece and Italy to ornament their stately homes. But it was Schlegel who created a conceptual armature for the celebration of fragments as such. For Schlegel, a fragment as a particular has a certain unity (“[a] fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog,” Athenaeumsfragment 206), but remains nonetheless fragmentary in the perspective it opens up and in its opposition to other fragments.
[3] If a literary form like the fragment opens up the question of the relation between finite and infinite, so do the literary modes of allegory, wit and irony—allegory as a finite opening toward the infinite (“every allegory means God”), wit as the “fragmentary geniality” or “selective flashing” in which a unity can momentarily be seen, and irony as their synthesis. This is, at root, religious move, and connected to the invention of the modern category of the Sublime by Burke, Kant and others (this same Sublime runs right through into later science fiction, as our much prized ‘sense of wonder’: the total perspective vortex of awe, wonder and terror that the sheer scale of the cosmos evokes in us). God is infinite, whereas we are finite and mortal. This entire world in which we live, big though it is, is only a fragment of the divine totality and harmony, and though our finite brains cannot apprehend actual infinity we can, as it were, get a glimpse out of the corner of our eye. So: fragments, by not pretending to unity and harmony, are not only more honest, they actually generate more intense affect than do well-wrought-urns, because they gesture at their implicit greater greatnesses, with (often) the added pathos of that greatness having been lost. It's Shelley's traveller from an antique land in ‘Ozymandias’. It's Fuseli's ‘The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Antique Fragments’ (1780)
DeleteThis is the climate in which Coleridge publishes ‘Kubla Khan’ *as* a fragment, with a lengthy prefatory note spinning Coleridge's whole Porlockian story as to why it's allegedly unfinished. It's why he was happy to publish the unfinished ‘Christabel’, or why Wordsworth's ‘Prelude’ (a mere shard of the mega-epical Recluse Wordsworth originally planned) stands as one of the signature masterpieces of the age. This feeds through into High Modernism (a much more fundamentally Romantic literary movement than is often realised, I think) as the apotheosis of the fragment: Eliot's Waste Land assembled out of orts and scraps, quotations and original lines: ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins—why then Ile fit you’:—fit as the fragmented consciousness of the epileptic, but also fit as the jigsaw-puzzle assemblage of the myriad broken bits and pieces into a mosaic. See also: Joyce & Pound, Picasso & Braque, montage & mass-reproduction, Art of & Noise (this last example bringing ‘postmodernism’ into the mix: similarly enamoured of the brittle joys of shinily tesselated surfaces comprised of a bricolage of quotation, allusion and fragmented sensibility).
[4] And to move back towards the question of the classics, it has real-world consequences too. Go into any museum, and you'll see artefacts from the ancient world presented to punters as fragments: ridiculously so, really. There's no way that a face with its nose sheared off (say) will look anything other than lamentable, and such a ruin certainly doesn't convey what the original sculptor was trying to get at: but museum directors will under no circumstances repair the broken fragments of statuary in their collections, let alone paint them in their original colours. We make a fetish of our fragments.
DeleteThis brings me to my left-hand, the one that does the non-academic writing: science fiction and fantasy and imaginative engagement. The hand that took Anthony Burgess's fragmental project, "The Black Prince" and completed it. The hand that yearns one day to complete Coleridge's unfinished Opus Maximum, or confect a complete, 24-canto “Don Juan". That hand.
To be clear: I have no problem with the Romantic, Modern or Postmodern fragment. On the contrary, art produced under its aegis remains my favourite art. I could recite pretty much the whole of "The Waste Land" by heart, for instance. But nonetheless my creative allegience belongs not to High Modernism and its literary-experimental high culture descendants, but on the contrary to the derided pulp shadow of that High Modernist tradition.
Let's take for example Tolkien. Now one way we might want to take Tolkien is as anti-matter to the matter of High Modernism. Joyce wrote one short, accessible and widely-read book ("Portrait of the Artist"), one much longer and more challenging novel about language and myth that featured some of the same characters ("Ulysses") and one mad giant unreadable book ("Finnegans Wake"). Tolkien, of course—"The Hobbit" (1937), "The Lord of the Rings" (1954-5) and "The Silmarillion" (1977)—*did the same*. But Joyce became the cornerstone of the academy's sense of what the novel in the 20th-Century means, and Tolkien, still largely academically neglected, became instead the favourite of the general non-academic reader, as per Tom Shippey's polemical, and wonderful, study: "Tolkien: the Author of the Century". In many ways Tolkien, and the pulp-SF inheritors of H G Wells, shadow the trajectory of Joyce, and the high-art inheritors of the tradition of Henry James, through this period.
[5] And that's peculiarly relevant to the broader argument I'm trying to pull together here. Because the core fact about Tolkien, really the starting-point from which everything he wrote and imagined derived (even more fundamental than his deep philological passion for inventing languages) was his stated desire to *reconstruct a mythology for England.*
DeleteHe felt the need to do this because, in Tom Shippey’s words, ‘England is the most de-mythologised nation on Earth’. Where the Greeks still have access to a more-or-less coherent sense of their body of ancient myths and religions, where the old Japanese myths and legends can still inform Japanese life and sense of self, where Native American or African ancient rituals and stories are still alive—and so on around the world—the aboriginal body of myth and religious practice of the English are barely recuperable (this state of affairs is a little less extreme for the Welsh, Scots and Irish). This has two causes: one, the Norman Invasion and the subsequent ruthlessness with which the invaders suppressed native culture in the service of maintaining their own stranglehold on power; and, two, the later Puritan revolution when, with Taliban-like single-mindedness, Cromwell’s regime went about the country extirpating as much of the old, pagan culture as they could (Tolkien added a third purgation to this narrative: the Industrial Revolution. But I’m not sure I agree with him on this. Mass industrialisation certainly had a deracinating effect on British culture and society, but my sense is that at such times people are more, not less, likely to revert to ancestral stories: and there was no focused attempt to destroy the ancient culture in the 19th-century—on the contrary this century saw the florescence of antiquarianism that began to search systematically into our lost past).
All we have left of our ‘original’ pre-Roman, pre-Norman culture and mythology are fragments. Sometimes these fragments snake their way into new forms. Arthurian myth and legend is all very fine and wonderful, but it is French, not English (Lancelot du Lac and so on) imported by the conquerors and written down for the benefit of an aristocratic audience of the ruling caste. But something of the ancient aboriginal myths of England surely inform the oral (rather than written) and peasant (not aristocratic) stories of Robin Hood, a kind of avatar of the Green Man of the Woods. Although the fuller understanding of what that character meant to the pre-conquest English is hard to pin-down. Why are there so many pubs across England called The Green Man? The people drinking in them couldn't tell you, although there is, presumably, something with quite deep roots in the collective-alcoholic-sacramental folk-history of this country that explains it.
Similarly, if we go back to our pre-conquest literature to try and understand the older picture we're faced with the fact that, though some Anglo Saxon literature has come down to us whole, lots hasn't, and much of this latter makes little sense because its context has been destroyed.
Tolkien found these shards extraordinarily compelling, and he accreted his own stories about those orphaned references. For example: Eärendil the Mariner who in The Silmarillion sails his magic boat across the sky with a shining Silmaril upon his brow, derives from the lines Tolkien found, orphaned from their larger Old English mythic or cultic context, in the Exeter Book: "éala éarendel engla beorhtast/ofer middangeard monnum sended ..." (‘Hail Earendel! Brightest angel sent to man throughout middle-earth ...’) Tolkien took his expert's sense of what Earendel probably meant to the pre-conquest English, and fleshed out a story that makes him the son of men and of elves that ties in to his larger mythography of magic jewels and the battle against evil. And, in a larger sense, the whole of Tolkien's legendarium is this: the restoration of a full mythic, cultural and narrative context for the bits and pieces or orphaned Anglo-Saxon that so moved him.
[6] This is part of a much larger project for Tolkien. He saw the world as broken, but his interest was in trying to making it whole again. He believed healing is possible (specifically, he believed healing is possible through Christ, because his Catholic faith was a central part of who he was) and he wrote his fantasy to explore that conviction. This is the core thing that separates his art, and therefore the promiscuous body of commercial fantasy written in imitation of his art, from the High Modernist stream. And it's this that brings me back to Greek tragedy, and the reason why it so captured my spirit back when I was young: an individual broken, in my various unexceptional if painful ways, as I was and am; living in a society fragmented in a larger and more dangerous manner as we all are. The thought that healing might be possible evidently spoke to me profoundly, as it continues to do.
DeleteBecause that's the thing about Greek tragedy: it almost always establishes a breach *in order to heal the breach*. "Telephus" is a play about a wounded king dressed in rags. Compare it with, let's say, "King Lear": also a play about a wounded king dressed in rags. The difference is that the whole point of the "Telephus" is that the king is healed, and so the world is; where the point about Shakespeare's towering but remorseless masterpiece is that neither of those things can happen—the king's wits are permanently shattered when his pride crashes against the anvil of a world that won't bend to it—the kingdom is divided into pieces—Gloster's eyes are pulled out—and so on, and on. Euripides' play ends with a numinous wonder of the god himself, appearing on stage to seal the reconciliation; Shakespeare's ends with the few survivors unable even to speak what they ought to say, and trudging off in misery.
What's sometimes forgotten about Attic tragedy is that it was an integral part of a collective religious festival, a ritual by which the whole polis came together to work vicariously through the way trauma is superceded by reconciliation, all presided over by the deity Dionysis, god of drama and also wine, that intoxicating and therefore sacramental quantity. Aeschylus's "Agamemnon" is a play about a rupture violently inflicted on the worlds of marriage, family and polis; but it is a mistake to treat this one drama in isolation, since the larger point of the "Oresteia" is tracing how, with what difficulties and compromises, the rupture is healed, and the terrors of the cosmos converted to kindly ones.
The Attic tragedy we have is fragmented in multiple ways: passages, singed and worn and pulled from the ground at Oxyrhnchus, lacking the rest of their play; individual plays missing the rest of their trilogies; drama missing the religious and political (versions of the same thing for ancient Greeks) contexts of ritualised communal coming-together. And we should not leave them, like those dead-eyed bleached-bone-coloured broken statues in the British Museum; we should restore them, give them back their wholeness and colour, as an act of devotion of the imagination.
To speak for myself, briefly, finally: Romantic and post-Romantic art has profoundly shaped who I am. I love Coleridge and his forms of ruin; I love High Modernism and postmodern irony. But this is precisely where, if I had patience, I'd move the argument into a new direction. Because my hunch is, and the case is, I think, there to be made, that 20th- and 21st-century Fantasy picks up on this Tolkienian (and we might say: this Attic) project of finding ways to heal. That Fantasy as a genre is in some sense about the tiny torn up pieces of our world as the ground out of which some manner of wholeness can, magically, be created. But that would be a lengthy argument and this post is lengthy enough. Whole sight, as the man once said, or all the rest is desolation.
In my own quest to restore the history of Coleridge (and I see the meta here) I'd have to accuse Livingstone Lowes and many others of taking that statue of Plotinus and doing everything but restoring the nose. "The ancient aboriginal myths of England" brings to mind the druids - the overwhelming conceit of freemasonry in the 1790's was to restore the ancient mythographies. I didnt know that Tolkien's Earendil derives from the Exeter book. That's wonderful. To paraphrase a famous freemason from the 1770's - "The secrets of freemasons are like the Sybilline Leaves. To the uninitiated they appear as fragments, but to the initiated they are all parts of one whole." I think this is what attracted Coleridge to the secret societies in which he at least dabbled throughout the 1790's. I wonder if Southey's recollection in The Doctor &c of a book's title being Le Morte d'Arthur implied that he was highlighting the non-English origin of that mythology. It's tragic that your publisher closed shop before the pages of your book could take substance. If only I could finish mine. I appreciate your thesis that fragments "generate more intense affect than do well-wrought-urns". A fragment is a glimpse of something - a lucid moment - eliciting a willing suspension of disbelief that for the "moment" constitutes poetic faith. Momentarily. And that's the best we can hope to achieve.
DeleteHard to disagree with this, "Unknown". When you say "if only you could finish yours ..." --- your what, I wonder?
DeleteWell, I've been working on a book for the last six years to be titled Occult Coleridge. I investigate the various secret societies - freemasonic and otherwise - in which Coleridge was at least partially involved. Dates, names, places throughout the 1790's and all of the esoteric associations between them. Then, I show how both his Mystery poems and his "inaccessible" prose speak to these groups' ambitions, and how he kept the secret (as was tradition) even to his grave. How he was funded by them, and how they were grooming him, etc. I show the source of "Alph the Sacred River" and also the lengthy 17th century work from which the logic (and much of the specific diction) of Rime of the Ancient Mariner is derived. And then how the myriad classical allusions in the poems map off of a Western Esoteric Tradition aesthetic. Coleridge kept a LOT of secrets, in a nutshell. I've been thoroughly immersed in the 1780's and 90's these past few years to try to best see it from Coleridge's perspective. My background is mathematics and sciences - my university degrees anyhow - so I'm by no means a belletristic writer. This book is heavy in Platonism and Hermeticism - every time I discover some new facet I want to rewrite half the chapters and reframe some of the main arguments. But my early enthusiasm is now confronted by the headwinds of exhaustion.
Delete