Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 13:50:28 -0500
From: "George Y. Trail" <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Poetry, prose, fiction as meaningful


Well then it wasn't a serious question, right? 

One wonders however, how you would define Romanticism if you see it as
anti-material.  Whitman, for instance, insists that he is the poet of
the body and the poet of the soul, and that lacking one means lacking
the other. Transcendence of the material is thus, for him impossible. 
Blake thinks that the material is created by the imagination to give it,
as it were, something to do. Keats leaves us in the endless cycle of
seasons repeating. Swinburne leaves us Hertha, the earth spirit.
Lawrence insists on placing the soul in the heart and the belly and
loins where, he says, she belongs.  

The transcendent is precisely the creation of the classicist, not the
romantic. The timeless is a classical conception, as is the ideal. If
you think not you have written Socrates down as a romantic, which is a
real stretch.  

Cheers, 
g 

Fredrik Hertzberg LIT wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, Barron wrote:
> 
> > I hate to be dense here, but we have loosely been discussing whether or not
> > poetry transcends. Transcends what?
> > --
> > Barron
> 
> I took it to mean transcend its materiality, its material conditions
> (language, time and place). To say that poetry transcends these
> conditions is in my opinion a Romantic legacy (which survives in theories
> that treat poems as free-floating texts).
> 
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