Anthea to Juliet (UK)nindulgenceJuly 11 2005, 16:35:30 UTC
Juliet--
>>and anyway, they were mostly covered by your blouse
Blous*es*, if you'll recall--namely, the ones I had to go out and purchase the next morning as none of mine had necklines high enough...or cuffs long enough, for that matter.
>>And Anthea, no more can I believe that you're falling into the undergraduate trap of thinking that just because a literary work isn't much good it isn't an important historical source. In fact my second year tute group just last week caught on to that one faster than you.
Jesus Christ on a bun, Juliet! If you didn't devote so much of your class time to the study of "poems" that are little more than diary entries in metre, perhaps you could instil in your snot-nosed little padawans a greater awareness of the complexities and potential pitfalls of approaching literary works as historical documents. It's bad enough having to deal with students' enduring _Shakespeare_in_Love_-style pop-cultural preconceptions about the artistic process without scholars like you actually reinforcing the idea that one can assume some sort of straightforward correspondence between the life of a *real* poet and his work. Kennedy, Hornblower, Edrington, and the rest didn't simply transcribe their personal experiences in verse form; they *played* with the stuff of their emotional lives, plotting their fears and desires onto mythic archetypes (e.g., Kennedy's "Neptune and Leander" poems), exploring what-if scenarios (e.g., Hornblower's almost unbearably wistful, if stilted, pastorals); and assuming the voices of imagined poetic personae (e.g., Edrington's famous series of mock-epics regarding the sexual adventures of Anemone and Lady Jane).
Even Lady Barbara achieves a brush or two with poetic greatness when she takes a break from dutifully detailing the colours of the wallpaper and the patterns of the china to focus her imagination instead on the *real* object of her desires (which, as you say, was clearly *not* her irrevocably gay cold fish of a husband)...and it's no coincidence that those are the two of her poems that would be most difficult to date and contextualize had she not helpfully done both herself.
In short, those of us who study actual *poetry* in the AoS must exercise a far healthier skepticism re: biographical readings--and engage in far more vigorous debate over the existing evidence--than those of us who spend our careers poring over 18C equivalents of Bridget Sodding Jones's Diary.
Anthea
PS See you in Bath next Friday at 9? I'm at the Queensberry all week during my "Sex and the 18C Spa" lecture series. Oh, and do *try* not to mix yourself up with your American counterpart on the way, would you? From the look on the poor girl's face when she walked into my suite at the MLA, you'd have thought she'd never seen rope before.
>>and anyway, they were mostly covered by your blouse
Blous*es*, if you'll recall--namely, the ones I had to go out and purchase the next morning as none of mine had necklines high enough...or cuffs long enough, for that matter.
>>And Anthea, no more can I believe that you're falling into the undergraduate trap of thinking that just because a literary work isn't much good it isn't an important historical source. In fact my second year tute group just last week caught on to that one faster than you.
Jesus Christ on a bun, Juliet! If you didn't devote so much of your class time to the study of "poems" that are little more than diary entries in metre, perhaps you could instil in your snot-nosed little padawans a greater awareness of the complexities and potential pitfalls of approaching literary works as historical documents. It's bad enough having to deal with students' enduring _Shakespeare_in_Love_-style pop-cultural preconceptions about the artistic process without scholars like you actually reinforcing the idea that one can assume some sort of straightforward correspondence between the life of a *real* poet and his work. Kennedy, Hornblower, Edrington, and the rest didn't simply transcribe their personal experiences in verse form; they *played* with the stuff of their emotional lives, plotting their fears and desires onto mythic archetypes (e.g., Kennedy's "Neptune and Leander" poems), exploring what-if scenarios (e.g., Hornblower's almost unbearably wistful, if stilted, pastorals); and assuming the voices of imagined poetic personae (e.g., Edrington's famous series of mock-epics regarding the sexual adventures of Anemone and Lady Jane).
Even Lady Barbara achieves a brush or two with poetic greatness when she takes a break from dutifully detailing the colours of the wallpaper and the patterns of the china to focus her imagination instead on the *real* object of her desires (which, as you say, was clearly *not* her irrevocably gay cold fish of a husband)...and it's no coincidence that those are the two of her poems that would be most difficult to date and contextualize had she not helpfully done both herself.
In short, those of us who study actual *poetry* in the AoS must exercise a far healthier skepticism re: biographical readings--and engage in far more vigorous debate over the existing evidence--than those of us who spend our careers poring over 18C equivalents of Bridget Sodding Jones's Diary.
Anthea
PS See you in Bath next Friday at 9? I'm at the Queensberry all week during my "Sex and the 18C Spa" lecture series. Oh, and do *try* not to mix yourself up with your American counterpart on the way, would you? From the look on the poor girl's face when she walked into my suite at the MLA, you'd have thought she'd never seen rope before.
~
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