《读诗的艺术》章节试读

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-序（王敖） - 序（王敖）

只有在完全丧失了文化更生能力的时候，才会不出产真正的诗人，而仍在早就诗人的时代，也必然会给批评家留出活动的空间。我们可以对时代感到失望，但还不至于彻底绝望到胡乱否定的地步。

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庞贝废墟迟早是每个人的故乡

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第1页 - 布鲁姆如何读诗

叶芝的声音是炽烈的，而史蒂文斯的声音很安静，因为他是这样的诗人：他倾听并以某些方式把握不可名状的事物，以及“躲藏在头脑里的思想发出的嗡鸣”。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第240页

对我们来说，现实和意义之间存在明显的界限。只有具体而特殊的事物看上去才是真实的，而且有同等程度的真实性。有些事情是残酷的事实，它们除了发生过之外并无更多的意义；有些事情也许具有上帝理解的意义，我们却无法感知；我们可以感知到一些事情确切的意义，我们也许会赋予另外一些事情错误的意义，然而所有这一切都跟它们的现实存在是两码事。人类对时间的经验是一种对连续的独特时刻的经验，每一个时刻都是新的，而且永远不可重现。我们会发现某个这样的时刻很无趣，我们会忘记它，但我们不能否认它的存在，我们就不会活到现在。
人对时序的感受总是参杂着情绪的，比如记忆总是有优先遗忘伤痛的机制。然而对于无法磨灭的伤痛，事件前后的时间段似乎倾向滑向一个深渊，使得事件的前因后果虚无化。然伤痛本身便历史化了，变得难以消解，即所谓难以释怀。

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小便之后摸索着回床上……
——《悲伤的脚步》
完整版本：
Sad Steps　（Philip Larkin ）
...
...
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part the thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.
...
Four o'clock: wedge-shaped gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-pierced sky.
There's something laughable about this,
...
The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
...
High and preposterous and separate--
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
...
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
...
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第317页 - 希腊人和我们

荷马雄踞希腊文学的开端。如果说《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》比其他民族的史诗更好，那不是因为它们在内容上取胜，而是因为它们有更加复杂的想象——给人的感觉是，它最初的材料被非常精细地加工到现在我们看到的形式里，这是因为它来自一个远为文明的境况，比如跟英雄时代湮灭过久而且不足为信的日耳曼民族相比。然而，对两者做出客观的比较是困难的，因为日耳曼史诗没有更多的历史；而荷马通过罗马人已成为欧洲文学基本的灵感来源，没有他就没有《埃涅阿斯》、《神曲》和《失乐园》，也不会有阿里奥斯托、蒲柏、拜伦的戏剧诗歌。
P319下，在十九世纪和我们的世纪，独立的艺术天才时常宣称自己有最高的重要性，甚至还说服了一小部分唯美派；然而这只有在雅典才会成为一种普遍的社会事实，因为天才并不是宣称自己有特殊的权力的孤独者，而是社会中备受称颂的精神领袖。与之最接近的现代活动不是任何戏剧，而是球赛或者斗牛。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第119页 - 切斯特顿的非虚构性散文

史蒂文生作为一个叙述者的缺陷，并非因为他过于装饰的风格，向传统认为的那样，而是因为他的风格过于精简，只告诉读者关于人物最本质的东西，其他一概不提。在一篇极为可笑的文章里，切斯特顿令人信服地证明了吉卜林是个没有地方性根源的世界主义者。1688年光荣革命的政治后果是把这个国家的政府交给一小群财阀，这种状态显然持续到了1914年，甚至可能直到1939年，不管文艺复兴和宗教改革意味着什么，他们都不是理性对狂热的反动——相反，更公正的描述是，他们是对中世纪后期教练过渡的逻辑的反动。对于这种观念的变化，切斯特顿尽到了不小的责任。对我们每个人而言，我们喜欢读一些作家而不管他们的缺陷，而另一些作家，他们所有的优点也没给我们多少乐趣。要让我们发现一个作家是让我们"有同感的"，他的和我们的想象的偏好一定存在某种亲缘关系，正如切斯特顿所说：
在每一个艺术家的头脑背后，都有某种类似于建筑的模式和类型的东西。任何有想象力的人所拥有的原初的品质是意象。它仿佛是他梦境中的风景，那个他希望制造或者愿意徜徉其中的世界，他自己的秘密的行星上的奇花异兽，那种他愿意去思考的东西。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第44页 - 读诗的艺术

巴菲尔德说，“它一定是一种意义上的殊异。”然后，他做了一个出色的辨析：
它与惊异并不是对等的；对我们意识到自己并不完全理解的，或对它
的理解程度无论如何没有我们曾认为的那么高的东西，我们的反应是
惊异。美具有的殊异的因素的效果是相反的。它产生在与我们的意识
不同的意识的接触之中——不同，但又不会遥远到我们完全无法分享
的地步，在这种联系中，它正像区区这“接触”一词所暗示的那样。
实际上，殊异在我们不理解的时候会激起惊异，在我们理解的时候能
激起美学想像。
这里的中心词是“意识”。正如巴菲尔德所揭示的，意识之于诗歌就像大理石之于雕塑：是用来加工的材料。词语是意识的各种比喻：诗人的词语在意识上是隐喻性的，它们邀请我们分享一种殊异。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第269页 - 布莱克/奥登和詹姆斯/奥登（詹姆斯·芬顿）

史本德曾告诉奥登，他怀疑自己是否应该写散文，奥登的态度很明确，“你应该只写诗，不要写别的，我们不希望在诗歌上失去你。”“可你真觉得我是那块料吗？”史本德怯生生地问，“当然，”奥登冷冷地答道。“可是为什么？”“因为你承受耻辱的能力极强。艺术是从羞耻中诞生的。”

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第176页 - 写平凡的大师：菲利普·拉金

对拉金来说，光是一种宗教体验。不管我们是否信仰它，他写作的时候，光芒倾泻而出，或者涌流向前。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第149页 - 刘易斯卡罗尔

《爱丽丝漫游奇境》最早的题目是《爱丽丝的地下探险》。可为什么卡罗尔没有保留这个题目？因为爱丽丝逐步地征服着一个个表面。她上升或者返回表面。她创造表面。穿透或者掩埋的运动让位于轻逸的侧面滑动；深度中的动物变成纸牌上没有厚度的形象。更有甚者，《镜中世界》致力于镜子的表面并操纵一盘象棋。纯粹的事件从境遇中逃脱。我们不再穿越深度，而是在滑行中穿越镜中世界，仿佛一个左撇子把一切都变成另一番模样。刘易斯卡罗尔描述的福图纳图的钱包是个一条线可以穿过其两面的莫比乌斯圈。数学是有益的，因为它可以产生新的表面，而且它能给一个可怕的深度中的混合物的世界带来和平，所以卡罗尔是位数学家兼摄影师。然而，深度的世界仍然在表面之下吵吵闹闹，并且威胁要突破表面。即使是被展开或者弄平，怪物们仍然缠绕着我们。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第2页 - 序

诗表面的软弱，有时候也是它的强大，它退却到你的内心，在底线处发出声音，但却能帮助你生活，让你做个不同的人。

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不要因为诗歌有难度而谴责它

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第6页 - 序

如果读诗算是一种艺术，并不是说诗变成了艺术处理的对象，也不意味着理性的分析直接会变成艺术创造。正如艾略特所说，批评是文明人的本能行为。这种本能是随着读诗的快乐开始的，与理智结合前进，目标是得到诗带来的经验和智慧。当我们面对那些强大而精炼的诗歌合金，我们可以惊叹着抚摩，也有权分析它们的成分，更美妙的则是在想象力的超高温中一起参与创造。诗歌的敌人是那些假定诗已经是文本尸体，可以运用观念的解剖刀随意切割的人，他们搞错了。真正的诗歌批评和诗歌，不管它们多么形态各异，共享一个缪斯。当它们偶尔出现同样的面目，就像史蒂文斯的诗那样，那些读诗的人会看到她神秘而友好的微笑。

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《读诗的艺术》的笔记-序（王敖） - 序（王敖）

真正的诗人和批评家的共同财产是诗歌激发出的智慧，但这种智慧有不同的类型。诗人在评论自己热爱的诗人的时候最具魅力，也最给人启发……相反，他们评论与自己禀赋志趣不同的诗人时也最具攻击性……如果我们考察批评史，就会发现一个现象，经过有趣的简化，诗歌批评的争论就像荷马史诗里的一个场景。批评家们在平原上两军对阵，他们支持的大诗人们则在经典的圣山行互相争吵。比如庞德和史蒂文斯迥异的诗学理想，几乎重新划分了二十世纪六七十年代以后的英美诗歌批评……诗歌批评有理解的同情，也有理解后的拒绝同情，有声东击西的暂时奏效的策略，也有充满意气但深有启发性的误判。多读此类文字，可以增强读诗时的批评敏感，也有助于深入理解诗歌观念演变的历史。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第171页 - 写平凡的大师：菲利普·拉金

即便是口头创作，也仍是一种头脑中的书写。诗歌是言说，但它也是书写。对拉金来说，诗的进展……集中于五音步之内可能的转换和停顿。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第271页 - 布莱克/奥登和詹姆斯/奥登（詹姆斯·芬顿）

一个诗人最痛苦的经验是：发现他有一首明知是虚情假意的诗已经满足了公众而且进入了选本。他明白这首诗可能还不错，但这不是问题的关键；他就不应该写下它。
没有哪个诗人或小说家希望他是有史以来唯一的一个，但大多数人希望自己是当世唯一的一个，而且很多人开心地相信这一希望已经变成事实。
一些书被冤枉地忘记了；没有哪本书被冤枉地记住了。
在评论一本坏书的时候，人不可能不卖弄。（奥登）

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《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第2页 - 《读诗的艺术》 序言

当代的各种文化声音对诗歌的贬抑，反映的并非诗歌的衰落，而是人们对生活的不耐烦。不读诗的人会愤怒地说，“为什么没有好诗，你说有怎么我就没看到？”事实上，他们在过去的生命中至少被诗打动过一次，那经常是发生在他们期待长辈手中糖果的时代，如今他们发出的仍是类似童年期的抱怨。这些人也会像赶庙会一样，纪念不幸陨落的诗人。他们赞颂诗人像神的使者化身流星，在想像力的天空中迈出阔步，但也提醒自己，如果他活在隔壁的现实生活里，也不过是个IT 和房地产时代的落伍和失意者。预设的前提是，我们只配拥有一个让诗人憔悴在泥涂中的现实。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第210页 - Green Words

John Clare: A Biography
Readers of poetry tend to know a few haunting anthology pieces by
John Clare and to recall him vaguely as an English "peasant poet."
Only in the twentieth century have his extensive manuscript
writings been excavated from regional libraries, private
collections, and town archives, and scrupulously edited or (in the
case of the poems printed with editorial "corrections" in his
lifetime) re-edited. The great Clarendon Press edition of his
poems, which has appeared over the past twenty years with Eric
Robinson as general editor, runs to nine substantial volumes. It is
estimated that Clare wrote some 3,500 poems, in almost every lyric
and narrative genre (except epic), and in many and various formal
patterns, including startlingly original sonnets. And yet this
prolific author spent almost half his life--from the age of
forty-four until his death at the age of seventy--in hospitals for
the insane. (He escaped once for a few months and, penniless and
starving, painfully walked the eighty miles home, but then he was
re-certified and permanently re-hospitalized.)
The contemporary rehabilitation of Clare has been in part
politically motivated: he is the voice of the unschooled, of the
laboring poor, and of political protest, as well as a demystifier
of pastoral. Yet it is not merely these social claims that would
draw readers to his pages. His writing has consistently found
support from poets--Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, Edward Thomas,
and most recently Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney. A life of this
unusual poet must do justice to his themes (political or
otherwise), to the context from which he sprang (with all its
deprivations and obstacles), and to the ultimate worth of his
poems. A biographer of Clare can hardly help seeing the life as
focused and framed by mental derangement, and Jonathan Bate, the
author of this new biography of Clare, chooses his title--"I
Am"--from the beginning of one of the asylum poems, written when
Clare was in his mid-fifties:
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 oblivion's host
Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled
throes--
And yet I am and live--like vapours
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.
The pathos of the last two lines--their helpless bewilderment--makes
the reader of this biography recall that, although Clare was
married and the father of seven living children when he was
confined, there were no continuing relations (except by letter)
with the family after he was "imprisoned." Many poems written
during the asylum years--including "I Am"--show no sign of
derangement. Others do. Analyses of Clare's mental symptoms incline
toward a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness (he wrote
incessantly in fits of enthusiasm and then collapsed into exhausted
depression). As he grew older, he suffered from delusions (he was
Napoleon, he was Byron, he was a boxer). Bate gives Clare the
benefit of the doubt whenever possible, supposing that the multiple
identities may have been partly a conscious game, but he does not
try to insist on Clare's sanity at all times.
The man on whom such misfortunes fell had a seraphic nature. He was
born in 1793, a handsome boy with a high brow and piercing blue
eyes; he grew up in Northamptonshire, and became--although the
region exhibits less topographical interest than much of
England--one of the great recorders of the English landscape, its
flora and its fauna observed with tenderness, humor, and unflagging
delight. (Many of his lines begin "I love," followed by some
natural object or event or action: he is warmer in his watching
than our naturalist Thoreau.) Clare is unusual in seeing human life
in seamless continuity with the lives of birds, animals, and
insects. He notes the habits of the hedger or the ditcher or the
shepherd or the milkmaid in exactly the same way as he notes the
behavior of a dog or a badger or a robin or a termite. He preserves
a vague sense that the activities of human beings are perhaps more
consequential than those of instinctual creatures, and so he often
closes his poems--after describing the weather, or the activities
of beasts--with a human group; but when people enter the poem,
Clare's tone does not change. Human beings are given structural
position rather than tonal pre-eminence. Anthropologist of rural
culture, ethnographer of vanishing customs, scientist of birds and
plants, Clare had a naturally encyclopedic mind. The amassing of
detail in the poems is overwhelming, and sometimes it works against
their aesthetic success.
Clare was aware that his absorption in nature and local customs was
unusual. He writes of being truant as a schoolboy (he had a few
months of schooling each year, but only from the ages of five to
twelve) because he preferred seeing what was happening in the
natural world; and he repeatedly reports the elation of the
schoolboy released at the end of the day. He went out to work with
his father as a thresher from a young age, and in subsequent years,
up to his mid- twenties, he worked (I quote from Bate's list) as a
"ploughboy, potboy in local inn, [doing] weeding, tending of
horses, gardening ... [serving as] nurseryman . .. lime-burner." He
knew what it was to freeze with cold, to faint from hunger, to
quail before brute labor in the fields. He read whatever he could
get his hands on, and hid his poems in a hole of the wall of the
family cottage.
The bookseller in the nearby town of Stamford had a cousin in
London, John Taylor, whose firm had published Keats's Endymion.
Taylor admired the poems by Clare that the bookseller showed him,
and published--in 1820, when Clare was twenty-six--the poet's first
book, Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. It was a great
success, and Clare became famous as a "peasant-poet," a type made
popular by Robert Burns. By 1822 Clare had published a second volume
(The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems), had been to London twice,
and had met Lamb, De Quincey, and Hazlitt. (Keats and he just
missed meeting before Keats's death. ) Through the efforts of
Taylor and others, Clare found patrons and a patroness; a
subscription was taken up on his behalf.
By 1823, however, as depression followed success (the second book
not having sold as well as the first), Clare's friends became so
worried about his health that they persuaded him to see Keats's
doctor in London. A third book (The Shepherd's Calendar; With
Village Stories, and Other Poems) appeared in 1827, but the
short-lived sensation of Clare's writing had died down, and the
book, though it contained the irreproachable "Shepherd's Calendar,"
made no money. Nor did the fourth book, The Rural Muse (1835). Two
years later, beset by money worries and discouraged in his
vocation, Clare was certified (perhaps after episodes of violence
compounded by drink, as Bate speculates), and found himself in the
asylum for life.
Jonathan Bate tells Clare's story well, with innate sympathy for
Clare's plight and unfeigned enthusiasm for Clare's gifts. There
are perhaps more details here of Clare's relations with his
publishers and his patrons than most readers will desire, but it
could be argued in Bate's defense that the peculiar conditions of
publication in the early nineteenth century require explanation. We
see Clare struggling to gain individual patronage, group patronage
(by which "subscribers" would guarantee the cost of producing a
volume), and a home in a publishing firm. And because Clare was
unschooled in standard grammar and punctuation, his manuscripts
presented his publisher with the problem of "corrections." By
himself, Taylor transcribed the cascade of almost illegible
manuscripts (a scribe failed at the task), changing misspellings,
inserting punctuation (Clare used almost none), rectifying Clare's
dialect-grammar, and suggesting cuts. Clare reacted to the
corrections sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with irritation.
Increasingly, he wished to assert his independence; yet he depended
on his publisher to see his works into print. He went so far as to
try to leave Taylor and solicit subscriptions by himself for a
volume that he could himself control, but he could not manage to
collect enough subscribers.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates Clare's difference from his publisher
better than the name that he wanted to give his fourth volume. He
would not use a generic title such as Poems Descriptive or The
Village Minstrel, but rather would choose a peculiar name, The
Midsummer Cushion. As soon as the phrase is explained, it becomes
symbolic of everything Clare wanted his poetry to be. He writes:
It is a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stick a
piece of greensward full of field flowers and place it as an
ornament in their cottages, which ornaments are called Midsummer
Cushions--and as these trifles [his poems] are field flowers of
humble pretensions and of various hues I thought the above cottage
custom gave me an opportunity to select a title that was not
inapplicable to the contents of the Volume.
The grassy earth is the base of the "cushion"; but the flowers
"growing" out of the base are not species rooted in that turf but
flowers that grew elsewhere; they are "applied" as ornaments to the
artificially detached piece of sod. It is a very cunning and
absolutely exact symbol. Clare's poetry is of the English soil; but
the soil has been cut and squared into verse, and has been
ornamented with selected natural phenomena. He must have been
intellectually pleased with his title, but it was never to appear in
his lifetime. Instead, a selection of poems from the manuscript of
The Midsummer Cushion was printed by Taylor under the more
acceptable generic (and classicizing) title The Rural Muse.
How should we read Clare's poems today? As he left them in
manuscript, or as they were tidied up by Taylor, or in some middle
semi-corrected form? For his edition, Eric Robinson rightly
transcribed the poems as they appear in manuscript. Jonathan Bate,
hoping to bring Clare to the notice of modern readers, chooses
understandably to print some of the poems as they appeared and were
"approved" by Clare in his lifetime, rather than to reproduce the
wording of the recently available manuscripts (though he does
include, for comparison, two examples of unprinted manuscript
versions). Bate's light punctuation helps the modern reader to
penetrate Clare's word-thickets, especially in the longer poems.
Still, those attracted by what they find in Bate will be drawn, I
think, to look up the deeply attractive spontaneity of the
manuscript originals; one can get used to Clare's linguistic habits
without too much effort. (I have silently corrected, for the
convenience of the modern reader, Clare's erratic spellings in the
quotations here; occasionally I have cited from one of Robinson's
volumes rather than from Bate; and sometimes I have conflated
elements from Robinson and Bate.)
Clare's subject matter with respect to the objective
world--landscape, flora, fauna, laborers, customs, seasons--did not
change over time to any significant degree. What did change was his
style. His beginnings were genuinely artless, and his early pages
(when read with hindsight) offer interesting clues to what must
have been subsequent and profound self-criticism, as the poet began
to aim at the observational austerity of the middle poems, not to
speak of the otherworldly purity of tone in some of the late work.
The early poems are imitative of Gray, Cowper, and Collins, and
often affect poeticisms: an address to glowworms begins, "Tasteful
Illuminations of the night." Individual pieces can be sentimentally
religious or, at the other end of the scale, vulgarly coarse. A
poem in comic praise of "My Mary" shows Mary the servant currying
favor with her mistress by pretending to be attached to the new
baby, but abusing it as soon as the mistress is out of sight:
Who when the baby's all beshit
To please its mamma kisses it?
And vows no Rose on earth's so
sweet?
My Mary.
But when her Mistress isn't nigh
Who swears %amp% wishes it would die
%amp% pinches it to make it cry?
My Mary.
It is unsettling to find Clare using exactly the same Mary-meter to
praise his dog:
And who when I at dinner sit
In silence seems to beg a bit
Then wags his tail in thanks for it?
My Rover.
Besides the failed attempts at high style and low, at religiosity
and comedy, at the gothic and the balladic, there are equally
failed posturings of protest:
O cruel War, when will thy horrors
cease,
And all thy slaughtering of poor men
give o'er?
O sheathe O sheathe thy bloody
blade in peace,
Nor stain thy hand with human blood
no more.
Among the earliest poems we also find a prophetically dangerous
group of amorous verses, testifying to Clare's compulsive need to
pledge everlasting love to any lovely face:
Hark thee, maid, I'll leave thee never;
Hark thee, if thee love I've given,
When done loving here for ever,
Thee I'll ever love in Heaven.
Erotic delusions--that he had not one wife but two, the first being
Mary Joyce, his first love, whom he had not seen in
decades--persisted in Clare till death.
And yet among the awkward and imitative early poems there are
unmistakable glimpses of the lyric poet that Clare would become. In
a moment of frustration, he represents, in "On Labour," someone
very like himself, who is filled with the love of nature's
beauties: "The passing clouds, the cottage brook or tree." Moved by
these sights, the laborer wants to speak of them, but he has not
the words in his possession to do them justice:
His bosom warms enraptured at the
sight
With secret pleasure %amp% unknown
delight;
His swelling soul to memory's
treasure flies,
%amp% strives to speak--but Ignorance
denies.; In each of these extended poems, a piece of the landscape
itself speaks--an unprecedented gesture in Romantic nature poetry.
With more confidence, Clare writes in 1818 a poem called "The
Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters" that he will rewrite in the 1830s
as a more famous poem, "The Lament of Swordy Well." In each of
these extended poems, a piece of the landscape itself speaks--an
unprecedented gesture in Romantic nature poetry. In the first, a
brook laments the fact of enclosure, by which moors and wetlands
were fenced in and made into arable land. Trees were felled, hills
were leveled, and the face of the landscape was utterly changed.
The meadows and the moors-- where Clare was free to wander, to hide
in hedges, and to write his poems in pencil on his hat brim instead
of working--were now closed to him. Public streets made him
nervous; on manorial land he could be thought a poacher; with the
steady encroachment of enclosure, he had lost the freedom to
traverse open space that was inseparable, for a poet of his
restless physical constitution, from writing itself.
In "The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters," the young poet becomes
the channel for the brook's voice as she grieves the violence done
to her and condemns the workmen who axed down her willows:
Look backward on the days of yore
Upon my injured brook;
In fancy con its Beauties o'er--
How it had used to look;
O then what trees my banks did
crown,
What Willows flourished here!
Hard as the axe that Cut them down
The senseless wretches were.
Immediately the brook relents from her anger at her despoilers; the
ax- wielders were but slaves to the avaricious wealthy men who
ordered the destructive work of enclosure for their own gain:
But sweating slaves I do not blame,
Those slaves by wealth decreed;
No, I should hurt their harmless name
To brand them with the deed.
Although their aching hands did
wield
The axe that gave the blow,
Yet 'twas not them that owned the
field
Nor planned its overthrow.
The later poem, "The Lament of Swordy Well," reproducing without
indents the stanza form of its predecessor, is grimmer and more
outspoken, as the "mossy hills" of the former quarry called "Swordy
Well" cry out against their leveling by the "greedy pack" of
enclosers, who assault the earth like dogs going at prey:
Yet worried with a greedy pack
They rend and delve and tear
The very grass from off my back--
I've scarce a rag to wear.
And as the sale of grain brings in more and more money, as more and
more land is enclosed and made to bear, the voice of the land rises
in pitch:
And should the price of grain get
high--
Lord help and keep it low--
I shan't possess a single fly
Or get a weed to grow;
I shan't possess a yard of ground
To bid a mouse to thrive,
For gain has put me in a pound,
I scarce can keep alive.
This is the outspoken Clare of political protest at full tilt, with
indignation, economy, and strength in every line. Blunt anger is a
genuine aspect of Clare, though not his most original quality.
The supreme achievements of Clare's originality are two, and they
resemble each other not at all. The first is the assembling of
energetic genre scenes of field and cottage: the second (which I
postpone for the moment) is the invention of poems of an
unforgettable subjectivity (such as "I Am"). The scenes of nature
reach their public perfection in "The Shepherd's Calendar" and
their private perfection in Clare's remarkable poems about the
hidden paradises of birds' nests. "The Shepherd's Calendar" was
originally planned as a book offering both a description of each
month and a "cottage tale" to accompany the description. Clare
enjoyed retelling in verse the tales that he had heard from his
parents and other villagers; but these narratives, in which the
writer is scarcely visible, have lasted the least well, perhaps, of
his works.
The descriptive accounts of the months in "The Shepherd's Calendar,"
on the other hand, are work of a very high order. They can best be
compared, in their method, to the representations of the months
found in illuminated manuscripts. In the Trs Riches Heures of the
Duc de Berry, we are shown, within a single landscape, several
activities taking place that are characteristic of the month: a
sower is sowing, a ploughman is ploughing, some aristocrats are
hawking, a hunter is shooting a crossbow. The separate figures do
not interact at all; they are intended as a montage of functions,
not a social group. Though Clare (like his model, the Milton of
"L'Allegro") may structure his month by contrasting daytime and
evening activities, he feels free, within that larger arrangement,
to let his fancy play with all the actions typical of the time of
year. Besides the visible actions of molecatcher or woodman or
gipsy, there is an emotional subtext in these poems, in which Clare
ascribes numerous emotions to natural creatures. Infusing himself
into all natural things, Clare believed that animals, birds, even
times of day respond to experience no less than we. I underline (in
the scattered excerpts from "January" that follow) the tokens of
these emotions:
The moorhen too, with fear oppressed
Starts from her reedy sheltered
rest....
[Birds] Fly to and fro to dreary fen,
Dull winter's weary flight again....
The sun is creeping out of sight
Behind the woods--whilst running
night
Hastens to shut the day's dull eye....
[The thresher] leaves the mice at
peace again
To fill their holes with stolen grain,
Whilst owlets, glad his toils are o'er,
Swoop by him as he shuts the door....
And geese are gabbling in their
dreams
Of littered corn and thawing
streams....
The frightened horse with broken
rein
Stood at the stable-door again....
And, after a bravura passage on the fairies' evening sports, Clare
penetrates, with his finest ray of perception, the consciousness of
a sleeping gnat as the fairies' coaches run over him:
A midgeon, in their road a-bed,
Feels not the wheels run o'er his
head,
But sleeps till sunrise calls him up,
Unconscious of the passing troop.
The emotional nature of Clare's world--with its reluctantly creeping
sun, gluttonously dreaming geese, momentarily frightened animals,
clever thieving mice, eagerly hastening night, flight-weary birds,
and untroubled Mercutio- midge--gives us our best picture in
English verse of pagan animism.
Although Bate gives "January" whole, he offers only fragments of
some of the other months of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and they are
not always the excerpts another reader might have chosen. Clare was
least original in "April," but almost all the other month
descriptions are worth reading whole. Let me offer a piece that
Bate does not include, to induce readers to progress to Robinson
(in Poems of the Middle Period). The month is July: throughout the
morning the heat has been rising, and now it is high noon. In
Clare's usual genre scenes, everything proceeds by the plucked
string of vivid verbs, as nature buzzes with activity. But now, as
nature's song gives way to silent heat, Clare becomes the poet of
non-being:
[Now] noon burns with its blistering
breath
Around, %amp% day dies still as death:
The busy noise of man %amp% brute
Is on a sudden lost %amp% mute;
The cuckoo singing as she flies
No more to mocking boy replies;
Even the brook that leaps along
Seems weary of its bubbling song,
%amp% so soft its waters creep
Tired silence sinks in sounder sleep;
The cricket on its banks is dumb;
The very flies forget to hum;
%amp% save the wagon rocking round,
The landscape sleeps without a
sound;
The breeze is stopped; the lazy bough
Hath not a leaf that dances now;
The totter grass upon the hill
%amp% spider's threads are standing still;
The feathers dropped from
moor-hen's wing
Which to the water's surface cling
Are steadfast %amp% as heavy seem
As stones beneath them in the
stream;
Hawkweeds %amp% groundsells fanning
downs
Unruffled keep their seedy crowns,
%amp% in the oven-heated air
Not one light thing is floating there--
Save that to the earnest eye
The restless heat seems twittering
by;
Noon swoons beneath the heat it
made
%amp% flowers e'en wither in the shade.
"Day dies still as death"; "Tired silence sinks in sounder sleep":
one can almost hear Clare thinking in these abstract summations.
And though this inventory of July non-event is the negative version
of what Seamus Heaney has called the "one-thing-after-anotherness
of the world" (praising Clare's gift for showing just that), the
passage implies all the things that Clare misses when nature
becomes vacant, things that he needs to make him happy: to hear the
cuckoo call, the brook babble, the cricket sing, the flies hum; to
see the dancing leaves, the waving grass, the swaying
spider-threads; to contrast the moving feather with the sunken
stone; to watch the "seedy crowns" of weeds puff away in the wind;
to rejoice in flowers blooming in shade.
Bate offers a strong representation of the poems Clare wrote after
he left Helpstone, his native village, for Northborough. Although
the villages were only three miles apart, Clare felt exiled from
the home of his youth. A new terseness came to this often prolix
poet as he experimented with sonnets, arranging the rhymes in many
different ways but above all departing from conventional sonnet
themes. Clare's four-sonnet sequence on village badger- baiting
(the best poem in English on group aggression against the solitary
misfit) and the sonnet on finding a field mouse's nest (brilliantly
commented on by Heaney) are often anthologized. But for sheer shock
value, given the subject matter of the English sonnet before Clare,
I quote the opening of the double sonnet on the marten (a
"slender-bodied carnivorous mammal considerably larger than the
weasel, and of somewhat arboreal habits"):
The marten cat, long-shagged,
of courage good,
Of weasel shape, a dweller in the
wood,
With badger hair long-shagged and
darting eyes
And lower than the common cat in
size,
Small head, and running on the stoop,
Snuffing the ground, and hind-parts
shouldered up--
He keeps one track and hides in
lonely shade
Where print of human foot is scarcely
made....
I relish the picture of the well-read Clare arising from a page of
Shakespeare--"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"--and dipping
his pen to immortalize the marten. It took comparable strength of
mind to think it worth one's while to describe the exact appearance
and number of eggs in a nest:
Five eggs, pen-scribbled o'er with ink
their shells
Resembling writing scrawls which
fancy reads
As nature's poesy and pastoral
spells--
These are the yellowhammer's.
Clare had a veritably Darwinian curiosity with respect to birds'
nesting habits; he wished he could understand what gave them their
impressive capacities in nest architecture. Nests were also of
great psychic importance to him as the precariously hidden bowers
of Nature's fertility. And besides the courage to inscribe the
ephemeral (which Clare took to be the eternal, considering that
"Nature's glee" had existed since the Creation), Clare had unusual
confidence in the symbolic resonance of his descriptions, in which
images stood in for thoughts. Wordsworth may have declared his faith
that "every flower/Enjoys the air it breathes," but only Clare
makes us believe it. His cows, his flowers, and his dragonflies
have exactly the same gamut of emotions as he.
Perhaps it was from his symbiosis with nature that Clare gained his
deep capacity for introspection and his acquaintance with the
psychic reverberations of images. The emotions of flowers, the
emotions of animals, the emotions of brooks and quarries, the
emotions even of stars--describing these, his source could have
been only in himself. Or perhaps the conflicts of nature, in storm
and flood, made him understand the storms and floods within himself,
gleaning from those inner turbulences the vocabulary of stress and
disaster and melancholy that he could then project onto nature. His
skin was an osmotic membrane, permeable to every sigh of nature's
being. Just as he accumulated in memory and the mind's eye a
voluminous portfolio of sights and sounds and smells, so he filled
up an equally voluminous album of feeling. It was on this resource
that he drew for the almost disembodied poems that crown his work,
poems that strike us as a strange development in such a superlative
poet of material embodiment.
It is, in fact, the unearthly poems that make us realize that we
misjudge Clare if we think of him as a poet occupied only in
compiling his atlases of the natural world, of folk customs, and of
rural tale-telling. It is in looking back, after reading the
unearthly poems, that we realize how emotional the descriptive
poems really are--even if the emotion is ascribed to pismires or
woods ("resting in their shade/Of social loneliness"). In Clare's
holistic ecology, nature, man, mind, feeling, and images made up a
seamless unity--a conviction most firmly expressed in his ars
poetica, "Pastoral Poetry": "True poesy is not in words/But images
that thoughts express."
It is Clare who stands silently behind one of John Ashbery's most
famous opening lines: "I tried each thing, only some were immortal
and free." The disembodied values of immortality and freedom,
detached from material circumstance, become in the unearthly poems
Clare's bulwark against his environment. "My life hath been one
chain of contradictions:/Madhouses, prisons, whore shops--" he
bursts out in his stanzas in imitation of Byron. In such a mood of
despair, he began another poem in which he all but gives up the
ghost. Although a thunderstorm is raging around him, he can neither
be roused (as in the past) to fellow feeling, nor can he reflect
upon it as a fearful symbol of his eternal destiny:
The heavens are wrath, the thunder's
rattling peal
Rolls like a vast volcano in the sky,
Yet nothing starts the apathy I feel
Nor chills with fear eternal destiny.
My soul is apathy, a ruin vast;
Time cannot clear the ruined mass
away.
My life is hell--the hopeless die is
cast
And manhood's prime is premature
decay.
Clare's characteristic intensification-by-doublets is visible as
"the apathy I feel" becomes "My soul is apathy," and "a ruin vast"
becomes "the ruined mass. " Then, from nowhere, a resurgence of
spiritual strength springs up in the poem in a geyser of
repudiatory doublets:
Roll on, ye wrath of thunders,
peal on peal,
Till worlds are ruins and myself alone;
Melt heart and soul cased in obdurate
steel
Till I can feel that nature is my
throne.
I live in love.
"My life is hell" has been wrenched into its opposite, a radiant
creed: "I live in love." The poem ascends to mental sunlight as
Clare, with an immense effort, wills that his heart and soul, by
melting the armor of resistance to love that they have constructed
around themselves, yield the incandescent heat of love's sun. He
can then regard life's vicissitudes as illusions, and soar to a
position higher even than nature's throne, imagining at last a human
mind free as the mind of God is free:
I live in love, sun of undying light,
And fathom my own heart for ways
of good;
In its pure atmosphere day without
night
Smiles on the plains, the forest and
the flood.
Smile on, ye elements of earth and
sky,
Or frown in thunders as ye frown
on me:
Bid earth and its delusions pass away,
But leave the mind as its creator free.
"[I] fathom my own heart for ways of good": looking within himself,
besieged by the thunderstorm, Clare finds a sun of love even more
powerful than the natural sunlight that he had spent his life
praising.; Again Clare finds what is immortal and free...
Another poem, of comparable drama and vigilant power, is named
simply "A Vision." Again Clare finds what is immortal and free, but
that victory is prefaced by such a naked retelling of his life's
story that we flinch as the stripped verbs accumulate. Yet
disabling loss ends resolutely in outgoing giving and staunch
keeping. This visionary parable, with dazzling minimalism, re-tells
the triumphant re-creation, by the unfading light of language, of a
once desperate emotional tragedy:
I lost the love of heaven above,
I spurned the lust of earth below,
I felt the sweets of fancied love
And hell itself my only foe.
I lost earth's joys but felt the glow
Of heaven's flame abound in me
Till loveliness and I did grow
The bard of immortality.
I loved but woman fell away
I hid me from her faded fame,
I snatched the sun's eternal ray
And wrote till earth was but a name.
In every language upon earth,
On every shore, o'er every sea,
I gave my name immortal birth
And kept my spirit with the free.
"A Vision" is the tale of any profound spirit, long imprisoned or
deprived, who gains inner freedom. For Clare, language was the
means of freedom; writing till earth became the names he had given
it, he broke through to the untrammeled space of language. Once the
earth has been sublimed into words, those words extend,
potentially, to every shore and every sea and every language.
While Clare was still able to write, his unearthly poems, tuned
above normal hearing to the music of the spheres, could envisage
triumphs of the free mind, of the sun-writer's inspired word. But
he had the courage to look away from his sun-ray, bringing his
imagination to the very brink of death. He had written innumerable
invitation-poems asking various maidens to walk with him, to meet
him, to be faithful to him; now he takes that fundamental yearning
for a twin female spirit--never in life satisfied--and publishes,
in 1848, "An Invite to Eternity," asking the beloved to go with him
into the gray uncertainty of doubt with which he approaches
extinction. Every line of this poem, shrouded in dusk and mist,
repays thought:
Say, wilt thou go with me, sweet maid,
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through the valley-depths of shade,
Of night and dark obscurity,
Where the path hath lost its way,
Where the sun forgets the day,
Where there's nor light nor life to
see,
Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?
Three stanzas follow, in which Clare's traditional opening
metaphors--the valley of the shadow of death, the selva oscura, the
losing of the right path-- undergo strange geological tumults like
those of the Last Day:
Where stones will turn to flooding
streams,
Where plains will rise like oceaned
waves,
Where life will fade like visioned
dreams
And mountains darken into caves--
As in all the unearthly poems, the images gather to a desolate
moment of abstraction:
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity,
Where parents live and are forgot
And sisters live and know us not?
Among the shades, we forget our living parents; once we are in the
valley, our living sisters forget us; non-identity replaces
identity. Bate points out the echo of Hamlet's dilemma in Clare's
bleak third stanza:
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be,
To live in death and be the same,
Without this life or home or name,
At once to be and not to be,
That was and is not--yet to see
Things pass like shadows, and the sky
Above, below, around us lie?
The spectral lovers see the sky above them, as in life; but it is
also below them, as they are discharged into the cosmos; and it is
around them as they float alone in air. In the disturbing ending,
Clare speculates that in a final dissolution the lovers will forget
even each other:
The land of shadows wilt thou trace
And look--nor know each other's
face,
The present mixed with reason gone,
And past and present all as one?
Say, maiden, can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead?
Then trace thy footsteps on with me:
We're wed to one eternity.
The lovers are wed not in, but to, a single eternity--one that will
be nameless and blank. The pervasive sadness and gravity of this
invitation lie very far in tone from any Christian promise of
eternity. Pilgrimage has never been bleaker or more vestigial,
never less certain of its end.
Clare was to write later invitations of a genial sort, just as he
was to write Christian poems of irreproachable orthodoxy, but in
these he does not find the expressive intensity to which despair
and doubt had brought him. Making his means the most elementary
lyric music (da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da- dum) and the simplest
monosyllabic vocabulary ("trace" and "face," "gone" and "one,"
"led" and "dead"), he fuses together a desolate undoing of kinship,
a collapsing temporality, and a paradoxical being and not being,
with reason itself--or "reasons," as Robinson would have it--in
abeyance. There is scarcely a word in Clare's exquisite late poems
of this sort that could not be understood by a twelve-year-old; and
yet in them the whole is always far greater than the sum of the
unassuming parts. Behind Clare's native song- measures of three and
four beats per line lie metaphysical conceptions of the sort that
he learned from Shakespeare's equally metaphysical song practice.
The Gordian knot that bound Clare all his life was the riddling
relation between his yearning heart and the "objective" phenomena
of nature: "The Riddle nature could not prove/Was nothing else but
secret love." Clare's excesses--in flirtation, in writing, in
drinking, in wandering--become in Bate's account the psychological
undersong of the poems, while his passionate reading--of poets, of
Shakespeare, of books of science and natural history and geography,
of radical political writings--forms the intellectual ground bass.
The painful discords emerging in Bate's account are occasioned in
the early years by poverty and crushing labor, in the middle years
by vexing personal relations with publishers, and in the later
years by increasing illness and confinement.
The last testimonies make sad reading. In a self-epitaph to be
inscribed on the back of his portrait, Clare finally solves "the
Riddle nature could not prove": he now understands that Nature, not
Mary Joyce, was his true beloved, and he her husband. Dying, he
leaves her a widow:
Bard of the fallow field
And the green meadow
Where the sweet birds build,
Nature thy widow....
Bard o' the mossy shed,
Live on for ages:
Daisies bloom by thy bed
And live in thy pages.
There are no poems surviving from 1852 to 1859, though in 1860 Clare
began to write again, chiefly trifles. His mind was failing,
perhaps from strokes; it was a stroke that killed him in 1864. A
letter survives from 1860, which he wrote in answer to a man who
had inquired at the asylum about his well-being:
Dear Sir
I am in a Madhouse and quite forget your Name or who you are--you
must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of and why
I am shut up I don't know--I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
John Clare
"This is a voice," comments Bate, "not of madness but of quiet
despair." But it is not really the voice of sanity, either; it
speaks from an Archimedean point quite outside the social world.
(Earlier Clare was able, and had permission, to walk into town, buy
tobacco, sit and talk to villagers--to live at a closer proximity
to human beings. By 1860, his powers had failed, and he would often
sit vacantly in his chair at the asylum. The tone of the letter is
as much vacant as despairing.)
Bate closes his narrative of the life with another of Clare's
self-epitaphs, this one from a late poem called "The Peasant
Poet":
A silent man in life's affairs
A thinker from a boy,
A Peasant in his daily cares
The Poet in his joy.
The thinking of the naturalist, the daily cares of the laborer, and
the joy of vision remained enduring co-presences in the poet's
mind.
It is useful, especially for the American reader, to absorb the
biography of Clare along with the poems. Bate evokes the ravages of
enclosure, the horrors of parish relief, the desperate unemployment
of seasonal laborers, the dank conditions of rural cottages, the
plague of tuberculosis that killed so many of the poor, the
difficulties encountered by any laborer--even one of genius--in
placing his work before the public eye, the landscapes in which
Clare lived, the folk customs that he commemorates. The reader is
deftly carried along into Clare's nineteenth-century
environments--literary London, asylums for the insane, the
servants' quarters in wealthy houses. And Bate's appraisals of the
poems are vigorous, fair, and well-phrased. They cannot go very
deep--this being a biography--but they are on the whole accurate
and pointed. The textual explanations in the appendix to the
biography cannot explain or justify all the editorial choices made,
and purists may well prefer the earlier, unmodernized Penguin
Selected Poetry. But Bate's biography and Selected Poetry, aimed at
"readers new to Clare," ought to attract many to the poet and his
inexhaustible poems. Clare was a very lovable man, who honored his
parents, loved his children and saw to their education, and valued
his home, his friends, and his books. He deserved better than the
wretchedness that marred his life and isolated him from others.
That he could remember and grasp joy, even in "the vast shipwreck
of [his] life's esteems," testifies to the emotional tenacity of
his inner light.
By Helen Vendler

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-the Greeks and us - the Greeks and us

#特里斯坦与伊索尔德##为爱而失去的世界#尽管他们的关系是他们眼中惟一的价值，它仍然是一种折磨，因为他们的性欲只是他们真正激情的象征性表达，而这种激情向往着两个灵魂合为一体，只要他们还有身体，这种圆满的境界就不可能达到，所以他们最终的目的是死在对方的怀抱里。
如果唐璜英俊或者丑陋，女人们在他动手前就已经对他有好恶之情，这样他的勾引就不会是绝对纯粹的意志胜利。因为，关键在于他的牺牲品应该对他没有自发的感情，除非他决定去挑逗她们。反之亦然，对他而言重要的不是她的外表如何，而仅仅是因为她是所有女人中的一员；他对老丑的女人和年轻美女一视同仁。
#算术上的原因#这个人决心去做世界上所有女人的第一个情人，而某个女孩碰巧是他无穷无尽的序列中的下一个整数。
特里斯坦与伊索尔德受折磨，因为他们被迫做两个人，而他们渴望成为一个人；唐璜也受折磨，因为无论他勾引的女人数量有多大，它仍然是有限的，他不能停下，除非他能够达到无限。
他们的大敌都是时间：特里斯坦与伊索尔德惧怕时间，因为它有可能带来变化，而他们希望激情的时刻永远不变，所以爱情的迷药和他们境遇中无法拆除的障碍成了反抗变化的保障；唐璜惧怕它，因为它有可能带来重复，而他希望每个时刻都是绝对新奇的。
两个神话都是基督教想象的疾病。每当一对夫妻因为不能互相扮演对方心目中的神圣形象而离婚的时候，当他们不能忍受回想自己爱过一个并不比他们更好的真实的人的时候，他们都中了特里斯坦神话的符咒。在现实中与这两个神话形式最接近的例子都不可能是异性恋，特里斯坦与伊索尔德会是一对女同，而唐璜则是鸡奸者。
这两个神话都依靠基督教，也就是说，它们只可能在这样一个社会中被发明出来，这个社会里的人被教导去相信：a.每一个个人对上帝来说都具有独特和永恒的价值，不论他在世界上的社会性的重要程度如何。b.自我对上帝的献身是自由选择的行动，是一种由无限热诚造就的无关情绪的绝对承诺。c.一个人必须既不让自己受暂时时刻的统治也不企图超越它，而是让自己对它负责，把时间变成历史。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第125页 - 奥登：《牛津轻体诗选》导言

在任何创造性的艺术家的作品背后，都有三个主要的愿望：，制造不某种东西的愿望；感知某种东西的愿望（在理性的外部世界里或是在感觉的内部世界）；还有跟别人交流这些感知的愿望。在制造东西方面没有兴趣和才能的人，也就是说在一种特殊的艺术媒介里没有一技之长的人，不会成为艺术家，他们外出聚餐，他们在街角闲聊，他们在咖啡馆里大发议论，对交流没有兴趣的人也不会成为艺术家，他们成为神秘主义者或疯子。制造某种东西的愿望也许永远是艺术家自己能意识到的最费心思的事情，它是独立于时间之外的一个常量，真正发生变化的是他的媒介，他对口语和书面语的态度，她感兴趣或有能力感知的事，他想要与之交流的观众。一个社会的同质性越强，艺术家与他的时代的日常生活的关系就越密切，它就越容易传达自己的感受，但他也就越难做出诚实公正的观察，难以摆脱自己时代的传统观念所造成的偏见。一个社会越不稳定，艺术家与社会脱离的越厉害，他观察得就越清楚，但他向别人传达所见的难度就越大。随着旧的社群的解体，艺术家们会陷入对自己的情感的研究，而且跟别的艺术家们引为同道，他们变得内省，晦涩并自视甚高。作为最伟大的浪漫派诗人，华兹华斯，的例子很有启发意义。虽然他声称自己要用真正被人们使用的语言写作(尤其指威斯特摩兰的农民的语言），但他做的并不总是很成功，而且在他最好的作品里（颂歌和《序曲》），他的词藻总是远离口语的诗歌语言。《序曲》的副题是”一个诗人的成长“，这很能说明问题。华兹华斯早年曾经有过对无生命的自然的一次或一系列的强烈体验，他以自己后来全部的诗歌生涯来描绘他们。实际上他对农村劳动者本身并不感兴趣，对其他人也是如此，除非它们有助于解释他的幻想以及他跟这种幻象的关系。现在诗人的问题（也是当今所有其他人的问题）在于如何找到或建立一个真正的社群，让每个人都能在其中找到受尊重的位置，并感到如鱼得水。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第100页 - 围绕霍斯曼的一首诗

正如艾略特所说，以最适当的方式跟诗人相联系的过去，既是暂时的也是永恒的。首先，它是人类的可能性的宝库。它提供一个维度，我们在其中注视着人类设想出来的、还会被再度构想出来的形形色色的卓越和堕落的类型，同时也被它们反照。诗人需要让鲜活的过去成为他不带褊狭地关照现在的工具，成为他用更少的话说出更多内涵的工具；他一定希望拥有圆通的技巧和才能，让过去的历史对他的诗预设的读者有所助益。正如我的朋友约翰·西亚迪（John Ciardi）曾经说的，”庞培废墟迟早是每个人的故乡”。我想补充一点，对每个诗人来说，不管他作为批评家还是辩论家会怎么发言，庞培的废墟仍然是想象的城市里异常繁忙的地区。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第152页 - 吉尔·德勒兹：惠特曼

人与自然之间的关系是如此。惠特曼跟年轻的橡树们进入了一种几乎是体育运动般的观念，一种短兵相接的竞技，他既没有让自己站在它们的立场上，也没有跟它们融为一体；相反，它让某种东西在人类的身体和树木之间双向的流转，身体接收到‘树木的一些有弹性的纤维和明澈的汁液’，而树木得到了一点人的意识（”也许我们在交换。“）最终，在人与人的关系也是孤独这样。又一次，人必须发明自己跟别人的关联。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第一章，“读诗的艺术”的重点 - 第一章，“读诗的艺术”的重点

若干主要观点：
1、诗本质上是比喻性的语言，一首伟大的诗的形式本身就可以是一种修辞或比喻。四种基本的修辞：
讽喻：言此意彼，以至表达完全相反的意思；
提喻：即象征，以部分代整体；
转喻：用邻近（空间上接近）代替相似；
隐喻：把一个词所具有的通常含义转移到另一个词上；
在真正的诗里，当比喻性的语言恣意奔放并带来新鲜的意境，这种意义的生成会得到最大限度的实现。
2、语言在相当大程度上是隐蔽的修辞，无论何种修辞，只有我们对其敏感性增强的时候才会辨认出它们。
3、诗的伟大除了依靠比喻性语言的神采，还依靠认知的力量。伟大的诗人习惯了在诗歌中表现思想，或者在诗歌中思考，这两者基本没有区别。诗的力量可定义为：把思想和记忆十分紧密地融合在一起，以至于我们无法把这两个过程分开。
4、读诗的艺术的初级阶段是掌握具体诗篇中从简单到极复杂的用典。要识别和诠释典故必须依靠读者的学养与机敏。
5、用典是维系过去与后来诗篇之间的一条线索。
6、“必然性”，即不可避免的语言表达是伟大诗篇的一个至关重要的特性。
小结：什么是伟大的诗歌？答案：持续有力的用典，认知的原创性，个人的神话构建。伟大的诗歌具有一种普遍和本质的难度：是扩展我们意识的真正的模式（读诗是扩展意识的训练）。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-序（王敖） - 序（王敖）

诗歌并不提前放弃任何人，就像任何人都有权朝拜缪斯。但缪斯本人并不是个民主派，只有真正登堂入室的人才可以窥见她的真容。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第1页

想把这篇都拍下来，可是太长了……

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第33页 - 读诗的艺术

在我看来，“必然性”，即不可避免的语言表达是伟大的诗的一个至关重要的特征。但对一个读者来说，她怎么来判断一首她以前从没读过的诗是否具有真正的诗的品质呢？在你读一首诗的时候，你心里要有几个问题。它的意义是什么，这种意义是如何获得的？我能判断它有多好吗？它超越了自己的时代和诗人生活中的事件了吗，还是它现在看来仅仅是属于一个时代的作品？

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第5页 - 读诗的艺术

“事实上，英语诗歌修辞的秘密之一，可以说就是在字源上做文章，用来更新沃尔特所说的词语“更锋利的棱角。”

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第135页

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第1页 - 序

真正的诗人和批评家的共同财产是诗歌激发出的智慧，但这种智慧有不同的类型。诗人在评论自己热爱的诗人的时候最具魅力，也最给人启发。
……
农家出身的希尼在留在学校教书之前，曾经认真考虑过泰德·休斯的建议，去做一个职业的渔民，我们不知道那样一来，他是否还回去牛津讲授克莱尔。但我相信，在希尼评论克莱尔的时候，一定会想到自己有一个终身徘徊于乡野的想象的自我。
……
如果读诗算是一种艺术，并不是说诗成了艺术处理的对象，也不意味着理性的分析直接会变成艺术的创造。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第329页 - 希腊人和我们（威·休·奥登）

大约四分之三的现代文学都跟男女之爱的主题相关，并且假定恋爱是人类最重要、最宝贵的经验。我们对这种态度习以为常，以至于我们往往会忘记它的存在不早于十二世纪。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第1页 - 序

诗不是思想，但有助于我们理解思想的方式。
诗的多义性会精确地区分读者，并把他们送回自己的世界。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第1页 - 读诗的艺术

肯尼斯·勃克（Kenneth Burke）是一位深刻的修辞学家（或研究比喻性语言的学者），他区分了四种基本的修辞：讽喻(irony)、提喻(synecdoche)、转喻(metonymy) 和隐喻(metaphor)。勃克告诉我们，讽喻被人们用来表示在场和缺席的问题，因为它们可以言此意彼，甚至于表达完全相反的意思。我们听到哈姆雷特说“我谦卑地感谢你”或类似的话的时候会不寒而栗，因为这位王子毫无谦卑和感激的意思。
现在我们普遍把提喻称作“象征”(“symbol”)，因为以部分代整体的比喻性的替代也表示了未完成的状态。在此状态中，诗中的东西代表了诗外的东西。诗人们经常会更加认同几种修辞中的某一种。在美国大诗人中，罗伯特·弗罗斯特热衷于讽喻（与他在大众里的名声相反），惠特曼则是使用提喻的大师。
在转喻中，邻近代替了相似，因为任何东西只要在空间上与替代物接近，它的名称或主要的方面都足以指示它。在罗伯特·勃朗宁那首非凡的独白诗中，罗兰公子(Childe Roland) 在结尾的时候被“号角”或者喇叭所代表，他用它无畏地吹奏：“罗兰公子走向暗塔”。
隐喻严格意义上地把一个词所具有的通常的含义转移到另一个词上；正如哈特·克兰优美地写道，“有小马鬃毛的牡丹花”（peonies with pony manes ），用“牡丹花”（peonies）和“小马”（pony）的谐音加强他的隐喻。或者，仍然是克兰这位最高强度的隐喻型的诗人，他把布鲁克林桥的曲线称作它的“跳跃”，然后进一步把大桥称作竖琴和祭坛。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第317页 - 希腊人和我们

希腊文化有连续的三个中心，爱奥尼亚的沿海地区、雅典和亚历山大。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第99页

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第162页 - 写平凡的大师：菲利普·拉金

它们讲述的是悲伤的关于平凡的真理，就像他的榜样之一爱德华·托马斯的诗那样。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第175页 - 写平凡的大师：菲利普·拉金

我本想它会伴随我的余生——
我曾感觉，在城镇之外，
永远都会有田野和农庄，
在那里，乡下粗汉可以
去爬那些没被伐倒的树；
我知道会有错误的警报······
那将是逝去的英格兰，
那些林阴，草地，小径，
市政厅，雕花的唱诗台。
以后会有书来记载；它会继续留在
展览馆；但留给我们的一切
就是水泥和轮胎。
《逝去着，逝去着》

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第128页 - 《牛津轻体诗选》导言

这段起之后的几页论述了接受普遍教育的公众的兴起，造成了诗人与读者的关系的大转变。第一次了解到这种观点，因此印象很深。今天在看奥尔巴赫的《摹仿论》（百花文艺版）十九 翟米妮·拉赛特，其中560页之后也提到这种关系的变化。谈的也挺深入，且提到了读者的浅俗的原因，因为压力的急剧增加，他们没有余裕文艺风赏了。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-序（王敖） - 序（王敖）

批评是文明人的本能行为。这种本能是随着读诗的快乐开始的，与理智结合前进，目标是得到诗带来的经验和智慧。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第88页

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第1页 - 布鲁姆如何读诗

在体验崇高的过程中，我们会体悟到一种伟大，我们的回应是一种想与它认同的欲望。这样，我们将成为我们注视的东西。崇高超迈是从伟大的雄心里散发出来的品质，它也来自华兹华斯所说的一种始终关于存在的意识。
在我看来，“必然性”，即不可避免的语言表达是伟大的诗的一个至关重要的特征。但对一个读者来说，如何判断一首从未读过的诗是否具有真正的诗的品质呢？在你读一首诗的时候，心里要带着几个问题。它的意义是什么，这意义是如何获得的？我能判断它有多好吗？它超越了自己的时代和诗人的生平吗，还是它现在看来只是属于一个时代的作品？

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第45页

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-序（王敖） - 序（王敖）

如果批评家独具慧眼，就能尽快在拥挤的人群中认出那些不远万里而来，已经衣衫褴褛的王子。

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第115页 - W. H. Auden on G. K. Chesterton’s Non-Fictional Prose

I have always enjoyed Chesterton’s poetry and fiction, but I must admit that, until I started work on a selection for a publisher, it was many years since I had read any of his non-fictional prose.
The reasons for my neglect were, I think, two. Firstly, his reputation as an anti-Semite. Though he denied the charge and did, certainly, denounce Hitler’s persecution, he cannot, I fear, be completely exonerated.
“I said that a particular kind of Jew tended to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew tended to be a traitor. I say it again. Patent facts of this kind are permitted in the criticism of any other nation on the planet: it is not counted illiberal to say that a certain kind of Frenchman tends to be sensual…. I cannot see why the tyrants should not be called tyrants and the traitors traitors merely because they happen to be members of a race persecuted for other reasons and on other occasions.”
The disingenuousness of this argument is revealed by the quiet shift from the term nation. to the term race. It is always permissible to criticize a nation (including Israel), a religion (including Orthodox Judaism), or a culture, because these are the creations of human thought and will: a nation, a religion, a culture can always reform themselves, if they so choose. A man’s ethnic heritage, on the other hand, is not in his power to alter. If it were true, and there is no evidence whatsoever to suppose that it is, that certain moral defects or virtues are racially inherited, they could not become the subject for moral judgment by others.
That Chesterton should have spoken of the Jews as a race is particularly odd, since few writers of his generation denounced with greater contempt racial theories about Nordics, Anglo-Saxons, Celts, etc. I myself am inclined to put most of the blame on the influence of his brother and of Hilaire Belloc, and on the pernicious influence, both upon their generation and upon the succeeding generation of Eliot and Pound, exerted by the Action Francaise Movement. Be that as it may, it remains a regrettable blemish upon the writings of a man who was, according to the universal testimony of all who met him, an extraordinarily “decent” human being, astonishingly generous of mind and warm of heart.
My second reason for neglecting Chesterton was that I imagined him to be what he himself claimed, just a “Jolly Journalist,” a writer of weekly essays on “amusing” themes, such as What I found in my Pockets, On Lying in Bed, The Advantage Of Having One Leg, A Piece of Chalk, The Glory of Grey, Cheese and so forth.
In his generation, the Essay as a form of belles-lettres was still popular: in addition to Chesterton himself, there were a number of writers, Max Beerbohm, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, for example, whose literary reputations rested largely upon their achievements in this genre. Today tastes have changed. We can appreciate a review or a critical essay devoted to a particular book or author, we can enjoy a discussion of a specific philosophical problem or political event, but we can no longer derive any pleasure from the kind of essay which is a fantasia upon whatever chance thoughts may come into the essayist’s head.
My objection to the prose fantasia is the same as my objection to “free” verse (to which Chesterton also objected), namely, that, while excellent examples of both exist, they are the exception not the rule. All too often the result of the absence of any rules and restrictions, of a meter to which the poet must conform, of a definite subject to which the essayist must stick, is a repetitious and self-indulgent “show-off” of the writer’s personality and stylistic mannerisms.
Chesterton’s insistence upon the treadmill of weekly journalism after it ceased to be financially necessary seems to have puzzled his friends as much as it puzzles me. Thus E. C. Bentley writes:
To live in this way was his deliberate choice. There can be no doubt of that, for it was a hard life, and a much easier one lay nearby to his hand. As a writer of books, as a poet, he had an assured position, and an inexhaustible fund of ideas: the friends who desired him to make the most of his position were many. But G. K. Chesterton preferred the existence of a regular contributor to the Press, bound by iron rules as to space and time. Getting his copy to the office before it was too late was often a struggle. Having to think of a dead-line at all was always an inconvenience
Whatever Chesterton’s reasons and motives for his choice, I am quite certain it was a mistake. “A journalist,” said Karl Kraus, “is stimulated by a dead-line: he writes worse if he has time.” If this is correct, then Chesterton was not, by nature, a journalist. His best thinking and best writing are to be found, not in his short weekly essays, but in his full-length books where he could take as much time and space as he pleased. (In fact, in my selection, I took very little from his volumes of collected essays.) Oddly enough, since he so detested them, Chesterton inherited from the aesthetes of the eighties and nineties the conviction that a writer should be continuously “bright” and epigrammatic. When he is really enthralled by a subject he is brilliant, without any doubt one of the finest aphorists in English literature, but, when his imagination is not fully held he can write an exasperating parody of himself, and this is most likely to happen when he has a dead-line to meet.
It is always difficult for a man as he grows older to “keep up” with the times, to understand what the younger generation is thinking and writing well enough to criticize it intelligently; for an overworked journalist like Chesterton it is quite impossible, since he simply does not have the time to read any new book carefully enough.
He was, for example, certainly intelligent enough and, judging by his criticisms of contemporary anthropology, equipped enough, to have written a serious critical study of Freud, had he taken the time and trouble to read him properly: his few flip remarks about dreams and psycho-analysis are proof that he did not.
Chesterton’s non-fictional prose has three concerns, literature, politics and religion.
Our day has seen the emergence of two kinds of literary critic, the documentor and the cryptologist. The former with meticulous accuracy collects and publishes every unearthable fact about an author’s life, from his love-letters to his dinner invitations and laundry bills, on the assumption that any fact, however trivial, about the man may throw light upon his writings. The latter approaches his work as if it were an anonymous and immensely difficult text, written in a private language which the ordinary reader cannot hope to understand until it is deciphered for him by experts.
Both such critics will no doubt dismiss Chesterton’s literary criticism as out-of-date, inaccurate and superficial, but if one were to ask any living novelist or poet which kind of critic he would personally prefer to write about his work. I have no doubt as to the answer. Every writer knows that certain events in his life, most of them in childhood, have been of decisive importance in forming his personal imaginative world, the kinds of things he likes to think about, the qualities in human beings he particularly admires or detests. He also knows that many things which are of great importance to him as a man, are irrelevant to his imagination. In the case of a love-poem, for example, no light is thrown upon either its content or its style by discovering the identity of the poet’s beloved.
This Chesterton understands. He thought, for example, that certain aspects of Dickens’ novels are better understood if we remember that, as a child, Dickens was expected to put on public performances to amuse his father, so he informs us of this fact. On the other hand, he thought that we shall not understand the novels any better if we learn all the details about the failure of Dickens’ marriage, so he omits them. In both cases, surely, he is right.
Again, while some writers are more “difficult” than others and cannot therefore hope to reach a very wide audience, no writer thinks he needs decoding in order to be understood. On the other hand, nearly every writer who has achieved some reputation complains of being misunderstood both by the critics and the public, because they come to his work with preconceived notions of what they are going to find in it. His admirers praise him and his detractors blame him for what, to him, seem imaginary reasons. The kind of critic an author hopes for is someone who will dispel these preconceived notions so that his readers may come to his writings with fresh eyes.
At this task of clearing the air, Chesterton was unusually efficient. It is popularly believed that a man who is in earnest about something speaks earnestly and that a man who keeps making jokes is not in earnest. The belief is not ill-founded since, more often than not, this is true. But there are exceptions and, as Chesterton pointed out, Bernard Shaw was one. The public misunderstood Shaw and thought him just a clown when, in fact, he was above all things a deadly serious preacher. In the case of Browning, Chesterton shows that many of his admirers had misunderstood him by reading into his obscurer passages intellectual profundities when in fact the poet was simply indulging his love of the grotesque.
Again, he shows us that Stevenson’s defect as a narrator was not, as it had become conventional to say, an over-ornate style but an over-ascetic one, a refusal to tell the reader anything about a character that was not absolutely essential. As a rule, it is journalism and literary gossip that is responsible for such misunderstandings; occasionally, though, it can be the author himself. Kipling would certainly have described himself as a patriotic Englishman who admired above all else the military virtues. In an extremely funny essay. Chesterton convincingly demonstrated that Kipling was really a cosmopolitan with no local roots, and he quotes in proof Kipling’s own words:
If England were what England seems,
How soon we’d chuck her, but She ain’t.
A patriot loves a country because, for better or worse, it is Is. Kipling is only prepared to love England so long as England a Great Power. As for Kipling’s militarism, Chesterton says:
Kipling’s subject is not that valour which properly belongs to war, but that interdependence and efficiency which belongs quite as much to engineers, or sailors, or mules, or railway engines…. The real poetry, the “true romance” which Mr. Kipling has taught is the romance of the division of labor and the discipline of all the trades. He sings the arts of peace much more accurately than the arts of war.
Chesterton’s literary criticism abounds in such observations which, once they have been made, seem so obviously true than one cannot understand why one had not seen them for oneself. It now seems obvious to us all that Shaw, the socialist, was in no sense a democrat but was a great republican; that there are two kinds of democrat, the man who, like Scott, sees the dignity of all men, and the man who, like Dickens, sees that all men are equally interesting and varied; that Milton was really an aesthete whose greatness “does not depend upon moral earnestness or upon anything connected with morality, but upon style alone, a style rather unusually separated from its substance”; that the Elizabethan Age, however brilliant, was not “spacious,” but in literature an age of conceits, in politics an age of conspiracies. But Chesterton was the first critic to see these things. As a literary critic, therefore, I rank him very high.
For various reasons I selected very little from his writings on historical and political subjects. Chesterton was not himself an historian, but he had both the gift and the position to make known to the general public the views of historians, like Belloc, who were challenging the Whig version of English History and the humanists’ version of cultural history. It must be difficult for anyone under forty to realize how taken for granted both of these were, even when I was a boy. Our school textbooks taught us that, once the papist-inclined and would-be tyrants, the Stuarts, had been got rid of, and the Protestant Succession assured, the road to Freedom, Democracy and Progress lay wide open; they also taught us that the civilization which had ended with the fall of the Roman Empire was re-born in the sixteenth century, between which dates lay twelve centuries of barbarism, superstition and fanaticism.
If today every informed person knows both accounts to be untrue, that the political result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was to hand over the government of the country to a small group of plutocrats, a state of affairs which certainly persisted until 1914, perhaps even until 1939, and that, whatever the Renaissance and the Reformation might signify, it was not a revolt of reason against fanaticism — on the contrary, it might be more fairly described as a revolt against the over-cultivation of logic by the late Middle Ages — Chesterton is not the least among those persons who are responsible for this change of view. The literary problem about any controversial writing is that, once it has won its battle, its interest to the average reader is apt to decline. Controversy always involves polemical exaggeration and it is this of which, once we have forgotten the exaggerations of the other side, we shall be most aware and critical.
Thus, Chesterton’s insistence, necessary at the time, upon all that was good in the twelfth century, his glossing over of all that was bad, seems today a romantic day-dream. Similarly, one is unconvinced by Belloc’s thesis in The Servile State, that if, when the monasteries were dissolved, the Crown had taken their revenues instead of allowing them to fall into the hands of a few of its subjects, the Crown would have used its power, not only to keep these few in order, but also for the benefit of the common people. The history of countries like France where the Crown remained stronger than the nobility gives no warrant for such optimism. Absolute monarchs who are anxious to win glory are much more likely 4 to waste the substance of their country in wars of conquest than plutocrats who are only interested in making money.
Chesterton’s negative criticisms of modern society, his distrust of bigness, big business, big shops, his alarm at the consequences of undirected and uncontrolled technological development, are oven more valid today than in his own. His positive political beliefs, that a good society would be a society of small property-owners, most of them living on the land, attractive as they sound, seem to me open to the same objection that he brings against the political ideas of the Americans and the French in the eighteenth century: “Theirs was a great ideal; but no modern state is small enough to achieve anything so great.” In the twentieth century, the England he wanted would pre-suppose the strictest control of the birth-rate, a policy which both his temperament and his religion forbade him to recommend.
On the subject of international politics, Chesterton was, to put it mildly, unreliable. He seems to have believed that, in political life, there is a direct relation between Faith and Morals: a Catholic State, holding the true faith, will behave better politically than a Protestant State. France, Austria, Poland were to be trusted: Prussia was not. It so happened that, in his early manhood, the greatest threat to world peace lay, as he believed, in Prussian militarism. After its defeat in 1918, he continued to cling to his old belief so that, when Hitler came to power in 1933, he misread this as a Prussian phenomenon.
In fact, aside from the economic conditions which enabled it to succeed, the National Socialist Movement was essentially the revenge of Catholic Bavaria and Austria for their previous subordination to Protestant Bismarckian Prussia. It was not an accident that Hitler was a lapsed Catholic. The nationalism of the German-speaking minority in the Hapsburg Empire had always been racist, and the hot-bed of anti-Semitism was Vienna not Berlin. Hitler himself hated the Prussian Junkers and was planning, if he won the war, to liquidate them all.
Chesterton was brought up a Unitarian, became an Anglican and finally, in 1922, was converted to Roman Catholicism. Today, reading such a book as Heretics, published in 1905, one is surprised that he was not converted earlier.
If his criticisms of Protestantism are not very interesting, this is not his fault. It was a period when Protestant theology (and, perhaps, Catholic too) was at a low ebb, Kierkegaard had not been re-discovered and Karl Barth had not yet been translated. Small fry like Dean Inge and the ineffable Bishop Barnes were too easy game for a mind of his caliber. Where he is at his best is in exposing the hidden dogmas of anthropologists, psychologists and their ilk who claim to be purely objective and “scientific.” Nobody has written more intelligently and sympathetically about mythology or polytheism.
Critical Judgment and Personal Taste are different kinds of evaluation which always overlap but seldom coincide exactly. On the whole and in the long run, Critical Judgment is a public, matter; we agree as to what we consider artistic virtues and artistic defects. Our personal tastes, however, differ. For each of us, them are writers whom we enjoy reading, despite their defects, and others who, for all their virtues, give us little pleasure. In order for us to find a writer “sympathetic,” there must be some kinship between his imaginative preferences and our own. As Chesterton wrote:
There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about.
This is equally true of every reader’s mind. Our personal patterns, too, unlike our scale of critical values, which we need much time and experience to arrive at, are formed quite early in life, probably before the age of ten.
In “The Ethics of Elfland” Chesterton tells us how his own pattern was derived from fairy stories. If I can always enjoy reading him, even at his silliest, I sure the reason is that many elements in my own pattern are derived from the same source. (There is one gulf between us: Chesterton had no feeling for or understanding of music.) There are, I know, because I have met them, persons to whom Grimm and Andersen mean little or nothing: Chesterton will not be for them.

《读诗的艺术》的笔记-第135页 - 布罗茨基的随笔（约·马·库切）

“要不惜一切代价避免赋予自己受害者的地位。”（布罗茨基）