domingo, 26 de diciembre de 2021
miércoles, 15 de diciembre de 2021
4. Literatura inglesa del siglo XIX
Terminamos,
con la unidad 4, nuestras lecciones presenciales sobre literatura
inglesa. Sigue la literatura inglesa en la Sección B (no presencial), unidad 6: literatura inglesa del siglo XX.
Algunos de los
manuales recomendados, pueden encontrarse en la web en PDF. Aquí hay
dos de ellos:
PDF
(The Short Oxford History of English
Literature)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9a3FSxKl6ZlV0dkUkJSWHR0dEU/view?usp=drivesdk
(M Alexander, A History of English Literature)
—pero es más que recomendable que compréis
manuales
y los tengáis para uso vuestro. La literatura norteamericana no está
incluida en estos manuales; se estudia en otros manuales, que
tenéis recomendados en el programa.
En el
blog iré poniendo materiales
adicionales, pero como pregunta de
tema para examen
entrarán únicamente los principales autores que aprarecen destacados en
el
programa, en negrita. Alguna pregunta corta sí que puede caer
sobre
autores del siglo XX, así como
traducción/comentario.
H. G. WELLS
(1866-1946)
_____. The Time
Machine.
Novel. 1895.
_____. The Island
of Doctor Moreau.
Novel. 1896.
_____. The Invisible Man. Novel.
1897.
_____. The War of
the Worlds.
SF novel. Serialized 1897.
_____. The First Men in the Moon.
Novel. 1901.
_____. The Food of the Gods.
Novel. 1904.
_____. Kipps. Novel. 1905.
_____. The War in the Air.
Novel. 1908.
_____. Ann
Veronica. Novel.
1909.
_____. Tono-Bungay.
Novel.
1909.
_____. A Short History of the World.
1922.
_____. The Shape
of Things to Come. New
York: Macmillan, 1935.
_____. The Mind
at the End of Its
Tether. 1945.
Herbert George Wells, b. lower middle class, Bromley;
British
man of letters, science fiction and realist fiction writer, reviewer
and man of
letters, and leading socialist intellectual; began as working class
teacher, married
cousin Isabel, divorce, married pupil Amy Catherine a.k.a. "Jane", a
wife tolerant of his sexual freedom, mother of 2 sons, Gip and Frank;
lover of novelist
Dorothy Richardson, of young Rosamund Bland; of novelist Violet Hunt;
had 1 illegitimate daughter, Anna Jane, with young
lover and 'New Woman' Amber Reeves, later Amber Blanco White; lover of young writer Rebecca West, had a
son by
her, Anthony West; lover of 'New Women' like countess Elizabeth von
Arnim,
Odette Keun, and Russian spy Baroness Moura Budberg; had very
many
other minor sexual affairs; public scandal
with
suicidal lover Hedwig Verena; apostle of free love and cult of
progress; Leninist
apologist, internationalist, linked early on to Fabian Socialism and later to League of
Nations
committees, travelled in Russia, France, Switzerland, Spain and the
USA, world-famous
man of letters and progressive international intellectual; Ph.D. U of
London 1943.
Profetas de la Ciencia Ficción: H.
G. Wells
Unos
apuntes sobre la obra de H.G.
Wells
H.G.
Wells: Una película sobre su vida. También un
documental biográfico.
Y aquí una
película "retrofuturista" basada en su novela Things
to Come.
En Mind
at the End of its Tether,
H. G. Wells reflexiona, al final de su vida, sobre la naturaleza y
límites de las ilusiones humanas como guías para la acción, y concluye
con un escepticismo desolador ante la muerte de las ilusiones que
sustentan el mundo en que vivimos—que tiene de ilusión colectiva más de
lo que solemos sospechar.
___________________
El 13 de diciembre seguiremos viendo escritores británicos del XIX: Tennyson, Hopkins y Wilde. A continuación, con H.G. Wells terminamos el tema 4 y volvemos atrás en el tiempo para tratar los comienzos de la literatura norteamericana.
Otros autores significativos de la época victoriana:
Thomas Carlyle - Past and
Present, The French Revolution
Matthew Arnold - Culture
and Anarchy
William Makepeace Thackeray
- Vanity Fair, Esmond,
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Robert Browning - Dramatic
Lyrics.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning- Sonnets from the Portuguese
Christina Rossetti - "Goblin Market"
Algernon Charles Swinburne - Poems
and Ballads, Chastelard
Thomas Hardy - Far from the
Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure,
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure
Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
Rudyard Kipling - Kim, The Jungle Book
_____________________________
OSCAR
WILDE
(1854-1900)
Anglo-Irish writer and dandy, b. Dublin, st.
Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford; l. London;
journalist, poet, prose writer and dramatist, brilliant
conversationalist and socialite, m. Constance Lloyd 1884 (d. 1898);
loved Lord Alfred Douglas; imprisoned for homosexuality 1895-97; d.
Paris.
_____. Poems. 1881.
_____. The Duchess of Padua.
Tragedy. 1883.
_____. The Happy
Prince and Other
Tales. 1888.
_____. The
Picture of Dorian Gray.
Novel. 1890.
_____. Intentions.
Essays.
1891.
_____. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
and Other Stories.
_____. A House of Pomegranates.
Stories. 1891.
_____. Lady Windermere's Fan.
Drama. 1892.
_____. Salomé. Drama. 1892.
_____. A Woman of No Importance. Drama.
1893.
_____. The Sphinx. Poem. 1894.
_____. Poems in Prose. 1894.
_____. An Ideal Husband.
Drama. 1895.
_____. The Importance of Being
Earnest. Comedy. 1895.
_____. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. 1898.
_____. Epistola:
In carcere et
vinculis / De Profundis. 1891. Memoir/letter to Lord
Alfred Douglas.
1896.
___________
- Una
introducción a Oscar Wilde (Some
notes on Oscar Wilde).
- Una conferencia de
Fernando Galván sobre Oscar Wilde.
- A
video tutorial on The Importance of Being Earnest.
_____________
NIVEL
AVANZADO: Oscar Wilde
Una buena película reciente sobre Wilde:
The
Happy Prince / La importancia de llamarse Oscar Wilde.
Y otra más antigua:
_____________
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
(1844-1889)
_____. "The Wreck of the Deutschland."
_____. "Pied Beauty."
_____. "The Kingfisher."
_____. "The Windhover."
_____. "God's Grandeur".
_____. "Carrion Comfort."
_____. "No Worst, There is None."
_____. "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire...."
All these in:
_____. Poems. Ed. Robert
Bridges. 1918.
Victorian poet, st. Oxford, converted to Catholicism after Newman,
became Jesuit priest, repressed homosexual, inner torments and acute
health problems, burnt early poems, spiritual poems were published
posthumously by Robert Bridges; proto-Modernist stylist, cultivated
'sprung rhythm'.
— Una
introducción a Hopkins.
___________
Nivel
AVANZADO:
-
Dos
conferencias sobre Gerard Manley Hopkins.
-
Una mesa redonda sobre Gerard
Manley Hopkins.
_______________
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)
Tennyson, Alfred (Lord). Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. 1830.
_____. "The
Lady of Shalott." Poem. 1832, 1842.
_____. "Morte d'Arthur." Written 1833-38. In Poems. 1842.
_____. "Ulysses." Poem.
Written 1833, pub. in Poems. 1842.
_____. Poems. 1842
(including material from 1830 and 1832).
_____. The Princess. Poem.
1847.
_____. In
Memoriam A. H. H.
Poem. 1850.
_____. "Ode" on the Death of Wellington. 1852.
_____. "The Charge of the Light
Brigade." Poem. 1854.
_____. Maud, and other Poems. 1855.
_____. The Idylls
of the King. Poems.
1859-1885.
_____. Enoch Arden etc. Poems.
Moxon, 1864.
_____. The Holy Grail and Other
Poems. 1869.
_____. Queen Mary. Drama.
1875.
_____. Harold: A Drama. 1876.
_____. Ballads and Other Poems.
1880.
_____. The Falcon. 1884.
_____. The Cup. 1884.
_____. Becket. Drama. 1884.
_____. The Works of Alfred Tennyson,
Poet Laureate. 1884.
_____. Tiresias, and Other Poems. 1885.
_____. Demeter and other Poems.
1889.
______
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Una
panorámica sobre su obra.
Canción de Loreena McKennitt sobre uno de los poemas artúricos de
Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174626
_________
Tennyson: NIVEL AVANZADO
_____________
Lo mejor del teatro inglés victoriano
son, posiblemente, las operetas cómicas de Gilbert &
Sullivan. Aquí una de ellas, Patience.
O quizá una película musical sobre otra opereta, The Pirates of Penzance. Se pueden oír
todas las operetas de Gilbert&Sullivan en YouTube.
____________________
Nuestros siguientes autores para esta última semana de noviembre son, de tres en tres:
- los poetas románticos Wordsworth, Keats y Byron
- los novelistas Mary Shelley, Dickens y George Eliot.
GEORGE ELIOT
(1819-1880)
George
Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann [later Marian] Evans, English
novelist, b. Warwickshire; quarrelled with her father on her leaving
the Church; self-taught in Continental writing and philosophy; went
through intellectual/erotic infatuations and love affairs with
intellectual men, some married;
assistant ed. of the Westminster Review 1851; lived with G. H.
Lewes c.
1854-1878; successful realist novelist and skeptic moralist; first
ostracised as scandalous and
then successful socialite; married young admirer John Walter Cross 1880
and died; left no children.
_____. trans. (unsigned). The
Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. By David Friedrich Strauss.
1846.
_____, trans. The Essence of
Christianity.
By Ludwig Feuerbach. London, 1854.
_____. Scenes of Clerical Life. Stories.
1857.
_____. Adam Bede.
Novel.
1859.
_____. The Mill on the Floss. Novel.
1860.
_____. Silas
Marner. Novel.
1861.
_____. Romola. Novel.
Serialized in the Cornhill Magazine.
1863.
_____. Felix Holt, the Radical.
Novel. 1866.
_____. Middlemarch:
A Study of
English Provincial Life. Novel. 1871/2.
_____. Daniel Deronda. Novel.
1874-76.
Apuntes
sobre George
Eliot.
Resumen de Middlemarch .
_______________________________
NIVEL AVANZADO:
George Eliot: A Scandalous Life
George
Eliot (audio at Oxford University).
A lecture by Rebecca Mead on George Eliot's
Middlemarch.
Uno de los amigos e inspiradores de George Eliot fue
Herbert Spencer. Aquí hay unanota sobre su influyente teoría de la evolución cósmica.
_______________________________
Empezaremos diciembre con Mary Shelley y Dickens.
Traed los textos a clase.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
Victorian novelist, playwright and journalist; b. near Portsmouth; run-down middle-class family, son of a clerk in the Navy pay office, father imprisoned for debt, unhappy childhood experience when forced to work as a child in a factory, apprenticed clerk, stenographer at Parliament, journalist at the Morning Chronicle, married Catherine Hogarth; had many children; in love with sister-in-law, soon dead; lover of young actress Ellen Ternan, separated from wife Catherine 1858; world success and fortune as writer of serialized novels; friend of John Forster, Wilkie Collins, etc., energetic socialite and amateur actor; travels in USA and Italy; anti-slavery advocate in America, philanthropist and social reformer, launched periodicals (Household Words, Daily Mail), popular entertainer with public reading tours of his novels, d. of heart failure.
_____. Sketches by Boz. Serialized in Old Monthly Magazine. 1836-37.
_____. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Serialized novel. 1836-37.
_____. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Novel. 1837-8.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Novel. 1838-9.
_____. The Old Curiosity Shop. Novel. Serialized in Master Humphrey's Clock. 1840-41.
_____. Barnaby Rudge. Novel. Serialized in Master Humphrey's Clock. 1841.
_____. American Notes. 1842.
_____. A Christmas Carol. 1843. (Other Christmas stories in the 40s, 50s and 60s).
_____. Martin Chuzzlewit. Novel. 1844.
_____. Pictures from Italy. Travel book. 1846.
_____. Dombey and Son. Novel. 1846-1848.
_____. David Copperfield. Novel. Serialized 1849-1850.
_____. Bleak House. Novel. Serialized 1852-1853.
_____. Hard Times. Novel. Serialized in Household Words, 1854.
_____. Little Dorrit. Novel. Serialized 1855-1857.
_____. A Tale of Two Cities. Novel. 1859.
_____. Great Expectations. Novel. Serialized 1860-1861.
_____. Our Mutual Friend. Novel. 1864-5.
_____. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Unfinished novel. 1870.
Life of Dickens —and main works—from the Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Cazamian on Dickens as a social novelist.
Charles Dickens (Victorian Values)—some notes from Stephen Coote's handbook.
_____________________________
Dickens en cine: Algunas películas
______________________________
__________________
MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851)
Mary Shelley, née Mary Godwin,
English woman of letters,
novelist and prose writer; daughter
of Mary
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; m. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1816.
_____. (Anon. pub.). Frankenstein,or, The Modern Prometheus.
Novel. 1818.
_____. Valperga. Novel.
1821.
_____. The Last
Man. Novel.
1826.
_____. The Fortunes of Perkin
Warbeck. Novel. 1830.
_____. Lodore. Novel. 1835.
_____. Essays and Letters. 1839.
_____. Rambles in Germany and Italy.
Travel book. 1844.
Ballesteros, Antonio. "Mary Shelley y Frankenstein: La creación de un mito y suproyección en la literatura fantástica victoriana." Conferencia en la Fundación Juan March.
https://www.march.es/conferencias/anteriores/voz.aspx?p1=101521&l=1
Una pequeña introducción a Mary Shelley.
Sobre Mary Shelley y Frankenstein, nos remitiremos además a este documental de la serie "Profetas de la Ciencia Ficción".
_________________________________
NIVEL AVANZADO: Mary Shelley
La novela de Mary Shelley The Last Man, sobre una mortífera pandemia global que acaba con la humanidad, es modelo y precedente de toda una "plaga" de literatura pandémica y apocalíptica. En la Unidad 6 podéis leer sobre Jack London y "La Peste Escarlata." Con respecto a la actual pandemia del coronavirus, sin embargo, conviene tener en cuenta otros factores culturales e históricos. Véase por ejemplo este vídeo sobre control global y pandemia, que es de 2014—no de 2020. Esto también es, a su manera, literatura de anticipación.
Otra ficción reciente que recreaba un evento apocalíptico era The Road, de Cormac McCarthy. Aquí una nota sobre la novela, y la película.
____________________________________________
Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN - A film directed by Kenneth Branagh (1994).
_____________________________
LORD BYRON
(George Gordon,
1788-1824)
George
Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, English romantic poet, b. London,
member of the Chamber of Lords; abandoned England 1816, travels in
Europe; Italy and Greece; libertine with innumerable erotic affairs, fascinated
and scandalized his social circle; friend of Shelley, fought vs. Turks
on Greek side pro independence, d. Missolunghi, Greece; individualist,
skeptic, hedonist, satirist of social conventions.
_____.
Hours
of Idleness.
Poems.
_____. Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage.
1812-1818.
_____. The Giaour. Verse
romance. 1813.
_____. The Corsair. Verse
romance. 1814.
_____. The Bride of Abydos.
Verse romance.
_____. "Darkness." Poem.
1816.
_____. Domestic Pieces. 1816.
_____. "Prometheus."
Poem.
1816.
_____. Manfred: A
Dramatic
Poem. 1817.
_____. Beppo. Verse
romance.
1818.
_____. Mazeppa. 1819.
_____. Don Juan,
an Epic Satire.
Satirical epic. 1818-23, pub. 1919-24.
_____. Cain. Tragedy. 1821.
_____. "The Vision of Judgment." Poem. 1822.
_____. "January 22nd. Missolonghi: On This Day I Complete my Thirty
Sixth Year." Poem. 1824.
Lord
Byron and his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (BBC).
________________________________
NIVEL AVANZADO: Sobre la hija de Byron, Ada:
- Ada Lovelace, la primera programadora
________________________________
Nuestro siguientes autores serán dos poetas románticos, Wordsworth y Keats. Leeremos en clase de los dos, así que traed los textos.
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
English romantic poet; modest middle class
family, apprenticed and
licensed as apothecary 1816, met Leigh Hunt and
Shelley, travelled to the Lakes, Scotland and Ireland with Charles
Armitage Brown and settled with him 1817; in love with Fanny Brawne;
financial problems, suffered from tuberculosis, attacked by Lockhart
and other
reviewers; travelled to Italy, d. Rome. BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN
KEATS.
_____.
Poems
by John Keats.
London: Ollier, 1817.
_____. Endymion.
1818.
_____. "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream." Fragmentary epic poem. 1819,
pub. 1857.
_____. "Ode to Autumn." pub. 1820 with:
_____. "Ode on Melancholy."
_____. "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
_____. "Ode to a Nightingale."
_____. Lamia, Isabella, The
Eve of
St. Agnes, and Other Poems. 1820.
_____. The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821.
_______. "Why Did I Laugh Tonight?" 1819, pub. 1848.
_____________________
John
Keats (NIVEL AVANZADO)
______________________
NIVEL AVANZADO: Otros poetas románticos.
KUBLA KHAN —un célebre poema visionario de Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Y de Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind".
______________________
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)
English
romantic
poet; country middle-class childhood in
Cumbria, school with future wife Mary Hutchinson; orphaned as a boy,
left
Cambridge; fought for inheritance; radical youth, travelled to France
during
Revolution, 1 illegitimate secret child there, returned to England,
disillusioned
with Terror, depressed by personal and historical turmoils; friends and
german
travels with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; later friends with Walter Scott,
De
Quincey and Sir George Beaumont; married and lived in Grasmere, Lake
District,
with sister Dorothy and wife Mary (1802); 5 children with Mary, lost 2
children;
official position at the post office administration; later lived in the
South
and turned conservative Victorian sage, retired
in the Lake District, Ambleside; received legacies and help for his
poetry, pensioned
in 1842, then Poet Laureate 1843. Known for his poetry of the emotions,
of memories and of intensely-lived experience, expressed in a simpler
language reacting against 18th-c. poetic diction.
_____. Descriptive
Sketches. 1793.
_____. Lyrical
Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems. 1800. (With some
poems by S. T. Coleridge).
_____. The Prelude. 1st version, 1799; rev. 1805; 1st pub. in 3rd rev.
version, 1850.
_____. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early
Childhood." 1802-4, pub. 1807.
_____. "Tintern Abbey."
_____. Poems. 1807. ("The Solitary Reaper")
_____. The Excursion. Poem. 1814.
_________________________
En nuestra Sección B, estamos ya en el último tema: 8. Literatura norteamericana desde 1960.
A principios de diciembre
tendréis ya en red todo el material para la sección B, temas
6-7-8.
____________________________
Con Mary Wollstonecraft cerramos el siglo XVIII; con Blake ya pasamos al XIX, y a continuación empezamos la Unidad 4 (Literatura inglesa del siglo XIX).
Primero Austen y Walter Scott—traed las lecturas—, y a continuación más poetas románticos:
Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Mary
Shelley. Luego seguirán Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Hopkins, Wilde
y Wells. Traed los textos por ese orden a clase.
Los textos van siendo
selecciones más largas de novelas, etc.; procurad asignaros (y
mantener) un horario para lecturas. La lectura sistemática con diccionario es imprescindible
para desarrollar el tipo de dominio de la lengua que puede aportar sólo
la literatura.
__________________
SECCIÓN B: En la sección B del programa, para estudio fuera de clase, vamos añadiendo ya los últimos autores del tema 8 y último—Literatura Norteamericana 1960-2000.
__________________
SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
_____, ed. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 1802-3.
_____. The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Poem. 1805.
_____. Ballads and Lyrical Pieces. 1806.
_____. Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. Poem. 1808.
_____. The Lady of the Lake. Poem. 1810.
_____. Rokeby. Poem. 1813.
_____. Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since. Novel. 1814.
_____. Guy Mannering, or, The Astrologer. Novel. 1815.
_____. The Field of Waterloo. Poem. 1815.
_____. The Antiquary. Novel. 1816.
_____. Old Mortality. Novel. 1816.
_____. Rob Roy. Novel. 1817.
_____ . The Heart of Midlothian. Novel. 1818.
_____. Tales of My Landlord: Third Series. (The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose). Novels. 1819.
_____. Ivanhoe, a Romance. Novel. 1819.
_____. The Monastery, A Romance. 1820.
_____. Kenilworth: A Romance. 1821.
_____. The Pirate. Novel. 1821.
_____. The Fortunes of Nigel. Novel. 1822.
_____. Quentin Durward. Novel. 1823.
_____. Redgauntlet, A Tale of the Eighteenth Century. Novel. 1824.
_____. Tales of the Crusaders (The Betrothed and The Talisman). 1825.
_____. Woodstock; or, The Cavalier. Novel. 1826.
Walter Scott, Scottish novelist, poet and scholar; st. law at Edinburgh U, bar 1792; m. Margaret Charlotte Charpentier 1797; successful poet, printer with James Ballantyne; contributor to Edinburgh Review; built Abbotsford mansion; promoted Tory Quarterly Review; refused Laureateship 1813; pub. historical novels anonymously as "the author of Waverley" until 1827; baronet ("Sir") 1820; bankrupt with Ballantyne 1826; struggled to pay debts; world-wide influence on historical novelists and nationalist romance writers.
Influences on Scott:
Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 1765.
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent. Novel. 1800.
Una sección de un manual de literatura sobre Walter Scott.
_____________________
Apuntes sobre The Novels of Jane Austen (and Fanny Burney)
Una conferencia sobre la época de Jane Austen de Fernando Galván, que ha sido presidente de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos (AEDEAN) y de la European Society for the Study of English (ESSE):
De Jane Austen tenemos como lectura, en las fotocopias, el principio de su novela Mansfield Park.
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)
English realist novelist; b. Steventon, near Winchester; 7th child of the parish rector; lived unmarried with her family in Steventon, also in Bath 1801-5, then Hampshire and Winchester, novelist of genteel country families, of courtship and marriage, and fine psychological ironist on character, social appearances and manners.
_____. Northanger Abbey. Written 1790s, pub. 1818.
_____. Sense and Sensibility. Novel. London, 1811.
_____. Pride and Prejudice. Novel. 1813.
_____. Mansfield Park. Novel. 1814.
_____. Emma. Novel. 1816.
_____. Persuasion. Novel. Written 1815-16, pub. 1818.
- Some notes on Jane Austen (Short Oxford History of English Literature).
- Un documental de la UNED sobre Jane Austen (ENLACE AL VIDEO)
- Y una conferencia de Fernando Galván sobre la obra de Jane Austen.
_______
- Jane Austen y Walter Scott: NIVEL AVANZADO
viernes, 8 de enero de 2021
Walt Whitman - Whoever Your Are Holding Me Now in Hand
Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.
Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?
The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.
Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air,
(For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.
Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you.
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.
For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
Therefore release me and depart on your way.
______
Este poema viene de Leaves of Grass.
martes, 29 de diciembre de 2020
Emily DICKINSON – La Recluse incandescente (DOCUMENTAIRE, 1988)
Young, Veronica, dir. Emily Dickinson. Documentary. 1988. With French subtitles. ("Emily DICKINSON – La Recluse incandescente"). YouTube (Éclair Brut) 24 April 2020.* (With Richard Sewall, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich et Joyce Carol Oates).
2020
martes, 22 de diciembre de 2020
Edgar Allan Poe, poeta irremediable
El poeta irremediable
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), el "poeta irremediable", busca una luz fatídica y misteriosa para iluminar sus portentosas experiencias y para profundizar en los abismos del alma humana.
En 1842 publicaba uno de sus poemas, en que figuraba este fragmento:
las fibras de cuyo corazón forman un laúd.
Nadie canta tan asombrosamente bien
como el ángel Israfel
y las indecisas estrellas —según dicen—
cesan en sus himnos, presas por el encanto
de su voz, enmudecidas....
...Si yo pudiera residir
donde Israfel
reside y se personifica en mí,
quizá no cantase tan singularmente bien
una melodía humana,
y una nota más intensa que ésta
volara de mi lira hasta el cielo.
En este poema se reconoce en el acto un tono y una vibración espirituales ausentes en toda la versificación americana anterior.
Poe escribió, además, otros poemas, una novela, Las aventuras de Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), y numerosos cuentos y relatos, reunidos ahora bajo el título de Historias Extraordinarias, que Baudelaire comenzó a traducir a partir de 1848, aunque los críticos americanos seguían y siguen permaneciendo indiferentes a ellas. "Es un mal escritor, que debe su popularidad a un accidente pasajero", dice Yvor Winters, comentario que sólo concierne a Poe como poeta. Sus historias no son más que relatos populares. En cuanto al hombre en sí... Dos días después de su muerte, el New York Tribune publicaba un artículo bilioso que decía: "pocos le echarán de menos, pues aunque tenía algunos lectores, contaba con pocos o con ningún amigo". En su opinión, la sociedad sólo estaba compuesta de canallas. No soportaba la contradicción. Ignoraba la delicadeza moral. En resumen, era un vulgar ambicioso, un hombre "diferente" y, por lo tanto, peligroso, en doloroso desacuerdo con su país, al que osaba juzgar y condenar.
Baudelaire presentía en Poe a un poeta de vida espiritual intensa en exceso, de una lucidez demasiado grande, para que pudiera acomodarse a "esta inmensa barbarie alumbrada con gas" que era América. En julio de 1856, los hermanos Goncourt descubrían su obra artística y declaraban: "Una literatura nueva, la literatura del siglo XX... Por fin la novela del futuro dedicada a contar más la historia de cuanto ocurre en el cerebro de la humanidad que lo que siente su corazón". Y más tarde, el francés-norteamericano Julien Green escribía unas frases que plantean de modo definitivo el caso trágico de un hombre que se sabía "poeta irremediable" en un país que negaba al poeta el derecho a profetizar.
"Me pregunto por qué su país se ha mostrado tan injusto con él. Los lectores norteamericanos le consideran morboso y a América no le gusta estar representada por tan malsano poeta. Y es rechazado con más ira todavía porque América lleva en su seno ese desequilibrio que el genio de Poe significa como una flor tenebrosa, un grandioso lirio nocturno entre los dedos de la muerte."
Edgar
A. Poe, un escritor maldito
Aun con toda su aridez, los citados datos biográficos señalan un
destino: un hombre afectado por circunstancias particulares, pero que
no logró hallar en la sociedad en que vivía las respuestas, los
valores, el contorno que le hubieran permitido reconstruirse tal como
él desearea: feliz y equilibrado, dueño de su vida y de su pensamiento.
Se percataba de ello y en toda su obra intenta explicarlo: no deleitándose
en la descripción de su infierno, sino poniendo de relieve sus
esfuerzos para salir de él.
Poe navega contra la corriente literaria de su época. Hace justicia a
Cooper y a Irving, aunque no crea en su genio, pero debate contra sus
epígonos Cooke, Coob, Southworth, Holmes e Ingraham, simples románticos
aficionados, que mezclan lo real, lo novelesco y los convencionalismos.
A las "novelas-río" de moda, Poe opone "la literatura de revista", o
semanario, cuyo éxito popular, según él, no significa, "como suponen
algunos críticos, una decadencia del gusto", sino que es "un genio de
nuestro tiempo, de una época en que los hombres sienten necesidad de
cosas breves, escuetas y bien digeridas". En este caso no se trata
simplemente de una estética de la concisión opuesta a una estética de
la incontinencia verbal, sino del papel que debe desempeñar el escritor
ante las necesidades del público.
El mundo norteamericano en erupción, creador y destructor, triturador de cuerpos y almas, hace sentir como nunca lo que la vida acarrea consigo de misterio, de desorden y de abismos aparentemente insondables. Describir y amplificar no sirve para nada e incluso perjudica y mixtifica. En lugar de dejarse arrastrar por las olas, es preciso dominarlas, explicar su poder y su pretendida fantasía. No es tarea fácil y el público se resiste a ello. A partir de aquí, lo fantástico, casi el mundo del ocultismo, los prolegómenos de la ciencia-ficción, permiten al autor expresar libremente —aunque esta libertad procura revestirse prudente y púdica de complejos simbolismos— cosas que de otra manera desencadenarían sobre él la reprobación pública y quizá la cárcel. El lector, por su parte, puede no comprender nada o fingir que no lo entiende, al propio tiempo que se divierte con la fantasía y la habilidad asombrosas del prestidigitador.
Siendo tan compleja la realidad y los medios de tener contacto con ella tan difíciles de dominar, el poeta compone "una crónica de sensaciones más que de hechos", como dice el propio Poe en Berenice, renunciando a analizar despiadadamente las sensaciones. En La esfinge, el héroe divisa un monstruo que desciende por la colina: es un insecto deslizándose sobre un cristal. Rasgo que bien pudiera ser una de las claves principales de la obra de Poe. Se le considera, además, acertadamente, como uno de los patriarcas de la novela policíaca clásica: aquella en que el autor expone un enigma aparentemente insoluble que resolverá más tarde, únicamente mediante la inteligencia y la lógica, y demostrando que, de hecho, el lector disponía, desde la exposición de los datos, de todos los elementos necesarios para para solucionarlo por sí mismo.
Su novela Doble asesinato en la calle Morgue encaja perfectamente en esta idea, si bien sus demás relatos lo confirman: Ligeia, El escarabajo de oro, La caída de la casa Usher, El corazón revelador, El gato negro, William Wilson, El descenso al Maëlstrom, La carta robada, citando a propósito los que el propio Poe señaló como mejores. Nada hay en ellos sobrenatural ni fuerzas ocultas o misteriosas al margen del espíritu y la voluntad del ser humano. El hombre es libre y su destino aparece siempre determinado por la calidad de su raciocinio. El El escarabajo de oro, el protagonista razona adecuadamente y es recompensado por el triunfo y la fortuna; en El gato negro no lo hace así y es castigado con la muerte. Poe intenta demostrar y demostrarse a la vez que el destino es un mecanismo; ahora bien, un mecanismo estropeado puede ser reparado. Con una audacia que no excluye el terror, sino que lo incluye, por sentise débil, vulnerable y desarmado. Poe se enfrenta con lo desconocido, se deja fascinar por ello y lo expresa, en consecuencia.
Se podrá argüir que se trata sólo de símbolos, pero éstos son a veces tan densos y abrumadores que el espíritu del poeta irremediablemente escapa al dominio del "racionalista irremediable" y la lógica matemática ya no basta. Entonces todo aparece blanco como en Gordon Pym. El blanco es el color del vértigo, y Poe explica en vano que es una ilusión óptica y el resultado aparente de la fusión de los demás colores cuando se mueven con mucha rapidez. También procura evadirse: en la poesía que con él deja de ser discurso coherente, versificación y juego lírico, para convertirse en ejecutoria de la locura; evasión en el alcohol y finalmente en aquella muerte tan evocada. Poe muere vencido, o quizá debiera decirse, más exactamente, reducido a la impotencia, aunque sin haber cedido: como lo había escrito simbólicamente en Gordon Pym, convertido en libro de lectura para jóvenes a consecuencia—como en el Gulliver de Swift—de un malentendido:
Podría considerarse a Poe como un "caso" literario y patológico, si fuera el único en navegar en esta misteriosa embarcación arrastrada por una misteriosa corriente hacia la inmensa figura blanca que no sabemos si representa a Dios o a algún abominable cero matemático. Pero Poe tenía otros compañeros: prácticamente, todos los grandes escritores de su época.
martes, 15 de diciembre de 2020
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hopkins, Gerard
Manley (1844-89). In 1863 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he
wrote much poetry, including 'Heaven-Haven' and 'The Habit of
Perfection'. He came under the influence of the Oxford Movement and
Newman, and in 1866 was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In
1868 he resolved to become a Jesuit and symbolically burned his poems,
though he sent some copies to his friend Bridges for safekeeping. He
was professor of rhetoric at Roehampton 1873-4, then studied theology
at St Beuno's in North Wales (1874-77), where he also learned Welsh.
A new phase of creativity began in 1876. Inspired by the loss of the Deutschland
in December 1875, which had among its passengers five Franciscan nuns
exiled for their faith, Hopkins wrote his most ambitious poem, 'The
Wreck of the Deutschland'. In 1877 he composed some of his best-known
poems, including 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty'. After ordination he
was sent to Chesterfield, then London, then Oxford, where he wrote
'Henry Purcell'. Work in various industrial parishes followed,
including an exhausting spell in Liverpool (1880-1) where he was
oppressed by a sense of his own failure as a preacher.
Apart from work in anthologies (including Poets . . . of the Century, 1893, and Bridges's own The Spirit of Man, 1916), nothing was published until 1918, when Bridges produced his Poems; Bridges had judged the public not ready to receive Hopkins's 'oddity', but initial bewilderment was followed by steadily rising admiration. His poems, letters, and journals reflect his sense of vocation (sometimes conflicting) as priest and poet, his technical interest in prosody, and his search for a unifying sacramental view of creation. His concepts of 'inscape', 'instress' and 'sprung rhythm' have given rise to a large body of aesthetic theory. By 'inscape' he seems to have meant 'the individual or essential quality of the thing'; 'instress' refers to the energy which sustains an inscape, and flows into the mind of the observer. Both words were coined by Hopkins. 'Sprung rhythm' he considered less an innovation than a return to the rhythms of speech and of earlier forms of verse. But the great (though delayed) impact of Hopkins's work may be seen less in terms of technical innovation than as a renewal of poetic energy, seriousness, and originality, after a period marked by much undistinguished and derivative verse.
______________
Sprung rhythm (or 'abrupt rhythm'), a term invented by G. M. Hopkins to describe his own idiosyncratic poetic metre, as opposed to normal 'running' rhythm, the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Hopkins maintained that sprung rhythm existed, unrecognized, in Old English poetry and in Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton (notably in Samson Agonistes). It is distinguished by a metrical foot consisting of a varying number of syllables. The extra, 'slack' syllables added to the established patterns are called 'outriders' or 'hangers'. Hopkins demonstrated the natural occurrence of this rhythm in English by pointing out that many nursery rhymes employed it, e.g.
Díng, Dóng, Béll,
Pússy's in the wéll
He felt strongly that poetry should be read aloud, but seems to have felt that the words themselves were not enough to suggest the intended rhythms, and frequently added various diacritical markings. Some critics have suggested that sprung rhythm is not a poetic metre at all, properly speaking, merely Hopkins's attempt to force his own personal rhythm into an existing pattern, or recognizable variation of one, and that his sprung rhythm is in fact closer to some kinds of free verse or polyphonic prose.
__________________
Short Oxford History of English Literature
("High Victorian Literature"):
To Dickens and other Victorian progressives, the assertiveness of the Oxford Movement and the magnetism of the revived Roman Church seemed to be dangerous examples of 'Ecclesiastical Dandyism', an undoing of national history and a self-indulgent withdrawal from more urgent concerns. The career of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) might certainly have suggested the impropriety of such a withdrawal had the nature of his twin vocations to the Jesuit priesthood and to poetry been more widely known to his contemporaries. His conversion to Roman Catholicism at Oxford, and his decision to enter the Society of Jesus in 1868, efectively cut him off from the mainstream of contemporary English life. The failure of his Jesuit superiors to recognize and encourage his idiosyncratic poetic talent also severed him from the body of prospective readers to which he most earnestly sought to appeal. He burned much of his early work on his ordination and took up poetry again only in 1875 with the startingly radical 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', a poem which the editor of the Jesuit periodical, The Month, decided that he 'dared not print'. No representative edition of Hopkins's poetry appeared until 1918.
Hopkins was fortunate in the poet-friends with whom he corresponded, Richard Watson Dixon and Robert Bridges (1844-1930), the latter his literary executor and editor. These non-Jesuit correspondents were the recipients of the theories that he attempted to articulate and of the often extraordinary poems that were developed in relation to these experimental ideas. After 1918 his work found the wide receptive audience which it had earlier been denied, but Hopkins's experiments, like the culture from which they emerge, remain essentially of the nineteenth century. As his Journals reveal, he observed nature in painstaking detail, patiently examining flowers and leaves, intently noting the effects of light and shade, and delighting in gradations of texture and colour. Given the stringency of his Jesuit surroundings, his immediate culture may have been of aesthetic deprivation, but his habits of observation and recording had been long acquired. His attention to the exactness of things is indeed akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (if not to Pre-Raphaelite poetry) and his methods of analysis indicate a scrupulous Ruskinian apprenticeship. Hopkins's intellectual disciplines certainly benefited from his study of theology, and in particular from his somewhat eccentric (given the prejudices of his teachers) pleasure in the thought of the thirteenth-century philosopher Duns Scotus ('who of all men most sways my spirits to peace'). His poetry may have been far too idiosyncratic to appeal to the somewhat saccharine tastes of his contemporary co-religionists, but his structures derive from highly disciplined and often traditional ways of thinking, seeing, translating, and writing.
Most of Hopkins's surviving poems are distinctly God-centred. His is a God who resolves contradictions as the fount of all that is and as the Creator who draws all the Strands of Creation back to himself. Created nature is in itself immensely precious, for the glory and wonder of God is implicit in it. In 'Pied Beauty' Hopkins celebrates harmonized oppositions, dapples and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange' because they express the energy and vitality of the visible world, a world held together by a divine force that constantly regenerates it. Undoing, desolation, and the 'problem of pain' are however never eliminated from his most searching poems. At times it is humankind which mars the integrity of beauty by unfeelingly trampling 'the growing green', by felling the 'especial' sweetness of a line of poplars, or by caging skylarks, but Hopkins is never simply or naïvely 'green'. His poems also explore the presence of violence in the realm of the parahuman. Despite the wonder of it, the windhover's ecstatic swoop is none the less predatorial, breaking lines and straining words as it falls.
dom of daylights dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend; the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-beak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
The windhover's beauty is 'brute', yet its 'brutality' is of the essence of its animal perfection. Hopkins's poem gasps at the wonder of a creature whose free movement and concentrated strength stir an awesome sense of the presence of the Creator-Redeemer (its subtitle directs it 'To Christ our Lord'). Elsewhere in his work, most notably in the complex theological framework of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and the parallel poem 'The Loss of the Eurydice', Hopkins ponders the mystery of human suffering by forging parallels with a paradoxical Christ, the Man of Sorrows, and the Suffering Servant who is, at the same time, the Divine Judge and the Merciful Redeemer. He pulls dissolution into resolution by seeing patterns, not simply in the seasons or in the forms of nature, but also in religious imagery, in the observances of the Christian calendar, and in the ultimate meaning of the universe. The very intricacy of his verse is an attempt to express and recvord something of the multifariousness of the visible and aural world. The very 'difficulty' and the contortion of his poetry, its intellectual leaps and its violent 'metaphysical' yoking together of images, offer a momentary statis and a fusion of divergent insights and impressions. Hopkins found order where other Victorians saw anarchy; he recognized purpose where many of his contemporaries begain to despair over what they presumed was an increasingly meaningless fragmentation. Even in his dark, straining, disappointing, despairing last sonnets ('No worst, there is none', 'To seem the stranger lies my lot', I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day', 'Patience, hard thing!', 'My own heart let me have more pity on') there still remains the conviction that somehow a barely comprehended God comprehends all things.
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Este blog fue utilizado como material auxiliar para una asignatura del grado de Lenguas Modernas en la Universidad de Zaragoza, asignatur...
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