Calling from Diffusion: Hermeneutics of the PromenadeBased on four Nielson Lectures delivered at Smith College, this book examines a series of "promenade poems," lyrics that follow a poetic speaker moving through a landscape and responding to it. Thomas M. Greene invites the reader to consider a wide range of poets, beginning with Amy Clampitt and A. R. Ammons, continuing with Petrarch, Ronsard, Saint-Amant, Milton, Vaughan, and Marvell, and concluding with two representative Romantics, Wordsworth and Whitman. Greene's discussions of this rich body of texts stimulate reflection at several levels. They can be read first of all simply as analyses of several memorable poems exhibiting a similar structure over a period of seven centuries. They can also be read as meditations on the workings of lyric poetry, which is always attempting to bring into sharper focus the sensibility of a speaker whose emergence depends on her naming and evoking the objects surrounding her. Thus Greene argues that the distinction of a poetic consciousness lies in its "permeability," permitting a more intimate interplay between internal and external realms. His title is drawn from a line by Whitman: "You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!" Finally, at yet another level, Greene's book presents a way of thinking about language which, recalling the Heideggerean theory of "ereignis," suggests that only through the projective act of naming can human beings assimilate things through intuitive knowledge. An afterword, "The Morality of Literary Interpretation," surveys critically a range of hermeneutic theories and formulates a position that accords the literary text both autonomy and mystery. |
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... reflect a paternal presence , as that presence had been functioning in Helen's past life , but if anything its absence . The content of her discovery would not appear to have derived from Lacan's phantasmal Imaginary order , and it is ...
... reflected , as a light bestowed.13 Once again that circular movement of outstreaming and receiving receives stress , but the movement is unmediated . The outstreaming Coleridge evokes is reflected in The Prelude , but he is not here ...
... reflect ? The speaker finds himself treading the shore on the southern coast , the seacoast , of his native Long Island , to which he applies the Indian name “ Paumanok . ” There's a dark element in this seascape ; it's far from ...
Contents
Circles and Variations | 15 |
Utopias of Solitude | 29 |
Getting Engaged | 49 |
Copyright | |
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