The reading for Friday (2/4) is Northrop Frye's influential essay, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Note that I say "influential" and not "accurate" or "masterful." There are reasons why I'm assigning this essay, but giving you a definitive answer to the question, "What is Later C18 Literature?" is not one of them.
Rather, the essay is one smart, thoughtful answer to that question--but not necessarily the best or most complete one. Testing your observations against it will help you to find answers of your own. When Frye wrote this essay in 1956, Gray and Warton were definitely on his map of relevant writers (note that Gray is one of our "Survivors" and Warton is not). However, the work of Mary Jones ("Holt Waters") or Mary Leapor ("Epistle to Artimesia") probably hadn't crossed his path. He may have heard of Phillis Wheatley (another of our "Survivors"), but she does not appear in his essay.
Do Frye's conclusions about later C18 Lit. apply, even though our data set is different from his?
Think specifically about Frye's remarks about "the literature of process." How does he define that term, and how do you see the poems we've read embodying that definition? Pick one example of a moment, image, or excerpt from one of the poems we've read, and show how it either bears out Frye's claims about later C18 literature as a "literature of process"--or not.
Deadline: Friday (2/4), 1pm.
2 comments:
In his essay, Frye asserts that certain C18 texts "give the impression of literature as process, as created on the spot out of the events [they] describe" (Frye 146). I found this to be a profoundly accurate statement when applied to Thomas Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard." The first stanza reads, "The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, / The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me" (Gray 1-4), which I feel could easily be a product of the poet's surroundings at the time. A sense of impending darkness is established not only in the circumstances but in the mood of the chosen language.
The Literature of Process is one that puts the reader in a place where he/she views both the text and the practice for which an author constructs that text. It focuses on what the author does vs. the characters, and it emphasizes sound patterns, because it believes that the poetic process—composing poetry supersedes the product—the poem itself. As a result, rhymes combine words based off their sounds rather than their grammar/meanings. It mostly operates as through a dream-like trance or medium, and when emphasis is placed on the original process than you end up with subconscious poetry that is very repetitive, wise yet mysterious in nature, related to a ritual chant or use of some magic words, dream-like, and charming. A great example would be an oracular poem in its long form, because it is primarily construed based off a series of utterances that are irregular in their rhyme scheme, but clearly distinguished from one another.
An Example of Literature as a process would definitely be Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” because he initially sets up the atmosphere with details that helps the reader to envision/picture a graveyard behind a churchyard as someone’s funeral, where a ritual chant in the form of a prayer or reading of an elegy often takes place. His rhyme scheme focuses on the flow of sound rather than sense. For instance, “Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap” (line 14), would make more “grammatical sense if it were changed to “Where the turf heaves in many a mould’ring heap. Most of his poem depends solely on the rhyme scheme rather that the. We also have signs that suggest that he puts a lot of his own political, personal, and perhaps religious views into the making of this poems and the elegy that precedes it. For example, he mentions in lines 15 & 16 that "Each in his narrow cell for ever laid//The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep," which suggest that these were fathers that proceeded our lifetime that lay here now. Lines 59 & 60 “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest //Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood,” confirms the belief that all die as some point or another. Gray in a settled way includes himself into this belief, because he too can only fit in one of the two categories at the end of the day: rich or poor. Like many poems written during this period, we also see how words like Ambition and Grandeur surface to take a humanistic form here.
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