Download From Classical to Contemporary

Definitely not waving
HUM 3285: British and American Literature
Spring 2011
Dr. Perdigao
January 26, 2011
Notes on Drowning
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“Prufrock”
“Not Waving but Drowning”
“Musée des Beaux Arts”
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Notion of suffering, human condition
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Ideas about civilization, between Yeats, Eliot, Auden, extending beyond Ireland,
England, America
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Insiders/outsiders
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Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a war to end all wars but inevitability of WWII
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Idea of politics, aesthetics, western civilization as a whole
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Immediacy of experience, impersonality
Falling
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/philolog/2005/11/ekphrasis_ovid_in_pieter_br
eug.html
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
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Born in Hull, Yorkshire, lived north of London
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Father left to join North Sea Patrol, mother died when young, influence of aunt
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First novel Novel on Yellow Paper (1936); first book of poetry A Good Time Was
Had by All (1937)
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Language play—colloquialism, slang, nonsense, didacticism (2373)
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Religious skeptic— “Our Bog is Dood”
Oxymorons
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“. . . despite the growing critical attention that Stevieʼs work is receiving, actually
positing the ‘real’ Stevie and locating meanings and values in her writing has
become more difficult simply because her stream-of-consciousness prose and her
poetic embryos are so widely and so variously interpretable that exegetes clash and
contradict. Stevie has been called an essentially public poet employing
prosopopoeia to address her audience in several distinct voices including that of a
child; an adolescent; a bitter, cynical woman; a theologian; and a philosopher. She
has been called a stand-up comic and an ironist, a lyricist, a confessional writer, a
closet dissident if that is not a contradiction in terms, a satirist, and a Christian
apologist. She has been described as a lover of animals and a hater of children. . . .
She has been called a masker and a revealer. In the ring ratings of twentieth-century
poets, she has been judged a lightweight and a heavy. She has been proclaimed an
airhead and an egghead. She has been accused of anti-Semitism and general
misanthropy. She has been praised as one of the most musical poets of her
generation, and she has been castigated for having a tin ear. She was clearly
preoccupied with death, but she lived her life with enthusiasm, even glee. She
imagined extravagantly. She was a queen of contradictions, and yet she bombards
us with binaries. She was . . . well . . . Stevie.”
(qtd in J. Edward Mallot’s “Not Drowning But Waving: Stevie Smith and the
Language of the Lake” 171-2)
Voicing
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“The widely anthologized poem contains a number of elements familiar in Smithʼs
other verse. The question of voice, silence, and the possibility of speech by the dead
is enhanced by Smithʼs adoption of three separate personae: the drowned man
trying — and still failing — to articulate his unhappiness, the singular
writer/eyewitness who can hear the deceasedʼs cry, and the group of acquaintances
who still, to some extent, mistake a death scene for a meaningless wave.”
(qtd in J. Edward Mallot’s “Not Drowning But Waving: Stevie Smith and the
Language of the Lake” 173)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
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Born in York, England; educated at Christ Church, Oxford
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Moved to U.S. in 1939, became an American citizen in 1946
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“from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of
cultural decay” (2421)
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Great Depression, Waste Land, draws on Freud and Marx; England as “nation of
neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system” (2421)
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Rejection of Yeats’ notion of poetry as transcendent, redemptive, the prophetic role
of poetry