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Heroic Poets
Jun. 2nd, 2007 09:37 amDon't tell the girlfriend, but -- I've fallen in love with someone else.
He's bald, chubby, and pushing 70. But oh, what a magnificent mind.
Yes. I'm reading Clive James's Cultural Amnesia.
Listen. This is what he has to say on the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova:
"...she was an inspiring symbol, but when a poet becomes better known than her poems it usually means she is being sacrificed, for extraneous reasons, on the altar of her own glory. In Ahkmatova's case, the extraneous reasons were political. It should be the mark of reasonable politics that a woman like her is not called upon to be a heroine."
Think about that last sentence. What does "reasonable politics" mean? What are unreasonable politics, and why do they force poets to become heroes?
And that's just from the first essay. There are a hundred more in the book.
*happy sigh*
(There's an abridged version of the Anna Akmatova essay up on Slate.)
He's bald, chubby, and pushing 70. But oh, what a magnificent mind.
Yes. I'm reading Clive James's Cultural Amnesia.
Listen. This is what he has to say on the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova:
"...she was an inspiring symbol, but when a poet becomes better known than her poems it usually means she is being sacrificed, for extraneous reasons, on the altar of her own glory. In Ahkmatova's case, the extraneous reasons were political. It should be the mark of reasonable politics that a woman like her is not called upon to be a heroine."
Think about that last sentence. What does "reasonable politics" mean? What are unreasonable politics, and why do they force poets to become heroes?
And that's just from the first essay. There are a hundred more in the book.
*happy sigh*
(There's an abridged version of the Anna Akmatova essay up on Slate.)
