”Bell Tower
I have seen, desolate one, the voice has its tower;
The voice also, builded at secret cost,
Its temple of precious tissue. Not silent then
Forever--casting silence in your hour.
There marble boys are leant from the light throat,
Thick locks that hang with dew and eye dewlashed,
Dazzled with morning, angels of the wind,
With ear a-point for the enchanted note.
And these at length shall tip the hanging bell,
And first the sound must gather in deep bronze,
Till, clearer than ice, purer than a bubble of gold,
It beat in the sky and the air and the ear’s remorseless well.”
--Léonie Adams
The Creator Has a Master Plan.
On judging Poetry: i have always liked Pound's formula of Logopoeia (nuances of meaning), Melopoeia (verbal music), & Phanopoeia (images), so that there can be poems that are excellent in any or all of these, but these are distinct & separate ways a poem can be good. Historically (& culturally) the preferences tend to shift. Right now people don't read out loud so much, & all kinds of well-regarded poets may not be good at (or indeed interested at all) in Melopoeia, for example. Whereas directly in the wake of Eliot & Modernism, Logopoeia took center stage. Even this is doubtless too simple a classification, but at least it's a start.
Nothing annoys me more, to be honest, than a priori attempts to judge art according to dogmatic rules. I much prefer to examine individual works that repay my attention, & if it reminds me of something else, that's not always worth erecting into a canon of criticism.
--One may ask, what is the role of Emotion in all this? & i say: emotion is never conveyed directly (e.g. as it would be by tone of voice, or as depicted by its musical accompaniment) but rather gets encoded culturally--we recreate the emotion from all of these means, according to convention. A very good example of this, i think, is the sort of Gothic imagery we associate with Halloween. One has to work hard to make it frightening, after so long; otherwise it's Camp.
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