Question'd Every Gust
Initial thought after initial reading of Lycidas: Oh, dear. That was...labor.
Not that I'm at all against intellectual labor, but attempting to engage Lycidas on a meaningful and perhaps even transformative level was simply impossible. (I have been reading John Dewey for another course this semester, and though I am unsure of a good deal of his pedagogy, I see his influence hovering about this last sentence. A bit disconcerting and something that requires more reflection.) I confess to having read Johnson's tirade against the poem--his attacks on the supposed incoherency and vulgarity of its style and content--before reading Lycidas itself, but my reactions greatly differ from his: He hated it. I am simply apathetic.
Well, I shouldn't say "simply" anything. I found several of its images individually striking (the lines concerning the "perfidious Bark" (123) in particular) and I have certainly become a big fan of Camus, but these were small thrills almost immediately forgotten by the poem's end--an end that took only six pages to get to (hardly laborious) but felt much longer.
Why? I don't know. Quite possibly because I was a shallow audience and need to reread the text and revise my statements. I think I'll go do that now.
Not that I'm at all against intellectual labor, but attempting to engage Lycidas on a meaningful and perhaps even transformative level was simply impossible. (I have been reading John Dewey for another course this semester, and though I am unsure of a good deal of his pedagogy, I see his influence hovering about this last sentence. A bit disconcerting and something that requires more reflection.) I confess to having read Johnson's tirade against the poem--his attacks on the supposed incoherency and vulgarity of its style and content--before reading Lycidas itself, but my reactions greatly differ from his: He hated it. I am simply apathetic.
Well, I shouldn't say "simply" anything. I found several of its images individually striking (the lines concerning the "perfidious Bark" (123) in particular) and I have certainly become a big fan of Camus, but these were small thrills almost immediately forgotten by the poem's end--an end that took only six pages to get to (hardly laborious) but felt much longer.
Why? I don't know. Quite possibly because I was a shallow audience and need to reread the text and revise my statements. I think I'll go do that now.
posted by alh at 9:46 PM
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