Post by George J. DancePost by Michael PendragonPost by George J. Dance"As the structures of philosophy and science become more complete, the poet retreats from large-scale cosmological and epic themes summing up the learning of his time, and partakes of a growing fragmentation of experience.
Okay... so grand epics and philosophical poems like Homer's "The Illiad," Lucretius' "De rerum natura," Dante's "The Divine Comedy" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" give way to poems of personal experience like Sappho's "To an army wife, in Sardis," Ovid's "Amores," Petrarch's "Sonnets" and Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love."
When the poet has so central a relation to his society [knowledge transmitter], there is no break between him and his audience: he speaks for, as much as to, his audience, and his values are their values. Even if a professional poet, he is popular in the sense [186] that he is the voice of his community. Shakespeare, who is still essentially an oral poet, shows a similar identification with the assumptions of his audience. It is particularly this empathy between poet and listening audience that is broken by the rise of a writing culture. In a writing culture, philosophy develops from proverb and oracle into systematic concept and logical argument; religion develops from mythology into theology; magic fades out and is absorbed into science. All these speak the language of prose, which now becomes fully developed, and capable of a conceptual kind of utterance that poetry resists. It is the discursive writer or thinker who is assumed to have the primary verbal keys to reality; the norms of meaning become the norms of a prose sense external to poetry. As a result the poet becomes increasingly isolated in spirit from much of the thought of his time, even though he continues, as a rule, to be a scholarly and erudite person, aware of what is going on in the rational disciplines."
I'm not seeing how this changes the parameters of his argument... it will probably require additional passages to clarify its meaning contextually.
As it stands, he still seems to be connecting a conceptual downsizing in the scope of poetry with an analogous rise in philosophy and science... all three of which co-existed in Ancient Greece (basically, from the beginning of recorded history).
The passage does, however, clarify that he is citing a line between poetry and prose; and gives the impression that this division came about after Shakespeare's day.
Post by George J. DancePost by Michael PendragonPost by George J. DanceHe tends more and more to convey his meaning indirectly, through imagery and metaphor, and the surface of explicit statement that he shares with other writers becomes increasingly opaque.
So... as science and philosophy became more complete (apparently the ancient Greeks are considered "primitive" in Mr. Frye's estimation), poetry scaled down from epic to personal themes and became increasingly metaphor-laden and arcane.
Well, no, the problem wasn't science and philosophy's development, but their medium, which increasingly became that of prose. Plato and Aristotle didn't even like poetry, much less write it. (You mentioned Lucretius, but I'm not convinced that is science, as opposed to just a poem about science like the Essays Poe et al wrote?)
Plato and Aristotle's use of prose supports my stance: that philosophy and poetry coexisted from the dawn of civilization. Offhand, I can't think of any philosophical work that was composed as a poem.
"De rerum natura" is science in poetic form. The translation I've read was a literal one, which abandons the rhyme and meter, and ends up reading very much like a science textbook. While it does show that poetry once tackled the topic of science, it was pretty much a one-time-only deal.
I can't recall any pre-Shakespearean scientific tomes (apart from the writings of the alchemists, which passed for science in their day, but are now relegated to the heading of "mysticism"). But, since I can't recall any other scientific poems, I don't believe the advent of written science affected the course of poetry.
Post by George J. DancePost by Michael PendragonBut since personal poetry existed at least as long as philosophy and science, and has employed metaphor for just as great a length, Frye's theory is based upon a false premise and ultimately fails (at least in terms of cause and effect).
I think the problem is that you've interpreted Frye as talking about the modernist revolution, when he's talking about the shift from an oral to a written culture (which has happened at different times in different places). Understandably, since I hadn't given you the whole paragraph; and probably because of that phrase he used, "fragmentation of experience," reminded you of Eliot.
The shift from oral to written culture began around 2,600 BC; and Western Civilization's shift took place somewhere between 750 and 400 BC.
If Northrop is arguing (much as Robert Graves does in "The White Goddess") that prior to the advent of written culture, poetry held one of the highest positions in popular culture as both a sacred and magical form of language (Graves even goes so far as to propose that poetry *created* language with each word originally being a "poem"), but that the rise of philosophy and science (in Ancient Athens) relegated it to the position of a secular art form, then I have no objections to his statement.
If, however, he is claiming that this shift occurred *after* Shakespeare's day (post-1616), then I think he is sorely mistaken.
And, based on the quoted passages you've provided so far, I believe that the oral-to-written shift he is talking about is not one of culture in general, but in the field of science and that he is referring to the Age of Enlightenment (1685-1815). This era was certainly not conducive to poetry, and its greatest poets maintained a religious/spiritual/mystical stance (Donne and Marvell). I've never been a fan of Pope.
I suppose one could argue that the Age of Enlightenment made it impossible for poetry to ever be considered as a form for philosophical or scientific treatises again... but I must still maintain that apart from Lucretius, it had never really been used to either of those ends.
Post by George J. DancePost by Michael PendragonNot only have epic and personal poetry always co-existed, but the former have rarely been expressions of philosophy and science, but that epic poetry focused primarily on historical and religious themes.
Frye made the same point with respect to religion, that as it's changed from mythology to theology, its medium has also changed to prose; but again you'd have had no way of knowing that (save by actually clicking the link and reading the article) when you wrote your comment.
I hadn't realized that the link provided the text of entire essay. I just clicked on it and... who was E.J. Pratt? That's a rhetorical question, as I've just Googled him as well; it is, however, intended to show my total lack of recognition for his name. Of course the answer is that he's a Canadian poet, and... few of these have left much (or any) impress on American literature or culture.
He does say that Pratt (through his poetry) "takes on so many of the characteristics of the poet of an oral and pre-literate society" and compares them with "the earliest English poetry" (which I would take to be around the 10th Century). He then traces the oral tradition back to Homer, whose epics related a mixture of legend, history and religion (much like the Old Testament of the Bible).
However, our discussion isn't over where Pratt fits into the poetic scheme of things, as of precisely what era/shift Frye is referring to. Which raises a large, and possibly unresolvable problem in the context of the complete essay: Frye isn't discussing the history/development of poetry (or even the poetic ramifications of the shift from oral to written society), but the writings of E.J. Pratt. His references to Home, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, etc., aren't done to establish a timeline on the topic of poetry, but to place Pratt's poetry in relation to that of other poets.
I have stopped reading at Section II, because it discusses specific Pratt poems, none of which I'm familiar with.
Post by George J. DancePost by Michael PendragonPost by George J. DanceHe is sometimes difficult to read -- Eliot even suggests that difficulty is a moral necessity for writers of his time -- and above all, originality, saying things in one's own way instead of simply saying them in the way that they have always been said, becomes accepted as part of the convention of serious literature.
Eliot is the point at which Frye's argument should begin, for it was Eliot who led the movement away from popular poetry to its academic offshoot. Eliot's movement was not predicated on the supposed maturation of fields of science and philosophy, but on the spread of education and the intellectual elitism of his academic upper class peers.
Post by George J. Dance"This means that the serious poet is likely to have a restricted audience of cultivated people -- "fit audience find, though few," as Milton said of Paradise Lost -- and that the importance of social function is not widely recognized or understood....
Eliot's removing poetry from the popular to the academic realm was meant to achieve precisely that end: to restrict the poetic audience to the "cultivated" classes. This effectively killed off the art form.
The function of poetry had always been associated, not with science and philosophy, but with incantation and magic. Epics like Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" deal with the religion of their times (religion being of supernatural/spiritual origin rather than empirical), whereas love poems are a form of spellcraft designed to procure the affections of the love-object being addressed.
The loss of incantational/magical poetry was compensated for by the medium of popular song (which had often crossed over with poetry in the past). Poetry became the exclusive property of a small group of students and professors in university classrooms, while popular song became one of most defining factors of popular culture.
Post by George J. Dance"With the twentieth century the tension between the desire to be popular and the necessity to be restricted in audience takes some grotesque forms. One thinks of Eliot, ending his Waste Land with a quotation in Sanskrit, yet speaking of the advantage, for the dramatist, of an audience that could not read or write; or of Yeats trying to bring drama to communities that often could hardly read or write, yet filling his poems with recondite Cabbalism. But the idioms of popular and serious poetry remain inexorably distinct. Popular poems tend to preserve a surface of explicit statement: they are often sententious and proverbial, like Kipling's "If" or Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" or Burns' "For A' That," or they deal with what for their readers are conventionally poetic themes, like the pastoral themes of James Whitcomb Riley or the adventurous themes of Robert W. Service. Affection for such poets is apt to be anti-intellectual, accompanied by a strong resistance to the poetry that the more restricted audience I spoke of finds interesting."
Tellingly, Frye's examples of popular poems date from the 19th and early 20th Centuries; as opposed to the modern (1968) times of which he writes.
Historically, Eliot's upper class elitism was countered in the mid-20th Century by the equally intellectual snobbery of the bohemian autodidacts led by Ginsberg; and in the latter half of the century, by barely-literate representatives of the Bukowski school (the great unwashed).