Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Pregnancy of Poems

I'm still thinking about Frye's idea that poems are born, not made.  This profound comment has stuck with me throughout the semester thus far, for many reasons.

If poems are born, than than the conversation of literary theory becomes much more complicated.  We have to think about language.  If poems are born, then there must be a universal poetic language. And what is that?  We know that English is not the language of the poet, and we cannot measure a poem without it's exact words.  Hence, the problem with translations. 

(When we look at Harold Blooms translation of the Pentateuch in The Book of J, the first five books of the Bible's meaning varies greatly from the commonly known King James translation. And when we take Sexson's Biblical foundations, the story of Eve eating of Adam's fruit means something very different than the translation at E-Free bible study.)

In each case, the meaning varies greatly, giving translators, and then the readers the choice to chose where they want the text to go.   

But Frye would argue that the meaning is already there, and the writer needs to divorce himself or herself from the text, in order for the true and ideal poem to show itself. And from there, the poem takes on its own life, becoming better, because it can get better.  Perhaps Frye is speaking only in terms of literary criticism.

But it seems to me that Frye is saying that in language, there is the ever-present possibility of improvement, and that poets are not capable of achieving the perfection that poems are.  Which means that there is a divine dialogue that exists on its own.

Plato believed that poets were deranged.  But he also believed in a perfect ideal. His ideal was what inspired a copy in everything.  So if Plato was a literary critic, then he would have to have believed that there was an ideal poem, also. 

I wonder what the two critics' poems would look like in relation to each other.


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