Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

I will stop here. You don't need to know a single thing about Milton to enjoy this. in addition, being able to create a narrator with anxiety is different than having anxiety.

Stop if you wish, but please recognize that you're putting words into my mouth. Did I ever say that you need to know anything about Milton to enjoy the poem? No. I was just showing, by extension, where your "either/or" takes us, given that "When I consider" is an expression, however artfully rendered, of Milton's own anxiety as a poet. It is certainly others things, as well, but fundamentally, that's one of the generating motivations of the poem. You may disagree with that assessment. I have deep and sound reasons for positing it. I feel no need to offer them, because I've already tried, and you are entirely deaf to them.

You are stuck in a very basic, very beginner mind set here."

That's a convenient assertion to hide behind. It also shows me that you are stuck in a very pretentious, elitist mindset, that closes you off to creative and interpretive possibilities.

"Do NOT confuse the narrator with the poet."

Rhetorically, this is ridiculous. You don't issue emphatic, pedagogical edicts to people when you're having a reasoned discussion. And that's exactly where I take issue with you. You posture, without any solicitation on my part, as my superior. That you are my superior as a writer is something I can acknowledge freely and easily, but it doesn't change the fact that the norms of civil discussion require that you must abrogate the role of the instructor.

Otherwise, you become a condescending, pretentious conversation partner.

Now. No one is confusing anything with anything. I can acknowledge that the narrator is, or at least can be, a step removed from the author. I did it on several occasions in the last response I gave you. Even so, that the narrator is in each case an expression and determination of the author is something you can keep denying, without it being any truer.

Think about it. When we right a character piece, for instance, one of the things we do is attempt to occupy the imaginative space of the character we are writing. We attempt to feel what (what we imagine) he or she feels; we attempt to sympathize with the figure that we are both inspired by and also help to form. It takes me drawing upon my own feelings, in this instance, to be able to do this -- a sort of fluidity of personal and authorial identity that you keep denying.

"as for the rest of your very long diatribe, you need to understand the difference between using personal experiences to convey a shared human experience and writing a diary entry. You show, clearly, that you cannot differentiate."

You really didn't read any of what I wrote very carefully at all, did you? If you had, you'd see that this is exactly what my entire "diatribe" was about. A good author slips right past the bifurcation you posit in response to the ideas I'm presenting, because he self-consciously reveals as well as self-consciously conceals the different, generative aspects of his own experience and reflection. And that must be so, or Hesse really didn't deserve that Nobel Prize, after all.

You're clinging to an occult, Cartesian conception of selfhood, wherein the author's identity is something radically separated from his work as a writer, as much as from his influences, etc. What I've tried to point out is how the process of writing both informs and transforms the writing self, as much as it is also informed by the author's identity.

If you're so high and mighty, Milo, you would be magnanimous enough to put some loving attention into our discussion, and acknowledge the cogent and astute things that I'm trying to communicate to you. But no. You are caught up in your ideas of what constitutes good and bad literature, good and bad writing, and you are caught up in positioning yourself as my teacher. Although you are perhaps very right in much of what you say, you're not at all clear on what your reasons are, which reside in the deeper mechanics and psychology of authorship.

That this much is true has been evidenced to me, time and time again, by the way you resort to posturing and silence when pressed to defend your position. It's unfortunate.

[billy]

thread closed, everything that can be said has been said.

[billy]

i actually forgot to do it

it's done now and a few post have been removed after the fact :J:

[tectak]

i actually forgot to do it

it's done now and a few post have been removed after the fact :J:

I think that milo...oh...threads closed....