Romantic Poetry in a World of Scientific Workshops

[billy]

at a guess i'd say it's because you're all alone and lonely.

did milton succeed in justifying [the ways of] god [to man], has anyone had success at doing so?
does anyone actually care if he did or didn't or is being alone a side effect of reading what milton wanted to justify. usually people are alone for more corporeal reasons than milton's justifications.

Milton said he wanted to justify the ways of God to man. And it worked for me. So why am I so alone?

[billy]

Loneliness is next to Godliness...?

Something like that.

cleanliness is next to Godliness...? so the question is...does one need to bathe after reading milton?

[billy]

and yet despite your magnetism you're all alone

I get in with a lot of visionary poet types. The way I talk and live my life draws them to me. And a lot of their stuff is the disjointed kind of schizophrenic nonsense. I still believe there's a better way.

[billy]

wtf does milton have to do with him being alone as far as romanticism goes? i could understand "i think romanticism has died" but the milton/god thing just muddies the water and makes it seem like a psychological problem because he doesn't believe in god's justification. i'm a romantic at heart, i see it all the time but i doubt rowens and me would be compatible as any kind of like-minded people. i think the premise fall flat if he believes it's not dead. as long as there's one believer it still lives. the same as if on'y one person can justify a god, then god exists in that person.

That's just it though. Milton wrote it. I don't doubt that he did. Do I feel the need to do justify the ways of God? No. Is it a goal/purpose of my writing? No. What I fail to understand is how the desire/need to justify the ways of God to man (within or without poetry) would make someone feel alone? I don't see any correlation between the two. Perhaps the how and why are entangled, but I have no idea how the feeling of being alone relates. It seems like any interesting topic to discuss, but I just don't understand the premise here.

That is the premise. The romantic world is gone. You no longer understand it. He still does. He is alone.

[billy]

love is probably the only thing richer than either. personally i don't think there's any reasonable argument other than denial to say otherwise.

I'm not cynical at all, and started this thread on the strength of something richer than idealism or religion or all the centuries of poetry has had to offer so far. . . . If you want to know what that is, you're going to have to wait until me or you accomplish it. I'm not cynical enough to count that out.

[Leanne]

I don't know anyone who believes in God or Satan. I don't know anyone who writes or reads poetry. I live in a world where whatever you say or do is cool with everybody else and nothing ever happens. Everybody is nice. If you're sick and dying lots of people will come to your bedside and cry and say, I'm so sorry this is happening to you, man. And nothing ever happens. Everybody is understanding, and bright, and knowing, and nice. Everything is fun and easy and nice every day and every night and it always has been and always will be forever.

Milton was blind, not deluded. I don't think he truly believed that an absence of belief in God was at the root of man's inhumanity to man. In truth, he couldn't really agree with anyone else's definition of what God is -- certainly not the populist deity that people bang on about these days. He was very good at pointing out flaws and forcing readers to re-think their most dearly held beliefs, but at the end of the day he didn't really offer much in the way of solutions. Nor was his an enlightenment philosophy, by which one would have to arrive at a solution personal to oneself in the tradition of the Buddha. No, he was a judge and we were found wanting, but without knowing what we were wanting.

I love Milton. I think that without him, much of philosophy and social theory would be very different. Nonetheless, he is just one stepping stone in a very long path. Milton's concepts of free speech, and especially freedom of the press, have been twisted into barbed weapons that bear no resemblance to the romantic notion of freedom. His arguments against censorship have allowed these very proponents of "free speech" to become censors themselves. Is this Milton's fault? Of course not. It is the fault of successive misinterpretations and cherry picking -- just the same cherry picking one does when one says things like "Milton said this thing I agree with and now that Milton's dead nobody else understands me".

Milton's been dead a while. If nobody understands you, it's because you're not trying to be understood. That's a choice that has nothing to do with whether or not angels are fornicating above you.

[Leanne]

I would be happy enough if God did smite more people for writing cliched poetry though.

[rowens]

I don't want to be understood. I only want to read and write poems that make angels appear out of thin air. Or thick air. I want to read poetry so strong that the images and figures haunt my dreams and walk the earth in physical form.

[Leanne]

There are fauns in Arcady who are very happy to hear you say that. They'll be knocking on your window shortly (actually, fauns do everything shortly, since their legs aren't very long).

[rowens]

Milton inspired a lot of romantic visions. Now he doesn't inspire many poets to visionary poetry. It seems only things like LSD and bipolar disorder do.

[Leanne]

I have no psychoses, drug-induced or otherwise, with which to write. I have only Milton, his associates, that guy he didn't like very much but who made nice pies, and a pen with assorted nibs.

I bought some gold ink the other day. That should lend some veritas, right?

[Leanne]

Most cynics I know (including myself) are really romantics who are just constantly disappointed by the world and therefore projecting the disappointment as a bitter shield.

I don't need God to tell me that things should be better.  We do what we can in our own small spheres and hope that the shield is strong enough.

I sense my insufferable idealism slowly becoming some shade of cynicism.  And I don't know how I feel about that.  I feel some kind of growing bitterness towards the world for being able to change me; to shake what was once so unwavering.  But if the cynicism is just a shield to keep my more softer parts from harm, maybe I can think of it then as just necessity.  But what happens if, within the confines of yourself and this shield upheld around, you start to self-annihilate?  How do you keep from that?  What's the antidote.  Surely more than what poetry alone cannot satiate. 

When did the cynicism start setting in for everyone else?  Maybe I'm late to the party at 23.

At 23 I'm pretty sure I was still naive enough to think that it didn't matter how many times people knocked me down, I'd always want to get right back up. You're an early wiser.

I can't answer the self-annihilation thing. For a while, I mimicked others and thought that might do. It didn't. When it's eroded enough, the raw centre is exposed and the sensitivity wakes you up. You build yourself back from that template. It's not perfect, but it's better -- but there's no way to reach it, that I know of, except with time and a whole lot of abrasion.

[rowens]

I have no psychoses, drug-induced or otherwise, with which to write. I have only Milton, his associates, that guy he didn't like very much but who made nice pies, and a pen with assorted nibs.

I bought some gold ink the other day. That should lend some veritas, right?

I come not to bring truth but a subtle knife.

[milo]

" . . . Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways ways to man."

-Housman

[ellajam]

Most cynics I know (including myself) are really romantics who are just constantly disappointed by the world and therefore projecting the disappointment as a bitter shield.

I don't need God to tell me that things should be better.  We do what we can in our own small spheres and hope that the shield is strong enough.

I sense my insufferable idealism slowly becoming some shade of cynicism.  And I don't know how I feel about that.  I feel some kind of growing bitterness towards the world for being able to change me; to shake what was once so unwavering.  But if the cynicism is just a shield to keep my more softer parts from harm, maybe I can think of it then as just necessity.  But what happens if, within the confines of yourself and this shield upheld around, you start to self-annihilate?  How do you keep from that?  What's the antidote.  Surely more than what poetry alone cannot satiate. 

When did the cynicism start setting in for everyone else?  Maybe I'm late to the party at 23.

At 23 I'm pretty sure I was still naive enough to think that it didn't matter how many times people knocked me down, I'd always want to get right back up.  You're an early wiser.

I can't answer the self-annihilation thing.  For a while, I mimicked others and thought that might do.  It didn't.  When it's eroded enough, the raw centre is exposed and the sensitivity wakes you up.  You build yourself back from that template.  It's not perfect, but it's better -- but there's no way to reach it, that I know of, except with time and a whole lot of abrasion.

I'm with you both, just further down the line. I can tell you that for me the balance is easier to live with. My idealism still exists but in Leanne's small world way. I have found that I can, to an extent, make the world that I want to live in by interacting with people in the way I choose and keeping my distance as much as possible from what I know does not work for me. I have enough cynicism not to be taken on a daily basis . The shield is up, though sometimes the world crashes through, but somehow I still have a place in the world. I've found that staying alive is the trick, everything else will just have to work itself out.

" . . . Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways ways to man."

-Housman

[RiverNotch]

Ideally, I consider myself beyond cynicism, but my head is a detachable organ, so practically, I am very, very naive. Then again, how much of my life experience have I revealed here, outside of what 18 years reveal?

In the beginning, God made the solution to all loneliness: for Adam, he made Eve, and for Eve, he hypnotized Adam -- for Israel, he made Moses, and for Moses, he charmed Israel -- for Mary, he made Jesus, and for Jesus, he fucked Mary. That is, how many times a day do you bone down? Ultimately, loneliness is both a choice and a condition, but a condition one can only choose to heal -- for it can be healed, as all sicknesses can, with blood of lamb, or oil of holy unction, or even ink of psychiatrist. I don't think the question of God's justice or Man's depravity is really tied to it, even if it often feels that way -- solve those problems (neither logically nor emotionally, I am sure), and you'll just end up into falling into another, sometimes higher, sometimes sillier, trap.

As for your aesthetic problem, I'm no Milton scholar, so all I can say is that influences are some sort of a cascade -- there's probably a lot more Milton in, say, Adventure Time than I know, just as there is a lot more Gnosticism and Kierkegaard and Freud than I first thought. I have a feeling that I'm already steeped in Milton, even though outside of a few poems, I'm not really into him yet.

[rowens]

I never said I was lonely. But was alone in wanting a poetry like the Bible, Dante and Milton that becomes real, the beliefs and experiences of generations of people. I want a poetry so real that dogs bark at it in the night when all the people are asleep. Poetry that evolves new physical areas of the brain. Not just words and meanings in musical and aesthetic forms, but new and old worlds carved out of the solid bones of living gods and disfigured chimeras. Worlds where science and politics drown under ancient mud when giants cast them to the sides with the wave of a flood. Where aliens who travel here in ships that emerge through the space between the seconds on a stopwatch find William Blake's poetry and the Book of Job more essential than Earth and stars and human blood.

[Leanne]

I wanted to do that once, but people who should have thought it mattered thought it was about something they already knew, and stopped the world from changing. Instead, they call poems about periods and pubic hair 'brave' because you don't have to think about those things, only feel them. 'Feel' supersedes 'think'. We want to be primal, poet, don't take our chemically-enhanced emotions from us. We don't care for how cold you are.

But people are the plague we must endure, so I took the sleeping pill and wrote limericks until the future forgot what I wanted to know.

[milo]

I still like the pubic hair sonnet, does that make me a bad person?

[billy]

lay back on the couch, now tell us, why do you keep bringing up lonely

I never said I was lonely. But was alone in wanting a poetry like the Bible, Dante and Milton that becomes real, the beliefs and experiences of generations of people. I want a poetry so real that dogs bark at it in the night when all the people are asleep. Poetry that evolves new physical areas of the brain. Not just words and meanings in musical and aesthetic forms, but new and old worlds carved out of the solid bones of living gods and disfigured chimeras. Worlds where science and politics drown under ancient mud when giants cast them to the sides with the wave of a flood. Where aliens who travel here in ships that emerge through the space between the seconds on a stopwatch find William Blake's poetry and the Book of Job more essential than Earth and stars and human blood.