November 3, 2008

Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry 1821 published posthumously in 1840 by Mary

“But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one
...It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Chris Clark’s synchronicity, coincidence, intention is secondary

Talbott
p. 28 “before Carroll, children’s lit was educational tracts”
p. 204 mass murderers
p. 21 Alice pervades Western civilization 

p. 29 John Lennon

p.134 logic of the dream

Chuang Tzu, surrealism, Coleridge opium and Kubla Khan
Kafka, Nabokov, Joyce, Auden, Graves, Heinlein, Lennon, Monte Python

Ernst, Jarry, Dali, Magritte 



Alice public domain ~1900

• Alice's Adventures in Oxford -- Mavis Batey (Pitkin Pictorial Guides and Souvenir Books)
• The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, and John Tenniel (Hardcover - Nov 1999)
• Alice's Misadventures Underground: The Complete Annotated Oxford Text by Bradley E. Craddock
• The Story of Alice and Her Oxford Wonderland by Christina Bjork and Inga-Karin Eriksson
• Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up Book
• Tenniel illustrations
• Rackham illustrations
• The Annotated Lolita Alfred Appel Jr.

Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

historical events become myth because they enforce the status quo?
the marginalized mythologized in kitsch?

epilepsy: Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin The Idiot

Northrop Frye: The Educated Imagination

Longinus Sublime: “not to persuasion, but to ecstasy ... bewilderment, surprise, fear”