thnks my friend travesti and jigolo

John Clare roundup

I haven't had a chance to read this, and I fear to link blindly to Christianity Today, but I know some of you have the hots for Clare and can sort things out for yourself.



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Interesting, Killer, and thanks for explaining it in more detail.

Killer, that Levi quote is killer, and I think I agree with you. Celan's another one who puts the woe-is-me crowd to shame. I think your evaluation of Plath is fair; I have the same admixture of delight and disgust when reading her work.

Oh boy, Madeleine, sorry it took so long for me to notice I was being engaged. I hadn't read the John Clare article and still haven't as it is bloody long and I've been overwhelmed with other readings.

I fear my attempt to have some fun on the Sylvia and Ted stream will haunt me for awhile. I did not mean to offend Claude as I seem to have done.

I have nothing against a writer responding to their personal suffering, only my own personal preference for certain responses. Above all, I am most uncomfortable with anything that begins to smell of whining... or whingeing as Sylvia Plath might say in a fake British accent. Ariel was one of the first books of poetry I ever bought for myself and I was predictably and suitably moved by its poetic power. She really does display a mastery of form and rhythm. That said, rereading it a few times increases the whine-factor in it, and I can honestly say I experienced this annoying whine-factor before reading any biographical details of her or Ted Hughes -- I guess I was aware she killed herself, and the irony of that detail as it relates to Lady Lazarus, but that is all.

In other words, people will always use details of a poet's life to advance what I consider to be annoying stereotypes that work against any real advancement in people's understanding of each other, and, no, this is not the poet's fault... unless the poet participates in this advancement through their poetry. My opinion is that Plath did, here and there, and I consider this, just a tiny bit, a betrayal of her obvious brilliance as a poet.

I offer this quote as an example of what I love to see writers doing with their suffering:

"This time last year... I had an enormous, deep-rooted foolish faith in the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary things to me. My days were both cheerful and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure. Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself... This year has gone by so quickly."
                                    Primo Levi, "Survival in Auschwitz"

This is, in my opinion, so much more subtle and complex and genuine and authentic than anything Plath abstracted from her own suffering, and, in my opinion, contains not even a hint of self-pity. Bravo.

And I Thought I Was Poor...

More on John Clare.




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I, too, think Clare is brilliant. The article was a bit hyperbolic in praising the bio author as the sole resuscitator of Clare's reputation. Seamus Heaney has dedicated a fair chunk of prose to Clare already, more so than to many of the other so-called Romantics.

I've always liked John Clare the most out of the Romantics, and I'm grateful that one of my profs included him in her Romantic Poetry course. His poetry is slowly becoming canonized again.

Killer, would you say that his madness, like Plath’s suicide “encouraged the advancement of ideas like…poet-as-tragic-figure” and do you resent him as a result? If not, why? Why resent Plath’s response to her suffering and not any other poet’s?

What Ever Happened To...?

John Clare.




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