[lbo-talk] further evidence of the decline of men

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Sat May 13 06:39:08 PDT 2006


At around 12/5/06 5:48 pm, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> On 5/12/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>> The Imperfect Enjoyment
>> John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
>
> Oh, this is just too good!
>
> For anyone interested some of the Second Earl of Rochester's poems can
> be found here.
> http://www.poeforward.com/poetrycorner/wilmot/poems.htm
>

What is this vacuous nonsense? Here I quote from one of his pieces titled "A Satyre [sic] Against Mankind":


> His senses are too gross; and he'll contrive
> A sixth, to contradict the other five;
> And before certain instinct will prefer
> Reason, which fifty times for one does err.
> Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,
> Which leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
> Pathless and dangerous wand'ring ways it takes,
> Through Error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
> Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
> Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;

What is with the complicated language to make a silly point about Reason? And what's with the uppercase 'R'? Some sort of pre-pomo? And once you strip the fancy language and unnecessary Latin, what is left? Is it even correct about 'reason'? Turns out not. As Richard Dawkins [more politely] said of Keats.

What a waste of time reading this sort of stuff. Nothing I have read so far about him makes me think he is worth my time! Was this guy a Nazi by any chance?

--ravi (do I need a smiley?)

P.S: Jerry, you are a good sport, and I still owe you some responses. Interesting poems by the way... though I never quite learnt how to read poetry :-(. But the segments of Hölderlin that I have had a chance to read (thanks to guess who?) were beautiful, even to my untrained eye/mind.

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/



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