"B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote: Carrol Cox wrote:
"All literature, even very wonderful literature, even in class society, does not involve suffering but rather celebrates merely being alive."
I didn't quite get this poem, Carrol. It's supposedly written by Marriane Moore, and it sounds like Moore, but you say that she only wrote the part in quotes? I didnt want to comment at the time (I was way over my allotment on this thread already), but much of the punch of the poem, on first reading, comes from the contrast of natural beauty in the first part with mechanical violence in the second.
What's the scoop?
BobW
Carrol,
That was a great passage ("The Icososphere").
I've often wished there was a listserv where folks could share favorite poems, literary excerpts, etc., as they dealt with leftist issues -- you know, age-old stuff like intolerance, class oppression, etc. Sometimes poets and writers (of fiction) can express things in a paragraph or two, and in a much more convincing way, than the most erudite of footnoted essayists across many pages. Like the Carl Sandburg excerpt I posted a week or two ago, which I was personally surprised to have found. (About men buying and selling one another, etc.)
Having said that, yeah, no one can doubt the elan of Walt Whitman and how his exuberance drove him to write. By the same token, it's hard to imagine a cheery chap writing Les Fleurs du Mal instead of the actual writer, Baudelaire, who suffered from the double whammy of a broken heart and syphilis as he put pen to paper.
-B.
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