ENGLISH 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Anthropocentrism, Mad Libs, Peignoir
Document Summary
In a crisis of values (relig/politics) poetry as value-test formal iteration (regular stanzas, etc) rather than extant forms (sonnet, etc) Poetry =/= work, sunday as freedom from both labor and religion. Access to natural world"s raw data vs poetry as world-making ideological purge ( snow man ) Stevens" poems are suspiciously free of explicit engagements w/ archive. Why are his poems so hard to carbon date? like the birds in one of his poems, questioning morning - poetry questions static value. Suspiciously free b/c the way you see stevens" engagement w/ his moment is in the absence of apparent engagement w/ that moment. A time when god is dead, capitalism doesn"t work, democr doesn"t achieve what. Whitman hoped for - all we have is a strange linguistic art, that can test all other values that fail b/c they"re static models, and b/c they"re things we inherit rather than build.
