I know, I know you have no interest in poetry, to put it mildly. But this is prose about poetry - which sometimes takes some explaining. The subject is about how people relate to themselves, the world, and each other.
I know you are still not interested, but just pretend you are. Maybe you are marooned on a desert island and poetry magazine washes up in a bottle. In that case, pull out the cork and turn to page 149 of the November 2009 issue.
Here are some tidbits:
Isolation and communion can be viewed in two ways. The first
has to do with the private self. For each person, some isolation and
some communion are necessary. A balance. Reflection and busyness. The
contemplative life and the active life. Sainthood and heroism. In this
perspective, “isolation,” which has negative connotations, should
perhaps be replaced with “solitude,” which can mean a self-chosen
retreat. The second way to view isolation and communion is social. Do
we have satisfying access to our society or are we cut off from it,
rebuffed and frustrated by it? Does it allow us to have an effect on
it, a worthy place within it, or does it repel any decisive influence
from individual persons, such that we feel ignored, even tyrannized over?
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Society certainly permits and in fact requires participation, but
does it do so only at the cost of agreement to preordained structures
and behaviors that are non-negotiable? ... Is the person who truly disagrees always thrust to the margins of social life?
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The formative struggle of the modern individual’s life is to
find a place in society, as the whole history of the novel shows us.
There’s no such division as the one usually made, between inward and
private life on the one hand, political and economic life
on the other. It’s a matter of life and death. Isolation is death. A
society that isolates its individual members from itself, placing them
in enforced solitude, or that gives them only a simulacrum of
communion, is deathly, and it is deathly because what it believes in is
death. Communion on the other hand is life and comes out of belief in
life.
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The famous phrase “what man has made of man” was written by William Wordsworth in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken
international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such
a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs
in the poem “Lines Written in Early Spring,” which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798,
in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the
time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to
promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of
justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. “Bliss was it
in that dawn to be alive,” he wrote, “But to be young was very heaven!”
Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan
exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and
Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had
been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he
should try to make of himself.
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