The Fourth Dimension of a Poem
Page 26
surrealism, 72
Swift, Jonathan, 72
Symbolists, 183
Symons, Arthur, 183
Symposium (Plato), 166–67
syntax, in “Ode to Autumn,” 46
System of Nature (d’Holbach), 78, 134
Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw, 168
techne, 155
technology, 150
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 14–18
popularity of, 15
text, 32, 58
Derrida’s definition of, 61
as performative, 59
personification of, 62–65
as signs, 60
as tissue of quotations, 59
theme, 102
Theocritus, 146–47
theology, 163
theory, 53–54
as orientation to language as such, 88n
theory worlds, human world vs., 69–77
Thomas, Dylan, 3, 148–49
Thomson, James, 52n
“Three Years She Grew” (Wordsworth), 115
time, xii–xiii, 13
“Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 119, 133
green earth in, 130
nature as living entity in, 130–31
Tolstoy, Leo, 80
Tories, 225
trace, 75
tragedy, 155
Transcendental Idealism (Schelling), 206
tropes, 65
True, the Beautiful, and the Good, The (Cousin), 180–82
truth, 54, 61, 83–84
as beauty, 164–65, 166–67
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 104–5
ultrastructuralism, 73–74
Universalgeschichte, 202
Universal Spirit, 141
urbanization, 133
useful arts, 173, 174
utile, 67–68, 156
Utilitarianism, 220
utilitarian religion, 164
utterance, act of, 2–3, 30n
of “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” 10–11
of “Cynara,” 19–21
in Keats’ poetry, 32–33
of “Mansions,” 23–28
of “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” 18–19
in “Ode to Autumn,” 44, 49
in “Ode to Evening,” 51n
in “On This Island,” 6, 8–10
of “Surprised by Joy,” 13
Valéry, Paul, 183
Validity in Interpretation (Hirsch), 108
Viennese waltz, 19, 20
Virgil, 67
Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 178, 185, 187
Wandering Jew, 201–2
Weg (path), 203, 206, 207, 209
Weltbild, 70–71
Whichcote, Benjamin, 171
Whigs, 225
whirlwinding, 23–24
Wilde, Oscar, 20
Wilson, Edmund, 87
wind, 23, 37
Wissenschaft (Fichte), 205–6
Wittgenstein, Ludwig:
ambiguous duck-rabbit drawing used by, 128
on certainty as language-game, 98, 126, 129
on conversions, 77–78, 91n
on language as inter-involved with forms of life, 125–26
on primitives, 70–71, 125
Wolff, Christian, 158
woman, 197–98
Woodmansee, Martha, 175
words:
meaning of, 2, 3
sound of, 2
Wordsworth, Catherine, 12, 13
Wordsworth, William, xi, 12–14, 132, 146, 218
Ammons vs., 149
as egalitarian, 223–24
green earth used by, 131
Hazlitt’s stormy relationship with, 214
healing power of, 14
as hopeful of French Revolution, 219
idiolect of, 112, 123
life journey in, 207–8, 210
metaphors of, 136–39
“one life” used by, 131
“A Slumber,” 107–26
sound of, 31
work, 58
Works (Hazlitt), 213
World as Will and Idea, The (Schopenhauer), 179
world-picture, 71
writing, lethal quality of, 64
writing-in-general, 58
Yeats, W. B., xi, 222
Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck, 160, 161
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Abrams, M. H. (Meyer Howard), 1912–
The fourth dimension of a poem : and other essays / M.H. Abrams ; foreword by Harold Bloom. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-05830-7 (hardcover)
1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Poetics. I. Title.
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*This was a lecture delivered at several universities in 2010–11. The text is that of the version delivered at Cornell in November 2010. The lecture relies on oral demonstrations of the diverse effects of the enunciated speech-sounds that constitute the words of a poetic passage. A video of the lecture at Cornell is available online at fourthdimensionofapoem.com.
*From The Persistence of Poetry, edited by Ronald M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst, Mass., 1998). This was a collection of papers delivered at the John Keats Bicentennial Conference held at Harvard University in September 1995. For additional analyses of the effects of the material dimension of poems (the physical articulation of their speech-sounds), see “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem,” in this volume.
*From The Emperor Redressed: Critiquing Critical Theory, edited by Dwight Eddins (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1995). This was a paper presented at a symposium, “Critiquing Critical Theory,” held at the University of Alabama in 1992.
*From The Philosophy of the Curriculum: The Need for General Education, edited by Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, and Miro Todorovich (Buffalo, N.Y., 1975). This was a paper delivered at a conference on “The Philosophy of the Curriculum” held at Rockefeller University in 1973. References are to two papers published in the same volume: Frederick A. Olafson, “Humanism and the Humanities,” and Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Observations on Humanism and History.”
*This was a lecture delivered at several universities, at various stages of its evolution, between 1976 and 1981. For related considerations of the nature of certainty and of the openness to disagreement in literary criticism and other humanistic enterprises, see the essays “What’s the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?” (especially pp. 67–72), and “A Note on Wittgenstein and Lite
rary Criticism” (especially pp. 84–87), in M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (New York, 1989).
*From Notre Dame English Journal 13 (1981). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
*This was the introductory essay to the collection The Motif of the Journey in Nineteenth-Century Italian Literature, edited by Bruno Magliocchetti and Anthony Verna (Gainesville, Fla., 1994).
*Originally published in The New York Review of Books, May 10, 1984, under the title “The Keenest Critic.” This was an essay-review of David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford, 1983).