A few brief comments on An Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney

I've read this in conversation with brief excerpts from Gosson, Plato, and more extended readings from Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy.

The main note I want to make here is that there is a lot of fluff thrown up by the author about the contradictory arguments that Sidney makes between the first three quarters of his piece and the last fifteen pages or so. After a vituperate defense of poetry against philosophers, historians, and other detractors, the bear turns in on itself and starts speaking against bad poetry, in a few cases going against the very forms that earlier had sounded so wonderful. It also includes a vicious backlash against the contemporary English drama, and especially "the mongrel tragicomedy." The inturning is true.

But I think that, having read the other materials, there is more to say about it. Sidney is apprehensive like Puttenham that poetry should appear to be good, fair, and decorous, out of fear that they should not be well-governed. Hence Puttenham's long tracts on decorum, and Sidney's railing against poetic forms that do not keep to the rules of their elders. The adherence to rules is the central point, though there are other sticks of contention. For Gosson and Plato, poetry is inherently unruly, a clarion call against authority. They would let it in, they both argue, except that it deceives, it is magical, and it cannot be controlled. It is a rival to the state.

Puttenham alleviates the tension by showing how poetry is so often subordinated to the state, and teaching subordination to the state (decorum) as a necessary precondition of poetry. Sidney alleviates the tension between authority and poetry by demonstrating how poetry is self-governed in ways not incompatible with authority. He defends the form of poetry as having many good uses, the language as being conducive to good poetry, but must go after the individual practitioner for then not governing himself under Sidney's classical rubric for good poetry and drama. Comedy should incite delight, while laughter, uncontrolled, turns against the images of virtue he earlier espoused. I'd say that, if one pays attention to how Sidney works with poetry earlier, on the main it's not surprising that he ends with his attacks. He cannot yet assert the freedom of poets, so instead he must assert another monarchy, a monarchy of style.

Secondary Reading on Mechthild of Madgeburg

I keep wanting to write Badgerburg. Or Fudgeburg. Mmm. I have to read secondary material for the class that I pick out myself. I struck gold on one, and only got glancing references in the other. I'll let you guess which is which.

Rosalynn Voaden. "All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta." Medieval Women in their Communities. Ed. Diane Wyatt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997: 72-91. 

Pretty basic. Helfta is a community of (practicing Cistercian) nuns in the thirteenth and fourteenth century who were a focal point for a few strong mystics, among them Gertrude, Mechthild of Madgeburg, and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Mechthild of Madgeburg features in this historical narrative as the figure that comes to the community late in life (she was a Beguine before), briefly discovers the virtue of community (she was isolated before and more bound to her church fathers), and then dies. Before doing so, however, she does write one book and impart onto Gertrude and Mechthild of Hackeborn the mystic tradition, in which they bind up  community and womanness. (The Sacred Heart, the resulting cult, articulated divine authority with an awareness and attention to feminine experience, which is then explored and expanded upon in the repeated feminine and communal images.)


David Neville. "The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Madgeburg." Mystics Quarterly 34.1-2: 2008, 1-34. 

Daaaamn. I was fairly impressed here.

First there's a brief, polemical, but useful survey of materials that previous scholars have brought to the study of body and sexuality in Mechthild. Neville makes his eventual point clear here, that there is not a simple division of body/low and spirit/high. While those registers are true, there is also a way in which Mechthild appropriates an idea of a more divine body, unified with the spirit, which is at once furthest away from God and closest to God. From the start, the bodily pain is the point of greatest distance (because it reminds one of the immediacy of the body) and of greatest closeness with God (in the metaphor of longing, the intermediary longing that communicates between the spirit and the Trinity) (2).

A lot of medieval authors avoided the association of the sexual and this relation with God, though they did use metaphors of marriage (10-11). Mechthild does not avoid the subject, marking desire - even erotic desire - as a divine characteristic (8). However, this desire must be divine, that is, associated with a renunciation of earthly sexual desire and the strictly earthly postlapsarian body. Instead, through such renunciation, she must attain, not only the prelapsarian body of perfect intactness, but the body of Mary through which all things can pass through without being impurified.

Finally, to justify her point, she distinguishes the appearance of wholeness, which many corrupt people in the church have, from the actual wholeness which she gains through the figure of the bride of Christ.

I would've preferred Neville write more about how Mechthild's desire is not only precipitated on immediate satisfaction, but is also tied to a denial of that satisfaction. That is, in a way, her earthly body also matters, because it is the crude material which must behurt to be healed. Her fallen nature is the very thing that allows God to reconcile her desire, a drink that would not be as sweet if she did not also have the distance from which she would reconcile.

Mechthild of Madeberg, Part 3

This sounds like a serial.

I wasn't able to take as good of notes on this part, due to riding the bus, so I'm really dredging the memory here.

There is more description here than before. We get descriptions of the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. She emphasizes order a lot, that the angels and seraphim are below the levels of the honored humans, the apostles, the saints, the Lady, and so on. The Kingdom of Heaven has an end to its statutes as Hell has an end to its order, but there is no end to its being. There is an ordering of the procession into heaven - first maidens, then widows, then the married couples who dare not take away spiritual grace with bodily indulgence. There is even an ordering to the virtues of the choirs that sing, mercy given to the unbaptized children, and so on.

Also, there are more visions of Hell, like 3.15 and 3.21. It is upside down, and the punishments of the sinful are ordered based on what Lucifer does with them, normally some variation of being ground, gnawed, eaten, or kissed foully. The Jews are lower than the mere ignorant. 

There are also a couple of interesting narrative moments. Mary's life story is told, and flowers emphasized again as giving birth to Jesus was like dew through the flowers "so that thy purity was never touched" (3.4). Then in 3.9, she describes the beginning, when the Trinity differentiates, when the Bride is created, when she sins and brings God sorrow, and how Jesus chooses to love her anyhow. Then, as in part 1, the passion of Christ is told again, except this time in terms of what the loving soul would experience, in third person feminine. His suffering is hers, and must be, when a soul is penetrated by the love of God (3.11).

There is more going on here than I can know. More on the Harrowing of Hell by the prophets (3.21)...  What love is good to God. The only other thing I recall is how, when describing the loves in this part, they seem a (hah) mirror image of the ones in part one. Now at one point she has a hot desire that God cools, rather than vice versa. Is the switch intentional, a necessary part of union being this sharing of sensation? I'm not sure.

A couple more for medievalism!

Well, all those times I called myself a medievalist, I didn't know what a funny thing I was doing. A medieval scholar is someone who studies medieval history, literature, art, or so on. A medievalist is one who adapts medieval themes into present culture, such as an architect or a social activist or a Sir Walter Scott. These articles abundantly pointed out the difference, and then broke it down, showing why the distinction is not one of privilege, and in many ways isn't a distinction at all. Thus, in a single sitting I've been both castigated and vindicated for my writing! Woo!

John Simons, "Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-Industrial Popular Literature"

Medievalism is only recognized by Victorian England because it is at that point that the refined high-culture readers and authors finally give it any attention. However, that is not to say that it wasn't there before. Continuously from the sixteenth century there have been genres of what has been typically considered "low" literature that have dabbled with the medieval to comment upon contemporary beliefs, contest social injustices, and entertain the public. Simons thus studies first the continuing manuscript romance tradition (in urban, nonaristocratic readership) and then, more briefly, the brief chapbook romances in the eighteenth century, read by agricultural laborers (farmers) and gentry children (well-off kids). By this, less well-off readers gain access to aesthetic pleasures where they couldn't have access to, say, belles lettres.

Clare A. Simmons. "Medievalism and the Quest for the "Real" Middle Ages: Introduction."

This is the essay that contested the division between medievalism and medieval studies. For a while the two were relatively unified, including in Furnivall's work with the Early English Text Society and earlier with various authors and philological groups. It was in the late 19th century, as English became a department in the University, that medieval studies sought to distance itself from the medievalists who used medieval themes for social, political, or aesthetic ends rather than historical authenticity or (what amounts to the same thing) literary purity. Lots of good medievalist background, like Chartism, quixotic fears, Burke, and so on. Finally, the division is negated, since scholars always approach their work with something they bring in... the enthusiast medievalist cannot be stopped.

Dellheim, "The Face of the Past: Preface, Ch. 1 (The Paradoxes of Progress)"

The medieval images and simulacra that adorn train stations and hotels, the most modern of the 19th century being simultaneously the most medieval in appearance. The English Parliament being rebuilt in a medieval mode that was "unpopular" as soon as it was built, and a London that looked more medieval in 1900 than it ever had since the Middle Ages. The look back is also a look forward, a necessary part of the discourses of progress as well as the longing backwards. Medievalism was all-consuming, used by progressives and conservatives to urge balanced progress and continuity.

Loretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren, "Introduction."

By now, so much of it has been said before. Permeation as a theme for medieval themes in 19th century England. Interesting because they show how even anti-medievalist backlashes couldn't avoid using medieval themes.

Mechthild of Madgeberg

The Flowing Light of the Godhead, tr. Lucy Menzies, Parts 1 and 2

This is not an ideal translation, but I cannot get a hold of a more complete copy before class early Thursday morning. The only evident problem is that of omissions, which the author explains as a cost-saving measure. And of course the scholar in me hates when someone else determines for me that something is unimportant. If I were reading for pleasure alone, then I'd not mind so much.

Anyway, observations! Since there isn't a much better away to approach the text.

It is a combination of prose visions, poetic dialogues between figures like the "Soul" and Godly "Love," seemly epistles between God and Mechthild, and so on. Most of the sections are short, with a few extended ones happening especially near the end of a part.

She is a Catholic mystic from the thirteenth century, writing in a Low/Middle German dialect. It's tough to know exactly what, since her works only come to us in a Latin and High German translation. She was a beguine (and possibly an abbess) for a while, before joining the nuns in Helfla in her old age. The Church often didn't like her for the criticisms she made about its worldliness. Many scholars think Dante was influenced by her imagery of death. She was never canonized, and forgotten for a long time until the late 19th century. So that's the official detail.

Her theology is one that, for the most part, I've seen before. The soul must renounce life and castigate the bodily senses in order to attain oneness with God as personified in the figure of love. The soul is occasionally lifted with God into high contemplation, the body utterly burned away so that the soul remains a mirror to reflect the Father's glory.

After flying high like a dove, though, she must inevitably descend back into the body she abhors. Such separation is necessary. As Jesus describes in part two, there are two cups from which she can drink. The first is red wine, signifying sorrow. The second is white wine, signifying consolation. The white wine is the better wine. However, the soul is best when it drinks from both. The soul best feels the healing and oneness with God when it also knows the solitude of an earthly life, though she is never parted from God, only separated.

Of course there are what we'd call sexual tones, since so much is put into the love poem form. Mary is the Bride to the Bridegroom, the Father. She is the Mother to the Son. And she is Friend to the Spirit. Even Mechthild is often called bride, though, and there is a certain tension between the earthly tropes of love, and the spiritual level it attains:

"Lord! Thy blood and mine is one unstained;
Thy love and mine is one and undivided;
Thy robe and mine is one, unspotted,
Thy lips and mine are one, unkissed..." (2.25).

They are so close in union that their lips do not merely touch, as in a kiss soon to be separated, but they are actually one. Fruitful study could be made of other images, such as Mary's overflowing milk to the glory of the Father and the love of man.

There are also other images that demand further study, such as the prolific uses of the color white to designate purity, or the frequent use of flowers, to the point where they seem a pagan appendation upon her worship. "I come to my love / As dew on the flowers" (1.13).

Perhaps to contrast with the abundance of the flower, she is frequently in a desert. It could be a reference to Jesus's trial in the desert (1.29), but appears frequently on its own. It could refer to the ascetic ideal that many saints hold, or perhaps to the sparseness and temptations of this world to a flower grown for God.

Finally, I should pay attention to when she talks to or about other saints, especially women ones, and especially those near her own time. Hildegund of Schonau, for example.

More to come, as I read the third part for Thursday as well.

A Couple of Medieval Revival Pieces

I think I'll call it a light day today. It was raining earlier, and I enjoyed that. Now it's turning pretty light outside, and I'll want a few hours to myself before I go out tonight.

These essays were not so hard. I also tended to like their tone better. Sometimes Bloomfield was about to lose me, because he has the great and sweeping style of an old medieval historian, but he brought the information where it counted. Finally, their tone was clear. When you state clearly what the purpose of your essay is, it's not original or brilliant, but neither are most of the first couple of paragraphs of countless essays where I struggle to find the thesis.


Charles Dellheim, "Interpreting Victorian Medievalism." (DA553.H57 1992)

He broke it down. To put it concisely, there were several uses of medievalism in the period. The conservatives sought to use medieval themes to impose a sense of security and social order amidst the apparent upheaval of industrialization. The liberals used medieval themes to uphold claims for freedoms and liberties that were, according to them, older than bondage (see ideas of the "Norse yoke." Gothic architecture, instead of appropriating obscure rules and dictums of the church, were made instead to simultaneously restrain industry and uphold democratic virtues. Medievalists were unified in their appeal to the past, but not to its use.

Morton W. Bloomfield, "Reflections of a Medievalist: America, Medievalism, and the Middle Ages."

Another broad, sweeping essay. Medievalism is split into three uses -
1. Medieval ideas and institutions, carried directly onward, that later come to fruitition.
2. Looking back to medieval ideas and myths and reinterpreting them for the present.
3. Study of medieval history and the past for accuracy's sake.
He argues that the second and the third reinforce each other, to put it most broadly, that the scrupulous and careful study of history provides new modes of expression for the medievalist enthusiasts who start clubs like the SCA, who tend to look back longingly and forward with dread. I disagree with the last point, as a medievalist who is very technologically friendly, but the simplification here does not disrupt the main point.

A cold, cold dose of Romanticism

I enjoy a good deal of Romantic poetry. I prefer the writings on the subject less. Perhaps it is a gut reaction to the ostentatious tones that the critics this week tend to take. I'm not sure.

1. W.K. Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery"

Wimsatt is one of those old-guard critics. He espoused New Criticism, which emphasized study of the form and the structure of a poem. When used well, it provides brilliant close readings of material that would otherwise remain relatively inaccessible. When used dully, it is dry and raw. Wimsatt uses it well, but it occasionally chafes.

Main point: The Romantic poets, as compared to the Neoclassicists before them, moved away from metaphors where both tenor and vehicle were dissimilar and distinct to a mode where the tenor was an abstract quality. As the subject became nature, as the animating principle of the panthetistic spirit and the scientific object became a metaphysics, as the poets and readers became attuned to the thought and feeling, the structure of the poem and the metaphor changed to allow this explosion of imagination. Vividness that approaches direct sensory perception while nevertheless resisting the subrational. Nature gains uncommon power, a haunting character in this way.

I cannot dispute the point.

Unfamiliar words:
Esemplastic - unifying disparate parts. The poetic imagination is said to have an esemplastic power, according to the Romantics. In this case, it is the union of the individual and nature, possibly openng "our primary awareness of the world into symbolic avenues to the theological" (25).

2. Geoffrey Hartman, "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness"

Main point: Both the German and the English Romantic poets saw introspection or self-consciousness as a disease, eating at oneself and wasting away like a self-consumed lover. Self-consciousness was both maligned and necessary to them. They thought that by learning enough and projecting their focus outward to nature, they would be able to move beyond self-consciousness to a new experience, a closer communion with nature that would be more original, more healthy. They would explore nature with their images, and not simplify it or cut down, as traditional analysis would tend to do. Poetry, like myth and religion, would resist the analytic destructive impulse and purify it. However, the Romanticists had a peculiar anxiety, because they could not adequately define the function of the art that served as their escape. Art tries to reconcile the subject with nature, but at the same time it is split from nature because it has no authoritative myth. Thus the Romantic poet, like the Wandering Jew, is anxious in his/her own deathlessness.

Unfamiliar words:
Thomas Carlyle: Came up with anti-self-consciousness theory. 19th century author.
Larmoyant: Tearful, maudlin. This author had a tendency of using French or German instead of English. In which the author talks about the tearful Romantics.

3. Paul de Man "The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image"

Lots of people like Paul de Man. I'm more ambivalent. You just don't begin an essay with, "In the history of Western literature..."

Main point: He's concerned with the shift of the status of the image in Romantic poetry to greater prominence and concreteness even as the structure of the poetic language becomes more metaphorical. The metaphors and words attempt to usurp the originary status of nature - they try to be original, but because they are images of something else, cannot be the literal or transcendental flower. Words must originate, and they cannot simply be pre-existing. The subsequent Victorians are tainted by this failure, and must live in the shadow of nature's grandeur. The poetic imagination even for the Romantics must turn away from earthly nature and ascend into some other nature, up in the sky, attempting to ascend beyond the contradictions of nature. Imagination, rather than encouraging coexistence with nature, seeks to establish consciousness independent of it, but he doesn't explain why the preoccupation with nature begins in the first place. (He only explains, via Rousseau, that it is there.)