(Oct 31, 2019 09:16 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:(Oct 30, 2019 05:28 AM)C C Wrote: Nobody really knows, but my utterly daft, facetious, cherry-picking contribution to the speculation would be that the short piece was partly inspired by this state centennial celebration poem(?) below that wanders all over the place. Written by someone named Joe M'Spadden and published in the The University of Tennessee Magazine, Volume 11, somewhere among issues 1 to 4 (1886 to 1887). Stevens could have even stumbled across it in the years prior to 1918.
Not bad, C C. It's anyone's guess, I suppose. Good thing I asked you about Davidson.
Learned my lesson there, when it comes to forcing a gimmicky scenario to fit a clunky, artificial form. Wait until after the animated gif is done before posting what the text normally looks like on a "page". Because "you know you're going to change some things" in the course of that. And I did.
Quote:What about Heidegger's jug? The jar could be something like that.
Time and Being was nine years later (1927 vs 1918) and "The Thing" lecture was in 1950. But some of Stevens' work has been construed in a phenomenological context (i.e., parallel development, maybe they had an in-common philosophical provenance). Firewalled mystery, minus account setup: "The Idea of It": Wallace Stevens and Edmund Husserl
Things merely are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Wallace Stevens was ... a poet who thought poetry is or could be a species of world-making. [PLATH: 'I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.'] His poetry can be read as a pursuit of the question, "World-making in what sense?" ... Critchley's thesis is that in his austere late poetry Stevens puts questions of this sort to rest because he realizes that, as a species of world-making, poetry is a noble failure. The paradox is that only poetry can articulate this fact about itself, which also turns out to be a fact about the world itself: namely, as Critchley's title has it, "things merely are." The turn of the screw is that perhaps only poetry can shed interesting light on this fact about things.
Heidegger & poetry (What are poets for?): So, what is the nature of this 'destitution' Heidegger is quoting? The Gods (not only Christ but the Classical Gods) have defaulted, have 'died' as an organising principle, and with them our civilisation has been decentred. This is a common enough theme in modernist literature. Most famously in the English speaking world, William Butler Yeats explored this in the first verse of his celebrated poem, The Second Coming (1920).
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•After the war, Heidegger focuses only on poetry, what he thinks of as the art-‐form of modernity
•For Heidegger, art has become merely an opportunity for pleasure in the modern world: it has lost the central social role it once had
•He seeks to return us to the age of the Greeks, in which art was a way of grasping truths about human life
•The poet’s job is to diagnose the malaise of the present age in order to prepare the way for the (unlikely) possibility that Western culture will be able to return to an authentic relationship to being
•For Heidegger, our age (the 1940s, but his argument, one could propose, applies also to now) is a time of night, winter and destitution
•We are in this age of destitution because there are no gods to gather men and things into a relationship –the gods (Greek, Christian etc) have all fled the world
•Hölderlin recognizes that the meeting of gods and men we have lost once occurred in the Greek festival
•Festivals are holidays, or holy-‐days, in which one could set oneself outside of everyday activity and work and access our true essences (and recognize the essences of others: to recognize also means to care for)
•Human ‘essence’ is set against human usefulness: for Heidegger, the modern world only sees people in terms of use-‐value, or as ‘resources’
•In the festive mode (mood), however,we stand not just in the 'essence' of things but also in their 'wonder' and into gratitude for the fact that they are and that we are among them
•In the festive mood, things possess a special ‘gleam’(Glanz), the shining of the essentia
•Things then show up as belonging to a sacred order and since they themselves share in this sacredness,command of us love and respect
--summary points, Warwick classroom