Recent Events from the Cowan Center: Frederick Turner on Poetic Language
Recording and Transcript of the 2021 Cowan Chair Lecture
Georgia O’Keeffe – The Lawrence Tree, 1929
Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Literature at the University of Texas-Dallas, is a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and contributed to the volume on lyric in Louise Cowan's series The Genres of Literature. He begins with a consideration of what is proper to lyric poetry rather than to any other poetic form. He then reviews Yeats's magisterial poem, going through it sequentially in a kind of walking conversation with us, restating in his own words, one by one, the philosophical issues and distinctions raised in Yeats's walk through the Irish schoolroom.
And then the real fireworks begin. Turner's poetic at-homeness with the latest scientific understanding of our living world gives us his imagination, changing our notion of incarnation and creation, tearing down the wall between the sciences and the humanities, and rebuilding the bridge of analogy linking all sectors of the universe. This gift allows us to look at the dynamic process of the world in the same way in which we are fascinated with the poetic dynamics of the word. "Beauty, then," he concludes, "is our expression of the creative self-generation of the universe."
Read the full lecture here or watch the recording here or below. Either way, don’t miss the Question & Answer period (beginning at 56:30) at the end of the video— it is almost a lecture in itself!
Lyric and the Gestation of Poetic Language: Yeats's Poetic Labor in "Among School Children"
1. Labor and Beauty
Among all the definitions of lyric, two fundamental characteristics emerge. One is that it is in the voice of the poet in person--it is not spoken as a proxy for the tribe, or in the ventriloquism of drama, or as the prophet of a god, or as the teacher of doctrine. The other characteristic is that it sings: the singer's soul is revealed in the song, the dancer is the dance.
This last phrase is of course from Yeats's “Among School Children,” that autobiographical meditation on the nature of beauty and on the art and labor of creating it. It is also an example of its subject. Let [us read] it.
Among School Children
By William Butler Yeats
I.
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;[. . .]
Note that Yeats is expressing powerful feelings, which any creative writing student can do in a journal, or teen in a tweet. But what makes this poetry great is that this is a self that is worth listening to, for whom millennia of philosophy, major events in history, an active and creative life, brilliant friends, and the whole body of human poetry and science and theology are part and parcel of his subjectivity. And this is a poetic singer of massive, but understated virtuosity. As a senator in the government of liberated Ireland, one of Yeats's duties is to serve as a school inspector. The fact that Ireland puts a poet in its government means that the country is betting on him to do something that a mere politician or administrator could not do. He is being made partly responsible for the education of a new nation. How do we prepare children to be creative citizens? Is poetry of any real use? Thus begins a propulsive series of questions that continues to the end of the poem.
Read more here. . .