Word: poeticizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...agent of individual and social transformation. For Frye, mythologies, as imaginative universes, are not primitive stabs at science, but "rather an attempt to articulate what is of greatest human concern to the society that produces it." In his exaltation of the imagination, he goes so far as to view poetic myth as embodying a higher order of reality than scientific truth. In an essay called "Spengler Revisited," Frye defends Spengler against his detractors, in part, by saying...
...Venus," an actress of little distinction but a first-class nag-the last person to appreciate the extraordinary poems she inspired, like The Promises of a Face. More briefly a "White Venus" entered his life: Apollonie Sabatier, a famous salon keeper of the day. She elicited a series of poetic love letters-including To She Who Is Too Gay and The Spiritual Dawn. When, after five years, Apollonie wrote him a valentine, Baudelaire cut and ran. He could put a woman on a pedestal or in the gutter, but there was no middle ground. "I have odious prejudices about women...
...recognition--a contribution, Keeley believes, akin to that of major poets such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound--who, like Cavafy, shaped "their individual myths out of the cities and countries of their imaginations." But Cavafy, in relative literary isolation, "was the first of these to project a coherent poetic image of the mythical city that shaped his vision"--what Keeley terms "the Alexandrian mode." Keeley shows how Cavafy's development of his "myth in progress" paralleled his personal acceptance of Alexandria in literal and metaphorical terms--and how the mythical city increasingly shut out the real one below Cavafy...
...than the "manipulator." Thus, "the game of nations interests Cavafy primarily because of what it reveals about basic, perennial attitudes or emotions and only secondarily because of what it reveals about the historical process..." Keeley explains. History serves a "metaphoric function," and it becomes one limb of Cavafy's poetic organism...
...CURIOUS neophyte, Keeley's book is a more provocative introduction to Cavafy's world than is Liddell's biography. Yet the two complement one another, for Keeley discusses the poet's life only insofar as it enters into the progression of the poetic myth, while Liddell brings poetry into his book only insofar as it illuminates the poet's life. Thus, for the truly inquisitive neophyte, reading both books more or less concurrently is a highly satisfactory introduction to Cavafy's life and work. And, by juxtaposing the two studies, one is relieved of Liddell's occasionally tedious scholarly circumspection...