The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making
Susan Stewart
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0226773876
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.
call, As if his liquid, loose retinue stayed Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid, The common pass, Where, clear as glass, All must descend Not to an end: But quickened by this deep and rocky grave, Rise to a longer course more bright and brave. He juxtaposes the even measure of pentameter couplets against the uneven dimeter passages: first a couplet, then, doubling, a pair of couplets in succession. Thus although the entire poem shares a common rhyme 68 chapter three scheme, the
restrict our concerns and hopes to the limits of our bodies. Such negative freedoms grant from the outset that power is something that must be wrested away from what is outside of our bodies and the limits of our bodily extension. Positive freedoms, however, involve acts of affirmation—they are experienced not as away from but as toward. The prevailing theme of negative freedom is our mortality; that of positive freedom, our decision to live. This notion of positive freedom has been popularized
an outcome of it, adds to the inverted metaphor of darkness nourishing a dying flame. Shelley underlines the vast asymmetry between our endless substitution of metaphors for death and the literal irredeemable fact of death itself. Shelley’s hymn reaches its epitome as section 5’s ending noise—the shrieking and clapping conversion—then leads, in section 6, to the poet’s allusions to the dream and hope his own words cannot express: that Intellectual Beauty will free the world from its “dark
and clasp’d my hands in ecstasy! Here the twenty-four-year-old Shelley is describing his boyhood fascination with ghoulish notions and lifelong enjoyment of horror stories. When he was a child, he especially liked to scare his sisters with invented legends like “The Great Snake.” And his biographer Richard Holmes records how just two years before, when Shelley, his wife Mary, and her sister Jane (Claire) Clairmont were together in London, Jane and Percy would stay up late frightening each other
thought itself. The necessity of starting out, of new beginnings, is as central to our existence as life itself—the very nature of our vitality. To assume that art making is a practice indicates from the outset that the long historical task of art is unfinished. Individual works will necessarily exhibit formal closure, but the task of art in general is incomplete and drives this process of continual beginnings. Something continues to call for art, something in the experience of those who make it