A briefing
“The sequence shows glimpses of the scoured alpine landscape outside the hotel’s windows: “the distant plume / of a snowslide / on glacial slopes,” but the would-be Tibetan mountainscapes are only backdrop to the poet’s back-and-forth on ego and emptiness.” Above: Photo of the Canadian Rockies by David Whelan, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sam Johnson’s line on the Metaphysicals — that in their work “heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”[1] — is one example among many in Anglo-American letters of how a term of reproach, given some time, becomes a term of praise. Since Eliot in 1921 pardoned the Metaphysicals for all that violent yoking, applauded them for their immunity to the dissociated sensibility of his contemporaries, readers of poetry in English have been taught to admire poets who “ransack,” as Johnson said, art and nature for conceits that are misaligned or unevenly yoked.
Sam Johnson’s line on the Metaphysicals — that in their work “heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”[1] — is one example among many in Anglo-American letters of how a term of reproach, given some time, becomes a term of praise. Since Eliot in 1921 pardoned the Metaphysicals for all that violent yoking, applauded them for their immunity to the dissociated sensibility of his contemporaries, readers of poetry in English have been taught to admire poets who “ransack,” as Johnson said, art and nature for conceits that are misaligned or unevenly yoked.
Edited by Charles Bernstein