In How to Read a Poem, explain Eagleton's argument about either "The Death of Experience" or "Imagination." What is he saying about the relationship between experience and poetry, or between imagination and poetry? Quote specific passage and examine them. Keep your response grounded in what he is saying. That means wrestling what specific phrases like what he means by "the Eternal Now of modern urban experience" (17), "resisting the commodity form" (18), and "the death of Bourgeois Man" (19). Some of the terms and names he uses may be unfamiliar, so some internet research is called for.
Be specific and think critically. Focus on one specific idea. Your response should be 300 words.
Technology is taking over and it is creating its own experience instead of us experiencing. For instance he says that hotel clerks used to have to write out someone's name instead of typing it onto a computer. Kind of what we are doing right now as we type up our answers. It used to be no computers meaning communication. It is a "new threat of extinction," or in my words killing our own experiences through technology. He goes on to state that "modernity has stripped us of many things," and it honestly has especially communication. As generations continue so does technological advances, one day it will be to where people only talk through text. For instance I was at a get together the other day and I noticed the younger people are the more they are on their phones. The lines "we never need to leave our cars, so we never need to leave our own skulls" made me think of the way in which we look at experiences through technology. As in if a friend tells you about the trip to the Grand Canyon, you already have an idea of what it will be like. He goes on to say that the death of experience is the death of man itself, which makes sense because we are becoming unnatural in a sense. Instead of walking we drive, instead of experiencing, truly experiencing, we look at pictures and can intake that experience through short cuts. Another line that stuck out to me is that if technology can "dilute experiences, it can also increase the accessibility," which is essentially true. Like the car analogy, if I had to walk to the grand canyon I would never get there, but I can fly or drive there thanks to technology. As far as the relationship between experience and poetry goes, it is the "bridge to the gap" of "rationalism and irrationalism." Poets now have accessibility to experience mostly anything, and can write about it. The meaning of poetry all relies on the experience itself. Although some may seem very abstract, there is still meaning to a poem regardless of what it may seem. For example my last poem was about sluts, and it is based on my own experience realizing everyone has a different definition for them. Poetry is all about experience and the emotion people feel while not only in the moment but after and before. Its so much deeper than meets the eyes.
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ReplyDeleteImagination
ReplyDeleteImagination is that which gives literature its life. It allows us to live someone else’s life that we can gain more experience from. It allows us to gain “experiences which we are unable to enjoy first hand (Page 23).” We, as people, can only see from our perspective. Even when we are given someone else’s perspective, say when someone is telling a story, we still are only able to understand them through our perspective lens. With this shot at our pride, we reach for the impossibility of understanding something without a perspective lens. This is what our imagination is; we are trying to see something as it is in itself in comparison to seeing something through ourselves. We read stories about heroes and romances and think that we, too, can save the day and fall in love because we think “Well, I thought like them for a while.” Eagleton points out that the imagination boom occurred when “everyday life was increasingly governed by an ethic of selfish individualism (p 23).” This spark in literature as way to imagine is because people wanted to buy into a life that wasn’t theirs for a while, they wanted to see something else in itself because they grew weary of their own lenses. This allowed people to grow out of their self-centered nature, and grow into one of learning others and becoming something close to what can be imagined as community. Imagining what another might feel is what causes a moral being to become less self-centric and be able to cut off from straight desire, keeping the world afloat. While, Eagleton says, it takes imagination to plan a genocide or a bank robbery, it also always us to gain experiences we otherwise couldn’t have, and seek to see from others perspective as we can’t do with our own reasoning alone.
Imagination is something that everyone will go to for comfort. Eagleton starts his argument by saying, “young people who have been murdered were invariably bubbly and fun-loving with hordes of friends and a passionate zest for life” (22). Later going on to say that writing and poems are a way to make imagination more feasible. Eagleton talks about how imagination allows people to create and discover persons or events that they wouldn’t be able in real life. One could imagine the absolute greatest, craziest possibilities, or amazing hopes and dreams, or one could imagine the obverse; disturbing nightmares, possibly the worst thoughts to cross that persons mind. There truly are no limits. The quote from our reading that best describes this is, “ The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand… you can always read Conrad and imagine yourself in South-East Asia” (23).
ReplyDeleteThis passage shows the importance of imagination through all people. It gives people opportunities that would be limited for financial reasons, health reasons, or bad luck. Later in the paragraph the author says that poor conditions allowed imagination to grow more in men and women, saying that when people were limited, their oppression would look to imagination to feel a sense of hope. However, as with most things, there is also a down side. Eagleton later goes on to say that imagination leads to hate and pain in the world. Every oppressive idea, every war, every murder and rape came from the imagination of the person which committed the fault. These negative ideas are usually for that one persons gain at the expense of others. Imagination is a difficult thing to possess because it opens the doors to many possibilities. One of these many possibilities is poetry. Poetry opens so many doors to people and allows people to be free. It is something that can be written to move people and to give them a new purpose, or a new way to look at things. Poetry can lead and open the door to the imagination just by the vivid pictures or the lack there of. In the same sense that imagination leads to poetry, it takes someone’s mind and imagination to come up with that poetry in the first place. They really do go hand in hand. You cannot have one, without the other.
The imagination allows us to put ourselves in fantasy worlds and things beyond. In order to be a good poet you must be able to explore these ideas and leave the monotonous pattern of your own life. Imagination lets poetry go beyond the right now and into a "superior realm" (23), but "What kind of a world is it in which possibility is unquestionably preferable to actuality?" (23) Eagleton asks. Why would you want to live in a world where people prefer a life made up that does not actually exist? That is a poets job. They are required to be in there head exploring the imagination. The imagination allows for escapes such as reading and imagining about the vacation spot you have been dying to go to but cannot actually afford. A poet should not feel ashamed or that his job is as "scandalous as being paid for sunbathing or having sex" (22) because we all have to explore our imagination and we all do. We praise fiction love stories and mold our lives to be like heroes from the movies because of the sense of pride we feel in imagining ourselves in that way. Without imagination we could not function. Who would imagine the layout for new buildings or the advances in technology? Just as "bank robbers need to be reasonably imaginative about making good their escape" (24) so we all need to imagine our way through life. Without an imaginative mind, poetry does not exist. To survive we all need to carry some "selfish individualism" which requires the imagination. You cannot simply socialize in a society without sympathizing and empathizing with the human race. As Eagleton says, "The imagination was a form of compensation for our natural insensibility to one another" (24) helping us a long to function in society is the imagination. Without the imagination, there is no story, there is no poetry. They are one in the same.
ReplyDeleteEagleton's point of view on imagination or at least his explanation was that of imagination in a sense, “ which it would seem almost impious to subject to criticism.” And from that you can understand that imagination is something of someone else mind but also of yours and the person's next to you, which is kinda like when he stated that, “The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand.” And also a fact that Eagleton also explains short and well, “It is revered as one of the ‘highest’ of human capacities; yet it is also embarrassingly close to fantasy, which is one of the most infantile and regressive. And he goes again to explain that imagination is just as it is someone's thoughts that do not normally actually exist or that are edited copies of something else, “There is nothing creative in itself about the imagination, which launches wars as well as volumes of poetry. The imagination, like memory, is indispensable in an everyday sort of way: we would not tread warily on a slippery path without having a dim picture in our heads of how we might come to grief on it.”
ReplyDeleteBut to explain imagination on a better “ground” he explains the fact of importance about things among us as humans. The quote goes into better explanation,” Eagleton explains literary critics live in a permanent state of dread – a fear that one day some minor clerk in a government office, idly turning over a document, will stumble upon the embarrassing truth that we are actually paid for reading poems and novels. This would seem as scandalous as being paid for sunbathing or having sex...Critics do not have the satisfaction of working on things that actually exist, like sick dogs or dental cavities. So they are tempted to pluck a virtue out of necessity and claim that they toil in an altogether superior realm, that of the imagination. This implies, rather oddly, that things which do not exist are inevitably more precious than those that do, which is a fairly devastating comment on the latter.”
But what struct me and my understanding of the realationship he explained was this last little bit, “So far, we have been speaking of poems and poetry without pausing to define our terms. Before we go any further, then, we need to see if we can arrive at some workable definition of what we are dealing with.” So that means we are trying to understand one another like he stated earlier, “The imagination was a form of compensation for our natural insensibility to one another, “ but we we have no true middle ground between us. That we understand and imagine what we don't which is this middle ground that poets “write” to hoping we understand it.
Aside from those things I understood the relationship as one of unknown but together...that anything can happen especially things we don't understand or know or can even comprehend, which he stated clearly, “Acts of imagination are by no means always benign... Every lethal invention on record came about through the envisaging of unrealised possibilities.”
Eagleton discusses how the advancements in the modern world, of capitalism, of moving forward, the need for new things in the modern world, have all basically destroyed the idea of experience, and its importance. He mentions that it is the need to have the experience, and not, as Robert Creeley would, have the experience of the experience, that is so important in today’s modern flit-switch society. He does go on to explain that the kind of experience of which he speaks is one made of tradition, a “rich, contemplative inwardness” (19). This idea of experience is one that includes every kind of path, a unity of thought, contemplation, and culture. Poetry binds this experience together in a physical version of its “harmonious” form. Poetry, as Eagleton states, works in a way that makes “every element [conspire] with every other to form an integrated whole” (19). In this way, poetry brings forth this more “inwardness” part of a human being, with the exact kind of language needed to give individuals a sense of traditional connection. Poetry, language in general, can also go beyond this unified connection of experience. It can fall into the ideas of imagination, which can make our experiences enlightened, or at least a bit better. Eagleton argues that it is imagination, very similarly to poetry, that allows us to experience another person’s life, a way to get past the “natural insensibility to one another” (24). It also allows us to be brutal, to live out our inner evil desires in a way that is “by no means always benign” (24). He argues that imagination, as an idea, is neither specifically good nor bad, it is simply a “faculty” that we can use in order to convey our experience with others, whether that experience be real or fantasy. Either way, through poetry or imagination, we can gain a better understanding of the human psyche.
ReplyDeleteEagleton's take on the death of experience seems to be that what we consider to be an experience is a bastardization of what it used to be. On page 18, he says "what we consume now is not objects or events, but our experience of them... They come ready-interpreted, thus saving us a lot of inconvenient labour. What matters is not the place itself but the act of consuming it. We buy an experience like we pick up a t-shirt." What he's trying to get across is that what we consider to be an experience is more like buying a keychain that you saw the lady two spots ahead of you in the checkout line had, not because you wanted it but because you wanted to match her, to have something in common. In our modern world, we have pre-planned package vacations, tours through capitals and famous landmarks of history, but it's the exact same information, the exact same "experience" that your neighbor had three weeks ago when he went on that trip. The uniformity that we've placed upon our opportunities for organic and unique encounters with the world and each other destroys our ability to grow into individuals with some singularity; this is becoming the "new threat of extinction" that is to be replaced with a pissing contest of whose version of the same happenings was better and how. But if poetry is supposed to be the stuff that "rather than simply allow us to consume the stuff, it forced us to wrestle with it", how can these cookie-cutter experiences help us? What good are they if they're the same crap that any joe off the street has under his belt? If what is supposed to be unique has become common, if the source of our strength as poets has been cheapened, then what is the point? That is the death of experience.
ReplyDeleteEagleton’s idea of society losing experience itself is grounded in the loss of, “myth, magic, kinship, tradition, solidarity and subjectivity” (17). He believes that through continuous input on what to think, so many brand names always peeking out; we the people are overly influenced in many ways, and it constantly effects our judgments.
ReplyDeleteHowever in one regard I disagree with Eagleton; in reference to human experiences, from famous ones such as The Grand Canyon Experience, to miniscule ones such as what we consume, Eagleton believes that every experience is prepared. He states that, “The experience is already out there, as ready-made as a pizza, as bluntly objective as a boulder, all we need to do is receive it” (18). While I agree that many experiences are prepared and labeled, he may be generalizing a bit ambitiously. While there may be labels which describe a successful action, behavior, or experience, there will always be syntactical gaps when attempting to convey particular feelings associated with these successes. The experience can never truly be shared, but only experienced, which is precisely why Eagleton is correct about overwhelming input from all sides in modern society.
Eagleton is convinced that the relationship between experience and poetry is that they both share some key factors; they are both harmonious and unified, with “Nothing out of place, that no word is idle or superfluous” (19). This idea can be transposed to define experience as well; true experience being one of the occasions where one’s full focus and energy as directed one way, consuming the individual completely in an often positively oriented way.
Imagination is used for a multitude of different purposes. A lot of imagination is needed in every day life; we often need to use imagination for a multitude of different real life purposes. Though most of what Eagleton talks about is how imagination effects people when reading and creating literature, he does stop to talk about what else imagination is used for. He says that “Acts of imagination are by no means always benign” (pg 24) and that we use imagination through out life. This is evident in most of what we learn and do; we have to apply at least a small part of our imagination into it, to picture the outcome and to predict the future a bit. Our imaginations are what makes us unique as a species, we can have whole worlds in our minds and using that power we are able to apply it to practice uses. When using our imagination we are able to picture stuff in a different and almost revolutionary way. We can take whole rooms and basically spin it in our heads. We can use our imaginations to seat people at dinner party. Eagleton even says that even criminals use imagination, for example “Bank robbers need to be reasonably imaginative about making good their escape.” (24) Though we do use imagination for a lot of real world applications, we also use it for other things like imagining people, places, emotions, and ideas that we may never be able to go to or feel in reality. Imagination is a great tool and helps us with stress as well as a multitude of problems. A lot of people can wind down and distress by letting their imaginations flow and run wild, taking on the form of arts and literature for others to explore and learn about.
ReplyDelete“Imagination”
ReplyDeleteIn his argument about imagination, Eagleton brings up the point that although we usually view imagination as this grand fantastical thing, it is actually just an average everyday tool. He does not slight the power and awe that accompanies imagination, he just presents that it can also be terrible or mundane. Eagleton points out that we hold imagination to such a high esteem even though it is not something that takes a terrible amount of expertise, saying “it is revered as one of the ‘highest’ of human capacities; yet it is almost embarrassingly close to fantasy, which is one of the most infantile and regressive”(23). People do not generally accept the ideas of children as genius, and yet when similar aspects of imagination are expressed in adulthood, they are treated as works of brilliance. He continues on to argue that we live in a society in which “things that which do not exist are inevitably more precious than those that do” (23). This seems to present a problem for Eagleton because he claims that “possibility clearly isn’t always undoubtedly preferable to actuality”, trying to get the point across that imagination can be just as much death and destruction as it is sunshine and rainbows (23). Eagleton also presents imagination as a means for a society of self-absorption to experience empathy. The imagination allows someone to step outside of their own world and into someone else’s, allowing for a more open realization of others’ circumstances. Furthermore, Eagleton claims that “the imagination, like memory, is indispensable in an everyday sort of way… it is essential to our survival” (24). So although he claims that imagination is an everyday thing for everyone, Eagleton also makes sure to establish that it is essential to our lives, and that it can be just as terrible as it is magnificent.
The Death of Experience
ReplyDelete"Experience for Benjamin meant the stories which the old recount to the young; and its disintegration in modern times was in his eyes on of the most grievous forms of human poverty" (17). In this passage and most of Eagleton's argument, I believe, is that the information technology we have now a days as the cause of the Death of experience. "Niagara Falls, Dublin Castle and the Great Wall of China do our experiencing for us." (18) I believe this passage alludes to this concept, still today visiting these places is seen as an amazing experience, however a lot of people are less excited to visit these places because of the digital visuals we have of them nowadays. Before the only way you could 'see' these places was by hearing stories of these places, the vivid descriptions you got triggered your imagination and you'd want to go out and live the experience yourself.
Eagleton talks about how experiences now are pre-packed for us, in the sense that any sort of experience has already been layed out, no spontaneity to it. "The experience is already out there, as ready-made as a pizza" (18). Indeed we do see this a lot nowadays, going back to the Grand Canyon, nowadays there's tour guides to walk you through step by step of the whole place, explain things that don't necessarily need to be explained and just take away from the bliss experience that should be this natural landscape.
He makes a connection between this packed experience era we lived in with poetry. "For what, so the critics inquire, is more unified and harmonious than a poem? Isn't it part of the very definition of poetry that absolutely nothing is out of place," (19). I disagree with this notion, although it is true that in the structure of a poem is considered as perfect, perfect in the sense that everything is where it is supposed to be, it isn't something that was planned or packaged, its just something that is born and just is as it is.