Poetry and the Sublime

We are currently in Winona, MN.  Although it is a little dry here in places, the river is running and I find it extremely beautiful.  I have tried to express how I feel, but it always comes out sounding trite.  I have been reflecting on why poetry and music typically expresses feelings better than prose.  I think that all the oft-cited reasons, such as the inadequacy of our vocabulary to express subtleties of emotion, are probably partially true.  I think another factor is that people cannot really listen to each other.  As soon as somebody starts talking, we start hearing what we think the person is saying rather than what is actually being said.  This is probably why it frustrates people if they can't figure out what "box" to put you into.  Are you a liberal?  A conservative?  A reactionary?  People always want to filter what is said, to reduce it to something familiar.

Poetry has the ability to throw you off guard.  I think this is why the best poetry is not easily accessible; if you have to take the time to understand it, it can get past your filter and into your heart.

I think this is why Willa Cather wanted to separate her art from her politics.  As soon as she is labeled a "reactionary" for describing a romantic image of the past, then we can shut off what she is really saying. My opinion is that Willa Cather really wanted to capture, as well as possible using the limited palette of the English language, is a sense of the sublime.  This is why her writing is so apt to use elaborate descriptions of romantic images, such as sunsets and horizons.

In addition, I am not sure that her politics are very well understood, either.  I hope to look into it when we travel to Red Cloud.  Political thought is always provisional, and can seem superficial to people in different contexts.  It seems somebody as sophisticated as Cather could not be adequately described using simplistic labels of any kind.

I also don't think her vision of the past is all that romantic, to be honest.  Her characters seem to be alienated and helpless, particularly the most sympathetic of her characters.  There are three suicides in My Antonia, one of them was beloved Mr. Shimerda.  

I found Cather's valedictory speech, delivered when she was sixteen, to be very insightful and reflective.  In this speech, she clearly has her heart in the future; she has a clear picture of how people can prepare themselves to maintain a sensitivity to the divine in a world where accepted views are being challenged by the  advances in science.  

Jonathan Swift wrote, "When a true genius appears among you, you will know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."  I think this describes what has happened to Willa Cather.  It is too bad that academic interpretation of literature is shaped so much by intellectual trends.  I think that there is so much pressure for professors to publish that they almost need to hang their reputation on movements, particularly if they lack the creativity to come up with new perspectives on their own.  The problem with applying a critical approach to interpret somebody's writings, particularly writings as deep as Cather's, is that it is intellectually limiting.  That is not to say that Freudians, for example, don't have anything to say about literature.  It is true that we should try to see the literature beyond the filters we use.