Poetry

Today we discussed William Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and what the Romantics defined as true poetry.  To them, poetry was the expression of an experience; poetry was recalling their feelings at a later date, giving physical form to their memories. 

So this afternoon, inspired and challenged, I turned a very personal memory into a poem.  I am not going to post the poem, because what i learned about myself while writing the poem is far more important.  I learned that, while poetry may be the recording of an experience, writing a poem is itself a very unique experience.  I sat very still for a long time trying to recall every tiny detail from my memory.  I tried to remember exactly how I felt about that day, how other's reacted to what happened, specific thoughts I had about the clock and the coffee, everything down to the wallpaper.  I thought if anything I would've been angry, but really I just cried for a little while.  And then I found peace.  Today I allowed myself to feel emotions that I didn't know I was still harboring because I had put an experience in the darkest corner of my mind and refused to relive it.  I came to terms with my emotions when I experienced expressing them.  To me, that is true poetry. 

First Thought

This is my first blog ever, so criticism and tips are appreciated!  I am starting this blog for the Humanities class I am taking this semester: The Humanistic Tradition III: Romanticism to Postmodernism, as taught by Professor Thomas Deane Tucker, PhD. 

 I am pretty excited about the assigned readings for the class, which include texts like Shelley's Frankenstein and Marx's The Communist Manifesto.  The assignment for tomorrow's class is to read Steven Kreis's Lecture 16: The Romantic Era. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture16a.html   I encourage you to read it (if you have time) it is well written and very insightful.

As I was reading the lecture, the following paragraph in particular stood out to me,

The Romantics defined the Enlightenment as something to which they were clearly opposed. The philosophes oversimplified. But Enlightenment thought was and is not a simple and clearly identifiable thing. In fact, what has often been identified as the Enlightenment bore very little resemblance to reality. As successors to the Enlightenment, the Romantics were often unfair in their appreciation of the 18th century. They failed to recognize just how much they shared with the philosophes. In doing so, the Romantics were similar to Renaissance humanists in that both failed to perceive the meaning and importance of the cultural period which had preceded their own (see Lecture 4). The humanists, in fact, invented a "middle age" so as to define themselves more carefully. As a result, the humanists enhanced their own self-evaluation and prestige in their own eyes. The humanists foisted an error on subsequent generations of thinkers. Their error lay in their evaluation of the past as well as in their simple failure to apprehend or even show a remote interest in the cultural heritage of the medieval world. Both aspects of the error are important.

                                                                                                                                    (paragraph 12)

I found it intriguing that the Romantics and the Renaissance humanists both tried to elevate themselves by rejecting the ideas of their predecessors, but are regarded today as being foolish for doing so.  It evokes an important question for our own generation: have we forgotten where we came from?  Are we being so narrowminded in our veiws of the "oldfashioned" values that our parents and grandparents hold that we simply run as far as we can in the other direction without looking back? Are we looking for important lessons and similarities, or have we shut out all other opinions in the mindset that WE know best?

Another important question that I find myself asking is what will our generation be remembered for?  Will be catergorized and studied by future generations for pop culture, going green, or our need for instant gratification? Are we on the egde of a ground-breaking movement like the French Revolution, or will we merely blend into the era between the Civil Rights Movement and the next big thing?