end of the 19th century. Felicity Yates gives us no such sense. And I've combed this literature to find out what my parents' religion were. They met at seance tables. Yes, they had informants, and they meant a lot to them. But it's in the dream, it's in Australian tribes where they do practice such, having their ancestors come to speak to them. That's what, and or to speak for them, that's what Keats is doing when he writes letters drawn from Shakespeare. He lets his spiritual ancestor, by the way, it's better than the ancestors of race, or the ancestors, although he may have great insurance since he's English and Shakespeare's English, but it's better than the ancestors you got by race or by your genealogical descent because you adopt them. Being adopted, I have an extra sensitive sense about adopting parents. If they got to adopt me, I get to adopt parents. And there's a form of adoption of a poet.

[01:01]

I mean, you adopt Shakespeare in a sense when you take him seriously as your father, but particularly not fathers. I kept adopting mothers, H.D. was an adopted mother for me when I even got to meet in the, this hints. But when I say ancestors, we bypassed our trouble with fathers and mothers because ancestors don't name whether it was a father or mother. The ancestors are those who come from the realm that is immediately yours, and they can't come any other way. You can get an A in a course in poetry if you simply remember passages and put it all together in your head, you'll do a better job getting an A than if you found an ancestor there. My problem in taking a survey course is while there were other ancestors, Milton was so much an immediate ancestor experience as such, it wasn't even loyalty.

[02:03]

I couldn't move on or otherwise, I was immersed in it and I would have not even done very well answering about the poem. My account would have been as garbled as a quarrel with one of my immediate parents. I mean, it would be one of the poorer sources for what I really like. If you just think about it, you've got a slight biased point of view if you just entered that intimately in the relation of the poem. I've got to put on my watch and go to the front. So let's see if I can, right? It is just a foyer to which we will still be beginning with Sardello from here, but that's all right. I'm used to this. In the course of the Kantorovich in constitutional law, he never got up to the Magna Carta. It was a great joke. It was a course that was mandatory for law students and yet it was restricted. He restricted it to 15 students.

[03:04]

And the law department at Cal demanded that he have at least six law students in there and then he had all his favorites in for the others. And all of us were grinning, all of us medievalists were grinning because we would say, do you think you'll get to the Magna Carta? And these poor law students were taking the course of a very great scholar in constitutional law because they had to have constitutional law. And they thought they were in a survey and we were in one of these things where we'd be in the Whitaker mode and where it possibly was for weeks on end. And well, if I could get to a piece of formula because I don't want to end right at four, I don't know. Backtrack and contrast. Tradition, in a double sense, one that we've got because our literature courses now have defined an English tradition in letters.

[04:04]

And there's quite, to quite extent, American studies have defined a tradition. So in the tradition we know that, let's take our American scene. In the tradition we know that in the 19th century we've got two great poets, Whitman and Emily Dickinson and another one that Whitman found it hard to remember poem. This would be an example of, this is Whitman, and if not Whitman's head, he didn't know of Emily Dickinson. And Emily Dickinson knew remotely of Whitman. So the poets, it's poets later who begin to name them. And yet when we come to somebody naming a tradition within American studies for his own reason, Olson would not like to name Whitman at all there. He was about as graceless at admitting the possibility of Whitman being in the show as William Carlos Williams was, which had a considerable lack of grace. And Pound's alliances with Whitman

[05:07]

are at best an alliance with an absolutely unsavory ancestor. He hopes that Eliot won't be checking up on him or something. And as frequently Pound does, caught in between his sense of what was right in culture, in the sense of the middle class culture, and his sense of something about poetry, in their American scene, let's say, Olson came from the training of American literature, American scene, I believe, American studies. It's a fight uphill for Melville to emerge, and still not admitted as a poet. He beats Robert Browning around the clock, in plural, for presenting us with insurmountable difficulties of syntax. And at the same time, so you have

[06:11]

to convert yourself to Melville to read poetry. Of course, since the whole generation willingly converted themselves to Wasteland, I'm not sure. There are instant conversions, like instant coffee. I mean, Powell was an instant conversion. And to an extent, the Wasteland was an instant conversion, because it had a tone of the modern. And its occurrence in the Dial and the series of magazines did make for a kind of instant conversion. It went along with the attitudes of the 20s. It had lots of guarantees within it that Pounds never took at this level at all. You do have to convert yourself to certain poetry. Well, compared with Pounds, you really have to convert yourself to Melville to read. He likes to make it tough and uphill to read. But if you take, as I would, Melville and Emerson

[07:11]

in their prose, and Hawthorne as being primary, then you begin to get a perspective, something that's called a national literature. And as a matter of fact, in this, I don't vary. There's a negative describer of the American studies would be Ivor Winters, who, when presented with Emerson, wants to find a root proof right away. And when presented with Hawthorne, wants to find a root proof, and manages to find the most curious ones. You say, this is a great tiger, and Ivor Winters will run out presenting this other thing, which says, well, isn't this a nice one, and it doesn't eat meat? You know, I mean, it's a great improvement on the scene. And he's still describing the same, however, he has still in mind, when he does it, trying to undo exactly the same series that I'm talking about.

[08:12]

That fixes itself in a nation's mind. That one's misleading to the poet at the beginning, and yet it forms, right away, some place to look. Some place to look about where the source might be that's very close to you. And anthology will never do it, because anthologists have already picked denatured poems, for sure, so that they don't insult each other when they're between the same covers. I don't mean that I just, it's like homogenized anything. You've got to be sure that your anthology is not unwieldy, and that you can teach from it. And it's impossible, if you have the awkward knowledge you have, when you get involved with any poet. But poets, I can't imagine, an anthology may give them a few hints. It isn't yet hearing of a part in.

[09:13]

Our whole period seems to be turned on to Blythe, and Blythe is a very good example, in that he rises with just the poem. Since his entire mind about the poem is poetic, he does not seem to have the idea of a literature at all in his mind. I don't get that picture off the plate. Milton has, remember, he's making a literature. But Blythe begins to have a negative relation to a world Milton draws on directly, and that is the one of the world preceding the Bible, outside the Bible, infidel world. Remember, Milton, like Dande, makes an entire alliance with the classical world, with the Greco-Roman world,

[10:15]

draws directly upon it as being of the same order of inspiration as the Bible, and draws on elements that are completely outside of the Judeo, but also the Greek elements that have entered the New Testament, so that the two entirely different worlds are coexisting. In Blythe, we have the idea of a series of worlds coexisting and of drawing upon sources that include, for the first time openly, include visitation. Dande has a few things. Sanford, too, and maybe Wolf-Heine, maybe I'll do myself to remember it out of Milton, because of poet's visitation, that not only do they draw upon the world of poets and the pre-existing and outside the boundaries of their civilization, upon a previous civilization, but they draw upon voices

[11:21]

and so forth coming to them in dreams, and in Blythe's talking, talking with the imaginary people of the realm of the poem. In Blythe, Blythe will make his alliance and declaration of his ancestors. He'll make it directly by challenging Milton and writing Milton, by saying what, for instance, he knows of what Milton's book was saying and not saying. He will make his alliance directly, for instance, with Chaucer in just the fact that he saw to it, he did and proposed and thought to it, that he did the Pilgrims, Canterbury drew, and drew each one in the terms that show that he was, in his poetry, as I do not see Milton as having been

[12:25]

penetrated, that aspect of Milton, Blythe wanted to have what was in Chaucer, which was the faces of people, and since they begin to be in Chaucer, they're people. Remember, most of Blythe's are visionary and not people, but in Blythe's earliest poems, before they're part of the mythic Blythe, of interior and so forth, they're astounding dramas of people. I mean, they already have faces, like Blythe reassures us, yes, they do have faces, because in Chaucer, he finds where it is, where his ancestry is, of that aspect of the times when they're particular and absolute and not mythic. I mean, Blythe's bath is Blythe's hope, but another thing that can happen in poetry is an immediacy. And as a major power, then moving forever in poetry, not ever having to be repeated and haunting it as a potentiality that one can, you know,

[13:28]

where to go, as William Cross Williams did, there was my man, says William Cross Williams, of Chaucer, you have to cross miles of what is not in tune with it. So one of the processes of the poet is to find what's in tune. He finds first is the music, that Pond Pond talked about, inhabiting all forms. How else to get even start hearing what those other tunes sound like, but also opening yourself to the humanity. If you find only your tune, that, in that one, the search for that one, that is your voice, and it's very much needed. If that were the only thing, it would be the narrowest gain, and it would not open up to the vast human community that lies in the other reason poets go to the entire expanse of poetry, which is to dwell in a larger human community than their own ancestors. Than their own spiritual ancestors across time.

[14:32]

More and more on my mind is, and it's a thing that we face, what I can't think of what we ever didn't face, but we face in a most immediate way today, because our concept of humanity is now total. It's always shocking to me how long it took after science finally got down to it, biology observed that man was one species. In other words, if they breed together, it's not like a lion and a tiger giving birth to a tiburon, and then it took them ages in anthropology to figure out that they couldn't be primitive or some other species, and that what they were talking about, about race must be an absolute cell. There's absolutely no, it would be of no significance at all, real significance is biological primary. Do they breed completely and wholly,

[15:38]

and that's the real ground. Meanwhile, in the literature, we have the problems of translation and so forth, and yet only translation have brought certain integers from other places. Particularly, I'm thinking of the glimpse I get from the Australian eternal ones of the psalm, Dr. Bernie Media, or in Pound's canoes, of all surprise, not the canoes, but in culture, well, in the canoes, Gesura's Luke comes forward out of an African story, right into our American myth comes something that we could not have found any place else, except in what was viewed as a tribal myth, one of the faith and death. And that story is no longer a story just of its tribe in Africa, but becomes a part of the larger, in other words, the tribe is the species by this time, not only does it extend across time, but more and more in our time, it extends throughout the world of man

[16:41]

in order to have its variety in which it finds its residences. Its strong residences may be found anywhere. I have a very strong immediate resonance to Gesura's Luke, not only because it's in my master's poem, the canoes, but I already had it before it appeared in the canoes. So I said, wow, except I'd met it in Pound, but not in the culture, had drawn upon Frobenius and searching back of that to Frobenius, I came to the myth. And then later it comes into the canoes, but at a time when he doesn't have a book, it becomes to him because it comes to him. We no longer have then just what we would have named as the tradition, the one of the traditions of our, of the Romance tradition, starting when we go to Sordello, we will go through the tradition of what is Romance. It starts at a very definite time in the 11th century, 12th century. And it may be that today I raise questions about,

[17:42]

the serious questions that we've got about how much did we get in this invention of the imagination of the psychodrama of enchantment and enthrallment. Poetry is an enthrall in a world that enchanted, still a primary endowment poetry in one of the places where I more than sympathize with the ones that criticize it, though they, I am often disappointed because they don't realize how much is involved in their criticism. But some of the women criticizing H.D.'s poetry have been much more, much more immediate to it because her poetry is entirely a poetry of enthrallment. Enthrallment is extremely important to me emotionally. And I picture it, we may be trying to find a way at the present time, certainly I am, much like the Sadomasochists are trying to find a way for what was experienced before,

[18:43]

even as murder, and certainly as terribly destructive force within sexuality, to transform it into a love, to transform it into one right to love. The pressures and the lack of permission for the components of the Sadomasochistic complex that's at first described by Krafft Ebbing, I think, and then as Freud tackles them and finding the primary to our sexual nature. And Ray's question, maybe we're repressed sexually because we've not found a way for the full sexual nature to be love, which is a long struggle for sex to be love. And for them to be united, no reason for them to be united at all. And so it isn't reason, it's adventure, it's imagination, it is poetry, the world we create, that could be one. And meanwhile, components in it, that you can see when your cat bites

[19:43]

the neck of the other cat, and so forth, that when they're separated out and repressed, turn out to be murder, or turn out to be a terrible mayhem still in the sexual world, the exploration of this becomes primary. In the same way, I see myself, yes, poetry must be engaged with this element that's been so important to it, and increased, and has increased, not decreased, of how enthralling the poem is, how enthralling that voice was when you first heard it. But it was, and it was, if it was experienced as a potentiality, that potentiality was surely a potentiality then for the good. And there are no, any potentiality for good is equally a potentiality for you. You can increase potentiality, you can increase potentiality selectively. Power is the power to do anything. And the retraction of power is, you can retract power

[20:43]

because you're afraid it might be evil, but you've also retracted it from a life good because you simply restrict the power. And that transformation of the enthrallment of the poem, yet when we return on the 9th, and we have seven lectures, I'm not going to begin on the enthrallment, I'm going to begin on the, I'm going to begin on this Pound to Brown and the Shelley thing, and start with the Sardella, because Sardella has to do with the historic poet, and with an account of the spirit of romance. But by the second lecture we'll be into the question of enthrallment. Well, because the whole idea of romance was obedience to the love, the love object? No, it wasn't experience as object. The master-mistress

[21:44]

is one of the marvelous terms they had. If we think we're sensitive about he and she in our period, before the bourgeois period, the Middle Ages were extremely sensitive to it, and it's mattered by a much more serious thing, when Eleanor of Accra was Accretane, and an absolute power, the he and she of it, got to be a mistress and a master, or absolute, because class matters, not, I mean, you had to break down the inheritance of land to an eldest son or something in order to break that whole. But the other curious thing I'm going to be tracing when I get back of the Sardello is going into the actual rise within two centuries and to the hubris buried in the ideas of romance, because the poets aimed

[22:45]

more and more and more until at the end of the spirit of romance, not only had they separated, not only had they defined that romantic love would be based on an absolute exclusion of the possibility of sexual fulfillment, this is their famous cult of adultery, but it was also that the object had to be, they would argue themselves into the unobtainable position, and the courts of love did this over and over again, there would be services and servitudes, but they could not possibly arrive at their goal. It heightened, and certainly, there was an experience over two centuries of a heightening of what we would call a hysteria, and at the end of, after the Albigensian Crusades, the Roman Catholic Church had a crusade against the poets themselves as such, because they had advanced a doctrine in which chastity,

[23:46]

remember, it's very important within the Church, chastity, which before was thought of as a way of gaining divine or magic power, was now thought of as the highest form of sexuality. Non-fulf... and in Hidden Faces, Dali says, only man could think up an ultimate perversion like chastity, and the Church stared at documents worth citing chastity as the ultimate sexual perversion, when the Church believed it was purity, that chastity was purity, and poets, and poets, and this was a poetic doctrine, it never extended beyond the community of poets, it didn't, by the way, lead to, it doesn't mean that the poets who were writing these documents are among the great Rubador poets, but certainly it goes at the heart of the matter of the mystery of Beatrice, because for Adande,

[24:47]

that he saw Beatrice only once, which is not exactly the case, but that it had to be at a point, and that, and she becomes the entire germ of the ultimate and former of his entire spiritual world, is sexual throughout, and his sexual relations with Mrs. Adande are not sexual relations at all, they're simply breeding Adande's in the combination of two houses, because we're in a feudal period when this was in general, marriages were not ever made for love, they were all catastrophic, if love were entered into it, but Adande's also removed the urge, and the urge, the urge of love has been moved, removed, there's no evidence that he was loving for Beatrice, I mean, lots of terms that are very important to us, and make it much more complex for us to keep this matter of what is love, of what is loving, and the promise of the romantic tradition, so we'll,

[25:47]

on the 9th of March, I think it is, it's the first, second Sunday in March, and there are four, then four, four Sundays running, running, I don't even think, but we, we will begin with Sordello, and, and by the second Sunday, I hopefully will be relaying, it still would be inviting enough me, relay an essay by a contemporary, Canadian poet, contemporary, man in his 50s or so, who will act, who, who, who does a marvelous essay on the very first Troubadour poem we have, but he notices in it, in it is the term error, and errand, with an errand, night, and so forth, and that, which means wandering, it's invaluable in French that error means to wander,

[26:49]

and he raised the question, isn't the entire thing for the poet to wander, isn't it when language wanders that it wanders into poetry, and in the very first Troubadour poem we have, we have this one, this is but the, this is a poem by the father of Eleonore d'Aquitaine, Guillaume d'Aquitaine, and, and, and it, in a magic, it contains a, a marvelous proposition that complicates the picture of the impromptu that enters in, series of servitudes and so forth that are, that are a, that are a, a psychodrama, but also a sexual drama. I think we may have more and more, notice more and more how much we've shunted away into a manufactured the sadomasochistic world by our non-transformation of the world, meaning of slavery, I mean, we wouldn't penetrate what's going on within slavery. When, what is viewed as merely being an economic opportunity,

[27:49]

no one asks why was it an exciting economy? No one asks what was the opportunity? As a matter of fact, it was so sickly, an exciting opportunity that almost everybody knows in the South has really gone to machines and put their slaves onto the wage system. Earlier, they'd have profited 10 times over, but something that prevented them from ever catching on that all you had to do was, I mean, Emerson writing before the Civil War knows that, that the slaves working in the Northern factories are worse off a million times. I mean, they're really taught, whereas the ones in the South, I mean, unless they're masters, super masters of wickedness or not, everybody's caught in stuff because you're not getting anything like it's possible. So then we have to, at least there, we have to turn around. What was it going on in slavery that kept, that, how late it untypical? Okay, well, so we resume. Isn't that wonderful? We didn't get to do all those things just to start out.

[28:49]

Okay. So let's sort out what sort it is. Death? Sword. No, S-O-R-D. Yeah, S-O-U-R-D in French is death. Oh, okay. Well, that's S-O-R-D-E-O in Italian. Did you see that in the literature? Oh.

[29:11]

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