That what happens in Marx is that the revolution has ceased to exist as a possibility in the actual world and has entered the imagination. Marx has a politics in which he vainly tries to make it happen after the fact of seeing that it has ceased, its moment has passed and has come into the imagination of Marx. And so it appears as a specter. it haunts the mind of europe it haunts the working class we'll never see a working class like that again our present one just cashes in i mean it ain't haunted by that specter to be rough the specter that haunts the early part of this century is is is it is also the great century of the transference of ghost stories from the gothic tradition into the ghost story whose last expression will be in the wasteland when you've got April the Cruelest, and out come the same things from under the ground to haunt the twenties of all things.

[01:02]

There is yet an inviting project for those eager to turn to it about ghosts as they travel through. All right, let's turn to the moment when... Let me look at how my time is doing. Yes, well, we're doing... Okay. I'll read the opening passage so you've got a frame. And... The scholars seem to inform me more than once, and so I guess it may be true, and I'm not venturing that on my total ignorance of the field, that it's 40 years from the 1863, in other words, it's practically the beginning of our century, before any deep Browning, Robert Browning reader, notices who the narrator is in Sardau. All the 19th century presumed that the narrator who opens this poem happens to be Robert Browning.

[02:09]

Actually, when we read it, and I hadn't, I mean, so I find, okay, our minds are a different kind of mind. Somebody, and it is, since Robert Browning was difficult for people to read. and difficult for himself to read, Robert Browning clubs formed right away to try to figure out what was going on in Robert Browning's poems. They don't really thrive until you come to the period of the dramatic monologues that we know most familiarly. People gave up on these first three poems. Well, they not only gave up, but the reputation that Robert Browning was totally un-understandable is due to Sordello. Pauline had evoked a lot of readers who were... The contemporary readers who were earnest in the poem found marvels going through Pauline and continue to find marvels in Paracelsus.

[03:14]

So when Sordello appeared in its first edition, the author of Paracelsus had said, and the ones keeping up, you know, where is that? Oh, I've heard of Maximus, I'll read the new Maximus. What the hell is going on in this poem? They were grabbing a hold of this Sordello the minute it came out, and it was a very young poet. They gave up in droves. They jumped off the wagon in tons. And yet the poet must have expected it, must have anticipated it. The four times of writing it was he was trying to both insisting that what was there was going to be in its I mean, the jewels were not going to be brought forward, polished. Here it is. It really is our awful word, ecology, but we were almost in the ecology of writing.

[04:16]

Not quite yet in the ecology of writing, but almost coming into it with Robert Browning. Not willing to do that. Yet, more writing and rewriting. I guess that I'm sure now that the first version must not exist because there's a theory, and there obviously wouldn't be a theory if the first version exists, that maybe originally he wrote it... Those who find his rhymed couplets very awkward in this, which is not my sense of it at all, they have a theory that he must have written it in blank verse first, and that the chaos came about by putting it into rhymed couplets. So obviously we don't have those first drafts. I won't get to go run and look at a first draft to see how much Shelley came into the first round giving rise to this banishment. Uh, but what did... Why is Shelley a threat? What? Why is Shelley a threat? Well, I said he's scared when you see the sublime. End of lecture two.

[05:14]

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