And actually, actually within Sardella, they all get repeated, because actually Sardella is a man and a book. And I've got several little hints in my mind that Yoich must have had a good idea of Tardello when he said about Finnegan, because in his case, it is that the man is sitting in a book by defining them to Finnegan. And more than that, you have a little guided tour of history and everything by a guy who points out things with a pointed wrist like in Tardello. I'm not quite ready to get a narrator like Sardella, but a narrator, like, it's a funny way of being able to turn on the mocks of the blind without getting caught in it yourself by having a narrator.

[01:08]

And who's an idiot? Right. John Berryman, who ended up in the hands of the idiot. They took over things on him. I'm much in belief of actually starting when you said you're going to start. Because otherwise we move continuously forward from our 2 o'clock, and then we decide that it must be at 2 o'clock, and everybody arrives at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and it must be 2 o'clock in the afternoon. So what? What can we do now? I think the detection will be weird this way. So what doctor? 2 o'clock. 2 o'clock. Listen, I worked back in the months ago. I loved the... Thank you.

[02:31]

When I was nine years old, there was a day when I was out in my family with a man named Mr. Brown, and that's when I was supposed to be in my family, and that's when I was supposed to be in my family, and that's when I was supposed to be in my family. Pauline, which he published anonymously. His father financed Pauline and his father financed the publication of Paracelsus and also of Dordello. But the first book was published anonymously because Browning felt it had been so much of a confession in a way. He had meant, however, to objectify that meant to lift from the poem the elements of invasion of the poet's own soul. Yet in the very proposition, coming at the cheats with the proposition that

[05:25]

These are great moments in poetry, and in our English poetry, they teach advanced ideas that life is a veil of soul-making and soul-creating. And Browning will, in Tordello, for instance, advance that into ideas of makers that far extend the first propositions of tradition in poetry, where the word maker was what they used for the poet. Dunbar's lament for the makers would be a primary to look at for what was the proposition there of what the makers did. Chaucer was a maker, the makers had died, and we have a great lament at the moment of this transition, but the word maker remained. So when Browning returns to the maker's seed, the makers of... Andy was very... He took that cheap stain, the veil of soul-making, my rough memory of it, but... rightly, I don't want to recall putting out what the phrase is, it's how it exists, and then in some in mind, if you can't get away from it, Matthew picked it up and proposes it as a foreword.

[06:37]

He both needs it and wants it, and at the same time wants to distance from it, and part of the adventure, an adventure of distancing. Before I come to his distancing, I want to read you a framework, because it's a remarkable poet, And the poem, I may read it entire because it's not... Those who usually read Pilgrim's Progress don't read the author's apology for his book. And in the author's apology for his book, some things miss. For one, it's fundamentalist to look up Pilgrim's Progress and miss... Or even as I remember in survey courses when I was a freshman or so, How you approach Bunyan, everything that makes you want to think of it as affirmative, as somebody without the sophistication of the relation of the writer and reader. And yet the frame for A Pilgrim's Progress was what, say, And the title of Pilgrim's Progress is In the Similitude of a Dream.

[07:44]

And I'm not guessing that's a preface, because the preface is a remarkable poem. And the opening of Pilgrim's Progress is, As I walk through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rag, standing in a certain place with his face in his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. We're in the primaries of what our academics report to us. Or, at such a level that we've found ourselves in, that it's essentially the first point that we're pointing to, and we're not going to do that again and [...] again. Thank you.

[08:50]

so so Amen. Okay, what is the power?

[10:31]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[12:08]

Thank you. Thank you for watching. Amen. And so, the authors are, you know, they're trying to figure out, you know, how do you do it, and [...] how

[14:41]

I mean, in the correspondence after, it all started to feel so familiar with people at that time, that I started to love. In my 20s, if I was writing, I would write to a certain number of people at that time, because I was a young man, too. Oh, it was a good idea to write to them, and, uh, uh, in that particular, uh, time to sit down with all kinds of people, you know, The man said, why do you let it down like this? I said, why do you let it down like this? I said, well, you try out the one I need. Then I go, and I go down, and I go, and I go, and I go, and I go. That's why the only time I have seen that phrase is in the United States or in the United States of America. Most generations are looking around and they'll be out of the United States of America. But I'm going to stand back and I'm going to be honest with you.

[15:45]

I'm going to be honest with you. [...] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[16:54]

Thank you. [...]

[18:20]

Thank you. [...]

[20:01]

¶¶ Thank you. [...]

[21:36]

Thank you. [...]

[24:22]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good. Good. Thank you.

[26:18]

Thank you. [...]

[27:50]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[29:22]

Thank you. Thank you. That's it. Thank you for watching.

[31:06]

Thank you. [...]

[32:28]

Thank you. Okay, awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

[34:14]

Thank you. [...]

[36:31]

Thank you. Ah. Thank you. Yeah.

[38:03]

Thank you. [...]

[39:45]

Thank you. so so Thank you. Thank you.

[41:36]

so Thank you. Yeah.

[43:18]

Thank you. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.

[45:35]

I don't know. I don't know. Here. Stop fooling me. Stop. So what do you do? [...]

[46:37]

So what do you do? [...] The power is not only the force that draws the garden, but the power of the people. And that's the power of the people. So what's the power of the people? As a matter of fact, one of the factors that drives what's called the power of the people, the power of the people, is that we are acting with the power of the people. To make the power of the people, And now we're not only good writers about things that have never been written about before, but started by a deaf, visually impaired, deaf-blind, [...]

[47:47]

to show you the last job and so forth. Right. This is the guy. He's another boy. Yes, I mean the boy. Pound. He's writing to me. He's writing to his grandpa. And he would write all day. Reminding me, I mean, that's why he's writing to me. Yes, I am going to write to this guy. I'm going to write to his grandpa. I'm very glad that my kid liked that. Scared him. We're going to go back again, Shelley. Thou spirit, come not near now, not this time desert thy cloudy place to scare me. Now, this time refers to the fact that when he wrote Pauline, Shelley was a specter throughout the work, as he wrote. And when he wrote Paracelsus, Shelley invades. Browning lets him invade directly, both Paulines. And he exorcises from this poem the specter that scares him.

[48:57]

Pound started the cantos with the evocation of Robert Browning in the first version of the cantos. For those of you who were not here last time, I'll read you that opening, the very opening of the cantos as proposed. and ghosts right away, thou spirit, but translated into ghosts. Hang it all, there can be but one sordello, and sordello is put in... italics. Pound insisted on italics. I haven't looked at my cantos to see if italics are kept, but since they're kept through the first, as Bush points out, they're kept through all early printings of it. Pound is talking about the book, about the poem Sordello, but it's also a book. It's a book-length poem. readers can be scholarly readers, can be so careless that I have read other scholarly works on Pound that assume that there's only one, what Pound is saying here is there's only one

[50:11]

historical Sordello. And, oh, as a matter of fact, it's Kenner who always wants to one-up and can't stand any other author than Pound to exist, so Pound must be improving Robert Browning. And so Kenner points out that Pound means he knows very well that Robert Browning's Sordello is not the real Sordello, and so when Pound really comes to write the cantos, he does away with all the Robert Browning stuff, and we arrive at the Sordello with the Dante, he born of in Mantua, and as cleared away, all the rubbish, meaning the atmosphere of Robert Roenick, But Pound would have known. I do not mean to demean Kenner's scholarship. His partisanship at almost all points with Pound is very liable indeed to overlook or try to obscure, make just such an announcement as if Pound had improved on Robert Browning.

[51:14]

But the The line that sums up Sordello when the final Robert Browning version comes in is Dante's, and Dante himself had an imaginary Sordello when Sordello appears in the Brutatorio. So Sordello had entered poetry in Dante, no longer in his own case. His own case is obscure, so Dante could do more with Sordello than he could do with other... But also, importantly, all right, okay, we'll have a little dash, a little summary here of the Sordello. What in the legend of Sordello in poetry that Dante knew very well, because he had, in De vulgari eloquentia, summed up that Provençal poetry, and he was entirely familiar with it. Not the character you meet now at all in Browning's Sordello. You never dreamed he was a Provençal poet. The one in here, he dies at 30. The Provençal poet died in his 80s.

[52:16]

Last time I referred to Richard III and his hump. how when you take a person over into your history, you see to it that they have been, they come into the imagination and immediately they have what they never had before, and it's right for them to have. I mean, you make a fiend out of a character in history who never got to be a fiend, then it becomes, I mean, he's all in Shakespeare land, that Richard, and he's very clearly there. And it's absolutely clear in Dante, I mean, in Browning, he does exactly that, because Browning knew very well, I mean, the only references he has to when he learned about Sordello was, yes, he wrote poems in French, in Provence, in Languedoc, And he was known for two kinds, for two things that happened in his poetry. He was thought to be by Dante, and Dante may have invented him as, the first in the tradition of the Provence, where...

[53:21]

The love was purified, was proposed as a purism. Proposed, in other words, love was entering the imagination and the troubadours are the ones who at the end of the 13th century, after the Albigensian crusade, the troubadours had gone far beyond the Albigensians to propose that all of sexual love would enter the imagination. That means it leaves the body of origami. Reich would faint dead away. Wilhelm Reich would be lost in the loony bin or wherever they put him. Poets were walking around and thriving on advanced state of deprivation. They were living on the edge of the night called hunger. And they said, this was exquisite. This is the only... I mean, it's when you ain't getting it that it's there. I mean, they found the magical formula that when you got it, it wasn't there at all. And when you didn't get it, it was in the imagination. And the imagination was everywhere.

[54:27]

So there was no way of getting... I mean, every little cell was there. Anyway... Oh, I must, okay, footnote from my ancient aunt for moments when, when, the ancient Theosophist, and at the time I remember I had, I had let her rights function in the orgasm because I really wanted to blow her mind in quotes like you can want to do to your ancient aunt when you're, when you're about a smart-ass 22 and she's, is she 60 or whatever she was at that point? And, and, and, uh, uh, I was, she annotated all the way through the Reich, because actually Reich is bookly, like Theosophists think anyway. And driving me to Sacramento in 1942, so on 23rd, as we're driving along, she says, you know, Bobby, that dull look that comes in your eyes after having sex for three days? I said, wow. I don't think that's right. Bruce, too. She said, that's because it takes three days for the sex entities in the eyes to get down where they want to be, where all the things going on.

[55:30]

She says, you're very lively in the eyes because sex entities really want to be there where it's going on. And they're dazzling out there in front. But she says, if it's after three days, they get down there. they've left everything's left all the parts of the body you get a big wow except that you also catch on that all the rest of the body must be completely dull i mean more and more so only because the general till she says want to take sex over she says it but everybody when you really turn on it doesn't happen the very unfreudian message but it was it was very much where the the ecstatic poets in their in the had finally in their We will come to this again and lock the loop round by the fourth lecture. We will be back in a description of the... announcements of the Court of Love, astounding manifestos, like Brechtolz Manifestos, which were issued by the poets in the period just before Dante, at a point when the Albigensian Crusade is completely over, and the poets exceed the Albigensians in the idea of a purification, of turning into fire, not burning up, but a turning into fire of both love

[56:47]

and sexuality, realizing that there was a secret hidden in the agony of expectation that body and soul were in when something was not requited. that had to do with, and we're back at it, my loops are not that careless, but they're a little like a dream. I don't see the use of them at the time when I start. But back exactly at that thing that hovered around, the universalist interpretation of Christianity, that you do not arrive at heaven until everything does. And the difference between, remember Freud in 1899 is very worried about whether everything is genitally centered. Actually, there's a great impropriety because he realizes that there's a polymorphous pervert body. He hasn't yet gotten to the place that we are at the contemporary biology where they see that indeed there's sexual identity in every cell of the body.

[57:49]

I mean, every little brain cell, every cell of your skin which is sloughing off, all of them have the same... For a long time, they were going, they had to get it, they thought that if they did not have a spermatozoa or an ova, they couldn't tell anything about the sexuality of what they were looking at. And then they found out, lo and behold, it's everywhere. It's in every single cell of the body, exactly the same information, exactly the same thing going. All right. The... the poets had then come to, along the line of some possibility, to the edge in which the unrequited was going to be living on longing. At one point in which I went on a diet to lose 30 pounds, I realized that what we do in our civilization, eating is very much like what we do with sexuality. We cease to exhaust our appetite. We want to requite our longing.

[58:51]

In other words, if there's a fire in the room, 80 of us were there with buckets of water, and we'd put it out. And how to put life out almost, finally, is a picture. Now, we're reversing this whole thing to living on the edge. I wrote during the parade when I was dieting. I ceased to be dieting. I said, I returned to hunger to realize I've been eating not because I've been destroying taste, bypassing everything, because I wanted to destroy the hunger. And our civilization, flooded with commodity, is often to destroy the poignancy of the object, the poignancy, the beauty of a thing. The platitudes are all the time, by the way. The poignancy of the platitude, that life has, it haunts us. hounds of love browning throughout. Sardella has several statements about the plenitude of the... He says at one point, you want gems everywhere.

[59:57]

As his period wanted gems. As, for instance, his contemporary, Tennyson, was giving people gems. I mean, Tennyson was the greatest one. Talk about... Coming in in the 30s, and rumors still went, if you wrote a line of poetry, you polished it. And then after that, you polished it. And if you cut it right, you really have something on... uh... and at the in the end of that trip would come up with charles oldman said don't load the veins you know when you find the gold mine don't run in and load up the veins with more gold ore in there browning is very very aware that his poetry is filled with these but now they're going to be in nuggets they're not going to be popped they're going to be where they are embedded in the in the book. The craft of the poem, by the way. He follows the craft of the poem, but it's not the craft that polished it. And Tennyson, the difficulty of reading Tennyson, we may come to Tennyson, yet the 19th century looks to be more and more like it. It's a very strange territory. The difficulty for the 20th century reading Tennyson is our difficulty with the polished surface, with the polished stone, and admittedly, that's also in the picture.

[61:05]

That's also part of it. Well, let's read the opening then. Hang it all, there can be but one sordello. That's the book, one realized poem. But say I want to. Say I take your whole bag of tricks, let in your quirks and tweaks, and say the thing's an art form. That's Brown. Browning is the one that, in the course of Sardello, he will come across it. I keep wondering how will I come across it. Marked passages in here get more bewildering than just an open page of the text would be. He does refer, however, to the tricks a poet has. Things are tricked out for Browning already. You can't start writing. We're back at that page that I barely said the minute you start writing on it, you find yourself with an author coming in, the one who just wrote. How are you feel now that there's an author to that line you just wrote? And I had an adventure to step over that Bunyan takes and that Browning confronts, and that is you've got a reader. Yourself, namely. You need no one else, because as you read the line you just wrote, you are as far from that line as any reader will ever be.

[62:09]

As a matter of fact, if you think you know what you wrote, because you... at the guarantee of that you're further than any reader would be that the readers imagining what it means that you're presuming what it means you've already made a great error you've just written a line which says nothing but what the line writes and you're presuming because this is the great flaw of the person who said but i'd love to understand why this woman i really do feel that except i think really they're not going to do nothing with that line written on the page for me that's now sitting on the page and you haven't been to create probably the greatest disease in our time is people don't read themselves They do it even worse when they read it to us in public. I mean, they still haven't read it. I mean, it has not got across because the reader has not... The art of reading, it would be the new art of a poem. Rapun is right there. You're Sordello, again in italics, and that the modern world needs such a ragbag to stop all its thought in. Say that I dump my cat, shiny and silvery, as fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles.

[63:16]

I stand before the booth, the speech. But the truth is inside this discourse. This booth is full of the marrow of wisdom. Give up the intangible method, tower by tower, red, brown, and then he starts evoking his scene as it goes. And he comes back to the point. Well, tower by tower, red-brown, the rounded bases, and the plan followed the builder's whim. Volcaire's slim gray leaps from the stubby base of Altafonte. Mohamed's windows, for the Alcazar has such a garden. Split by a tame small stream, the moat is ten yards wide. The inner courtyard, half a swim with mire. Truck hose... There are not the rough men swarm out in robes that are half Roman, half like the name of hearts, and I discern your story. Bear Cardinal was half forerunner of Dante, Arno's that trick of the unfinished address, and half your dates are out.

[64:24]

You mix your eras for that great font Sardella sat beside. Now we've got the person Sardella. Tis an immortal passage, but the font... is some two centuries outside the picture. Does it matter? Not in the least. Ghosts move about me, patched with histories. You had your business to set out so much thought, so much emotion, to paint more real than any dead sordello the half or third of your intensest life, and call that third sordello, meaning the whole book. Now, this reading by a poet has at least come to two of the terms that Jane Carlaw writes in the letter that she writes. I don't know. I've read the work, and I don't know whether it's a man or a city or a book. Since that's so oracular, its quality, it is not, for instance, snippy like Tennyson was talking about a rival. And the closeness here is that Jane Carlyle had to attend another writer of that early Victorian period who, to quite a number, I notice, of people writing on Browning, seems to be a counterpart of Robert Browning, and that is Thomas Carlyle.

[65:43]

With his propositions of the hero and of the heroic, in poetry. We have the counterpart of Carlyle's propositions of the heroic in poetry and Emerson's propositions of the transcendental in poetry and the transcendental in the poet. And at a stage in which the identity of the poet seems to be born anew in the imagination, the minute the heroic is proposed, it really seems to be eternal. Carlisle, whole propositions about heroes in poetry, the poet is hero, the Napoleon is hero, I mean, the great man in history is hero, the series of perfect heroes in that remarkable prose at the level of poetry is oracular of the disappearance of the heroic from the active world and its appearance in the imagination in which it would become a spectre. uh... i'm not marxist uh... first announced a specter ought to work i mean at that it could anything tell you what happens in marks is that the revolution has ceased to exist as a possibility in the capital world that is under the imagination march of the politics in which in vainly tried to make it happen after the fact of seeing that it is ceased its its moment is passed and has come into the imagination mark and so it appears as a specter

[67:12]

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. The specter that haunts the early part of this century 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 got able to be cruel. How come they're saying things from under the ground to haunt the 20s of all things? 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 and let me look at my time my time is going yes well we're doing that okay i'll open i'll read the opening passage so you've got a frame and

[68:14]

These scholars seem to inform me more than once, and so I guess it may be true, and I'm not venturing in 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 and sort out. All the 19th century presumed that the narrator who opens this poem happens to be Robert Browning. Actually, when we read it, and I hadn't, I mean, so I find, okay, our minds are a different kind of mind. With 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 Sardello.

[69:26]

Pauline had... evoked a lot of readers who were The contemporary readers who were earnest in the poem found marbles going through Pauline and continued to find marbles in Paracelsus. So when Sordello appeared in its first edition, the author of Paracelsus, it 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 of them, and it came out, and it was a very young poem. 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 situ.

[70:31]

I mean, the jewels were not going to be brought forward, polished, here it is. It really is, to our awful word, ecology, but we were almost in the ecology of writing, not quite yet in the ecology of writing, but almost coming into it with Robert Browning, not willing to do that step. Yet, more writing and rewriting, I guess that I'm sure now that the first version must not exist because there is a theory, and there obviously wouldn't be a theory if the first version exists, that maybe originally he wrote it, that 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 first first, and that the chaos came about by putting it into Ron Cuthbert. 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 someone trip what where shelly was that he scared him you see the sublime or put two two but uh... or a to repeat it uh... what went went when shelly comes here shelly had a he had actually gone with shelly in the first two poems at and and uh... that and the sublime uh...

[71:46]

really overrode, about the only way to put it, what would be my picture, overrode an essential thing that Robert Browning had to come to in his poems. Those of you who know my poetry find me deliberately addressing how much I draw from the rhetoric of Edith Sickwell, for instance, whose overpowering rhetoric starts in a century, for instance, whose taste finds rhetoric in and of itself abhorrent. The majority of the poetry is rhetorical. Well, I can understand Browning's helplessness before a certain other aspect. Remember, taste is also changing. We're coming in, the sublime is disappearing, too, because the Victorians are coming. Both Edison and Browning would share this, and all Victorian readers shared it. They're reading the poem with the kind of seriousness that is not going to sail along with Shelley. they're already in full reaction against their romantic period.

[72:50]

Remember, Keith had troubles with his readers, didn't he? I mean, he's already into the trouble, and she faces it quite directly. He can see that he's always going to cause trouble. He has to propose next week. And he's in reaction all the time against Shelley's. The other thing that scares one in Shelley, and this I know, going over and over again, particularly in Prometheus Unbound, is that Charlie's music is very high indeed. That is, his command of rhyme, it can scare you to come into what happens in a certain assembly. Sailing rhymes and whole areas of the poem seem to invent themselves right out of the excitement of the poem. I would venture that something else may enter in the Victorian period. What led to my... resetting uh... arithusa was that jess did a painting of arithusa and he turned to try to quote from shelley and he found any lines of it he looked at ridiculous embarrassing and at the breakfast table i said oh well that's because it's written in an early nineteenth century sort of taste and it could be written in in twentieth century taste so all i did was write it

[74:18]

as if I were a 1920s snob cleaning up Shelley. Meanwhile, of course, I also experienced what I'm up against. I mean, what you're cleaning up. The juxtaposition is quite funny. I find reading Robert Browning, I still feel... We are way into every form of inversion except inverting a noun and a verb in a line of poetry. But the scare, I think, is very... I get back to it in all spirit. Thou spirit, come not near now, not this time to desert thy cloudy place to scare me. thus employed with that pure face. I would add to the scare, at lunch, we were talking about Helen Adam, who has just one demand of a poem, and that is that it give you a groove. Well, gee, you can read candles by the mile with no groove. I mean, this is an old Scott requirement of the poem, and if it gives you a groove, yes, and if it don't give you a groove, no. And Helen can find grooves.

[75:22]

She's out there to listen for a groove. If there's a fleet of a possible groove. But what I do know about that groove, a groove is like gruesome. It's exactly that. It's the passing of a spirit, of a ghost, of something. But scary. Scary. That edge of something scary. That edge of Oh, the Jungians have muddied the whole pond by picking up the word numinous, which is more than we need. And not enough. Not enough that we need. No, just a real good scare, man. And in the contour of poem that it would come into the place where the poet himself is unhanded. Now we're back at disarming and unhanding. Tell me about disarming came earlier. Yes, at a point you are... We're back at the sense of peril. And Shelley does it in the sublime. There's no description of the sublime, by the way. The difficulty in Emerson is that if you don't read patiently, word by word, phrase by phrase, and you rip it off, you get to jello transcendentalism.

[76:22]

I mean, it looks like it would be easy with nothing scary, but that's not what's there when you read it. Because Emerson's got the scare very much in mind. It is like our... Well, Jung is... It's when you rip off Jung that you get the numinous and more people running around with the numinous without the other thing that scares Jung, the inflation that comes in his patience and in himself that he talks about. A danger that he sees is always coming up in Jungianism. No one ever got into a state of inflation in Freud. They got to lots of other things. All people out there were in contact with... body when they weren't, but the disease, I mean, the peril in unionism is inflation, and he talks about it over and over again, and this is what makes it intelligible, but unions don't run out with inflation, they run out with the numinous that go dancing with her every night. But back to this business of this momentous care. There are other moments that certainly, in Sordello, not only Browning had to come to his own scare I think in part but it is interesting the difference between Browning here where he banishes Shelley and essentially goes into his poem Sordello which is going into a realm of the imagination because of its history gobs of history seem to be in here and yet the poet has made it quite clear that this is not it can't be the historical Sordello

[77:46]

In the poem, the azzardello in the poem, he falls in love with Palma and uh... she not only is [...] uh... she's not going to be a future role in the palm of she is that sympathizer but very important for or or robert browning was at the sympathizer was centrally the woman reading his work pauline in pauline is just such as a uh... brings serious questions about whether Pauline is not God. So she does come close to Beatrice in this way. Maybe Beatrice is the sympathizer in Dante. I've stated that she isn't in order to come around because when we think about it, Beatrice's instructions in Dante, when she starts, when she answers that, she's the reader of the poem. and when she comes to work profound instructions to dante when he asked the nature of the imagination which is his on his purgatorial is the purgatorial it didn't exist any blaze alice until it's there in that divine comedy and she gives him the instructions about what are there so she is in this strange role uh... i would not name her the muse but she has a role very close to it

[79:04]

it seems to be much more like that goddess, that woman in great power that Parmenides goes before in his poem, who instructs him in the nature of truth and falsity and so forth, and illusion in the imagination, and seeing through to the center and essence of things that goes beyond the actual. And so she becomes the reader of Parmenides. The muses at the beginning of Hesiod tell him that in the orders of poetry he will always be in the projection of truths that sound like lies and lies that sound like truth, and this is the nature of the making of things, making up of things. In Colleen uh... but the it the uh... pauline is clearly the report protection of the reader what's interesting is that robert browning then does discovered the sympathetic reader who was a poet the co-poet uh... uh... elizabeth barrett browning and and and not hot uh... in relation to start out all over and over again uh... she loves sort out all clearly thought it was essential robert browning

[80:29]

that was not only inaccessible to her, but inaccessible to him, as he read over and over again in 1863, still trying to bring out what was in the poem. What was in Patterson, William Carls Williams, will still be in the same school portrait, referring to the pitchblende and talking about the Curies, who appear as absolute projections of the poem, working in the pitchblende. the essential still announced in poetry to be that working in an element, you know not what, in which something absolutely deadly and perilous is that must be brought forward. In the mystery of things brought forward, we gladly say take it back. Again, for a bit of contemporary gossip, but the distance between two poets is to arrive at Boulder as I did two years ago, and Allen Ginsberg is protesting, and I find out he's protesting not about the government alone, but protesting plutonium itself, which he's portraying in some very loose mythology as being Pluto, and Pluto as being merely some bad guy.

[81:33]

I mean, Pluto meaning the devil, meaning the bad ones over there, and so he's got some ode against Plutonium. I said, gee, if you... Certainly one of the great revelations of our time, and you're against it? I mean, is this what you're out bearing your little banner for? I mean, it might wipe us out, but since it's been brought forward, I'll trust that the mystery goes deeper. If we're wiped out by it... And so the peril must mean that the intuition... There is no going back on that which comes forward in the trade. Not to admit what comes in in this whole field. Then you start doing the process of repression. If you have never heard of plutonium or radium and so forth, it's not yet your business. But when you hear, you've got to go deep in it and find out what's happening. You don't protest it. And then you've got to wonder at what is this radioactivity which increasingly floods our own world.

[82:36]

You have to go into the nightmares and dreams of the fairs. Because here I'm talking about reading life as a dream. Let me read aloud Robert Browning's preface to Sordello. that he wrote in 1863, because in 1840, when the poem was issued, it really did result in, it had a result, Emily sold about nine copies the first year, so only those receiving copies, and when they received copies, everybody heard that this is impossible, no way do you want to get into buying this, there he was, stacks of Sardella back, see, and the But he still was determined, well, he worked on the poem, still trying to make it so that it would be accessible. But, of course, his main job, and it's far clearer, is to make it that it had to be accessible to himself.

[83:40]

It must have become more and more clear to him when his sympathetic reader, his fellow poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, found it as inaccessible to her as it was to him, and experienced it in his terms, I mean, because Browning had projected in Pauline that as with Palma, by the way, that in some way, it's clear that Palma also doesn't understand the Sordello in the poem. Sordello can't understand the Sordello, and Palma can't. In the poem, disastrously, Palma, to rescue Sordello, to make him a success, to make him move history, reveals to him that he is the son of Sanguero. Now, by the way, since this is entirely created by Browning, she's revealing to him what he is in the poem. The moment of her revelation to him that he's the son of Salingrera is the moment in which it takes place. So Palma is both the reader and, in a curious way, one of the movers inside the poem. And she is designing that Sardello, who in some way has failed to come to what he would be as a poet.

[84:50]

But we have no picture in the life of the historical Sordello that at 30, in Browning's poem, he dies when he's 30. There was anything there because all the Sordello we know is a Sordello written in later years. So if he died at 30, he sure had failed to come to whatever it was. But Salangera opens as the father then, comes into the poem as the father, and brings up that other scary thing that haunts him from Shelley and haunts us so highly from Shelley that it's for people who remember nothing else of Shelley, we remember that the poets are the What? Unacknowledged legislators. And that brings into question, as I said, when in passages, heaven is in quotes, meaning it exists as an idea, something far beyond anybody's definitions. At least that's what Henry James and I mean by quotes. Too awful to define.

[85:56]

Henry James can put a mere thing. Cherry can put quotes in G. I mean, not even Freudians dare quote that. when he gets there. I mean, since he can make shocking disclosures and then shock you out of your existence with the awfulness of what he put in quotes. Robert Browning is sort of aware of that in its own way when it comes forward and gives his son the measure that he should be an acknowledged legislature changer of history. Burckhardt, in the same period in Germany, projects that only three people, three kinds of men make history. Perfectly clear in Burckhardt's world that women don't make history at all. But three kinds of men make history. One of the great makers of war, it shocks you, not governors or anything else, and the poet not the philosopher, and the other is the saint, not the pope, and so forth.

[87:02]

And he says of them that in the design of history, in that triangulation, there are fatal misunderstandings. And he gives an example for the poet that the poet thinks of all the matter in religion as great matter for a poem. While the saint thinks, well, these are impossibilities because he's also, the saint Burckhardt recognizes that Saint Francis is both saint and poet. The church, however, he said, so he doesn't have the manner of religion, I said. Thinking of power entering the actual world. Actually, I should switch this around because I falsified this by putting a saint in there. He's got, he means the ones, he's shockingly enough, because that's getting to our legislature later. He's got, he means the Pope. He doesn't mean the saint. Burckhardt doesn't mean the saint. He means the Pope. He means the powers in the church. The powers in the church think that the poetry is a great way of getting across the essential, which are the ideas of the laws and religion. These are the makers and breakers of the history. Well, that Burckhardt in Germany advances the poet as the great maker of history is something we wouldn't even think of today.

[88:09]

So Shelley is not alone in his strange conviction at that point in the 19th century that poetry moves on. To Germany, of course, Goethe must have been over-persuasive that poetry moved on, and probably to Europe, Goethe was over-persuasive. But I don't think England faced anything since Shakespeare that would persuade you that they occupied this place. But what I want to call your attention to now is how important sympathy is in this preface that in 1863 Browning writes, In the rewrite, between the third version and the fourth, just before, I guess it's 1843, 1840 when he starts the poem, and 1844 when the poem is published, after three versions, then is when Browning makes a trip to Italy to get background, to get the plates. And I find it interesting that he goes into the poem first entirely in the imagination, and I understand a good deal of this.

[89:12]

And then he begins to realize that he must then go and will find, in other words, not only what he dreams Italy to be, but Italy itself will tell him. When I wrote the Venice poem, it was not... I believe no poem comes... entirely, let's say, from some right out of your own box. It came to me, in this particular case, close to the way Robert Browning frames his poem, because it came because I was in a course on medieval and Renaissance architecture, and I started writing a poem during a lecture on the architecture of of the St. Mark's. And that lecture was a series of about four, and so gee, I think I flunked the examination, but because all during that lecture I was looking at the lantern slides, and for examples of how people fail, in Browning's poem, for instance, he says, I'm standing here with a pointer pointing to this man Sardello, and yet it took 40 years for me to notice.

[90:25]

More people say, what, you weren't in Venice? And I say, look at the poem. It says, lantern slide visions of Venice repaired. What do you think lantern slide visions of Venice are about? I think they were lantern slides. But they're immediate. At the time when they come, they actually come to the poem. That's what I mean. They come past you. They don't come just to you. And you were in the poem. As you go into the poems, the things that come through are remarkable. You can't tell when they're going to come through. When you go fishing for them...

[90:53]

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