He really only understood two lines, the opening line, and the last line, and both of them were lies. He was taught by Jane Carlyle, who said that she couldn't tell whether Sardello was a man, a city, or a book. And actually, within Sardello, that would get repeated, because actually Sardello is a man and a book. And I've got several little hints in my mind that Joyce must have had a good idea of Sardello when he said about Finnegan, because in his case, it is a man, a city, and a book by the time you come 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 pointer, just like in Sardello. I'm not quite ready to get a narrator like in Sardello, but a narrator is a funny way of being able to turn on the mock sublime

[01:04]

without getting caught in it yourself by having a narrator. And who's an idiot? Right. Thought John Berryman, who ended up in the hands of the idiot who took over Jane's side. I'm much in belief of actually starting when you said you were going to start, because otherwise we move continuously forward from our 2 o'clock, and then we decide that it must be at 2.10, and everybody arrives at 2.10, which means it must be 2.00, so forth. Puerto Ricans now seem to be passionately geared this way. So we'll start at 2.00. With some remarks back from a month ago. Well, I lost my absolute opinion, because when things come in green very vividly, they prove that they can understand me before I turn around.

[02:07]

I think I've been last time. My impression is that nobody has noticed me. Well, people have spoken and interacted with me in a sense of,

[03:42]

well, I can talk about a lot of things, but almost 70% of the people who have spoken to me have not. And yet, in addition to that, I think that it should be said, that what I'm saying is wrong, and what has been used against me, and I think it's an essential issue to go on to say, is called the Genesis of Ethro-Canto, Ronald Cook. Especially because, how so entirely reformed the concept of canto, when he decided he was not, that he was going to be about an objective, we'll get to that picture, because Browning had questions about why he proposes to be objective, and he had trouble with what would be the subjective of his poem. He was under criticism for what,

[04:43]

in his very first work, Pauline, of which he published anonymously. His father financed Pauline, and his father financed the publication of Paracelsus, and also of Sordello. 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 element of invasion of the poet's own soul. Yet in the very proposition, coming after Keats with the proposition that, these are great moments in poetry, and in our English poetry, that Keats advanced the idea that life is a veil of soul-making and soul-creating, and Browning will, in Sordello, for instance, advance that into ideas of makers, that far extend the first propositions of

[05:49]

tradition in poetry, where the word maker was what they used for the poet. Dunbar's lament for the makers would be primary to look at, but what was the proposition there of what the makers did? Chaucer was the maker, the makers had died, and we have a great lament at the moment of this transition, but the word maker remains. So when Browning returns to the makers see, the makers of, and he was very, he took that Keats thing, the veil of soul-making, my rough memory of it, but rightly I don't want to record to a footnote what the phrase is, it's how it exists even in Duncan's mind, that you can't get away from it. Matt, he picked it up and proposes it as a forward. He both needs it and wants it, and at the same time wants to distance from it, and part of the adventure, an adventure distancing. Before I come to his distancing, I want to read you a framework,

[06:50]

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, something's missed for one who's fundamentalist and took up Pilgrim's Progress, and missed, or even as I remember in survey courses when I was a freshman or so, how you approached Bunyan, everything would make you want to think of him as a primitive, as somebody without the sophistication of the relation of the writer and reader. And yet the frame for Pilgrim's Progress, which let's say, the title of Pilgrim's Progress is In the Similitude of a Dream, and I'm not guessing that's prefaced, the preface is a remarkable poem, and the opening of Pilgrim's Progress is

[07:52]

As I walked 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 rags, standing in a certain place with his face from his own house, a book in his hand and a great burden upon his back. That, yes, we're in the primary of what our acumen and the philosophy are, at such a level that when Pound opens the keys in the shadows with the pheasants with the birds on the back, the pheasants are not, can't, again, have the birds on the back, without being followed, it's not just a dream, it's a fact, it's a fact that we are, that we are men, and so long as life has been left,

[08:55]

we must learn to accept dreams, and that's what a dream is, a thought is a thought, I walked in the middle of the road,

[10:04]

I landed on a certain place where there was sand, I landed down in the middle of the road, I landed on a certain place where there was sand, and I reached the top, and I reached the top, it is the aftermath of these circumstances. Okay, what is the policy for the books? When at the first I took my hands of hand, thus far twice, I did not understand that I, at all, could make a little book of such love. Nay, I had understood to make another, which, when one book was done, was one of the many I did employ. And thus it was, I write in the way that greatest of saints did. This, I do not obey. Now, such things as the allegories of other circles, and the ways of glory, and more than such things, as I set out to construct,

[11:12]

I went forth as I fell, and they, hence, yet multiplied, quite far to the top of all that I applied. Nay, then, what I, in death, will have now put to my own selves, because to do that which is good for me, I should neither give it to the type, and keep out the books that I already knew about. Well, so I did, and yet, I did not say, though the whole world understands, and, let's suppose, who taught the saints I did not like. Nor did I undertake their liking. My name? No, not I. I did it in my own self, so who will give it to me? Now, all that's been done, and I've said it in the questions that have come, all we can do, in fact, is get the wise authors. The person sitting down to write, if you see how many authors there are,

[12:12]

so, so, so many authors. But if you sit down to write, get the letters I have for you. If I sit down to write, I must, I must also, at one point, I gave a little journal to the University of California, and because I was giving it to the University of California, he said, keep that for all my writings in the next few years. But I forgot, of course, I write in journals, and I forgot what the title was. So, but in a 1936 journal, you have a 1936 entry, you can see, in this case, that's 1936, and on some secret self-authored characters, I have entered on page, so I'm in love with showing stuff. But it's a constant entry, and I looked these off and thought, all right, if you've got to give,

[13:14]

you really can't go zip out of page, no matter what you do, if you're going to go in for it all, there it is. Okay. You've got, the minute you start writing, letters are marvelous, but all right, let's say you're writing just that note, I love notes. The minute you send it to me, it's already a textbook, it's not a diary, thank God. It already is an output, there's already some kind of tension that has to do with the book. But I'm not the author, nor, even when I write my poems, do I conceive of the one you need there as the author, because we did have a poet in between, who was not blank, and I brought all the blanks. The authors are, underwriters,

[14:18]

which I said I've written for, you can get to the point of consciousness that it takes generations to form things, and they have to do, but the very secret one, what happens to you when you're finished? And you have to face it, and enter a field of thought. When you're writing, of writing first, of writing on that piece of paper, writing to someone, I am in the correspondence, not that it ought not to be, because it's very reverential, and I'm not writing for charity, but in my twenties, if I was writing, I was writing to a convergent of people, that kept alive, that were ready to see me, all of whom were very vivid, and, in that course of letters, look all together, with the manner of writing a letter to unidentified, I would go all the way over to unidentified, and try to outdo unidentified,

[15:20]

ten times over, and on top of that, I'd write a letter to Pauline Kale, who was one of the only, I only did that first, at all, and that was my generation, and I would sit down, and tell the other ones, who were friends with me, that Pauline Kale, was a Pauline Kale, in the middle of a period, a very bad boy, and a human being, I'd refer to, on my, when I'm writing, where I'm writing, stick a possibility, if I have to, to her, having gotten that letter, that's too expensive, there's nothing but a letter, and I want to top it up, meanwhile, I would turn right away from that letter, and write to her, as I'd written to Pauline, and I'd write to Pauline, and I'd refer to her, as Pauline Kale, I'd refer to her, as Pauline Kale, which is done by a clamor, and then, and something like, the spirit of somebody, trying on a glamor,

[16:22]

to find himself, is up to here, and, now, coming all the way around, what's the next line, in the drama, the 12th drama, the storm, and the skeleton, and the dead skeleton, and the banished skeleton, the banished skeleton, after the story was done, has arrived, but the skeleton, changed, and it's like, but, [...] Pauline Kale, has entered the story, and from the door, coming to the door, and from there, and Charlie, he's not the person he's not, but my partner, is Charlie, a remarkable Charlie, enters the drama, and the story, [...] which may have not, which may have not, been the proper story, which would be, from the literary prose that ran down on the panel,

[17:25]

and let's take the topic, and put some facts of the course, and let's offer some comments and thoughts, and actually, now, I don't have a picture done, but perhaps at this time, perhaps we're on a board short. But we are not the first to want to set the record straight. Browning is writing about the very first dinner he goes to, where he finds himself in a company of workers, I'm not sure what it is, and then we're right, and there's a legend of that, and there's a huge conversation that I'm going to oppose, and lots of facts, without it, I mean, although there's a lot of emery, much of it, there's quite a bit, let's say that Browning,

[18:30]

that the legend went that Browning had an infirmary, we have another intolerant witness of a young teacher, he met a coleridge on the street, and Mr. Coleridge did not dare even notice that the young teacher possibly wrote any poems to his others, and he did not appreciate it at all, and never wanted to speak with such a gentleman again, who, in some sense, was a suspect of what others thought, which we're now in a lot of theater circles, and that's the source of all these. So Robert Browning has seriously read quite a lot of literary that he would have in a company or a landline company, and yet he was also, he was proud of it, he was proud that he did not know that he could also write poems for the public, and that's the one place that everybody should reflect the beauty of a poet,

[19:34]

and at the same time, and this is a paradox, but one can think, why did the poet get naturally drawn clearly to his others? Why didn't all this stuff for him come from that obscure source? This stuff could not be an apple at all, this stuff comes from no one, I'm not telling you, a grandfather, a husband, it comes from most sources that were in quite different places to accept this reference of Watson as a writer. This whole complex is what I struck by as well as the poet, this is what I know, it means I saw more Robert Browning's writing in more places, but it's not a period of solitude, it's a period of structure,

[20:34]

it's a structure of analysis. As a matter of fact, the point is that this was recorded through the voice of the people who were reading the book in our voice, it was recorded like this, this is the voice of Robert Browning, and it struck me in terms of a clear way that he was reading out the depth of something very disturbing. Remember, there's something disturbing in sitting two hours by yourself in a closet, one of its small steps is clear and simple, writing all the way through by the sand and sand. Now, a role can barely make this way and then every page is cut, [...] And if it is the role parallel to the character of the brain

[21:35]

or the we hey put it there, what the texture of the brain vibes or what all The reality of the territory of all of this earth is that it is a matter of what it survives to be. Death is a matter of what it survives to be. And by the fact of what it survives to be, it is called something not to survive to be. And that was clearly an emphasis on this. Rothschild had no other way, that's for sure. That's most of what you'll remember. He had no other way but to let this be a matter of what it survives to be. And the text of the text of this,

[22:36]

and don't try to talk about a definition I want you to go through, because mind you there, you are, you are, you have the beginning and the bottom. The beginning, for instance, if we'll go back to the text of this, he always invoked it up to an output. Rothschild had started a Freudian system in the 18th and 19th centuries. And this was the text that Rothschild wrote to him. He wrote it up to get up to 1000 years. The author, who had so many great Freudians, who were subjected to the trouble of what he wanted to do, Rothschild was so focused. And the Freudianism that he wanted was very close to the Freudianism. Everything was Freud, everything was Freud. He had written about it. So the text was Freud throughout. Only now, say, not from that past,

[23:41]

but to occupy the whole territory so that all that meritorious stuff could be made. He thought he was lost. He felt he was lost. He thought he was lost. But this did not mean that he had to remember that other people were lost and that no one was made to accept where universalism had origin. And as Rothschild was the first person I would like to mention here, he was the first person I would like to mention here, That's the whole text of it. That, as a matter of fact, shows how early he was brought up. And this was the first. He wrote to Einstein. He wrote to Einstein and Einstein. And he feels how people were also very interested in this subject. He could know at the time, he could know at the time, and it's past him.

[24:43]

It's only one path. A single path, by the way, So one thing is true in Marxism, Freud, only one thing happens. No matter what happens, it happens. And we have to look throughout the whole field, and that's what happens. The whole field is like sitting in a large lecture hall, and I think that this is just how Freud would have to do it. And we were on, oh, we were on first class, I was also on first class, and we made those high school things very good. Oh my God. But I was standing next to Eric Schneider, and he was absolutely people minded. Mr. Deberhardt was given the task of supporting people like Mr. Deberhardt.

[25:47]

And the redundancy in telling us what was in it was unbelievable. And besides which, it was a very long story. If I'm going to ask, if someone can't say the last, then you would somehow have gone, no, he's got to speak to the man. He does, can't he? And next to me, I remember I saw Eric Schneider moderating a Marxist party. Deberhardt's so sassy. And he said, let me tell you about that, because he was just fed up. And I turned to Jerry and I said, it was a humor, I said, but Jerry's always talking about Marxism, only one thing happens. I mean, what happens happens, and all the rest of it, now you're like, I'm not going to end this. He thinks what happens happens. Schneider walks, he's got to ride the lawn, and he's going on and on, and he's talking about, what happens, what happens.

[26:51]

Meanwhile, of course, all you have to think about is, you're in the stocking, and both of them are hats. And if he grew it, it would turn out to be thrown anywhere. If you're acting loud, then both of them, it's co-existence, it's co-existence. I said, oh, there you are, it's very funny. With his hat, both of them. With Jerry Schneider, both of them. But if you co-exist, that's great. But if you're in the stocking, you're in the stocking. Then you can say, it's starting to co-exist, but it's not co-exist. And a very peculiar one, given my perspective, and it works over there. Well, let me read you the qualities. And all of you examine that. Because sound is a channel. The left one. It cannot be. It's a bunch of sounds that you thought didn't play, but it did.

[27:54]

Not in the stocking. I mean, that's a good question. It's not a good phrase. It's lighter somehow, not a real explanation. And all of you, let the person who styled it style it. It's one of those things that can't be stopped. That's how it works. Well, that's one of the first things that brought me out of the stocking. Also, when I went to my friend's library, I discovered a version of it. I dialed the number, and I manually weighed it out, and then I thought, I mean, I don't know what I thought all of that was going on in Gallagher's life, but I not only thought that was fascinating, but I, when I detailed the stocking, and it showed me that this was

[28:59]

in perfect harmony. But this book was good for the job that it is not. You can't book it primarily. In fact, there is a world that tells you more about the world than you probably could ever possibly imagine. This is one of those things that's fine when you have a book that's in perfect harmony. This book is written in such a dialect that makes a mind to flip through tens of pages. It seems a novelty that yet contains nothing but sound and chronic gospel. By the time you make that announcement, you're already aware that honest gospel is strange, but fairly strange. By the time that Dr. Crockett is here, there's been passages, Dr. Crockett has had passages. I have prophesied before in the dark days. I've prophesied in heaven.

[30:00]

I've prophesied in God, and so forth. Imagination can't be a source of reality. All that's happened, probably the case that was the case that was the story that was the incident that comes against you, they have found that that you propose, by the way, beneath them an attempt to demonstrate that you have some sort of with Dr. Crockett to prove valid. What actually that you're trying to do is to know the plot that you need to want to place right away on the scene. The label that you want to put in the text of the book is enticing and [...] enticing

[31:02]

to tell you already that you've all been at the brownie and have been at the brownie long before we arrived at the brownie called Mimicry. There it applies to the natural effect of the work of each individual so they're left without the Mimicry. They've left the virgin and the brownie experience a truce in their Martin is at the point in which the gospel of grace is going to be immortalized.

[32:06]

He says, what? What? So he's telling people what the fundamentalism is in its full power. Now, look, look. Yes. Here's a great passage. All right. Take another take. I've recited this over and over again. At the point in which I believe this thing happens, in the arc of the age, the cause, the content, the form, and the act of growth enters the imagination. And it enters the imagination when it is given up completely in that line that I referred to in the character's handbook. But, but, but, only one thing happens. It's not growth. At the point of Dante's prime promise, when he asserted justice in the history of the race, he proved that criticism, essentially, had got into the influence of the true God,

[33:10]

because the true God is the one who comes directly to the truth. The false hope of Christian man is false. God would never make such a promise. No one can. That's never meant to be true. But that's terrible criticism of Christianity, and it's an atrocity. That's, apparently, what the main thing was, was what was called the Church, so the core of the Church. That the Church is the center of the whole. And that in Christianity, for instance, there would be a, in Christianity itself, there would be a, [...] opposite, but the hope that there would be a, is lost. Then all, but remember, hopes are not hopes, they're words. History teaches us grace, humility, and simplicity. God has entered in that space where they are immortal.

[34:13]

So that the divine poverty comes to pass, and that the women, women and children, by promise of the Church, God save lives, may be born in our fields, and learn that each divine birth, daily, and that there be known one civilization, that law, order, and simplicity are not civilizations, not civilizations, that the positive, and the living, may be born in our fields, and that there be the patience, and the goodness, and the knowledge, and the sanctity, and the wisdom, and the holy spirit, and the dominion, and the final salvation. It's one thing, it's another thing, it's throughout, but it's also clear when we study the Divine Poverty, it's the same element, the Divine Poverty. I've been in a group, you can take as the uh, angle, the valid power of the mind. It exists only in monsters, you know, there are probably no monsters. There are possibilities that exist in a theology.

[35:16]

There are possibilities essential to the human spirit that exist only in the spirit's love. I told you, the spirit's love can be both God, and God, and God. That's the greatest of all. So individuality, that's the greatest of all. It's the greatest of all, absolutely the greatest of all, or not at all, that's the greatest of all, unless it's God that gives it up. It's God, but God doesn't have a God. He's always there. I'm not talking about the living or the dead. God's always there. Alright, it's not the... Let's start from the beginning. In fact, Jesus is not the one that's dead. that it did not take the time, and it did not take the means that every Muslim in the world could have by the time.

[36:40]

And there's another part of it that I think is essentially proof of that. When the Pope sent a message, a pencil and pen point to the fourth time, and writes that he, the Pope, is the victor of God and his righteousness. And also, when my recognition that he will it. However, when the Franciscans come to translate the word God, there is no such word at all, in the language of Mongols, the word heavens. And the only difficulty in understanding it, what the converse means, what the con is, heavens, is a letter from the Pope saying that he is the victor of God.

[37:45]

I am the victor of heaven, by heaven. And heaven, if he wrote a letter back, which he sent to the Vatican, is a divine example immediately, in which the con recognizes the gift, which is baffling, that his victor in Rome has sent him a beautiful gift, as he was drawn by the Franciscans, and he is delighted to know that he has the gift. In fact, he is a little lost in the wonder of his metaphysical powers, realized in the end, even beyond his imagination. A lovely moment, of course, in which we will have to play together. Well, in the same way, in Shakespeare, in great moments like Kings, but Kings will be a little more real, where the text comes. For a moment, except for a break. But actually, but the screen of Kings, in Shakespeare, after that scene in Shakespeare, in Harrison's Shakespeare,

[38:48]

they enter the mystic mystery. Perhaps because they enter so fully in Shakespeare, that I have not been able to see, no matter how much I have looked, but maybe because they enter so fully in Shakespeare, that actually, in the royal house, that house, at that moment in time, that I could see. And in my portrait, there is another problem, because that is a photograph, a portrait, but it has only to do with to find not only the dream of Kings, but the reality. The loss of the Christ, at his level. What I want to suggest here is that the dream,

[39:49]

that it seems a novelty, and yet contains nothing but sound, and not a single phrase. It has to be standard. Nothing new. They will be read. Why? They will be read by generations, who are not fundamentalists. I have the impression that generations of fundamentalists, are stacked up, shelved in front, which might make them look like very bad characters, until progress is what they look like. And then that's read in closing paragraphs. Which shall be heard by shelves of melancholy, which shall be pleasant, yet far from folly, which shall be little, and their exclamation, for else grounded in idiosyncrasy, that shall love increase, for which shall be the man of the times, which shall stand up to freedom, and yet not flee,

[40:50]

for which shall be the mother of life, which shall do, thyself, and yet no harm, find thyself again without harm, which, thyself, and which thou don't not want, yet know that thou art blessed or not, by Jesus and Mark. Go then up to them, and lay thy book right there, Mark 7. If I think of the problem, a problem, where we are, in the contemporary brain, as an individual, what it comes to. And how's our difference, which we've talked about, the white and the black,

[41:52]

the black and the yellow, the black and the yellow, the purple and the blue, the purple, the purple, the purple, how's one in that big form, in that great form, how's one in that great form, or quite where, the, the heart, should, this, not, [...] this, this, we're present, but I don't intend, I'm not saying, how does, what, God is real, but, [...]

[42:53]

but, It's nice that Robert Brown wrote that, by the way, that you can start teaching Sardello, stop teaching Sardello, if you think the poem is too deep. Let me say, sir, it's very interesting. I don't know if you're dry from heartache later, but at some point, when the fire asks, what is something, you say, well, I don't know. There's only God and I here, and I don't know what God says. Which is really, actually, I thought that was, I said, what is this? But it goes quite, it goes all the way to God. And I thought, well, I wonder if God, when he woke up,

[44:05]

if the sympathetic creature can have a courage to speak, which he has, and lots have at various times. I'm focused on the sphere of development, and I know what it means to say it, but I don't have the capacity to develop it. I'm focused on the action, and what it means to the poem. Can't keep track of it. Can't keep track of it, and wouldn't go with it. Wouldn't let it go on. Thank you. What's next, maybe in the coming week, though it doesn't look like I'll get to it, so I think what will happen is, because it needs to get to the library, is Church House. And this book is the early version of Pentateuch. I can't at this point tell, but the early version of the Galilee. He thinks it's important. And so I think we'll want to bring it to the Library of Congress.

[45:05]

I think it's great. And let's turn it up a little. Well, it started just as a small poem, and then he started on the concept of the people. Well, this is my way of looking at it. When the God does not appear for almost a day, and then it's got the vow spirit coming on here now, and Browning wrote, the great, whatever, whatever, what God did there, because he writes it, Browning writes the summary, the prophet says, the Galilee party wrote it. Browning says, thou spirit, come not near me now.

[46:07]

Not this time, the first night, thou be placed to scare me. Not before that, the fuel of heaven. I need not fear the Lord, I may flee to them, but then, this is no place for thee. Before you shall be rising to God. I thought it. What was it like, in 1947, to write a poem? I went back in that section. A poem, not only in its poetry, has gone about the proper body, but a poem is, I think, the most, the most deep, poet-type person, person who has, as a matter of fact, when it happens to take the place of what's going to be the most important person, the poet, the one who wrote that poem,

[47:08]

is that he actually assumed to create, he called him that, Monez. And, not only, not only was writing about, that's about Tantos, and the late Tantor, Robert Browning, but, scholarship in the last ten years, writing about Robert Browning, brought forth, about certain aspects, both, like the narrator, Thomas Fordello himself, who was a lecturer, was a pointer, at this planet's life, to show you the rest, and so forth. This business is going to another voice. This is disarming the poem. Uh, how inviting to me, not with time, the letter, Grandpa. And, and he would write,

[48:09]

oh, Ed, reminding me, I mean, now that I'm 60, I, yes, I am aware that if somebody's 20, I'm, logically, their grandchild. I'm very aware of it, so I put like, Grandpa. Go back again, Shelley. Thou spirit, come not near, come not near now, not this time, desert thy cloudy place, to scare me. Now that, this time refers to the fact that when he wrote, Pauline, Shelley was a specter throughout the work, as he, as he wrote. And when he wrote, and when he wrote Paracelsus, Shelley invades, and Browning lets him invade, directly, both poems. And, and, he exorcises from this poem, the specter, that scares him. Pound started the cantos, with the evocation of Robert Browning, in, in the first, in the first version of the cantos. For those of you, who were not here last time,

[49:10]

I'll read you, that, that opening, the very opening of the cantos, as proposed. And, and, ghosts right away, thou spirit, 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 this, as they all, 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. Now, readers can be, scholarly readers, can be so careless, that I, I have read other, scholarly works on Pound, that assume that, there's only one, what Pound is saying here, is there only one,

[50:10]

historical Sordello, and, 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, and so, Kenner points out, that Pound means, he knows very well, that Robert Browning, Sordello, is not the real Sordello, and so, when Pound really comes, to write DeCantos, he does away with all, the Robert Browning stuff, and we arrive at, the Sordello, with, with the, Dante, he born of, in Mantua, and, has cleared away, all the rubbish, meaning, the atmospheric, Robert Browning, but, Pound would have known, Kenner is, I, do not mean to, to, demean, Kenner's scholarship, it's, his partisanship, at almost all points, with Pound, is, is very liable, indeed, to overlook, or try to obscure, make, make just such an announcement, as if Pound had improved,

[51:13]

on that Robert Browning, but, the line, that, 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, Bergatorio, 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, but also, importantly, alright, okay, where, we'll have, a little dash, a little summary, 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 Provencal 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 Provencal poet, the one in here,

[52:13]

he dies at 30, the Provencal poet, died in his 80s, last time, I referred, to Richard III, and his hum, how, when you take a person, over into your history, you see to it, that, that, that they have been, they come into the imagination, and immediately, they have, what they never had before, and, and, and is what is right, for them to have, I mean, you make a fiend, out of a character, in history, never got to be a fiend, then it becomes a, I mean, is all in Shakespeare land, that, that Richard, and, and, and, and he's very clearly there, the, in, it's absolutely clear in Dante, I mean, in Browning, he does exactly that, because Browning knew very well, I mean, the only, only references he has, to, when he, when he learned about, Sordello, was, yes, he wrote poems in French, in, in, in Provencal, in Languedoc, and, and, 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,

[53:16]

first of, in the tradition of Provence, of the Provence, where, the love, was purified, was proposed to, as a purism, proposed, in other words, love was entering, the imagination, and the pro, troubadours, are the, are the ones, who at the end of the, in the century, just, 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, would enter the imagination, that means, it leaves, the body of, or, again, I mean, 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 knife, called hunger, and, they said, this was exquisite, this is the only, I mean, it's when you ain't getting it,

[54:17]

that's there, I mean, they found the magical formula, that, 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, so there was no way of getting, I mean, every little cell was there, when you went, oh, I must take a footnote, from my ancient aunt, for moments, when, ancient theosophist, and at the time, I remember I had, I had lent her, Reich's function of 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, she's 60, or whatever she was, at that point, and, and, and, I was, she'd annotated all the way, through the Reich, because, actually, actually, Reich is googly, like, theosophists think, anyway, and, driving me, to Sacramento, in 1942, so I'm 23, as, as we're driving along, she says to me, you know Bobby, that dull look, that comes in your eyes, after having sex, for three days,

[55:18]

I said, wow, hey, I'll be in the right spirit, and I'll kill Bruce too, she said, that's because, it takes three days, for the sex energies, in the eyes, to get down, where they want to be, where all the things, going on, she says, when you're, you're very lively, in the eyes, because sex energies, really want to be there, where it's going on, you know, and they're, dazzling out there, in front, and she says, if you, 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 them, all the rest of the body, must be, completely dull, I mean, only, because the genitals, she says, want to take sex over, she says, everybody, when you're really turned on, it isn't happening, it was very un-Freudian, message, but it was, it was very much, where the, the ecstatic poets, in their, had, finally, in their, we will come to this, again, in largest loop, round, in the fourth, by the fourth, lecture, we will be back, in a description, of the,

[56:19]

of the, announcements, of the court of love, astounding, manifestos, like Breton's 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, in the idea, of a purification, of a turning into fire, not burning up, but a turning into fire, of, of, of, both love, and, [...]

[57:19]

everything does. And, and, and, the difference between, remember Freud, in 1899, is very worried, about whether everything, is genitally centered, that, that, actually, it seems to, there's a great impropriety, because he realizes, that there's a polymorphous, perverse body, he hasn't yet, gotten the place, that we're at the, are at the, contemporary biology, where they see, that indeed, there's sexual identity, in every cell, of the body. I mean, every little brain cell, every cell of your skin, which is sloughing off, all, all of them have the same, they did, for a long time, they were going, they had to get it, they, they felt, that if they did not have a, a, 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, the poets had, then,

[58:20]

come to, along the line, of some possibility, to, to, to, to the edge, in which, the unrequited, was going to be living, on longing. Uh, at one point, in which I, went on a diet, to lose 30 pounds, I realized, that it's, that what we do, in our civilization, eating, is very much like, what we do with sexuality. We see, we cease to exhaust, our appetite. We want to requite, our longing. In other words, if there's a little, if there's a fire in the room, 80 of us were there, with buckets of water, and we put it out. And, and, and, and, and how to put life out, almost finally, is a, is a picture. Now we're reversing, this whole thing, to, to, to living on the edge. I, I wrote during the parade, when I was dieting, I ceased to be dieting, I said, I returned to hunger, to realize, I've only, I've been eating, not because, I've been destroying taste, bypassing everything,

[59:20]

because I wanted to destroy the hunger. And, and, [...] and our, our civilization, blotted with commodities, is, is, is, often destroyed, 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, the, the, the lifeheads, the haunts. It haunts, haunts the hounds that love, Browning, throughout. Sardella has several statements, about the platitude of the, he says at one point, you want gems they're everywhere. As, as his period wanted gems. As, for instance, his contemporary Tennyson, was giving people gems, I mean Tennyson was the greatest one. Talking about, I'm, I'm coming even in the 30's, and rumors still went, if you wrote a line of poetry, you polished it. And then after that, you polished it. And if you could cut it right, you'd really have something. Um, and in the end of that trip would come over, Charles Olsen said,

[60:22]

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 dealt with, but now they're going to be in nuggets. They're not going to be part. 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 of polishing. 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. 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 in art form.

[61:22]

That's Browning. Browning is the one who says, in the course of Sordello, he will come across it if, I keep wondering, how will I come across it? Marked passages in here get more people hiltering 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 set 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 hadn't ventured the 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. As a matter of fact, if you think you know what you wrote, because you are the guarantee of it, you're further than any reader would be. Because the reader is imagining what it means, and 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,

[62:27]

and you're presuming, because this is the great flaw of the person who says, but I love the girl, I understand why this woman, I really did feel that. And you say, well, honey, really, it's not going to do nothing with that line written on the page. I mean, that's now sitting on the page, and you haven't ventured to read it. 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. Rapunzel is right there. You're sordella, again in italics, and that the modern world needs such a ragbag to stuff all its thought in. Say that I dump my cat shiny and silvery as fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles. 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 intaglio method.

[63:29]

Tower by tower, red-brown, and then he starts evoking his scene as it goes, and he comes back to the font. Tower by tower, red-brown, the rounded bases, and the plan follows the builder's whim. Boat hair, slim gray, leaps from the stubby base of Alta Forte. Mohammed'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. Trunk hose, there are not. The rough men swarm out in robes that are half Roman, half like the naval parts, and I discern your story. Bear Cardinal was half forerunner of Dante. Arnaud's that trick of the unfinished address. And half your dates are out. You mix your eras for that great font Sardello sat beside. Now we've got the person Sardello.

[64:30]

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 Sardello. The half or third of your intensest life, and call that third Sardello. Meaning the whole work, book. Now this reading by a poet has at least come to two of the terms that Jane Carlyle writes in the letter that she writes. I don't know. I read the work, and I don't know whether it's a man or a city or a book. And we're left with, since that's so oracular, its quality, it is not, for instance, snippy like Tennyson's who was talking about arrival. And the closeness here is that Jane Carlyle had to attend another writer of that early Victorian period who,

[65:34]

to quite a number I notice of people writing on Browning, seems to be a counterpart of Robert Browning. And that is Thomas Carlyle, 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 becomes, it really seems eternal. Carlyle, 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 heroes in that remarkable and a prose at the level of poetry is oracular of the disappearance of the heroic from the active

[66:39]

world and its appearance in the imagination in which it would become a specter. I love Marx's first denunciation, a specter haunts Europe. I mean, could anything tell you that what happens in Marx is that the revolution has ceased to exist as a possibility in the actual world that 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. The specter that haunts the early part of this century, 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 able of the cruelest outcome,

[67:40]

the same things from under the ground to haunt the twenties of all things. That 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 doing yes. Well, we're doing okay. I'll open, I'll read the opening passage so you 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 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.

[68:41]

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. 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 poem. 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. The Pauline had evoked a lot of readers who were Ruskin, I mean, the real, the contemporary readers who were earnest to the poem found marbles going through Pauline and continued to find marbles in Paracelsus.

[69:45]

So when Sardello 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 Sardello the minute it came out, and it was a very young poet. They gave up in droves. They jumped out 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. 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, not quite yet in the ecology of writing, but almost coming into it with Robert Browning, not willing to do that stuff.

[70:47]

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 verse, 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 the first draft to see how much Shelley came into the first round giving rise to this banishment. But what did... Why is Shelley a threat? What? Why is Shelley a threat? Well, I said he scared him. You see the sublime... Oh, all right, to repeat it. When Shelley comes here, he had actually gone with Shelley in the first two poems, and the sublime really overrode,

[71:50]

about the only way I could put it, what would be my picture, overrode an essential thing that Robert Browning had to come to in his poems. For those of you who know my poetry, find me deliberately addressing how much I draw from the rhetoric of Edith Sickwell, for instance, who's overpowering rhetoric in a century, for instance, whose taste finds rhetoric in and of itself abhorrent. It's a pejorative that a poetry is rhetorical. Well, I can understand Browning's helplessness before certain other aspects. Remember, taste is also changing. The sublime is disappearing, too, because the Victorians are coming. Both Dennison 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, against what...

[72:50]

Remember, Keats had troubles with his readers, didn't he? I mean, he's already into the trouble, and he faces it quite directly. He can see that he's always going to cause trouble. He has to propose an extreme, and he's in reaction all the time against Shelley's sublime. The other thing that scares one in Shelley, even this I know, going over and over again, particularly in Prometheus Unbound, is that Shelley's music is very high indeed. That is, his command of rhyme, it can scare you to come into what happens in a certain setting. Sailing rhymes and whole areas of the poems 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 Arethusa

[73:53]

was that Jess did a painting of Arethusa, 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 early 19th century sort of taste, and it could be written in 20th century taste. So all I did was write it 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, get back to it, in all spirit, thou spirit come not near now, not this time desert thy cloudy place to scare me,

[74:56]

thus employed with that pure face. I would add to the scare, at lunch we were talking about Helen Adam. Well, it's just one demand of a poem, and that is that it give you a grue. Well, gee, you can read cantos by the mile with no grue. I mean, this is an old Scotch requirement of the poem, and if it gives you a grue, yes, and if it don't give you a grue, no. And Helen can find that grues, since she's out there to listen for a grue, she can, if there's a fleet of a possible grue. But what I do know about that grue, a grue is like gruesome, it's a passing of a spirit of a ghost or 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.

[75:58]

Something about disarming came earlier. Yes, at a point you are, we're back at the sense of peril to move. And Shelley does it in the sublime. There's no description of the sublime, by the way, that it, or the, the difficulty in Emerson is that, it is that if you don't read patiently, word by word and phrase by phrase, and you rip it off, you get to a trans, you get to jello transcendentalism, you know, I mean, as 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, while Jung is, it's when you rip off Jung that you get the numinous and running 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 the lots of other things. They often thought they were in contact with body when they weren't. But, but the, but the disease, I mean, there's not, there's the peril in Jungianism is inflation. And he talks about it over and over again.

[77:00]

And, and, and, and this is what makes it intelligible. But, but, but Jungians 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, this, this moment of scare. There are other moments that certainly in, in Sardello, not, not only he, Browning had to come to his own scare, I think, in part. But, but the, it is interesting, the difference between Browning here, where he banishes Shelley. And, and, I mean, and essentially goes into his poem Sardello, which is going into a realm in 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 Sardello. In the poem, the art Sardello in the poem is, he falls in love with Palma. And she not only is, [...]

[78:05]

she's not in a Beatrice role in the poem at all. She is the sympathizer. Very important for, for, for Robert Browning was the sympathizer who essentially is a woman reading his work. Pauline in Pauline is just such, 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 start, when she answers that, she's the reader of the poem. And when she comes to her profound instructions to Dante, when he asks the nature of the imagination, which is his, his purgatorial, it's the purgatorial. It didn't exist anyplace else 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. I would not name her the muse, but, but she has a role very close to it. It seems to be much more like that goddess,

[79:10]

that, that woman in great power, that Parmenides goes before in, in, in his poem, who instructs him in the nature of truth and, and, and falsity and so forth, and, and, and illusion in the imagination and, and seeing through to the center and essence of things that it, that goes beyond the actual. And, and, and, and so she becomes the reader of Parmenides. The muses at the beginning, if he should tell him that in the orders of poetry, he will always be indeed, he will always be in the projection of truths that sound like lies and lies that sound like the truth. And, and, and this is the nature of the making of things, making up of things. In Pauline, the, the, Pauline is clearly the, a projection of the reader. What's interesting is that Robert Browning then does discover the sympathetic reader

[80:11]

who is a poet, a co-poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And, and, and in relation to Sardello, over and over again, she loved Sardello. She clearly felt it was essential, Robert Browning, 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, what in, in, in Patterson, William Collins Williams will still be in the same school of poetry, referring to the pitch blend and talking about the, the curies who appear as, as, as absolute projections of the poem, working in the pitch blend. 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. I, I, I can for a bit of contemporary gossip,

[81:14]

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, in some very loose mythology as being Pluto, and Pluto as being merely some bad guy. 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 comment, 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, I might wipe us out, but, but since it's been brought forward, I'll trust that the mystery goes deeper. If we're wiped out by that, so the peril must mean that the intuition, that there's no, there is no going back on that which comes forward in the dream. We can, not to admit what comes in, in this whole field,

[82:15]

then you start doing the process of repression. If you, 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 whole world? What is, what is the, you have to go into your, into the nightmares and dreams of the fairs, and, and, and, and the, because here I'm talking about reading life as a dream. Let me go, let me read aloud Robert Browning's preface to Sardello. Um, that he wrote in 1863, because in it he, in 1840, when the poem was issued, it really did result in, it had a result, only sold about nine copies the first year, so only those receiving copies,

[83:16]

and, and, and when they received copies, everybody heard that this is impossible, no way do you want to get to buying this. There he was, like stacks of Sardello back, see, and, and, and, but he still was determined, well he worked and worked on, he worked on the poem, still trying to make it so that it would be accessible, but of course his main job and his prime clear is to make, that it had to be accessible to himself, became, 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 Sardello in the poem, I mean, Sardello can't understand the Sardello and Palma can't, in the poem, disastrously, Palma, to rescue Sardello, to make him a success, to make him move history,

[84:18]

reveals to him that he is the son of San Aguero, now, by the way, 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 San Aguero 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 is in some way has failed, to come to what he would be as a poet, but we have no picture in the life of the historical Sardello, that at 30, in Browning's poem, he dies when he's 30, there was anything there because all the Sardello we know is the Sardello written in later years, so if he died at 30, he sure had failed to come to whatever it was in the poem, but, Salenguera opens as the father then, comes into the poem as the father, and brings up that other

[85:20]

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, Henry James could put a mere thing, chair he can put in quotes, and gee, I mean, not even Freudians dare approach 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, um, Robert Browning's sort of aware of that in its own way when it appears in the poem. Solingiro comes forward and gives his son the measure

[86:25]

that he should be an acknowledged legislator, a changer of history. Burkhardt, in the same period in Germany, projects that only three people, three kinds of men make history, perfectly clear in Burkhardt's world that women don't make history at all, but three kinds of men make history. One of the great makers of war, shocks you, not governors or anything else, and then one's the poet, not the philosopher, in other words, the saint, not the pope, so forth, and, and he says of them that, that, that in the design of history, in that triangulation, there are fatal misunderstandings, and he gives an example for the poet, that for a, the poet thinks of all the matter in religion as great matter for a poem. While the saint thinks, well, these are impossibilities

[87:25]

because he's also perfect, the same Burkhardt recognizes that Saint Francis is both saint and poet. The church, however, he said, so he doesn't have the matter of religion, in a sense, thinking of the 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. Burkhardt 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 in religion. I mean that, that, the laws in religion. These are the makers and breakers of history. Well, that the church, that the Burkhardt in Germany advances the poet as the great maker of history is something we wouldn't even think of today. So Shelley, and 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, that, that poetry moved on and probably to Europe, Goethe was over persuasive.

[88:25]

But I don't think England faced anything since Shakespeare that would persuade you that, that, that occupy this place. But what I want to call your attention to now is how important sympathy is in, in this preface that in 1863, Browning writes. In the rewrite, between the third version and the fourth, just before the, in the 18th, 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 place. And, and, and I find it interesting that he goes into the poem first entirely in the imagination. And I understand a good deal of this. 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,

[89:27]

I, it was not, I believe no poem comes, uh, entirely, let's say, from some, right out of, 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 the course of, in a course on, on medieval and renaissance architecture. And the poem, I started writing a poem during a lecture on the architecture of, of the, St. Mark's. And that lecture was a series, about four. And so I planned, but I, so, gee, I think I flunked the examination. But because all during the lectures, I was looking at the lantern slides. And for examples of how people fail, in, in, in Browning's poem, for instance, he says, I'm standing here with a pointer pointing to this, this man Sardello. And yet it took 40 years for people to notice. More people said, what, you weren't in Venice? And I said,

[90:28]

look at the poem. It says lantern slide visions of Venice repair. 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, 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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