Lyric poetry, by its very nature, has always been less concerned with continuous, historical or epical time, with chronos, than with kairos and what Joyce called epiphanies, moments in which experience or vision is concentrated or crystalized. Lyrical poetry, therefore, was more dependent on the unity of inner experience—that is, of the experiencing consciousness—than on that sequence of outer events which provided a framework for verse or prose narrative.
—Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the Nineteen-sixties (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1979)
No comments:
Post a Comment