Playfulness Flashcards
Professor Ricks
points out the need to recall the etymology of ‘silly’ as ‘blessed, forutnate’
F.R.Leavis
‘mental idiosyncrasies… extravagantly indulged’ ‘fails to make living contact with us’
Stan Smith on Leavis
‘to speak of the poet’s linguistic virtuosity was usually to level… superficiality, immaturity, narcissism and ultimately moral failure and degeneracy’
Auden on the reason for doing anything in his journal
‘the only reason for doing anything is for fun’
Boly
‘Auden, who followed Dante in believing that the deepest human motive is creative joy’
Mendelson
‘he believed that a comic poet could be a greater and ultimately more serious poet than a tragic or solemn one’
Irvin Ehrenpreis
‘his habit of playing solemn games’
Haffenden
his language games which allowed him to disclose ‘the way the commonplace hides the extraordinary, and the outside of things grows from and yet misrepresents their inside’.
English moralist critics like F.R Leaves and Donald Davie objected to the
‘improvisatory’ quality
although not as lexically experimental as his work was to eventually become, Auden plays gleefully with the potentialities of the English language for the esoteric or bizarres
“Pliocene” “Insufflation” and “paterfamilias” in Winds for instance
Auden’s criticism is not a very reliable guide to his own comic poetry;
in “Notes on the Comic” he more or less equates comedy with what provokes laughter
Auden felt comedy was the most humane and most profound literary response to _________
the “baffle of being”
he sees a ‘laugh’ as
‘less /Heartless than tears’ (Tonight at Seven-Thirty)
