Novalis: A Tribute

[jdeirmend]

Dale,

Thanks for coming forward and offering some critique. I have only a smidgeon of undergraduate creative writing under my belt, and though two of my teachers were prize winning poets, neither did very much by way of teaching the basics of formal poetry. Coincidentally, I tend to prefer and admire the discipline of the same over much of what passes for "free verse" these days . . . insert some blah blah blah about my concurrences with Harold Bloom and the contemporary flight from all cognitive and aesthetic value.

Anyhow, I'm happy to have the opportunity to learn from someone more knowledgeable about literature than myself. I have my M.A. in philosophy in psychoanalysis, and studied phil. at USC, but always felt most at home, to be honest, in creative writing and literary theory courses. I had a plan some years ago to get a second M.A. in literature and creative writing that fell through, so I'm happy to have stumbled upon this site.

After reading the meter sticky, my understanding of your major complaint about the deficiency in meter is that I don't really make iambs. This is by virtue of the fact that the second syllable of each pair, in many cases, falls on part of a word, and not a whole one. Does that sound right, or is there something else I'm missing?

Thanks,
James

English romanticism I know, German, not so much. The form here appears to be a syllabic sonnet, as it has ten syllables per line, but no consistent meter, although in a number of lines it follows IP closely. Of course the same problems that arise in a sonnet that is written in IP, also arise here, that is flipped syntax, sometimes known as Yoda speech.

"as if the world from it a sickness flung:
a rash, wrought by how bright his star did burn."

Some lines are awkward regardless of the form one might wish to attach to them such as:

"Like smoke, their whispers clung to the arid"

this does lead into the next line that starts on a half foot, but is in IP.

"halls of Academe, where sterile thought"

Still the fifth line is awkward at best.

The syntactical problems get worse in such lines as

"Yet all such men fail thereby represent"

the simple lack of the "and" causes such confusion as to make getting sense from this line difficult, and frustrating.

None of these problems are anything new to sonnet writers, especially those not very familiar with the form, and oftentimes those with some familiarity.

The positives are that the writer appears to understand what constitutes a sonnet and tries his/her best to conform, and I also suspect after reading over it a few more times the intent was probably to adhere to IP, and just experienced some failures along the way. Although a sonnet is technically not a difficult challenge, the difficulty rises in the extreme when we add the qualification of sounding natural.

I can certainly understand the anger in the piece as the romantics were assailed unmercifully by the modernist for their supposed reliance on sentiment, although it was actually the poor imitators not the masters that produced copious amounts of that overly sentimental drivel that still is inflicted on us today most often in the form of the "love poem". Caught up in the new rationalism of scientific determinism they were overwhelmed in their desire for objective poetry (a more soulless form of writing has never been known) . Thus Novalis along with the rest were cast aside, often brutally, together with the old morality and mores. Kill them all, kill all the Baron Von Munchausen.
One final note, I would change "health" and wealth" to some other rhyme as "health" makes no sense at all.

Dale