Quote:This is all I've been trying to say to you. That someone has written something or said something at all can be used to adduce or infer something about him or her, personally, as much as the conceptual/descriptive content of his or her writing. So indeed, if you can see the lying writer behind the text, the fact that you see him as a liar shows me that you know something, however minimal, about him/her.
inference is not fact . what i see may not be so. i may see a writer of wild tales as a liar, which i don't, the lie thing is a generalisation of writers. some will not be liars, but i feel most are. and not the liar liar type of liar, but the creationist type of liar where an artist creates something that never was. while it may seem i know something i don't not from the poetry, eg; i've read a lot of stuff about certain poets that taint what poetry fo theirs i read. i suspect for instance that shakey was a plagiarist. okay i see a bit of homage in his works (the story of anthony and cleo has been written many times etc.) but i never really new that till i read of it outside poetry.
you reinforce my view with some of your opening statements. here's one of them;
Quote:I think of Eliot as a poet who often thematized his own despair over this fact:
look the 2nd word you use, think....you think....you don't know. we know wilde was gay, how, even if he says "i'm gay" in poem are we to take it as a given? no we know he's gay because he was he stood up in court and declared "i am the prosecutor in this case" when defending a libel case saying he was a gay, he openly admitted the fact and lost the case. subsequently in another case brought about by the former he was jailed. finally being sent to reading jail, it was because of his treatment their he wrote 'the ballad of reading goal' we know it was terrible time in his life not because of the poem but because of [a] our knowledge that he was actually in the prison, [b] that he was a self confessed homosexual and [c] that the prison system of that time was particularly unkind, specially to for homosexuals which act was deemed a horrendous crime. so much so that wilde's judge upon sentencing him to two years declared (the maximum allowed) it was not enough for such an awful crime (paraphrased). i never got a jot of that from any of his poetry. i never new he'd been jailed for homosexuality let alone new that he'd penned a poem about it. we see what the writer allows us to see. and know what we THINK we know when we read poetry or fiction or even fact. a poet for me is the world poet, all i need to know is he lived and wrote poetry