Short Poems by T. E. Hulme

We’ve written about T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) before, in this previous post on his importance as a modern poet. In this follow-up post, we’ve put together ten of Hulme’s shortest and sweetest poems – most of which were written in around 1908-9 when Hulme was in his mid-twenties. These helped to light the touchpaper for modern English poetry, influencing Ezra Pound and imagism (Hulme’s prose writings would also later influence T. S. Eliot). Our founder-editor, Oliver Tearle, has written a little book arguing for the importance of Hulme’s poetry, so if this post whets your appetite for more, his book is available from your favourite bookstore (and if it isn’t, then, as Joan Rivers liked to say, get a new favourite). Anyway, here are the poems..................

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Short Poems by T. E. Hulme

The best T. E. Hulme poems, which can be read in a few minutes and enjoyed for a lifetime


We’ve written about T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) before, in this previous post on his importance as a modern poet. In this follow-up post, we’ve put together ten of Hulme’s shortest and sweetest poems – most of which were written in around 1908-9 when Hulme was in his mid-twenties. These helped to light the touchpaper for modern English poetry, influencing Ezra Pound and imagism (Hulme’s prose writings would also later influence T. S. Eliot). Our founder-editor, Oliver Tearle, has written a little book arguing for the importance of Hulme’s poetry, so if this post whets your appetite for more, his book is available from your favourite bookstore (and if it isn’t, then, as Joan Rivers liked to say, get a new favourite). Anyway, here are the poems.

The following short two-line fragment was one of a number of short ‘images’ Hulme never worked up into a full poem. But the image the poem conveys – as well as the poignant suggestion of memento mori – makes it worthy of inclusion here.



Old houses were scaffolding once
and workmen whistling.



One image that Hulme did work up into a full poem was the following lunar simile, which forms the basis of ‘Autumn’ (arguably the first modern poem in English). There may be a touch of autobiography in the image of the ‘red-faced farmer’, since Hulme apparently had a ruddy complexion and hailed from the rural North Staffordshire area:



A touch of cold in the Autumn night -
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.



Hulme was drawn to the moon as perhaps the romantic poetic image to trump all romantic poetic images, and returned to it in ‘Above the Dock’ (a poem that is slightly more conventional in that it is written in rhyming couplets):



Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.



Hulme likes the wistfulness of the city or town seen at night, with that meeting of the romantic (the stars and night sky) and the modern and urban. This two-line couplet fragment demonstrates this succinctly:




The mystic sadness of the sight
Of a far town seen in the night.



‘Mana Aboda’ was, along with the two previous poems, among the five short pieces which originally comprised ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’, which appeared as a postscript to Ezra Pound’s volume Ripostes in 1912 (Hulme must have had his tongue well and truly in his ruddy cheek when he came up with the title). ‘Mana Aboda’, by the way, is a Polynesian goddess.



Mana Aboda, whose bent form
The sky in arched circle is,
Seems ever for an unknown grief to mourn,
Yet on a day I heard her cry:
‘I weary of the roses and the singing poets—
Josephs all, not tall enough to try.’



‘Susan Ann and Immortality’ is another variation on a common theme of Hulme’s poetry – the relationship between the vast expanse of the skies and the small, earthbound things beneath our feet:



Her head hung down
Gazed at earth, fixedly keen,
As the rabbit at the stoat
Till the earth was sky,
Sky that was green,
And brown clouds past,
Like chestnut leaves arching the ground.



Meanwhile, in this initially untitled poem (Patrick McGuinness, in his excellent edition of Hulme’s Selected Writings, calls it ‘The Poet’), the poet figure dreams of a poetic founded on concrete images rather than abstract romantic platitudes.



Over a large table, smooth, he leaned in ecstasies,
In a dream.
He had been to woods, and talked and walked with trees.
Had left the world
And brought back round globes and stone images,
Of gems, colours, hard and definite.
With these he played, in a dream,
On the smooth table.



The following poem, ‘The Sunset’, offers – like ‘Autumn’ and ‘Above the Lock’ – a surprising comparison between the traditional romantic symbol (here, the sunset rather than the moon) and something unexpected (here, a ballet dancer).



A coryphée, covetous of applause,
Loth to leave the stage,
With final diablerie, poises high her toe,
Displays scarlet lingerie of carmin’d clouds,
Amid the hostile murmurs of the stalls.



Several of Hulme’s poems are preoccupied with fallen figures, people who have lost everything and find themselves dreaming of something now out of reach. We’ll finish with two examples. The first is a little-known fragment about Sir Walter Raleigh, and the other is perhaps Hulme’s most famous poem, ‘The Embankment’.




Raleigh in the dark tower prisoned
Dreamed of the blue sea and beyond
Where in strange tropic paradise
Grew musk…



The Embankment
(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night)



Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek": Rhetorical Analysis

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber. '
This is a case of Metaphor .The women have been here compared to predatory animals through their prey is not ordinary food but sexual flood.

--It is also a case of Hyperbaton since the word order in ‘did me seek’ has been changed from the usual one .
'That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change. ...................
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Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek": Rhetorical Analysis

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber. '
This is a case of Metaphor .The women have been here compared to predatory animals through their prey is not ordinary food but sexual flood.

--It is also a case of Hyperbaton since the word order in ‘did me seek’ has been changed from the usual one .
'That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change. '

--- This is a case of Metaphor since the amorous women have been here compared to birds while the poet himself has been compared to the feeder . The comparisons are left in explicit .

'There with all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?" '

This is a case of Hyperbaton since the normal word order in the question should have been ‘how do you like this?’

It is also a case of Paronomasia . Heart may stands not only for human organ but also for its homophone ‘heart on male dear’.



It is also a case of synecdoche (part for the whole) since the ‘heart’ stands for the lover.

'But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved. '

It is a case of verbal irony . Although the poet uses the word ‘kindly’ meaning appropriately . The tone of the poet as well as his description of the woman’s poet activity makes it quite clear that he means the exact apposite .

This is also a case of Hyperbaton since the normal word order should have been ‘ I am so kindly served’ .

Poetic Term: Prosody, Metre and Terza Rima

That art of writing poetry or part of grammar which deals with laws governing the structure of verse or versification is called prosody. It encompasses the study of all the elements of language that contribute towards acoustic or rhythmic effects chiefly in poetry but also in prose. Ezra pound called prosody “the articulation of the total sound of a poem ". Simply speaking all that can produce harmony and melody in poetry may be taken as the subject - matter of poetry. The plinth of prosody is based on two elements -- quality and accent. However, the accent is the key factor in understanding prosody..............

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Poetic Term: Prosody, Metre and Terza Rima

Prosody

That art of writing poetry or part of grammar which deals with laws governing the structure of verse or versification is called prosody. It encompasses the study of all the elements of language that contribute towards acoustic or rhythmic effects chiefly in poetry but also in prose. Ezra pound called prosody “the articulation of the total sound of a poem ". Simply speaking all that can produce harmony and melody in poetry may be taken as the subject - matter of poetry. The plinth of prosody is based on two elements -- quality and accent. However, the accent is the key factor in understanding prosody.

Metre

(Metrics) Metre measures the rhythm of a line of a verse or the theory of the phonetic structure of verse. The word metre derives from Greek word ' mefrom' which means ' measure'. Traditionally metre refers to the regular, recurrence of feet. According to the Hungarian -- American linguist John Lotz, “In some languages there are texts in which the phonetic material within certain syntactic frames, such as sentences, phrase, and word is numerically regulated. Such text is called verse, and its distinctive characteristic is metre ". Metrics is the study of metre of a verse.

There are basically four types of metres. They are:

i) Syllable - stress or accented syllabic metres

ii) Strong stress metres

iii) Syllabic metres

iv) Quantitative metres.

Terza Rima

A three rhymed pattern (i . e three line are rhyming together ) is called a triplet or tercet . Three lines with one set of rhyming words can be found in Tennyson or Dryden's poetry etc. This is however, not very common in English and is generally used to give variety to a poem in the rhyming couplet. However, the rhymes are sometimes linked from verse to verse and may be run as aba -- bcb -- cdc -- ded -- and so on . This form of triplet is called Terza Rima . It is borrowed from Italian and was employed by Dante in his Devine comedy. The finest example of it in English is Shelly Ode To The West Wind which, however, ends in a couplet.

Poetic Term: Heroic couplet, Rhyme royal, Ottava rima

Heroic couplet: Two line of rhymed iambic pentameter is known as heroic couplet - a a bb cc and so on . The term heroic is applied to it in the late 17th century when the frequent use of such couplets formed the heroic poems or epical poems andd heroic dramas.


In English Chaucer is the innovator whose the Legend of Good women and must of The Canterbury Tales are written in the rhyme style. The other masters are Alexander Pope, Dryden, and Samuel Johnson etc.......
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Poetic Term: Heroic couplet, Rhyme royal, Ottava rima

Heroic couplet: Two line of rhymed iambic pentameter is known as heroic couplet - a a bb cc and so on . The term heroic is applied to it in the late 17th century when the frequent use of such couplets formed the heroic poems or epical poems andd heroic dramas.


In English Chaucer is the innovator whose the Legend of Good women and must of The Canterbury Tales are written in the rhyme style. The other masters are Alexander Pope, Dryden, and Samuel Johnson etc.
Example:
“No Then thyself presume no God to Scan;
The proper study of mankind is man”
The Essay on Man
--- Pope

Rhyme royal: This is one of the popular varieties of rhyme scheme. There is a seven line stanza in rhyme royal -- a b a b b c c. It looks as if a quatrain has been dovetailed onto two couplets. Rhyme royal was used by Chaucer for the first line in English in Troilus and Criseyde and then by Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. However, royal name is derived from King James I of Scotland’s use of it in his poem The king's Book (1424).


Ottava rima : The origin of this rhyme scheme is Italian. Like Sonnet and terza rima it was also introduced in English by Wyatt in 16th century . The premier example of this verse form is Don Juan. The rhyme scheme of the eight line stanza is a b a b a b c c. It is noticeable that an extra rhyme has been introduced in the rhyme royal scheme. Here in ottava rima the single couplet at the end of the stanza gives a witty verbal snap to the foregoing section.


Exp: " A long , long kiss , a kiss of youth and love ,
And beauty , all concentrating like rays
Into one focus , kindled from above ;
such kisses as belong to early days ,
where heart , and soul , and sense , in concert move ,
And the blood's lava , and the pulse a blaze,
Each kiss a heart - quake - for a kiss's strength ,
I think it must be reckon'd by its length "
Don Juan
By Lord Byron

The Tradition of Tragicomedy throughout English Literature

Stated simply, tragicomedy is a blend of the elements of tragedy and comedy. To quote the seventeenth century playwright john Fletcher from the preface to his play The Faithful Shepherdess ; a tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy...............

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The Tradition of Tragicomedy throughout English Literature

Stated simply, tragicomedy is a blend of the elements of tragedy and comedy. To quote the seventeenth century playwright john Fletcher from the preface to his play The Faithful Shepherdess ; a tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.

In the 18th century Dr. Samuel Johnson defined tragicomedy as “drama compounded of merry and serious events”. Contrary to classical injunction against mixing the tragic and the comic in one composition as is insisted by Socrates at the end of Plato’s symposium; Dr. Johnson praises Shakespeare’s mixture of the two, when he says, “Shakespeare has united the powered of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition.” 

In Shakespeare’s tragedies the comic element, though a part of the play, nonetheless remains a distinct constituent in the sense that whereas it intensifies the tragic effect, it doesn’t threaten to influence the action of the play. Porterin Macbeth, fool in King Lear, and grave digger inHamlet, are a case in point. In Shakespeare’s tragicomedies too, the tragic element constitutes a significant part of the action of play. But here too, tragedy is threatened, yet avoided in time so that ultimately it doesn’t affect the fortunes of the protagonists. The two elements, the tragic and comic, thus remain distinctly apart, as is the case in much ado about nothing and other tragicomedies. One best example of tragicomedies by Shakespeare is so-called reconciliation plays, such asThe Winter's Tale , which reach a tragic climax but then lighten to a happy conclusion. In fact, Shakespeare's experimental later plays is known as tragicomedies or romances. These plays differ considerably from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, being more radical in their dramatic art and showing greater concern with reconciliation among generations. Yet like the earlier comedies the tragicomedies end happily with reunions or renewal. Typically, virtue is sorely tested in the tragicomedies, but almost miraculously succeeds.Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale as mentioned earlier, and The Tempest are the great four tragicomedy in the English text.

A tragicomedy becomes the usual form for plays in the tradition of the theater of the absurd, such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was originally written in French, En attendant Godot. The French version did not have the subtitle underscoring its nature. Beckett translated the play himself into English and gave it the subtitle: "a tragicomedy in two acts," we shall see how this play is different from tragicomedies of the past.

In order that you are to appreciate the play better, especially in relation to Beckett’s use of the resources of the performing arts, and a literary genre (i. e. as a tragicomedy), it is better to read T. S. Eliot’s essay,Tradition and the Individual Talent. The reading of this essay should enable you, in general, to see Eliot’s ideas of tradition and the individual talent, you should be able to see how the tradition of tragicomedy is by Beckett and how it undergoes a change at his hands. 

Modern playwrights, as we know, mix the two elements differently and perhaps far more effectively. The two elements interpenetrate within the same character and the boundary between the two in a composition is blurred. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is one of the best examples of it . The play is Conceived as a satirical meditation on Hamlet, by English playwright William Shakespeare. Stoppard's play focuses on the sadly existential but frivolous meanderings of two of Hamlet's marginal characters, a pair of quarrelsome courtiers. Tom was associated with the continental European theater of the absurd, a movement that lamented the senselessness of the human condition. He fused the English tradition of the “comedy of manners” with contemporary social concerns by concentrating on the intricate and comical duplicities of everyday conversation within a wider, and often menacing, historical perspective. This also projects their conception of the human existence and the concept of audience. According to Styan, “is treated to the absurdity of human life inoculated first with laughter.” So you will see that in waiting for go dot, Beckett has to use stay’s words again, “filtered the nightmare of human existence through the screen of laughter.” Or, shall we say that the protagonists inWaiting for Godot laugh to save their tears?

Mimesis

Mimesis has almost the same meaning as mime but the concept of imitation in this case has wider connotations. Originally, Greek artists were the first to establish mimesis (imitation of nature) as a guiding principle for art, even as Greek philosophers debated the intellectual value of this approach. The repeated depiction of the nude human figure in Greek art reflects Greek humanism—a belief that 'Man is the measure of all things,' in the words of Greek philosopher Protagoras. Architecture is another Greek legacy that the West has inherited, as Greece established many of the structural elements, decorative motifs, and building types still used in architecture today. Aristotle in poetics, states that tragedy is an imitation of an action, but the uses the term comprehensively to refer to the construction of a play and what is put into it. We should use mimesis to mean representation, which relates to verisimilitude. The outstanding work in this topic is Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis (1957)...........

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Mimesis

Mimesis has almost the same meaning as mime but the concept of imitation in this case has wider connotations. Originally, Greek artists were the first to establish mimesis (imitation of nature) as a guiding principle for art, even as Greek philosophers debated the intellectual value of this approach. The repeated depiction of the nude human figure in Greek art reflects Greek humanism—a belief that 'Man is the measure of all things,' in the words of Greek philosopher Protagoras. Architecture is another Greek legacy that the West has inherited, as Greece established many of the structural elements, decorative motifs, and building types still used in architecture today. Aristotle in poetics, states that tragedy is an imitation of an action, but the uses the term comprehensively to refer to the construction of a play and what is put into it. We should use mimesis to mean representation, which relates to verisimilitude. The outstanding work in this topic is Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis (1957).

As a literary genre, the term signifies the attempt by one writer to rework the structure and theme of an earlier writer’s work recast a contemporary mood. The form is most prominent in verse, and the most notable examples date from the late Renaissance period, culminating in the wok of the Restoration and Augustan poets, who frequently wrote imitations of the famous classical poets, Juvenal and Horace being the most cultivated. By this means satire could be updated for instance but the framework of similarities to an age long past could be invoked for special effect. The from is distinct from a translation and allows considerably more poetic license. The Latin original (imitation) and its Greekcounterpart (mimesis) have a stricter intellectual connotation, referring to the whole of the representation of reality through the written word.

Literary theory during and after the romantic period regarded imitation is sense as a somewhat inferior practice, derivative lacking in originality. Prior to that and for many centuries it had been regarded as a wholly respectable practice. Aristotle advocated it, so did Cicero and Horace. The idea was that a writer should learn everything he could from the masters who were his predecessors. This point of view prevailed during the medieval and Renaissance periods and continued into the 17th century. 

Gao Xingjian and "Soul Mountain" : Ambivalent Storytelling

This review is a little special: it’s about a book I heard completely while driving around in my car. I recently returned to my home town, Houston, a city where people spend unbearable amounts of time in the solitude of their cars, driving from work to home and work again. In Houston waiting in traffic is synonymous with living. One passes through neighborhoods in air-conditioned comfort, cursing the red lights and slow-moving cars. The purpose of Houston life, it seems, is to wander around without having to feel the breeze or notice the trees, people or shops. The only interruption to the routine are the weekly visits to the gas station, where the traveler parks, inserts his debit card into the machine and pumps gas into his tank Then, if he is lucky, he can leave as quickly as he came, merging into the grumbling fog of traffic..................
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Gao Xingjian and "Soul Mountain" : Ambivalent Storytelling

Review by Robert Nagle , Houston, Texas, September 2002.

This review is a little special: it’s about a book I heard completely while driving around in my car. I recently returned to my home town, Houston, a city where people spend unbearable amounts of time in the solitude of their cars, driving from work to home and work again. In Houston waiting in traffic is synonymous with living. One passes through neighborhoods in air-conditioned comfort, cursing the red lights and slow-moving cars. The purpose of Houston life, it seems, is to wander around without having to feel the breeze or notice the trees, people or shops. The only interruption to the routine are the weekly visits to the gas station, where the traveler parks, inserts his debit card into the machine and pumps gas into his tank Then, if he is lucky, he can leave as quickly as he came, merging into the grumbling fog of traffic.

Gao Xingjian’s novel, Soul Mountain, is about a similar wandering. It is about a man, an intellectual, a writer, an anthropologist, whose mission is to collect folk culture all around him. In reality, he just wanders around, traveling wherever fate sends him. He is in search of something, some answer, some mythical place he calls “Soul Mountain.” In his heart he knows it does not really exist, but that does not make his pursuit any less worthwhile. His motivation is little more than pretext; he wants to find interesting people and learn about local legends. He wants to meet pretty women. But most of all, he wants the trip to help him make sense of his past tribulations.

The novel is not particularly thrilling or amazing, nor is the plot gripping. There are occasional poetic flourishes, a few self-conscious narrative interludes and several vivid characters. And, oh, yes, several sex scenes, some prurient, some detached. As I hear various tales in my car, I feel restless and uncertain about where the book (and I) are traveling. At a red light at Wilcrest and Richmond Avenue, I am listening to an intensely passionate description of sexual intercourse. On Bissonet and I-59, I am hearing several men debate the existence of the legendary “Wild Man.” While stuck in morning Westheimer traffic, I learn that our protagonist is about to die of lung cancer. But wait. It was a mistake, a misdiagnosis. But wait — I have arrived at the 51 story office building, location of my temp job for the day. I park in an underground garage, walking through a tunnel to the building elevator–never once being exposed to the searing Houston heat.

PURPOSEFUL FORMLESSNESS

After listening to the book-on-tape and flipping through the pages, I am still puzzled. It just doesn’t add up. It is formless. Parts are profound or poetic; parts seem like unfinished sketches or notes jotted to oneself. There is no progression, except perhaps an inward progression toward understanding. One Amazon critic reported being so frustrated by the aimlessness of the book that he went directly to the final chapter and started reading backwards, a motive that I certainly understand. If anything, this essayistic novel is thematically arranged. The novel flows in several random directions, hitting the occasional eddy (sex, Taoism, modernism), twirling about until the protagonist can grasp for the next character or incident to push the story forward again. The current is slow and steady, and the narrator is content to stay afloat, letting his unspecified and lackadaisical quest lead him where it may.

What is this novel anyway? It is not a typical Asian novel. What is it? Gao must have been influenced by the formal contrapuntal emphasis of his Parisian contemporary expatriate, Milan Kundera* . Kundera’s essayistic novels impose a rigorous strict structure on plot and characters. But Gao makes no attempt to organize the anecdotes, observations and encounters that populate the book, giving the whole enterprise the aimlessness of a travelogue. Gao is dealing with vague allegory (I am thinking of J.M. Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” or maybe Kadare). But although Gao’s protagonist is obsessed with describing legends and examining their significance, in fact the novel dwells on the mundane. In one chapter, his quest to arrive at a city to learn about its legends and spiritual thought is derailed by a bus driver who has decided to stop at a cafe and not resume the journey until tomorrow. The protagonist/writer, eager to be on his way, is frustrated. Although he manages eventually to find a ride, this little episode provides a humorous and familiar example of how everyone abides by different schedules and priorities and how the narrator’s lofty ambitions have no more cosmic significance than a bus driver’s desire to have a good long meal.

The protagonist is clearly aware of contemporary society’s problems (the novel alludes obliquely at times to the building of the Three Gorges Dam or the Cultural Revolution), but his observations are not littered with references to pop culture or political events in the way that American novels or weblogs seem to be nowadays. Instead the narrator describes his novel through hearsay; he records what people say about themselves and their beliefs and mythologies. In one scene, a woman begs the narrator to write a description of her dead girlfriend to evoke her memory. She tells a sordid story about how her girlfriend was denounced and imprisoned and how she tried vainly to track people who knew her close friend. The protagonist half-listens, feeling nauseous from the seafood the woman had been feeding him. He absorbs these kinds of stories without necessarily feeling nourished by them.

Most of the characters are haunted by something, a memory, an old love, a father that died, a mother that disappeared. Because characters make brief appearances in the novel, there is only enough time to sketch one central overriding concern: getting a daughter into college, finding a key, selling one’s calligraphy. The protagonist leaves the people in the same condition in which he found them. That is, in fact, the one complaint I have of this unsettling novel. We have traveled (or driven) long enough with the novel, but by the end, we are left wondering whether we’ve even made any headway.

BEAUTY OR EVIL

Early on it becomes clear that the novel’s central concern was victimization and sexual brutality. The protagonist encountered (and slept with) a large number of females. Some chapters are sparse exchanges between lovers about love and self and surrender. Others recount legends about zhuhuapo, the word for certain beautiful tempting women who often bring misfortune. Most of the time the protagonist relates the sexual encounters with little enthusiasm, treating them as little more than obligatory episodes in his quest.

Throughout the novel the protagonist relates his history of sexual encounters, hinting at having witnessed some unspeakable sexual victimization. He doesn’t seek out female companionship, but he makes no special effort to fend it off either. He is jaded. He remembers the fires of passion, but now the endless conversation about such matters seem nothing more than the vanity of a species unwilling to acknowledge the passing of time. His participation in these unions seem to implicate him in an endless cycle of pain and victimization. His middle age sensibility warns him not to cause pain or harm. It seems he can no longer enjoy the company of a woman. Yet he longs to regain oneness with the natural world he so lovingly describes. Sex offers the opportunity to erase boundaries between self and another person. But it also is a power game in which someone always loses. In one town, the protagonist makes the acquaintance of an inexperienced girl who throws herself before him. He is attracted not by her beauty, but by her naivety and ardor. But in the middle of sexual embrace, he realizes that to continue with her would be absolutely cruel. He didn’t love her; he had no intention of marrying her. In a town with traditional views on marriage, a woman who had lost her virginity would lose any hope of getting married, and the potential for pregnancy would jeopardize this girl’ social standing. He refuses to consummate the act, hurting the girl’s feelings, but knowing in his heart that he is performing a supreme act of kindness. Or is he? In either case, the girl would be hurt; by denying her the sexual attention she craves, he deals a blow to her confidence. He presumes that his careful avoidance of heartbreak will be in the girl’s best interest. But isn’t this just a rationalization for indifference?

The only people who seem to play the game well are those who treat it as just that: a game. A promiscuous woman has a fling with him without any illusions about love or marriage. She does it because it is natural. Is there anything wrong with that? She says no, and after a night of passion, the protagonist recounts the lovemaking not with passion or a sense of the woman’s beauty. He merely recounts their conversation about how such a lifestyle could be justified. Clearly he is past the point of being able to enjoy such encounters. After meeting another young attractive woman, he finds the thought of passion to be more painful than pleasurable. He writes:

I would rather drift here and there without leaving traces. There are so many people in this big wide world and so many places to visit but there is nowhere for me to put down roots, to have a small refuge, to live a simple life. I always encounter the same sort of neighbors, say the same sort of things, good morning or hello and once again am embroiled in endless daily trivia. Even before this becomes solidly entrenched, I will already have tired of it all. I know there is no cure for me.”

In one of the book’s oddest chapters, the protagonist hears the story of a group of youngsters who had sex parties and a girl who was executed for the corrupting influence she had on other girls. The sentence is of course unjust, and the girl is deserving of pity. But the protagonist seems shocked less by the sentence than the fact that the girl organized these parties freely, without any background of victimization or exploitation. For him, it raises the question whether sexual activity was really a power game where one person always trumped another. Here was an individual who turned promiscuity into a personal choice and seemed not to have injured anyone, physically or psychologically. Yet, she is condemned and ultimately destroyed. In another episode with an attractive girl certainly too young for him, they have an innocent talk on a mountain trip, and he agrees to take a picture. The girl gives him her home address in another city and invites him for a friendly visit. But after the encounter, which the protagonist describes very objectively, he never develops the photos or bothers to keep the girl’s address. Later, when he wonders “whether or not one day I’ll have all this film made into print…(or) whether she will look as stunningly beautiful in the photo,” he reveals that his appreciation of beauty has not faded, even as he tries to suppress it. “I can only recoil when confronted by beauty or evil,” he says.

NATURE VS. BUREAUCRATS

Although Gao’s sensibility is far too cerebral to concern himself with political concerns, he laments the loss of privacy, spontaneity and freedom in a society controlled by bureaucrats and officials. Characters don’t rail against communism; they rail against the loss of spontaneity in life caused by their political system. In one scene, when townspeople cheer on a singer to perform some songs, an official breaks the show up because nobody had obtained the right permits. This official turned out to be the singer’s son. These officials are petty and bothersome, but certainly not worth fearing. Gao’s novel is truly apolitical, but he views regulation and officialism as encroaching on the natural world and even personal relationships. In one story, he tells of how elderly people with political blemishes in their past were banished to inferior retirement homes, “homes for the “solitary aged” while others stayed at “homes for the venerable aged.” Later on, after the Party admitted its excesses of the period, all retired people went to a “home for the aged,” leading one to wonder whether the current system was in fact an improvement over the old system. When a relative inquires about a parent who had died in a home for the “solitary aged,” he discovers that the paperwork had disappeared and that barely a record existed of her incarceration. The system is both impersonal and inefficient; the book is littered with incidents of people being harmed, either directly or indirectly by zealous officials. For Gao, officials are harmful because they try to impose artificial order on the world around them. Even when the governing bodies try to amend its impunities against the natural world or society, it fails. For a while he follows a band of biologists trying to study the panda’s natural habitat, a rather absurd undertaking, given that the pandas are practically extinct anyway and the habitat has changed so irrevocably. Why bother, the protagonist asks a skeptical old man. The man replies:

“it’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance–people need to deceive themselves. We’re preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the chance for survival and yet on the other hand we’re charging ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself. Look at the Min River you came along on your way in here, the forests on both sides have been stripped bare. The Min River has turned into a black muddy river but the Yangtze is much worse yet they are going to block off the river and construct a dam in the Three Gorges! Of course, it’s romantic to indulge in wild fantasy, but the place lies on a geological fault and has many documented records of landslides throughout history. Needless to say, blocking off the river and putting up a dam will destroy the entire ecology…when people assault nature like this nature inevitably takes revenge!”

The sexual violence alluded to throughout the book is another such assault on nature. It suggests disturbance, an inability to reconcile opposing forces in the natural world. According to one legend, young girls who had been raped or treated badly would dive suicidally into the river far below. This violent, eerie reunion with the natural world was alluring not only to the townspeople, but even the protagonist’s girlfriend, who liked to imagine jumping.

THE STORYTELLER’S DISCOMFORT

So where does the novelist come in? What should he do? The protagonist (and author) is not quite sure. His ostensible function is to collect cultural history from the regions. He was a storyteller, historian, photographer, social scientist, ecologist and anthropologist all wrapped up into one. Is he merely cataloging human experience? Or sifting through life for examples of beauty and epiphanies? His ostensible purpose is to collect legends and folk songs (and by the way, even the Communist Party couldn’t find fault with that). Behind this straightforward task lies uncertainty about what the writer should be doing with the half-truths that are called legends. If told and retold enough times, these legends attain the status of a “social truth.” The Wild Man (one of the legends retold in the novel) may be a myth, but hearing it so many times makes one no longer so sure. In a society where official versions of events are repeated over and over, to relegate the writer’s role to that of “legend collector” is essentially to render him irrelevant. Gao doesn’t seem interested in the political dimensions of this. The protagonist just wants to explore and take pictures and record. Still, the novel is more than that. Interspersed between descriptions of his travel, the reader will find stream-of-consciousness ruminations on the storytelling art, a sign that the writer is uncomfortable with just collecting the stories of other people. The novel records bedtime conversations with ex-lovers who are always questioning his motives, interpretations and attitudes. The feminine voice, often unnamed and unseen, is hypercritical, knowing, skeptical, needy and eager to unmask the narrator’s illusions. Indeed, quite often the stories are told in indirect discourse while the narrator is doing something else. He often, for example, tells stories about old lovers while in bed with another. In such a case, a story is a rude distraction for the current woman he is sleeping with. When stories of the past flow freely from the protagonist’s tongue during such private moments, it is a sign that the narrator is uncomfortable with how events are initially understood by people. Only after an event has faded into people’s memories can a storyteller find the discipline and structure and distance to shed light into what the episode was really about.

The legends, while artfully told, often reveal the narrator’s uncertainties about his role in capturing stories. He recounts a fascinating legend of a Grand Marshall from the Jin Dynasty who secretly watches a beautiful nun in the bathtub. As it turns out, the woman has cut open her stomach to expose her entrails and has begun scrubbing them in the same way she scrubbed the rest of her limbs. After she is finished, she sews up her stomach and proceeds with her routine tasks. After telling the story in a dramatic and convincing way, the narrator says:

This story is a political warning.

You say if the ending of the story is changed it could become a morality tale to warn people against lechery and lust. The story could also be turned into a religious tale to exhort people to convert to Buddhism. The story can also serve as a philosophy for getting on in society –to teach the morally superior man that each day he should investigate his own personal conduct, or that human life is suffering, or that suffering in life derives from the self. Or the story could be developed with numerous intricate and complex theories. It all depends on how the storyteller tells it. The Grand Marshall protagonist of the story has a name and surname so a great deal of textual research, examining historical texts and old books, could be carried out. But as you are not a historian, don’t have political aspirations, and certainly neither wish to become an expert in Buddhism, nor to preach religion, nor to become a paragon of virtue, what appeals to you is the superb purity of the story. Any explanation is irrelevant, you simply wanted to retell it in the spoken language.

So what is this bland pronouncement about? Is it just the usual complaint about interpretation? Is it warning people about the dangers of manipulating stories for other purposes? Is it merely professing neutrality about the storytelling art itself? No one could say for sure. In this passage, like many others, the author/protagonist is revealing his personal struggle about the nature of his art in the modern world. No one will deny that storytelling is good for its own sake, but a writer who writes with this belief will find his creative works littered with self-conscious musings, autobiographical ruminations and infusions of allegorical significance into the stories he retells. Does Gao decry this? Should the novelists instead be stripping away such personal touches just to focus on the story? Soul Mountain, as imperfect as it is, stands as an example of how easy it is for the author to become the story he tells and how difficult it is to separate the art of storytelling from the desire to explore ideas, personal emotions and metaphysical meditations.

Future Utopia: Brave New World- Huxley

Huxley was described by V.S. Pritchett as "that rare being-the prodigy, the educable young man, the peremial asker of unusual questions." Brave New World opens in a technically advanced future world. Here Huxley: shifts his mildly satiric observations of a limited group of people to a broader and more ironic satire of a utopian society.............
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Future Utopia: Brave New World- Huxley

The term dystopia ("bad place") has recently come to be applied to works of fiction, 
including science fiction, that represent a very unpleasant imaginary world in which 
ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are 
projected into a disastrous future culmination.

—M.H. Abrams in A glossary of Literary Terms

Huxley was described by V.S. Pritchett as "that rare being-the prodigy, the educable young man, the peremial asker of unusual questions." Brave New World opens in a technically advanced future world. Here Huxley: shifts his mildly satiric observations of a limited group of people to a broader and more ironic satire of a utopian society.

Brave New World is set in the future A.F. (After Ford) 632 in a society where war, hunger, suffering, disease are illiminated along with the freedom to have your own emotions, will, and mind. In this society, humans are: conceived and mass-produced in test tubes and are genetically engineered with standardized traits. In the beginning of this book, we see the Director of World Hatcheries lead the new hatchery students on a tour of a Conditioning Center in London where babies are produced in “clean bottles” and pre-sorted to determine which class level they will be born into. In this new world, people are conditioned from birth not to love one person, so there is no marriage and most people have many lovers: It was decided to abloish the love of nature, any any rate among the lower classes; to abloish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport.

As a science fiction Brave New World confronted with a man, Bernard Marx, “an Alpha Plus”. He resorts to entertaining himself most evenings, without the company of a woman. This encourages his individual thought, and he realizes that independent thought is rewarding, and that he must strive to become a real individual. Marx felt extremely uncomfortable because a man so conventional, so scrupulously correct as the Director-and to commit so gross a solecism! It made him want to hide his face, to run out of the room. "Everybody belongs to everyone else" is the basic psychology of the society. This suggests that an individual owes everything to society, but society in turn owes everything to him or her. This applies to all. 

In Huxley's perfect world, sex is a mundane undertaking. It happens to each individual almost every night but no one knows what marriage is. They simply have each other and move on. Beeside it, the government is very cruel to the population of the country: In hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thusand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death. A utopia, or perfect world, gone awry is displayed in Aldous Huxley's provocative novel Brave New World. Dystopia is drawn on “political and emotional events, and vision of future in contemporary fears of totalitarian ideology " (Baker).It is the situation that costs a piece of an unhealthy environment for human beings, is the theme of the novel. The dystopian setting is brought about by technology and by higher authorities. Just look at these words:

The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundredth metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation.

Huxley portrays a "perfect dystopia" where scientists "breed people to order" in a specific class (Baker). Everyone easily fulfils society's obligations and there are few surprises. If things should get stressful for any reason, there's always the wonder drug "soma". If anything goes wrong, there's always the "soma holiday" from life. Most of the Epsilon workers are paid in "soma" tablets to keep them happy.

In a dystopia there is no place for literature, “Beacause our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel-and you can’t make tragedies without social insstability. The world is stable now.” The following lines are enough to describes the condiction of a famous literary book: It was thick book and looked very old. The binding had been eaten by mice; some of its pated were loose and crumbled. He picked it up, looked at tge title page: the books was called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

In the conversation and confessions of the controller to John, the controller states that Shakespeare is forbidden both because it's old and beautiful, qualities that might make people turn against the synthetic beauty of the Brave New World, and because the people wouldn't understand it" (Baker).

In conclusion, in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World there was a numerous amount of dystopia displayed. The first evidence of dystopia of the novel is presented when the Director of Hatcheries is looses himself in his thoughts of the past. Following that evidence, Brave there is the one where people such as Bernard are not able to express how they feel or how they think. Women can get pregnant and there is no sure way for the scientists to end this process of nature in this dystopia. The fourth evidence is how soma is used by people to accept their unhappiness.

Freud' Stages of Development

The original concept of “psycho-dynamics” was developed by physician Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud suggested that psychological processes are flows of psychological energy in a complex brain, establishing “psycho-dynamics” on the basis of psychological energy, which he referred to as libido. 

When Sigmund Freud, introduced the psycho-dynamic theory, he grouped together theories to explain it, these include: ID, Ego, Super-Ego; aka: Psychic Analysis.
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Freud' Stages of Development

The original concept of “psycho-dynamics” was developed by physician Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud suggested that psychological processes are flows of psychological energy in a complex brain, establishing “psycho-dynamics” on the basis of psychological energy, which he referred to as libido. 

When Sigmund Freud, introduced the psycho-dynamic theory, he grouped together theories to explain it, these include: ID, Ego, Super-Ego; aka: Psychic Analysis.

Freud described ID to be – ‘It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego.’ The id is mainly responsible for our basic drives such as; food, drink and other general impulses.



The Ego comprises, the organized party of personality structure; the defensive, intellectual-cognitive, perceptual. Freud explained: ‘The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions …’ The Super-ego comprises of one’s inner-ambitions, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency (commonly called conscience) fantasies, feelings, and actions. Freud’s theory implies that the super-ego is a symbolic internalization of the father figure, and cultural regulations. The super-ego acts as the conscience, maintaining a good sense of morality.

The Oedipus complex, introduced by Frued, Freud developed the Oedipus complex as an explanation of the formation of the super-ego. The theory was based on the Greek myth of a son who kills his father and marries his mother.

The Electra complex is the psychoanalytic theory that a female’s psycho-sexual development involves a sexual attachment to their father, and is analogous to a boy’s attachment to his mother that forms the basis of the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex is largely based on an idea by Sigmund Freud, with the original term coming from Carl Jung in 1913.

According to Freud, a girl, like a boy, is originally attached to the mother figure. However, during “the phallic stage”, when she discovers that she lacks a penis, she becomes attached to the father figure, like a type of favouritism towards her father, whilst being resentful towards her mother.

Now we turn to developmental theories, and the most famous, historically, is psychoanalytic or Freudian theory. This theory sprung from Freud's observations of adults' recollections in therapy of their lives. Children were not directly observed. Although Freud's theory has been roundly criticized for its lack of scientific character, it does stand however as a grand metaphor for describing personality.

Freud's theory has three main parts, the stages of development, the structure of the personality, and his description of mental life. Here, the stages of the personality will be discussed.

Again, only from adult recollections did these stages emerge. The first stage is the Oral Stage. It runs from birth to age 2. In the oral stage infants and toddler explored the world primarily with their most sensitive area, their mouths. They also learn to use their mouths to communicate. The next stage is the Anal Stage. In the anal stage, children learned to control the elimination of bodily wastes.

The Phallic Stage (3-5 years of age) is probably the most controversial. The word phallic means penis-like. In this stage, children discover their sexual differences. The controversy comes from Freud's description of the Oedipus (for males) and Electra (for females) complexes, with their attendant concepts of castration anxiety and penis envy, respectively. Those complexes lead, according to Freudian theory, to normal differentiation of male and female personalities. The defense mechanism of repression was invoked to explain why no one could remember the events of this stage.

The phallic stage is followed by a Latency Period in which little new development is observable. In this stage, boys play with boys, and girls with girls, typically. Sexual interest is low or non-existent.

The final stage is the Genital Stage. It started around 12 years of age and ends with the climax of puberty. Sexual interests re-awaken at this time (there were sexual interests before, dormant and repressed from the phallic stage).

Neo-Freudian approaches added more stages (Erikson) and/or altered Freud's emphasis on psychosexual development. Those approaches will be discussed on a below.

Frankenstein: Marry Shelley

Texas astronomers have used the light of the moon to highlight the hour of creation for Victor Frankenstein and his notorious monster – and defend the memory of their teenage creator, Mary Shelley.

The inspiration came in a waking dream between 2am and 3am on the morning of 16 June, 1816, during a stormy summer on Lake Geneva, they explain in the November issue of Sky and Telescope...............

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Frankenstein: Marry Shelley

Texas astronomers have used the light of the moon to highlight the hour of creation for Victor Frankenstein and his notorious monster – and defend the memory of their teenage creator, Mary Shelley.

The inspiration came in a waking dream between 2am and 3am on the morning of 16 June, 1816, during a stormy summer on Lake Geneva, they explain in the November issue of Sky and Telescope.

In the preface to the third edition of Frankenstein Shelley described a villa party: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, herself and Byron's physician Polidori, and the famous challenge by Byron that each of them should begin a ghost story. She also described her repeated inability to come up with an idea until a moment of inspiration during a sleepless night in her dark room, behind closed shutters "with the moonlight struggling to get through".

And then, she continued: "I saw with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life …"

The two poets soon lost interest. Polidori picked up an idea of Byron's and much later launched another genre with a Gothic thriller called The Vampyre. He also kept a diary of his days with Byron and some enigmatic entries have prompted scholars and biographers to suggest that to enhance sales Mary Shelley might have composed yet another fictionabout the chronology of literary creation. Did Byron make his famous challenge on 16 June? Was Mary Shelley, only 18 at the time, writing the next day?

Or did she spend several days agonising and think of her tale on 22 June?

"Our calculations show that can't be right, because there wouldn't be any moonlight," says Donald Olson, from Texas State University in San Marcos. Just as astronomers can predict sunrise, lunar cycles and tides decades ahead, they can say when they happened centuries in the past. Prof Olson has already used astronomical tables and geographic reference points to fix the time, date and location of paintings by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh; to propose revised timings for the Battle of Marathon in 490BC and Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55BC; and even to confirm a freak Breton tide mentioned in Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale.

In August 2010, Professor Olson, two colleagues and two students went to Lake Geneva to discover when moonlight would have hit the windows, and penetrated the shutters, of Mary Shelley's bedroom. The answer required a visit to the villa, still in private ownership, a study of the terrain, and perusal of weather records.

Shelley reports that she stayed up beyond the "witching hour" of midnight. By 22 June, the moon would then have been a waning crescent, masked by a hillside. But a bright, gibbous moon would have cleared the hillside to shine into Mary Shelley's bedroom window just before 2am on 16 June.

So Shelley's version of events is supported by evidence. Byron probably made his famous ghost story challenge somewhere between 10 and 13 June, 1816. On 15 June, according to both Polidori and Mary Shelley, the party talked about the "principle" of life. The monster and the tormented scientist were dreamed up in the small hours of that night.

"Mary Shelley wrote about moonlight shining through her window, and for 15 years I wondered if we could recreate that night," says Prof Olson. "We did recreate it. We see no reason to doubt her account."

Foregrounding: Halliday

“The foreground is part of a view, picture, etc. that is nearest to you when you
 look at it (whereas) Foregrounding is the action of emphasizing something 
by means of linguistic devices.” Oxford Dictionary

Halliday defines foregrounding as a part of the functional theory of language, or what cannot be expresses statically is foregrounding, which was introduced by The Prague School (1926) as the feature of stylistics, that is “The branch of knowledge that deals with literary or linguistic style.” .............

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Foregrounding: Halliday

“The foreground is part of a view, picture, etc. that is nearest to you when you
 look at it (whereas) Foregrounding is the action of emphasizing something 
by means of linguistic devices.” Oxford Dictionary

Halliday defines foregrounding as a part of the functional theory of language, or what cannot be expresses statically is foregrounding, which was introduced by The Prague School (1926) as the feature of stylistics, that is “The branch of knowledge that deals with literary or linguistic style.” 

Foregrounding is achieved in language by introducing extra-regularity, meant the regularity which is over and above the demands of correctness—rhyme, rhythm, metre, alliteration, assonance are the examples of phonological over-regularity, thus, the two Prague School scholars defined foregrounding in their book “literary structures and style”, as follows: “by foregrounding, we mean that use of devices of language in such a way that this use itself attracts attention.”  Hence, foregrounding is achieved by parallism construction, in which one structure seems equivalent or parallel to another. Both the scholars believe: “in poetic language, foregrounding achieves maximum intensely to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the adjective of expression and of being used for its own sake.”

Let us take some examples for understanding the concept of foregrounding which “is perceived as uncommon, as deprived of automation, as de-automatized, as live poetic metaphor.” the following examples will show how familiar words are used to “de-familiarize” and “de-automatize” the exceptions of the reader, as Eliot says in The Waste Land:

“The nymphs are depraved

Departed, have left no addressee.”

“Let him easter in us.” (The Wreck of the Deutschland)

“Just man justices.” (Hopkins)

Foregrounding means giving unusual prominence to one element or property of a text. It refers to a process which brings something into the most central and prominent figure during a certain stretch of discourse. It can be achieved, as we have seen in the above cited example, by deviation. Another method of achieving foregrounding is through parallism; note the example from goldsmith’s the Deserted Village:

“ill fares the land, to hasting ills a prey

where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

The basic idea being dealt by the poet is that an increase in wealth leads to a decrease in human qualities. The grammatical parallel in the second line effectively brings out the irony of the statement. The second part remains in the memory because the author intends it to be foregrounded. The opposition between “wealth accumulated” and “men decay” and the consequent irony is effectively brought about the use of grammatical parallelism. Let us stylistically analyses another line taken from Hopkins poem the wreck of the Deutschland

“…the window-making, unchilding, unfathering deeps”

the three adjective in the given line

“window-making”,

“unchilding” and

“unfathering”

are linguistic deviants. Though women can be made windows, but the poet has used a compound morphological deviant; again “child” and “father” are nouns. Though fathering as participle is understandable, but the class changing derivational prefix “un-” in “unfathering” is not comprehensible.

Here is another example of grammatical parallelism: “I kisses the e’re I killed thee” (Othello). In this case, “kissed” and “killed” are similar in structure, in fact identical except for one consonant in each of the two structures. The words are however completely opposed in meaning.” The grammatical and phonetically parallelism in the act of kissing and killing appears to Othello’s tortured mind at that moment as being identical. Rhymes can also a form of parallelism construction which creates potential patterns which would not occur in the ordinary flow. This draw our attention and such construction are considered to be foregrounded.

Constructions can be said to be foregrounded if they deviate from the rules of normal language. 

Let us take the example of Dylan Thomas’s line “a grief ago” normally we say “a month ago”. Dylan has measured out units of grief, as we measure out units of time, the economy of words and deviation from normal rules of construction make the expression stand out noticeably, hence the expression is said to be foregrounded in the language of stylistics, thus foregrounding is the most important unit of linguistics but It is not used in the serviced of communication, but in order to place in the background the act of expression,

the act of speech itself.

Foregrounding is the basic principle of aesthetic communication, it is a creative method of highlighting a linguistic feature, which the artist wants to make noticeable. Jakobson is primarily concerned with the study of the artistic emphasis on foregrounding procedures—the language of literature is foregrounding against the background of conventional linguistic forms of expressions and observes “poetry is organized violence on ordinary speech”.