![]() ![]() From Dante to the present day, the katabatic imagination views the underworld as a crucible for the forging of a “true” self (see Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature).ĢIn modern times, two katabatic narratives have been influential in shaping Anglo-American ideas about the West’s relation to Africa and the Orient: Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. In The Poetics of Conversion, Freccero argues that Dante’s Commedia may be regarded as “the first novel of the self” (58). Dante was not the first, but he was certainly the most influential writer to turn the katabatic narrative into a quest for selfhood. What do I mean by a katabatic imagination? Katabasis is the ancient Greek term for the story of a descent into Hell and return, made by a living human being (see Clark, Catabasis 32). What should we make of such an image, broadcast nationwide on the British TV News (BBC, 10/03/03)? Should we be reassured that the military are engaging with serious literature at such a time? Or disturbed that a soldier might be thinking of Iraq as a region of damned souls? I took it as a sign, singular but chilling, of the shaping influence of a katabatic imagination at work in both the conception and the implementation of this conflict. The recirculation of her popular poem through citation and recitation, illustration and anthologization, prosody and parody, demonstrates a varied history of thinking through-simultaneously “about” and “in”-verse.1On the evening before the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, an American soldier sat in the sand, reading Dante’s Inferno in an English translation by Robert Pinsky. In the composition and reception of her poem, we see how Victorian poetry foregrounds its multiple mediations, including the mediation of voice by meter as a musical instrument. But Browning was already doing a version of historical poetics, in writing “Pan and Luna” as a poem about reading other poems about Pan, among them “A Musical Instrument,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Richards, who illustrates how a line from Robert Browning is read in the mind’s eye, as if in the present tense. ![]() While nineteenth-century verse cultures revolved around reading by generic recognition, a reading of poetry as a form of cognition emerges among later critics like I. ![]() In posing questions about what is “historical” and what counts as “poetics,” historical poetics cannot separate the practice of reading a poem from the histories and theories of reading that mediate our ideas about poetry. ![]()
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