Jan 22 2009
{book review} george looney: the precarious rhetoric of angels
Isn’t that a beautiful, evocative title for a book? I mean, you read that and you haven’t a clue what it means, but it sounds pretty, right? Which probably sums up how a lot of people tend to feel about poetry, and I admit that often goes for me too. I adore T.S. Eliot, but do I have a clue what, say, The Waste Land actually means? Yeah, not so much. To be honest I suppose I’m especially wary of analyzing poems I really love, because I’d rather enjoy Eliot for his marvelous imagery and wordplay than say “Clearly, J. Alfred Prufrock is sexually frustrated.”
Even when I read a poem like one of Eliot’s and have no idea precisely what, if anything, he’s trying to say with it, I still tend to find myself coming away with some idea of what the poem’s about, even if I can’t always put it into words. I suppose that’s one of my biggest criteria for any kind of art: it should mean something, whether I’m positive what that something is or not. Art that makes me go “Uh…what was the point of all that?” rarely counts as art in my book, if for no other reason than because the simple fact that I’m wondering what the point was means I wasn’t distracted by something else, like how pretty it was. (more…)
