ABOVE
Sigo romanántico (detail), Felipe Cussen 2024
The old Man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
(Wordsworth)
Without this stream, the poet seems to say, there would be no poem, only a paraphrasable, controllable plot. The doubleness of speech and the stream of speech scarce heard indicates the simultaneity of presence in the world and expansion from some far region sent, a rotation from subject-centeredness. “what we hear in [poetry] is the combination of two lines, one of which is in itself absolutely mute, while the other, seen separately from its instrumental metamorphosis, is quite without significance or interest . . . . Where paraphrase is possible, the sheets remain unrumpled, so to speak, and poetry has not spent the night there” (Mandelstam). Romanticism begins the process of reducing the distance between words as a stream (beneath the social level of speech), and the aristocratic tradition of poetry as inscription and poetic form as abstraction. (See below,”Writ in water”) line of Whitman streams out from the (social) lyric subject into a democracy of observations: “I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.”
BELOW
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
(Wordsworth)
Without this stream, the poet seems to say, there would be no poem, only a paraphrasable, controllable plot. The doubleness of speech and the stream of speech scarce heard indicates the simultaneity of presence in the world and expansion from some far region sent, a rotation from subject-centeredness. “what we hear in [poetry] is the combination of two lines, one of which is in itself absolutely mute, while the other, seen separately from its instrumental metamorphosis, is quite without significance or interest . . . . Where paraphrase is possible, the sheets remain unrumpled, so to speak, and poetry has not spent the night there” (Mandelstam). Romanticism begins the process of reducing the distance between words as a stream (beneath the social level of speech), and the aristocratic tradition of poetry as inscription and poetic form as abstraction. (See below,”Writ in water”) line of Whitman streams out from the (social) lyric subject into a democracy of observations: “I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.”
BELOW
Sigo romanántico, Felipe Cussen 2024
Felipe Cussen writes:
I used software to randomise all the words of the "a stream..." manifest, then erased the spaces and punctuation to leave it kind of a carmina cuadrata, and highlighted some of its letters to form a "stream" with the phrase "Sigo romántico, yo sigo románticoooooooo...." (I keep being romantic!) from a famous Chilean song.
Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
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