Sociology In Literature And Drama

[RonPrice]

This book too will elude you if you try to get a copy of it in a DC bookshop. If you find my teaser enticing then---I leave it to you---

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THIS WAR OVER FRESH GROUND

 

In the same way we are all poets....when we turn to that inner vision in which the existence, the destiny and the feelings of our own selves and other people come before us. The art of poetry is accomplished...in the stylized and simplified forms which are transformed out of real, everyday life into images divorced of real, everyday content. -Georg Simmel in Sociology of Literature and Drama, editors: Elizabeth and Tom Burns, Penguin, 1973, p.309.

 

Poetry enters vitally into many aspects of Prose....the whole antithesis crumbles beneath the weight of exceptions and borderline cases. The dichotomy is a product of our inbuilt philosophical tendency to reach for categorical simplifications. It makes little sense. -A.L. Close, “Don Quixote and the ‘Intentional Fallacy’”, On Literary Imagination: Critical Essays, editor: David Newton-De Molina, Edinburgh, University Press, 1976, pp.181-182.

 

Poetry is a feat of the heart,

of its subtle and mysterious style,

a complexity of thoughts

comes to occupy an usually small space

with meaning and then moves, of a sudden,

into the reverberating home

of other minds where the space changes

as in a mirror expanding, or like the sun

on steel is reflected back with heat,

warmth, but inert, hard, unmoved.

 

There is a texture here

in the outside bark,

a remote longing wetness dew

which I savour. And I lean back, too,

and go into a garden which I plant

and replant from moment to moment

with the soundless music of fugitive thought.

For this war is over fresh ground

in a private landscape whose fruits,

whose blossoms belong to all who understand

who live beneath this common sky.

 

Ron Price

13 September 1996