End of the 19th century. I believe Yeats gives us no such sense, and I've combed this literature to find out what my parents' religion, where they met it. Yes, they had informants, and they meant a lot to them. But it's in Australian tribes where they do practice having their ancestors come to speak to them. That's what, and or to speak for them, that's what Keats is doing when he writes letters drawn from Shakespeare. He lets his spiritual ancestor, by the way, it's better than the ancestors of race or the ancestors, although he may have great insurance since he's English and Shakespeare is English, but it's better than the ancestors you got by race or by your genealogical descent because you adopt them. Being adopted, I have an extra sensitive sense about adopting parents. If they got to adopt me, I get to adopt parents. And there's a form of adoption of a poet.

[01:01]

I mean, you adopt Shakespeare in a sense when you take him seriously as you're father, but particularly not fathers. I kept adopting mothers. H.D. was an adopted mother for me when I even got to meet in this. But when I say ancestors, we bypassed our trouble with fathers and mothers because ancestors don't name whether it was a father or mother. Ancestors are those who come. from the realm that is immediately yours. And they can't come any other way. You can get an A in a course in poetry if you simply remember passages and put it all together in your head. You'll do a better job getting an A than if you found an ancestor there. My trouble in taking a survey course is while there were other ancestors, no one was so much an immediate ancestor for experiences that it wasn't even loyalty.

[02:03]

I couldn't move on or otherwise I was immersed in it and I would have not even done very well answering about the poem. My account would be as garbled as a quarrel with one of my Indian parents. I mean, they were one of the first sources for what I really liked. If you just think about it, you've got a slight biased point of view if you just entered that into the relation report. I've got to put my watch in the water. Right. So let's see if I can... It is disappointing. We will still be beginning with Sardau. That's all right. I'm used to this. In the course of the Kantorovich in constitutional law, he never got up to the Magna Carta. And it's a great joke. It was a course that was mandatory for law students, and yet was restricted. He restricted it to 15 students.

[03:04]

And the law department at Cal demanded that he have at least six law students in there. And then he had all his favorites in for the others. And all of us were grinning. All of us medievalists were grinning. We would say, do you think you'll get the Magna Carta? And the poor law students who were taking the course were a very great scholar in constitutional law because they had the half-time for the law. And they thought they were in a survey. And we were in one of these things where you'd be in the living room. where it possibly was for weeks on end. Well, if I could get to a thesis part of it, because I don't want to put the pen right at four, I don't know. In backtracking contrast, tradition In a double sense, one that we've got because our literature courses now have defined an English tradition letter. And to quite an extent, American studies have defined a tradition.

[04:10]

So in the tradition, we know that, let's take our American scene. In the tradition, we know that in the 19th century, we've got two great poets, Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and another Another one, Whitman, found it hard to remember Poe. This would be an example of this is Whitman. It's not Whitman. He didn't know of Emily Dickinson. And Emily Dickinson knew remotely of Whitman. So the poets, it's poets later who begin to name them. And yet when we come to somebody naming a tradition within American studies for no reason, Olson would not like to name Whitman at all there. He was about as graceless at admitting the possibility of Whitman being in the show as William Carlos Williams was, which had a considerable lack of grace. And Pound's alliances with Whitman are, at best, an alliance with an actually unsavory ancestor.

[05:14]

He hoped that Eliot won't be checking up on him or something, and I, as frequently Pound does, caught in between his sense of what was right in culture, in the sense of a middle-class culture, and his sense of something about poetry. In their American scene, let's say, Olsen came from the training of American literature, American scene, American studies. It's a fight uphill for Melville to emerge and still not admitted in the book. He beats Robert Browning around the clock in Clarell for presenting us with insurmountable difficulties of syntax. And at the same time, so you have to convert yourself to Melville to read a book. Of course, since the whole generation willingly converted themselves to wasteland, I'm not sure.

[06:24]

There were instant conversions, like instant coffee. I mean, Powell was an instant conversion. And to an extent, the wasteland was an instant conversion because it had a tone of the modern. And its appearance in the dial and the series of magazines did make for a kind of instant conversion. It went along with the attitude of the 20s. It had lots of guarantees within it that pounds never took at this level at all. You do have to convert yourself to certain poetry. Well, compared to pounds, you really have to convert yourself to Melville's true purity. He likes to make it top and uphill for it. But if you take the Iowans, Melville and Emerson and their and Hawthorne as being primary, then you begin to get a perspective, something that both are natural literature. And as a matter of fact, in this, I don't vary.

[07:26]

A negative describer of the American studies would be Ivor Winters, who, when presented with Emerson, wanted to find a recruit right away and would present with author and was the private recruit and manages to find the most curious one. You say, this is a great tiger and I ever wanted to go on out and present you with some other thing. Well, isn't that, this is a nice one and it doesn't eat meat. So I put the great recruitment on the table. And he's still describing the same, however, he has still in mind when he does it, trying to undo exactly the same series that I'm talking about. That fixes itself in a nation's mind. That one's misleading to the poet at the beginning, and yet it forms right away some place to look. Some place to look about where the source might be that's very close to you.

[08:31]

And anthology will never do it, because anthologies have already picked denatured poems for sure, though they don't insult each other when they're doing the same cover. I mean, I don't mean that I just, it's like homogenized anything. You've got to be sure that your anthology is not unwieldy and that you can teach from it. And it's impossible if you have the awkward knowledge you have when you get involved with any poet. But poets, I can't imagine. An anthology may give them a few hints. It isn't yet . Our whole period seems to be turned on to Blake, and Blake would There's a very good example in that he arrives with just the poem. Since his entire mind about the poem is poetic, he does not seem to have the idea of a literature at all in his mind.

[09:39]

I don't get that picture off the plate. Milton has, remember, he's making a literature. And Blake... But Blake begins to have a negative relation to a world Milton draws on directly, and that is the one that the world preceding the Bible, outside the Bible, infidel world. Remember, Milton, like Dante, made an entire alliance with the classical world. the Jericho-Rome world, directly upon it, being of the same order of inspiration as the bottom. and draws on elements that are completely outside of the Judeo, but also the Greek elements that have entered the New Testament. So the two entirely different worlds are coexisting. In Blanks, we have the idea of theories and worlds coexisting and of drawing upon sources that include, for the first time openly, include visitation.

[10:54]

Dante had that word, too. And maybe I'll do myself to remember that note in the poet's advertisements, that not only do they draw upon the world of poets and the pre-existing and outside the boundaries of their civilization, on a previous civilization, but they draw upon voices and so forth coming to them in dreams in Blake talking with the imaginary people of the realm of the poem. In Blake, Blake will make his alliance and declaration of his ancestors. He'll make it directly by challenging Milton and writing to Milton by saying what, for instance, he knows of Milton's book was saying and not saying.

[11:57]

He will make his alliance directly, for instance, with Chaucer in just the fact that he saw to it, he did and proposed and thought to it, that he did the helping. Canterbury drew and drew each one in the terms that show that he was in his poetry, as I do not see Milton as having been, penetrated that aspect of Milton, Blight wanted to have what was in charter, which was the fences of people. And since they begin to be in Joppa, they're people. Remember, most of Blight was visionary, not people. But in Blight's earlier poems, before they're part of the mythic Blake, but Ontario and so forth. They're astounding grandmas of people. I mean, they already have faces. Like Blake reassured us, yes, they do have faces, because in Chaucer, he finds where it is, where his ancestry is.

[13:02]

So that aspect of the times when they're particular and absolute and not mythic. I like that. Let us hope not, but another thing that could happen in poetry. and as a major power, then moving forever in poetry, not ever having to be repeated and haunting it as a potentiality that one can, you know, where to go as William Cross Williams did. There was my man, said William Cross Williams, a chocolate, a mild of what is not in tune with it. So one of the processes of the poet is to find what's in tune. He finds first is the music that Pon Pon talked about, inhabiting all forms, or how else to even start hearing what those other tunes sound like, but also opening yourself to the humanity. If you find only your tune, that, in that one, the search for that one that is your voice and that's very much needed, if that were the only thing, it would be the narrowest gain and it would not open up to the vast human community that lies

[14:17]

in the other reason poets go to the entire expanse of poetry, which is to dwell in a larger human community than their own ancestors, than their own spiritual ancestors across time. More and more on my mind is, and it's a thing that we face, that I can't think of poetry ever didn't face, but we face in a multimedia way today because we Because our concept of humanity is now total. It's always shocking to me how long it took after science finally got down to it by biology and observed that man was one species. In other words, if they breed together, it's not like a lion and a tiger giving birth. birth of a T-bron. And then it took them ages in anthropology to figure out that then they couldn't be primitive for some other species. And that what they were talking about, about race must be an absolute cell.

[15:20]

I mean, there's absolutely no significance at all. Real significance is biological, primary. Do they breed? completely and wholly, and that's the real ground. Meanwhile, in the literature, we have the problems of translation and so forth, and yet only translation have brought certain integers from other places. Particularly, I'm thinking of the glimpse I get from the Australian eternal ones of the soul. Or in Pound's canto, of all surprise, not the canto, but in culture, well, in the canto, the serious loop comes forward out of an African story, right? Into our American myth comes something that we could not have found any place else except in what was viewed as a tribal myth, one of the taken deaths. And that story is no longer a story just of its tribe in Africa, but becomes a part of the larger, in other words, the tribe is the species by this time.

[16:34]

Not only does it extend across time, but more and more in our time, it extends throughout the world of man in order to have its variety in which it finds its residencies. Its strong resonances may be found anywhere. I have a very strong immediate resonance to Caceres, not only because it's in my master's poem, the cantos, but I already had it before it appeared in the cantos. So I said, wow, except I'd met it in Poundville. Not in the culture had drawn upon upon Provenius and searching back at that to Provenius, I came to the myth. And then later it comes into the canon. But at a time when he doesn't have a book. It comes to him because it comes to him. We no longer have then just what we would have named as the tradition, the one of the traditions of the Romance tradition starting in, in fact, when we go to Sardella, we will go through the tradition of what is Romance. It starts at a very definite time in the 11th century, 12th century.

[17:36]

And it may be that today I raise questions about, serious questions that we've got, about how much did we get in this invention of the imagination of the psychogramma of enchantment and enthrallment. Poetry that is enthralled in a world that enchanted, still a primary in one of the places where I more than sympathize with the ones that criticize it, though I am often disappointed because they don't realize how much is involved in their criticism. But some of the women criticizing H.D. 's poetry have been much more immediate to it, because her poetry was entirely a poetry of enslavement. And from what is extremely important to me emotionally, and I picture it, we may be trying to find a way at present, and certainly I am, much like the sadomasochists are trying to find a way for what was exchanged before, even as murder, and certainly as terrible, destructive force within sexuality, to transform it into a love, to transform it into one right to love.

[18:53]

The pressures and the lack of permission for the components of the sadomasochistic conflict, which are first described by Kraft, Edding, I think, and then as Freud tackles them as finding the primary to our sexual nature. And Ray's question, maybe we're repressed sexually because we've not found a way for the full sexual nature to be loved, which is a long struggle for sex to be loved. For them to be united, there's no reason for them to be united at all. So it isn't reason, it's adventure, it's imagination. It is poetry, the world we create, the two be one. Meanwhile, components in it that you can see when your cat bites the neck of the other cat and so forth, that when they're separated out and repressed, turn out to be murder or turn out to be a terrible one. may have been instilled in the sexual world, the exploration of this becomes primary.

[19:59]

In the same way, I see myself, yes, poetry must be engaged with this element that's been so important to it, and has increased, not decreased, of how enthralling the poem is, how enthralling that voice was when you first heard it. And if it was exchanged as a potentiality, that potentiality was surely a potentiality then for the good. And there are no, any potentiality for good is equally a potentiality for evil. You can increase potentiality. You can't increase a potentiality selectively. Power is the power to do anything. And the retraction of power, you can retract power because you're afraid of life and evil, but you've also retracted from a life good because you simply restrict the power. And that transformation of the enthrallment of the poem, yet when we return on the 9th and we have seven lectures, I'm not going to begin on the enthrallment.

[21:06]

I'm going to begin on this Pound to Brown and the Shelley thing. And start with the Sardella, because Sardella has to do with the story of the poet. And with an account of the spirit of romance. But by the second lecture, we'll be into the question, because the whole idea of romance was obedience to the love object. No, it wasn't the experience of the object. The master-mistress is one of the common terms they had. If we think we're sensitive about he and she in our period, before the bourgeois period, the Middle Ages were extremely sensitive to it. And as a matter of fact, a much more serious thing, when an Eleanor of Aquitaine was Aquitaine, And an absolute power that he and she have got to be, I mean, a mistress and a master for absolute, because class mattered, not, I mean, you had to break down the inheritance of land and to an elder's son or something in order to break that hold.

[22:25]

But the other curious thing I'm going to be tracing when I get back up with Sordello is going into the actual rise within two centuries and to the hubris buried in the idea of the romance because the poet aimed more and more and more until at the end of the spirit of romance Not only have they defined that romantic love would be based on an absolute exclusion of the possibility of sexual fulfillment. This is their famous cult of adultery, but it was also that the object had to be They would argue themselves into the unobtainable position. And the courts of law did this over and over again. There would be services and servitudes, but they could not possibly arrive at their goal.

[23:28]

It heightened. And certainly, there was an experience over two centuries of a heightening of what we would call a hysteria. And at the end of, after the Albigensian Crusades, the Roman Catholic Church had the Crusades against the poets themselves, as such, because they had advanced the doctrine in which chastity, remember it's very important within the church, chastity which before was thought of as a way of gaining divine or magic power, was now thought of as the highest form of sexuality. And Hitler faces Dali as the only man to think of ultimate perversion like chastity. And the church there, at documents, were saying chastity is the ultimate sexual perversion. when the church believed it was purity, that the chastity was purity. And poets, and this was a poetic doctrine. It never extended beyond the community of poets.

[24:29]

It didn't, by the way, lead to... It doesn't mean that the poets who were writing these arguments are among the great Loubadour poets, but certainly it goes at the heart of the matter of the mystery of the attrition because for Dande, that he saw Beatrice how he was, not exactly became, but that it had to be at a point, and she becomes the entire germ of the ultimate and former of his entire spiritual world, is sexual throughout, and his sexual relations with Mrs. Dande are not sexual relations at all. They're simply breeding... Dante's and a combination of two halogens, because we're in a feudal period when this was in general. Marriages were not ever made for love. They were all catastrophic if love were into it. But Dante's also removed the urge, and the urge of love has been moved, removed. There's no evidence that he would love being for Beatrice.

[25:32]

I mean, lots of terms that are very important to us and make it much more complex for us to keep this love. matter of what is love and what is loving and the promise of romantic prediction. So on the 9th of March, I think it is, the second Sunday in March, and then four four Sundays running, we will begin with Sordello, and by the second Sunday, I hopefully will be relaying, it still will be inviting enough of me, relaying an essay by a contemporary Canadian poet, who does a marvelous effort on the very first troubadour poem we have, but he notices in it is the term error and errant.

[26:40]

with an Eric Knight and so forth, which means wandering. It's invaluable in French, the error that means to wander. And she raised the question, isn't the entire thing for the poet to wander? Isn't the language wanders, that it wanders in the poetry? And in the very first Coup d'Or poem we have, we have this one. This is a poem by the father of Eleanor of Aquitaine. at Guillaume Aquitaine. And in a magic, it contains a marvelous proposition that complicates the picture of the impromptu that enters it. Curies of servitude and so forth that are a type of drown-out, but also a sexual drown-out. I think we may notice more and more how much we shut it away into what manufactured the sadomasochistic world by our non-transformation of the world of meaningless slavery.

[27:42]

I mean, we wouldn't penetrate what's going on in slavery. When it's viewed as merely being an economic opportunity, no one asks why was it an exciting economic opportunity. No one asked what was the opportunity. As a matter of fact, it was so exciting opportunity that almost everybody in the South had really gone to machine and put their slaves onto the wage system earlier. They'd have profited 10 times over. But something that prevented them from ever catching on, that all you had to do was, I mean, Emerson, writing before the Civil War, knows that the slaves working in the northern factories are worse off. A million times, I mean, they're really caught, whereas the ones in the South, I mean, not the masters, the super masters of wickedness are not. Everybody's caught in the South, because they're not getting anything like it's possible. So then we have to, at least there, we have to turn around, what was it going on in this library that kept, how light it undid it from?

[28:42]

OK, well, so we resume. We didn't get to all those things in Cardell?

[28:49]

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