the bruised and sullen wreck, sunlight to be diffused for that. Sunlight, meet which a scum at first, a million fibers of our chokeweed nursed, they spread themselves, mantling the troubled main, and, shattered by those rocks, took hold again, so kindly blazed it, that same blaze, to brood o'er every cluster of the multitude, still hazarding new clasps, ties, filaments, an emulous exchange of pulses, vents, of nature into nature. till some growth, unfancied yet, exuberantly clothe the surface solid now continuous one. Now, on the surface purposes of the poem, this is describing a growth forward of complex and tumultuous uprising of the crowd following the emperor and calling upon the emperor to come

[01:06]

And the other side, the Pope for us the people, so we have us the people where I say they were they all the time. Once within quotes, the Pope for us the people who begun the people, carried on the people thus to keep the Kaiser off and dwell with us. See you. Or say two principles that lived each, now in the two principles we're right back at that fault, that earthquake that must divide from things, continuously divide things, and its other motive is not only these cleavages, the broken sentence. Browning is the master, the trouble of the Browning syntax, he's the master of the broken subject, the broken sentence, the broken and repeated earthquake juts. And he also argues that Right now, I don't know in this poem where he argues, because this I've gotten from other conversations of these scholars.

[02:11]

One of the great arguments he has against the arrogance of the poets who call upon the sea. I mean, Browning, with a great score about here I am, and a caricature of the poetry of his period that I think I was blushing a bit as I read this caricature, since I'm always exulting in it. the glories and whatever's, oh, thunder, you know. Well, Browning doesn't mind thunderous sea, but what really got him was, here I am, we, ah, me, to see the smallness of man beside the vastness of the sea and the tremendousness of the stars and the great and whirling orders. Thank God today when we open up physics, we don't find great and whirling orders when we look at the stars, because that scene's been blown forever. So it looks as messy as we do. And the universe is somewhat back together again, given until they get another great and glorious order. But frequently in Duncanlands, you've got, well, I usually have just the glee of getting out. But all that grandeur that one could immediately have from sea or heavens, particularly.

[03:17]

Browning did not really like the Dari wastes. uh... uh... it when they meant when they when they demeaned man as being possibly the universe that you were going to address the or you were or you were in or your immediate one as they were used to how vast that is and how and how nowhere man is or what a little pygmy this is but let's read this again because you can see it right away contained in here even more vividly than when he strikes out against the monolithic sea, that the sea's there and yet choking and broken with the same forces that man would be for Robert Browning, that his own mind, and certainly that the poem immediately became for him. It is really a picture of what it's like, of how it moves to be in a Robert Browning construction. Cliffs. If I come to a period, I'll tell you. Okay, so you get an idea how it comes together. But he writes by paragraph.

[04:18]

So let's give the paragraph. Let's give the paragraph. The paragraph begins at 205 and ends at 237. And the emperor to come, it's an enfolded paragraph because it just followed what cry? All right. But it's a paragraph because it really designates it. The emperor to come, his crowd of feudatories, all and some that leapt down with a crash of swords, spears, shields, one fighter on his fellow to our field, scattered it on, took station here and there, and carried it till now with little care, cannot but cry for him, how else rebut us longer. Question, okay, we got sentence number one in the paragraph. Cliffs and earthquakes suffered just in the mid-sea, each domineering crest which not save such another throw can rest from out, conceive.

[05:19]

A certain chokewood weed grown since o'er the water, twine and dangle thrown too thick, too fast accumulating round. too sure to overriot and confound ere long each brilliant islet with itself and let a second shock save shoal and shell whirling the synthy drift wide alas the bruised and sullen wreck sent sunlight to be diffused for that for that not question for that Sunlight, neat witch, a scum at first, the million fibers of our chokeweed nursed, disbred themselves, mantling the troubled main, and, shattered by those rocks, took hold again, so kindly blazed it. that same blaze to brood o'er every cluster of the multitude, still hazarding new clasps, ties, filaments, and emulous exchange of pulses, vents of nature into nature, till some growth, unfancied yet, exuberantly clothe the surface solid now, continuous one, colon, quotes, the pope for us the people who begun the people,

[06:34]

carries on the people thus to keep that Kaiser off and dwell with us. End quote. See you. And then the paragraph says it, two principles. It's not at odds with itself, but it is also this that seems to me the syntax of dream, because it isn't really ambiguity we've got here. We've got things choked together and ripped apart by earthquakes. The ambiguity is conceptual in a way, and for instance, when we draw it, we've got a choice of figures. But this is violent action and growth and intergrowth, intertwining growth. Tangle, which is very different, that's something Empson does not address. Empson and his generation, when they turn to it, can read magnificently in Tangle. I mean, they're very good readers. But the fact that he was interested in ambiguity is a problem that does not, I mean, the ambiguities when they appear in Robert Browning is what I'm getting at, the ambiguity of whether it is, for instance, the authorial voice or Robert Browning's voice, or the ambiguities that can come up in the U and Z,

[07:46]

are one of the modes. But the other mode is one of fracture, fault, vein, and all of those dimensions. And then you see, once you think about fracture, fault, and vein, that all the intertwining binding filament thing is the same thing. All look exactly like the same thing. The veins look like filament. And you come to clasps, ties, filament. It's like our word cleft. The word cleave means to cut and to be joined in one. And they cleave each as both seeing that the two things are together and that the two things are Cluck. Cluck. Hmm? What? It's spliced. Does spliced also mean two?

[08:49]

Does spliced two things together? Right, spliced. So we're reading spliced first. And we're not used to reading it. Think about Olson, for instance. No wonder I turned to this, because actually my poetry would present some problems that are very similar to Robert Browning. for one thing, when I articulate sentences into phrases, that's not in order to make it easier at all, but the phrases are cut away from syntax so that one phrase belongs as much to the preceding one as it does to the following one and no choice can be made. And so it says a series of things that would otherwise be a paradox but are not a paradox because they're coexistences in which you can make no decision and which say different things. And these meshings and browning, he gets into, by the way, of course, he gets into this tangle.

[09:51]

And he addresses the tangle absolutely directly in this. I mean, his sense of his own writing, he's better in this passage describing what the critics, describing the critics' problem than the critics' word. And he wholly addresses it. addresses it, I mean, he sees it, of course, he makes us see it. We can't do anything about it, and you can see how few we're going to turn to get into Sardella. The first place is not a masterpiece. No one in the world, I mean, we aren't, I'm not correcting an oversight. We're getting into a poem that was experienced by its very writer as being a chokeweed, it's a chokeweed. But the adventure I want is, what do we find in the chokeweed? To me, one of the things in the chokeweed that is promising is that it still keeps everything together and puzzles over them when they've actually formed a tangle.

[10:56]

Jasper's collages in jigsaw puzzles. And when I work jigsaw puzzles, which I do in periods of when materials are needed for collages. They so take over my total body that when I try to read, I'm trying to fit one word into the next word. And when I dream, I try to fit one scene in there. It's terrible. It's lousy. Try eating flan and try... as if it were a jigsaw puzzle that you had to fit in every little part. So obviously I prefer a tangle. It doesn't quite do the same thing to me that a jigsaw puzzle does with everything defined and actually fitting. And yet I've written passages in which I've said surely the beauty in poetry must be that each part is fit. As you write the The feeling that the word is fit and that the phrase is fit is extraordinary.

[12:02]

It comes very near to drawing an arrow and hitting the mark, more so that the drawing the arrow created the mark or whatever. I think that I just stumbled on his end thing or something. But in poetry, yeah, man, that's the way it comes. Meanwhile, we're talking about it fitting and being a tangle here. It's a snarl of yarn. It's exactly, it's the opposite. It's not exactly, and yet it is one in which splice as you will, it will only join the more surely. Talking about earthquake, yeah, splice as you will, eyelet from eyelet, it will only more surely join the tangle that you actually have to, get tied into and untie and so forth, unwinded things. Well, let me leap forward in my... Oh. Well, let me prepare our...

[13:13]

Just to come to the bridge where Dante appears in this opening book, and next time I'll begin with the Dante and then go to the Dante problem of Sardello, which means, well, I will read aloud next time Sardello's Cervantes, the one that's quite famous, and give you some idea of what, along with how Sardello appears as a key poem in the problems about Sardella's appearance in Purgatorio. But I'm going to read now from page 200, beginning right ahead of where I am. Yes, 310, beginning with 310, because I want to come upon it.

[14:31]

Let me cheat here and see if I'm going to come upon it, what I think I'm going to come upon. This is the . OK, no, we're not going to come upon that. OK. Because we've got a place where, as readers, we're being led into maker C, but makers move here. Make a kinetic sign. I mean, going into the dream, leading in, the same night wears, this is line 309, the same night wears, Verona's rule of yore was vested in a certain 24. And while within his palace these debate concerning Richard, this is our guy with the pointer telling the story, telling the story, period. And while within his palace these debate concerning Richard and Ferrara's fate, glide we by clapping doors. Well, we've heard that a million times. Now we sail on in the sunset. This is that dimension that you see in shorts in the movies over and over again.

[15:34]

But it draws us into a dream that's a very strange space by inviting us that way. Glide we by clapping doors with sudden glare of crescent that's vented on the dark, nor care for aught that's seen or heard until we shut the smother in, the light, all noises but the carrack booming, safe at last. Why strange such a recess should lurk behind a range of banquet rooms? Your finger thus you push a spring and the wall open. Would you rush upon the banqueters, select your prey, waiting the slaughter weapons in the way, strewing this very bench with sharpened ear, a preconcerted signal to appear? Or if you simply crouch with beating heart, bearing in some voluptuous pageant part to startle them? Nor mutes, nor masters now, nor any. Does that one man sleep whose brow the dying lamp?

[16:39]

Think about this as a movie. Not only as you move into the movie, but the you is at first that impersonal one. You know, you do so-and-so, and we're back in that recipe. Except the reader is you. So the reader's drawn in, and in a dream, a dream of his, her, very own. By the way, one interesting thing is that for voluptuousness and so forth, no one in the Victorian period ever seems to have gotten to... They found it disturbing, everybody about the same way. Remember, they put all of sexuality over there. So ladies or gentlemen all underwent the same voluptuous experience of this passage. They didn't check out, am I a lesbian, am I a yammyness, or am I a what? They all experienced the same voluptuous experience because sexuality, undifferentiated, had been placed in a place where it was covered up with clothes, it was where we're going right now. It's violence we just saw as we went back, for one thing. Think about this. Think about the time when it's being written. It's in 1830s. Why strange such a recess should lurk behind a range of banquet rooms.

[17:43]

Your finger thus you push a spring and the wall opens. Would you rush upon the banqueters, select your prey, waiting the slaughter weapons in the way, strewing this very bench with sharpened ear, a preconcerted signal to appear? Or if you'd simply crouch with beating heart, bearing in some voluptuous pageant part to startle them? Nor mutes, nor maskers now, nor any Does that one man sleep whose brow the dying lamp-flame sinks and rises o'er? What woman stood beside him? Not the more is he unfastened from the earnest eyes because that hour fell between? Her wise and lulling words are yet about the room, her presence wholly poured upon the gloom down even to her vesture's creeping stir, and so reclines he saturate with her until an outcry from the square beneath pierces the tron. He springs up, glad to breathe, above the cunning element, and shakes the stupor off as, look you, morning breaks on the gay dress, and near concealed by it, the lean frame like a half-burnt taper, lit erst in some marriage feast, then laid away till the Armenian bridegroom's dying day in his wool wedding robe.

[19:07]

You've got notes. I burn to know. How come that Armenian bridegroom was in there? I mean, the note of, hmm? Kind. What? Oh, that closed at line 345, 345, which is one of those double lines. Frequently, the movement from paragraph to paragraph is a single line, which then is dropped on. Yeah? An Armenian custom in which a torch is half burned at a man's wedding. been wrapped in his wolf-wetting robe and saved to be burned at the... Oh, I see, but that wasn't my trouble. My trouble was, who is this here Armenian? I mean, how come I'm in the hands of an Armenian bridegroom? No, I mean, the poem already says that, doesn't it? Yeah, there are notes at times that since the poem said exactly that, But meanwhile, what in the world? Well, actually, of course, you're led along this long passage. You come along. Browning, I mean, Dr. Freud should lean forward. Robert Browning, what a meaning in Browning. Here at the end of this passage.

[20:10]

All this passage, I saw your mother as we went by. I think, of course, somebody about to go. But what was this here? Browning is that an Armenian name, yes? I can't get the right tone from out of there. Why was I doing that? Jack, what was on your mind? No, I'm good. Well, next time, by the way, in book one, the appearance of Robert Browning right out front in line 345, just a just ahead of where we are. If I should falter now, 347, if I should falter now, it's in parentheses. So in his own punctuation, he makes it clear that he's moved up. In parentheses, he moves up out of his narration. The surprise of I sat on the dograna's steps is that it's in the narration. And you shifted that voice. And it's in this passage that Dante appears. as the the, the thine.

[21:12]

And so that Dante is the you. There's a series of direct addresses in this from the authorial, but with a, and they immediately disturb the Robert Browning level. Remember he said he's scared. The one we did touch upon was the exorcism of Shelley. We know that While we've already got the man in the boot with the diorama, it's not he who was scared by Shelley. It's Robert Browning who was scared by Shelley, and that exorcism of Shelley's spirit is Browning's needed exorcism. And now we have the direct address to Dante and a speech to Dante in the middle of the... of the narration. And that is in book one and begins, the paragraph begins with line 345. For he, for he, gate vein of heart's blood of Lombardy.

[22:14]

That's the evocation and then suddenly it's you. Right. Right. And so next time we will be in, I will get to wander in a little thing of of Dante's very interesting proposition, because Sardello, this again came from my fishing around continuously, and when I meet people talking about what's going on here, and Tom Peterson, who's working on this, who told me first, well, he couldn't, in this period, come to the... uh... that could be here uh... because you recognize dissertation in in italian and uh... on that uh... dot a or whatever but but he got did have a marvelous uh... dot they teacher at cal and she had written an article on dante in sardella so he that i'll send it to you and and it arrived this morning and it uh... and it is uh... as we would say if it were at that would be a jigsaw puzzle piece but it also got a lot to choke we

[23:15]

Oh, yes, yes, yes. Right, right. Thank you. And I'm now going to also remind me at the beginning, because I want it both ends. When I talked with Yvonne about the end, and she and Roti Baker said, well, it would be welcome for the Zen Center to let me give these lectures here. I said, well, I also felt that there should be some contribution from the people attending. Well, practically to, of course, the affair of moving chairs back and forth and to the disturbance of the but also there should be a contribution uh so some there will be a is there a dish or something uh right oh the box there a contribution to the zen center uh that will be let's say for our upkeep but also for some of them uh for your participation because well i'm not in what

[24:28]

The only form of, let's say, would you pay me, is the only one that would be significant is participation. And while participation, I get the participation directly as I get back from you. the material as they go. This is also the other participation and appreciation of the space we have. We have two problems. We've got time. And you and I together keep that time from 2 to 4. So does the Zen Center. And we have the space. And that one is the one the Zen Center has given us. We don't have some other space, though, I know of. a poet of transition, and also a poet, however, that all, even the 20th century little book on Provençal poets will tell us that Sordello did not, in that long lifetime, did not come to the fruition that other poets came to.

[25:49]

So very important to Browning was that his imaginary self, the center of poetry in this, be a poet who did not succeed. Now, not only back to the picture where Palma, his reader, his sympathetic reader, reveals to him that he is the son of Salangero, who is not only the great political power, but as Browning or anybody in this field knew, one of the friendliest little Hitlers of the period, because when Salangero comes into his actual power, it's a terrible power. Sardello anticipates it. Sardello, what Sardello opposes to his father when he comes before him, is the people. And since Thalingera arises on the side of the Ghibelline, Giordello was born into a Ghibelline, entirely Ghibelline context comes to project the Guelph position because in the context of the period as Browning portrays it, in the context certainly of the Echelons and Thalangara, the other side is the people.

[27:02]

In their own place, they're the tyrants. So there is an opposition to tyranny, but not Well, I would say, in my own feeling, but I'm going to hopefully skip book four and five, Arsalan Guerra's case, and I see we can't skip the picture of power, but not right now, but I have to get into it. Yet, remember, Browning, in the court reforms, it's Browning when he returns from Italy, after guiding what place tells him. going along to these cities and suddenly comes back, I think it's all the more forceful for being in a place where all the people are speaking Italian. The people come forward as if they were possibly the readers. Now let's think of the cast in Sardello as it's given. Palma, the sympathetic reader, the one that also he falls in love with who becomes the lady. Salingara, the father.

[28:04]

I would venture here that what haunts Robert Browning is... We'll let you change. I'm thinking of Francis right now, where I want to get the next jewel. We've got a sympathetic reader here, and I don't want her to miss it. I didn't put that on the tape, though. I'll show her. This is going to be difficult. I want to write about it. I'm going to record my own. Sorry. There we are. Sorry. In fact, picture the cast, because think of the poem again, Sordello, as Pound sees it, and it means the book, the whole poem. Browning does exactly the same thing. In one passage of the turn, he's going along about what Sordello's writing, and he sums up what that poetry's like, what Sordello wants to do, and then comes, so that, dot, dot, dot, why...

[29:10]

you'll write Sardello, meaning the poem I'm writing. So right in the middle of Sardello, we have one of those breaks. It breaks through every layer of the thing, and we've got the book in the middle of the book. Sardello now is inside the book. And more than that, it goes back to, those of you who know the cantos, one of the most intoxicating things when I was young, but that's up to only yesterday or so when I suddenly dawned on me, the connection. One of the great endings of the cantos, early cantos, is a canto that ends, so that. I said, wow! But since it started with Sordello, we suddenly sold that dot, dot, dot. Why, you'll write Sordello. It's exactly what comes popping into Browning's mind. That's the poem I'm working on. That's the level discovery to us. Approaching Sordello as a dream in depth of what the poem is. Not what it will be, but Browning, of course, is a young boy that's also picturing what will it be. And then he finds, all right, I must always be in this presence, fathoming what is the work I have to be at.

[30:13]

Then, even if he made a plot, as we can, and drew, Solemn Guerra finally comes forward in that poem to be central, once Palmer's. Palmer's there right away, early. She comes forward. There's a witch, Adelaide, in the background. I don't think she's the ideal reader or whatever. She won't even give Serdello, won't even give him the time of day, as you say. She carefully doesn't tell Serdello who he is. And who he is, by the way, is back between the writer and the author, isn't it? I mean, the Serdello, all the letters that we're going to talk about Serdello is, the poet addresses the poem, which must continuously be an oracle of who he is, and the fact that the author appears is very bewildering. It's not mine. It's not mine. It's a feeling all of a sudden. How come I... Over and over again, I've come to passages in a poem thinking, both this has to be me. Who else is around here writing? And meanwhile, I don't get to be me. I don't get to be inside my skin.

[31:15]

I don't get to be just me. something all around. Now I'm all the way around, because our cast of Who's in This Dream has expanded from Palma and Sordello. Oh, initially, before Palma, it's Sordello and poppies. Marvel. Opium poppies, perhaps. Sardello, identifying with poppies, finds that he has... What is the quality? It's marvelous. That's early enough. I should be... Sardello, take a little time for Sardello. Cut in here. Well, we may come across it along the way. So he had nature in that way. The identification with trees, the identification with landscape. So there's landscape in Sardello. It becomes his first audience. Remember. It's present. And then from there on, it is in Sordello that Browning realizes something I thought I'd masterminded when it came into my little head, luckily before I found it in Browning, but recognized in Browning, by the way.

[32:23]

That's another thing we do is recognize, recognizing our fellowship with what has already present to ourselves. The rest of it we almost miss. Robert Browning comes up with the idea that in writing, at least in the poem, The ends become means. A realized poem becomes the beginning of poetry, not the end of it. The divine comedy does not close, it closes a whole realm, but it opens an endless realm. It closes the Provençal, so that actually the very first poems of the Provençal are, and in that sense it's a summa. But it's not a summa in the philosophical sense. St. Thomas Aquinas, the difficulty of that summa or of that pretension of philosophy to write a summa is it writes an end. It writes a closure and does not propose at all to write the beginning, opening of everything.

[33:24]

So St. Thomas Aquinas fails within his summa to realize that a summa might be the beginning of things, might be the point at which nothing yet exists. In the Divine Comedy, it's harder by the fact it opens up for it. product even where he posed in it and when Beatrice discusses the nature of heaven and hell they become the propositions that open the whole world the whole world is illustrated throughout and the presence of eternal time throughout the whole thing Browning is not writing a summa here at all but what is right away in his mind as a young man is that and now we might go back to the scare of Shelley that although that is an end I mean he's not that Browning is where not only can I not be another Shelley, there will never be another Shelley. That must be the end of Shelley. And yet Shelley, in truth, is the beginning of Shelley. And the power that you find, because the last time I addressed how we turn around, because you meet it first in literature courses, in which it's a court to substantiate your membership in a middle class.

[34:39]

as it took over the possession of literature. And that basis could be found in the Areopagitica in Milton's address to the Parliament on the subject of education and the great promise to get that Parliament to see that if you had a nation, which they now have, not a king, the glory of kings was a poetry, and poetry returned to the glory of kings by actually creating it, and now the glory of nations would be a poetry, something the middle class was never quite sure of, but the Victorians are... The Victorians are the most about moment, the one that Browning and Tennyson are in and the expectation is sitting on, the most about moment in which England now become an empire will have its full glory and its poet. Enough, of course, to bow off stage for sure. I mean, it couldn't be too polite to suddenly disappear from that. Don't lend back that glory at all. Dr. Tennyson's strongest thing comes forward with great doubt and depression.

[35:45]

But surely it's not only about, I mean, I know we'll get to immigration next month. But it pictured as something happening. And we are, by the way, in America, so close in this period, the Victorian period, that these were our American problems immediately. They were... The societies reading Robert Browning were in every major literate circle in the United States. All right, here... And we'll close then with this letter, and then next time, will yet come to Sordello? Who will may hear Sordello's story told? And Tennyson said, and that was a lie. Tennyson said he understood only two lines in the whole poem, and one was the first, who will may hear Sordello's story told, and one was the last one in the poem. And

[36:47]

Who would have heard Sartella's novel? And he said both of them were lies. But I want to read this and point out, by 1863, Browning wants to reinforce his reading and view of the poem. And 1863 is, of course, after now is over. very close experience of Elizabeth Barrett's reading with every sympathy to form. So he begins to realize, but it wrote through Tadello, that although he, Robert Browning, gets into trouble, it's always reading smart. So the sympathetic reader does not have some magic. And I think my own feeling of this is that it's a great truth that we would avoid. I mean, and frequently I... in my imaginary reader in letters where I draw her. She's a big, comfortable, very fat lady of a certain age, as the French say, namely about the age I'm in.

[37:59]

But she's fat because she really lets herself go. And poetry and everything else. Gertrude? Gertrude? Yes, she is an artist's tiny shape. Right. And the main thing was that I'm not sure. I think I'd settle just for a sort of a... My sympathetic reader had merely become tolerant. Because when I asked myself, why is this a picture of my reader? It was somebody who, when I looked foolish, said, oh, that's a sweet boy. Well, boys will... and and when i think that i think that i think she said well isn't it in the strange what people come into people's heads and so what i want to be a tolerant but that time to get by all right here let's hear our friend rb i'm no wonder i identified the rd to rb dear friend and this is to jay mills and uh... uh... but these all mills and it come to write to robert browning a little group had who began to write Browning over years, drawn to his poetry, he knew by 1863 that he only had a handful at all that were drawn back and back and back to Sardello as he was.

[39:07]

And by 1863, then, he returns to his 1840 version, so there is an earlier version than the one I've got here, and tries to clear up certain portions. What he largely does is to add add punctuation level put in quotes put in dashes and so forth remove semicolons and put in dashes so he tries to separate the levels of voices and see if he can clear up that confusion because you've got you have You have five or six levels. One level which is deciding, then Robert Browning will clear through even in the middle of all that. Mills, I rejoice that Mills was among the intelligent readers having arrived at that point of the Dante etudes of announcing I was a liberal. And I meant Mill exactly. That seemed to be the most profound insight. Radical, that profound insight would be a la Vanzetti. And liberal, a la Stuart Mill, James Stuart Mill.

[40:09]

That is a great insight into the necessary equality. Absolutely, Dante uses the term liberal as a requirement. Mills and, oh, Beck, our friend Mills, had written, well, at least in your second edition, you cleared up punctuation. Well, actually, Mills didn't mean he cleared up punctuation. You brought punctuation forward so something's happening in it. Boy, I'd rather have that coming in a letter or an essay than the grand thoughts we get in literary essays. Dear friend, let the next poem be introduced by your name. therefore remembered along with one of the deepest of my affections, and so repay all trouble it ever cost me. Affection, so it was not only a sympathetic reader, a reader who had a deep affection for what was coming into being through the courses of the poem. The one place I am certain of Robert Brownlee all the way through, trouble.

[41:16]

Trouble it cost me. Always troubled, but came there, even in those celebrated dramatic monologues. Always troubled, and always with a deep underlying affection for what comes forward. The remarkable thing, it's like Shakespeare's absolute boundless affection, we are incapable of. Well, actually, Shakespeare had troubles when he came to Henry VIII or something, but, I mean, if we faced about our reactions to the Vietnam War, and what is our poetic prediction there, or facing Nixon would have been one of the great false stats of all time if he were put on a proper stage, is we, in our side-taking, had no fundamental human affection. Shakespeare has affections for the, unless you think Macbeth is a friendly neighbor to have around, or Lady Macbeth, his affection goes so deep it comes to the actual human center, and that's the revelatory center for us, too, when it turns. Not that we feel, not pity, but absolute affection.

[42:19]

So I'm loading this letter, but it was written and put in front of the poem with every note. I wrote it 25 years ago for only a few That's a little difficulty because, yes, actually he'd gotten into enough trouble with Pauline and Paracelsus, and he obviously knew as he went through his writings of Sardello that there would be very few reading it, counting even in these on somewhat more care about its subject than they really had. My own faults of expression were many. By the way, in the tradition of Pound, poets today have more idea of Sardello and, as a matter of fact, of Dante than Robert Browning's generation had. Cary's translation is out of that period, I think. because I think that's what Robert Browning threw on, but it's with Rossetti's and the Pre-Raphaelites that Dante comes way forward, and then will really not be forgotten.

[43:30]

He finally arrives in Tyre. It's that, by the way, with the Rossetti, the Sardello arrives in Tyre. Rossetti read Sardello aloud to the Brotherhood. Swinburne claims to have memorized sordello but since swinburne has lots of claims i'm not certain it is i i find more substantiation that swinburne dance around the room naked was simeon silence since there was a witness i find no witnesses or auditors who heard who heard our friend swinburne recite sordello in terror in any part but with but with care For, let's go back, my own faults of expression were many. All his life, Browning will be, that will be a condition of Browning's genius. And he means that directly. He doesn't mean that any of them are careless. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when she's wishing that when he is inspired, Robert could get straight across

[44:41]

uh... what it is that inspired him uh... knows that again it and if this doesn't mean that it might not be strange and [...] obscure the very writing that he gets into is inventing an obscurity that had not been there initially. And that is the secret of the path he has to take. And it is the one of his faults of expression. He kept trying to clarify it and getting deeper and deeper. Faults of expression, but mea culpa. Again, I would drive that these are really loaded. The fault of expression, the awful thing about idiotic faults of expression, faults of expression that aren't driven deep and faced, is not that they're false, but they're not faced. It's assumed there's no fault there. We're back at admissions. Our period needs gravely to face its faults. And in the absence of facing its faults, we get idiocies. We get total idiocies. If Allen Ginsberg had faced the faults of Howell, instead of ripping them off and advancing, and we thought, wow, man, look at that, what courage to ride around with your ass in the winds,

[45:47]

um no i mean they are they kept they reasserted themselves 10 times over in kaddish in the great moments of his poetry if he's faced into the fault but he capitalized on his faults the difference a capitalist system capitalizes on his fault sells him and gets interested now 20 percent or 50 percent or one thousand percent if ezra pounded faced into his faults I mean, it's typical for our poetry all the way through. It begins to capitalize. It must be the disease of our total society. It capitalizes its faults. Anyway, we've got a guy here who couldn't. And he talks about my own faults of expression were many, but with care. The word care has already been there before for reading and writing. For a man or a book, such would be surmounted. But that's what I mean by facing the faults, if you care, going into the care of the faults, and without it, what avails the faultlessness of even? So part of the message that I want to get out of this dream is, yes, we have faults.

[46:50]

The faults must be essential. And to have essential faults, then every care is taken and ready, and when the fault appears, and now we're back at the fault line, oh, I love that... uh... rock-and-roll group to call themselves san andreas fault hit a mile baby i'm talking about real faults from which it moved let's assume that it can't come from anything but a fault and that must be the seriousness of it i blame nobody least of all myself who did my best then and since for i lately gave time and pains to turn my work into what the many might instead of what the few must like in part that He writes his first of his dramatic monologues within a couple of years of Sardello. It cleared the way, by the way, and itself develops the method and makes clear what the dramatic monologue would be. But to clear that way, he goes to only one voice or two.

[47:51]

He's no longer in this realm. And it's in the accumulation of those monologues and the after reflections that we begin to wonder, Again, we return to a problem of Sardella. What puts all of this together? What does it coexist in our mind? But, after all, I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave if I find it. I imagined another thing at first. The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires. Rightly, and I've come, and serious scholars, and we've got we've got mark what's up two of them that really actually bring their names but next time i will give you their name two of them are i take it young women doing wonderful work on robert browning they really catch this one because no we know something is important in the fact that that the historical thing is not decoration in here.

[48:54]

In the first place, it's the ground everything's embedded in. And more than that, it's something embedded in another ground. And more than that, it must be the order of the imagination, because it's not history. So we get the commentator, the Poundite, who comes up and says, well, Pound's Sardella is historical. I mean, that's a trouble that Pound should have looked into. Because when Pound makes his faults, which are his errors, and by the way, you've heard me know that I feel that if Pound had not made his errors, in other words, he had to make errors, his faults are ones that go deep and profoundly into the spirit of our time, to our fault. And he himself in his old age comes to despair and to, I think, deep spiritual experience of those cantoes. Meanwhile, the ones who hate him and hated the Catholic say, there, the old man thinks he did it wrong. He came, I mean, in this you will find me profoundly Christian. I can tell you, the Old Testament tells us nothing about a deep-running fault.

[50:01]

Jewish mysticism does, but not the Old Testament. And the Christian conscience of a deep-running fault, I think of as something entering world consciousness and entering our Western poetry that is our dream that we're going through and processing may go, you know, you could throw it overboard, by the way. There's more than one human dream, as we all know. But it's a little difficult at this point for Duncan to run over to Voodoo, put on a little black face and some chicken feathers. Meanwhile, Voodoo is coming into our world consciousness. I mean, the other way around, everything comes into it. But this is the fault, certainly Browning, right in it when he's here. The historical decoration would purposely of no more importance than a background requires. Having been at work now 12 or 13 or 14 years on a thing called groundwork, The word background is interesting enough. No more importance in the background. And my stress lay on the incidence of the development of a soul. Now, at least by 1863, if we didn't read Serdella, where also the same announcements made over and over again, we find Robert Browning deliberately carrying forward as a major purpose Keats' proposition of this making of a soul.

[51:19]

Little else is worth study. It's this that Pound began with. And shoved away, certainly one of the things that got him that deep in the way we close it away, the question of soul from the canto. Is it a soul term? At the end, it is. It's always in grief condition. It comes into its confessions. But for the major part of the cantos, it is in mind isn't allowed to be present at all because the other great disease of all of us, to know it all about what's going on today, that knows more about what's in the Ayatollah Khomeini's mind, or could correct Carter or anything. I mean, the TV-mindedness which Pound has before TV. I think he invented TV. So that declaration's not very shy. He erases how much he is in this tradition. I, at least, always thought so. So we get a declaration, and Browning, in mid-course, it's not going to get out of line.

[52:25]

It also, of course, is not going to get him into the ball. I mean, he's troubled. He knows what he can do. He already, though, has a measure that he has found a steady measure that troubles but is not going to be unruly. Something unruly had to happen. You, with many known and unknown to me, think so. Others may one day think so. And whether my attempt remain for them or not, I trust, though away and past it, to continue every your written to Milton. And with encouragement, Milton was not a person who read Sordello with any more confidence, but read it with sympathy, and read it with something now that was not a sympathy for Browning, But with the poetic sympathy that, as I look at more and more of these Victorian readers of the poem, I find quite remarkable. So next Sunday, I'm going to begin at this point talking a little about those readers, as you come across them, and raising some questions about what has happened now when we have got not only a sense, at the end of the sense of literature, after Robert Crowding's time,

[53:43]

when the poem and poetry entered as an actual subject matter into education, as such, and you had people writing essays on poems and advancing and reassuring their position, asked about a current book out of essays on my work, a body of those essays are written by people who did their dissertations on my work and who were in writing their essays essays are guaranteeing their dissertation. If I should not prove to be permanently established in the curriculum of the teaching of English, they're shit out of luck with their dissertation. What did you write on that? Nothing. So immediately they write guarantees. And somebody said, well, they laud you. I said, no, no, no, that's not quite what you're reading. Take a look again, and you're writing people who are actually guaranteeing by their essays, the subject matter on which their profession is actually, you know, if you did your dissertation in TB, you might lament it if TB were to disappear.

[54:52]

How have a place to end up as a doctor with TB cured? They've got to be sure they're permanently. Okay.

[54:58]

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