"Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it."
— Samet, Elizabeth D.
Author
Date
February 3, 2012
Metaphor
"Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it."
Metaphor in Context
Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it. In a letter she wrote the day she died, Elizabeth Bishop complained to the editor of an anthology that included some of her poems about the notes that had been appended: "If a poem catches a student's interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. . . . You can see what a nasty teacher I must be--but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them." Bishop saw in her students' resistance evidence of a bias against knowledge in favor of feeling: "They mostly seem to think that poetry--to read or to write--is a snap--one just has to feel--& not for very long, either." She closed, "If you can get students to reading, you will have done a noble work."
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Elizabeth D. Samet, "Grand Allusion" New York Times Book Review (February 3, 2012): 31. <Link to NYTimes.com>
Date of Entry
02/07/2012
