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Vanguard Boojum, v. 1, issue 1
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VANGUARD BOOJUM Published by Robert W. Lowndes, 325 West 11th Street, New York 14, New York, as an unjustified vehicle for those Vanguardifs who wish to review the official mailings but do not have publishing facilities to hand. This is issue number one, and, if Able Seaman Shaw returns soon, and can revive his Vanguard Variorum (a justified vehicle serving the same purpose more neatly) this will also be the final issue. Meaning pox vobiscum. Fit the 1st: AGENBITE OF INWIT The question posed in On Non-Violent Resistance is much discussed in Vanguard; I am mildly surprised that a man trained in Marxism should raise it, for no problems are so amenable to dialectical treatment as those of this kind (ie: what Judy contemptuously calls the "political" as divorced from the historical.) After all, Doc, you made some money by using the unity-of-opposites concept at one time -- remember the procedure by which you wrote stores around already-painted covers for Norton's magazines? That should be hint enough. The Aesthetic Question: I don't deny for a moment that "Heirs-Presumptive" deals with he question of exclusions, as well as with a "one-value orientation". In my comments on "At the New School", however I spoke of a specific "one-value cultural orientation", which is a referent of a different color; this particular statement of limitation may be implicit in the lines Lowndes quotes from his poem, but as far as I can see, only through their very lack of specificity. This is certainly quite all right with me -- I am not, nor was I, attempting to prove the Lyons poem the better of the two peers, but only to propose two readily available laboratory tests of Wordsworth's dogma about the nature of good writing; therefore to adjust the relative effectiveness of two different methods for violating that dogma -- and I think that if netting of the general nature of these lines gives them an advantage in this argument, and the specificity of the Lyons' references, which Doc would claim also fo this own work, a detriment. Lyons, in short, clings too closely to the moral where Lowndes clings too closely to the event, gaining at the same time in depth what Lowndes gains in breadth. If Doc and anyone else interested in this argument is willing to grant me this last premise, then I think a tentative conclusion is now possible. Neither poet excels in the province of the other, but between the two procedures we have available a Poetry which, though written at what Wordsworth would have considered a prohibitive proximity to the original stimulus, nevertheless has attained both breadth and depth. There is still a third category (these labels were first proposed by Van Wyck Brooks, incidentally) which I cannot honestly find exemplified in either poem, and it is one which Wordsworth would have considered very important indeed -- perhaps paramount: height. If this is so, we can now pin the question to the mat and begin twisting its most vulnerable toe. Presupposing -- as the reasoning above tends to indicate -- that the quality lost by not waiting for tranquility in order to recollect the specific emotion is that of height (Wordsworth would have called it "elevation", which is perhaps not the same thing,) just how great a loss is this? In one great specific branch of poetry, for instance, traditional criticism is agreed that only twelve sonnets have been written since 1580 (the date of Mark Alexander Boyd's "Fra bank to bank", which for some undoubtedly idiotic reason is not included among the "Golden Dozen") which have all three qualities perfectly and equally attained. The most recent of these twelve is Words-
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VANGUARD BOOJUM Published by Robert W. Lowndes, 325 West 11th Street, New York 14, New York, as an unjustified vehicle for those Vanguardifs who wish to review the official mailings but do not have publishing facilities to hand. This is issue number one, and, if Able Seaman Shaw returns soon, and can revive his Vanguard Variorum (a justified vehicle serving the same purpose more neatly) this will also be the final issue. Meaning pox vobiscum. Fit the 1st: AGENBITE OF INWIT The question posed in On Non-Violent Resistance is much discussed in Vanguard; I am mildly surprised that a man trained in Marxism should raise it, for no problems are so amenable to dialectical treatment as those of this kind (ie: what Judy contemptuously calls the "political" as divorced from the historical.) After all, Doc, you made some money by using the unity-of-opposites concept at one time -- remember the procedure by which you wrote stores around already-painted covers for Norton's magazines? That should be hint enough. The Aesthetic Question: I don't deny for a moment that "Heirs-Presumptive" deals with he question of exclusions, as well as with a "one-value orientation". In my comments on "At the New School", however I spoke of a specific "one-value cultural orientation", which is a referent of a different color; this particular statement of limitation may be implicit in the lines Lowndes quotes from his poem, but as far as I can see, only through their very lack of specificity. This is certainly quite all right with me -- I am not, nor was I, attempting to prove the Lyons poem the better of the two peers, but only to propose two readily available laboratory tests of Wordsworth's dogma about the nature of good writing; therefore to adjust the relative effectiveness of two different methods for violating that dogma -- and I think that if netting of the general nature of these lines gives them an advantage in this argument, and the specificity of the Lyons' references, which Doc would claim also fo this own work, a detriment. Lyons, in short, clings too closely to the moral where Lowndes clings too closely to the event, gaining at the same time in depth what Lowndes gains in breadth. If Doc and anyone else interested in this argument is willing to grant me this last premise, then I think a tentative conclusion is now possible. Neither poet excels in the province of the other, but between the two procedures we have available a Poetry which, though written at what Wordsworth would have considered a prohibitive proximity to the original stimulus, nevertheless has attained both breadth and depth. There is still a third category (these labels were first proposed by Van Wyck Brooks, incidentally) which I cannot honestly find exemplified in either poem, and it is one which Wordsworth would have considered very important indeed -- perhaps paramount: height. If this is so, we can now pin the question to the mat and begin twisting its most vulnerable toe. Presupposing -- as the reasoning above tends to indicate -- that the quality lost by not waiting for tranquility in order to recollect the specific emotion is that of height (Wordsworth would have called it "elevation", which is perhaps not the same thing,) just how great a loss is this? In one great specific branch of poetry, for instance, traditional criticism is agreed that only twelve sonnets have been written since 1580 (the date of Mark Alexander Boyd's "Fra bank to bank", which for some undoubtedly idiotic reason is not included among the "Golden Dozen") which have all three qualities perfectly and equally attained. The most recent of these twelve is Words-
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