Aesthetic Experience and Ideas: Death in Literature Flashcards

Death in Poetry: Foundations and Movements

• Effectiveness of Poetry for Mortality:

  • Poetry evokes deep emotions and sensory sensations through language.

  • It utilizes symbolism and imagery in tandem to generate layered meanings.

  • The symbol is considered the "soul of poetry," used across ages, countries, and languages to enhance impact.

• Symbolism:

  • Definition: A physical object used to represent an abstract idea. In literature, it is a figure of speech where a person, object, or situation represents something beyond its literal meaning.

  • Function: Adds depth, allows for the efficient and artistic connection of big ideas, and helps readers track central themes and complex concepts.

  • History: Started as a literary movement in France in the $1880s$. It posits that poetry parallels rather than replicates nature.

• Imagism:

  • A $20th$ century movement in poetry.

  • Characteristics: Clear images and sharp language. Every image is intentional and can be presented as similes or metaphors.

• The $20th$ Century Context:

  • Marked by vast changes and darkness: Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and World War I ($WWI$).

  • Writers often focused on "living death"—a state of existing after the trauma of war while functionally or spiritually dead.

T.S. Eliot and "The Hollow Men"

• T.S. Eliot Profile:

  • American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic.

  • Leader of the Modernist Movement.

  • Known for experimenting with style and diction; heavily influenced by Dante.

  • Artistic Goal: To reflect humanity's darkness while showing the possibility of redemption.

  • Accolades: Nobel Prize for Literature and Order of Merit in $1948$; recognized as the greatest living English poet following the publication of "Four Quartets."

  • Personal View: Eliot saw the poet's job as reorganizing the "real world's messy, irregular and fragmentary experience" into emotions.

• Poem Components: "The Hollow Men":

  • Epigraph: A short quote at the start of a document to set tone or provide context.

    • "Mistah Kurtz—he dead": Reference to Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness."

    • "A penny for the Old Guy": Reference to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot.

    • Allusion to Charon (the ferryman of the underworld).

  • Themes: Spiritual paralysis and cultural decay resulting from modern intellectualism and the violence of $WWI$.

  • Style and Imagery:

    • Uses children’s nursery rhymes (e.g., the mulberry bush) as an "antidote" or a return to childhood innocence before the knowledge of evil.

    • Key Images: "Stuffed men," "wind in dry grass," "rats' feet over broken glass," "sunlight on a broken column," "valley of dying stars," "shattered architecture."

    • Liminality: The setting is "death’s twilight kingdom" or a corrupt world turned into Hell. The figures represent a "living death"—hearts beating, but not truly alive.

    • Dante Allusions: "Direct eyes" refers to Beatrice in "The Inferno" (Canto $III$), who could see through flaws to God. The hollow men avoid eye contact due to shame.

    • The River: References "the beach of the tumid river," a Dante-esque underworld image.

  • Famous Closing Lines: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."

The Modern Elegy and Maya Angelou

• Elegy Definition: A poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

• Aspects of Modern Elegies:

  1. Death must be seen and formally recognized through language.

  2. Expressions of grief are often written against the "impersonality of science" (symptoms/causes), focusing instead on emotion.

  3. A paradox: The interaction between an actual death and the ongoing liveliness of the language recording it.

• Maya Angelou:

  • American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist.

  • Published $7$ autobiographies (e.g., "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," published $1969$).

  • "When Great Trees Fall" is an elegy written for her friend, James Baldwin.

• Analysis of "When Great Trees Fall":

  • Metaphor: Falling trees represent the impact of the loss of individuals.

  • Themes: Absence creates a void but also paves the way for new growth.

  • Sensation: Equates death/loneliness with a solitary cold sensation.

  • Key Vocabulary: "Eroded," "recoil," and "shrink" describe the psychical reaction to grief.

  • Legacy: Death is not the end; a "soothing electric vibration" fills the void left behind. This aligns with Yeats' idea that the dead live on through their legacy.

Encountering Death and Mourning

• Literature as Healing:

  • The written word provides a means for grieving and articulating what is felt but hard to tell.

  • Knowledge of death is often a taboo; literature breaks this to allow psychological and social mourning.

• Key Psychological Concepts:

  • Autothanatography: A genre where readers hear the voices of those facing impending death or the grief of those left behind.

  • Grief as Reconstruction: Mourners must accommodate the reality of impermanence and revise their identity.

  • The Labour of Mourning: The difficult work of acceptance and identity reconstruction. Grieving is only effective when emotions are translated into words.

  • Decathexis: The process of releasing the emotional ties between an individual and the deceased object/person.

    • Timeline: Mourning is generally associated with a duration of up to $2$ years.

    • Melancholia: Grief lasting longer than $2$ years without resolution.

  • Derrida's "The Work of Mourning": Suggests we must mourn but not "develop a taste" for it; we hold on to the living through our tears for the other.

Philosophical and Cultural Perspectives

• Buddhist Beliefs (Kisā Gotami):

  • Story: Kisā Gotami seeks a mustard seed from a house where no one has died; she realizes death is universal.

  • Duhkha: The Buddhist term for suffering.

  • Lessons: Death is inevitable; suffering arises not from change itself, but from the desire to keep things the same and the refusal to accept impermanence.

  • Comparison: Like modern writers, the Buddha emphasizes that a single day lived with understanding of reality is more valuable than $100$ years without it.

• Latin Phrases:

  • Memento Mori: "Remember you must die." A reflection on life's brevity.

  • Memento Amori: "Remember love." Often a counterpart to memento mori, emphasizing living with purpose.

• William (Bill) Whitehead - "Good Grief":

  • Canadian writer and filmmaker; partner of Timothy Findley (Tiff).

  • "Good Grief": Part of the collection "The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning."

  • Themes: Criticism of the "privatization of grief" (cultural tendency to hide mourning).

  • The Crematorium Speech: Whitehead described Tiff’s body being changed by fire to permeate the air and become part of other living systems (plants, animals).

  • Legacy: Whitehead notes that Findley lives on through memory and his books, which continue to affect others.

  • Survival: The text explores how one’s "sense of self" remains while acknowledging the aching absence of the loved one.