auden on poetry

“For, really, a poem can never attain a Paterite condition of “music” because it is written in language, which belongs to the world outside art before it belongs to the world within: “It is both the glory and the shame of poetry”, W. H. Auden memorably observed, “that its medium is not its private property”. Auden, who liked antitheses, once divided the authorship of poetry between Ariel, the arch-formalist who sang private lyrics of self delighting beauty, and Prospero, who sought to hand down moral truths; and while “every poem”, as Auden wrote, “shows some sign of a rivalry” between the two, all poets begin with an inclination for one or the other. Leighton writes very well indeed about Ariel poets who find themselves acknowledging kinds of Prospero truth—about death and loss and absence. But Auden leaves open a possibility which these excellent pages do not explore: that of the Prospero poet surprised into moments of Ariel lyricism.”
-Auden

memory and feeling

"Car aux troubles de la mémoire sont liées les intermittences du coeur.," writes Proust (II, 756).

He goes on to say that it is the existence of our bodies that give us the illusion that all our feelings are perpetually in our possession. But this is not so.

This made me think of all the incompatible feelings we have about Bloom while reading Ulysses. We know how we feel at each moment, but there is a problem when we try to sum up our overall feelings about Bloom.

There is also a larger point about reading here. We are one person when we read a novel. We're another when we sit in class to discuss it. "Literature says very little to those who understand it," writes Benjamin. The experience of reading is one thing. The chats we have about literature are another thing, perhaps not related to the first.

If this is true, the only way to share the experience of reading a novel would be to read it aloud together.