"In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest form of repression both in the mind and in the state. Outside romanticism, repetition has a very different import: it is the sustaining the renewing power of nature, the basis for all art and understanding. The detailed history of repetition deserves a book to itself; here it will suffice to note that repetition lost its moral value only with the spread of the industrial machine and the swelling of the romantic chorus of praise for personal originality. Until two hundred years ago virtually no one associated repetition with boredom or constraint. ennui is ancient; its link to repetition is not. The damned in Dante’s Hell never complain that their suffering is repetitive, only that it is eternal, which is not the same thing."
— Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, page 172. I have been thinking of this immensely provocative passage while reading Siobhan Phillips’s fascinating new book The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. (via ayjay)
-
poorerthandead liked this
-
settledthingsstrange reblogged this from ayjay
-
jweatherford reblogged this from ayjay
-
michaelfunderburk reblogged this from ayjay
-
consillyence reblogged this from ayjay
-
deshaunicus liked this
-
jesstify liked this
-
jesstify reblogged this from ayjay
-
ayjay posted this
