Done done done!

So it's later than it was supposed to be, but paper #1 is handed in. Now I'm sitting in the student center, watching the torrential rain and wondering if I should go out in it to have ONE BEER ONLY and say goodbye for this term to everyone at grad pub before I go back to the library. I probably should, but it is so nice and warm and dry in here. So nice, too, that it no longer matters exactly how Wordsworth addressing his poem to Coleridge and writing scenes of Coleridge reading it, even after Coleridge is dead, relates to some larger element of Romantic thought. I think the part of me that loves this stuff, and the part of me that is analytical, are not the same part.

No, that's not exactly it. This relates to a little conversation I've been having with myself lately about why most writing about poetry is boring. I used to think it was just me, and then in a different part of my brain I also thought it was just Helen Vendler (who, in speech, is brilliant and fluid and amazing, but the writing, to me, is often both flat and less than totally convincing). Then I put those things together with a couple of other things and realized that it must be poetry. Part of it, I think, is that the mechanics of close reading are hard to perform in print. I even might say impossible, and I'm really not sure what to do about that: what in conversation is fascinating detail, on the page just seems painstaking and dry. And then also, the readings I'm most stimulated by are the most speculative, and trying to prove them with the rigor responsible scholarship requires--or even just to articulate a reading so that a reader can follow, step by step, without you there to have a dialogue or, I don't know, make instructive facial expressions or whathever it is that mitigates this problem when the discussion is verbal--is like . . . actually, this is the perfect simile: it's like Audobon's birds. You can make your representation of the thing, but in the process you kill it. I wonder if it made Audobon sad, painting corpses all day.