Jack Foley on “Hamlet, Keats, and La Conscience de Soi”

This piece is from Jerome Rothenberg's superb and always interesting blog Poems & Poetics. I think that this discussion of "interiority," self-hood, and the functions of poetry is of particular relevance to the study of  issues of central concern to Henry Corbin.

Reconfiguring Romanticism (37): Jack Foley on “Hamlet, Keats, and La Conscience de Soi”

Rothenberg writes that this essay  "is the prequel to an eight-part series on Poems for the Millennium, volume 3, prepared by Jack Foley for presentation on Cover to Cover, his longrunning program on KPFA-FM (Pacifica Radio) in San Francisco. The full list of readers includes Bill Berkson, e.e. cummings, Diane Di Prima, Jack & Adelle Foley, Katherine Hastings, Michael McClure, Michael Palmer, Jeffrey Robinson, Jerome Rothenberg, Leslie Scalapino, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Walt Whiman. Show times are consecutive Wednesdays from 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. beginning on April 14, for which a detailed listing of program contents will be presented here at a later date.

Foley writes, "I agree with Paul de Man (a mentor of mine at Cornell) that “What sets out as a claim to overcome Romanticism often turns out to be merely an expansion of our understanding of the movement” and that Modernism—despite its frequent explicit rejection of Romanticism—is in fact a thorough-going example of it. In general Romanticism marks the shift from thinking of poetry as a “craft” (and of the poet as “maker”) to thinking of it as a provoker of consciousness, even a creator of consciousness."

John Keats - Life Mask. from Joanna Kane's astonishing book The Somnambulists