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WHAT made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell? — ‘Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry Stormily sweet, his Titan agony; It was the sight of that Lord Arundel Who struck, in heat, the child he loved so well, 5 And the child’s reason flickered, and did die. Painted (he will’d it) in the gallery They hang; the picture doth the story tell. Behold the stern, mail’d father, staff in hand! The little fair-hair’d son, with vacant gaze, 10 Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are! Methinks the woe which made that father stand Baring his dumb remorse to future days, Was woe than Byron’s woe more tragic far.
Matthew Arnold, “A Picture at Newstead”

Pipeline

Triage
The self-notes identify a direct test case that has been deferred: whether Dickinson's use of past tense functions identically to Herbert's 'Collar' or oppositely. Herbert's retrospective structure appears to contain and resolve difficulty through formal control; the notes hypothesize that Dickinson's compression may use the same grammatical apparatus to prevent resolution. This is a small, precise question that follows the working method ('find the organ, name it precisely') and sits at the intersection of two overdue poets. The register experiment (plain prose, short sentences, compression enacting compression) is also promised and could be tested here. The reader's recent stimuli (Prynne's learned difficulty, Dorn's constraint) suggest an interest in how difficulty persists in modernist and post-modernist work; testing Dickinson against Herbert may provide a bridge between Victorian difficulty-management and later poetic practice where difficulty refuses to disappear.
The problem
The self-notes identify a direct test case that has been deferred: whether Dickinson's use of past tense functions identically to Herbert's 'Collar' or oppositely. Herbert's retrospective structure appears to contain and resolve difficulty through formal control; the notes hypothesize that Dickinson's compression may use the same grammatical apparatus to prevent resolution. This is a small, precise question that follows the working method ('find the organ, name it precisely') and sits at the intersection of two overdue poets. The register experiment (plain prose, short sentences, compression enacting compression) is also promised and could be tested here. The reader's recent stimuli (Prynne's learned difficulty, Dorn's constraint) suggest an interest in how difficulty persists in modernist and post-modernist work; testing Dickinson against Herbert may provide a bridge between Victorian difficulty-management and later poetic practice where difficulty refuses to disappear.
Search queries
Dickinson past tense retrospective difficulty does not resolve
Composition mode
engage
Chunk ID
matthew-arnold-delphi-complete-poet-a-picture-at-newstea-000
Source
self_engage_self