Lofty

Phenomenal Literature,A Global Journal devoted to Language and Literature, 2018

We all seek the good life. What we mean by a good life may vary widely. In this book I will show that the good life and melancholy are linked. However, it is my observation that our modern Western consumer culture not only ignores this link between melancholy and the good life, but actually denies it. As if we can be happy without melancholy! Contemporary consumer culture defines melancholy along with other supposedly negative moods, in opposition to all that is regarded as positive. As if the metaphor of positive and negative, derived from electronics, helpfully categorises something as human as a mood! Christianity has traditionally had a well-attuned understanding of melancholy as we can hear from Christian music, for instance plainsong and choral music generally. However in our time some Churches have been overcome by an one-sidedly purposeful spirituality. purpose has become a big buzzword. linked with this situation in which melancholy is expunged is the corresponding fact that poetry has been made irrelevant. If you understand the world in terms of positives and negatives what will poetry have to offer' (few today can say what poetry is for, or what poets are for. ) They seem redundant. On the other hand most people know that in other societies and once upon a time in our society, poets were important and even held a pride of place - just think of ancient Greece, medieval Europe, Tudor England. )he best story-telling was poetry, for instance Homer's Iliad , and the saga of Beowulf. Many people assume that poetry has simply been displaced by technological advances and that poets and poetry have passed their use by date, rather like old fridges, )/s or computers. We simply don't need them any more. We live in a technological age and poetry along with poets belong to a dying age of books and boring entertainment. Only an elderly generation not brought up on technological devices could possibly be interested in poetry. Contrary to this kind of mind-set, I will paint quite another picture. Not only will I show melancholy as formative for the good life, however we define that, I will show that melancholy is a matter of soul, not self, and that poetry can connect us with the soulful mood of melancholy, and become a primary way to cultivate soul.

Yale Review, 2008

Family Medicine, 2019

This paper examines how poets of the Romantic era found their niche on the edge around the coin, balancing their works between their own vision and the poets who came before.

Visual and Literary Catharsis, 2018

This paper seeks to investigate the metaphors and images of emotional excess in selected poems of English Romanticism. Unlike these days, when emotional stability and temperance are thought to be crucial in living a successful life, English Romantic poets glorified emotional excess, seeing it as a prerequisite for poetic creation, self-development and any revolutionary transformation. Such a stance can at least partially be explained by a reference to the aesthetics of the sublime, where beauty is measured by the intensity of emotional response. However, emotions in the Romantic period form not only a ground for an aesthetic experience; in fact, their status is much more complex: they simultaneously become a path to wisdom/knowledge and condition artistic creativity.

Literature Compass, 2004

This article argues for the importance of heart imagery in Victorian poetry, and briefly outlines how changes in the conception of the heart – both as a physical organ and as a poetic image – are intimately linked to contemporary anxieties about feeling and emotional expression.