Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. I haven’t read _Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns_ yet, but if you are referring specifically to the volta, I can definitely see how that aspect of the form relates to NC. The ability to lay out a line of argumentation, often in an almost dialectic manner, and then flip both argument and counter argument into a more expansive view of both (a synthesis that is greater than the previous parts) certainly seems like an instrument of NC. Shakespeare, of course, was a master at this. Fun stuff.

Thanks for stopping by. Don’t be a stranger.

I’m doing work on Keats’s Negative Capability, and so came across your post.

I’m especially interested in the way you see Gluck linking NC and the sonnet, and especially the sonnet’s turn. The turn is my other great critical interest (see my Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers, 2007)). I’ll have to look into this some more, but, initially, I like the idea that attention to turns can help to produce NC.

Your post was a fruitful find for me– Thanks!
Mike Theune

One of the things I liked about this essay, once I got into Glück’s viewpoint, is that it did not seem to be divisive – that is, there seems no need to pick “camps” – any temptations in that regard are likely semantic. That said, I suppose the issue of control is a matter of taste, and while I favor noble dishevelment in theory, in practice I find Glück’s precision as elucidating as any rant.

Thanks for stopping by.

Cheers,
Robert

Sense by sitting inside the negative capability of another, letting it wash in. By dissection or osmosis of reader of the unconscious intent of the writer.

If the writer’s hand is not firm enough or trained enogh, it can become automatic not to revealing truths but repeating cliches that come easily. By conscious practice of pruning, the suckers of these automatics can stay in control.

I’m not sure caricature works in the same way as persona – i.e. giving voice to aspect-perceptions that represent the “psychic autobiography.” The downside of caricature is the exaggeration of stock features (the big nose, the jutting chin) – but I would say distillation and essentialization is absolutely the stuff of lyric. Tricky – because when you talk about that as some kind of conscious effort, a game of what-to-hide and what-to-reveal with the reader, my experience is such a linear approach ends up clunkier than what happens on inspiration, what “comes together” as the intangibles you discover after the fact. So, I suppose when I talk about determinism I mean intention – not a linear plan but a direction of discovery, ending in a sense of sentience about the work, whose mechanics are only revealed in dissection – not assembly.

“a suspension of didactic conclusion” yes. Staid accurate homilies get no points for their truth because they don’t get far inside enough the mind to resonate. I could see that.

One must be interesting and speak of what stood out not that which was flat and common. It allows one to be more extreme and distorted than reality.
Would that be like saying caricatures are more representational than any photo since it highlights what is uncommon?

Elegiac works? here’s a review: http://www.whimsyspeaks.com/2007/06/