One way to write a prosodical history of Spanish would be to start with squibs like this (Saintsbury on Browning):

Often describe as a loose and rugged metrist and a licentious, if not criminal, rhymester. Nothing of the sort. Extraordinarily bold in both capacities, and sometimes, perhaps, as usually happens in these cases, a little too bold; but in metre practically never, in rhyme very seldom (and then only for purposes of designed contrast, like the farce in tragedy), overstepping actual bounds. A great master of broken metres, internal rhyme, heavily equivalenced lines, and all the tours de force of English prosody.

Then you could expand each entry into a short essay.

For a poetry guy I'm remarkably literal minded. I tend to think there's more on the literal level, the meaning of the words, that should be talked about. I liked Nabokov's approach. What kind of an insect is Gregor Samsa? What is the actual floor-plan of Borges's library. I like it when a novel puts in exact references to historical events, but very very few, so that we know when the novel is set. For example, I was telling my students that the action of a novel was probably in the 40s, and then I remembered there was a reference to the 2nd Vatican council.

There was a book about Spanish detective fiction. One novel was set in the US and featured a reference to someone named "Cid Corman." The author of the book about Spanish detective fiction, an American, made fun of the Spanish novelist for not knowing that the English-language name "Sid" is short for Sidney and is spelled with an ess. Well, what this person did not know was that Cid Corman is a real person.

There is so little real in literature that the little bit that is real has to be respected.

Suppose there's a work that is very much, on its surface, fretting about a particular problem. Then why do you need a Freudianism that somehow removes that surface worry and puts it into the textual unconscious? Then you can talk about a cultural anxiety writ large across an entire spectrum of works. What makes something visible (as opposed to concealed) in a literary work? Something are not visible until you point them out; then they become hypervisible and you wonder why nobody saw them before.

In saying that literary works are about exactly what they seem to be, I am leaving open a few options.

(1) A work may be confused, a "problem play" so to speak, where there might be a serious discrepancy about two or more possibilities.

(2) A work might be so far removed in time that we no longer understand it. We have lost the references that make it intelligible. Maybe we don't have the actual philological wherewithal to decipher the text.

(3) There are poems I've read a hundred times that have obscure passages. We might not know how to construe particular phrases in Milton's sonnets, for example. Actually parsing them syntactically can be quite difficult.

etc...

In other words, there are literary enigmas to be resolved.

So from one point of view things are pretty much as they seem to be, and from the other point of view there is very little that is settled knowledge: we can still debate the "meanings" of even very canonical works. I myself vacillate between these two positions, and on any given day might find myself anywhere on the continuum.

I'll somehow get myself in the situation of picking a fight with someone on the internet. Usually, it's one I know I'll win. It's usually, though, the expression of another kind of anger just being channeled in that direction.

Here's a guy, for example, who thinks that all the stuff Plato wrote about explicitly, all that actual thought expressed with such care, is not, maybe, quite as significant as an esoteric code beneath the surface in musical terms.

Here's a novel idea: literary works are about exactly what they seem to be about. Wallace Stevens's poetry is about the relation between the poetic imagination and reality. Ezra Pound's work is about economics and his own particular view of history. Honor plays are about honor. Homer is about Homeric heroes and their code of behavior. Unamuno's Abel Sánchez is about its announced and ostensible theme: envy. "Howl" is about how the best minds of his generation have been destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. If I have read any poem or novel I know what it is about.

To the extent that you understand what the action of a narrative is, the plain sense of the words of a poem, you understand the literary work itself. Sure, you can talk about some themes that aren't explicitly enumerated, but that's simply a way of abstracting concepts from concrete situations. For example, in a play about two brothers fighting for succession to dynastic power, we could talk about the "theme of legitimacy." The big abstract thematic words like power, alienation, love, death, envy, are never at too far a remove from what the play or poem is actually dealing with right on the surface. There's difference between saying "It's a play about a guy who can't find a job" and "It's an examination of the limitations of the American dream." The latter sounds more sophisticated because it is more abstract.

Writers do not write in secret code. The meaning of their works is not concealed beneath the surface. If it were, then would they expect nobody to understand them until some clever dude cracks to code 300 years later? That doesn't seem very plausible. Usually, the meaning of the text is in plain sight. The clever dude with his esoteric theory is always wrong, because nobody encodes a message that deep into the text. That's just not the way literature works because it just wouldn't be viable that way.

Allegorical works Pilgrim's Progress like Dante's Commedia point us directly in the direction of their allegory. There's no mystery to what they are about.

Metaphors in poetry are very conventional. Life is a road. A human being is a tree. The night is something negative, something to be surpassed. Morning is hope. The sun is a powerful source of heat and life. 90% of poetic metaphors are of this type.

All this being said, many people are terrible readers. I would suggest that they are terrible because they are looking for a secret code and forget to look at what the text is saying on its face. This is especially true of difficult texts. If you understand a difficult text on its face, what the words are actually saying, you won't even need to find an esoteric meaning. If there is an esoteric system, it will be available, more or less, in the writer's complete works, as in the case of William Blake.

***

My entire profession, nevertheless, exists because things are not quite as simple as I've laid out here. They are a little more complicated and nuanced, and this little bit has made all the difference.

I want to do a book on 20th century Spanish + Spanish-American prosody. It could be very big. Sometimes a chapter of a book you're writing wants to be a book, wants to have all the other chapters be like it.

Enjambment is very different in free and metrical verse. In a metrically literate society, could have the convention that verse be written out as prose. It would make no difference, because everyone would be metrically literate enough to know where the line endings were. In free verse, the line endings make the verse: a reader could not reconstruct the lines by applying a set of internalized metrical rules.

For example, Spanish ballads are written either in lines of 8 or of 16 syllables. This creates very little difference. It's the same form no matter what. Anyone could take a poem printed as 8s and write it out as 16s with no problem. My worst student in intro to lit might make a few mistakes, but then you'd call that student not metrically informed.

Anyone should be able to write "fourteeners" out in ballad stanza typography.

This is one of my most popular posts for some reason, according to my stats. I think people are just googling innumeracy and getting to it that way.

If you want war, work for justice.

I found out that that quote about peace and justice is attributed to Pope Paul VI. This attribution doesn't make me agree or disagree any more with the sentiment, or think any more or less of this Pope.

My introduction minus the obtrusive signposting:

Receptivity, which I define as the capacity to receive and experience the greatest products of the human intelligence, is the single most significant principle for research and teaching in the humanities. Receptivity entails the fullest possible response—affective, intellectual, and aesthetic—to a wide range of visual art, music, literature, and systems of thought from any and all human cultures. Intelligence, as I employ the word here, encompasses all the possible ways in which human beings can make sense of their own experience of reality and develop forms of cultural expression. Some of these forms might not appear to be intellectual in the narrower sense of “cerebral,” but they all involve the human intelligence in this larger sense.

We need, then, a shift in focus—away from a sterile academic formalism and toward a more finely tuned receptivity to the “raw materials” of the humanities. The work of Federico García Lorca puts this argument to the test. Lorca, in my view, is an example of a higly receptive artist—in some sense a theorist of receptivity—and one whose own critical reception exposes the inadequacies of contemporary academic criticism.

Let's call the biographical man "William Shakespeare" S1.

Now let's call the real author of the works of "Shakespeare," whoever that might be, S2.

Now let's call the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere V1.

Now let's call the real author of the works attributed to de Vere, whoever that might be, V2.

So the real question of Shakespeare authorship is not whether S1 or V1 = S2, but whether S2 = V2? In other words, who wrote the works of de Vere? It is doubtful that the real author of Hamlet wrote de Vere's work, which is pretty wretched. Or, if de Vere needed a pseudonym for the works of Shakespeare, why didn't he need one for his "own" works?

Of course, we don't care who wrote de Vere's attributed work, you will say.

Exactly. We don't speculate that Marlowe wrote de Vere's work, or de Vere Marlowe's.

I've never liked that bumper-sticker "If you want peace, work for justice." I'm all for peace and justice, but the idea that you have to eliminate all injustice from the world first, before you can work directly for peace, means, in practice, that you will always have war, just or otherwise. Does this bumper sticker mean that injustice is the root cause of war? Then war seem can very "just," because it is designed to right injustices, right?

An injustice is a lack of balance. Something is out of whack, something is wrong that needs correcting. This attempt at correction can be irenic or bellicose; it can succeed or fail. There is nothing in the idea of justice itself that is pacifist.

If you want justice, work for justice.

If you want peace, work for peace.

Not very catchy slogans. "If you want justice and peace, look for peaceful means to remedy injustice" won't fit on the bumper.

Maybe someone can tell me what this bumper sticker is meant to convey.