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June 27: One of my favorite poet/thinkers (and there have been a few) is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but he said a lot of dumb things. One I came across in an (enjoyable) essay on Pound by James Longenbach, "Ezra Pound at Home," which was in an issue of Southwest Review I was sent to consider for review. Longenbach was discussing a poem by Pound, "In Durrance," in which Pound partially quoted a definition of beauty Coleridge had in his "On the Principles of Genial Criticism," and gave a fuller quotation: beauty is a "calling on the soul, which receives instantly, and welcomes it as something connatural."
I bring it up here as an example of gush--something many (most?) people seem to be satisfied with as insightfully definitive, but which actually says just about nothing, only that beauty is something human beings naturally respond to (and do so quickly). In other words, beauty is something nebulously to which we respond in a quick, natural, nebulous way. I came up with a better definition over forty years ago--by determining the material cause of a perception of beauty, and how our brains materially recognize it. My definition isn't gush, so no one is interested in it.
I may be doing an injustice to Coleridge: in context his definition may be no more than a set-up for something more intelligent. Taken by itself, though, the quotation serves admirably for the lesson I wanted to give (and got me through another entry).
Latest medical news is that I don't know how I'm doing except that I haven't had a stroke or heart attack yet. I feel droopy still, and my blood pressure is moderately high. Gotta take it a day at a time, I guess.
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