English 021 Creative Reading

Weblog - Category - 5 Byatt
Hiding behind Prose
5 Byatt
by jsimpson

In quoting a poem from Yeats, Fergus reveals how he feels in regards to poety. This passage in the book is evidence that Fergus feels that poetry provides something more or less than mere words. Instead of quoting Yeats, Fergus could have simply told Maud to grow her hair out...
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April 05, 2005, 02:34 PM
Parallel Between Maud and Poetry
5 Byatt
by bellwang

Both Ash and Christabel “savour the phrase” (187) ‘telluric conditions’. The imagery of something being submerged underground recurs throughout Byatt’s “Possessions”. The prince in Christabel’s fairytale “The Threshold” correctly chooses not the sun-sister, nor the moon-sister, but the earth-sister. The prince does not want to choose the earth-sister because...
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April 05, 2005, 02:25 PM
Sabine Lucréce Charlotte
5 Byatt
by jhoffman

Sabine's relationship with imaginative writing is similar to Christabel LaMotte in that they are both heirs to a tradition of mythology passed down through their fathers. But her experience with mythology differs in that her father communicates it through oral storytelling, while Christabel’s chooses to catalogue the history of it...
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April 05, 2005, 02:22 PM
The “Magnificent Importance” of Ash Scholarship
5 Byatt
by acathcar

After working for years in the “Inferno” (31) of the Ash factory, Blackadder “[is] discouraged and [likes] to discourage others” (13). He repeatedly rejects his own footnotes as “ugly and ungainly” (33) while editing Ash’s poetry. His editorial comments are often “set down, depersonalised, and then erased” (325). Blackadder’s feelings...
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April 05, 2005, 02:01 PM
Sometimes you just need to put down your books and push people around. Yea!
5 Byatt
by jsese

Poetry gives Maud a subject to invest her identity and specialization in; what it does not provide her the ability to interact in the normal world. She quotes Christabel: “Outside our small safe place flies Mystery” (290). This is truer for Maud than she is aware. Her “safe place” is...
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April 05, 2005, 01:57 PM
Christabel the Spirit-Starving Artist
5 Byatt
by kparker

Christabel LaMotte’s poetry highlights the negative aspects, real or imagined, of whatever is going on in her life. The poem at the beginning of Chapter 7 probably resembles much of her work before her relationship with Ash. The poem contrasts men and women sharply, essentially saying that whereas men can...
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April 05, 2005, 01:50 PM
An Escape
5 Byatt
by rmccally

Christabel LaMotte lives a depressing life: she has no husband, she has an affair with a married man which she feels guilt for, she becomes pregnant with an illegitimate child, and she finds herself incapable of living the independent lifestyle she craves. She also searches for magic in the real...
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April 05, 2005, 01:48 PM
Blanche's verification through poetry
5 Byatt
by began

For Blanche Glover, poetry provides the truth about Ash and Christabel that she otherwise cannot ascertain. Ash’s poem “Swammerdam,” as well as the letters between Ash and Christabel, gives Blanche enough evidence to confirm the affair. In a letter to Ellen Ash, Blanche writes, “You did wrong to keep my...
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April 05, 2005, 01:46 PM
Roland is a knight...no, he's a comma
5 Byatt
by lcolon

In the text, Byatt expresses Roland’s role as two textual elements: one being the comma and the other being a knight. The knight, being important to the content of the story plays a much more substantial role than a comma, which is only important technically. The very first poem in...
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April 05, 2005, 01:36 PM
Poetic Origins
5 Byatt
by kmcqueen

Through the work of Randolph Henry Ash, Roland is immersed in a life that distorts reality. His apparent lack of self-defining characteristics plagues him with a life lived through the work of another. Victorian poetry is Roland’s escape from the natural world and a conquest to “know the origins of...
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April 05, 2005, 01:28 PM
Ash and Poetry
5 Byatt
by oradwan

Randolph Henry Ash uses Poetry to communicate with women. The restrictions on his proper conduct in a Victorian age limit how truly he may communicate with members of the opposite sex, limiting him to formalisms and utmost politeness. However within the poetic medium, Ash can talk frankly to women in...
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April 05, 2005, 01:19 PM
Perfect Love
5 Byatt
by jmurray

For Randolph Henry Ash, imaginary writing provides as escape from the reality into a world that is perfectly suited for him. Specifically a world where his relationship with Cristabel is a hell of a lot simpler. The world he imagines in Ragnarok is one of perfection. As Ash writes, "All...
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April 05, 2005, 12:42 PM
RHA and possessing himself
5 Byatt
by pdecoste

In Randolph Henry Ash’s case imaginary writing provides him the medium to truly possess and communicate his own emotions. An example of this occurs in Ash’s Ragnarök when he states, “Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore/ And touched the woman’s hand, who clasped fast his./ Speechless they...
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April 05, 2005, 10:38 AM
Poetry as Ellen's Medium to Love Her Husband
5 Byatt
by sstewar2

For Ellen Ash, poetry serves as a supplement to the love that she shares with her husband Randolph Ash. Since she is unable to have a connection with him through life itself, she gains this false aspect of her love through poetry. Within Possession, Ellen’s love for her husband Randolph...
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April 05, 2005, 05:24 AM
An Existence "Beyond the Safe and Solid"
5 Byatt
by aahearn

Maud wrote a paper about “the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces” (61). Living in a simple university flat, with a secure teaching post and an...
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April 01, 2005, 11:18 PM
Sixth blog entry
5 Byatt
by mphillip

Due before class on Tuesday, April 5 "I find I am at ease with other imagined minds...." - RHA, in a letter to CL (p. 174) From the perspective of someone in your group, what does poetry (or other imaginary writing) provide that is unavailable in 'real' life? What does...
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March 31, 2005, 12:42 PM