Bob and Tom, both former teachers of American literature, struck up a conversation while sauntering towards three geocaches they hoped to find. Bob claimed that all great literature struck a pleasing balance between what he called the didactic and the aesthetic—the pragmatic and the artistic. Tom asked him to explain, but Bob replied, “To elaborate is to no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.”
That’s a cop-out, declared Tom. What do you really mean? Well, for example, take Leaves, said Bob: “I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.” The poet takes a mundane act of being of service to somebody, helping on a wagon, and transforms it with words like seize and wisps into an artistic frolic, an immersion of the senses into the world as it comes to us. A good writer can transform a mundane word like tree or nine or sky or twist into the stuff of mystery and magic, of profundity and pathos.
And here’s another, said Bob excitedly: “The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf/Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind/ Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.” See how the poet gives fingers to leaves, fingers that clutch and sink into soil as if it were flesh? Those two ordinary verbs, coupled with that ordinary noun, transform a kind of weather bulletin into poetry, don’t you think?
I see the poetry there, sure, Bob, but I don’t see much of the pragmatic in that poetry. Besides, isn’t most writing just practical stuff, not poetry? Doesn’t it just convey simple thoughts, devoid of any kind of art? Everybody recalls “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”? That’s just stating the facts, isn’t it? Where’s the art in that? Maybe there are three or more functions to writing, Bob.
C’mon, Tom! Really, you can’t see the poetic elements in that address? At least three come immediately to my mind: the balance of ideas, the parallel structures, the power of the shortened final statement. Nobody’d remember that famous speech if it had been only a practical announcement of the facts at hand, but it was poetry and pragmatism, Tom! How about this one, which has just as much of the pragmatic and the poetic as the last passage, though it’s even more politicized: “Well, make yourself at home. No introductions needed. There’s literature on the table. Take some of those pamphlets with you to distribute aboard ship. They may bring results. Sow the seed, only go about it right. Don’t get caught and fired. We got plenty out of work. What we need is men who can hold their jobs—and work for us at the same time.” Do you see the art in that, Tom?
I’m not convinced. I see the pragmatic there but not one element of art! Let’s turn it around, Tom said. Where’s the didactic or practical aspect in “To have just missed the perfect love, / Not the hot passion of untempered youth, / But that which lays aside its vanity / And gives thee, for thy trusting worship, truth-- “? I see the poetry in it, but not an ounce of the practical. You can’t really contend there’s something pragmatic lurking in those words!
I don’t believe you, Tom! I should think any statement about love and passion, vanity and truth begs to be considered philosophically, which means practically rather than poetically; so that passage is certainly poetry and pragmatism fused together. You remember this one, don’t you? “For I have known them all already, known them all:-- / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; / I know the voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room. / So how should I presume?” You see the art and the practical in that easily enough, don’t you?
Ok, ok, I’ll give you that example. But I could cite two dozen more that lack poetic or what you call pragmatic aspects. For instance, “I never hear the word ‘escape’—“? You see anything at all pragmatic in that poetry?
And at that, Bob had, for a moment, nothing to say. Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. His mind was paralyzed. A dozen ideas presented themselves for his consideration, but he couldn’t cite a single passage to counter Tom’s argument.
Tom saw his opening and pressed Bob further. You see anything poetic in this brilliant passage? “One of the most tragic examples of our unthinking bludgeoning of the landscape is to be seen in the sagebrush lands of the West, where a vast campaign is on to destroy the sage and to substitute grasslands. If ever an enterprise needed to be illuminated with a sense of the history and meaning of the landscape, it is this. For here, the natural landscape is eloquent of the interplay of forces that have created it. It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity. But the pages lie unread.” Bob had recovered. Of course I do! he exclaimed. The poetry is in the substance of the passage, in the land itself! That’s part of the integrity of the land the author is trying to get her audience to recognize. But there’s also a bit of artistry in the conclusion to that paragraph. Its brevity packs a lot of punch, don’t you think, and isn’t that the stuff of poetry in particular and art in general? I got another seven or so prose pieces in mind whose poetic elements you’d probably not recognize. Shall I recite them?
I’m still not persuaded you know what the heck you’re talking about, Bob. I still believe there’s some writing which is totally practical and other writing that’s clearly artistic. Maybe sometimes there’s an overlap, but lots of times there isn’t, as in this mundane, pedestrian prose: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” Not an ounce of poetry in that, Bob, unless you been drinkin’ over much! And you could quote nine whole books—every blessed word in them!—and you wouldn’t change my mind about this nonsense of yours. Yeah, speaking of nonsense, what about nonsense verse? No sense, no meaning. Therefore, no practical aspect at all—just pure art!
Tom, you know what all your talk reminds me of? “Soon, with a noise like tambourines, / Came her attendant Byzantines.” Tom, a bit hurt, rejoined, And you know what you remind me of, Bob? Sore losers. Blokes behind the eight-ball. You didn’t prove your case, and you know it, Bob. Give it up!
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The revised coordinates will take you to what was once Blue Ridge College (affiliated with Bridgewater College). The Church of the Brethren purchased what had become known as New Windsor College in 1912; by 1944 the Church of the Brethren developed plans to transform the college into a disaster-relief facility. Today the COB’s Disaster Relief Ministries are respected world-wide. SERRV, an adjunct to those efforts, is a non-profit whose mission is “to eradicate poverty wherever it resides by providing opportunity and support to artisans and farmers worldwide.” The products it sells are produced in environment-friendly ways through partnerships with artisans and farmers throughout the world and are fair-trade certified. p>
Enjoy the view of the Catoctins to the west while you search for the cache. You probably won’t grow weary in looking for this micro, but feel free to savor the campus and the surroundings; there are many places to sit and relax.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.