52/1001 - Byron, Hall ,Karr

 Essay:  Art and Nature in Poetry by Lord Byron, and excerpt from a letter to William Bowles. Worth reading: https://www.everywritersresource.com/art-and-nature-in-poetry-by-lord-byron/

"Let us examine a little further this “babble of green fields” and of bare nature in general as superior to artificial imagery, for the poetical purposes of the fine arts. In landscape painting the great artist does not give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents and composes one. Nature, in her natural aspect, does not furnish him with such existing scenes as he requires. Everywhere he presents you with some famous city, or celebrated scene from mountain or other nature; it must be taken from some particular point of view, and with such light, and shade, and distance, etc., as serve not only to heighten its beauties, but to shadow its deformities. The poetry of nature alone, exactly as she appears, is not sufficient to bear him out. The very sky of his painting is not the portrait of the sky of nature; it is a composition of different skies, observed at different times, and not the whole copied from any particular day. And why? Because nature is not lavish of her beauties; they are widely scattered and occasionally displayed, to be selected with care and gathered with difficulty….

Art is not inferior to nature for poetical purposes. What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements. A Highlander’s plaid, a Mussulman’s turban, and a Roman toga are more poetical than the tattooed or untattooed New Sandwich savages, altho they were described by William Wordsworth himself like the “idiot in his glory.”

I have seen as many mountains as most men, and more fleets than the generality of landsmen; and, to my mind, a large convoy with a few sail of the line to conduct them is as noble and as poetical a prospect as all that inanimate nature can produce. I prefer the “mast of some great admiral,” with all its tackle, to the Scotch fir or the Alpine tarnen, and think that more poetry has been made out of it. In what does the infinite superiority of Falconer’s “Shipwreck” over all other shipwrecks consist? In his admirable application of the terms of his art; in a poet sailor’s description of the sailor’s fate. These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem. Why? because he was a poet, and in the hands of a poet art will not be found less ornamental than nature."

Short story: The Man Who Lived Backward by Charles F. Hall

In the Tales Before Lewis book. Apparently, this is the story Lewis mentions in the i to to The Great Divorce that inspired the image of the unbreakable solidity of Heaven. I enjoyed it.

Poem: 

A Descending Theology: The Garden

by Mary Karr

We know he was a man because, once doomed,

he begged for reprieve. See him

grieving on his rock under olive trees,

his companions asleep

on the hard ground around him

wrapped in old hides.

Not one stayed awake as he’d asked.

That went through him like a sword.

He wished with all his being to stay

but gave up

bargaining at the sky. He knew

it was all mercy anyhow,

unearned as breath. The Father couldn’t intervene,

though that gaze was never

not rapt, a mantle around him. This

was our doing, our death.

The dark prince had poured the vial of poison

into the betrayer’s ear,

and it was done. Around the oasis where Jesus wept,

the cracked earth radiated out for miles.

In the green center, Jesus prayed for the pardon

of Judas, who was approaching

with soldiers, glancing up—as Christ was—into

the punctured sky till his neck bones

ached. Here is his tear-riven face come

to press a kiss on his brother.