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Chapter 34 - Poetry
- from Part III - Contexts
- Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Samuel Johnson in Context
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2011, pp 294-302
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- Chapter
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Summary
PO′EM. n.s. [poema, Lat. ποίημα.] The work of a poet; a metrical composition.
A poem is not alone any work, or composition of the poets in many or few verses; but even one alone verse sometimes makes a perfect poem. Benj. Johnson.
Samuel Johnson never resolved his ambivalence to poetry, repeatedly evinced in his poems and criticism over a career spanning almost fifty years. Exquisitely sensitive to the medium, Johnson could be jarred by metrical irregularities, delighted by rhetorical grace, and gripped and enchained by imaginative power – what he tellingly calls “the force of poetry” (Works, 5:127) – such as when, as a boy, “he suddenly hurried upstairs to the street door that he might see people about him” after reading the ghost scene in Hamlet (Miscellanies, 1:158).
Exaltation and contempt
Poetry perplexed and divided Johnson. It could be the noblest of arts: “Rhetoric and Poetry,” as he observed in the preface to The Preceptor, “supply Life with its highest intellectual Pleasures; and in the hands of Virtue are of great Use for the Impression of just Sentiments and illustrious Examples” (Prefaces & Dedications, p. 183). In the Life of Milton, the great lexicographer loftily defined poetry as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason” (Lives, 1:282). And in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson explained how the best poetry could “instruct by pleasing,” whetting and sating “that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life” by “exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that reads [it] to read it through” (Works, 7:67, 83; 16:118).
10 - Baseball and material culture
- Edited by Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University, New York, Stephen Partridge, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Baseball
- Published online:
- 28 July 2011
- Print publication:
- 21 February 2011, pp 138-154
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Summary
How things are made, used, and valued (economically, morally, aesthetically, and culturally) and what they signify concern material culturists. According to Jules D. Prown, material culturists tend to fall into one of two categories – hard or soft – depending on how they read or interpret objects: the “hard material culturist focuses on the reality of the object itself, its material, configuration, [and] articulation.” By contrast, “soft material culturist[s] [read] the artifact as part of a language through which culture speaks its mind.” That is, the “quest is not to gather information about the object itself and the activities and practices of the society that produced it, but rather to discover underlying cultural beliefs.” One might say that historians gravitate to the “hard,” and anthropologists to the “soft,” but both form part of a continuum.
This chapter, which is more “hard” than “soft,” and, given the scope of the subject, suggestive rather than definitive, enumerates the extraordinary range and diversity of baseball artifacts, as well as inventions and technologies that have influenced the game. Then, it briefly examines, in order to provide insight into the development of baseball and its relation to the surrounding culture, a number of baseball's most significant objects.