http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/09/existentialolcaturday/ A blog from the Poetry Foundation where contemporary poets debate classic and contemporary poetry from America and around the world. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:12:11 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/09/existentialolcaturday/#comment-984 Ange Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:37:37 +0000 http://pf/harriet/?p=394#comment-984 Eliot's ailurophilia is entirely too whimsical for an age where pets are literally sacralized. We repress nature, the uncanny, et al., only to summon it back in small, manageable, 10-15 lb. rations. Steve, I don't know - your acte gratuit of affection sounds entirely too rational to account for the disproportionate feelings elicited by pets.... Eliot’s ailurophilia is entirely too whimsical for an age where pets are literally sacralized. We repress nature, the uncanny, et al., only to summon it back in small, manageable, 10-15 lb. rations.
Steve, I don’t know – your acte gratuit of affection sounds entirely too rational to account for the disproportionate feelings elicited by pets….

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/09/existentialolcaturday/#comment-983 Christian Bök Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:00:48 +0000 http://pf/harriet/?p=394#comment-983 While I am probably a "cat-person" rather than a "dog-person" myself, I have never fully understood the infatuation with these animals—and while I like visiting cats in the homes of my friends, I have never kept a cat as a pet. I do love the poem by Christopher Smart (probably for all the same reasons that Smart loves his cat)—since the rhapsodies of the poem partake of the same feline traits as the cat itself. I also like teaching the poem in classes on the avant-garde, contrasting "To My Cat Geoffrey" with poems like "To a Locomotive" by Walt Whitman and "Grid Erectile" by Christopher Dewdney, both of which list a series of rationales for writing about the adored object, using incantatory repetitions of a causal phrase. I suppose that I have to ask why you have not in turn commented upon the ailurophilia of T. S. Eliot, whose work, by comparison, seems like a travesty of Smart…. While I am probably a “cat-person” rather than a “dog-person” myself, I have never fully understood the infatuation with these animals—and while I like visiting cats in the homes of my friends, I have never kept a cat as a pet.
I do love the poem by Christopher Smart (probably for all the same reasons that Smart loves his cat)—since the rhapsodies of the poem partake of the same feline traits as the cat itself. I also like teaching the poem in classes on the avant-garde, contrasting “To My Cat Geoffrey” with poems like “To a Locomotive” by Walt Whitman and “Grid Erectile” by Christopher Dewdney, both of which list a series of rationales for writing about the adored object, using incantatory repetitions of a causal phrase.
I suppose that I have to ask why you have not in turn commented upon the ailurophilia of T. S. Eliot, whose work, by comparison, seems like a travesty of Smart….

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