Update & DeBury Assignment Example

Yesterday was a great start! I've put in a request to fix the projector, so it shouldn't be a problem. I've also included a link the the English translation of the Philobiblon. See the orignal post, now revised.

The blog, as you can see to the right of the screen, now has an email subscription link. You should get an email message whenever I post something new. Let me know if this isn't working for you.

I have chosen the 13th chapter of the Philobiblon as an example. Note how I've taken the chapter title verbatim and used it as my title. Note also how no effort was made to write in the style of Richard DeBury. Note also how I am not commenting on DeBury's ideas, but taking them as a starting point for my own thoughts on the subject(s) he writes on. I think it's about 230 words long. I should also say it's a first-draft. I'm sure it needs revision.

"Why We Have Not Wholly Neglected the Fables of the Poets"

Poets, by which term I mean imaginative artists, scientists, and workers of all stripes, have always been condescended to--treated as children--by those who believe in the notion of absolute truth. Poets make things up. They fabricate. Some even say they lie. Though they often live their lives on the margins of society, their posthumous contributions to culture are undeniable. In fact, they are central in ways that make clerics, politicians, lawyers, bankers, and moneymakers so envious that they need to find new ways to disparage poets/poetry/poetics. In my reading, the key word in DeBury's title is "wholly," because it acts as a hinge. Plato was famously (and curiously) wary of poets, and wanted to exclude them from his imagined ideal Republic, the literary construction of which is itself an act of poetry more than philosophy or science. In the past two centuries, we've heard forceful arguments from among many many others, Percy B. Shelley, William Morris, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, defending the centrality of poetry in the quest for a better society. You'll have a hard time finding good poems (works of art) praising war and injustice. Yet, you can find it everywhere in works of law, politics, and even theology. The ability to imagine otherness and to act on this imagination, is the province of the poet and the artist. Today it is as indispensable as ever.