5 facts about flowers in literature

5 facts about flowers in literature

We want to talk about facts about flowers in literature: Classical and comparative perspectives. This is partly a springboard for you, those of you who are doing Classical subjects at A-level in school, and now, perhaps, studying Sappho and lyric poetry in the A-level Love and Relationships segment.

But I'm also reaching out to those of you who maybe are thinking about doing Classics at university, but haven't experienced very much of it, but have other experiences of literature and art, reading more widely, perhaps in English literature particularly.

So what I'm interested in trying to do here is to to try to enact the sense of why experiencing and thinking with texts is fun and life-affirming and enjoyable, and joyful. So I'm interested in helping you read and attend to what literature can do.

Through the experiential joy of what literary texts are and how they make us think things. And so I'm going to be focusing on imagery. The relationship between imagery and experience, but with the particular focus on flowers and the imagery of nature. I'm going to talk you through three texts, two classical ones and one very much non classical one.

And there's a bit of bibliography at the end, and a series of links to the modules that I teach at Warwick, both undergraduate and talk masters levels, as that springboard into helping you understand how reading can broaden your horizons a little bit, and thinking about doing an arts subject at university, particularly Classics. I'm starting from a very much non-classical perspective, from Rita Felski in her book Uses of Literature.

facts about flowers in literature: Rita Felski

We want to talk about facts about flowers in literature with Rita Felski is an English literature professor in North America. She's interested in reflecting, in a contemporary setting, on what literature has to offer, what its powers are, or at least what its claims are. And I think what I want to try to demonstrate today is the way in which the modes of expression of literary texts help you ask questions about it and about yourselves.

So Felski here on page 62 of Uses of Literature says literature seems , and I put that in bold, akin to sorcery in its power to turn absence into presence, to summon up spectral figures out of the void; to conjure images of hallucinatory intensity and vividness, to fashion entire worlds into which the reader is swallowed up. Now for me, what's interesting about this is the sense in which the seeming-ness of literature is important here.

What is special about literature is its ability to make those claims upon you. But also preserve the doubt about the extent to which you can possibly be swallowed up into these entire worlds of experience. Why this is important and interesting to me is it speaks to me as a Classicist because it also speaks to me about my relation to the ancient material; indeed, the ancient worlds which Classical texts and being a Classicist allow me at least a sense of access to.

So thinking with literature helps inform my own and hopefully others impressions of what being a Classicist even might be. So hopefully a sense will emerge from what I'm saying here of the importance of Classics and the importance of reading Classical texts more broadly for its purchase on issues in the the appreciation of art, and texts, much much more widely than than simply about, you know, going to Classics to have all your questions answered about the ancient world.

From my perspective, thinking with ancient texts is about the questions that they can ask us today, not about, you know, dipping into the well of antiquity to find out all the answers to what the ancient world was actually like.

facts about flowers in literature: an amazing bit of Sappho

We want to talk about facts about flowers in literature: So I'm going to start with an amazing bit of Sappho: Sappho fragment 96. Sappho 96 is obviously a fragmentary poem, Incomplete. We don't really know how it how it started or ended. But it s an absolutely extraordinary, fabulous, piece of writing / exposition / composition, in the way it negotiates between two things:

On the one hand - an intensity of interpersonal relationships: talking about other people being like goddesses; the longing, the biting of the mind that someone feels when they remember somebody who isn't with them anymore; that intensity of personal feeling, interpersonal relation.

And, on the other hand - the extraordinary ability of Sappho to enact a sense of detail in the natural world, as, in part, a vehicle for explaining and understanding, helping us to feel the intensity of those interpersonal relationships.

The power of the sense of not only feeling but also loss that comes out in this poem. So we have the sense of remoteness, and now she is conspicuous amongst Lydian women , this woman who is now somewhere else; but the poem makes you think of nature, makes you think of moonlight (moonlight that s Homerically inflected because of the rosy-fingered epithet that is in Homer in the Odyssey famously used of the dawn, not of the moon);

the spread of the light of the moon enacts the feeling of separation but also memory, in a way that all of that light spreading over these fields full of flowers makes all of those all those minute little details as it were come to life be felt, the dew pouring onto roses, and chervil, and sweet clover.

That extraordinary detail, that is enormously evocative and lyrical because of its manipulation of and its ability to somehow figure personal feeling, human personal feeling: that's something that's distinctively, intensely lyrical about how Sappho feels; and how we experience Sappho feeling, Sappho feeling; how we experience lyric poetry as enacting senses of feeling and personhood.

And that's deeply associated in Sappho's poetics (how Sappho's poetry works) through the idea of consolation, and how Sappho's flowers, the imagery of flowers that featured very frequently across Sappho, seem to be about a poetic means of offering consolation. And this comes across in the work of the Classicist Mark Payne, thinking about Sappho's flowers as consolatory.

As he says, cultivating the feeling that one is not at home in the world in the way that flowers and grass or at home in it, is a way of coping with the loss of those features of one's lived experience that make the world feel like home. The natural world in Greek literature and philosophy.

So, across Sappho, the importance of the momentary illumination of flowers, however ephemeral they are, somehow make the idea of human loss more manageable, as a kind of surrogacy.

As I say, flowers and a landscape stand in for or act as, however feeble, surrogates for the things we have lost. And literary texts, especially perhaps lyric ones, enact this surrogacy but also invite reflection upon it. This is one of the ways in which feeling about imagery in Sappho makes a huge difference.

Why that matters is because you can't strip away, you know, the lyric detail, the formal detail of Sappho's lyric poetry, in order to make sense of Sappho. It doesn't make sense, to kind of, you know, read past the imagery to think about what Sappho was really like .

It makes sense to read Sappho through and with the imagery, to understand the kind of experiential complexities that Sappho's poetry is interested in fostering. What I also say here is that literary flowers may also articulate, but mitigate, our own mortal sense of distance: as from the natural, so two from the dead, or departed, and so too by extension, from the ancient and the Classical just coming back to what I said earlier.

And also, and this is not only true of ancient lyric texts, but also true of of much more recent, perhaps lyrically inflected, kinds of writing, is that literary attentiveness to small details and differences in the world can help us understand ourselves as well as our relations to others in the worlds we inhabit, or might wish to inhabit. facts about flowers in literature is continues.

facts about flowers in literature: Virginia Woolf's famous novel The Waves

(So there s that sense in which that wish fulfillment is Is something that makes literature always about desire of whatever kind.) We want to talk about facts about flowers in literature: So here s my my swift reference across to a very different kind of text. This is a piece from Virginia Woolf's famous novel The Waves, written in 1931. You don't need to know anything about The Waves, particularly, in order to understand what's going on in this passage/excerpt that I've provided here.

What I will say is that this novel is distinctive because of the disjunctive way it's written. It offers reflections on six different characters, fictional characters, in the novel, but those six each have different kinds of experiences as articulated in the narrative, but the characters are interspersed with a sequence of natural reflections marked as set apart in the novel from the characters experiences by Italicization and setting out from the narrative context.

Here we have, across this couple of pages of Woolf s novel, an intensity of detail. The birds feeding in the garden, in those first two paragraphs: enacting a range of different kinds of experience, the way the text is able to invite us to think about how the birds experience their world;

and then it moves into thinking about how the light of the sun effects the imagined experience of a room illuminated by the light coming through a window. And it focuses on a flower. The real flower on the windowsill was attended by a phantom flower, yet the phantom was part of the flower for when a bud broke free, the paler flower in the glass opened a bud too.But the parts of this article are:

1. There's a sense here of multiplicity

2. one of the reasons why Woolf's novel is so famous

facts about flowers in literature: There's a sense here of multiplicity

There's a sense here of multiplicity, experiential multiplicity: enacted first through the imagery. Then we get, immediately after this, the move back into the the fictional setup of the novel and its offering of the viewpoints of different characters.

And here one of the main characters, Bernard, talks about his life at college, talks about complexity; and the experience and understanding of who he is as a person becomes multiplied, multiplicitous. The novel as a whole through the experience of characters like Bernard and the experience of those sections of natural imagery, gets us to think about human consciousness as a multiplicitous, dynamic thing. facts about flowers in literature is continues.

facts about flowers in literature: one of the reasons why Woolf's novel is so famous

And I think one of the reasons why Woolf's novel is so famous and so important in the history of literature is because it's so attuned to the kind of basic questions and basic issues that literature offers up for us and allows us to comprehend and involve ourselves in:

in a sense, the invitation to consider the dynamics of personal experience, and what it is to be related to other people. For me this is important and useful because it gets us to think about time. It gets us to think about the use of imagery to negotiate temporal distance.

it gets us again, with Felski, to at least ponder on the extent to which we can access worlds across time and space - that for me as a Classicist, Classical texts seem to dangle in front of us. My final example is from another piece of Greek lyric poetry. This is an excerpt, actually quite an extensive excerpt, from a short poem by Pindar, celebrating a victory in the Olympic Games. facts about flowers in literature is continues.

facts about flowers in literature: Pindar

We want to talk about facts about flowers in literature with Pindar. Pindar is one of the most famous and distinctive voices from all antiquity. He's, along with Sappho, the most famous of all the Greek lyric poets. He's most celebrated as a composer of victory odes for people who won athletic and other kinds of contests at the major festivals of the 5th century BC.

What matters to me about Pindar here, in a way that, frankly, is often overlooked (for those who who look to Pindar for historical knowledge about athletics and sport and religion and all the rest of it is) is that what matters to Pindar is imagery and experience.

In order to celebrate and make his, you know, the moment of success that he's celebrating, have any purchase, Pindar opens his poem out to a full, a much fuller range of human experience and human attitude and human feeling. And he does this through imagery.

Partly through this extraordinary opening. Sometimes people need the winds; at other times, waters from the heavens, rainy children of the clouds. Setting out a kind of implicit contemplation of nature, as a vehicle, as a means, to open up the poem into the specific moments of success and the importance of celebrating that, the joy of celebrating individual achievement, especially for Olympic victors.

It's interesting how human flourishing, human joy of success, then itself becomes attracted into that original natural imagery: It is through a God s favour that a man blooms in wise understanding, as in all things. So the the song that Pindar is writing here to adorn, and celebrate, and be an addition to, the golden olive crown of victory that Hagesidamos of Western Lokroi has won in 476 BC., preserves, beyond the ephemerality of any kind historical means of celebration and the trappings of success, a kind of feeling of experience.

Pandora is interested in exposing, exploring, and opening out the sense of what a victory can mean, what a specific moment of success can mean. By allowing us to investigate and question our own complicity in that experience as part of what it is to be a human being, across the full range of human experience of the world, from the opening of the poem onwards.

Sometimes people need the winds the most; other times waters from the heavens: sailors; gardeners: we need rain. Yes, we do sometimes need rain perhaps not like right now, in May 2021, but there we are! OK, so that's that's just me chatting to you about the range of kinds of things that ancient lyric texts can get you to think with through imagery.

But also, you know, part of what it is to be involved in thinking with literary texts at all, across time and space. So there's a a page of references here: some of my own work on lyric poetry; the translations: some of the translations I've referenced here; but also kind of a gesture towards comparative literature too with thinking about modernist fiction and Virginia Woolf.

And finally, just a quick slide on the modules that I teach at Warwick currently: So I teach bits of the first year Greek culture and Society module which introduces students, of whatever range of experience of Classics previously, to a full range of issues across politics, society, religion, literature - all kinds, all kinds of different things as a first year module.

I have two specific 2nd-year / 3rd-year honours modules on my own research interests: so a module on Greek lyric poetry; but also thinking about the politics of literature in archaic and classical Greece, again including comparative literary perspectives.

I teach advanced-level ancient Greek language in the department, through the Greek literary text module for students some of whom come to the department with A-level Greek and also to others.

And I'm also very much interested and involved in the teaching of our talk Masters program as the co-convenor of our new Ancient literature and Thought degree, which is fabulous: a very contemporary course, cutting edge in all the right ways for thinking about what Classics can do to you, do for you. OK. I will stop there. Many thanks indeed.you can read more about facts about flowers in literature Here. and also you can watch more about facts about flowers in literature: