Monday, November 12, 2012
Southey's footnotes
Seriously. There are pages in this poem that have a single line of actual content, and the footnotes take up the rest of the page in small print. As someone who loves putting things in context, I enjoy and hate this. It reminded me of Darwin's Loves of the Plants, the footnotes in some cases taking up more than the actual poem. A simple reference could have sufficed, or at least added these additions to the end. Instead, the reader is drawn back and forth in a weird pulling motion between Southey's actual poem and his footnotes. I suppose one could read the poem first, then revisit the footnotes later, but I feel like this method is not effective for reading poetry. Poetry and footnotes should complement each other, not fight for page space.
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Maybe there is some displacement that we are supposed to feel as does the boy and his mother as the veil on the city is lifted and they move from being in a desolate desert to a sumptuous palace? Just a thought :)
ReplyDeleteAfter researching Southey for our presentation, I'm a little skeptical of the guy. I think he may have been fanatical/crazed, so the ridiculous footnotes don't surprise me.
ReplyDeleteI hated the footnotes! I feel like I would figure out my pattern for reading the poem and then have to go on a totally different tangent with the footnote. The fact that footnote information had to carry over to the next page was insane. I agree that they should be read together, but I had to do a reading of the poem all the way through first, simply to finish the poem and try to grasp the proposed thoughts. I wish those kinds of comments had been placed elsewhere, I didn't immediately need the information to finish reading the poem
ReplyDeleteI hated the footnotes too. At least Darwin's footnotes explained his poem better. Southey just seemed to repeat himself over and over again.
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