Abstract

Verse 1

I put on my bowler hat and my best tweed jacket
And I go to the lecture hall
I'm a stuffy academic at a conference of professors
And I fully mean to rock them all.

I've the notes for my talk and an abstract to boot
Western Literature's the topic today
But there's more! For I compare the subject with thermodynamics
An original perspective, I should say.

Chorus 1

The structure is as follows: I have five main points
And the classics are the focus of the first.
Homer, Virgil, and the Bible, Dante, Chaucer, William Shakespeare
Constitute the mythic works of verse.
This period continues right until the Metaphysicals
The final poets, in my estimation
Who were able both to think a feeling and to a feel a thought
In perfect unity of reason and the passions.

Verse 2

After this, the Restoration is the term which I employ
To connote the writers who came next:
There's Milton and there's Dryden and there's Alexander Pope
And by and large, they drew upon their intellects.

In fact, I argue that this emphasis was rather detrimental
To poetic feeling in their major feats.
To correct this came Romantics such as Coleridge and Shelley
William Wordsworth, Byron, William Blake, and Keats.

Chorus 2

Personal emotions, egotistical sublime
The Romantics thought these notions paramount
But the mind of Europe's more important than one's personal experience
Which is what the Modernists espouse!
No more lofty symbolism or pantheistic pap;
Now we concentrate on dry, hard things.
Perfect balance 'twixt the feeling and refinement of the poem
As the Classics had been wont to write and sing.

Verse 3

Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, and Joyce
And HD bring us to the present time.
But what shall follow after? This is how thermodynamics
Enter into this discussion of mine.

For the laws thereof necessitate the universe entire
Progresses t'ward a state of entropy
A balance, equilibrium through energy dispersion
But unsuitable for life, regrettably.

Chorus 3

So the final state of all existence is cold death
And the primal state is chaos, formless, void.
But in the billion billion years that shall occur betwixt the twain
Is the ideal age, before we're all destroyed.
And the same is true of literature! From early myths to end:
And I wonder, of what shall this end consist?
But for now the better age is here! of World Wars and Imagism,
And one classic Anglo-Catholic monarchist!