On the ideology of the sonnet considered as a form of ‘verbally materialized social psychology’, given Valentin Nikolaevič Vološinov’s methodological prerequisites that 1) Ideology may not be divorced from the material reality of the sign; 2) The sign may not be divorced from the concrete forms of social intercourse; and 3) Communication and the forms of communication may not be divorced from the material basis (with the addition of footnotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson)
the matter of the sonnet muttered metered matter
material of language innerest of wood
timber con-struere forest matter mater
lectionis lex ferenda lex ferita pointing toward
absent vowel (spirare) רוח חיים as רוח ממללא
vowel verba as social practice volant
scripta source and manent mater mamelle-law
maynage of ink and parchment voice & whole
anterior to ψυχή notaio’s practice
sicilianu→toscano материальная часть court
sum of interrelations banking commerce facticity
de’ Medici→Biblioteca Laurenziana purport
familychurchstate :: in/ob/de/con{struction
creazione storica ממללא materielle Produktion
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1 All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet; therefore, we value the poet.
2 Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.
3 The difficulty of the present sonnet consists in Racher’s regrettable decision to include various quotations in their original languages. I shall endeavor to present their meanings where these are not clear to the average reader, and, where possible, their sources as an aid to the scholar.
4 The phrase is taken from Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus VI, and translates as “We have the eye of the spirit free, unimpeded, and full of light."
5 Of the origins of the sonnet, we can say, in the words of The Right Reverend George Berkeley, that “it arrives on the scene inseparable from the material practices of the ideological state apparatuses, and is itself as a notion a theatre of contending ideological interests.”
6 The phrase is an expression in the Old Church Slavonic, and is a central term in the mystical theology of Pavel Florensky. The term represents a unification of the notions of φιλία (friendship) and ἀγάπη (universal love) in the divine process of ἀδελφοποίησις.
7 Racher has taken this Italian expression from Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetica in nuce. In English it says that “it cannot be said that poetry is sentiment or image or the sum of the two, but ‘contemplation of sentiment,’ or ‘lyric intuition’ or (which is the same) ‘pure intuition,’ inasmuch as it is pure of every historical and critical reference to the reality or unreality of the images of which it is woven, and gathers the pure palpitation of the life of its ideality.”
8 The German here comes from Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, and roughly translates as, “Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic. For matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. There is a total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.” In both content and form, this poem is an epitome of Racher’s art, insofar as it fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade.
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