Allen Ginsberg’s lecture on Dharma Poetics continues from here
AG: We have also Herrick on Ben Jonson, his direct teacher. We have (John) Milton’s sonnet on Shakespeare giving … in terms of recognition of who are the inspirers of a sequence of attitudes and approaches to language and mind in poetry. And then we have Shelley invoking Milton, and we have Blake invoking Milton as well. Later on we have (Federico Garcia) Lorca invoking Whitman. And also (Fernando) Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, with his great celebration of Walt Whitman. And in modern (times)…
I think Pat Donegan mentioned that this notion of lineage might be a new Buddhist infusion into Western poetry. But actually it’s an old, old, old story. Repeated in many poems from (William) Dunbar, or earlier than Dunbar on. In present times the lineage that I follow is Kerouac and Snyder as teachers, and Burroughs and then (a) major teacher William Carlos Williams, who picked up from Ezra Pound and were brother teachers and they took off somewhat from Whitman. And Williams goes back to (John) Keats for his appreciation of sensuous-ness, resonance-ness, thing-ness. “No ideas but in things” he gets from Keats, I think.
Of the notion … there is a Buddhist notion of nostalgia for the teacher and there is for that the traditional bard song, the laments or songs of Mermaid Tavern. What’s that song? I don’t have that around but what is it? [Allen is remembering Keats’ “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern”] “Bards of old.“ Do you remember that? There’s a little song by I think … a longing for the Mermaid Tavern where the bards gather together is very similar to the song of “Oh how I wish was (with)] my teacher with the other students and we were all there in the vajra banquet together.”
to be continued