Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Parenthetical Citations
- Introduction: A Philosophical Poet (of Ordinary Language)
- The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry
- Chapter 1 The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
- Chapter 2 Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
- Chapter 3 Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 4 Recounting Reverses, Recovering the Initiative: Act II of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 5 The Congregated Powers of Language: Act III of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 6 Resounding Celebrations and Constraining Commissions: Act IV of Prometheus Unbound
- Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Parenthetical Citations
- Introduction: A Philosophical Poet (of Ordinary Language)
- The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry
- Chapter 1 The Everlasting Universe of Things as Shelley Found It in 1816: “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
- Chapter 2 Where Shelley Wrote and What He Wrote for: The Signature of “Ode to the West Wind”
- Chapter 3 Knowing What We Do (With Words): Act I of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 4 Recounting Reverses, Recovering the Initiative: Act II of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 5 The Congregated Powers of Language: Act III of Prometheus Unbound
- Chapter 6 Resounding Celebrations and Constraining Commissions: Act IV of Prometheus Unbound
- Coda: A Voice to Be Accomplished
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Stanley Cavell has repeatedly affirmed that in the example and teaching of John Austin he found his philosophical voice or “the track of it” and that this new-found voice was itself pitched toward “[bringing] the human voice back into philosophy.” Drawn down this path in his philosophical calling, Cavell soon found himself attracted to a body of romantic literature, in the breath of whose being he, in turn, heard an aspiration toward “the recovery of the (of my) (ordinary) (human) voice.” Cavell's “sense that the voice [had] become lost in thought” eventually led to his remarkable contention that the splendors of especially the female voice in opera perform a fervent act of thinking, whose provoking condition is the Emersonian difference between “the world I converse with in the city and the farms…[and] the world I think,” and whose plight is to be “stretched” between the (actual) world from which one is “to be seen” standing amid all our sad circumstance and the other (perfectionist) world “from which to be heard” and “to which one releases or abandons one's spirit.” On the strength of his long investment in the thinking Emerson preaches and practices as an “abandonment of and to language and the world,” Cavell dares to call opera an arena of thoughtful struggle where we “[stop] to think (say not for action but for passion), as if to let our needs recognize what they need,” and where “the most forbearing [and perhaps the “most thoughtful”] act of thinking…is to let true need, say desire be manifest and be obeyed.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Constitution of Shelley's PoetryThe Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound, pp. 241 - 246Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009