Reference Tool: Table of Contents for William Gass's The Tunnel, as Not Provided by the Author

3 LIFE IN A CHAIR
8 Mad Meg in the Maelstrom
15 The Funny Papers
26 In the Funnies
49 KOH WHISTLES UP A WIND
76 Mad Meg in the Maelstrom
96 WE HAVE NOT LIVED THE RIGHT LIFE
107 August Bees
116 Uncle Balt and the Nature of Being
127 Mad Meg
128 The Ghost Folks
130 They Should Live So Long: The Old Folks
146 TODAY I BEGIN TO DIE
156 Culp
214 MAD MEG
219 The Sunday Drive
236 Mad Meg
239 A Fugue
241 In the Army
242 Accusations of Platyhelminthism
243 The Barricade
244 Mad Meg
245 Mad Meg
247 Mad Meg
259 Mad Meg
262 Mad Meg
264 Mad Meg
268 Mad Meg
272 At Death’s Door
282 WHY WINDOWS ARE IMPORTANT TO ME
310 Blackboard
317 Kristallnacht
334 THE FIRST WINTER OF MY MARRIED LIFE
355 Family Album
375 Child Abuse
379 Foreskinned
386 THE CURSE OF COLLEAGUES
386 Planmantee Particularly
396 Planmantee Particularly
399 Governali Goes to Heaven
414 Herschel Honey
427 Scandal in the Schoolroom
437 AROUND THE HOUSE
475 SUSU, I APPROACH YOU IN MY DREAMS
493 Down and Dirty
506 Learning to Drive
522 Being a Bigot
534 GOING TO THE RIVER
534 The Cost of Everything
554 Do Rivers
564 Sweets
583 OUTCAST ON THE MOUNTAINS OF THE HEART
583 Aunts
603 Mother Makes a Cake
615 Blood on the Living Room Rug
632 OUTCAST ON THE MOUNTAINS OF THE HEART

Dana Gioia, The Poet in the Age of Prose

Here is some of Dana Gioia'a The Poet in an Age of Prose from Can Poetry Really Matter, Graywolf, 2002.

Regarding the New Critics: "The older generation of formalists came to maturity during World War II, and their emergence as writers coincided with the postwar period of American cultural ascendance. The intellectual assumptions behind their word reflect the ebullient confidence of America’s new international dominance…they were determined to meet the Old World on equal terms by demonstrating their mastery of its traditional modes of discourse…they assumed—as a central ideological foundation—the reader’s deep familiarity with traditional literature…they wrote poems that displayed their full command of the traditions of English literature, informed and energized by international Modernism…Their word was intellectually demanding, aesthetically self-conscious, emotionally detached, and intricately constructed. Their audience was, by definition, limited to fellow members of the academy’s intellectual and artistic elite." 227

"The New Formalists emerged in less optimistic and assumptive times. They came to maturity in the cultural disintegration of the Vietnam era…What the New Formalists—and their counterparts in music, art, sculpture, and theater—imagined was a new imaginative mode that took the materials of popular art—the accessible genres, the genuinely emotional subject matter, the irreverent humor, the narrative vitality, and the linguistic authenticity—and combined it was the precision, compression, and ambition of high art." 227-8

"The new sensibility also has led to the return of verse narrative, the exploration of popular culture for both forms and subjects, the rejection of avant-garde posturing, the distrust of narrowly autobiographical thematics, the unembarrassed employment of heightened popular speech, and the restoration of direct, unironic emotion. Seen from this perspective, the movement might be more accurately described by the alternative term Expansive poetry. This expression captures the eclectic interests and broad cultural ambitions of the movement." 226

Regarding the specific discomfort of critics with popular culture in New Formalist poetry: "Unlike the actual audiences for popular art, they view it generically in abstract terms—often with an unconscious element of professional condescension…the notion that serious artists would employ popular forms in an unironic, undetached, and apolitical manner leaves these au courant theorists nor merely dumbfounded but embarrassed." 229

A Jonson Sentence

Ben Jonson on the court culture:

"A man lives there, and in that divine rapture, that he will think himself in the ninth heaven for a time, and lose all sense of mortality whatsoever; when he shall behold such glorious (and almost immortal) beauties, hear such angelical and harmonious voices, discourse with such flowing and ambrosian spirits, whose wits are as sudden as lightening, and humorous as nectar; oh: it makes a man all quintessence, and flame, and lifts him up (in a moment) to the very chrystal crown of the sky, where (hovering in the strength of his imagination) he shall behold all the delights of the Hesperides, the insulae fortunatae, Adonis gardens, tempe or what else (confined within the amplest verge of poesie) to be mere umbrae, and imperfect figures, conferred with the most essential felicity of the court."

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Thomas Nashe

from The Terrors of the Night:

A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum of froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations.

You must give a wounded man leave to groan while he is in dressing. Dreaming is no other than groaning, while sleep our surgeon hath us in cure.

A rich man delights in nothing so much as to be uncessantly raking in his treasury, to be turning over his rusty gold every hour. The bones of the dead, the devil counts his cheif treasury, and therefore is he continually raking amongst them; and the rather he doth it, that the living which hear it should be more unwilling to die, insomuch as after death their bones should take no rest.

Tullius Hostilius, who took upon him to conjure up Jove by Numa Pompilius, had no sense to quake and tremble at the wagging and shaking of every leaf but that he thought all leaves are full of worms, and those worms are wicked spirits.

The spirits of the fire which are the purest and perfectest are merry, pleasant, and well-inclined to wit, but nevertheless giddy and unconstant.