Dreaming in Canaan

This is a little long for a standalone poem, I agree, but I don't think it's fair to say it doesn't present many ideas/feeling/images. The first three lines alone discuss the question of whether or not the privilege of authorial knowledge bears a causal relationship to (or otherwise supervenes upon) the obligations an author bears towards his or her audience (pay special attention to the placement of the prepositions in these opening lines, the grammatical progression of the threefold self-naming of the narrator in line two, and the general power dynamics of the subjective and objective case, especially in the context of a monologue where every word contributes to the reader's understanding of the narrator's self-image), the image of the simultaneously claustrophobic and near-religious (see the etymology of "adoring" and the homonymous play of the word "mass" in this context) connotations of this dynamic (not to be confused with the fully religious and philosophical questions on the nature of authorship and beauty raised in later lines), raise questions about the presence of teleology in art (note the implicit standards of intentionality introduced by the use of the words "find" and "lies," as well as the overall metaphysical questions raised by the narrator's perceived audience's equivocation between divine and artistic modes of inspiration), and evoke a drastic juxtaposition between personal self-ideation as an individual and as a dissociated social entity (see the distinct choices of when and where the narrator chooses to refer to himself via pronouns, versus his decision to refer to himself via his full social station and occupation, as well as the vast array of implicit images raised by his particular word choices in this regard--to say nothing of the information about himself he deliberately omits). I think there's plenty being expressed here, and I'm a little disheartened to hear it's being overlooked.

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