These poems were initially inspired by my young life in Wiltshire, the landscape of the downs, early interests in natural history, and the New Naturalist books which began publication in 1945. The Jewish-American philosoher Hans Jonas has been an important influence in the first part of the poem. There are also scatterings of short quotation in the tradition of Montaigne, Pound and Williams. Today we might invivoke a Benjamin or indeed closer tohome, Humphrey Jennings as important prose parallels. In Pandemonium, which began with a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Jennings referred to his assemblage of textual quotations as “knots in a great net of tangled space and time.” It was part of his great defence of the poet’s vision, the exercise of the imagination, “an indispensible function of man like work, eating, sleeping, loving.” This book is offered in the same spirit.
“The arioso occupies an intermediate position between recitative and aria…. It is the lest tied to a definite scheme. At times it approaches aria, but it is far more often close to rectative, with which it is frequently united within the same movement as a component part of the conclusion… The accompaniment…is not only as a rule livelier than in recitative but also frequently made up of definitive motives.”
Alfred Dürr The Cantatas of J.S.Bach.
