Empire of Idealism conference, Prato, Italy

Palazzo Datini

At the Empire of Idealism conference, organized by the R.G. Collingwood Society, in Prato, Italy, immediately after the ISKCON Studies conference outside Florence, I presented in broad outline my defence of ‘Idealism as Alternative Modernity’, or rather, of a few general aspects of it. With no parallel sessions, the presentations at this conference had to be very short; when I sent my abstract, I didn’t know I had only twenty minutes + ten minutes for questions and discussion; when I learnt this, I had to write another paper than the one I had originally planned. But it seems I managed to communicate some of my main points. Many of the scholars attending I knew well from other idealism conferences over the years. The organizers’ emphasis on Collingwood probably explains why some were missing this time, though (Phillip Ferreira, James Allard, and Leslie Armour, for instance). Although the Collingwoodians have broadened their meetings to include earlier idealism, or, I should say, idealism proper, and the theme of this conference was the spread, and variations, of idealism throughout the British empire, there were still many more specialized Collingwood papers here than at the more general idealism meetings. Prato was chosen because of the Australian Monash University Centre there, the organizers coming from Australia; but we only met at this centre for a drinks reception – the sessions were held in the beautiful Palazzo Datini. Everything, including hotels and restaurants, was conveniently within walking distance  inside the walls of Prato’s medieval historic centre.

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/euros/research/researchcentres/collingwood/newsevents/

conference-2010.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palazzo_Datini.JPG

Gunnar Ekelöf

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Ekel%C3%B6f

This is a poor Wikipedia article. Ekelöf began as an ordinary, wild, young, radical modernist and surrealist, and this early phase was of course quite as much an expression of romanticism as his later development, although in a different version. He was certainly ill at ease with the established upper and middle classes. But Ekelöf’s poetry increasingly expressed the alienation of the artist from the radical, modernist, and rationalist social engineers and ideologues who during his lifetime came to dominate those classes completely.

The quote from Anders Olsson may or may not express a truth about Ekelöf, but perhaps it represents his application of contemporary literary theory rather than any deep, original grasp of Ekelöf’s poetry (I was present when Olsson defended his thesis on Ekelöf at Stockholm University in 1981). The category of “modernist” poetry is often simplistic and misleading, and should perhaps in some respects be questioned.

Much more needs to be said about Ekelöf’s later work; he became in some respects a kind of mystic. His later collections of poems are endlessly fascinating as artefacts. Admittedly, his mysticism is of the distinctly modern, lower romantic, pantheistic, and erotic kind. But it is hard to find mystical poets of not just the last hundred but the last two hundred years who are not, so one has to work from within this predicament, as it were. And in Swedish twentieth-century poetry, Ekelöf is a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gunnar-ekelof.jpg