For God's sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.

I love that line.

Okay, so instead of reading Milton and Coleridge and the like, I've been watching Woody Allen movies. But those are classics, too. (Some of them, anyway.)

What I like most about Allen's best films is that they present such an idiosyncratically complete version of reality. Films such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors feel as if Allen somehow transferred his soul directly onto celluloid. (Whether or not they really do express the "real" Woody Allen is irrelevant; more important is that they seem to.) The women, the doomed relationships, the jokes, the jazz, the New York intellectuals, and just New York generally: these things all combine so perfectly that I just envy the hell out of Allen for being able to make art that way.

This is what makes an artist great: s/he (re)creates a reality that reflects the essence of his/her personality. This is as true for poetry as for film: When I read Blake, for instance, I am allowed to live in the world as Blake saw it. This is appealing because it's the reflection not of the everyday, confused, ordinary personality, but of an intensified, essentialized personality; it's the reflection of how it feels to be fully aware, fully focused, and fully alive. No doubt William Blake shuffled about in an ordinary, confused state most of the time, as do we all. But sometimes his personality coalesced so as to make possible the reality that we find in his poems and paintings. All that he thought and felt and obsessed over came together in the work. This appeals, I think, because we all want to tap into the equivalent intensification of our own selves. Once we know what this feels like from experiencing great art, we have a better chance of coalescing this way ourselves. And then one's whole experience of reality changes, if only temporarily, because the world we see is the world we are.

Also, I like the specific milieu of Allen's films. I like the humor, and I like the intellectually pretentious characters. I think I may be a Woody Allen character, or maybe I aspire to be one. He has a brilliant short story called "The Whore of Mensa," about a call-girl service that provides beautiful women who, instead of having sex with their customers, have conversations with them about stuff like Dostoevsky or Hegel or the symbolism in Moby-Dick, etc. If such a service were real, I would use it.

I guess part of my interest in Allen's work is a sort of nostalgia for that sort of intellectual culture, in which literature majors actually talked about literature instead of just theory. I'm nostalgic for it, even though I never experienced it when it really existed. I want to think about symbolism and meaning, not all this gender and class crap. I feel kind of betrayed by the current English-dept. climate. But I digress.

I'm still planning to delve deeply into English lit., and as I do so I will try to focus on how the poets in question manage to transfer their essential souls into the writing.