{"id":70,"date":"2016-06-24T10:35:53","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T14:35:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/?p=70"},"modified":"2021-10-28T20:40:14","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T00:40:14","slug":"the-feeling-of-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/the-feeling-of-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"The Feeling of Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>By putting \u201cFeeling\u201d next to \u201cFreedom,\u201d I hope to emphasize a few points: <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In one sense, \u201cfeeling\u201d implies that freedom is often a kind of illusion. As\u00a0<\/span>William Butler Yeats<span> writes in <\/span>&#8220;Adam\u2019s Curse&#8221;<span>: \u201cI said, \u2018A line may take us hours, may be, \/ Yet if it doesn\u2019t seem a moment\u2019s thought, our stitching and unstitching has been nought.\u2019\u201d This is a familiar idea\u2014the virtuoso in basketball, or stand-up comedy, or dance, can \u201cmake it look easy\u201d as the result of much work and practice.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In a different way, though, \u201cFeeling\u201d emphasizes exhilaration beyond mere expertise: that rare thrill of feeling liberated. The great Italian writer Primo Levi, confined in a concentration camp, writes about the value of his memorized lines by Dante Alighieri, their importance to him and to others enslaved there. Though the chapter proposes that for a poet the opposite of freedom might be feeling blocked, unable to write, there is also the simpler opposite of tyranny. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>More directly, I hope this chapter will convey an unlimited range of possibilities.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By putting \u201cFeeling\u201d next to \u201cFreedom,\u201d I hope to emphasize a few points: In one sense, \u201cfeeling\u201d implies that freedom is often a kind of illusion. As\u00a0William Butler Yeats writes in &#8220;Adam\u2019s Curse&#8221;: \u201cI said, \u2018A line may take us hours, may be, \/ Yet if it doesn\u2019t seem a moment\u2019s thought, our stitching and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}