Taking Back our Bodies: Women and Sexual Freedom

After choosing to go about this British Literature course in an unconventional, in all actuality, a random way, starting with Jane Austen and the Victorians and moving to Hardy and then back to Chaucer, Aphra Behn and finally Defoe, I am surprised at how little the order mattered. Usually when reading in chronological order there is a desire to find some sort of progression of ideas, but this crazy circle actually showed me the falsity of this assumption.  I was especially surprised at how views of women’s freedom and sexuality seemed to regress with time instead of progress from the 14^th century to the 19^th century.   Of course I knew the Victorians had a big hand in forcing women into the domestic sphere, making them ornamental in nature, forbidding them their sexuality, and making them completely helpless without a husband, but the arrangement of these texts reminded me that there were those before the Victorians and in spite of the Victorians, who envisioned a world where women had more power than that of simply a household ornament.  In fact if I look at these texts in chronological order—Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (1386?), Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Austen’s Persuasion (1817), and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), life for women seems to get progressively worse. 

In “The Wife of Bath,” Chaucer portrays a woman who has been married five times and is confident in her sexuality and boasts of her control over men.  Chaucer describes her in the general prologue:

 “Gat-tooth’d (gap-toothed) was she, smoothly (truly) for to say.

Upon an ambler (slow horse ) easily she sat                             

Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat

As broad as is a buckler or a targe (kinds of shield)

A foot mantle about her hippes large” (lines 468-472)

The gapped tooth, the large hat, and the large hips all suggest a sexual appetite that she describes later in her own prologue in statements like: “And many a saint, since that this world began,/Yet lived they ever in perfect chastity./ I n’ill envy no virginity./ Let them be bread of pur’d wheat’ seed,/ And let us wiv’s hot’n barley bread” (140-44); and “In wifehood will I use mine instrument/ As freely as my Maker has it sent” (149-50). A few lines later she boasts of her power over her husbands: “Upon his flesh while that I am his wife./I have the power during all my life/Upon his proper body, and not he” (157-9). She even describes one husband who is an anti-feminist and likes to read a book about “wicked wives” (684) with examples from Roman stories and the Bible. However, she even takes on this husband. She tears up his book; he hits her; she makes him feel bad; he feels bad; he gives her control of the household and stops reading the book. After this long prologue about all of her husbands, she finally launches into her story about a knight and his punishment for rape, which consists of searching for the answer to the question, “what women most desire.”  The answer he discovers is that “Women desiren to have sovereignty/ As well over their husband as their love” (1038-9). So, the story supports the Wife of Bath’s real life story in her prologue, and reinforces her belief that women should have mastery over their own lives and their husbands. 

            Next in Oroonoko, although Behn does not portray a woman with the degree of dominance that “The Wife of Bath” has, she still portrays a woman in Imoinda who has a romantic power over the hero, Oroonoko. Although Imoinda’s qualities consist of beauty, gentleness, modesty, and sweetness—qualities that seem to undermine feminine power, Behn does not allow these qualities to totally diminish Imoinda’s power because Oroonoko, the male “hero,” values these qualities to the extent that his love for her drives the action of the story.  However, despite this power over Oroonoko, Imoinda is more a type—a romantic heroine—as opposed to a woman who’s power can be translated to real life.  Even as a powerful romantic heroine who fights bravely by Oroonoko in the slave rebellion, her power is ultimately limited to the romantic and the erotic. Her body is her only power, and she relinquishes this power by giving her body to Oroonoko to kill rather than risk living without him and having someone else take control of her body. So, in Oroonoko, the female protagonist loses some of the power over her own body that the “Wife of Bath” seems to have had 300 years earlier.

            However, Imoinda is not the only important female character in Oroonoko. The story is told in first person from the point of view of Aphra Behn herself.  Behn’s real life is in many ways much more heroic than her idealized romantic Imoinda.  Behn is the first professional female author—that is she provided for herself through her writing, not through her husband. While the name Behn came from her husband, his death provided the desperate circumstances which led her to writing.  Little is known about her life besides this marriage and death to a man named Behn, a short stint as a government secret agent, a near brush with debtors’ prison, a relationship with a libertine lawyer named John Hayle, and, of course, her success as a playwright and author.  Although short, this biography suggests that Behn had more control and independence than her romantic character Imoinda.  As narrator of Oroonoko, she brings to light the question of the female narrative voice and a woman’s role as writer.  As the narrator, Behn even questions her own authority as a writer in a male dominated profession. She says that it is Oroonoko’s “misfortune to fall into an obscure world that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame” (940). However, she goes on to mention men that could have written about him, but failed to do so, indicating that the view of those that believe a male pen could have done better is futile because her voice is the only authority here.  At the end of Oroonoko, she mentions her role as writer again with a similar humility but with more confidence that she is as equal to the task as any man:

“Thus died the great man, worthy of a better fate, and a more sublime wit than mine to write his praise; yet, I hope, the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda” (962).

The fact that she mentions “the reputation” of her pen suggests that she sees herself as a writer worthy of recognition, and the fact that she ends with Imoinda’s name suggests that the women are really the heroes of this story. 

            Another female character writing her own history is found in Defoe’s Moll Flanders.  Moll’s unconventionality, her belief that a gentlewoman means providing for oneself, her “bawdiness,” and her independence seem to echo the life of the real Aphra Behn. However, unlike Behn, Moll’s voice is not truly her own, it is Defoe’s voice. Defoe makes sure to point this out in the author’s preface where he even mentions “that the original of this story is put into new words…particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words than she told it at first.” In this statement, Defoe suggests that Moll is different from the ideal woman who is modest, submissive to her husband, and dependent. She is immodest, assertive, and independent, yet her life warrants telling despite these undesirable feminine qualities. Defoe tries to pretend that this story is didactic, but the fact that Moll doesn’t die tragically or suffer permanent damnation means that this story doesn’t exactly strike fear into all of those immodest women out there.  In fact, since the story is told from Moll’s point of view, the reader is sympathetic to Moll’s reasoning and sees her troubles as a result of problems with society not her own morality. The novel ultimately seems to be a critique on the economy rather than morality—specifically the lack of economic means for women to make money.  Moll, like the Wife of Bath, seems to make finding husbands her profession, but, unlike the Wife of Bath, she is not as successful at it and turns to theft to support herself.  Also, the Wife of Bath doesn’t have to go through censorship to tell her story like Defoe claims Moll has to go through, which suggests that a woman like Moll is not capable of telling a her story in her own voice without the help of a man like Defoe. This loss of a true female voice to the censorship enforced by a patriarchal society seems to regress from the openness of the Wife of Bath’s voice and the authority of Aphra Behn’s voice.

            Just as Aphra Behn was concerned about her authority and reputation as a female writer in a male world, 95 years later Jane Austen struggles with the same concern.  In Persuasion, through her female protagonist, Anne, Austen grapples with how to express herself in a persuasive manner as a writer and as a woman in a world dominated by masculine views of mind and character.  While Persuasion is not necessarily a regression from Oroonoko and Austen’s authorial voice is not a regression from Behn’s voice, the fact that the struggle for an equal female voice continues almost 100 years later is discouraging to the hope of progress for women.

            This discouragement at what society has done to women’s freedom of voice and body culminates in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  Tess is doomed from the beginning as a poor woman in the 19^th century.  She has a tragic nobility about her similar to Imoinda in Oroonoko in her acceptance of her fate for the one she loves.  She is just as much of a slave to the white man as Imoinda. Tess’s body is seen only as an object of desire, and the ownership of her body is taken from her by Alex near the beginning of the novel.  From that point on her fate is not her own because she knows she lives in a world where women are valued only for their economic worth and their virginity. Tess could be like Moll and not worry about morality and choose to live by whatever means possible to support herself. She could boast about her sexuality like the Wife of Bath, or she could try harder than she already does to persuade Angel to value her despite her loss of virginity. However, she doesn’t seem to have Anne’s voice, Moll’s control, or the Wife of Bath’s confidence.  She is closer to Imoinda in character than any of the other women in the novels I read, but she doesn’t even have the ability to drive Angel’s actions in the way that Imoinda is able to drive Oroonoko’s actions. She also does not even have control over her body in death. Imoinda chooses to die by her lover’s hand in order to save her body from future violation. Tess, on the other hand, sacrifices herself for Angel, not for her own body, which has already been violated and controlled by Alex. In her one act of control, Tess kills Alex to revenge herself for the life he took from her, but that control is short-lived because the laws of society soon condemn her to death.

            It is interesting that whether it is the 14^th century or the 19^th century, the women who choose to live outside the moral construction of society seem to have the most control over their lives. However, even those women, like Moll and the Wife of Bath, are limited to control in the realm of marriage.  All of the female protagonists mentioned are only seen as successful if they manage to marry or at least get the respect of a man. They are defined by how men view them, and the appearance of a regression in women’s freedom and control from Chaucer to Hardy could be attributed to a change in men’s view of women. Tess has to live in a world where men idealize women to the point that they have no room to be human. Imoinda is similarly idealized, but so is Oroonoko, which makes her idealization as a woman less profound. The only reason that Oroonoko seems more progressive than Tess is because of the knowledge of Aphra Behn’s life, which seems like one that characters like Tess could only dream of. 

            I guess the point of this discussion is the realization of how important sexual freedom and perceptions of morality are to the amount of control women have over their lives.  The more“civilized” society seems to become, the more moral restrictions the leaders of that civilization (men) seem to place on those they wish to control.  This is not to say that women are or should be immoral, but that morality is sometimes falsely and unequally constructed to benefit some and control others, which in the past has served to benefit men and control women.  Hopefully since the 1950’s, we have finally begun a linear progression for women’s rights that will not return to the ideas about women established in the Victorian age that limited their worth to virginal bodies mounted on pedestals of false morality.

Thomas Hardy, Tess, and the Beginning of a New Era

I had heard from various English professors about how depressing and sad Thomas Hardy’s novels are with various quips like “everyone gets married in Austen and everyone dies in Hardy.”  After reading Tess of The D’Ubervilles, I didn’t feel that sad or depressed. It seemed less like a tragedy than an inevitable resolution to a situation.  Besides the fact that she is in a Hardy novel, which I was told could not end well, Tess is a woman in the 19^th century—a poor woman in the 19^th century—a woman who loses her virginity in the 19^th century. It couldn’t be good.  While reading Tess I certainly felt depressed as I was forced to watch her slow and painful journey towards death, but after reading the last few pages where Angel and Liza-Lu watch Tess’s hanging from a distance and a few sentences later they simply walk on to continue their lives, I find myself as the reader easily moving on as well.  This insensitiveness to Tess’s death is something I believe Hardy wants us to feel.  Yes, we were enveloped in her individual story for 400 pages or so, but in the end, just as we suspected, she died just as we all will.

Even Tess realizes that her story is not unique. When Angel offers to teach her some history, Tess replies: “Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I already know…Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all” (Oxford World Classic 2005 edition, 142). In fact throughout the novel we are reminded of the story of Adam and Eve.  Tess, undoubtedly is Eve as she falls victim to Alec’s devices in the woods, and Alec is undoubtedly the devil who openly admits that he is bad and is even seen holding a pitchfork at one point.  Angel is, of course, and an angelic figure of good, who Tess ultimately cannot be with because of her sin with Alec.  It is not that simple, however. Angel is also an Adam figure at one point in a Garden of Eden setting at Talbothay’s with what he believes to be an innocent Eve. So, in a way, Tess gets a second chance at Eden, but that second chance is doomed to fail.

Tess is too human, and not enough of the spiritual ideal Angel wants to see in her. Even when Angel comes down off his cloud after going to Brazil and loves Tess in the flesh, Tess knows that her happiness with him cannot last because she knows, just as the reader knows, that she is doomed from the beginning.  Waking up from the altar at Stonehenge where she has been sleeping, she says to Angel when the police come to take her away: “Angel—I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted—it was too much—I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me” (418).  Her sense that her happiness could not last seems tied to the Christian idea of original sin. She was a sinner from the beginning, even if she did not choose that fate. Worse, in a Puritan sense, she is a sinner who is not one of the elect as the natural signs around her have suggested throughout the novel.  More interestingly the novel is filled with pagan images in relation to Tess like the stone pillar at “Cross-in-Hand” that Alec makes her swear never to tempt him again and Stonehenge where she falls asleep on the altar that was once used for sacrifices, suggesting that Tess was never a part of the Christian world. 

 It seems that Tess is more of the flesh and blood of the natural world rather than the spiritual world. She is tied to the land throughout the novel. Hardy often points to Tess’s realization that Nature and Society are in conflict with one another. When Tess wakes up from her night in the leaves hiding from the man on the road (who turns out to be farmer Groby), she finds a bunch of birds who have been wounded by hunters and died in the night.  Hardy says, “she was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature” (298). Tess had been lamenting her lonely and unjust separation from Angel, but seeing the actual death of these birds she realizes her sorrow is a false construction. Nature in this sense is the cycle of living and dying—physical existence. Tess realizes her sorrow is an artificial one because it would not exist without society. Even Tess’s own nature as a woman is constructed by both Angel, who sees in her an idealized pureness related to nature, and Alec, who sees her only in her physical and sexual nature. Tess is trapped by both of these views of her nature, which ultimately kill her just as the birds are killed unnaturally by hunters. 

The result of this conflict between the real physical reality of Nature and the artificial societal construction of Nature for Tess is that she often combines the two, so that physical Nature reflects the artificial Nature of her social condemnation. For example, after secretly listening to Angel play his harp in the garden (a natural and realistic garden of Eden in its imperfection as Hardy describes it as “rank” with “weeds emitting offensive smells” but “dazzling as that of cultivated flowers” all the same) he discovers her as she begins to retreat and asks her if she is afraid. She replies that she is not afraid of “outdoor things” but “life in general” (139). He asks her “how is it” that she thinks so, and she replies:

“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says ‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?” And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and the clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me!” (140).

Tess’s pessimistic reading of Nature as a reflection of the human condition has what Angel refers to as “the ache of modernism” (140).  He is surprised to find such ideas in a milkmaid, but “the perception arrested him less when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by words in –logy and –ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries” (140).           

This concept of ideas existing in the human subconscious for centuries until they are “realized” and defined goes back to the idea of cycles that Hardy hints at in the ending when Liza-lu and Angel walk on after Tess’s death to continue a new cycle. Other writers of the period, like William Butler Yeats, express the same sense of the cyclical nature of life and some sort of universal subconscious, which Yeats calls the “Spiritus Mundi,” which connects all people past and present.  In his poem “The Second Coming,” Yeats debunks the Christian idea that the second coming of Christ will end the world. Instead the “second coming” is merely the end of one cycle of life and the beginning of another.  In this sense of life, Tess’s death may not seem as tragic because it does not mean much in the relation to these endless cycles. On the other hand, Tess’s death is even more tragic because it means that others will have the same fate in future never ending cycles.          

This idea of never ending cycles is reminiscent of Eastern philosophy found in Hinduism and Buddhism of samsara—the endless and meaningless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that humans must overcome.  In the Hindu sense, Yeats’s idea of the “Spiritus Mundi,” is related to the idea of the Atman—the ultimate reality underlying all humanity. In Buddhist terms, this would also be something similar to Nirvana.  Both require enlightenment, which comes from breaking through some illusion of reality in order to escape the endless cycles of reincarnation.  In Buddhism, unhappiness comes from suffering, which comes from desire.  All of human life is suffering because there is a nagging sense of incompleteness and the problem of impermanence. Change cannot be controlled as Tess so aptly demonstrates in her tree metaphor.  The cause of this suffering is the desire to fill this gap of incompleteness and to find permanence.  The problem is that nothing is permanent, and the more you gain the more you have to lose, so even when you believe you are happy, you are really unhappy because you know that happiness cannot last. Tess also expresses this feeling when she tells Angel “this happiness could not have lasted” at the end just before the police take her away.  By realizing this impermanence, Tess seems to be released from her suffering. She is “ready” for death; she has given up her desire for life.  I don’t know if this would be considered enlightenment, but Tess’s sense of Nature beyond society, her sense of tragic connection with others like her in the past, and her sense of her own fated impermanence suggests that if Hardy had given her a Buddhist terminology instead of a Christian one, she might have found more peace before death.  

Here are some words of wisdom from the Buddhist text, The Dhammapada: 

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.” 

“But he whose mind is calm self-control is free from the lust of desires, who has risen above good and evil, he is awake and has no fear.” 

“When a man considers this world as a bubble of froth, and as an illusion of an appearance, then the king of death has no power over him.” 

“From passion arises sorrow and from passion arises fear. If a man is free from passion, he is free from fear and sorrow.” 

“There is no fire like lust, and no chains like those of hate. There is no net like illusion, and no rushing torrent like desire.”

Victorian Doilies

Before delving into the Victorian age for probably the third time, the first since high school, I did my best to recall everything I knew about the Victorians. For some reason I could think of nothing else but a big, white, lacy doily. Try as I might, I couldn’t get past that obstinate doily blocking all other images from my mind. Great, doily vision, I thought. I caught a few other Victorian snippets through the doily’s holy façade—some Dickens and Mrs. Havisham (the lace connection helped), a Christmas tree (I made a doily angel for my Victorian Christmas tree in 8^th grade), tea cups (usually placed on a doily), factories (they make doilies), orphans (they don’t have doilies), and prostitutes (I’m sure a doily is involved somehow). This “doily vision” is, of course, not unfounded, and as I began to refresh my memory by actually reading, I realized the source.

The Victorian age came at the time of the Industrial Revolution in England. So, industrial revolution means factories, possibly doily factories employed by orphans, a growing straight-laced middle class who actually want to use doilies for their ornate Christmas trees and tea, and a world of Mrs. Havishams, prostitutes, and other unmarried women who had no proper place without marriage. Yes, the doily does have its point after all as the great symbol of Victorian industrialization and domesticity.

I did get beyond the doily however, and found the Victorians to be much more complex and significant to literature than the lacy doily façade suggests. For example, Tennyson in “The Lotus Eaters” questions the point of humankind’s toiling: “Should Life all labor be?” (line 87). Why should we be miserable our entire lives working away like good workaholics when we could sit back and relax? Tennyson, I think, asks this question partly in reaction to the industrial revolution, and the miserable working conditions that come out of it, and partly in reaction to the questioning of religion in response to Darwin.  Becoming the world’s industrial leader meant paying a huge price in human happiness, and without a solid belief in God, there exists a greater reason to question this sacrifice. So why not become “like Gods together, careless of mankind” (line 155) and rest our heads beside our necter?

Matthew Arnold encountered this same sense of melancholy and longing for a serenity he can’t find in this incongruous world. His poem, “Dover Beach” offers a sense of this feeling:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

This poem is enough to make anyone feel melancholy. Arnold, and whoever his “love” is, seem to be alone in an uncaring world. The individual is reduced to nothingness in the vast universe with little connection to anyone. Even his connection to this “lover,” who never speaks throughout the poem’s monologue offers little comfort to the speaker as the last three lines end in despair:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In his essays, Arnold makes clear that these ignorant armies consist of the middle-class made ignorant by the dullness of their Puritan lives that replaced feeling, emotion, and beauty for order, machines, and false morality.

This Puritan morality, of course, was delegated to the Victorian woman, the “Angel in the House”, whose job was to purify their husbands when they came home after working all day in the immoral world.  The Victorian woman’s place was in the domestic sphere where she became the pure and selfless protector of morality. A woman, who wanted to be respected, had to become a wife. If not a wife, maybe she could become a governess, but her respectability declined slightly.  The rest of the “redundant women” who had no husbands and no money worked in factories, became prostitutes, or lived off of their father or brothers income, as Christina Rossetti did in order to write.  She lived the life of a “Chaste Victorian Spinster,” but as her poems show, this was the societal mask forced upon her. In “Goblin Market,” she reveals the dangers of a woman giving in to her desires.  In the Victorian age a woman was not supposed to have desire of any kind—sexual or not. She had her place in society, and to question that place was to threaten the moral success of society.

So with that said, as a woman, I am so glad that I did not grow up in the mid to late 1800s. While, yes, women have come a long way since the Victorians, I don’t know if we as a society have every fully grown out of our Victorian heritage (imported Victorian heritage since we’re in America). Women still do most of the house work, govern most of the children, and are consumed by the desire to marry. We are also considered “sluts” if we let our desires get the better of us, whereas men are “studs” or “players,” which have a much less negative connotation. The rapid growth of evangelical Christians in America suggests that Americans are not only desirous of a fixed moral structure, but are reacting to the need to have faith in something higher than themselves or risk feeling like Tennyson and Arnold—living pointless, struggling lives alone and forsaken in an uncaring universe.  The opposite, and incongruous aspect to the growing religious culture in America, is the obsessive materialism. The Victorians had knickknacks galore, and we are not different (maybe a little updated—fewer doilies). The Victorians were enthralled with technology, but society today is obsessed. i-Phone, anyone?  

So, needless to day I have one complicated doily image in my head now.

The Ordinary and the Extraordinary

Wordsworth says in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” These feelings, he suggests, are best expressed in the “language really used by men.” The language of ”low and rustic” life, as he calls it, when used to describe incidents and situations from common life, and then thrown over with a little color of imagination and creative presentation are key to uncovering “those elementary feelings” which burst forth in states of excitement. Now I really have no idea what “real” and “common” language Wordsworth is describing here. I don’t really know anyone, except possibly English majors or Romantic enthusiasts, who walk around saying “I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills.” I take his point that poetry about common life, incidents, objects, etc. can be extremely effective in awakening the mind to the beauty of the world around us because it can make the every day supernatural. The emotional response from reading “I wandered lonely as a cloud…when all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of golden daffodils” is much more affective than “I saw some clouds and daffodils on my walk.” 

Coleridge, although good friends with Wordsworth, seems to agree that Wordsworth was trying a little too hard to develop his poetic recipe for success. In Biographia Literaria, Chapter 17, Coleridge objects to Wordsworth’s idea that ”the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life” (Coleridge’s words). He says: “I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word ‘real.’ Every man’s language varies according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man’s language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use.” Coleridge points out an important inconsistency in Wordsworth. In poems such as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth, as characteristic of the Romantic movement, focuses on the individual’s experience and revelation. In his talk about “real” language or “common” language he forgets individuality.

So, why does it matter that Wordsworth makes this blunder? For Coleridge, it meant that Wordsworth was subjecting poetic language, which is anything but common, to the ordinary. In order to discover truth and beauty through pleasure, according to the Romantic tradition, there has to be an extraordinary. It is hard to be excited by the ordinary. The Poet, himself, according to Wordsworth, is “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). If the poet is limited to the common, the ordinary, he or she ceases to be a poet.