Haunting Nick Drake – Meta criticism

There are various ways of writing about a musician’s achievement. One is a simple narrative about any personal connections – together with visual memorabilia to try to recreate the atmosphere in which some of their work was done:

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/meetingnick.html

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/robinfrederick.html

Another is in terms of how such connections and context might suggest sources for the work:

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/jazzin1.html

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/boyce3.html

Or again you can try to show how the work creates its effects:

http://www.robinfrederick.com/nd1.html

http://www.robinfrederick.com/nd2.html

http://www.robinfrederick.com/nd3.html

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/poorboy.html

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/RM&ATC.html

http://www.andrewkeeling.ukf.net/NickDrakeAnalyses.htm

The better the work the more endless this process of explication becomes and the more profound the different frameworks that you can use for this purpose. Indeed with truly great artists this process never stops.

You can try to understand the personality of the artist in the work:

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/boyce.html

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/boyce2.html

The greater the artist the more elusive their personality often becomes.

Or you can try to find the artist in the different ways the work is interpreted

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/tribute1.html

Finally its possible to imaginatively project an interpretation of the work on a grander scale:

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/tonyreif.html

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/exiled.html

One word for this last endeavour is “haunting” and has been best explicated in Jacqueline Rose’s book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.

The disruption of the lyric voice in the last part of the 20th century may mean that all serious interpretation of profound lyric writing may involve haunting. A ghost identity needs to be invoked in order to provide the stability which in earlier ages the poet’s identity was able to provide. For the next few decades the greatest artists may be those who most effectively collude with our haunting.