Different types of novels and novellas, according to John Gardner

Lyrical Nature Prose

Now I'm finding a particular kind of lyrical prose, starting with Virginia Woolf. I'm already familiar with it in poetry, mostly from the Transcendentalists—it's the poetry of nature, and the worship of it. And now I discover Mary Oliver.

She writes incredible nature poetry, and she wrote a handbook for poets, but what really knocks me out is her book of lyrical essays called Upstream.

• Upstream by Mary Oliver—Read Sample

“These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering—I mean remembering in words—what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. The poet used the actual, known event or experience to elucidate the inner, invisible experience—or, in other words, the poet used figurative language, relying for those figures on the natural world.”

—Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

Having copied that over here, it suddenly strikes me that it's a different way of saying what I discovered about the origins of the gods and earlier supernatural beings (like the Titans and the Frost Giants, who came before the gods). They were the forces of nature given human (superhuman) form, and endowed with the appropiate kinds of character traits. In our most primitive beginnings we personified these titanic forces, capable of destroying us on a whim, as gigantic beings made of the forces at who's mercy we live. And then we dreamed more civil, more human figures—the gods—made of the same forces but more like us, and there to protect us from the savage elementals of pure unmediated nature. The gods arrived to help us struggle toward civilization out of the savage cradle of Nature.

“But perhaps you would argue that, since you want to be a contemporary poet, you do not want to be too much under the influence of what is old, attaching to the term the idea that old is old hat—out-of-date. You imagine you should surround yourself with the modern only. It is an error. The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past; but with a difference. Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows it or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired. There is, in other words, nothing new about it. To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air.”

—Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

... And THAT is another way to say "Before you can transcend the rules, you need to know the rules."

Or that "We stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us."