I've been reading the new translation of Huizinga's book "Autumn of the
Middle Ages" (known to countless history undergrads as "The Waning of the
Middle Ages"). He writes much about medieval pageantry, the pervasive
"beautification of life" through popular ritual & the dreams of chivalry
& nobility, as a sort of middle path between the modern sense of practical
social progress & the traditional unworldly asceticism of religion.
He talks about how in the late Middle Ages the chivalric forms were
still active but had become very self-conscious & artificial -
elaborate shells of past orders.
Cris's quote here makes me wonder if there is a parallel to the
self-conscious postmodernism so characterized. If doubt is cast
on the purposes of poetry in the culture at large, then artistic forms
might tend to display a solipsistic, ironic artifice as an end in itself.
But the role of the poet has always been to give life to dead letters.
Henry
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