This is such a wearisome subject because a bone so much worried at but as
far contemporary Britain is concerned the underlying agenda in this as a
cultural debate in poetry is nothing but the simply political. The modernism
of Eliotics or the New Critics was assimilable because of its fundamental
reactionary conservatism. Likewise, the popularity of poet such as Shelley
with former generations of the General Reader had to be dismantled. But, the
spread of avant-gardiste tendencies among the Great Unwashed in the Forties,
Sixties and Nineties beyond the bounds of the Taught and Canonical required
the Happy Few to re-conscript the General Reader in the sacred British cause
of suppressing thought in the name of common sense for the simple and
unmentionable reason that in Britain all power derives from the acceptance
of a total irrationality, the existence at the heart of things the Crown,
the madness of an hereditary monarchy. Moral or Physical outspokeness are
allowed by the traditional parameters of British society but
Intellect-you-all analysis must never wander too far from the confines of
Professorial rooms in Cambridge. I mean, it's ok in astro-physics, on
Lucasian Chairs, because that's pure mysticism. And visual Art is useful in
Advertising designs and modern music makes good sound tracks for horror
films but we mustn't have thought getting too close to the Common Noun or
Verb in the Street.
So people like Gioia or most of all the Laureate of the Official Cult of
Private Misery, Larkin, whose politics were no aberration, are taken up as
Guardian Devils. I'm not saying for a moment that all poetry is necessarily
political, there are things far more important, beyond all this fiddle, but
it's cultural reception in Britain at least in recent years has been nothing
but that.
And that at least is as brutally simple as that.
Vivat Regina. Long live Firebox. Invite me to your parties, particularly
nice ones full of interesting people.
>From a loyal Subject of the Active Verb of the Royal Noun.
Zadek the Priest, whoops, I mean
David Bircumshaw
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