I don't think "bombastic" will ever designate any positive aspects of
style. The Blackmur essays emphasize how poetry in the West has depended
on the wholeness & objectivity of the Greek tradition (Homer, the
tragedians, the philosophers) & the different kind of universality
& objectivity of the Biblical foundations. What you have there over
the centuries, through efforts of different poets in different eras,
are achieved means of expression which integrate the strictly poetic
(aesthetic), with primary & recurrent questions of philosophy & religion.
The achievement of realism, say, as described in Auerbach's _Mimesis_,
has its counterparts in the slow changes of lyric/epic/didactic idioms.
I think this is really one of the deep secrets of style in poetry,
in that, over time, there is a grafting or integration of the aesthetic
& the philosophical as dramatized in the mimesis of experience. This
is where the force of poetry's purpose or role is found, in its
learned capability to articulate these integrations. So that as with
Blackmur you can evaluate poets & poems which somehow fall short
because of shallow roots - a misunderstanding of the true capacities
of style. So you find clever takes on fashionable contemporary
thinkers, but in an idiom so artificial, so removed from ordinary
problems (which are found at one of the magnetized poles of any
philosophy), that the result is glib or unconvincing. One is
left unmoved. Or you find masses of poems which are little dramas
or illustrations of current political debates, but because they
don't know poetry's own deep traditions, the style is flat,
imitative, full of cliches & shallow emotions. Or you have a debate
between "art" & "the academic", or between "spirituality" and
"technological society", but because of light reading & an
ignorance of the Classical-Hebraic foundations, the polemicists
are unaware that most of these issues have already been transmuted
into SONG, into styles & forms which are there to absorb &
learn from & adapt today. When this gets turned into just another
polemical crusade - as it was during the 90s in the US - the point
gets lost - I mean the practical point for writers themselves. It
turns into a pedagogical debate about the great books & different
issues of snobbery & elitism, etc. But the point that gets lost
that us poets should take to heart is that the tradition provides
the very speech, the idioms, of our own poetry - the good food.
It's the very "breath of another" Graham sees in that lamp.
What I'm saying is, I guess, if you explore deep enough, there's
a fused objectivity, an integration ALREADY THERE, between the
"lyrical" & the "philosophical", between speech as art (Homer,
Sophocles) & thought as intellectual light. That's the kind of
standard of clarity that I think might move poetry beyond those
enormous shadows of the early modernists toward something
new, equal to their achievements.
Henry
>Does that cover the base or have I missed some other senses of
>"philosophical" poetry that have emerged, or should? (Besides "bombastic," I
>mean, although that could well designate some largeness or loftiness of tone
>or perspective that's not necessarily all bad.) The issue of intellectuality
>seems a necessary condition but not one to be conflated with
>intelligence--and certainly not at the expense of the lyric, any more than
>the conventional imagism or intense feeling associated with lyric poems
>should or would be denied those we call philosophical--right?
>and more of it too, but I have just come across a selection of poems from
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