Rebecca:

<<
My point here is that a poem is not really "about" anything, though we use
this way of speaking of it for convenience.
>>

Well, sometimes ...  Whatever else, Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" +is+ about
the Peterloo Massacre.  But that's maybe an extreme example.  On the other
hand, MacLeish to Mallarme, "a poem should not mean but be" is as limiting
in its own way.  (And this may be part of the debate here -- I think both
dave and I both see poetry as deeply implicated in society? history?
politics (in the widest sense)?  The Exclusion of the World is something
that happens in English poetry at a particular point in time -- with the
late Augustans?  I think Pope, say, would be baffled by the idea that 'a
poem is not really "about" anything'.

<<
Whatever the poem's subject,  it is inseparable from the language in which
it is expressed.
>>

Agreed, oh agreed, definitely.

<<
So there is no context that a poem can provide except its language,
>>

Um ... This strikes me as an extreme version of the New Criticism (which,
admittedly, I grew up with and was once a fully-signed-up member).  I think
I'd now see language as the primary, but not the +only+ critical element.
Perhaps I'm simply getting more moralistic as I get older.

<<
and it seems to me, that, in the case of this poem, it is quite obvious that
the cliches are deliberate, though how successful the cliche is as a
strategy is another argument.
>>

OK, I think I'll go with this -- both elements of your sentence <g>.

<<
Well, again, at the risk of repeating myself, I don't think the author's
entire work can provide the context for the individual poem. The individual
poem might be illustrative but it could equally be exceptional. I think that
to read the "poet" rather than the poem is the problem here, from my point
of view.
>>

Well, two things ...  I was thinking specifically of the case where an
author
predominantly writes in an "un-clichéd" fashion -- there the benefit of the
doubt comes into play.  Again, while I'd agree that individual poems can
(and should) stand on their own, sometimes the whole is greater than the sum
of the parts.  Again, as an extreme example, I don't think reading
Shakespeare's Sonnets as interconnected rather than simply individual poems
means I'm reading the poet rather than the poem(s).

<<
On the other hand, it could sound like the old rib argument, that out of
Larkin's rib, Duffy was created...

[g]

Well, I'm glad you grinned here,
>>

Well, it +was+ a well-funny remark.

<<
because to me it is funny, this whole issue of who is the father of whom?
filiation?  whatever term is used, it suggests that there is something
equivalent to pregnancy and inheritance in the association of texts, and I
don't think so.
>>

Ouch!!  I think I'm going to have to purge my language of precreational
metaphors <g>.

<<
Filiation _is_ an unfortunate term to use here,
>>

... it was a bit of Deliberate Provocation.

<<
particularly because the poem, oh, have we forgotten the poem, that began
the discussion, is under suspicion for this 'illicit' and, by implication,
incestuous, relationship. So it is an aspersion, casting a kind of sexual
suspicion upon the generation of the text, hence, the "comes, somehow, out
of" or "filiation" as if the Duffy poem were the ill-gotten child of the
Larkin poem. And this sort of suspicion is generally cast upon texts by
women poets as the same sort of suspicion is cast upon women poets when it
is implied that their works are published because it all "comes, somehow,
out of" their 'connection' with some editor or their good looks.
>>

Wow!!  I hadn't realised I'd freighted "filiation" with quite such a complex
perspective.  I must be cleverer than I thought.

<<
Well, the Significant Void is the missing male, whoever it is that buys this
finery and clothes for sexual favors, or perhaps it is male/s.  Hardy erases
the man from this poem and that erasure is partly what overturns the
conventional expectations of what it means to be ruined. What vanishes is
the man and the sexual act, and what we are given is a conversation between
two women.
>>

Indeed!!  A lovely succinct commentary, Rebecca.  Much sharper than my own
limp effort.

<<
I'm also curious how do you know that this Significant Void is deliberate on
Hardy's part? There seems to be no more evidence for that than in the Duffy
poem, no less either. In both cases, it seems to me to be there in the
context created by the language.
>>

Hm ... Yes, I'm caught here.  I suppose I'd say it's deliberate with Hardy,
as the conventional treatment of the situation would +normally+ include sex
(and as you point out, the man).  But then the same could be said about
Carol Ann Duffy's poem.

<<
Perhaps U.A.Fanthorpe?

I'll have to think about this one. U.A. Fanthorpe? <G>
>>

A marvellous poet, witty and wry.  She has a Selected out from Penguin, as
well as lots of individual volumes.  My personal favourite poem (well, I
suppose it's her anthology poem, but still ...) is "Not My Best Side" -- a
triptych of voices, the Dragon, and the Girl, and St. George.

Here's the Girl speaking:

II
It's hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It's nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest,
I didn't much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have ache, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon -
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl's got to think of her future.

(Bah -- went to the trouble of scanning and OCRing this, and it's on the
Web!  Here you'll find the complete text:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/438.html

... and two other poems, if you click on her name.)

Actually, there are ways that this poem would link into the themes we've
been discussing.

<<
But again, all of this talk of who is the progenitor, who is the heir?
Why the preoccupation with the genetic transmission of the word?
It gives a whole new meaning to Plath's, daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm
through, don't you think? <G>
>>

I really MUST give up on those philoprogentive metaphors ...  A male sort of
thing, mibee.

:-(

I was going to go on to explore the idea of
influence/response/counter/inheritance/(plagarism) in terms of the relation
between Katherine Philips and Anne Bradstreet, and John Donne, but I've
prolly said more than enough already for one post.

Cheers,

Robin