From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>
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can anyone think of a significant and effective
satirical poem in English from the last fifty years?
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In a close approximation to the "classic" satiric vein, there's the first
poem in Peter Levi's _Death is a Pulpit_:
When traffic died I dreamed the other night
about a god with sheepskin wig and tight
violet breeches writing * * * *, and then
satiric verses with a golden pen ...
On the boundaries of the 50 year remit is Auden -- "Under Which Lyre?" was
written in 1947.
I suspect as well as the reasons for the decline in verse satire that Jon
suggests ...
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1) political activities, 2) social class and subculture differences, 3)
sexual strategies, and 4) the literary style of
other poets
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... we could add in the (predominant) retreat from formal verse -- satire
gains from an elegant incisiveness. And that simply, it's done better and
more effectively by alternative comedians and certain of the other
televisual options. In the same way that the novel exerted a pressure on
narrative poetry -- if you're going to do it at all, you'd bloody well
better do it real good, like Browning, and Clough in _Amours_, written at
the height of a renewed vogue for epistolary novels, with Swinburn's odd
whipping novel, _Love's Cross-Currents_, not far in the future.
There's a curious overlap here -- one of the defining moments in the shift
of effective satire into TV was _That Was the Week, That Was_ in the early
sixties -- and among other things, the program also featured a reading of
Peter Redgrove's satiric poem, "The Sermon".
All, all of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.
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the ubiquitous conspiracy of benignness in
the poetry world
SNIP
(My dictionary includes no such word as "benignness, but I thought there
ought to be one so I invented it.)
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BENIGNITY might be close. OED2(3) defines the primary meaning thus:
" 1. Kindly feeling and its manifestation; kindness of disposition, or of
manner."
Robin
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