Thanks Dominic for the clarity of these definitions - I guess it's worth
remembering that Hopkins and Blake were accused of writing "bad" verse in
their day, or just being plain crazy - (I was reading The Windhover
yesterday and remembering again what an amazingly brilliant poem it is) -
Very often the poetry towards which I respond most has a fractured quality,
a sense that a form or convention has been taken and broken into something
else. Thinking here of poetry like (to cite some random examples) Blake's
London, or Hill's The Triumph of Love, or HD's Hermetic Definition or
Trilogy.... Some bits of Prynne, where the Romantics shine through - Perhaps
traditions of form exist in these poems like ghosts, or as a sense of a
history of aesthetic as ruins behind or within it (breakage as angelic
presence, then, a la Benjamin?) - I guess I can't think of a poem, however
naïve its provenance, as _not_ being embedded in a history, though that
history may well be one that has been erased. Or am I being fanciful again?
It's quite early here...
Best
A
On 31/8/05 7:29 PM, "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> "Formalism" would be a prescriptive/normative approach to form, based
> on the codification of the by-products of formal imagination.
> Formalists assert not only the existence of a (more or less
> variegated) tradition, but also the existence of underlying rules that
> determine, or generate, the contents of that tradition ("the key to
> all mythologies"...). These rules place limits on the scope of
> experimentation, and authorize a variety of judgements about (for
> example) "skilled" and "unskilled" usage.
>
> Obviously the formal imagination doesn't operate in a vacuum - it does
> no harm to recognize formal traditions, or to try to think
> systematically about their contents. The difference is perhaps the
> difference between taking a given systematisation as a fixed point of
> reference, a centre to which all excursions must either return or get
> irrecoverably lost, and taking it as material for transformation.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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