As one of the poets mentioned on Marks' list (thanks kindly, Mark) I'd
like to mention that Wordsworth has always been an inspiring example.
And so has Thomas Hardy. And that neither of them has anything to do
with the (actually extremely varied and in some quarters quite
healthy) poetry which gets labelled "mainstream". It was Donald Davie
who was mainly responsible for the Hardy--Larkin link, as he was for a
lot of other misleading pronouncements at a time when the Cambridge
academy was forcing its way into the contemporary poetry scene as
adjudicators. It's like Eliot's silly attack on Milton and Pound's
silly attack on just about everybody -- an academic obsession with
genealogies which has little to do with how poetry gets written. The
historical occasion is built into the writing of someone like WW and
there are questions of authenticity which cut it off from its
"influence" . Recent writing about him from Cambridge could not be
accused of promoting philosophical empiricism.
You can get rid of all 20th Century English (not British) poetry if
you want to ---we did in Cambridge in the 1960s, -- if you want to
write in a certain way you construct a tradition for yourself, tho I
don't think it actually helps. And of course it comes back, it has to,
you realise that you're deliberately blinkering yourself for the sake
of some poetico-ideology. I should have thought the time for that kind
of exercise was long past.
And incidentally, as regards a certain kind of poetical texture and
figurative freedom among the French "symbolistes" passing on to
America and all that, I think that if you get the full historical
perspective on this, you find that what it ultimately derives from is
England, in the form of Shakespeare (as against Racine etc.). France
had a very rigid inheritance of what we call Augustanism, and an
Academy to enforce it, and Shakes was one of the great liberators
from that for the early 19th century poets.
Thanks for innarestin chat, everyone.
Peter
On 26 Aug 2009, at 14:49, Tim Allen wrote:
You might not like it jamie, but for as long as the mediocre and dull
are held up by the broadsheet hacks and current Poetry Review critics
as being the best of British while treating the names on cris's list
as some kind of eccentric anomaly, a bit exotic and interesting but
not really 'it', then names like Whitman and Dickinson are going to be
shunted around thus. The antipathetic relationship between mainstream
British poetry and the modernisms and post-modernisms is a fact, so
stop trying to pretend otherwise. This antagonism seems to be
something particular to the English speaking world, or far more
pronounced and stubborn at least. Why?
Tim A.
On 26 Aug 2009, at 14:00, Jamie Mckendrick wrote:
> Baudelaire as a poet - and even the history of his reception -
> interests me
> intensely, and I don't like to see him, or for that matter
> Wordsworth, Whitman
> and Dickinson, shunted around like pawns in a specious manouvre to
> vilify
> contemporary British poetry.
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