Peter, no one is saying that Wordsworth should not be admired. My
point is that his influence has prevailed in UK poetry long past its sell
by date. I don't jink much of shakespeare's sonnets by the way--great
though he was as a playwright.
On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:01:31 +0100, Peter Riley
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>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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