Jeff,
I'm perplexed by your response to my mails:
>Jamie, I wish you would be less tenacious in your quibbling on this
>matter. Here is my response:
>>“Apart from the back-to-front chronology of Poe and Baudelaire, 200
>>years of British (and Irish) poetry swept aside with those two
>>words "empiricist" and "parochial"?”
>I have conceded this point in my response to those who earlier pointed
>it out. It seems rather than the French having influenced Poe he
>nfluenced them. Poe not being British, my main point stands: British
>poets had little to do with the development of High Modernism.
It was my first mail that first drew attention to the anomaly by complementing
Poe on his clairvoyance, and you hadn't 'conceded' this point when I wrote my
second mail.
I'm afraid that like your claim about Poe, your judgements concerning
Wordsworth, Shelley etc. just won't stay afloat. It's not "cherry-picking" to
quote a few lines from Wordsworth. As another example, the whole
Immortality Ode (in which he posits an innate knowledge and a prenatal
existence) would refute your idea of his 'empiricism' as would the animism of
the Lucy poems.
You originally argued that unlike US poetry:
>British poetry, conversely, has continued in the tradition of Wordsworthian
>empiricism and parochialism, largely antagonistic to any use of a poetic
>language that basis its affects on aspects other than descriptiveness and
>anecdotal confession. How long this will remain the case is uncertain. It has
>certainly been the case for over 200 years.
Sincerely, I can't see why you believe "I keep trying to use misdirection." No-
one would think of denying the importance of US poets in High Modernism. It
hardly needs to be re-asserted. But in response to this sweeping final
paragraph, I merely glanced at the first 100 years - and could have sited a
handful of others such as Arthur Clough, Christina Rossetti and Thomas
Beddoes to make the same point. And that's before starting on the vexed
issue of the twentieth century. But maybe you're not really interested in
Baudelaire, Poe, Wordsworth etc. but only want to use them to glue together
some putative tradition that explains "the appalling state of the mainstream".
You can really get much more parochial than that.
Respectfully,
Jamie
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