Bob, one thing that has always interested me is HOW IMPORTANT (AS PERCEIVED)
the consumer of the poem is.
This is where trouble begins, as the fights break out.
One perceives oneself in a given way that is not shared by others, and the
poem becomes a vehicle (an instrument) for addressing the dispute. All of a
sudden "What happened to the poem?"
:)
Sheil
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Bob Grumman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Gerald Schwartz wrote:
>
>> Can there be truly objective criteria for judging a poem?
>>
>> G. E. Schwartz
>>
>> I'm supposed to be away from my computer by now but got delayed by a
> touch of some virus (at least, that's all I hope it is). So I'm still at
> home able to argue (alas). My response: there's no way to be truly
> objective about anything, but there are ways to be reasonably close to it.
> Instead of going into how one can do this, because of my excuse (my virus),
> I'm going to skip to a prediction of mine:
>
> It will eventually be possible objectively to evaluate the amount of
> pleasure a given poem gives a given subject at a given time via
> neurophysiological readings. (I consider a priori that pleasure, finally,
> is all we're after--in poetry and everything else.) So, a reasonably
> objective evaluation of that poem for that person would be the average of a
> number of readings, and a reasonably objective evaluation of the poem for
> everyone, the average of such readings for everyone who experiences the
> poem. Forever.
>
> I'm speaking of the consumer value of the poem. That's not all that
> counts, for me. I've long yammered that a bad poem can still be an
> /important /poem if it provides poets with some new tool of value. So, a
> poem can be extremely effective, as many of Robert Frost's are, for me, but
> not important because they don't do anything of consequence particularly
> well. Ditto for all of Shakespeare's poetry (I consider his plays drama,
> not poetry). Pound's /Cantos/, as a whole, is not an effective poem but a
> highly important one--again, for me. Some of E. E. Cummings's poems are
> both effective and important.
>
> To judge the importance of a poem would involve determining what other
> poems used the tool it was the first to use, of first to use well, and how
> good they were.
>
> In any case, there are certainly degrees of objectivity--e.g., judging a
> poem a good one because one's grandfather wrote it is clearly less objective
> than judging a poem a good one because it contains fresh metaphors about a
> subject a consensus of intelligent. informed observers rates as important.
>
> I'm now going back to bed.
>
> --Bob
>
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