I haven't read Fieled's essay and wasn't commenting on it: I was directing my observations to Tim. (Since Tim is on the list, he is also able to respond, if he wishes.) I am not sure that we can exclude the examples of Keats or Coleridge just because they were talented poets ...
My preference is for an an attempt to articulate the aesthetics, the philosophical assumptions with which one is working. Part of the importance of the engagement with 'theory' in the early 70s was that it sought to expose and explore the assumptions underlying various kinds of judgement. 'Non-theorised' poetry, in my experience, often has a theory: it doesn't articulate it because it assumes that it is 'natural'.
Robert
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From: British & Irish poets on behalf of Jeffrey Side
Sent: Mon 30/08/2010 17:55
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "The Conspiracy Against Poems" by Adam Fieled at The Argotist Online
Robert, are you using the example of Keats to also gainsay Fieled's argument? If you are, it is very unfair, as not all poets today who think they are doing what Keats attempted have his talent. That was partly Fieled's point. The whole thing has become open to abuse.
And just because some poets may have theoretical approaches to poetry shouldn't necessarily mean the resultant poetry is all that good-look at Wordsworth, or Pound, even.
Original Message:
I was interested in your comments below. What happens, for example, if you play your second paragraph against, say the practice of Keats - reading Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dante for models; inter-acting with the work of Leigh Hunt, who is one of his earlier publishers - isn't this fitting poems into models, templates, family resemblances - or, at least, developing his own work through engagements with these earlier models? Isn't some of the early work 'skewed' by wanting it to be accepted by Hunt? And aren't Keats's letters frequently involved in theorising his practice and theorising for future practice - developing a poetics?
I wondered also about your statement that, for you, theory and poetics always come after the fact. Isn't the theorising of one fact the context for the next fact ... even if the next fact then requires the theorising to be reconsidered. In short, I am wondering whether the relationship between theorising and practice isn't rather a dialectic.
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