Many familiar, Max. Liked the Larkin - almost sane.
Bill
On Mon, Jun 23rd, 2014 at 10:42 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Here then are my two dozen standing stones.[writes Christopher Rush
> http://www.felixdennis.com/subject/poetry-subject/poets-playlist/]
>
> (1) Poetry is more philosophical and serious than
> history. (Aristotle)
>
> (2) The truest poetry is the most feigning.
> (Shakespeare)
>
> (3) Poetry should be simple, sensuous, passionate.
> (Milton)
>
> (4) Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
> feelings. (Wordsworth)
>
> (5) Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.
> (Wordsworth)
>
> (6) Poetry is the best words in the best order.
> (Coleridge)
>
> (7) Poetry should surprise by a fine excess. (Keats)
>
> (8) If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a
> tree, it had better not come at all. (Keats)
>
> (9) Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
> (Flaubert)
>
> (10) Poetry is a means of overcoming chaos. (I.A.
> Richards, literary critic)
>
> (11) Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Frost)
>
> (12) Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
> (Frost)
>
> (13) Genuine poetry communicates before it is
> understood. (Eliot)
>
> (14) Poetry is what heals by cauterising painful
> emotion. (Felix Dennis – with apologies to Felix for my verbal
> shorthand)
>
> (15) Poetry is what makes you more human than you were
> before. (Rush)
>
> (16) Poetry is what makes you fall back in love with
> life when you have fallen out of it. (Rush again!)
>
> In addition to these landmarks, there were some general pronouncements on
> poets, all of which seemed to cast their various lights on my top-ten
> cull.
>
> (17) The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of
> imagination all compact. (Shakespeare)
>
> (18) The poet’s task is to take this bronze world and
> make it gold. (Sidney)
>
> (19) To the poet nothing can be useless. (Johnson)
>
> (20) The poet must preside over the thoughts and manners
> of future generations as a being superior to time and place.
>
> (21) The language of the age is never the language of
> poetry. (Gray)
>
> (22) The language of the age is always the language of
> poetry! (Wordsworth)
>
> (23) A poet is a man speaking to men. (Wordsworth)
>
> (24) Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
> world. (Shelley)
>
> There were others that sprang to mind. But life is short – and weekends
> shorter. There were, however, two passages about poetry which I’ve always
> kept on a bedside cabinet composed of little grey cells on the left-hand
> side of my brain. One is from The Cave of Making by another old bugger,
>
> W.H. Auden:
>
> After all it’s rather a privilege
> Amid the affluent traffic
> to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
> background noise for study
> or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
> cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
> or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly insists upon
> being read or ignored.
>
> The second passage is from a lecture given by A.E. Housman at Cambridge in
> or around – I think – 1932. Housman said there was such a thing as sham
> poetry, a counterfeit deliberately manufactured and offered as a
> substitute, the best example of it being the kind of verse written between
> Samson Agonistes in 1671 and the Lyrical Ballads in 1798: the kind
> dominated by intelligence, which involved, as Matthew Arnold also wrote,
> ‘some repressing and silencing of poetry … some touch of frost to the
> imaginative life of the soul’. The eighteenth century poets wrote not out
> of the depths but out of their heads, and poetry does not come out of the
> skull but out of the gut or soul. If poetry came out of the head the
> Augustans would have written it rather better. And when you look at the
> four eighteenth century poets who did write it better – Collins, Smart,
> Cowper and Blake – you see at once why they did so, why they were able to.
> You see the only thing they all had in common – they were all mad!
>
> Aha! Remember Plato? ‘He who without the Muses’ madness in his soul
> comes knocking at the door of poetry, and thinks that art will make him
> anything fit to be called a poet, finds that poetry he indites in his
> sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.’
>
> It’s dangerous to offer examples, but perhaps the last obvious madmen to
> write true poetry were Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas – both Welsh! Larkin
> put himself into a most effective poetic straight-jacket, successfully
> creating the impression that he was almost sane. But he wasn’t. He
> wasn’t simply the intelligent Hull Grump. He had the madness in his soul
> that Plato talked about. I read many contemporary poets on the other
> hand, and find them dismayingly sane. They have something to say but
> can’t say them in the way that will move as Milton once moved.
>
> What is it about those six simple words of his – Housman asks – that
> almost draws tears?
>
> Nymphs and shepherd dance no more
>
> Is it that they evoke a sense of that older England which Felix writes
> about in one of my chosen poems?
> Housman gives the only answer he can:
> ‘I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to something
> in men which is obscure and latent, something older than the present
> organisation of his nature.’
>
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