re: 'great' poets...the term applied synchronically is a paradox, isn't
it? I mean, 'greatness' is an historic achievement, instituted by
historiographers of the arts whose attribution of that term is a
positive statement of their own belatedness. So Dryden can call Milton
great, knowing himself edified by that attribution; similarly Beckett and
Joyce, or today's reader and Heaney/Hughes: what's gained by setting a
high value by someone's work is a sense of relatedness, which becomes an
investment when the reader is also a writer. Of course, the reader might
say it is his utter un-relatedness, or the impossibility - contrived in
adulation - of showing a relation between eg Hughes's work and his own,
that make the latter great: this is equally a sense of relatedness. Why,
Clifford, can your mind not be changed? Not that it necessarily should be
(though I have to agree with the others, H&H seem tenaciously ephemeral in
all but economic terms) - but this particular finished and flawless
attitude seems eerily religious..
- I saw Hughes read. Greatness came neither cheap nor noticably, have to
say.
keston
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