Seems daft to me to use "better than/as good as" terminology to compare
Mozart to Sinatra, as fundamentaly we'd be comparing unlike with unlike.
Eliot with Wensleydale (district or cheese). Strauss with Celtic (tongue,
team or steam). It just isn't enough, given the gulfs between them, to
level both down to consumables and say, they both did the music thing,
which part of the cd rack shall we go to? Even if we (a) restrict it to
vocal music, and (b) ignore issues in comparing composer with performer,
you use different bits of organs to voice WAM's lines to those required
for Frankie, and similarly, unless you're comatose, you listen
differently.
Moving that across to PO-etry, I'd say the same's roughly true - you need
a different voice to be Cris or Ira or Sweet Simon A. And different ears,
one hopes, to listen to each. Part of my whole problem with a (notional)
hegemonic M**nst***m is the implied uniformity of approach from author to
reader, which leads to serious problems even at the Heaney=Hughes level,
and gets more and more flawed as we try to build others in. Roy Fisher?
It's getting rocky. Edwin Morgan? Have to throw out huge tracts to make it
float. Denise Riley? Over it goes.
This isn't to say it's impossible to make qualitative comparisons in
disparate areas - gosh, I hope not, I do so enjoy doing it - only that on
the whole it's more fun to learn the individual voices. I've got to say I
never really learned Sinatra - never got past the I'm-so-wonderful aura
which each line came packed in, never saw the range which people whose
opinions I trust tell me was/is there. That's my fault, and my hard luck
too. Mozart was full of shit too, of course, by all accounts, but the page
filters it out so that something else can shine out on the air.
Onwards!
RC
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