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On Wed, 11 Apr 2001 10:54:38 +1000, [log in to unmask] wrote: >Me, I always feel worried by prescriptive lists, especially concerning >such delicate and multifarious organisms as poems: after all, I know of >wonderful poems that break all these rules. Neverthless, I confess a >fascination with purgatives, simples, decoctions, plasters, spells and >other things absorbed through the skin or taken by mouth etc for the >efficacious treatments of distempers, catarrhs and wonky vapours... > >A The doctor's prescription (ovvero the notion of a poetic canons) Joking apart, the series of posts under the title " The doctor's prescription", is merely suggested by me as a set of stimuli to reflect upon the notion of poetical canons, which implies two different attitudes which while clashing one against the other, co-exist, that of canonic rhetorical rules and that of personal innovations and practices. In the first one, we take it should be taken into consideration the so called a parte obiecti, the point of view, the perspective of the work itself as such, say its connotation within a given literary tradition carrying with it all the rhetorical rules, the elements of tastes and poetics, therefore Ovid, Virgil, Dante and so on). Of course, as Matthew has suggested with his personal remarks, any statement regarding the existence of a set of rules, i.e., of a canon, implies the birth of what we know to be an anti-canon ( often ideologically enacted by both a group of poets: the Surrealists, for instance. Or by a single individual operating towards innovation). The second perspective is the one that assumes as valid and legislative the point of view and the tastes of the reader and of the audience in general. So, it is less canonic and more fluctuating, less connected to the " a parte subiecti" . This second point of view is more subjected to the changes that occur to time and places within a goiven community, and therefore reflects its needs more closely. One must note an "overdose " of a given aesthetical rule that, however valid in the abstract and in the realm of the " a parte subiecti" , becomes obsolete (at least for a while) in the real world of the readers. Omero, Dante e Shakespeare became all of a sudden more popular than the classic Orazio, Virgilio and Petrarca. For twenty years now, the second perspective tends to be more popular and acclaimed because of the emphasis on the readers' tastes and shared authority. The hierarchy of value are established not by dictionary of rhetoric and stylistic but by t5ghe audience interest in the published material available and in its shifting extemporaneous moods. This is why fame is more in danger and obsolescence always behind each poets ' door. The updating of the institutionalized canons is a matter of fact in modern and contemporary poetry, given also the accessibility of the products on the market. Is this situation better than the one before, when the canons where more rigid and secured by their crystallizations? To put under investigation and discuss canons means that one is allowed to render problematic the institution of poetry at its very core. This coincides, luckily, with the evident decline of the critique, unlike one may think or fear, the doctor included. Erminia