Well, picking two out of your list at random, Mark, what about Empson's
"Missing Dates"?
(And how do you manage to transform him into a jellup-supping
plantationer? Well, actually, I can see quite well how you manage
that segue. <g>)
And Ransom -- maybe this is a UK thing, but I reserve my most acute
venom directed at the New Formalists for the way they seem to manage to wtite
him out out history and replace him with The Later Auden.
I wouldn't go to the stake for the New Agrarians as a whole, but I'd
put at least five poems by John Crowe Ransome in my Ideal Anthology.
Starting with "The Equlibrists" and working down through "Captain
Carpenter" to "The Blue Girl".
And as to Empson, at least he wasn't writing tight-arsed verbally
circumscribed lyrics of the kind the Birk so precisely characterised in an
earlier post.
Empson is one of my heroes.
(As if it wasn't obvious. <g>)
Robin
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 10:11
AM
Subject: Re: Infinite Difference, sampler
no. 8
It was shit, but immensely popular (as poetry goes) in the US.
He, late Eliot, and a contingent of southern writers (Cleanth Brooks, Empson,
Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom), some others, and of course Frost, were
the vanguard of the counter-revolution. Given the US, it's hard not to see
this as a turning away from decadent Europe toward the value of
transparency.
Best,
Mark
At 09:50 AM 3/8/2010, you
wrote:
But most of the later (post-1939)
Auden *was (with exceptions) purely shit, surely, Mark?
He got
crucified across the language barrio.
Robin
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Mark Weiss
- To: [log in to unmask]
- Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 8:54 AM
- Subject: Re: Infinite Difference, sampler no. 8
- Agreed, across the board. I haven't been able to explain to myself why
English language poetries should have experienced this rejection of
modernism. Blaming, for instance, the prestige of Eliot or Auden in their
neoclassical dotages seems to beg the question. At the heart of it there
seems to be a deep fear of instabilities of meaning and appearance.
- Best,
- Mark
- At 07:20 AM 3/8/2010, you wrote:
- Hi Mark
- This is my last word on this 'cause then I'm
off.
Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry
(University of California Press).
http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
"Not since the
1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of Twentieth Century
French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense
of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb
collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like
it." John Palattella in The
Nation