Davie was trying to make a parallel claim – that Hardy was the important figure for twentieth-century poetry. The contortions that he goes through to fit Roy Fisher into this paradigm would be amusing except that the rumour was that this chapter put Fisher off writing for a while.

Robert

From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 06 August 2011 13:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Slidvid of Aleph Null stills

Jim, Herzog seems out to prove the exact opposite of Wordsworth's optimistic "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her" 

Which reminds us there's another side to Wordsworth to the one David calls the "middle class ruminative". But I'm not sure we want to go down that road with all its "empirical" roadsigns again.

David, I'm guessing we're almost exact contemporaries, and experienced the clammy, assertive presence of Thatcherism at the same time, but I don't quite recognise these blighted geneologies. Though far from confident on the topic of the 'British Poetry Revival', I can't see it growing out of 'The Purity of English Diction'. Do you really think the influence of Davie (though an astute critic on Hardy, Pound and Bunting) reaches out that far? He seems latterly to have settled for Sisson and Tomlinson as the great poets of the age. And as a poet himself?

  Even if Rimbaud still seems way ahead of any subsequent avant, or for that matter retro, garde, I don't feel as gloomy (as I take you to be) about the possibilities of something lasting being - or having been - made in our time. Though the present pasticciaccio at the Poetry Society doesn't bode that well for the administrative arm.

Whatever forms of patronage exist, whether aristocratic, state or academic, I suspect poetry of any note always happens "in spite of" rather than "because" of it.

I'm afraid I won't be able to follow this thread beyond today as I've just booked a flight from Liverpool to Catalunya, cheap enough not to be conspicuously bourgeois.

Hasta luego,

Jamie

----- Original Message -----

From: [log in to unmask]">David Bircumshaw

To: [log in to unmask]"> [log in to unmask]

Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 9:29 AM

Subject: Re: Slidvid of Aleph Null stills

Jim

I meant the poetry of that time, and the qualifier was 'relatively'.

I would incline towards an idea that much of the force of British poetry in the past arose 'in spite' rather than 'because' although it's not as simple as that. With, say, Blake, clearly his oppositional stance powered the poems, but the comic brilliance of, again say, the Dryden of 'MackFlecknoe' comes from a point of view putatively within the structures of power. Yet again the kind of ruminative middle-class tradition of Wordsworth is another strand.
I've seen it claimed that the most performed of Shakespeare's plays in the Eighteenth Century was in fact King Lear, not with the altered ending for the 'official' theatre, and that this was because of the attacks on authority given the King in his madness, which evaded the censors, being 'the Bard'.
But much of the impetus, the main trend,  of recent British poetry has been of the more sedate, Wordsworthian kind. Indeed you can trace a line of descent from Grasmere to Prynne and, in a kind of way, it could be claimed that the spiritual father of the 'British Poetry Revival' is more likely to be Donald Davie than J.A.Rimbaud.

On 6 August 2011 08:45, Jim Andrews <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I will be sure to have a look at Kaspar Hausar. I downloaded one so far: Into the Wild Blue Yonder, which I will watch soon.

British poetry minor? Well, I know it has its problems, as does all poetry these days, but you Brits value literacy and poetry, as a culture, in ways that have over and over again given the world such a gift. Or is it that those individuals have emerged not so much _because_ of the culture but despite it? In that case, let us have more great poetry to spite the nation and the forces of dullness wherever it thrives.