Peter, apologies. I’ve only just received this from the spam folder it was discourteously relegated to, so missed it. The Dante categories are in De vulgari eloquentia. Let me look them up – that will take a while – and see if they shed any light on the discussion.
Presumably Dante's classifications relate to, or derive from, that three-fold division of troubador poetry, which unfortunately I can;t refer to properly because I've completely forgotten the names for them and don't know where to find them. But there was a sweet or attractive mode, and there was a (less common) harsh, rebarbative, obscure mode, but there was also a mixed or inbetween mode, which was the one that interested me. I take these terms to define the text rather than the music, but probably nobody knows about that.
I was thinking of contemporary poets who wilfully seek to exploit ugliness as an act of alienation with strong political overtones or as an expression of disdain for themselves and the human world. The poetry then either avoids or travesties all lyric input. It is not uncommon. I can't remember why I referred to this, but it wasn't in argument with anyone.
* The terms Jacques Roubaud uses are trobar clus [closed], trobar leu [clear] trobar ric [rich???].
These are all songs, so the harsh or difficult one doesn't associate with the spoken word.
PR
On 24 Oct 2016, at 15:11, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Pretty well all of this makes sense to me. The case I'm putting 'against' it is in my last post, though somehow I'd like this to be in dialectic with my argument.
I'm grateful for the reference to Denis Stevens that I didn't know.
Much as I love the accompanying musical giggle to the mention of Larkin, the part of the argument I don't really follow is regarding ugliness, anti-song, anti-poem. Well, I follow it but I think it's an argument with something or someone else. The idea of the spoken as against the sung doesn't imply ugliness, often quite the opposite (nor does song always imply the attractive). But the unalluring can be very much a part of a poem - Dante, for example, isn't just dolce stil but employs rime petrose and all kinds of cacophonous effects in his Commedia and in some of his sonnets, about as far away from the melodious as can be conceived.
Jamie
