Tim, as usual a thoughtful response from you. People on this forum
have certainly taken a knee-jerk reaction to what I said.
On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:30:42 +0100, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>I get the feeling that Jeffrey's question has been a bit
>misrepresented by the responses so far.
> From this side of the pond, from a certain angle, there is certainly
>a case to be made for the relatively healthy American follow-on to
>European modernism, compared with what happened in the English
>'English' speaking speaking poetry dominant here in the second half of
>the century. Part of the problem, for anyone trying to track back, was
>the Movement's suppression (witting or unwitting) of anything which
>did not fit its tastes. Some people, while not necessarily agreeing
>with post-Movement poetics, still seem to have swallowed its
>revisionist propaganda.
>
>How much ideas about Wordsworth have to do with this is an
interesting
>question. For me there are contradictions in Wordsworthian
romanticism
>(e.g. between common speech realism and individual elevation of
>spiritual 'emotion') which have never been resolved by subsequent
>English poetics - it is definitely related to what Jeffrey is talking
>about , but I wouldn't want to speculate further without giving it
>some serious thought.
>
>Tim A.
>
>On 25 Aug 2009, at 11:30, Jeffrey Side wrote:
>
>> New blog post:
>>
>>
>> "Has British Poetry had any significance since Wordsworth?"
>>
>> This may seem an outlandish question, but I think it has some force
>> behind it. Of course, the influence of Wordsworth on contemporary
>> British mainstream poetry need hardly be stressed, and I have
>> written extensively about this elsewhere. It is because of this
>> influence that most of the celebrated British poetry of the
>> Twentieth Century tended towards mediocrity when compared to
>> American poetry of the same period.....
>>
>>
>> http://jeffrey-side.blogspot.com/
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