I don't want to make any big claims for the Stafford poem. It's  
pedestrian and it does one of the unforgivable things in my book, it  
interrupts itself to explain the circumstances. When that happens the  
poetry, even the gentlest depictive poetry, has to stop until it can  
be resumed. Jaime's prose sketch was more touching. What worries me is  
the terms under which the avant-garde attacks poetry such as this,  
which is always moral rather than aesthetic, and assumptive concerning  
what is transmitted. For a century or so the avant-garde (which I'm  
using as a blanket term) has claimed moral high ground on the basis  
either of political rectitude or the status of the selfhood in the  
poem, sometimes cunningly encompassing both at once. Mere self- 
referral is read as inevitably self-centering or selfishness thus a  
sign of bad character. so poems are dismissed as "good guy" poems. And  
yet the history of the avant-garde displays a collection of some of  
the greatest egotists of the century (also greatest snobs and greatest  
bullies) accompanied by a mass of extremely bad political thinking.

As John knows as well as I, those who have been through "Cambridge"  
have been taught to disdain the genial in poetry and denigrate all  
merely social virtues, and to present an aggressive or a least  
rebarbative surface to the reader, attitudes inherited from Wyndham  
Lewis (Artist as Enemy) as well as Leavis, which persist and are  
increasingly strong not just in ex-Cambridge, where they think they  
are soldiers for the right, but in just about the whole of the avant- 
garde. (except the good guys).

pr


On 29 Nov 2014, at 10:00, Hall, John wrote:

Whether it makes any difference in the case of this particular poem is  
one
thing, whether it ever makes any difference another. The appeal to the
authority of personal experience is often a strong rhetorical tactic and
of course not just in poetry. As a mode it places the vulnerability of  
the
speaker/writer in the position of human shield for language. It is
praised, is it not, as Œauthenticity¹ and for its courage, which is  
often
real enough. As has been mentioned it can also be scorned as mere
anecdotalism, argument founded on case studies of one, and those perhaps
as trustworthy as Andrew Mitchell¹s. (Incidentally the etymology of
anecdote is, apparently, Œnot published¹. On that basis once an anecdote
is published it loses its right to the designation!)

In Stafford¹s poem it seems to me that the crux lies not in the first
person singular but in the first person plural. It only becomes apparent
towards the end that the ŒI¹ is not alone in the scene, with first Œthe
car ahead¹ and then Œour group¹. The second last line is where I suspect
that its popularity ­ I think it is a popular poem ­ arises:

	I thought hard for us all­­my only swerving.

This implies that there is a lot at stake in I's decision, whose
implications go well beyond this Œwilderness¹; I feels the burden of
exemplariness, which may be one of the (welcome) burdens of a particular
kind of lyric poem. This incident is Œfor us all¹. Does it matter  
whether
or not the incident actually occurred to the assembler of these words?  
If
it didn¹t then the assumption of priestly authority ­ the one authorised
to conduct sacrifice ­ is the more extreme. I think it matters only to
that extent. And as you imply, Peter, without searching outside the  
poem,
how could we know? I suspect that the force of the poem depends just as
much on the retrieval of the word Œswerving¹, which has earlier been  
used
unmetaphorically for the risk to drivers¹ lives of a dead animal left on
this particular road. It returns metaphorically as an ethical term, and
leaves hanging in the poem an equivocation about all that thought Œfor  
us
all¹.

Is there a whole genre, not quite coinciding with what people might or
might not be meaning by Œlyric¹, that could be called the homiletic? The
incident is the text for the day. This is how I recall the (Anglican)
sermons of my childhood.

All best,
John







On 28/11/2014 20:28, "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I can't see how it makes any difference whatsoever whether this
> incident actually happened to Stafford or not. And how would we know
> anyway?  When we speak of "poetry of personal [sc. authorial]
> experience" are we not actually speaking of narrative poetry as such?
> Of story? Which is certainly not restricted in usage to any fictional
> mainstream.
>
> PR
>
>
> On 28 Nov 2014, at 20:09, Hall, John wrote:
>
> William Stafford, Travelling through the Dark??
>
> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171495.
>
> Now where did that come from?
>
> John
>
> On 28/11/2014 19:38, "Hampson, R" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: