Give a name to something. Add epigrams. Talk goes viral. Books, aspiring PhD students writing little articles, appear. Now it’s a name we all repeat and vaguely define to our own private, half-lazy, satisfaction. But what the fuck is it, really?
It was because somebody died. A new thing must happen because the young watch the old getting old and dying and it scares them, so they substitute mortality, decrepitude and physical death with “we’re different! we’re new! we’re modern!” and this perversity of frightened youth and frightened middle-age (with some old enablers) thinking themselves special goes on for generations—the “moderns” die (surprise!) and the “post-moderns,” young, excited, and fit, rise up in their place.
Not only do frightened mortals name things “modern” or “post-modern” (it can be as simple as pointing to some thing and saying, “modern”—O holy, stamped, new thing!) the “Romantics”—who were called that after they died, the “Romantics,” themselves, were never the “Romantics”—were named. They were just like the “Moderns!” Now do you see how it works? The professors (the worst! Professors!) know exactly how this works.
Don’t tell anyone: Byron’s favorite author was Pope. Keats’ favorite author was Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s favorite author was Plato. Byron was just a guy writing the best things he could—but no! He was a “Romantic” doing something “new,” which is exactly what the “Modernists” were doing! Ha ha ha!
Do you ever wonder why in poetry there are no more guys today, young guys, like Keats and Byron, just writing stuff that’s really good? And instead there’s all these “new verse movements” and “camps” and “schools” and MFA applications, and “hurray!! the Dick Review just accepted my (crummy) poem!” Do you ever, in an honest moment, wonder about that?
(But there’s always been good and bad poetry! Yes. And how does that contradict what I’m saying? There is good…and bad poetry. Agreed. Do you think “good poetry” just drips out of some dropper at a steady rate, completely on its own, without any input from the world? If you believe that and it’s true, then we all need to shut up and if you believe that and it’s not true, then you are stupid and need to shut up for that reason. Therefore, shut up. “There will always be good and bad poetry” is not an argument.)
Anyway, I’m sorry guys, but it’s really, really time for a reckoning. We need to examine our terminology and start talking to each other, calling a time out on our terminology, so we know who we are, and what our terminology (growing with a mind of its own) has become.
I’m sure many have already impatiently anticipated this: why does Scarriet keep going on about Romanticism and Modernism? Doesn’t Scarriet know these are just bankrupt labels? True. I’m only using this quotidian terminology to investigate false literary reputations of actual persons (little matters, but perhaps this does). Meanwhile, those who object to Romanticism v Modernism go on talking about the “Objectivist” school (ha ha)—(my gadfly Kent Johnson solemnly informed me, “Tom, it’s not a school.”) Memo to all would-be geniuses: Objectivism (Pound or Rand), Marxism, Feminism and Capitalism aren’t real things.
I do hope everyone will join me in this discussion. I have most hope for those from India and eastern Europe: independent and happy thinkers, for the most part; others tend to be either too cynical (hello Brits!) or extremely talented—but too imitative. Americans are much too anglophilic–London and New York intellectuals have made John Stewart Mill their God.
I’ll finish this brief piece by copying, anonymously, feedback this week to Scarriet’s latest essays (with my replies) by two brilliant online acquaintances. This will explain more, perhaps:
REACTION 1
“I try not to wander into the poets’ minds. Their rejection of romanticism may have seemed right to them at that point, it may have been correct or incorrect, but that does not imply the poetry is not good.
Similar flaws exist in writing from the Romantic era but more so in those who attempt to write in meter for the sake of it. They like to be haughty and arrogant and cannot differentiate between being grateful for lyrical energy as a tool, elevating and pushing it further to using it as a skill set to just sound high and mighty. I have no concept that poetry that is difficult or inaccessible should not exist. But this set is often like the Bourgeois, approaching meter and rhyme and forms more as hats to wear than foundations to create and offer and sing. One reason is also that each artist must offer something authentic.
Many who write in meter will have their work compared to the extraordinary work created by these old poets. It is difficult to surpass for most apparently. A lot of that will sound cliche’ since its already written, done though I do believe everything can be elevated but do I get to read such poetry? Romantic poetry that truly surpasses, offers me something truly new, a new rhapsody— no. Very rarely. What we see is just as a shadow of what these great poets created and then some are just copying what has been written and the poems just scream dull and cliche’ and simply an algorithmic approach that invokes nothing in the reader. Some of these poems come across as forces as if the poet can’t understand that a form should not have the poem suffocating in it but only singing, belonging, and elevated. A lot of these poems are dull for me and I just cannot read them. I just get bored. A lot of poets I see whose poems are winning awards just because they belong to the “Romanticism” category are no different from the poets whose work is for some reason very popular today but lacks depth and true innovation and just floats on shallow surfaces.
Language is beautiful. It can be celebrated in lyrical wells, and in its complexity of words. Modernist poetry can be very thought-provoking too and overlaps with my senses as someone who likes science or tech or mathematics. New realms.
Both have pros and cons but the essential thing is both have great things to offer as well. Also, give modernism time. Time is needed for art to evolve. Perhaps, combine the two or just something entirely new. We must allow. I like to separate the art from the artists, poets are tricky creatures, but art, in itself, is a shattering rhapsody. Sometimes the music is obvious, harmonious and at other times like the sea, an inner music— more as a landscape, pick the elements and let the alchemy exist more as silence/ cacophony in the self.”
SCARRIET: Thanks. I feel I have not described the situation well. This is not really a matter of meter versus looseness, though that is part of it. Harmony versus Cacophony. The bourgeois reference is a Marxist sword which I’m not prepared to counter. The beautiful transcends the political for me. Harmony transcends the political. The other issue is poetic reputation—fraudulent or true? That’s important, as well. I don’t know what texts are available to you, but if you compare Shelley’s Defense of Poetry and Poe’s Rationale of Verse to Pound’s ABC of Reading or other discourses in the Modernist canon, you should note a tremendous difference. Art on one hand, clownish ambition on the other.
“Poetic reputation can certainly be fraudulent and changes with time. It is essential that as readers we discard that and approach any work of art unbiased. The beautiful does transcend the political for me as well. However, just like I said, sometimes I may differ greatly in the thought approach that artist adopt but if I feel that the art is good, I do not like to deny that. Clownish ambition is something I would certainly not be content with. I related to modern poetry because of a deep sense of disillusionment. I have tried all my life to offer but I have seen life’s apathy and cruelty almost too closely as well. Many aspects of modern poetry help me voice that energy. I also never think of myself just as a poet or writer. I simply see myself existing and find all paths of exploration have their merit. Thought-innovation, mathematics does appeal to a significant part of me, perspectives that I like simply because of the possibilities they open for the human mind. I simply would not like to compare because I don’t see any gain in that. I would like to take or imbibe what is good. I do agree as poets we have responsibility that the artists whose work deserves very much to be read be read and changing the mindset or the mindset is part of that. They are also wildly different in their approaches, the forms, the states of being, the time and era which doesn’t mean that we can’t compare them but it’s certainly a ground that encompasses a lot before any statements can be made. Of course, as a critic you would be engaging more keenly in these. I am yet to understand and accept the entirely of what all being a critic may require of me and I would not make such a commitment until I feel I have developed an entire sense of how to be in this role. For now, I prefer keeping an entirely unbiased view when I read and an open mind. Public opinion or alleged reputations are something I never take into account. History keeps rewriting itself but mostly, I suppose, that is my right as an artist, to reject the opinions of any human being, prize winner or not.”
SCARRIET: I have heard that our sanity depends on having dreams at night. We cannot choose what we dream. If dreams are unpleasant, they are trying to tell us, something perhaps. In waking (and poetry) I feel desperately a desire to choose only what is pleasant. Life to me has never been a dream. Poetry, even less so. My choosing is paramount. Whether I am dreaming without knowing it, I am not certain, except when I choose the pleasant, I believe I am not dreaming. I choose the pleasant dream. You say life has given you the bad and therefore modern poetry allows you to traffic in the bad? I confess I don’t understand this.
REACTION 2
“I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not saying that TSE, EP, MM, WCW, and RF were the same as Keats, Byron, and the other major Romantics, but that they did the same thing, reformed English verse. You don’t have to love all of either group. (As you know, I’m not a big fan of WCW, and I can leave most Shelley and a lot of Byron, as well as all later Wordsworth, pretty much on the shelf.) As for Frost, he was making it new in different ways. He brought the dramatic monologue into new ground, and may be the first poet in English to bring women’s experience to the fore (always excepting Dickinson, who was brilliantly interior). Frost was doing very nearly what Wordsworth had done in the lyrical ballads, writing the lives often left behind. WW would have loved The Code. / A lot of our differences are differences in taste.”
SCARRIET: Taste, as Poe, said is 95% of poetry, and verse is 95% mathematical. Emerson’s effusive hyperbole re: The Poet is silly and garish by comparison. E. leads to Nietzsche and fatalism/fanaticism. The first poem, I believe, which gets a close reading in Understanding Poetry is Frost’s “Out! Out!” (I think that’s the title) about a horrific accident and the death of a child. Boy, is it well done. But I hate it. Likewise, I don’t like everything the Romantics did. Didn’t the Roman poets do dramatic monologue? Catullus, etc. Shakespeare and Browning, the pinnacle of the dramatic monologue. “Reformed English verse” is too broad a term for me. What does that mean? Rhymes in the middle and beginning of lines instead of at the end? Expanding stanzaic forms? Formalism of more rigor? Extending out the iambic line? Or just a general relaxing? Haiku elements? Do Eliot/Pound/Williams sound more like “natural speech,” like men talking to men? Nah, not really. The insertion of “patient etherized upon a table” was nifty, but like Duchamp’s toilet it’s either a one-time laugh, or if it’s persisted in, it destroys civilization.
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Thanks and carry on, everyone! And watch out for that Nietzschean Emerson! Seriously!
Scarriet Editors
Salem MA July 29, 2022