No good poem needs explaining.
Poets, however, need to explain themselves. Every poet needs a manifesto.
New Romanticism was really nothing more than my attempt to issue a manifesto.
The New Romanticism is a poorly formed and disjointed poetry movement (movement and manifesto are the same). I tried to include Ben Mazer (see my book Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism Thomas Graves, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2021) but failed, and generally, a few others (friends of Ben, mostly) and that failed, too.
Unfortunately, “New Romanticism” in poetry recalls 1980s pop music. The 60s were good, both soul and nerd-wise, Led Zeppelin was good in the 70s—then punk came with its attitude, but musically, punk was bad, and so the 80s returned to pop, but with videos and bad taste overload. Musically, the 80s was 60s lite.
New Romanticism?
And Mazer isn’t even Romantic. He’s T.S. Eliot. What was I even thinking?
Oh sure, one can take a step back, and say with Randall Jarrell, Modernism is an extension of Romanticism and make all kinds of wide historical claims, effectively blurring everything. Great. But then what’s the point of using a term like the “new” Romanticism?”
A few of the things I have written may be interesting, but the label “New Romanticism” is a problem.
The 200 year old Romantics in poetry are icons, superstars. Blake? Byron? Keats? Shelley? Wordsworth? The Romantic “manifesto” has been articulated for them by historical scholarship—and the little prose they did write in the way of manifesto was sublime, selfless and had universal importance.
The ravings of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson are narrow and cringe-worthy by comparison. T.S. Eliot said poetry should be “difficult” and Delmore Schwartz asked innocently, “why?” but the professors agreed with Eliot (naturally).
Today the manifestos of Modernism are muttered in ways few find interesting.
The verse prosody of the Moderns is too complex—you have to go back to Poe’s “Rationale of Verse” to find something well, “rational.” Simple, clear.
But since the Moderns believe “it all scans,” what are we to expect in the way of prosody from the Moderns? Something crazy and complex. The “headless iamb” and so forth. Calling Annie Finch.
The late Harold Bloom is the Manifesto King of our day, with his idea of rivalry—poets write against one another, and the original is all. This has always been true; it’s not a new idea or an interesting one; it says more about the time we live in than anything else.
Those Romantics. We can’t surpass them—and so Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” at least rings emotionally true.
“New Romanticism” isn’t really wrong. It’s suicidal.
When the 20th century dust clears, children will still be reading “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” and not a whole lot of what came after.
Ezra Pound’s manifesto said the image was vital.
Dante, however, showed in his Comedia, that even in poetry, the “image” is idol worship. According to Dante’s vision, image-in-poetry is a process. Poetry is a divine journey, not a narrow list of rules.
From a private conversation I had with Ben, in which I reminded him learned criticism by poets themselves sets them apart and truly makes them famous—and this can’t be overstated—Dante features poetry lessons in his Vita Nuova, Shakespeare shares his critical ideas in his Sonnets, Pope in works like “Essay on Criticism,” Wordsworth and Coleridge most famously in the Preface and Biographia Literaria, “The Poet,”by Emerson, Poe, the monster critic, Pound and Eliot—and wonder of wonders, just like that, Mazer has released his manifesto at last.
Here’s an excerpt.
“Art is first and foremost the constituent of God. It is on God’s authority that everything hangs there. All poetry is in praise of God.
The poet better have a very clear receptor to handle the job.
In the human sphere, of which the arts partake, the highest form of Godliness is holy matrimony. Along the way, the languishments and yearnings of love drop their fettered implements.
These are the byways and treadmills of art, the tithes of vanity.”
Does Mazer sound closer in this passage to Eliot, the Christian, or Shelley, the Romantic?
Eliot, of course.
So much for New Romanticism and Ben Mazer.
My quarrels with Eliot—mixed with admiration—are extended. I won’t get into them here.
I will quote one more passage from Mazer’s just issued manifesto—and this leads us into the friendly argument I began with Ben that his poetry contains “no ideas.”
“Tone is texture; it is pointed obliquity. Ideas inform poetry obliquely. They do not hit one over the head as in prose.”
The dark and cloudy imagery of Dante’s Inferno leads downwards/upwards to the clarity of visionary ideas in the “Paradiso.” Moderns are certainly allowed to write “Inferno-poetry” with clotted imagery in which no idea is clear—but the wider arc should be understood. Therefore, the manifesto.
If we take just two famous examples of Romanticism, Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” we do in fact see “ideas” that hit one over the head.
Immediately upon reading these two poems, their ideas—recalling a scene, in one, the vanity of statuary, in the other—could not, to all readers, be less “oblique.”
What makes poetry great? Two things. Phraseology: “the lone and level sands stretch far away” —and ideas.
It is the phraseology itself, not the phraseology hiding the idea (“obliqueness”) which is poetry’s virtue.
Unfortunately legions of sophisticated poets—of the oblique Difficulty School, the ones who travel no further but pause forever in the shadowy recesses of the “Inferno” (the Comedia’s most popular section by far)—reverse the formula, convincing themselves obliquity itself is the virtue.
It is this reversal, despite Mazer’s endless talent and his strong feelings of divinity and sublimity—which bar him from the popularity of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. At his lyric best, Mazer weaves a magic spell, but obliquely:
And end in rain. Just as it begins.
To wade through the perpetual hieroglyphs,
one constant stranger, visiting to tea.
The afternoon sinks down. Chinee! Chinee!
And though you have a lot to say to me,
blankets the evening and conceals the night—
as if one starry fog were shining bright
to be repaid with afterthoughts. One bliss!
Sinking into an opiatic haze
as if there were no number to its days.
I can’t recall! I can’t recall the sights
but, as if the silent film restarts,
and has a lot to say, the broken lights
serve to remember what they cannot name.
(from “The King”)
Salem, MA 11/5/22