I hate to generalize about this, but it seems to me that for many poets everything begins in early adolescence. (Maybe it's all a puberty rite.)
In early adolescence there are no sharp borders between poetry and other kinds of writing, or between poetry and experience in general, or between a writer and his or her comrades in writing.
Classicism(?)... we (or I) need a new word for this. Since the Romantic era youth has been lock-kneed, stereotyped, as rebellion. But the passion of young poets for literature has as much to do with a secret affinity for the voice of experience. Classicism should not simply be equated with realism or world-weariness (though these aspects cannot be denied, either). Think rather of the notion of hard-won experience. The voice of character & wisdom - of the veterans of spiritual battles, of living itself.
New forms of such classicism appear in every generation - the enthusiasm of young poets for their own literary discoveries, their delvings into the past, the obscure quaint voices of the ancients (or even just the previous generation) - which turn out to be unexpectedly familiar - clear & pungent.
Keats we think of as a Romantic... but he was also classic in this sense. The classiest of the classic.
Showing posts with label classicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classicism. Show all posts
7.31.2007
2.24.2006
Our world is different, our problems are different, our lives are different today. What the classic sources provide, maybe, are not so much literary models as examples of intellectual and artistic confidence. There seem to be no problems - moral, psychological, political, artistic - which, once they became aware of them, Shakespeare & Dante & Homer & Virgil & Ben Jonson & Andrew Marvell & John Donne & "J" et al. were not willing to take on. I know this is an idealization : that's what classics are for.
(& the real hikers learn Greek, Latin, German, Ethiopian, Arabic, Chinese. & Russian, of course.)
(& K-2 poets take on cliff-like problems.)
(& the real hikers learn Greek, Latin, German, Ethiopian, Arabic, Chinese. & Russian, of course.)
(& K-2 poets take on cliff-like problems.)
7.28.2003
More reasonable debate from Tim.
The Rousseau quote seems a more individualist version of the social contract than my little statement. But my emphasis to start with was not on the process of political reform but on its source, which I asserted came not from some Rousseauiste romantic rebellion but from a perennial "tree of life" of humane values.
I guess I could summarize my position as : classicism is a recognition of the living presence of past poetry : and this recognition - this active reading and interpretation - is an integral aspect of making new poetry. Poetry is a living presence because it is an emanation from the broad universal stream of life & truth itself. The binary polemics and provocations of both the "avant-garde project" and its reactionary antagonists tend to deflect from the most basic and integral aspects of poetry-making.
Now everyone may nod their heads & go back to making joyful noises.
Mandelstam : "classicism is revolution".
The Rousseau quote seems a more individualist version of the social contract than my little statement. But my emphasis to start with was not on the process of political reform but on its source, which I asserted came not from some Rousseauiste romantic rebellion but from a perennial "tree of life" of humane values.
I guess I could summarize my position as : classicism is a recognition of the living presence of past poetry : and this recognition - this active reading and interpretation - is an integral aspect of making new poetry. Poetry is a living presence because it is an emanation from the broad universal stream of life & truth itself. The binary polemics and provocations of both the "avant-garde project" and its reactionary antagonists tend to deflect from the most basic and integral aspects of poetry-making.
Now everyone may nod their heads & go back to making joyful noises.
Mandelstam : "classicism is revolution".
7.24.2003
7.22.2003
Jonathan & Tim, I appreciate both your comments. But I think the whole lineage issue is a distraction, probably because I'm having trouble articulating exactly what I mean.
When I wrote about the avant-garde's dismissal of past poetry, or its framing of Whitman or Dickinson (for example : & you could find any number of examples) as avatars of resistance coming out of nowhere, I did not mean to insist on some standard stereotypical model of conservative poetics, in which the Great Figures, the classics, serve as Models for their ephebes & epigones.
Yes, the avant-garde, or the post-avant in Ron's term, may be obsessed with their own lineage; but the lineage is brought to the fore as a defense of an over-all agonistic paradigm, in which the "avant-garde project" (Steve Evans' term) is a project of critical thought (uniting poets with thinkers and activists more generally) which dis-establishes bourgeois values & systems (the "classic" futurist ideology). The attitude of the avant-garde toward the extended traditions of poetry is really a subset of this larger project.
Obviously and undeniably, each historical era produces new states of consciousness, new values, new faiths, new despairs; even the most traditionalist of the modern poets were engaged in the deepest rethinking and rewriting of the worn-out, deteriorated sensibilities and styles of romanticism and symbolism.
What seems worn-out and delegitimized to me, now, are artistic programs driven by the late effects of 20th-century ideologies. When I quoted some mathematician a few days ago, who wrote that "when faced with an insoluble problem, make it bigger", what I had in mind was enlarging and subtilizing the concept we have of literary influence and the influence of the tradition, the poetry which has become a natural force in the culture at large. In my view the poetic process is precisely an activity of working through and beyond ideological formations & cliches, by means of a more intimate engagement with the achievement of great poets emanating from former cultural eras and crystallizations. What this intimate engagement results in is a discovery of perennial human concerns, passions, longings, breakthroughs : the very definition of "classic" and classicism. This is not an artificial or reactionary process in any way : the intimacy of a poet with a past poetic spirit leads to the authentic re-discovery of the Real and the perennial.
The re-discovery of the classic is also a discovery of the normative. The avant-garde dismisses the normative as bourgeois or reactionary. But it is precisely this extreme position which makes the political edge of avant-garde poetry ineffectual. The greatest threat to the abusers of nature, freedom, and justice on the right, for example, will not come from their opposite numbers on the left, but from the center of normative humane values. This is true for politics in general and for its aesthetic manifestations too.
When I wrote about the avant-garde's dismissal of past poetry, or its framing of Whitman or Dickinson (for example : & you could find any number of examples) as avatars of resistance coming out of nowhere, I did not mean to insist on some standard stereotypical model of conservative poetics, in which the Great Figures, the classics, serve as Models for their ephebes & epigones.
Yes, the avant-garde, or the post-avant in Ron's term, may be obsessed with their own lineage; but the lineage is brought to the fore as a defense of an over-all agonistic paradigm, in which the "avant-garde project" (Steve Evans' term) is a project of critical thought (uniting poets with thinkers and activists more generally) which dis-establishes bourgeois values & systems (the "classic" futurist ideology). The attitude of the avant-garde toward the extended traditions of poetry is really a subset of this larger project.
Obviously and undeniably, each historical era produces new states of consciousness, new values, new faiths, new despairs; even the most traditionalist of the modern poets were engaged in the deepest rethinking and rewriting of the worn-out, deteriorated sensibilities and styles of romanticism and symbolism.
What seems worn-out and delegitimized to me, now, are artistic programs driven by the late effects of 20th-century ideologies. When I quoted some mathematician a few days ago, who wrote that "when faced with an insoluble problem, make it bigger", what I had in mind was enlarging and subtilizing the concept we have of literary influence and the influence of the tradition, the poetry which has become a natural force in the culture at large. In my view the poetic process is precisely an activity of working through and beyond ideological formations & cliches, by means of a more intimate engagement with the achievement of great poets emanating from former cultural eras and crystallizations. What this intimate engagement results in is a discovery of perennial human concerns, passions, longings, breakthroughs : the very definition of "classic" and classicism. This is not an artificial or reactionary process in any way : the intimacy of a poet with a past poetic spirit leads to the authentic re-discovery of the Real and the perennial.
The re-discovery of the classic is also a discovery of the normative. The avant-garde dismisses the normative as bourgeois or reactionary. But it is precisely this extreme position which makes the political edge of avant-garde poetry ineffectual. The greatest threat to the abusers of nature, freedom, and justice on the right, for example, will not come from their opposite numbers on the left, but from the center of normative humane values. This is true for politics in general and for its aesthetic manifestations too.
I'm sketching the outlines of a different paradigm for poetics, different from that which dominated the last century. The new-old paradigm would not accept an a priori agonistic or dialectical stance with regard to past poetry, spurred (as it was in the 20th century) by social/political violence, crisis and disorder.
The new approach would acknowledge its debt to, and its affinities with, an underlying basic poetic process itself; it would recognize the cultural architecture formed by this process which seeps into experience, art becoming a second nature (the "second life of art", in Montale's terms).
The metapoetry which might stem from this approach would be an outcome of the poet's recognition of affinities with, and differences with, these models of art/nature, which are already suffused throughout everyday and aesthetic experience; "metapoetry" because the ensuing dialogue with past works would in turn suffuse the work itself.
Classicism in this sense, is essentially a recognition that the embodiments, the incarnations, so to speak, of the poetic activity of distant times, is not necessarily a dead weight or an inimical influence; but a series of saliences or models - examples of achievement and goads to revision.
The new approach would acknowledge its debt to, and its affinities with, an underlying basic poetic process itself; it would recognize the cultural architecture formed by this process which seeps into experience, art becoming a second nature (the "second life of art", in Montale's terms).
The metapoetry which might stem from this approach would be an outcome of the poet's recognition of affinities with, and differences with, these models of art/nature, which are already suffused throughout everyday and aesthetic experience; "metapoetry" because the ensuing dialogue with past works would in turn suffuse the work itself.
Classicism in this sense, is essentially a recognition that the embodiments, the incarnations, so to speak, of the poetic activity of distant times, is not necessarily a dead weight or an inimical influence; but a series of saliences or models - examples of achievement and goads to revision.
7.21.2003
Sometimes I've been criticized for my repetitive definitive assertive assertions about what "poetry is". But in today's literary climate, a return to basic first principles might be a healthy thing.
The confusion in avant-garde oppositional circles seems to be what it's always been : a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty. Imitation, as practiced in all the thousands of MFA programs etc., is castigated as not only unnecessary but as positively bad (The "School of Quietude" polemic is only the latest in a long line); what is put in its place are rotating models of literary rebellion or idiosyncrasy, as if rebellion & idiosyncrasy themselves were the substance of art and poetics. This is the fundamental mistake.
The contempt for imitation reveals an underlying misreading, an erasure of past poetries and their replacement with an a-historical continual revolution. But past poetries will not go away, will not be shunted aside; what the various idioms of futurism reveal, more than anything else, is aesthetic impoverishment and the debasement of literary values.
The oppositionalists read Whitman or Dickinson, for example, as utterly sui generis, geniuses from nowhere, whose lack or displacement of any lineage whatsoever then becomes a model for authenticity. But the activity of poetic making came before them; their technical achievements are a secondary effect of the intensity of their poetic thought, not simply stepping-stones in some kind of diachronic procession of unconventional literary progress or revolution. Literature does not simply "add on" to some "advances" in a linear progression : it wavers over time, swayed by individual authors whose insight & capability allow them to counter whatever rhetorical excesses or inauthenticities overshadow their times.
The basic character of poetic making has never changed. It is a verbal response to reality, a narrative ordering of experience, keyed to harmony (in both its musical and its logical or thematic senses). Praise come naturally to this activity; lyric ardor unites the perception of, and the desire for, what is beautiful; elegy and mourning express its loss; the logic of truth places beauty in a moral context; irony and denunciation are its negative image, its complementary shadow. The technique displayed in the working-out of this activity is secondary, the way Coleridgean fancy is secondary to imagination : poiesis itself is inherent talent, capability, a natural artfulness which emanates technique, rather than proceeding from it.
The great narrative of human experience is illegible without the first perception of the over-arching shape of the narrations which are already there. This is a hard thing to explain, but it gets to the root of the distinction between classicism and revolutionary modernism, or acmeism and futurism. The acmeist, for example, enters into a dialogue which is already ongoing : what this reflects is an aesthetic receptivity - beginning in childhood - to the natural continuity of human expression with time and nature. We learn the beauty of language and songs and stories at our mother's knees; our own artistic endeavors take place in the context of pre-existing beautiful sounds (other poems, other stories, other narrative orders). The world is shaped by the great narratives that preceded us : literature is not merely demystification, a purely negative critical activity of disaffection or disillusionment : it is also a sharing in the delightful apprehension of a stable and recurrent beauty or an underlying order.
This kind of classicism gives rise to those personal canons of aesthetic fitness and rightness which spur the poet to make something likewise, something both new and fitting : something right for the time and place. The great models of the past also challenge the poet to reach beyond the petty, the minor, the vulgar, the repetitive, to make something genuine, authentic and aesthetically meaningful in the clearest terms, for the widest, most disinterested audience.
The confusion in avant-garde oppositional circles seems to be what it's always been : a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty. Imitation, as practiced in all the thousands of MFA programs etc., is castigated as not only unnecessary but as positively bad (The "School of Quietude" polemic is only the latest in a long line); what is put in its place are rotating models of literary rebellion or idiosyncrasy, as if rebellion & idiosyncrasy themselves were the substance of art and poetics. This is the fundamental mistake.
The contempt for imitation reveals an underlying misreading, an erasure of past poetries and their replacement with an a-historical continual revolution. But past poetries will not go away, will not be shunted aside; what the various idioms of futurism reveal, more than anything else, is aesthetic impoverishment and the debasement of literary values.
The oppositionalists read Whitman or Dickinson, for example, as utterly sui generis, geniuses from nowhere, whose lack or displacement of any lineage whatsoever then becomes a model for authenticity. But the activity of poetic making came before them; their technical achievements are a secondary effect of the intensity of their poetic thought, not simply stepping-stones in some kind of diachronic procession of unconventional literary progress or revolution. Literature does not simply "add on" to some "advances" in a linear progression : it wavers over time, swayed by individual authors whose insight & capability allow them to counter whatever rhetorical excesses or inauthenticities overshadow their times.
The basic character of poetic making has never changed. It is a verbal response to reality, a narrative ordering of experience, keyed to harmony (in both its musical and its logical or thematic senses). Praise come naturally to this activity; lyric ardor unites the perception of, and the desire for, what is beautiful; elegy and mourning express its loss; the logic of truth places beauty in a moral context; irony and denunciation are its negative image, its complementary shadow. The technique displayed in the working-out of this activity is secondary, the way Coleridgean fancy is secondary to imagination : poiesis itself is inherent talent, capability, a natural artfulness which emanates technique, rather than proceeding from it.
The great narrative of human experience is illegible without the first perception of the over-arching shape of the narrations which are already there. This is a hard thing to explain, but it gets to the root of the distinction between classicism and revolutionary modernism, or acmeism and futurism. The acmeist, for example, enters into a dialogue which is already ongoing : what this reflects is an aesthetic receptivity - beginning in childhood - to the natural continuity of human expression with time and nature. We learn the beauty of language and songs and stories at our mother's knees; our own artistic endeavors take place in the context of pre-existing beautiful sounds (other poems, other stories, other narrative orders). The world is shaped by the great narratives that preceded us : literature is not merely demystification, a purely negative critical activity of disaffection or disillusionment : it is also a sharing in the delightful apprehension of a stable and recurrent beauty or an underlying order.
This kind of classicism gives rise to those personal canons of aesthetic fitness and rightness which spur the poet to make something likewise, something both new and fitting : something right for the time and place. The great models of the past also challenge the poet to reach beyond the petty, the minor, the vulgar, the repetitive, to make something genuine, authentic and aesthetically meaningful in the clearest terms, for the widest, most disinterested audience.
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