Getting back to Jonathan's "decorum", just some square-hole-in-a-round-peg thoughts...

thinking of an intellectual economy of various decorii. Imagining an imaginary literary culture, obsessed with codes, styles, formats, fashions, pecking orders, which nevertheless fails to meet a foundational or primordial fitness test, having forgotten the first principles of the decorum of its particular calling.

Poets set the benchmarks or patterns, by means of which they attune all the little elements of fitness to their sense of fitness as a whole : how a poet fittingly behaves on this straw-strewn threshing-floor.

Who in modern US poetry applied him or herself to Dante's fitness test? In relation to the poet's response to the challenges of the present?

Pound had the grandiose ambition & the social indignation. But observe the contrast between these two paradigmatic exiles.

I have the feeling that contemporary poetry fails a fitness test, in two or three basic directions, at least:

1. failure to acknowledge the difficult technical challenges to good writing in general.

2. failure to recognize the serious themes of great poetry : magnanimity, justice, vision (Dantean terms).

3. assumption that poetry is a means and not an end : a means to social conformity & worldly success.

4. assumption that poetry is a means and not an end : a means toward expressing sour, narrow-minded resentments, rather than exploring paths toward the amelioration of conflict & suffering.

I feel stuck between the sub-cultures of #3 and #4. The former exemplified in the MFA industry, magazine verse, the various cliques of youth-Kult "party poetry", etc.; the latter exemplified, just to use a small current example, in Dale Smith's implying a similarity between contemporary US & Nazi Germany (here). I know this wasn't the main thrust of Dale's point : but it's the typical coin of the realm among the cult of poesie du ressentiment.

I sense that Jonathan, on decorum, fitness, is onto something that could be productive.

The concept presupposes that a literary text occupies a place in a larger field, a context. That it is necessarily both an echo, to some extent, and a mode of address or indication toward something else.

Maybe most shifts in style depend on a new sense of decorum. That is, if there's a fitness in relation to experience or reality, then, as our general sense of reality changes, the old styles or old forms of decorum will no longer ring true. (Maybe some forms of decorum never change, though - built as they are on our direct responses to certain basic kinds of experiences. Laughter in comedy is just a special application of humor in general.)

Complex artworks are structured around complex forms of decorum. I remember reading an essay about Melville's Confidence-Man, which argued that the thing is a fantastic meditation/spoof on the generic expectations of literary forms.

Complex critical projects are probably built around systematic and layered senses of decorum.

Jonathan in the vein of decorum. Interesting.

Decorum, in one way, seems like a kind of reality principle. Style to fit the subject : but how do we know what fits unless we know something about the subject? (Reminds me what Frost said once: something like - only amateurs try to tell us something we don't know in poems; the pros stay with what everybody knows.) (I've probably mangled that into oblivion. Ne'er so well-express'd & all that.)

But then there's the decorum of style itself, & styles. Fashions quickly build their own boilerplate template collections. This is decorum in the one-way mirror, I guess.

more later?