Janus-Faced Henryism

In my Janus-faced post of yesterday ("poetry is/is not a psychological double-bind"), I did not quite express the whole of the elusive notion which triggered the initial commentary.  Let me see if I can briefly get there now.

The notion itself was about doubleness : a sense that some kind of detachment or critical awareness is integral to creative art forms - including poetry - and the art-experience itself.

Pasternak once characterized Mandelstam's appearance on the Russian literary scene thus : "you entered a conversation which had already begun."  Many the poet & theorist (Plato, Lacan, Levinas come to mind) have emphasized the dialogic nature of poetry (and consciousness generally).  But the notion is perhaps idealized to some extent.  If art is a dialogue, it seems somewhat one-sided.  One partner speaks, the other listens.  One is expressive, the other is mute.  One is conscious, deliberate, rational - the other subconscious, intuitive, ineffable.  One is assertive, the other receptive.  Yin, yang.  The two halves of creation and reception play a subtle chess game : poets acknowledge dreams, intuition, inspiration, negative capability, or the Muse as the true source of their rational articulations, bringing into question : who is really speaking here?  Who listening?

Then the poet and reader (audience) replicate this original duality - another mirror of doubleness.  The poet recites; the reader listens, responds - is bored, is moved; is misled, is enlightened; is offended, is pleased...

And then, finally, the poet is also the reader.  New poetry grows from old poetry, as the complex emotional-intellectual receptors of the poet respond to achieved works of the past (impossible to overstate the chasm which lies between the poet giving birth to a new, as-yet unknown work of art, and the examples of finished poems, which represent the poet's benchmarks, models, and obstacles).

Moreover, the poet is famously characterized (Keats' negative capability) as the embodiment of receptivity : he or she "reads" not only prior literature and rival poets, but the "signs" emanating from nature and experience as a whole.

The sketch or pattern of the field we are presenting here - this notion of "detachment" as integral to creative expression - begins to appear less like a standard opposition between "poet & critic", or "intuition and intellect", and more like a dimension of aesthetic experience as a whole.

Which raises, in my mind, the question of value.  Taste, critical judgement, tradition : perhaps these are both tacit and fundamental to an era's literary culture.  What do I mean by this?  How does this follow from the previous?  I mean that if tacit reception is one half of art & poetry, as a dialogic duality, then there is more to poetic making than a simple 1-2 process of "create-disseminate".  Reception becomes a kind of fertile, intangible ground or atmosphere within which actual poems manifest.

American culture idealizes immediacy, production, re-invention.  "Make it new" becomes the paradigmatic shibboleth for the sales appeal of the stylish rebel, for the idealization of change per se.  It's a linear, one-way process.  Success = succession.  I think what I am proposing, indirectly, is a challenge to this standard arrangement.

The poem on the page is a kind of message in a bottle.  Sheer potentiality - nothing until it is found and opened and received and evaluated.  And the message itself may be in code; it may be meaningless until you find it out, you give it meaning.  It may also be allegorical - in disguise.  The obvious, the overt message may be meaningless in itself.  The poem lives in another dimension - a quintessence, a 5th element, active only in tacit reception.  The poem is, at heart, a riddle.

I guess I would like to imagine a somewhat different American poetic culture than the one we have at present.  There seems to be a kind of short-circuit driving the current machinery, which goes something like creation-dissemination-publicity-fame-awards-prestige.  What's left out here is the tacit "(reception)" bracketing both sides of the term "creation".  Maybe a healthier, simpler template for poetic culture would go something like this : (reception)-creation-(reception)-publication-(reception).  This model is not driven by ambition, professional interests, & prestige, by ulterior goals and motives.  If I were able to, I would display the latter, (reception) model as a circle.

bookstalls in Paris

Stay, Momentary Confusion

Taking off where I left off a few hours ago, to retrieve Sophie from school...

We were mumbling something about critical detachment, about memory.  "Tradition" in poetry.

Tradition : bit of a taboo expression, eh?  Reactionary, neo-conservative, T.S.-Eliotos antique odor there.

Of course 20th-cent. Modernists revolutionized the whole notion - backward & forward, left & right.  But that was already a long time ago.

When I think about poetic tradition, I see something essentially unavoidable, like "family".  But this tradition is very much not a symptom of some filial-Oedipal-patriarchal-economic sense of duty.  It is instead something organic, almost biological.

Watch how young poets struggle to launch collectives, find affinities, soul-mates, define themselves, test themselves against be-laureled paragons, aspire to famousness, & so on.  What doesn't so much interest me here are motivating ambitions & rivalries.  Rather the curious thing is the anxiety, the helplessness, of poets - confronted by the fact that poetry is this livid knot of incomprehensible, uncontrollable, inexplicable lumpish living somethung, which nobody know how to explain, correct, control, or abolish.  Is like the inheritance of some arcane glob of biological (living) what-not, handed down from generation unto generation - the voodoo box of elegant poison Grandpa bequeathed us, whose Grandpa left to him, & so on, with an unreadable curse scribbled on the lid : Take Good Care of Me, Never Abandon Me, or You Gonna Die.

What are all these MFA programs for, if not that?  What are all these mags about?  These awards, these citations, this enormous prestidigitation of prestige?  These quotations in stone?  These honored dead, these beloved unread classics?  Touchstones?  Operatic ecstasies?

The point of the sword is immediacy.  Poetry doesn't need explaining : it's like a powerful speech, it justifies itself in the persuasive dominance of its message.

All the talent of Madison Avenue is compacted here in this syllable of recorded charisma.

But actually, I don't believe all that.  It's like the poetic version of a simplified, bowdlerized, philistine "American Dream" : the past is pointless; everything of value is about me, here, now.  Poetry is the anti-tradition. (Here we get down to the marrow of the dumbed-down American myth.)

Great!  Cool!  Make America Drool Again!  Great Gatsby!

Sounds pretty psychological, actually.  Frazer, Sacred Wood & all.  Siege Perilous.  The double-bind of succession, father & son.  Elongate twilight of Freud's sacrificial totem, across the "grey matter" of poetry itself.  (So maybe it is a symptom, after all?)

The Great Game.

But you mentioned game... (unicorns?)... so let's reiterate : I had this hunch or notion this afternoon about "detachment".

If we think about what we love, about what's beautiful... it occurs to me that the beautiful is always overdetermined : is "meta", one way or another.  What's beautiful entails, and emanates from, reflection (in both the physical & the intellectual sense).

Memory suffuses the object with feeling, identification.  What we love involves reverberations, echoes (mnemonic stimulae).

So, curiously, detachment - the distancing, the psychic freedom from passionate, emotional absorption - allows memory to evoke beautiful response, because it is fused with the recognition of tragic reality (the actual distance of the past, the ineluctable remoteness of lost time).

The plangent feeling of the truth, the power of the documentary.  Classic-Romantic.  (Italian Neo-Realism?  & then - Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Deserto Rosso.)

The hour draws on... my deep-seated hunches & haunches gettin' tired here, blog.  For Augustine (& for Nicolas Cusanus) time is purely psychological.  Bracketed by the soul.  Begins & ends there.  This is a liberating concept, on the one hand - & also an abyss.

But for Augustine (following Virgil) poetry (music) was the very strong magic of ordered time.  The enchantment of syllables, framing, architecturally grounding, the sacred ineffable Now (planted, as Joyce put it, on that very void).

Proust also, echoing Augustine.  Re-echoing the poets (in prose).

The frame supports the picture (Rothko colors dream into infinity).  The beautiful an echo, a reflection.  Sketch, abstract, icon, exemplum, imago - of the immaculate supra-beautiful.

So where does this leave poetry?  Tradition?

Sounds very Symboliste.  But remember : poetry is this intractable breathing spiritual animal - a stubborn problem, a dilemma - a sort of spiritual refugee, a crisis (like Roma in Roma).

Nobody can work it out in advance.  But I do believe it might be possible to re-think poetry (with a capital P) somewhat as the pre-Revolutionary, post-Revolutionary Russian Acmeists did (Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam).  With a sort of Cusanian (conjunctio oppositorum) passionate detachment, or critical engagement.

The paradigmatic or characteristic quality of contemporary cultural reality is immediacy.  All the Faustian technological forces are concentrated on disseminating the charismatic (marketable) product.  Of course there's a large element of risk involved, but this is of the essence of productive enterprise.  Success is the by-word; our future well-being depends on the happy financial outcome.

By the way, I'm not against free markets, or anti-capitalist.  I just believe there exists a scale of values which must mediate the struggle for economic domination, on behalf of equality, liberty, human rights, the common good, the safety net, the peaceable kingdom.  There are things more important than luxury, status, charisma and sway.  There is freedom.  There is equality.  There is justice.

Poetry inhabits this realm of universal spiritual values (see: Mandelstam on Chaadev, Rome, moral freedom).  And by grappling with the chaotic force-fields of articulate speech, it establishes a free space for what the Acmeists termed "the Word as such".

This sounds like a very hi-falutin' bequest.  But it's not, really.  I'm looking at the tradition of the beautiful as a manifestation of the detachment of elegiac (yet strangely hopeful) realism.  Of Blake's metaphysical "innocence and experience".

Social media is bursting with constant, relentless, monotonal cultural aggression, masquerading as sophistication.  The little screen is inundated with seductive, screaming roadsigns.  King Blurb is Trumpet for a Day.

Poetry, on the other hand, resonates with inherent doubleness.  It is not what you think, it is not what you feel.  It is not even what you read.  It is another kind of sign, pointing toward your beating heart.

Listen to it, keeping time... like John Donne's bell.  It tolls for thee.

Momentary stay, with confusion

For the past couple years, at least, I've been digging along in the trenches, or the mole-hole, of Ravenna Diagram, my long processional day-by-day poem.  It might be nice to try messing with this blog as I used to, with off-the-cuff observations & ponderings.  I have 15 minutes here before I have to go pick up Sophie, my granddaughter, from her school - what can I say in 15 minutes?

As I say, Ravenna D. absorbs most of my so-called mental concentration now.  But fleeting thoughts today...

"Detachment."  Is it possible an artist/poet might show a kind of natural capacity for detachment from his/her own work, and from the field of poetry generally?

Is such detachment perhaps necessary for substantial creative works?

I'm thinking about how poetic movements, fashions - fundamental changes in styles and thematic concerns - actually happen.  Perhaps they have to culminate in a level of conscious choice, of principle.  Some awareness, self-consciousness of one's cultural-historical situation, and of what might be possible.

This seemingly would require some mode of detachment - the ability to stand back, see things from "the outside".

Which for me anyway gets to a question about "tradition" in poetry.  Is there such a thing?  What does it mean?

Is it possible that the real & authentic creative effort we call "poetry" is very much caught up in a kind of artistic consciousness - a sort of retrospective "memory" - which is both involved, integrated - and detached from its processes and perspectives?

I guess the word often used is "critical" consciousness.

I must run... more later?  Who knows.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : poetics (label : subject/poetics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many, many others) :

allusion, beauty, commentary, complexity, incarnational poetics, literary absolute, mathematics, musicality, negative capability, paraphrase, reader, recapitulation, time...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

Believe it or not, I represent continuity with that old high road. An American version. Not the pretentious post-avants, not the harlequin New York School, not the prosy Olsonites, not the slick magazine poets, not the cautious academics (charming and dazzling and fine as they all can be). Not them - just little ol' me. Henry. It's all there in them pocket-size paperbacks, the long & short of it.

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.)

Responding in part to Robert A.'s interesting post on public/private manners & mannerisms:

Here's a passage from an essay that TS Eliot published in The Egoist in 1919 (& never republished):

"This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with a passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person...
...We may not be great lovers, but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition."

- this is quoted in Langdon Hammer's Hart Crane & Allen Tate, as part of his history of Crane/Tate/Eliot's ambiguous-subliminal erotic psychologies. Crane responded (as a gay man) to this early Eliot; Tate, on the other hand, to the reserved, impersonal, authoritative Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

I post this to point to the contrast between this, on the one hand, and the informal, relaxed familiarity of the NY School approach (which RA describes). Poet-friendships, there, are not surrounded by an aura of ambiguity, romance & taboo.

This "demotic" attitude seems connected with the general relaxation (or vulgarization) of sexual mores : the taboos have broken down.

The idea that private name-dropping in poems, etc., impinges on the boundaries of traditional public speech is true in more ways than one.

I think it's possible to send private, personal messages & public messages - separately - in one and the same poem. The overuse of obviously private messages seems kind of slack, in a way. But it may also be a realistic acknowledgement of the limits of a poet's reach & impact. & it reflects, back to us, the quality of our own private lives.

Eliot's passage above, by the way, seems like a script for my own comically-representative experience (I mean Mandelstam's impact, & the "Shakespeare episode"). Shakespeare's ambiguously erotic & narcissistic sonnets literally knocked the wind out of me - & threw me back into the Biblical fold.

Oddly, Eliot here seems sane & healthy to me. He's talking about love, not "eros" or sex (hence his phrase, "we may not be great lovers" - funny). Love may involve passionate erotic energies, but it's not only that. Contemporary mores often simply reduce love to eros.

The poetry of quietude is intimately related to the vague intuition that the poet's mission is to relive and revive the great and very old and very intricate language of the poems found in books.

This intuition has dual roots : first, in the encounter with the Bible (the book), experienced as a moment of personal destiny and rebirth; second, in the realization that every reading experience is an echo of the best moments of a lost childhood (when you were reading a story).

Thus the poetry of quietude is involved in a project of conquering or redeeming time.

There is a dimension in poetry which Ron, for all his genealogical & antiquarian research, knowledge, & passion, just does not get. & I know my own b-b-b-b-log is tedious with Ron-demurrals. Nevertheless I want to say it, just like I want to say, as an aside, that Louis Menand (in his essay in this week's New Yorker on the sociology of literature & prize-giving) does not get it, on a certain level.

What's wrong with Menand's very familiar thesis? The age-old mistake of the fore-brained philosophical proseur : to confuse the woman's dress & make-up with her physical beauty. Menand pretends to reduce art to power, commerce & good old ordinary human venality (how enlightened, how sophisticated, how worldly-wise, how regular-guy!). He forgets that the retail of literary commerce is rooted in the wholesale of aesthetic beauty; that the insane ego-trips, kultur-trips, money-trips & power-trips, which distort every human social interaction, don't actually touch or influence the formal elements of beauty (which are untouchable because formal - because rooted in nature) - elements that both the craft-work and the inspired genius of art are bound to emulate & reiterate.

& what do I want to say, again, about Ronville Sillimanville? What is it he doesn't get?

Ron reduces poetic history to a squabble between competing "schools". Essentially, this is a rationalization : a reduction of something which is more accurately, if more vaguely, termed "tradition".

Poetic tradition is ecumenical and welcoming : that is, membership is open to individuals from nowhere, everywhere. Yet once in the door, tradition is extremely demanding.

How so? Well, you cannot become part of the tradition by joining a school or a trend. In order to become part of the one great global tradition of poetry, you have to make poems. And poems are made with inspired poetic genius, gift, talent : because without these powers, the attainment of the particular order & beauty which inheres in poems is impossible.

Poetic beauty is so dense with articulate sensible conceptual order - like the synthesis of a coherent dream, raised to the nth degree - that its accomplishment is not available to the human will.

The literary theorizing which subjects poets & poems to the discourse of schoolish rivalries is similar to the Marxist narrow-mindedness which channels human industry & commerce into its particular video fantasy-battle between Good & Evil. That is, the model is inadequate to the complexity of the truth.

The poet is dedicated to the service of beauty; his or her productions bear witness to that dedication. This is not a board game to be judged by tyro-hobbyists.

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 pitiless authority of the old, suffocating the present under its weight.

A happy marriage involves mutual renunciation, self-sacrifice out of love.
So the new pleases the old, & vice versa.

Stevens' image of poetry as a man carrying his father on his back.

The wars over style & "lineage" : psychological projection & compensation.

The pitiless clamor of the New, which blindly erases what came before. "Classicism" is memory and pity. But memory can also be resistance.

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.

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.

Tim Yu responds to some of my recent postings.

My position on 20th-century avant-gardism and its inheritance is that it displaces, programmatically, any lineage but its own. That Ron Silliman et al. debate their own genealogy within that movement is not evidence to disprove my argument : that the project of revolutionary novelty displaces the poetic process itself. Tim writes:

"I'm most bothered by the statement that avant-gardism is simply "a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty." Nobody believes in mere "technical novelty"; to say that of a poem is simply another way of saying that it's silly, pointless, or boring. In fact, it seems like it's been the task of the avant-garde over the past century to pursue novelty with a purpose--precisely with the goal that Gould describes: a better "verbal response to reality." It just depends what reality you think you're responding to.

The labels "innovative" and "experimental" are occasionally annoying for this reason--that they suggest just fooling around with techniques with no purpose or direction, innovation for innovation's sake. "

It seems to me that Tim somewhat undercuts his own position in this last sentence. Where do these labels come from, if not from the programmatic commitment to "pursuit of novelty for a purpose"?

As I think my original posts made clear, I'm certainly not opposed to reform, re-assessment, renovation of existing decadences of style and rhetoric. My point is that "avant-garde allegiance" is fundamentally a form of intellectual conceit and self-delusion; it short-circuits the poetic process by means of historical narratives of literary progress, by partisan commitments to collective "movements" which take the place of individual perception and composition.

My object in these criticisms is not criticism for its own sake. I want to focus on those aspects of the poetic process which are perennial, not subject to polemics and tendentious literary politics. I think that's the best way to clear the air, to discover our real affinities and opportunities.

Once you acknowledge the presence of past poetry, you are at the beginning of a different road, where your own poetry starts to reflect the poems of the past, in echo & revision & reversal & expansion. What is permanent in experience is refracted through new lenses, a new time, new faith or new disillusionment. What is made permanent in poetry through re-invention begins to reflect, as in the dual lenses of a telescope, what is permanent in experience & nature. The perennial return of poetic themes becomes the shadow of the perennial concerns of life itself.

Maybe an answer to the excessive familiarity, and the familiar excess, of poetry, is this kind of metapoetry, oriented by echo & response to the distant foci of deep time.

All the business about professionalization-academicization-commercialization-subculturalization-politicization-depoliticization is something else, a side issue that obscures the substantial. To keep such things at arm's length can be liberating for the spirit, but in itself doesn't guarantee the visitation of the Muse. As Montale wrote, in "Stile e tradizione" : "Tradition is continued not by those who want to, but by those who can."

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 work involved. . . doesn't it have to do, in the long run, with what we identify as Truth? Beginning with puppy love for adored poems - listening, imitating, re-writing to suit different circumstances. Similar to adapting fashions from "models", or cardinals imitating car alarms. Milton reading Virgil. Shakespeare watching Marlowe. Then they go to work. Because if it's not re-written, it becomes a grave. Every poem ends as trobar clus : textual solipsism. The counter-weight of artifact & communication (Letter killeth/Spirit giveth life).