What About Poetry?

[poliphilo]

What about poetry? asks my friend goddlefrood

 Poetry is always with us but great poets are few and far between. Much of the 18th century was a great poet-free zone. There's Pope and after Pope no one of the first rank until the romantics. 

Was Gray a great poet? A minor poet who wrote one great poem, I think.

So the contemporary dearth of great poets doesn't necessarily mean that poetry is dead. 

To be a great poet you need  to get into the book of quotations,  to add something to the language,  to "purify the dialect of the tribe". The last British poet to achieve that was Larkin. The last American poet to do it was Ginsburg. 

There are those who say  the great poetry of our age is in our songs.  I'm not convinced.  Words for music are usually too loose to look well on the page. 

I adore Dylan. I think he's a great artist. I don't think he's a great poet.

Of course I may be overlooking someone. I've got to admit I don't read much contemporary poetry. Does anybody?

i used to be a reviewer. I gave it up because it was making me angry.

So many poems about what I did on my hols. So many poems about dying relatives.

The great poet of our age may not have been published yet, or not published prominently.  Blake, Dickinson, Hopkins all went unnoticed by their contemporaries. 

The first half of the 20th century was a great age for English language poetry- perhaps the greatest. How do you follow Yeats, Eliot, Auden et al?  It's as if everything that can be done has been done.  

There were over fifty years between the death of Pope and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads. That's how long it can take  a culture to recover from a golden age.

So, no, on reflection I don't think poetry is finished. A great poet will come along eventually. They always do.

Comments

[oakmouse]

I'm curious what you think of Robin Skelton and R.S. Thomas.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Robin Skelton is entirely new to me. I've just been doing a bit of research. Attractive, romantic poems. And he was a witch too? I feel I need to know more.

I've been aware of R.S. Thomas for years and must have read quite a lot of his work one way or another, but it's never really drawn me in. I find it very austere- chilly even.

[oakmouse]

Skelton is a trip. Look up his short stories while you're at it; they're worth a read. His poetry can be hard to find, but I lucked into a copy of his book "Shapes of Our Singing" and love it. The poems aren't all top-notch, but many of them are quite good.

R.S. Thomas is chilly, yes, and many of his poems don't touch me at all. Some even actively repel me. But some of them ... wow. I think "An Airy Tomb" is my overall favorite of his. He captures some of what I felt in the landscape of rural north Wales.