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Wednesday 24 August 2011

Our readers write

A bear disapproves of Pound's middle period.

Welcome to 'Our readers write', where we throw out a question related to poetry and ask readers to jump up and catch it. Got a question you'd like answered? Drop it in the comments section for use in the near future.

Poets like a chance to take a swing at one another, but, as this blog aims to portray only positive poetry vibes, here's a question that comes through the back door: are there any particular poets whose work you don't think much of, but whom you think everyone should read?

7 comments:

  1. I.A. Richards has a book called Practical Criticism. In each chapter he supplies a poem along with the comments his students made about it, which he then analyses.

    Among a great deal of 'Georgian' poetry, he inserts a poem by Donne ('When to the round earth's four imagined corners ...'), and a poem by Lawrence ('Piano'). It was only seeing them in that context - seeing how they were different - that made me appreciate them where before I'd passed by them.

    To phrase that as an answer - everyone should read the poets their favourite poets moved away from, to get a sense of that movement and to keep it clear.

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  2. Thanks for your thoughts, 'CR'. Exactly the kind of discussion we were hoping for here.

    So, one good reason to read what one doesn't admire is context for what one does admire. Are there other reasons?

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  3. Sometimes if you read someone you don't like, you find you were mistaken ...

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  4. Always true, Anonymous. But I was thinking of something a little more penetrating. For instance -- here it comes -- I'm not a fan of e.e. cummings. Try as I might, I find his formal and typographical experiments are undermined by his mostly trite content (see 'in Just-'for what I mean). But I do think people should read him. There's much to learn about sound and the rhythm of words on the page. Just don't ask me to like it.

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  5. Indeed. He's a well-loved poet, but I often feel that people love him for the sentiment instead of the sensibility.

    There's a difference between informed dislike and dismissal. When Pound or Eliot are talking about Milton ('leonine ramping', 'heavy conversation in lofty rooms', 'the poverty of the puritan mythos') you can be sure that they know roughly what happens in the poetry, what it's about, and what the author's concerns were. They had to know, and they wanted to do something else.

    Today, asking for opinions on Milton from certain contemporary figures will get you a much less informed response, to the point where, even if you agree with what P and E said about him, you begin to feel defensive. His support for republicanism and divorce, for example, tend to be overlooked.

    The scope of 'Paradise Lost', though, and the resonance of the blank verse are things which can't be taken for granted. And so often, even in 2011, when you come across a new poem in a 'major', oratorical mode, you think it needs to be more informed by Milton, if only to stop it falling into Miltonism ...

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  6. That would be, "At the round earth's imagined corners[.]"

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  7. Can’t think of anybody who exactly fits the bill, but there are some whose work I appreciate, but who enjoy a reputation that seems to me to outstrip by far any estimation I might have of of them. I therefore feel people really must read them, on the assumption that they might find something there that I’ve missed.

    The classic example of this, for me, would be Basil Bunting. I’ve read his work and enjoyed it, but I really don’t get why he seems to stir such extremes of emotion in some of his fans, to stir such violent and spittle-flecked responses. So often when any 20th century poet of sound reputation is mentioned on a blog, some commenter will pop up and rant about how that person’s work is trash, and Basil Bunting is the greatest thing since sliced bread (however irrelevant Bunting might be to the discussion at hand). Bunting’s own pronouncements on poetry seem to me dogmatic and self-opinionated - which is great, all grist to the mill of understanding poetics, and he’s hardly alone in that regard. The problem arises when you attract adherents who are more interested in dogma than in poetry.

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