01-01-2023, 12:43 AM
Title of column in NYTimes published on Dec. 29th:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opini...Position=1
Since you probably cannot read this brief essay without a subscription, I'm going to give some quotes (fair use! copyright-wise):
Modest as the festivities* have been, I am certain that in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration. This seems to me true for the simple reason that poetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it.....
*referring to the anniversary of the publication of The Wasteland
I’m hardly the first person to suggest that poetry is dead. But the autopsy reports have never been conclusive about the cause. From cultural conservatives we have heard that poetry died because, for political reasons, we stopped teaching the right kinds of poems, or teaching them the right way. (This was more or less the view of the critic Harold Bloom, who blamed what he called the “school of resentment” for the decline in aesthetic standards.)
Another argument is that the high modernist poets and their followers produced works of such formidable difficulty that the implicit compact between artist and audience was irrevocably broken....
.... modern life, disenchanted by science and mediated by technology, has made that* kind of relationship with the natural world impossible, even if we are keen botanists or hikers. Absent the ability to see nature this way — as the dwelling place of unseen forces, teeming with images to be summoned and transformed, as opposed to an undifferentiated mass of resources to be either exploited or preserved — it is unlikely that we will look for those images in the work of Homer or Virgil, and even less likely that we will create those images ourselves....
*his main point is that we are so cut off from the pre-modern connection to nature, that writing poetry has become impossible for us
With his almost cinematic montages, Eliot created a body of work that is unique in English poetry for its simultaneous ability to lay bare both the personal anxieties of its author and the sense of mechanized horror that had overtaken an entire civilization. In juxtaposing automobiles, typewriters, gramophones, popular lyrics and modern slang with allusions to Jacobean dramatists and half-parodic forays into more recognizably “poetic” language, Eliot created an idiom that captured the disappearance of the pre-modern worldview.
Eliot was successful — so successful that he remade all of English poetry, or what has passed for it since, in his image. The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot....
What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.....
For poetry to reappear, the muses would have to return from wherever they fled after we banished them. Among the conditions for their return would be, I suspect, the end of the internet and many other things that most of us value far more than we do poetry....
His argument is not very convincing, but if you can read the whole thing, you might find it interesting, if only because it is slightly provocative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opini...Position=1
Since you probably cannot read this brief essay without a subscription, I'm going to give some quotes (fair use! copyright-wise):
Modest as the festivities* have been, I am certain that in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration. This seems to me true for the simple reason that poetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it.....
*referring to the anniversary of the publication of The Wasteland
I’m hardly the first person to suggest that poetry is dead. But the autopsy reports have never been conclusive about the cause. From cultural conservatives we have heard that poetry died because, for political reasons, we stopped teaching the right kinds of poems, or teaching them the right way. (This was more or less the view of the critic Harold Bloom, who blamed what he called the “school of resentment” for the decline in aesthetic standards.)
Another argument is that the high modernist poets and their followers produced works of such formidable difficulty that the implicit compact between artist and audience was irrevocably broken....
.... modern life, disenchanted by science and mediated by technology, has made that* kind of relationship with the natural world impossible, even if we are keen botanists or hikers. Absent the ability to see nature this way — as the dwelling place of unseen forces, teeming with images to be summoned and transformed, as opposed to an undifferentiated mass of resources to be either exploited or preserved — it is unlikely that we will look for those images in the work of Homer or Virgil, and even less likely that we will create those images ourselves....
*his main point is that we are so cut off from the pre-modern connection to nature, that writing poetry has become impossible for us
With his almost cinematic montages, Eliot created a body of work that is unique in English poetry for its simultaneous ability to lay bare both the personal anxieties of its author and the sense of mechanized horror that had overtaken an entire civilization. In juxtaposing automobiles, typewriters, gramophones, popular lyrics and modern slang with allusions to Jacobean dramatists and half-parodic forays into more recognizably “poetic” language, Eliot created an idiom that captured the disappearance of the pre-modern worldview.
Eliot was successful — so successful that he remade all of English poetry, or what has passed for it since, in his image. The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot....
What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.....
For poetry to reappear, the muses would have to return from wherever they fled after we banished them. Among the conditions for their return would be, I suspect, the end of the internet and many other things that most of us value far more than we do poetry....
His argument is not very convincing, but if you can read the whole thing, you might find it interesting, if only because it is slightly provocative.