<<<
I remember a poet's writing to me several years back, You are the most underrated poet in the country. But then, he added, that's better than being the most overrated poet in the country. I was and remain impressed by the short distance between the two extremes.
-- Howard Nemerov, Journal of the Fictive Life (1963)
>>>
On the other hand, keep in mind what R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1924:
". . . in art, a school once established normally deteriorates as it goes on. It achieves perfection in its kind with a startling burst of energy, a gesture too quick for the historian's eye to follow. He can never explain such a movement or tell us how exactly it happened. But once it is achieved, there is the melancholy certainty of a decline. The grasped perfection does not educated and purify the taste of posterity; it debauches it. The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting. So far as there is any observable law in collective art history it is, like the law of the individual artist's life, the law not of progress but of reaction. Whether in large or in little, the equilibrium of the aesthetic life is permanently unstable."
Didn't Paul Valéry say poetry was language beyond paraphrase, language so vital it is irreducible?
Therefore, I shall return to thee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: " poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”
Comments