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Could a “History” of poetry be written?
The title of this book should be: “A chronology of Anglo-‘American’ poets and how a few other poets are seen from this perspective.”
In the Hegelian sense, a History as the cohesively conscious force collectively guiding a people could be tentatively written only about societies at large and, generally, more and more these days, about humanity as a whole; which is made manifestly obvious in this book in how poets and poetic movements influence each other to an extent which makes you wonder at times if poets are really the avant-garde of social consciousness or they are being framed by “officially authorized narratives” floating on a people’s shared consciousness (think of the NY Times with their: “all that is fit to print” and “we the people” don’t even get their inside joke) and/or are poets cleverhansing themselves into their own functional illusions and all those “isms” by previous developments? Solzhenitsyn said: “for a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones”. I think he was too harsh on outright open day-light “regimes” and he seemed to be talking about some sort of diabolic symbiosis. Go to page 230 on this book: “‘American’ Modernism”, to what extent is that “ism”, like pragmatism, a product of the incurable gringo protagonism?
Humberto Eco in one of the most intellectually charged jokes I have ever read points out that “we the people” don’t realize “Descartes demons” are actually politicians, police, … He has pointed out that after Aristotle’s Poetic nothing really of importance has been figured out regarding the inner workings of metaphors. Ancient Greeks were obsessed with like ratios. It was their main conceptual tool for all kinds of engineering and social technologies. Aristotle would “explain” poetry (something like (I don’t remember the exact one liner actually included in his “Physics” (I think))): “the eyes are to the body what the mind is to the soul”. So out of those types of conceptual parallelisms metaphors are brought about by “cross multiplying” and some syntactic pruning: “the eyes of your soul” (meaning “your mind”). I thought as part of the story line of this “history” an attempt would be made at “explaining” poetry going back to Aristotle. I was very wrong. It was written following a template: what the author sees as a poetic period as a title for the chapter + a few lines about the authors’ bio + some lines of their poetry and some (more or less self-serving) “explaining”, including some forensic “mind reading”. I would have removed the drawings starting each chapter (serving what purpose?).
There are flagrant (intended?) inaccuracies in this book from which I would just cite the one that I found monumental. Page 282, “Poets in Politics”: Nazism didn’t happen as a “reaction” to communism in Russia. Those “isms” happen for their own intrinsic reasons. If anything it was a reaction to the attempt by European imperial powers to exclude Germany from their party and even trying to turn Germany into their “negritos”, as well. Closing the paragraph author points out that after WWII many countries got rid of their colonial masters. So Nazism seemed to have done some good. European imperial powers got a taste of their own medicine.
An underlying tenet of “Western civilization” is that it is OK to exploit, genocidally engage people who can’t defend themselves on an equal basis: you talk yourself into believing that you are just “freedom loving”, “greater gooding”, … them and feeling great about it, the “Good Christian” you are. Comparatively speaking, the U.S. government has greatly surpassed the genocide of Nazi Germany, even though Nazis were killing people on an industrial scale (all you need is 3rd grade Math to show it to yourself). “The land of the free and the brave …” is the country with the highest incarceration rate. Besides, what do those stanzas on Patrick Henry’s mind, voice and times have to do with current day USA? The U.S. has become like a cross between Soviet era odd jokes and George Orwell’s “1984”. As a published poet myself at times I have had the chance to talk to poets and song writers about such matters. Why is it that there are no vibrant protest songs as it happened in the 60’s, more “question authority” poetry these days? Where are the Juvenal kinds of poets raising such matters to collective consciousness?
Poetry is kind of a taboo topic for linguists. The authoring, cultural and societal dynamics motivating poetic expression deserves more study. There is also lots of poetry in prose. Solzhenitsyn, himself an officer during WWII and a visceral critic of the excesses and abuses by Russian soldiers was shocked to have gringos tell him that they had done Russia the favor of saving them from Germany! I have dreamed about that book Solzhenitsyn should have written with Dostoevskyan overtones about how and why the most novel ideas end up being corrupted and how easy that is.
Solzhenitsyn’s truism is way too simplistic and I think he definitely had the brains and experiences to treat us better. After Bob Dylan finally accepted the Nobel price for Literature (a Grammy and other) I wonder to which extent it was because he is some gringo. Compare for example, Sting’s “Roxanne” lyrics with “Princesita” by el B/los Aldeanos (youtube oBF9thS534M); Bob Dylan’s with Silvio Rodríguez’!
The best poem I read in the book? The very last one on the last page of the book by Less Murray!
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