|
|
Essays on six poets in The Wounded Surgeon by Adam Kirsch:
"By insisting that the poet's actual life can be a valid subject
for poetry, that personality is just as important as craft, Berryman was voicing
the common feelings of his generation.
...
as he grew more convinced of his artistic path,
his condemnation of Eliotic impersonality grew more strident.
In a 1957 essay, Eliot's theory has been demoted from 'perverse and valuable'
to 'amusing,' and by 1960 it has become 'intolerable.' In 1962 Berryman
turned to sarcasm:
'One thing critics not themselves writers of poetry occasionally forget is that poetry
is composed by actually human beings,
and tracts of it are very closely about them'."
[p. 120 of The Wounded Surgeon by Adam Kirsch]. |
From Jarrell's prose introductions to his poems in his first publication in a book of poetry in Five Young American Poets, where he asserts "that Modernism is not modern":
Rather than being essentially new, a definitive break with nineteenth-century Romanticism -- as Eliot and Pound had declared -- Jarrell argued that "'Modern' poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become." The essay goes on to catalogue at length the continuities between Romantic and Modernist poetry: "very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, 'texture'; extreme intensity, forced emotion -- violence; a great deal of obscurity ... experimental or novel qualities of some sort," ... They can be reduced to a common denominator: both Romantic and Modernist poetry, Jarrell suggests, strive for ever more complex and difficult expressions. In its language, emotions, and organization, Modernism exponentially multiplies the strangeness and difficulty of poets like Wordsworth and Shelley ... a "quantitative change," not a qualitative one. The Modernists were not revolutionaries as they believed, but inheritors, and their poetry represented not a new beginning but "The end of the line" [as Jarrell later entitled a revised version of his essay] [p. 155-156]. |
Ultimately:
Jarrell came to believe, as he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in 1957, that "life beats art, so to speak, and sense beats eccentricity, and the way things really are beats the most beautiful unreal visions, half-truths, one can fix up by leaving out and indulging oneself." All the major poets of his generation would eventually come to a similar conclusion. [p. 173]. |
Related pages:
Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. How to Write Poetry. |
[Thanks for visiting.]
Copyright © 2008-2016 by J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted poems.
All rights reserved. |