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| Hearsay: |
Neil Astley, the editor of the great British press Bloodaxe Books, weighs in on the “use” of poetry.
George Szirtes gave this a sharper focus in his 2005 TS Eliot lecture, Thin Ice and the Midnight Skaters. Previewing his lecture in the Guardian, he wrote:
“‘If poetry makes nothing happen what use is it?’ scoffed a recent letter in a serious newspaper. It is not a new question, if a bit Gradgrindish in nature. What does music make happen? Or visual art? The writer might have been thinking of social change.”
Listing various poems which had worked towards such change, Szirtes continued: “The subject of poetry being life, and politics being a part of life, poets have written as they thought or might have voted. Whether they actually made anything happen is not clear. The quotation about poetry making nothing happen is, in fact, half-remembered from the second part of Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats, that goes:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
“Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of the above: that poetry is itself a way of happening.”
…
As the world’s politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But if Seferis and Heaney are right, poetry can at the very least be “strong enough to help”.
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February 26th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Phenomenally annoying is the fact that, after entering the special text from the image, one can type a comment, and press Submit only to find that the special text has expired. On pressing the Back Button, one’s comment is wiped out. The nicest thing one can say about such inconsiderate programming involves four letter words!!!
FOR GOODNESS SAKE CORRECT IT!
good grief, that even happens when one has JUST TYPED IT IN, *after* typing the comment. What are you people thinking???
February 26th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I was trying to say that poetry as an art form of offers a certain view of life that adds, inestimably to personal understanding. That is its use; and it is no small value!! Consider William Blake’s “A Little Boy Lost”, and ask yourself if you really want to indoctrinate your child with religious views, or such views as the morally and scientifically complex arguments that have lead to the religion of Environmentalism!!
(I refuse to re-write the explanation I initially provided, before your inconsiderate management of Captcha wiped out my first effort!)
February 26th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I’ll take that into consideration, but also consider that you’re the same guy who thought it a bad thing that Australia apologised to the Aboriginals. Isn’t there an Anne Coulter blog you should be hanging around? Oh, actually, I was lying about the first consideration. The captcha stays so everyone doesn’t have to look at porn and casino spam.