[New-Poetry] Taking Kooser's measure

[Roger Day]

On 8/31/06, Robin <robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> From: "Roger Day" <rog3r.day at gmail.com>
>
> > In historical terms that's "just"
>
> 100 years was the time Sam Johnson said it took to establish a classic.  (He
> also delivered a contempory judgement on +Tristram Shandy+ -- won't last.)
> It's still a useful yardstick.
>
> > - still, these judgements are
> > constructed on the wings of fashion and props of statehood.

I narrow my eyes at the incestuously small set of poetasters herein
involved in this sample taking. The English middle/upper class were
incredibly stable with little change in the constituency of the public
or the writers up until the mass-literacy movements of the 1900s -
which brings us to Yeats. Even for such a small group, poets go in and
out of fashion.

The post-war boom in literacy is producing a different public. I
remember an article in the Guardian for public library lending
figures. None of these writers mentioned above or below were in this
list, not even S

> Nope -- they're organic (though they may be linked into nationality/national
>
> identity/whatever).  (And OK, all statements like that should carry a
> last-50-years health warning.  Things may have changed.)  There's an
> incredible -- call it either consistency or inertia -- that begins with the
> contemporary and later judgements on Chaucer and runs (with occasional
> exceptions) up to Yeats.  For much of that time, the academic
> institutionalisation of English Literature (which is post-1900 --the Latin
> and Greek classics are another matter) simply didn't exist.
>
> (Johnson's +Lives+, which mostly reflects what the public [sic!] were
> prepared to buy to read in 1770 is pretty conservative in the judgements
> made as to who's important-- Dryden, Pope, Milton, etc.  And is the same as
> those made in the Norton Anthology of English Literature.  Look at the
> amount of space given to the say ten writers with most space in Johnson and
> it's virtually identical to that in Norton [with the exception of Donne].

one wonders at the tight little world of the poetasters.

> But it does turn on the availability (not the simple existence) of texts --
> you can't judge whether or not a writer is worth reading if you can get hold
> of their work to read.
>
> So however the consensus is established -- and it *does exist, for better or
> worse -- it way predates English academe.  Which anyway has always had a
> higher opinion of it's own power than is really the case.  Check out the
> books which are (and aren't) sold by students at the end of a course, for
> instance.  You can tell them X or Y is "valuable" till the cows come home,
> and they'll end up, the minute they no longer have to pass an exam, making
> their own judgements.  Except the ones who stay in academe.
>
> > See the UK
> > current curriculum and it's institutionalisation of the "canon".
>
> I'd rather not.  <g>

By the time students get to university they're infected already ...

> I'm not sure which curriculum you're thinking of here, Roger -- high school
> or university?  If the latter, it's to a surprising degree student-driven

> Robin
>
> >
> > On 8/30/06, Robin <robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> >> Quoth Roger Day:
> >>
> >> > Why is Donne major? In Johnson's time, he was considered extremely
> >> > minor. He's only just been dug out of the wood pile.
> >>
> >> Not "just" -- it's coming up to 100 years now.  The turning point was
> >> with
> >> Grierson's edition of 1912, followed by his selection in +Metaphysical
> >> Lyrics and Poets of the Seventeenth Century+ which T.S.Eliot reviewed
> >> (anonymously) in the TLS in 1923.  After that, it's history.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


-- 
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
"From the waist downwards, Bloodnok was tattooed with a pair of false
legs... facing the wrong way."