What is mainstream poetry? pt. 1

1.

The thing I hate about the Burgundian poets is, of course, their poetry, but second, after their poems, I hate the Burgundian poets themselves, for their arrogance, their insularity and their grotesque intra-communal fawning.

Jack Underwood, ‘The Poets of Gascony’

Around 2015 I got in an argument with the poet Jack Underwood. We didn’t know each other well, but we were in a pub after a poetry reading, and I was feeling fighty. He was telling me that the two factions which we used to call the mainstream and the avant-garde in British poetry were laying down their weapons.^[1]

Jack, as a Faber poet, was, it was hard to deny, mainstream, but his influences were eclectic—no one could think of him as the Philip Larkin dead-ender of caricature. And the argument he was making had cohered for him because he had recently spoken at a conference on a panel with Keston Sutherland. At that point, Sutherland was probably the North Star of British avant-garde poetry, the anointed successor to JH Prynne. But the two men could sit next to each other in a university lecture theatre and be civil, and even agree on much—Jack might not have been a Marxologist like Keston, but it’s not like he opposed the workers seizing the means of production. And he was fine with not needing to understand the immediate sense of a poem, or know who was speaking. Sutherland, likewise, did not think that the ‘lyric subject’ –the I of a poem expressing themselves as a coherent speaking voice— was inevitably some kind of right-wing or reactionary move condemning a poem to be propaganda for the way things are. This, Jack said was progress. I took a somewhat contrary position and said, no it wasn’t.

What was the point, I asked, in doing all of the difficult and often unpleasant things to language that our most ‘innovative’ poets like to do, if you didn’t think it was necessary, for artistic truth, or at least for revolution. Pluralism, I said, was impossible for a serious artist. If you could write more ‘accessible’ poems without them being falsehoods, why not do that? As a matter, of fact, I seem to remember saying, why even accept innovations such as free verse, as you yourself do, if they weren’t necessary? Why not write something that anyone could like and admire, like Tennyson? Jack’s response was to call me a fascist.

We didn’t get much further than that. And my point was a little fuzzy. People found Tennyson symptomatically modern in his day. One can say, more intuitively plausibly, that there are right and wrong ways to write an individual poem, but no right and wrong ways to write a poem in general. But I think part of what I’m going to try to say here, and which offended then, is that the conditions under which rightness or wrongness apply to an individual poem have to be understood as obeying certain general laws.

The question of which general laws apply, I believe, is the argument that has always divided mainstream poetry from the avant-garde, since around 1789. That is to say that it is an argument between a poetry that derives its authority from ‘nature’ and a poetry that derives its authority from ‘history’. Except, weirdly, the two regularly switch sides on the argument.^[2]

We live right now, under strange conditions for poetry, I think. The poets who publish with Faber, and the poets who publish with little presses called things like Angry Brigade or Dung Fucker differ less from each other than they ever have, at least since the 1960s, when the split between poetries became undeniable. They remain in what we might call affinity groups, but they often interact, often socialize, and rarely engage in factional polemic. The 87 Press will publish poets whose poems make sense, and Faber has poets who will do that annoying thing where the writing is all on top of itself so you can’t actually read any of it. In formal terms, the two scenes have closed in on each other. This poem by Ed Luker, for example, and this poem by Rachael Allen, don’t strike me as going about different business in the way that a poem by Kathleen Jamie and a poem by Robert Sheppard might.

I hope it’s uncontroversial to say that since the 2010s, both avant-garde and mainstream poetry have changed. In sociological terms, neither of them are really quite what they say they are. The avant-garde isn’t trying to do anything to culture, as far as I can tell, apart from make more poems that their friends will like, and nobody mainstream reads mainstream poetry.

The reasons for this rapprochement are many. Some of them have to do with increased political alignment, and (in my opinion) more rigorous thinking about politics on both sides. Some of them have to do with the same algorithmic forces that resulted in poptimism and a flattening in people’s music tastes, and some of them have to do with poetry’s entrenchment in academia and the shrinking audience outside academia for ‘mainstream’ literary work. I will try to do each of these justice in the series. But I want to suggest is that the cumulative effect, however overdetermined the cause, is that we are operating in a moment when our connection to general laws grounding poetry is somehow weak—that the analogies between what we can do with words and the demands of history or nature both seem implausible. This slackening of the connection has serious and even interesting implications for both kinds of poetry.

2.

In 2010, when I got into poetry, properly, the fracture between avant-garde and mainstream placed the avant-gardists on the side of history, and the mainstream on the side of nature. That is to say that the mainstream poets believed themselves to be writing poems in a way that conformed to the nature of language use, human psychology, and (this is the one that is I think most important to British poetry of the post-movement Era) to the actual indifference of the natural world to the meanings and values that we project on it. Meanwhile, the avant-garde thought of themselves as participating not in a natural linguistic behaviour, like peacocks with their tales, but in a historical situation, one which they sought to change.

Such a split might seem the natural way of thinking about the two tribes of poetry. Look at the metaphors used to name them, for example. Mainstream, natural, avant-garde, military (and a historically outdated tactic). But it’s not always been the case. If arguably the first avant-garde in English poetry is the Lake poets, their entire project is framed in naturalistic terms. Not just the ‘real language of men’, but the nature of the imagination, the psychological framework and Kantian parallels etc—this was what poetry depended on, nature. It was not a set of traditions or customs, exactly, but practices that aligned with nature, not with just representations of general nature, but nature itself.

Then again, after high romanticism, the most forward-thinking poets, Robert Browning, for example, were interested more in the historicity of the art form than in nature. The Americans, Dickinson and Whitman both, Nature boys and girls. Ezra Pound, very much on the side of history. TS Eliot, more complicated, I think. Before romanticism, Thomas Gray, John Milton or Edmund Spenser all poets who sought to change the language by foregrounding its historicity. Later, you can easily see the postwar American avant-garde as deliberately foregrounding the natural (I am nature) or (as in the case of Charles Olson) attempting to fit history into nature. You can see feminist writers arguing about whether they were writing in historical terms, or accessing some kind of true nature. Some important poets of the Cambridge school such as JH Prynne and Peter Riley, are very much interested in fitting history into nature, others such as Denise Riley, seem to me more interested in history. It is not a straightforward divide, and is itself, historical.

Over the last decade or so, however, things have changed.

3.

When I started writing poetry, I didn’t know where I stood. I did know that I found the political claims of British avant-garde poetry to be ridiculous on their face. To think that the only way to pierce the veil of ideology was to write without making sense, seemed to me to be a good way to justify being a loser. I was of the mind then (and in a more cautious way now), that if the master owns a good hammer then it would be unwise not to use it to smash up his house. People I met at parties, older men, mostly, with weird beards, by contrast, would say things like Adorno argues that Art progresses by taboo, so that what was once a truth becomes kitsch and thus must become taboo for poetry—into the dustbin of history goes Tennysonian melody, for example.^[3] I did not want to buy into the specific taboos of the UK avant-garde scene. I wanted to write lyric poetry of the sort that would fit into an anthology in a way that made it hard to place in time. I was a teenager, and I basically wanted to write like Percy Shelley. My girlfriend at the time once answered for me a question about what kind of poetry I wrote. Old-fashioned, she said.

And yet, in spite of my disbelief in the reasons for disjunction etc as poetic tactics, it seemed clear to me that was where the energy was. Mainstream poetry was, if anything, harder to believe in. Whenever I read, say, Sean O Brien, or Chris Reid, Carol Anne Duffy or Liz Lochhead, I felt little. The anecdotal-epiphanic structure of the widely appreciated poem was, as I had been told, often kitsch. To tell a little story in fairly digestible free verse felt divorced even from the poems these poems resembled historically.

To put it more exactly, the claim for the resonance of certain experiences struck me as question begging. The poems seemed to be, I would put it, in the service of certain truths, but they didn’t exemplify or prove those truths. They seemed, if anything, to sort of point in their direction and shrug, saying that as you couldn’t get there, you might as well stop here.

I’ll try to explain what I mean with an example. In my opinion, ‘The Onion Memory’ by Craig Raine (1978) is an excellent piece of craftsmanship, well observed, unsentimental in its treatment of serious feelings. It begins:

Divorced, but friends again at last,

we walk old ground together

in bright blue uncomplicated weather.

We laugh and pause

to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs,

prehistoric, crenelated, cast

between the tractor ruts in mud.

The form here is a neat kind of joke. It begins smoothly, a nice nostalgic ballad stanza, used ironically to conjure up an idealised past, before the poem undermines itself prosodically and thematically (in bright blue uncomplicated weathersyncopates the rhythm, adding complexity, and therefore irony). The truth, of course, is more complicated than a line of verse. The images of antiquity in the ground being trod are both visually precise and pun-laden (rutting is quite important to Raine’s oeuvre, perhaps to its detriment). Thus we have a nice treatment of the way that a certain feeling, a nostalgia for an old flame, might pervade or distort our perception. But you get the sense, too, that there’s something knowingly arbitrary about it all. It’s not that the metaphors and the like are decorative; they are purposeful, and yet, also, they are fungible, lacking the force they ought to have as individual perceptions. They are counters of the poet’s skill, but they do not individually matter. They add up to the story the poem is telling.

What’s wrong with wholeness, coherence of purpose, you might ask? But it’s a wholeness, a coherence of purpose that contains no struggle against it. Reality just falls into line with perception, here. Or, rather the gap is assumed and so perception is bossed around easily. In terms of the psychology of the poet, the world of the inner life grazes the world of the outer, but the contact is uneventful. Compare it to Sylvia Plath’s ‘Cut’, which also contains an onion, and you see the difference. What we have here, I would say is a melancholy distance between the language and the event. I am not with him in the experience.

This distance might be thematically appropriate for a divorce poem, but it also feels quietist, or even self-satisfied. Form and content are neatly ordered in parallel ways, but they do not generate friction. Distance is sad, and we see the message embellished, made artfully present in the poem. We admire the way we’re told about it; we aren’t compelled to feel it. This is, in the Coleridgean hierarchy, seems to me to be a poetry of the fancy, rather than the imagination. There’s a sense that writing is inadequate to the task of getting experience into it in its true intensity, so we sort of don’t try.

And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line--
headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine.

One way of saying it, in the more political terms that you used to hear in avant-po circles, it presumes our sympathy with a certain kind of bourgeois psychology. It also seems like that famed British understatement made into a principle of art. Leaving aside the question of whether or not bourgeois-subjective experiences of divorce or the Angloid temperament are interesting or not, (I think they are), it seems to me true that it doesn’t connect these adequately to some more basic imaginative capacity. It reminds you of a feeling it presumes you know. It beautifies the presentation of that feeling, but it doesn’t take you into its depths as an experience. The language is about the event, but it is not the event itself.

Back in the late 2000s, and early 2010s, the avant-garde argument against mainstream poetry tended to be put something like this, mainstream poetry, Robert Sheppard says:

privileges a poetry of closure, narrative coherence and grammatical and syntactic cohesion, which colludes with the processes of naturalization, that is, with the ‘attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic organization by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external world’, as Veronica Forrest-Thomson puts it. Its poetry favours an empirical lyri- cism of discrete moments of experience. Its insistence upon tone, and the speaking voice, strives to maintain the effect of a stable ego, present in the discourse as the validating source of the utterance.

That is to say, it naturalizes the individual subject (I) as the unit of perception. Or it naturalizes reference to the external world. So the poem is about X, and we measure it against X. Rather than consider it as an action or system, we consider it as an imitation, an imitation of a psychological truth or an event or an object. The standard 2000s political argument would then say that this is naturalizing a conceptual framework which is, in fact, ideological. By writing these kinds of poems, we are buying into an understanding of the world divided into the self and the external world, which not only isn’t accurate, but which is the product of various ways of thinking that really only develop in capitalist modernity. Language is not a way of seeing the world but is a collective resource and the poem is an intervention an action in this resource. The duty of the poet is to show us other possible worlds, and to not take a contingency of history for nature.

And yet my issues with Raine, I think, have more to do with nature, and the world outside us than they do to do with history. I have never felt that poetry had to denaturalize, exactly, and I’ve never really been able to do it in the ways that post-60s avant-garde poetics have advocated. Temperamentally, right from the beginning, I was a mainstream poet. I never stopped writing ‘mainstream’ poetry. Though I didn’t believe in its eternal truths, I carried on all the same, equally unable to commit to some project of changing history through poetry.

3.

My personal history is relevant, I hope, not because it’s a special case, but because I think this was a common enough feeling among poets of my cohort, and was itself symptomatic of something, of a shifting in the way poetry was understood. For one thing, you don’t hear these ‘avant-garde’ arguments against the lyric ‘I’ much anymore.

Why, in 2010, as perhaps in 1970, did the divide seemed to be articulated in these terms, with the binary drawn on this side? At this point, the avant-garde embraced artifice, it considered itself as part of a tradition intended to foreground the historicity of language use, and it was, for the most part, explicitly Marxist. On the other side, the mainstream defended itself in commonsense and naturalist terms. You can see it perhaps most clearly in the poetics articulated, after the end of its era, by Don Paterson in his The Poem, which connects the nature of poetry to a range of scientific discourses in a straightforwardly empiricist vein, proving, so to speak, that Douglas Dunn is a great poet with facts and logic.^[4]

Why also, did this divide break down after 2010?

That’s the assumption of this essay series, and the question I want to answer, as I proceed through it. Mainstream poetry, in the UK, was premised on a certain understanding of the natural way to write a poem. Their rivals and opponents premised their work on a specific historical situation, but this divide has now collapsed. The reasons for this are historical, but in being so, they have to do with nature itself, which is also collapsing around us.

4.

When Jack Underwood called me a fascist that night, he also recommended I rectify my ignorance of the work of Karen Barad, the physicist and feminist theorist of entanglement, whose Meeting the Universe Halfway, was part of a general movement towards rethinking the ‘external’ world in science studies and the like. Such work encouraged people to reconsider the ‘agency’ of nonhuman actors in the world. At the time, Underwood was embarking on a book about poetry and quantum physics, and he wanted to tell me that he was sure that there was no one way to write a poem, just as there is no one position on a wave function. Uncertainty is all.

By the time some of this material emerged, slimmed down and refashioned as a memoir of parenthood, Underwood’s book seemed to me, also, to be entangled with the various changes that have resulted in the disappearance of mainstream poetry as a specific style, and its replacement by something in some ways more ambitious, impressive, and committed, and in other ways more disappointing. Something soupier.

The first of these changes, I think, is the insistence of the environmental crisis itself. In some ways, you might say, Underwood’s original book project was in line with the mainstream poetry project. A scientific, and therefore naturalistic, grounding of the arguments for a certain kind of poetics. But this science is, in a crucial way, different from the kinds used by Don Paterson to show that rhythm is an echo of the entropy of the universe, or that metaphor is part of the structure of the brain.^[5]

Paterson argues for a gap between perception and reality—using some of the same science, even, but it is clear that what matters is reality. Or rather the reality is, as he puts it, in ‘Rain’, a wonderful poem (IMO) and one of the purest statements of his poetics ‘None of this, none of this matters’. Mattering isn’t real.^[6] Underwood, on the other hand sought to bridge them by insisting on the ontological primacy of uncertainty. For Paterson, our representations our inadequate. For Underwood, their uncertainty makes them real. To make this case, Underwood bought into a subset of ecology without nature arguments, popular in recent post-critical theory. It was a way of thinking about what ecology that required accepting a certain kind of entanglement that messes with the subject/ object divide of normal empiricism.

For a lot of millennial writers of poetry, I think, Actor network theory, Mortonesque ecology, and Jane-Bennett-style vibrant matter transformed a common sense understanding of what kind of nature it was that poetry ought to be grounded in. Climate change as it came to be conceptualised required re-orienting our whole sense of self and other in order to understand how to care for the world. This affected poets of both stripes—the naturalists abandoned nature, and nature began to intrude on history in new ways. As poets have always been sensitive, caring souls, they took such ideas on board as lessons in care.

So, while there was now a group of poets who, unlike their more avant-garde peers, might not conceive of a poem as a kind of political and historical praxis, having a necessary form shaped by its role in the abolition of the art/life distinction, the younger mainstream poets had their own novel orientations towards the practice of perception. They came, particularly, to understand nature as more complicatedly inside and outside, less definite. As nature disappeared in both a literal as an intellectual sense, as species collapsed and matter appeared to grow more vibrant, the poets of ‘nature’ began also to transform. Their poems grew less definite too, came to resemble more the work of less ‘traditional’ poets of the past and present.

Two other, key entangled aspects of the situation of contemporary mainstream poets can also be seen in the existence of Underwood’s memoir in the first place. The fact that a poet was so influenced by academic literary-critical trends is proof of the academic institutionalisation of mainstream poetry, which once looked down its nose at the professorly types and eggheads of the Cambridge school. Even if they also held professorships, they tried to maintain ideological distance. Their real home was somewhere in the publishing world, in the reviews section of the paper, in the pubs of Soho, in the semi-ironic little England of the mind. The newer poets are more obviously insitutionalised figures. This has changed the kind of poetry that is written. More contact with other traditions is part of the schooling, and more willingness to adopt ‘theoretical’ frameworks is part of the cost of doing business in the academy. In a way, this is downstream from the collapse of that second home in London publishing—there’s less space to resist becoming academic. Consider the more brute fact that Underwood ended up publishing his book on poetics as a memoir. I’m not saying this was purely for commercial reasons, but it is definitely easier to sell this kind of hybrid work than it is to sell an impersonal essay on poetry and quantum entanglement.

Poetry has been sheltering in the university for centuries, but even there, certain blunt commercial considerations have become more apparent due to the decline in serious publishing. It’s just that they then take a strange, split character—we are at once more academic and less intellectually ‘serious’. We apply for grants but we shy away from authority in our writing, to appeal to, someone, anyone.

In a sense, what we have now is a world where the literary audience is not highbrow or lowbrow or middlebrow but every brow height all at once. Theoretically inflected memoirs by poets are a publishing trend, one which makes not much money, but more money than ‘straight’ literary criticism would. Such forms, you could argue, dialectically embody the split character of contemporary literary success, mediated at once by academic prestige and dwindling commercial opportunities. They don’t pick a side but adapt to both. As much as the climate crisis, this trend has helped to reshape mainstream poetry, and has made it more various. This, I want to stress, is a symptom of the more general decline of the economic situation in the imperial core.^[7] The centre cannot hold.

Another aspect, entangled with all of these other phenomena is the 2010s boom in ‘identity politics’. The 2010s saw, mediated by the internet, and the financial crash, saw a huge resurgence of liberation movements in the west, and these movements exerted significant pressure on poetry in particular. I’ve mostly talked about ‘White Men’ in this essay, and that is partly because I think the question of ‘subject position’ does not affect all poets equally. One’s access to the natural has different starting points, and it seemed simplest to start with the group that tends to feel the burden of history less. Nevertheless, among white men, it became more common to include this kind of disclaimer, found at the beginning of Jack’s memoir:

I am straight, white, middle class, with a relatively normative gender identity; hardly a neutral position from which to make universal claims.

Again, such considerations, the provincialising of one’s former universality, weaken one’s sense of one’s connection to ‘nature’. Above, I said that one of the things I disliked about mainstream British poetry was the presumption of the importance of certain experiences. One thing that the rise of various internet-enabled liberation discourses did, was call into question the universality of certain kinds of experience. White, male poets were therefore inclined to think a little bit harder about history and about how to make the claim that this anecdote, about a ‘straight, white, middle class, relatively normative’ man matters to other people. How it contains special insights into the way things are.

Jack’s hybrid memoir form, indeed, which contains some fine poetry in it, offers one way of both provincializing and universalising his experience. Here we have the three ingredients of most poems, which we might call, truth, experience, and verse, separated so that each is more clearly visible. Truth comes from learning and theory, experience is personal, and verse is then allowed to suggest possible relations.

Such a form, the hybrid memoir/essay/poem is, I want to suggest, the dominant one of mainstream poetry in the latter half of the 2010s.^[8] It is also a form used in the avant-garde scene too. It is a sign of the collapse of the distinction, for better or worse, between these kinds of poetry.

The essay poem has been diagnosed as immediacy writing by Anna Kornbluh here, and thought of more generously as a way of surviving the death of poetry in this essay on Anne Boyer here. But I think it’s also been an attempt to be responsible about the relationship between poetry and truth, a way of thinking not about the death of poetry but the death of ‘nature’. It’s a form that’s obviously been associated with marginalized poets, partly as a way of making the truth claims of experience self-evident, and even of calling into question the function of poetry, but here, in the hands of a white person of ‘normative gender’, it serves the same purpose. It serves the same purpose in the hands of the avant-garde, who have also collapsed. It tells us, in some sense, that this poetry is a subject of legitimate interest, if not universal then shareable, because it comes with the truths it decorates attached and justified in prose.

If avant-garde poetry once sought to shake us out of our naturalizations, ours is not an era in which very much seems natural. And this changes the business of poets. You can see this handled quite nicely in Jack’s last collection, A Year in the New Life, a book I admired, in spite of his anti-fascist action against me. The title poem considers its speaker’s distant realtionship to the upheaval and tumult of our era.

The extra light of spring threw our business

into relief. My banner displayed a sunburst,

a bloodied hand dropping a knife, and

in the other hand an avocado withholding

its stone. War would soon come but not

for us, and this became our motto, Not for Us.

Then a crime in our community led to anger.

There’s a kind of wryness here about the impotence of poetry, about the impotence of western liberalism and leftism, too. It’s a poem of the 2010s (and 20s) uprisings that have yet to achieve their goals, and of not belonging to those uprisings.

Antifa angels bathed their eyes in milk,

as horses refused riders. The timid among us

signed petitions swearing that when the time came

we would know it by the rocks in our hands.

I made a banner for the protests to come

depicting the planting of milk teeth

The soft surrealism here, characteristic of Underwood’s writing, often winning, sometimes cloying, creates an appealing sense of unease, I think. It is ironised indeed, into a period style by being put onto the banners. These operate as a kind of self-critique, a stylish way of having it both ways. The poet is not of the protests, he is too fanciful, and yet here he is making fun of his fancy, putting it in service of the cause. The poem begins It was winter, the opposite of burning, which is also burning. In the difference, there is a resemblance.

However, as much as I admire the performance, it still shares something with Raine’s own stepping back. No attempt is made to abolish the distance between poet and protest through struggle, no attempt is made to rage against that distance, and neither is an attempt is made to justify it. No attempt is made to make contact with reality, partly because here the assumption is that poem and world are, if not touching, similarly structured—they are both surprising, strange places, uncertain realms. We see a wavering between representation and reality, but this insinuates, modestly, that the poem participates, in its own modest way, even if the poet is unsure what comes of that. The tension, the fight, between poem and world is resolved by the flight of fancy which resolves nothing. Impressive as the ‘move’ here is, how satisfying is it? How much reality gets in? How much history? Perhaps, what we are dealing with, when we deal with contemporary mainstream poetry, is a rejection of the old, comfortably melancholy stance towards reality of our tradition, and the creation of a new uncomfortably melancholy one. Two steps forward. One step back.

Personally, I miss the fighting that used to characterize poetry as a scene, the sense that something was at stake. I think poetry has to be a struggle. It doesn’t need to be for anything specific. But without contraries is no progression. Underwood’s recentish (2023) poem, the poets of Gascony, also manifests, with great skill, that great longing for antagonism, for common cause.

When I cease myself a little, and allow the sadness I weigh inside to reveal itself, as if breaking gently open the pellet of an owl to draw out the small bones, I find inside not that much to speak of. Not much by the way of reason, or for feeling. My life is lightly gilded onto the world. I feel that to be true. It is a leaf on a high bough that I attend to with the heavy weather of my own desperation. I am not expected to live so long. Life is cruel and hard in my own kingdom. That’s why I started to write poetry, I suppose, years ago now, I felt it, a need to answer myself that way. I suppose that must also be true of the Burgundian poets. How I hate the wide green hats they wear.

---

^[1] much like the US and much of the anglosphere, I think, though sometimes Brits use the abominable moniker ‘linguistically innovative poetry’),

^[2] That there are two sides is a radical oversimplification. For example, there is also a significant USA/UK divide on how nature and history have been polarized at different times in Anglophone poetry. When you add in the complexities by which racialization inscribes history onto biology and vice versa, the writing of poets in colonised countries and from racialized minorities is also often positioned differently, at any given time, from their white or imperial core counterparts. In some instances, the most influential Anglophone poets of colour have seemed to be attempting to dialectically transcend the binary—think of Brathwaite’s claim that the hurricane does not beat in pentameter as an attempt to hold the two together. And yet, what I think holds true is that factionalising polemics are understood through this nature/history binary; rhetorically, Brathwaite here is siding with nature as a way of articulating Caribbean history. Just as Derek Walcott does in ‘The Sea is History’.

^{[3] Actually, they said:} “In many regards, expansion appears as contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed con­ sumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken. More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo; everywhere artists rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom than that they immediately sought once again after ostensible yet scarcely adequate order. For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfree­ dom of the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain. The autonomy it achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nour­ ished by the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered.”

^[4] See my piece, here, which I think is a kind of prologue to this essay series.

^[5] Though like Paterson, Underwood also cites Lakoff on metpahor in the brain, in spite of the fact the man seems to me like a charlatan, tbh.

^[6] This is Paterson’s own spin, though it’s shared with, say, Hardy and Larkin. What matters to mainstream poetry more generally is a commitment to empirical reality, not necessarily an agreement about its value.

^[7] For more on this point, see my earlier essay on art and cultural industries, and my review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction.

^[8] For those who are interested, I wrote a poem about the essay poem here.