Apropos the topic of this thread, I've been remembering a passage from an essay I wrote on Edwin Muir, published in the
Hudson Review several years ago.
I still agree with what Muir says, although I don't believe this means that the terminology of technological innovations can't fit into poetry somehow. I don't think Muir would either:
Quote:
Muir was consistent in his romantic contempt for the modern idea of progress; he warned that, in a culture overdetermined by technological development, outward changes happen so fast that our primal identity becomes “indistinct. . . . The imagination cannot pierce to it as easily as it once could.” The constant metamorphosis of outer life brought about by technology obscures the essentials of human experience, which are remarkably consistent over time. In an essay called “The Poetic Imagination,” published in Essays on Literature and Society (1949), Muir made a distinction between technological and human progress:
Applied science shows us a world of consistent, mechanical progress. Machines give birth to ever new generations of machines, and the new machines are always better and more efficient than the old, and begin where the old left off. . . . But in the world of human beings all is different. . . . Every human being has to begin at the beginning, as his forebears did, with the same difficulties and pleasures, the same temptations, the same problem of good and evil, the same inclination to ask what life means.
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For me, that bit about essential human identity becoming "indistinct" in the constant flux of technological change is key.
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