The sonnet is a tradition. My concern is with keeping that tradition alive. This requires that good sonnets continue to be written, which in turn requires that poets writing sonnets be allowed to respond organically to the existing tradition, which in turn requires that the boundaries of the "sonnet" be open-ended.
My question is whether the conservative can keep the tradition alive. My answer is no. The insistence on "categorization" rests on an inherently closed-ended understanding of sonnet-hood, and is appropriate only for a tradition already pronounced dead. I believe conservatives
want to keep the tradition alive, but their method amounts to placing it in a coffin, which strikes me as... ineffective.
The same, by the way, is true of
chess. Computers are so good at standard chess that the life in the game now resides, to a great extent, in strange variants where human ingenuity still has a chance. (It's also true of politics; those who lament the decline of "western civilization" and want to "conserve" it have no love for the open-ended mish-mash of traditions that have lived and thrived in the west—they want a narrow, closed-off, arbitrary, dead thing.)
So no, I am certainly not confusing poetic quality with poetic
categorization.
Threaded Mode
