[Mary Meriam]

During a similar discussion in the past, Maz wrote and posted this poem:

La La Land

Come and live in La La Land
where the atmosphere is bland,
where everyone is very sweet
and all the poems are a treat.

If there’s something not quite right,
please don’t yell and start a fight.
because the status quo is grand,
and that’s the rule in La La Land

where nothing’s wrong and nothing’s sick
and nothing cuts men to the quick.
If some dark inkling irks a poet
we must advise him not to show it.

Please stay in step and stay in line
and everything will soon be fine;
for we’re all good and we’re all free.
Let’s write and publish, merrily.

And what we write is all (although
it may be judged on whom we know
and how much influence they wield).
So, sorry scribblers, shut up! Yield!

And if you wish to sidestep strife
you mustn’t sully art with life.


M.A.Griffiths

PS: I completely agree with Quincy that we have to deal with it.

I also find the notion of an absolute separation of poetry from what it states about the world equally suspect

There are lots of straw men about today (). Quincy, I never suggested for a second that we separate poetry from what it, ie the poetry, states about the world. I'm flummoxed if that's what you misread me to be saying. What I'm saying that it is precisely the poem that we should look at, not at what the poet does with his non-poetry time, which is likely, humans being what they are, to be highly problematic and quite irrelevant. Should the reader really obsess, at the expense of the poetry, over the fact that Larkin was a homophobic antisemitic nazi-sympathising paeodophile-porn-loving racially abusive horror at times? Is that where our main focus should be? Is that what we should wallow in concerning Larkin? Lots of poets are real shockers -- it seems to go with the territory. Sure a poet's disgusting bits should be addressed, but it should not dominate the entire response to that poet's work. Check it out, and move on. But with some it seems to be an obsession. Every time the wind veers east the rotting corpse of old Bete-Noir is trotted out again and given the rounds of the village, as if nothing else mattered.

[Holly Martins]

I hear what you say, Janet, but on a personal level, these days I find it hard to listen to Wagner without thinking of the little squirt's noisome pontificating, as I can't listen to Bach without being aware of his inner goodness. You are right, we should be able to divorce the man from the work, but I'm not sure I can do it.

[Janice D. Soderling]

My approach to Wagner is similar to Holly's. I detest Wagner. I hear his philosphy throughout his music, loud and clear. My quirk. Sometimes I take Gesualdo off the shelf and put him back, also my personal quirk.

Quincy, I didn't say I had burned all my Eliot books in the snow last night. I can still enjoy his work, though I enjoy it less when I think about Ezra standing over him with a red pencil.

I can enjoy Donne also, but think that "Batter my heart, three-personed God; " is a bit of silliness. But lovely writing.

Eliot has certainly influenced how I think about the writing of poetry, but I hope my content is my own thoughts. I don't think he thought of himself as a homeboy from St. Louis; he gave himself a complete make-over, becoming a British citizen, and converting to Anglicanism.

Actually Quincy, I think my thoughts on Eliot have quite as much validity as your thoughts on my thoughts. What's to get indignant about? Except the joy of being indignant.

You do have a point though that he might have regretted it. I'll keep that in mind.

[John Whitworth]

Larkin 'paedophile-porn-loving', Paul. Have you seen the porn he liked or are you talking about the schoolgirl novels? If you are, then ppl seemss a bit over the top. Paedophiles are adults who desire sexual relations with children - which appears to be anything from three months to, oh about ten or eleven I'd say. Children before puberty. I think old blokes and young girls is a bit... well, you know. But Sarkozy and the Italian PM whose name escapes me are not paedophiles. Just a bit... well, you know. But perhaps you have info I don't. Anyway, at least Philip didn't pursue the young Martin Amis around the dining room table. That was Labour MP and later Labour Lord, Tom Driberg. He didn't catch him though.

[Richard Epstein]

Those of us brought up on the New Critics may find it a tad easier to separate the biography from the poems, having had it beaten into us ("More? You want more biography?") that it was a more than venial sin to read the poet's personal life into his art. I can hear my mentors now: "That's nice, Richard. You shouldn't have Eliot to tea, if you feel that way. Now back to that line you find so offensive. Do you think he's alluding to Coleridge's yew?"

RHE

Well, let's say pornography inclined towards paedophilia, John. I know about the schoolgirl fantasy novels, but Andrew Motion's biography talks about (p. 266) how Larkin and Robert Conquest used to swap picture and prose pornography in which Headmasters did unspeakable things to schoolgirls (though PL and RC DID use to explicitly speak about what those things might be). There's more on this in Anthony Thwaite's Selected Letters.

I think Richard has a very good point about New-Critics-nurtured readers of poetry. As I see it a true poem has a life detached from that of the poet-vehicle who brought it into being. One way of seeing the poet-to-poem relationship is as that of artisan-to-artifact. The jeweller might think a thousand lurid fantasies, beat her spouse, say mean and hurtful things to neighbours, cheat on her tax return, write poison pen letters and advocate that leftists all be gaoled. Does that really mean she can't craft a beautiful piece of jewellery? Perhaps an even more beautiful piece than that made by the pious PC prude working at the next bench in the jewellery workshop?

[Roger Slater]

I don't get it. It's "beyond repugnant" to mention bad things about a poet, but not to mention good things? That's sort of the way Sarah Palin ran her campaign. Take bows and accept cheers when people want to praise her heroic soldier son (must be that she raised him so well!) but cry foul and leave-the-chldren-out-of-it when the subject turns to her pregnant teenage daughter.

Personally, I think it's beyond repugnant to excuse a poet's personal views just because you happen to like his poetry, particularly when those views are expressed in the course of what is being put forward as literary criticism expounding on what he regards as right and proper in poetry. That he did not misbehave with Stephen Spender hardly makes up for his detestable views in print, which it is healthy to speak out against.

If he tried to suppress the work in question, I have no indication that he ever stepped forward and publicly stated that he was wrong. It sounds to me that he was more embarrassed by the likely reaction than by views he no longer sincerely held in such a natural and ingrained way that it didn't occur to him until after publication that some might not react too kindly.

This is not an argument against his poems, which never moved me in any event even if he had been a man I could deeply admire. The same goes for his good friend Pound, who, purely by coincidence of course, had, shall we say, something of an anti-semitic streak.

I didn't see anyone here claiming that our assessment of Eliot's poems should depend on our assessment of the man. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be simply curious about the man behind the poems, the way we are generally eager to read biographies about famous people from all walks of life and it is generally considered entirely proper to have such interests. To bowlderize and excuse the life story of someone you would like to admire with less ambivalence is beyond repugnant.

[Janet Kenny]

Roger,
So much depends .... upon the way we met the work.

I met Eliot's poetry when my big brother was laughing at it and I was young and hungry for things like poetry which were not in my daily world. I stole my brother's book and absorbed the poetry, saw that my brother was wrong and am indelibly imprinted with that undeniably important experience.

I value that moment of discovery. I make no other claims for Eliot. He showed me new ways of being. That's all I need from him.

[Richard Epstein]

A classic statement of the issue is in Cleanth Brooks's "Criticism and Literary History: Marvell's Horation Ode," available on line at

http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/brooks1.htm

His argument is summed up in this paragraph, I think:

But I propose to deal here with a more modest example than Milton’s epic. I propose to illustrate from Marvell’s “Horatian Ode.” If we follow the orthodox procedure, the obvious way to understand the “Ode” is to ascertain by historical evidence—by letters and documents of all kinds—what Marvell really thought of Cromwell, or, since Marvell apparently thought different things of Cromwell at different times, to ascertain the date of the “Ode,” and then neatly fit it into the particular stage of Marvell’s developing opinion of Cromwell. But this yields at best only an approximation of the poem; and there lurks in it some positive perils. For to ascertain what Marvell the man thought of Cromwell, and even to ascertain what Marvell as poet consciously intended to say in his poem, will not prove that the poem actually says this, or all this, or merely this. This last remark, in my opinion, does not imply too metaphysical a notion of the structure of a poem. There is surely a sense in which anyone must agree that a poem has a life of its own, and a sense in which it provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged. It is a commonplace that the poet sometimes writes better than he knows, and alas, on occasion, writes worse than he knows. The history of English literature will furnish plenty of examples of both cases.

A poem "provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged." It can be elucidated by external materials. If a poet refers to "the swan of Mantua," it seems fair to go outside the poem to find out he's alluding to Virgil. As Brooks says, "To put the matter into its simplest terms: the critic obviously must know what the words of the poem mean, something which immediately puts him in debt to the linguist; and since many of the words in this poem are proper norms, in debt to the historian as well." But these are tools to find out what the poem says, not who the poet was. When Brooks concludes, "Was this, then, the attitude of Andrew Marvell, born 1621, sometime student of Cambridge, returned traveller and prospective tutor, toward Oliver Cromwell in the summer of 1650? The honest answer must be: I do not know. I have tried to read the poem, the 'Horatian Ode,' not Andrew Marvell’s mind. That seems sensible to me in view of the fact that we have the poem, whereas the attitude held by Marvell at any particular time must be a matter of inference, even though I grant that the poem may be put in as part of the evidence from which we draw inferences[,]" I can only agree, even though I must sometimes remind myself that knowing what I know about Pound's crackpot fascism and Eliot's semi-genteel anti-Semitism makes no specific poem either better or worse.

RHE-