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30 October 2004. Because I'm rushed, I will simply post the response to my previous blog entry that I just got for Geof Huth and say a few words about it: |
Bob, From the other side of the coin, you could be called a hyper-rationalist, one who cares so much about making the world totally rational that you end up discounting the normal unrational processes of thought and history. Waiting to see who's major is really what happens. No-one has any responsibility to posterity at all.
Even if Halvard (are you making up these names!?) figured out how he might decide who is major or not, it wouldn't make a lick of difference. The decision about a poet's "majority" is a process of massessment--a number of people, working unconsciously (and both contemporaneously and not), coming finally to some conclusion.
Massessment is finally what moved Bulwer-Lytton from a significant and famous novelist to a derided writer best known for the ridiculous opening to one of his novels: "It was a dark and stormy night."
I think discussing who is a major poet or not is fine and even interesting. But an individual's POV is essentially meaningless.
Geof
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(1) The masses consist of individuals.
(2) Where does massassessment come from if not from what individuals say and write?
(3) Bulwer-Lytton's opening sentence is not ridiculous. A night can be stormy and not dark, or dark and not stormy. Moreover, putting two similar, even redundant, adjectives together to emphasize something can be effective. The tenth-rater running the contest for bad writing inspired by his opinion of Bulwer-Lytton will eventually be shown to be much more of a fool than Bulwer-Lytton--because of what people like me right here have said about him.
(4) I of course don't discount the "normal unrational processes of thought and history," but use my lonely rationality as best I can to keep those processes from completely blighting the search for truth and the pursuit of beauty, as they must if not opposed.
(5) You can't be too rational in the search for truth. Or, come to think on it, in the pursuit of beauty. You simply ought not be only rational.
(6) I agree that no one has any responsibility to posterity. I think no one has any responsibility, period. However, my kind of person would (unrationally) feel enough of a responsiblity toward unborn generations to do his best to see that they got to experience the poetry of people like John M. Bennett, Guy r. Beining, and--yes--you and me, rather than just the poetry of those the loud are giving a head start to, like Billy Collins, C.D. Wright and Jorie Graham.
Do you really think that if no one bothers ever to name Bennett a major poet or, more important, treat him like one, that massassessment will nonetheless magically make him one? Or that if it doesn't, it will merely indicate that he was not major?
I can't see either. Not that it matters: I am innately incapable of not trying to to have an effect of consequence on the culture of my time. I won't stop just because it appears I won't succeed.
(7) Thanks for giving me this opportunity to laze out a filler entry instead of a better one.
--Bob
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