Arriere la muse academique! Je n’ai que faire de cette vielle begueule. – Baudelaire
Anti-Romanticism is a current
orthodoxy among ‘progressive’ or ‘innovative’ poets today. So-called
‘innovative poetry’ – a kind of Anglicised literary fashion derived from Black
Mountain style Projective Verse and ‘Language Poetry’ – ascribes an ethical
value to approved technicalities. ‘Ethical openness’ is defined against the
‘paradigm’ (watch out for that give-away buzzword) of ‘romantic’ self-expression;
‘self-expression’ is the deadliest
sin for neo-puritans. The technicalities
of ‘innovative’ poetry are a rhetorical box of tricks, devices for identikit,
academic ‘whiz-bang’ writing and, furthermore
– do not be deceived – there is a sinister pattern here – the inherent
totalitarianism of the English intelligentsia remains the same threat to
freedom today as in the previous mid-century. Then the same coteries of ‘fellow
travellers’ issued diatribes against ‘nineteenth century liberalism’ or ‘bourgeois
individualism’ and used the term ‘romantic’ as a vague insult, with
connotations of ‘ivory tower’ escapism
and sentimentality. ‘Self-expression’ and ‘individualism’ are both negative
terms in this discourse, a discourse that seeks to discredit the very basis of
creativity itself – the individual imagination.
Nothing much has changed, except
that the collapse of the Soviet Union means that these Stalinists are reverting
to their Puritan roots; an essentially reactionary, moralistic obsession with
selflessness and aesthetic abstraction. For some reason one is reminded of
stories told about the Donatists, early Christian fanatics who invaded churches
and threw buckets of whitewash over all the decorations and brightly coloured
representational murals.
Illus: Freedom Express, 2005
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