[lit-ideas] Poetry, ambition, and being 80

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 09:36:11 -0800
Milton at an early age decided he wanted to be a poet, one who would
establish Britain in poetry the same way Homer had established Greece and
Virgil Rome. Poetry has never been a self-supporting enterprise, neither in
Milton's time nor in ours. Milton fortunately had a wealthy father who
supported him through his MA and then six years after that at home while
Milton studied. His father thought all this time (according to John Rogers
of Yale) that Milton would become an Anglican priest (the only reason for
getting an MA in those days), but Milton instead wanted to write a great
epic poem. Writing about warfare as Homer and Virgil did would be awkward
because Spenser had done that before him with the Faerie Queen. Not only
that but Spenser had taken up religious themes. Spenser is out of fashion at
the present time. The Faerie Queen was "hidden from the investigation of
much Spenserian scholarship, with its empiricist presuppositions." The
Faerie Queen was allegory and if one assumes all allegory is bad or
simplistic well then one needn't pursue the matter further. It is true one
must have annotations to get through The Faerie Queen, but one most have
them to read Chaucer, Blake, or Milton himself - unless one is steeped in
Christian theology and then one is likely to find Milton heretical as often
as not.

The idea of a new English epic hasn't faded; although the long poem or
poetic sequence has satisfied the ambitions of most, but Hart Crane did
write The Bridge. Steven Vincent Benet wrote John Brown's Body. [Neither
Benet nor his poem are considered first rate today but he won a Pulitzer for
it in 1929 and a stage production of it was directed by Charles Laughton.]
Ezra Pound wrote Hugh Selwyn Mauberley before he wrote the Cantos. And yet
T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland is rated above these by modern critics, but then
the critics are "Modern Critics" and not totally out of fashion.  They would
naturally prefer a Modern Critical poem to any of the previous.

It is still not possible to become a poet unless one is subsidized, and
"selling oneself" goes a long way toward becoming subsidized. Another
accepted path is to become a University professor. Robert Lowell and John
Berryman did that - not full time but once they had become famous they
seemed able to teach as little as they liked. In my case I was subsidized in
a manner of speaking by becoming an engineer in aerospace. I did pursue the
writing of poetry throughout my 39 years in Douglas-through-Boeing but one
was expected to come up through the ranks, pay ones dues by going to poetry
conferences, learning who was who, making important contacts, or having
friends who were poets or publishers or who taught poetry - not something I
ever did. Still, a few poems now and again seemed pretty good. Is it really
"success in the eyes of the poetic Mandarins" of one's age that's important,
or is the writing of top quality poems? One can seek the latter, in my
opinion while ignoring the former. My 39 years in Aerospace was tantamount
to ignoring them anyway.

Harold Bloom once wrote that all the top-quality poets had been identified.
There weren't any unknown poets out there because a poet needed to publish
or he wasn't a poet. I'm paraphrasing but I took him to be saying something
like that, and I don't think he has a very good argument. Surely one is a
poet if he is writing decent poetry whether Bloom knows him or not.

As to how well I'm writing, I count my current ambitions as beginning in
November 2014. I have quite a lot of poetry from earlier years but I'm not
going to go back and look at it. No poet thinks that every poem he writes is
great. I certainly don't, but one needs to keep on writing anyway, because
if one is truly capable of writing the occasional fine poem, he will need
the skills to do it and the only way to have those skills available is to
use them continuously. Showing all the stuff I'm writing is questionable,
perhaps not advisable, but perhaps because I'm 80 it serves a sort of
purpose. We read that people are living longer as a result of the benefits
of medical science. Perhaps the undiminished minds of intellectuals will be
able to reach into greater age as well.

Earlier I wrote that I would be satisfied if I could produce 77 fine poems
from here on in. I was chided a bit. Surely I could write more than that.
I'm not so sure. I'll list the poems I think might be in (or near) that
category at present. One can look them up on www.lawrencehelm.com in the
months of November and December 2014 if one wants to.

Poems for consideration

"Handle of Osage Orange," 11-2-14

"Tracks," 11-23-14

"Stuff of dreams," 11-25-14

"Portents," 11-30-14

"Waiting," 12-3-14

"Her Smile," 12-9-14

"Checking my back-trail," 12-13-14

"Wives," 12-13-14

"The Coming of Summer," 12-16-14

Final list thus far

"The Coming of Summer," 12-16-14


[only 76 to go.  :-)]

Lawrence


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[lit-ideas] Poetry, ambition, and being 80

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