I. A Richards: Poetry and Beliefs'
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amnaarabiI. A Richards: Poetry and Beliefs'
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amnaarabiI.
A Richards: ‘Poetry and Beliefs’
The business of the poet, as we have seen, is to give order and
coherence, and so freedom, to a body of experience. To do so through
words which act as its skeleton, as a structure by which the impulses
which make up the experience are adjusted to one another and act
together. The means by which words do this are many and varied. To
work them out is a problem for linguistic psychology, that embarrassed
young heir to philosophy. What little can be done shows already that
most critical dogmas of the past are either false or nonsense. A little
knowledge is not here a danger, but clears the air in a remarkable way.
Contemporary Poetry and Belief - Michael Symmons Roberts
The role of poet had shifted, in the late twentieth century, from ‘poet as
truth seeker’ (O la Marianne Moore) to ‘poet as truth maker’. But this
relativism and denial of truth beyond the poem(the collapse of so called
‘meta-narratives’) is in reverse now. Why? Because, according to
post-secular philosophers like Blond, the project of relativism has failed.
But, given the damage to religious symbolism and currency, that David
Jones warned of fifty years ago, this is both crisis and an opportunity for
poets. There is a need to find new forms and images to express ‘religious
ideas and experiences. Bonhoeffer looked for the emergence of a new
kind of language for this. But ‘religious poetry’ has always been
innovative - e.g., modernists like Eliot, Jones, Moore, Bunting. Science
offers new metaphors too, new approaches. And science has led the way
out of the ‘hall of mirrors’ because climate change is nothing if not
meta-narrative. The ways forward for poetry include ascension through
difficulty and abstraction, and this essay shows three ways of exploring it
- Auden, Lewis, Levertov - along with three theoretical approaches.
Those of Williams, Milbank, Pickstock, ‘praise poetry’ being the ultimate
challenge. It also looks at way forward through Welsh-language poetry,
exemplified by Bobi Jones and others.
