4 - Poetic Artifice
Summary
One strong help for the pastoral convention was the tradition, coming down from the origin of our romantic love-poetry in the troubadours … that the proper moments to dramatize in a love-affair are those when the lover is in despair.
(William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral)He: … It is all up with the once bindingly valid conventions, which guaranteed the freedom of play.
I: A man could know that and recognize freedom above and beyond all critique. He could heighten the play, by playing with forms out of which, as he well knew, life has disappeared.
He: I know, I know. Parody. It might be fun, if it were not so melancholy in its aristocratic nihilism.
(Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus)No poet lived more completely in literature yet managed to inscribe the pain of existence so sharply on allusive verse.
(Peter Porter)In the innovative poetry of the twentieth century, and especially in the writing which characterizes the end of that century and the beginning of the new one, it is clear that we can no longer rely on a particular register of language to signal the difference between poetry and prose. This makes what Gérard Genette calls the ‘poetic disposition’, which is revealed in the ordering of lexical units on the page, and in their relationship to the white space, an extremely important ground of difference. As Forrest-Thomson says,
Poetry can only be a valid and valuable activity when we recognise the value of the artifice which makes it different from prose. Indeed it is only through artifice that poetry can challenge our ordinary linguistic orderings of the world, make us question the way we make sense of things, and induce us to consider its alternative linguistic orders as a new way of viewing the world. (PA xi)
The possibility of these ‘alternative linguistic orders’ depends upon the existence of established orders and codes of language, such as those analysed by Barthes. They depend, that is, upon what – following Kristeva – we might think of as the inherently intertextual disposition of written language.
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- Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Language Poetry , pp. 66 - 95Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001