No good English poets

[busker]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

[wasellajam]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

I guess I'll spend the next few days specifically reading British poets. I won't be able to argue for a specific poet and I'm sure I won't be able to defend any of my choices at this point, but I like this one:

The Biting Point
by Catherine Smith

Thirty years dead and still curmudgeonly,
my grandfather is driving me through
the fog-numbed streets of Crystal Palace
at five a.m. He’s in the plaid dressing gown
he wore to die in, and he’s shaved,
badly, flecks of dark blood stippling his chin.
We’re the only Austin 1100 on the road;
he tuts, crunching through the gears,
he blames the damp, the bad oil,
the years it sat cobwebbed in a garage.
My grandfather slows for the lights,
not best pleased when the engine stalls –
it’s no part of his plan, I know,
to crank the key three time before
the damned thing fires – the times he’s told me
a good driver knows his car’s temperament
like the back of his hand. As a milk float
toots behind us, he mutters, frowns,
eases one foot off the clutch as
the other trembles over the accelerator.
Listen to that! He’s triumphant
as the engine warbles its surprise –
as though it’s found a new voice,
a different register, like a woman
suddenly discovering a talent for opera.
That’s known as the biting point, he says,
I’m just telling you so’s when you get
A husband, you’ll know what’s what.
We coast down Fountain Drive, the car
sighs and dreams, a purring baby now.
My grandfather’s bolt upright, sliding
the wheel under calloused palms
as the BBC transmitter winks in the distance –
the last thing he mentioned, the last fixed light.

[milo]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

You go back and forth with conflating English poets with English poetry making the whole an unconvincing argument.

Eliot the man?  Terribly flawed along with the rest of us.  The poems he wrote?  Incredible (though way too few.)

Personally love Browning's poetry.

[Magpie]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

It's quite a bold claim... Shem was never that interesting.

At first I thought you meant English language poets and then perhaps you meant 'English type poetry', if there is such a thing. Dylan Thomas confused it a bit further with him being Welsh, which would narrow your list even more.

So none of the Romantics or the war poets or Blake or Ted Hughes?

16

[milo]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

It's quite a bold claim... Shem was never that interesting.

At first I thought you meant English language poets and then perhaps you meant 'English type poetry', if there is such a thing. Dylan Thomas confused it a bit further with him being Welsh, which would narrow your list even more.

So none of the Romantics or the war poets or Blake or Ted Hughes?

16

Eliot wasn't English, Thomas wasn't either
As for the Brownings - I shun to say neither
Robert was
Elizabeth wasn't
For ones left off - there are more than a dozen

[Magpie]

Eliot wasn't English, Thomas wasn't either
As for the Brownings - I shun to say neither
Robert was
Elizabeth wasn't
For ones left off - there are more than a dozen

Forgot that Eliot wasn't fully English.

According to Google Elizabeth is English, born in County Durham which would make her a Northerner.

But I suppose it detracts from the point if we are discussing their true nationalities. Even if we change it to British poets the statement doesn't hold.

[milo]

Eliot wasn't English, Thomas wasn't either
As for the Brownings - I shun to say neither
Robert was
Elizabeth wasn't
For ones left off - there are more than a dozen

Forgot that Eliot wasn't fully English.

According to Google Elizabeth is English, born in County Durham which would make her a Northerner.

But I suppose it detracts from the point if we are discussing their true nationalities. Even if we change it to British poets the statement doesn't hold.

yah - I am not sure why I wrote that.  It did remind me of P B Shelley who was also British and a fine poet and , even though well out of fashion, Hausmann was also a fine poet (imo, I recognize it is not hip to like him anymore yet still)

I would bet there are several dozen more that are fine writers.  Also, if just acting like expatriates are British - why not mention the distaste of Pound along with Eliot?

There are so many logic flaws in this it takes more work to point them out than to just dismiss the whole.

[busker]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

It's quite a bold claim... Shem was never that interesting.

At first I thought you meant English language poets and then perhaps you meant 'English type poetry', if there is such a thing. Dylan Thomas confused it a bit further with him being Welsh, which would narrow your list even more.

So none of the Romantics or the war poets or Blake or Ted Hughes?

16

I actually meant poets from the British isles. English is a lazy shorthand.
So Ireland is part of it. Pillory me if you want for that, but Trump has endured worse.

The younger romantics were great. They all died before they got boring.

Tennyson was the best of the craftsmen, but a thoroughgoing racist and his poetry falls short as a consequence. Was Hitler a fine artist?

Blake was great. Yeats was great.

Owen and Sassoon wrote some fine poems.

Ok, there were perhaps eight or nine exceptions. The rest were miserable individuals who shouldn’t be read at all. Larkin is like the Jeremy Corbin of poetry. He’s miserable and wants you to join him. We should read only about elevated things, like Jesu.

[milo]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

It's quite a bold claim... Shem was never that interesting.

At first I thought you meant English language poets and then perhaps you meant 'English type poetry', if there is such a thing. Dylan Thomas confused it a bit further with him being Welsh, which would narrow your list even more.

So none of the Romantics or the war poets or Blake or Ted Hughes?

16

I actually meant poets from the British isles. English is a lazy shorthand shorthand.
So Ireland is part of it. Pillory me if you want for that, but Trump has endured worse.

The younger romantics were great. They all died before they got boring.

Tennyson was the best of the craftsmen, but a thoroughgoing racist and his poetry falls short as a consequence. Was Hitler a fine artist?

Blake was great. Yeats was great.

Owen and Sassoon wrote some fine poems.

Ok, there were perhaps eight or nine exceptions. The rest were miserable individuals who shouldn’t be read at all. Larkin is like the Jeremy Corbin of poetry. He’s miserable and wants you to join him. We should read only about elevated things, like Jesu.

This just reminded me how much I like Heaney . . .

[busker]

Eliot wasn't English, Thomas wasn't either
As for the Brownings - I shun to say neither
Robert was
Elizabeth wasn't
For ones left off - there are more than a dozen

Forgot that Eliot wasn't fully English.

According to Google Elizabeth is English, born in County Durham which would make her a Northerner.

But I suppose it detracts from the point if we are discussing their true nationalities. Even if we change it to British poets the statement doesn't hold.

yah - I am not sure why I wrote that.  It did remind me of P B Shelley who was also British and a fine poet and , even though well out of fashion, Hausmann was also a fine poet (imo, I recognize it is not hip to like him anymore yet still)

I would bet there are several dozen more that are fine writers.  Also, if just acting like expatriates are British - why not mention the distaste of Pound along with Eliot?

There are so many logic flaws in this it takes more work to point them out than to just dismiss the whole.

Assume I meant poets from the British isles.
And throw in Americans into that mix.

[milo]

Also - would you include Joyce as a poet? I find him insufferable but he spews just the kind of inscrutable high brow crap you would pretend to like

[busker]

Also - would you include Joyce as a poet?  I find him insufferable but he spews just the kind of inscrutable high brow crap you would pretend to like

I’ll come to Joyce, but as I was walking the dog yesterday and listening to a business biography, it struck me that all culture is worthless.
Because think of it - we have created transfomer models that can think. And Shakespeare didn’t know that smallpox was caused by a virus. Or what a virus was.
Why should the eminences of the immediate past be seen any differently than our Neanderthal ancestors?

[Bruce V]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

Really?  Are you just trying to stir the pot to see what comes out?  Otherwise, can anyone have so much hubris as to dismiss all English poets after Shakespeare?

[Magpie]

This just reminded me how much I like Heaney . . .

Yeah Heaney is brilliant, got a collection of his called 'The Spirit Level' that's always close by, I posted one of them in Poems I That I Love thread

Seamus Heaney - A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

[busker]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

Really?  Are you just trying to stir the pot to see what comes out?  Otherwise, can anyone have so much hubris as to dismiss all English poets after Shakespeare?

What do you think?
Can you respect a man civilised enough to wear a tweed coat who lived through the early computer revolution and still thought that the “soul” went into suspended animation after death?

[milo]

This just reminded me how much I like Heaney . . .

Yeah Heaney is brilliant, got a collection of his called 'The Spirit Level' that's always close by, I posted one of them in Poems I That I Love thread

Seamus Heaney - A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

Originally - I did all of the Heaney voice recordings for the site but at some point billy lost them and replaced them all with YouTube kleps.

meh

[Magpie]

Really?  Are you just trying to stir the pot to see what comes out?  Otherwise, can anyone have so much hubris as to dismiss all English poets after Shakespeare?

It's good to stir the pot sometimes though. This site used to be full of discussions going back and forth like this.

---

Tennyson was the best of the craftsmen, but a thoroughgoing racist and his poetry falls short as a consequence. Was Hitler a fine artist?

This is a whole other question for another thread. Does someone's character and misdemeanours detract from their work as an artist?

[milo]

Really?  Are you just trying to stir the pot to see what comes out?  Otherwise, can anyone have so much hubris as to dismiss all English poets after Shakespeare?

It's good to stir the pot sometimes though. This site used to be full of discussions going back and forth like this.

---

Tennyson was the best of the craftsmen, but a thoroughgoing racist and his poetry falls short as a consequence. Was Hitler a fine artist?

This is a whole other question for another thread. Does someone's character and misdemeanours detract from their work as an artist?

I think it important that we keep them entirely separate.  Most great artists are terrible people in equal ratio.  Perhaps that is the price they pay.

Hitler may have been the exception in that his attempts at poetry were juvenile at best yet he was still a solidly unsavory person.  Well, he did some unsavory things - rumour has it he was actually quite likable to the right crowd.

[rowens]

My living is what ifs in connection with apparencies. What is apparent is what is gauged, and what is gauged is enhanced through what ifs, and through what ifs becoming what is.
I sense that yawning soothes more than breathing, so I yawn instead of breathe; I feel that daydreaming flows with more precision and less sharpness than thinking, so I daydream instead of think: For purposes, here: I find creation more valuable and effective than criticism or attacks, so I speak everything with the same monotone and deadpan expansion of my own creativity. It seems to me that people tend to find problems with other things more when they have problems with their own things, so, as with all things that I can go without, such as having pride, I don't need respect, and having no need to be correct, as gauging situational apparencies is enough, I don't need truth: I don't separate other people's things from my own things, and everything is done creatively, yawningly, daydreamingly, incorrectly and irreverently, with 0 problems and 0 resentment or shame.

All writers can be useful. Everything is useful. I need bad things to write good attacks. Hence, I love my enemies, even when my enemies find me so beneath them that using them as inspiration would make them laugh.

---

I like my masters sloppy so I can be sloppy. Or messy, rather? I like my masters great so maybe I can.

I feel Maddie might be my favorite Euphoria character.

No one else has posted yet, this isn't a bump.

---

Am I weak if my masters are a lower bar? Can weakness be a strength? Who's keeping score, and where do they store It?

[RiverNotch]

While I disagree with the premise of the original post on an intuitive level, I can't quite refute it, simply because I'm not so well read. Of the artists post-Shakespeare typically cited to be his equals, I've not read enough of one (Milton), and don't really grok the two others (the proportion of bad to good in Wordsworth is worse than that of Shakespeare, while Blake is too unpolished for me).

That said, I similarly disagree with the replies that we should somehow separate the art from the artist. Part of the satisfaction we get from a piece of work, whether we acknowledge it or not, is *moral*---we like transgressive art because it transgresses boundaries we acknowledge to be stupid, we dislike art that says nothing because it is morally banal, and so on---but also failures in politics can represent some very particular failures in aesthetics. An artist with bad politics suffers from two things, either a failure of imagination or a lack of self consistency, both of which are deadly to poetry, however stunning an individual piece may seem. Eliot isn't great precisely because he's so antisemitic, misogynistic, and altogether ur-fascist in his maturity: when your poetry tackles alienation under modernity and provides as a solution the Christian faith, but you alternately support systems so fundamentally modern and anti-Christian, to the point of inserting a few telling canards in some of your more obscure works, then your poetry utterly fails as an argument.

Of course, I'm not sure this perspective entirely agrees with the original post, either. For one, what's so special about *English* poetry that it has failed post-Shakespeare? Is it because, after Shakespeare, colonialism and capitalism reared their ugly heads, forever tainting most artists that worked under their shadow? In which case, the argument shouldn't be restricted to English poetry. Is it because the English language gestated in the unique soup of systems that ultimately gave birth to capitalism? In which case, Shakespeare, who wrote six hundred years after the Norman conquest, should be considered an anomaly, not the norm.

For another, you can't decry Tennyson and Hitler as decent to good craftsmen but thoroughgoing racists then lump the Irish in with the English. Like Eliot, that's just damningly self-inconsistent.

And my favourite Euphoria character is Jules, though I hear the show stopped doing her justice after season one.