Measuring Poetry

[Leanne]

The scene depicting young people following the directives of one man, to eschew the beliefs of another, before proceeding to tell them how he felt they should think is a little dismaying, as I suspect few young folk would refuse, and we have that with 'radical' Imams and others poisoning the minds of the impressionable young.

Absolutely -- that's largely the reason I despised Dead Poets' Society, as it smacked of a cult of personality with poetry as the excuse. A far better cinematic representation of poetry, art and indeed all learning can be found in The History Boys eg. "The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

In order to measure, one needs a miniature building-block, defined in relation to other things, even though it begin by being arbitrary. In Paris, there is a metal rod, which at a given temperature, represented the metre. Once one has this, other measurements flow. Rather ironically, there is no such metre in poetry-- not for measurement. Appraisals are fine; the idea of an accepted canon is fine. Yet over time, items which were immensely revered fade, and vanish: one only has to look at different editions of the Oxford Book of English Verse to find that people who once were thought giants, are now represented by scarcely anything.

In the physical universe, the parameters stay (largely) the same, with variables easy to predict, measure and compensate for. In culture and society, the shifts are somewhat less rational. The art world is in constant flux -- for an artist, the best you can hope for is that you will stumble upon something that registers on one of the more static (or more often renewed) scales. That's why the holy trinity of Love, Death and Betrayal are the themes that most often transcend time. The truth is, we really can't say definitively whether a poem is great or not in its time, because all the other pointers and cheats still exist to help us with the insights, rather like an in-joke. If, in even twenty years, it does not seem anachronistic or impenetrable, perhaps it has a shot at lasting.