tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post2911284568135561017..comments2023-11-22T09:11:01.567+00:00Comments on George Szirtes: The Englishness of English Poetry 2George Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-74647233763678922082008-08-15T09:42:00.000+01:002008-08-15T09:42:00.000+01:00I think D H Lawrence and Stevie Smith belong to a ...I think D H Lawrence and Stevie Smith belong to a fascinating English line of eccentrics, visionaries, small world- and system-makers, partly religious figures, who would include Blake and Peter Redgrove and Penny Shuttle. Smith has a mode of social satire of course but my hunch is, that under it all, she was primarily a religious poet. Earlier examples: Traherne, Langland, Christopher Smart...<BR/><BR/>No category is clear cut, of course, but to tell the truth this group, which should go under Blake and the Flaming Line, but could be Perpendicular too, is, in many ways, the group that interests me most because I suspect there is an alternative, part suppressed English tradition somewhere along this line.<BR/><BR/>Elizabeth Jennings here? Maybe Alice Oswald, though she could belong to the Constable chapter.<BR/><BR/>It is also possible that poets over a lifetime of writing shift categories.<BR/><BR/>Thank you for the thoughts. Always welcome. Off to Liverpool today where there will be other writers to discuss this with.George Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-20895548834868298692008-08-15T08:27:00.000+01:002008-08-15T08:27:00.000+01:00The first person to spring to mind is Defoe, of c...The first person to spring to mind is Defoe, of course... <BR/><BR/>Poets may be a slightly different thing, somehow. Yes, Larkin, Auden. Betjeman. Shakespeare, of course. And Dickens. I think Chaucer certainly, though as has been discussed elsewhere this week, he would probably have been a novelist if there had been novels in his day. Graham Greene. Stevie Smith. <BR/><BR/>But the very Englishness of this trait may lie in its pervasiveness: even English writers with much more mystical tendencies, Hughes, Lawrence, root their mystical observations in a very earthen set of observations. It's a mysticism that brings you BACK to observed, or even observable, life, rather than taking you away from it.<BR/><BR/>All this off the top of my still rather dizzy head, of course!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com