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Milton and Morrisons

The Guardian has a timely leader today reminding England that one of its greatest poets, Milton, is about to have a 400th "birthday" this December - and is in danger of becoming unread, untaught, and underappreciated.

At first, this might seem an improbable complaint, yet, reading the latest issue of The London Magazine (celebrating 276 years), I came across the following from poet-novelist Tobias Hill on the subject of poetic diction: "Ian MacMillan has a good line on this: don't put any word into a poem you wouldn't use in Morrisons [a store]; to do otherwise is as odd as popping out to the corner shop in a Shakespearean ruff".

Eyewear likes a bit of ruff. All of British poetry's current problems can be traced to such an attitude (one even more crudely anti-modernist, and anti-Renaissance, than anything Larkin ever came up with). MacMillan's offhand poetics of normalcy contains so many blandly buried assumptions it is startling: because, depending on what language one speaks, what gender, or race, or class, or nation, one speaks from, or belief system, one is likely to want to use different words in a corner shop. For MacMillan, an "ordinary bloke", poetry is about the down-to-earth, local, and unnassuming language of commerce. This is as far from the rhetorically rich, deeply-informed, and resonant, language of Milton as possible.

England's poets, today, often as not, are afraid to use the "mandarin tone" - favouring instead a laddish "democractic voice" - terms from Armitage and Crawford - the voice, it must be said, of the less-literate, and the less-thoughful, many. Milton was, clearly, a religious, deep-thinking, highly-engaged human being, perhaps a little elitist, who loved the full resources of language - sort of like Robert Lowell, or Geoffrey Hill. In the UK today, current poetic taste has drifted from Lowell (except insofar as he was Heaney's friend), and is mainly indifferent to Hill (seen as difficult and OTT).

So long as "poetic diction" is constrained by nonliterary social demands - the need to be normal, and like everyone else (not "odd") - then poetry resists being strange, eccentric, flamboyant, and deeply exciting in new and unimagined ways. To be embarassed to try on a little of Shakespeare's clothing, from time to time, is to be less than a full poet.

Comments

Anonymous said…
With you all the way Todd.
Rob said…
I agree with what you're saing there, Todd. However, I'd point out that when Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford used the term "democratic voice", they didn't use it in the sense above at all.

In fact, what you have made a plea for is pretty much what their "democratic voice" was about. They used the term to to describe a growing pluralism in UK poetry - less centred on London, and consequently more varied - a multitude of registers. To quote:

"The democratic voice may speak Gaelic or English. It may be gendered as male or female. It is unhieratic, belonging to a culture of pluralism, where its authority is both challenging and challenged. It is an allied self-awareness and bite that allows Peter Reading to combine traditional poetic techniques, such as couplets, rhythm and rhyme, with mixed colloquial and formal English, reported speech, everyday expletives and a gravestone epitaph, all within the one piece..." ('The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945', ed. Armitage and Crawford, p. xxii)
Ben Wilkinson said…
An interesting post, Todd. I agree that the 'laddish democratic voice' you mention has its limitations. It seems to me that the trick is to write poems that make use of the full depth and richness of language in such a way that doesn't draw too much attention to itself at first, or even second, glance. I know you're not a huge fan, but I think Paterson's very good at this - adopting a contemporary poetic voice and subject matter while still making use of a rich and varied diction. Think of the 'The Alexadrian Library' (parts 1, 2 & 3), or 'The Ferryman's Arms' from Nil Nil.

Of course, Paterson's is just one way of opening up new poetic terrain whilst keeping the poems rooted in the contemporary. I still enjoy reading poets writing in styles like Hill and Ashbery, as the potentiality and variousness of poetry is one of its most exciting features. And ultimately why catch-all attempts like MacMillan's at stating 'What You Definitely Should/Shouldn't Do In A Poem' are both laughable and disturbing.
EYEWEAR said…
Rob, you're right to highlight the pluralism of British "mainstream postmodern poetry" (to use a phrase that is problematic, but in critical usage currently) - a pluralism I often share. However, it seems the base line for much of this poetry - the jumping off stage - is "ordinary language" - an "as well-written as prose" component borrowed from Pound, but then used to browbeat truly weird, or opaque, language. And, Ben, I think Paerson is a very good contemporary Scottish poet, who adroitly mixes the ludic and the lucid in well-made lyric poems of often striking playfullness. I personally prefer Edwin Morgan's sense of style, but can see the lineage. I do think that "the mandarin tone" of Yeats (even Auden) is sometimes missed in current poetry (often for very good reasons); perhaps the way it gets back in is via a backdoor of post-ironic homage.
Steven Waling said…
Interesting that this "democratic voice" excludes the hieratic; anything but sounding "too poetic" seems to be allowable.

I know it can sometimes be rather over the top, but I rather like a bit of the old "too poetic."
Anonymous said…
I feel sorry for Ian macMillan who has been supporting himself by giving readings, workshops etc for many years and he's helped many writers realise their true potential. His quote concerns his own usage and not that of others like the muscle bound Heaney of that trickster Muldoon.

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