Heard on the BBC this morning - English may become "a dead language" in a thousand years, or at least, a minority language, like French. Dear me! I am not sure becoming like French is such a disaster. The English have relied a little too much lately on the soft power of their mother tongue, and it might do us all some corrective good to brush up on our Chinese, and learn some international and cultural humility. That being said, I doubt that the poems and novels of the English language will be as dead as the Greats for some time, and I am sure that this new Classical English, however quaint and obscure, will be studied for a few more thousand years, if only by scholars and saints. Though, it must be said, I am not yet convinced that human civilisation in its present consumerist form will survive.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
Comments
Having taught English for over twenty years I know that reports of its forthcoming demise are somewhat exaggerated. People think that English has become the world language purely as a result of colonialism. This is only partly true. Structuarally, English has an astonishing intrinsic power, economy and flexibility. The main problem that foreign learners face is the spelling. Compare it with French which has around half a million nouns where you have to guess the gender because there are no fixed rules. As for Chinese; hardly anyone outside China speaks it and I can't see that changing any time soon.
Best wishes from Simon
Anyway, newspapers are always proclaiming the demise of everything, be it literature, film, the world, English, or earlobe hair.