Kevin's Watch

In the sixteenth century a poet was one of the most important things to be. Adviser's to kings and queens, specially commissioned by the rich and the powerful, a symbol of status, of a learned intellect and emotional intensity only wished for by mere mortals.

Capitalism destroyed the aesthetic dream and beyond the Augustan poets such as Pope and Dryden who did have a hand in sculpting society, the romantics were derided as emasculate and pointless. Of course this was the perfect atmosphere for a poet. Can we really believe that had Keats not been rejected by his society that he would have been able to write the near perfect "ode to a nightingale". Or Shelly had he not seen such abject suffering at the hands of the despotism presiding greedily over the country, and such savage oppression of the peaceful masses at Peterloo would merely have wrote a love lyric rather than the revolutionary masterpiece "the mask of anarchy" which was deemed too politically explosive to even publish whilst he was alive.

Poets were often imprisoned and invariably poor in the eighteenth century. In their lack of value to society they were triumphs’ of an anti-capitalist, pro-social humanism all set to enlighten the world. Then with modernism this world was ripped apart and rendered unintelligible. Encapsulated in such dense labyrinthine works as Ulysses by Joyce or Eliot’s the wasteland.

The very notion of a straightforward answer to any kind of problem: whether political, social, emotional, familial, religious or aesthetic was now a fading utopian dream being swept aside by a deformed urban nightmare, breeding uncertainty and contempt for a world decaying at exactly the rate of that dream.

That poetry now rests in humble peace beyond the pound signs medusa like glare and on the dusty unswept shelves of second hand bookstores, is somehow fitting. From its early courtly decadence the discipline has attained an artistic exile from commoditising itself and for once we see triumph of art over capital. Poets now must be commended for their dedication to what we can say is the last true art form beyond the media hungry shock tactics of the visual arts, beyond the grim opiate that the television and film industries have become. We can aspire to an imaginative world whereby we can construct infinitesimal fragments of a time long forgotten and the imagination can wander through on its own terms.

sgtnull wrote:the true artist is the unpublished writer.

Plissken wrote:I paint, because there's something in my head I want to see that reality refuses to provide for me. Sometimes, I paint so that others can see it as well. Sometimes, I don't. One way is more viceral than the other, but I don't think that either way is more valid.

In short, because art is meant to communicate, there's no loss if you "cater" to the audience. Bending to the segment of the audience that controls the filthy lucre, however, will almost always cost you something.