"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats
In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~
"The Future of Poetry"
p. 151~
Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.
Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.
#IAR #IARichards #WBYeats #PBShelley #PercyShelley #FutureOfPoetry #PoetLegislators #PoemLegislations #PoetryAsLegislation
Brian Small
in reply to Brian Small • •By transferring these dangerously high claims form the /poet/ to /poetry/, we gain great advantages. We clear the poet form intolerable curiosities. If one-tenth of the attention which as been given to portraying poets---since Dr. Johnson, that harbinger of modernity, launched the lives of poets on publishers' programs--had been given to making poetry more accessible, the world (I venture to suggest) would be much better off and poetry have a different order of audience.
... Happy was Isaiah, who had no biographer! Unhappy, Jeremiah, about whom we know too much. Amos again: what a noble figure! Poor Hosea, the type specimen of Nosy Parker! If one-tenth the attention had been linguistic not novelistic; it appears that there's no reason whatever to think Hosea and his wife, Gomer, were not an entirely happy, faithful pair....
#RichardsOnProphets #ProphetPrivacy #MakersAndPrivacy #AmosAndHosea #IsaiahAndJeremiah #PoetsAndPoetry #HighClaimsPoetry