To address the topic adequately would require a shelf of books in half a dozen fields. It further suggests that this misunderstanding has created problems in how the art is generally taught in schools at every level of education. This essay examines what seems to me a current misapprehension about the nature of poetry. Private inspiration may be the stuff of poetry, but it is toxic to criticism. A little recklessness goes a long way, but sometimes literary culture needs to go a long way, too. Often reckless by scholarly standards, their criticism attempts to open new conversations rather than annotate and negotiate old ones. They also view poetry as a foundational element of education. They share a conviction that poetry-both its creation and reception– has great human importance that needs to be not merely understood but periodically renewed as a spiritual capacity. Nonetheless there is something interesting going on in the speculative work of these outsiders besides prophetic delusion or bard-envy. At their worst moments, as in Graves’s The White Goddess or Bly’s Iron John, they have claimed visionary authority. They relied mostly on experiential argument, mythic allusion, historical analogy, and personal narrative, often peppered with amateur anthropology or psychology. To put it mildly, these poets have not written in the language of academic discourse. That is probably why the poet-critics who have made the most persuasive claims on the primal aspects of verse have mostly been outsiders, such as Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, Edwin Muir, Kathleen Raine, William Everson, Robert Bly, Les Murray, Wendell Berry, and-to name one non-poet-Camille Paglia. There are too few hard facts and too many value judgments involved to make this a safe area of academic inquiry. Anyone with an advanced degree in literary studies knows there is no professional future in trying to connect the art of poetry with its putative human purposes. There often seems something crude or naïve about essentialist views of poetry. What comes next? A damsel with a dulcimer? The horns of Elf-land faintly blowing? That very word should cause responsible readers to cringe. Lacking a more stylish appellation, I’ll borrow an antiquarian term, enchantment. It is a topic so remote from contemporary literary studies that there is no respectable critical term for it. This essay explores one of those disreputable subjects, one that I’m quaint enough to consider important, perhaps essential, to the art of poetry. Some topics have been neglected so long that they now seem not merely unfashionable but quaint, eccentric, even disreputable. As scholars and critics pursue the themes and theories of the moment, other subjects remain overlooked. There is such an enormous amount of poetry criticism and poetic theory published at present that it seems impossible that any significant topic is neglected.
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