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Literary
realism |
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The need to represent or bear witness enters into most
art,
but literary realism usually means a portrayal of life in
all its immediately-given
ways, good and bad. Crabbe,
Kipling,
Frost,
Hardy
and Larkin,
for example, wrote a down-to-earth poetry of sobriety rooted
in actual perception, one that refused to sentimentalize,
idealize or transfigure the everyday, and distrusted mythologizing,
heightened emotions or rhetorical flourish. With modification
and many exceptions, such aims may lie at the heart of much
of today's poetry. |
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Literary realism today |
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But
what happened to the
older, idealistic concepts?
Fine to subscribe to a contemporary norms, but poetry once
expressed a richer experience of being
human. Poetry modified our experience of the world,
and in turn the way we represented it — heightening,
clarifying and illuminating in both directions, making sense
of our surroundings and so of ourselves. Postmodernism
deploys anything to hand, but the older poetry wanted established
verities, rescuing or devising expressions for their embodiment
of essentially human qualities. Contemporary
poetry is engaging, but in what way does it differ from
fragmented prose?
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Poetry and science |
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Until
recently there were two answers. We could distinguish
the factual and practical (prose) from the personal and emotive
(poetry). And poetry was a branch of literature, a fine art,
which existed
for its own sake, without utilitarian purpose. But we
express our feelings well enough in prose most of the time,
and poetry can be impersonal and effective — even great
poetry, e.g. Dante and Pope.
And art that serves no practical purpose hardly pulls
its weight in a modern society. Perhaps we should make
literary realism an important aspect
of cognition. The fine/applied art distinction, a Romantic
notion, is side-stepped, and financial resources become available
to improving
art itself rather than to marketing an oversupplied product.
Poetry loses its opposition to science, which in turn accepts
the parts played by mind
and social
context. |
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Taking literary realism further |
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Such
would be a new realism in poetry, beyond the usual confines
of social comment, literary
criticism and theory.
A helpful magazine is Philosophy
And Literature. The professional
section of PoetryMagic provides preparatory notes and
references, but non-subscribers may find these useful as
starting points: How Literature Works by K.
Quinn (1992), Barlow, Blakemore & Weston-Smith's Images
and Understanding (1990), G. Edelman's On the Matter
of Mind (1992), G. Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous
Things (1987), A. Kernan's The Death of Literature
(1990), D. Donoghue's The Pure Good of Theory (1992),
G. Graff's Literature Against Itself (1979/95), and
D. Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? (1992).
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