About Writing. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Jenny kiss’d me.

      Poets practically unknown in their time whom scholars have since rediscovered and found interesting include George Darley (1795–1846), Winthrop Mackworth Pread (1802–39), and John Clare (1793–1864). I’ve now named seven minor romantics. Someone might add another seven, to make, perhaps, fourteen. But today all fourteen concern a small group of professors and graduate students, enough to fuel the odd doctoral thesis and interest readers particularly focused on the period. At the time, however, when those six major and fourteen minor poets were writing, there were considerably less than 2.5 million people in the British isles who could read and write well enough to be poets of such ranking.

      Today the current literate field (in American English, say)—at least twenty-five times the size of the field of 1814—might be expected to hold twenty-five times six major poets producing poems of an interest comparable to those of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley (that is to say, 150 major poets), and twenty-five times fourteen minor poets (or 350) of considerable interest.

      That’s about what the statistics are.

      The fundamental difference between the world of 1814 and the world of the present day is that six major and fourteen minor poets is a knowable field. Arthur Symons’s The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (New York: Dutton, 1909; Symons: 1865–1945) gives essays on 87 poets born after 1722 and dead by 1868—his own cut-off point for the romantics—arbitrarily as all such dates must be, but still eminently sensible. In a final chapter, “Minors,” he mentions another 52 poets who fall within the same period. Though it may take a decade or more of reading, a single reader can be familiar with the totality of that field. No single reader can be thoroughly familiar with the works of 150 major poets and 350 minor poets. Symons’s 340-page book could not cover the major English language poets alive today—much less give a comprehensive survey of both the major and the minor poets whose births and deaths were contained within the last 140 years. Thus, the doling out by the literate readership of fame, merit, or even simple attention is an entirely different process from what it once was.

      When Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair was published in 1814 (that year when all the romantic poets we’ve mentioned were writing), queues began to form outside London bookstores four and five hours before they opened, and, by the time the doors unlocked, those queues stretched around the block. The Corsair sold ten thousand copies on the first day of publication, and three hundred thousand in the next year. (That is to say, by the year’s end, a copy was owned by just over a quarter of the people in the British Isles who could have actually read it.) And when the poet, novelist, and playwright Victor Hugo (b. 1802) died in Paris in 1885, his funeral was a four-day state affair, notably longer and finally grander than, say, the funeral of President Kennedy (b. 1917) on his assassination in 1963. Two years before, in 1883, when opera composer Richard Wagner (b. 1813) died in Venice, his funeral was not much smaller.

      Today the deaths of artists simply do not constitute such national events. A far greater percentage of the society has seen the works of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas than ever saw Wagner’s operas—or saw Hugo’s plays or read his poems and novels. But though Spielberg’s and Lucas’s works cost more to make and make more when they appear, when at last these film directors go, neither is likely to have the same sort of final send-off as Wagner or Hugo—which is another way of saying that today even the most popular arts fit into the society very differently from the way they once did, a century or two centuries back.

      From time to time all the major Romantic poets—and probably most of the minor ones as well—gave readings of an afternoon or evening in their homes or at the homes of their friends. Throughout the nineteenth century, writing their recollections of the French poets Rimbaud (1854–91) and Baudelaire, people described such occasions. The practice continued up through World War I and over the period between the world wars. William Merrill Fisher (1889–1969) writes about one such poetry reading “at home” in New York City, which the young Austrian-born American poet Samuel Greenberg (1893–1917) attended. From the sixties, I recall a woman who lived on Greenwich Village’s Patchin Place telling about such a gathering when she was a student at Smith College in the late thirties, at which Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) read from her recent work.

      I was born in the opening year of America’s involvement with World War II. Only twice in my life have I been to such an “at home” reading. Once was with an elderly German woman in Vermont, when I was eighteen (I am now sixty-three). The second time was about a half-dozen years ago, when a bunch of graduate students at the University of Michigan dressed up in eighteenth-century costumes and gave a “tea,” at which a few people read their poems. That is to say, it was in imitation of a discontinued practice.

      Consider, though: while all of them gave readings at peoples’ houses, neither Byron, Shelley, nor Keats ever gave a public reading of his poems during his brief life. (Prose writers such as Dickens and Wilde went on lecture tours, which even brought them to America, where they often did readings. But they did not come as poets.) A development of the last sixty years and almost certainly encouraged by the large number of returning soldiers to universities after World War II, the public reading, started at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in the years between the two world wars and was given a large boost by the popularity of the poet Dylan Thomas’s public readings. The idea spread to San Francisco art galleries and Greenwich Village coffee shops through the forties and fifties. Today readings are a staple of college campuses and bookstores with any literary leanings whatsoever, so that even the likes of Barnes & Noble sponsors them. “Open mike” readings and poetry slams are a regular part of contemporary urban culture. Only a few nights ago, with my life-partner, Dennis, I went to see Def Poetry Jam, a staged reading on Broadway, at the Longacre Theater, by nine urban poets (one of whom I’d taught with out at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, the previous summer); the event grew out of the Home Box Office television series Def Poetry Jam. Now writers such as Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959), Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) and Dorothy and DuBose Hayward, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes (1902–67), and Dylan Thomas (1914–53) all had verse plays (or operas) on Broadway. But despite Fiona Shaw’s one-woman presentation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1996, this is the first time, I suspect, that contemporary poetry, read by the living poets themselves, has hit the Broadway stage. Def Poetry Jam received a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation. Once again, art and the artist—specifically the literary arts and the literary artist—fit into the society in a very different way today from the way they did in previous epochs.

      When the change is this great, a phrase such as “the position of the artist has changed” no longer covers the case. Rather, such positions (where, as W. H. Auden once put it, “the artist is considered the most important of the state’s civil servants”) are no longer there for artists to fill—while other positions, however less exalted, are. This is tantamount to acknowledging that art—specifically poetry and prose fiction—has become a different sort of social object from what it once was, as English-language literature itself became a different social object when, shortly after World War I, it first became a topic of university study and so became the object we know today and more and more ceased to be the study of the philology of the language from Old English through Chaucer through Elizabethan English to the present—what “English Literature” had mostly meant before World War I, when it was taught at London and Edinburgh Universities in the 1880s and 1890s.

      The things we look for “literature” to do in our lives, how we expect it to do them, and the structures of the social net in which it functions have changed. This is not even to broach the displacements, transformations, and borrowings effected by movies, television, or, most recently, the internet.

      While these changes are very real, sometimes we can make too much of them. Art is a tradition-bound, tradition-stabilized enterprise. Often those folks newly alerted to the changes want to see a total erasure of the slate, allowing us to do anything and everything in completely new ways. But it is the СКАЧАТЬ