By Hugh Underhill
Modernist aesthetics were pointed out with a feeling of cultural main issue, outlined by way of its distance from an amazing of unified recognition. This unique research examines the fight towards that excellent of unitary subjective adventure in sleek British and Irish poetry from Hardy to Ted Hughes. Hugh Underhill argues that the poetry's emphasis on internal states underrepresents the level to which the problem is in truth socio-historically decided.
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Sample text
For R. P. Blackmur all this counts against Hardy, as something related does against D. H. Lawrence; it shows him 'deprived of both emotional discipline and the structural support of a received imagination'. Hardy sets up 'a scaffold . . out of the nearest congenial materials strong enough and rigid enough to support the structure imagination meant to rear'. But isn't it often proposed as a cardinal rule that the artist should make use of the materials close at hand ('immediate experience') since those are what he is likely to understand best?
The institution of criticism is variable. Critical methods and approaches had already multiplied in the course of our century before the new theories, the nouvelle critique, mounted their challenge; the critic had to be judicious in his use of these, and the newer perspectives only extend the options, adjust imbalances, and sharpen awareness. This is not to gloss over radical, sometimes disorientating, disagreements, but argument and counter-argument have always been the structure and incentive of enquiry.
My project is to insist on the validity and importance of that quiddity and idiosyncrasy, of those subjective understandings, which the Romantic tradition exalts, and at the same time that there is no such thing as immunity from 'history' or escape from the fact that concrete social and material contingencies do shape the productions of individual artists. My point, in fact, is that it is at the intersection of the two, in the complex interaction of the problematical T and extra-personal pressures, that poetry acquires its capacity to work and to matter.