poem about literary criticism
Criticism
I wanted to write a ditty
Exploring criticism of literary
The history of it you see
Is rather interesting to me
So I thought I’d give it a whirl
And see if we can’t ingest
thine artistry of verbal swirls
It might change somewhat in form,
Poets mutate set semiotics,
Move beyond sonnets fixed rules
I will create a language storm
I hope you find it cool
From poetry, metanarrative to prose
This metamorphosis in form
is quite an option
A poetic essay could take quite a while
don’t let this send you
reaching for alcoholic concoctions
I’ll try and foot all my notes
And use big words that rhyme
Not fond of elitism I’ll declare
Them concepts cumbersome
A comprehension crime
Not committed by dear reader
receptor import
But of me the explainer, composer
of this educational verse
For it is not my intent to befuddle
Such intelligents as yourself
Make philosophy of words
Easy to understand so we no longer
Have any mind confusing trouble
See from the tree of life - Erectus style
did transmute upright hairy Homo Sapien
with opposable thumbs,
a taste for meat
with a lovely longer tongue
that verbalised a treat
this new model human had
passed its provisional trial
Signify they did forty thousand years ago
Taught each other meanings to eat, feed and sleep
To carry sticks, hit wild animals ‘n sheep
From interaction thus - labour and socialisn’
Did these ‘ere homo sapiens really start thriving!
This here material base
did allow a certain blooming
Of ideas, aesthetics, paintin’s,
rituals an’ dance
but not much personal grooming
Social in nature, this interaction
Proved language very import
And so signage was taught
To children the Sapiens lineage
and thought
One theorist did speak,
In 1929 of such verbal feats
Voloshinov was his name
The Philosophy of Language, his game
“Signs”, he says “are finely conditioned
by social organisation of all involved”
“Speech, as one sign, evolves
in fighting off all submission”1
Voloshinov was a smart cookie
Always struggling for the poor
Noting “different groups accent their words
expressing contrasted social
interaction, aspirations 2and folk lore
“Signs”, maintained Volosh,
“ becomes arena of struggle of class”3
This Russian was with the Marxists
Not with academics who were posh
Marx and Engels were revolutionaries too
A little before Volosh’s time
They thought long and hard ‘bout language
It’s origins, secrets and essence in rhyme.
“It’s the immediate actuality of thought”
wrote those two in
Ideology of the German
“no wonder, indeed
given philosophers have taught
about thought having
independent existence
that they made language fling
into an independent realm”4
Giving language theory some substance!
But before Volosh, Engels and Marx
I must inform you,
I really must impart
Of strands, categories
Of literary works produced
In far-off European lands
According to one take
There was the word, the bolt, the light,
This one well read book said
It all came from Gods great sight
Not so said many writers and
Readers who followed
They’s reckon t’was just mystical clap trap
that illiterate peasants had to swallow
Along comes the scientific age,
Enlightenment and all
Out with the priests,
mystics and ball peering sage
Then came Romanticism,
In the seventeen hundreds an all
which rose secular-like
from a non sacred Enlightenment prism
Revolt, was this Romanticism
‘gainst aristocratic,
godly minded Lords
but also wordly protests
countering Enlightenment’s
strict rationalising doors
Counter-Enlightenment
this period’s been named.
Emotions, gush and fine feeling,
Oodles of this
Did this movement contain
Some reaction
Too,
One Terry Eaggleton
did ascertain
Reaction, as this genre did respond
To the advent of capitalism’s
Mechanised wage slavery prison
And its anti-cultural schism5
Lots of affinity with nature
does Romanticism
abound
Hero-worship a theme
Stemming from religions
worshipping divinities
Romanticist authors:
Cooper, Irving, Blake,
carried on this way,
writing this and that
bits of which were fake,
most of it OK
Romanticism contained
A certain fascination,
Even slight obsession
With the author that
Composed within the heralded
Written profession
A little later in history’s journey
Did some changes feature in
what we’re learning
to term as
Quality lettered yearnings.
Called Russian Formalism
It came from the snowy east
People say Formalism
Is the origins of literary criticism
It was a mighty, wordy beast
It rose up and out of
revolution times
In Russia, Mark One
where masses cried,
‘bread, freedom, rum!’
This discourse showed its heads
During the carnage that was
World War One – the horror, the terror
That killed so many dead
Capitalism showed its colours
Its brutal, wretched ways
Driven by want of resources,
land and private profit
Culturalists wanted better days
Soviet scholars, Shklovsky
Tynianov and Vinokur
Defined autonomy for poetry,
Called it special and art’s key.
A set of properties showed
Poetry ‘n prose’s rich surprise
Devices are employed
Said the Formalists you see
To eliminate poetry’s demise
The poet does craft her work
Using literary devices,
The Russian Formalists
Ascertained, its natural
Not a moral crisis
These dudes had a political bent
Not separate from the rest
Literary products weren’t individual gifts
Planted from on high
as part of a God’s test
But expression came from society -
Specific social, political conditions
Interpreted by you and me
- an integral part of history6
Poetry was also an
authors world vision
Expressed in bounteous
imagery ‘n symbolic fusions
But the Formalists pointed out
That individuals were part of
Society – of this
they had no doubt
During this same time
Another movement
Founded its rhyme
Called the Imagist Movement
T’was led by Hulme and a Pound
Whose politics were a bit unsound
They loved a bit ‘o imagery
Discipline and mechanical currents
Hence Pounds flirt with fascism
Was abhorrent, grotesque and shockin’
But when siring over 3 lined poems
Featuring war and dehumanised grit
Doesn’t really surprise me one bit
Then along came the Leavisites,
A special lot they were
Saved English Lit from propriety
Gave it much needed notoriety
DH Lawrence was a celebrated fan
Of the nineteen twenties Leavite clan
And while Lawrence was a sexist git
Their philosophy had progressive bits7
“Evaluation of literary writings”
purported Mister Leavis
“is bound up with deeper judgments
‘bout history ‘n how society works”8
He gave many well researched sightings
Scutiny, the clans famous magazine
became a worded beacon
a genuine moral crusade
To those in the midst of seeking
alternatives to culturally,
desert -like days
“This mechanised society produces such trash”9
wrote the editors of this zine,
romances, ads emanating banality,
alienated labour an’ vulgarising media
none of it I’m keen,
said Leavis with finality.
The task they set was clear.
To the educational institutions they went
To save selected few from life’s bum steer10
The question they forgot to ask
Why culture is so half-assed?
Individualistic, competitive and grey
Poor workers have to toil all day
Fed crap from corporate media
War ‘n’ lies that governments feeds yu
No time to read, reflect or muse,
Wage slavery deadens, makes ‘em, turn to booze
Educational institutions an’ intelligentsia for the most part
Make peace with rich rulers and stand way apart
From moral questions of the day,
Like how to transform culture to orange from grey?
Make culture for the poor by the poor
Make the third world into first
Bring out the black, indigenous and women
All those silenced, economically cursed
For that to occur power has to be taken
From the rich oligarchy’s and their moguls
Of this there can be no flaking
This is of my reckoning yes indeed
We can’t be educating in a vacuum
I think most would rightfully concede
Leavis thought up another interesting concept
calling it Mimetic Theory -
poetic language embodying reality11
he saw it all rather clearly
The Scrutinisers, like Romanticists
Didn’t like mechanised world
They wanted alienation to desist
Just weren’t sure how to being it about
Stalinism had given progressives
reasons to question and doubt
Then along came American New Criticism
From now called ANC
Was intelligentsia’s answer to
fascism being driven
all through Europe’s seas.
World War Two was another great shock
For those sensitive poets - mostly a caring lot
Who decided poetry could solve all ills
Including chaos and any great number
Of capitalisms crimes and kills
One I.A.Richards blamed science and technology
For crisis that was erupting
He saw poetry to play role of
Olden day mythologies
Replacing religion his idea was thus
That poetry can save entirely all of us 12
ANC held sway in McCarthy’s fifties
Eliot, Empson, Leavis an’ Ransom all
Complained of lack of sensuous particularity
And having society full of uneducated shiffties.
“Poetry is a nostalgic haven from alienations
bought on by industrial capitalism”13
the ANC did say.
Their critique of poetry was less radical
Focusing on tensions, paradoxes,
ambivalences and attitudes that contended.
Their semiotic critique seemingly never ended
Excitement over disinterested reconciliation
of opposing impulses. Never lending
help in building peaceful, just nations
Along comes the Geneva School of Criticism
In the forties and fifties
Around the time Edmund Husserl
Developed this thing called phenomenology
A concept literary circles thought pretty nifty.
“The science of pure phenomena
all realities - phenomena in our mind
and appearances of a kind.”
Taking a leaf from ANC’s tree
Husserl promoted absolute objectivity14
Empathetically assessing texts unbiasedly,
Seemingly addressing the vexed
task of finding authors world-views
No value judgements can
such assessments skew
But then! sexist, potential right-wing Christian texts
Walk away assessment free, but what’s next?
Fascism allowed to be vogue, potentially sexy?
Enter Heidegger, Husserl’s disciple
Reflecting on the irreducible ‘giveness’ of
Human existence. A topic not to trifle
Realms to unfold language, knowing
related to doing.15One cannot scoff!
“Hermeneutical phenomenology”
this man did develop
a ‘hermeneutic of being’,
an existentialist way of seeing!
Reception theory came along,
Which examined the import
Role of readers who read
Them pesky letters on the page
We can’t underwrite that deed!
Post-modernism, post-structuralism
Created a comprehension storm
Was all matter and reality simply text,
Arising from our subjective form?
Post-structuralism, literarily speaking
Arose out of French revolutions defeat
In nineteen sixty-eight. What a state!
The defeat got everyone freaking
So instead of taking state power
Subverting sentence structures
Made post-structuralists less dour
A certain theorist Bathers, he became
partial to post-structuralism
Decided reading wasn’t so lame
When abstracted to erotic play!16
Post-mod’s and structs
Argued ‘gainst belief systems
Some pinned their luck
On defining above as terroristic
Could only play with words
Every other tactical response was stuffed
Certainty and truth was an old idea
This is what was claimed
Absolute truth - simple nostalgia,
Scientific approach was over, never near
Noam Chomsky said lots about them words
noting “those left intellectuals,”
(I won’t call them nerds)
“are involved in unintelligible varieties
of postmodernism, (mostly nonsense)
Chomsky didn’t engage in niceties17
And if nothing is true then it’s hard to believe
Anything at all. Is that there a war?
Or just a figment of someone’s subjective
Textual take? Its so easy not to see
Women’s oppression, social decay
All the things that hold still true today
If one prescribes to deconstructed theories
And holds on really, really dearly
All the worlds evils seize to be
One can call it all text - abstractly!
I fear it is a big cop-out,
for highly paid waffle
Academics with big careers
espousing quite a lot of twaffle
What about the five children that
die every second? Food is spoilt
because no-one can pay, we need
concerted mass action STAT!
To correct these state of affairs
We can have poetry and cultural flair
In the movements for social change
And the poor can take power
Its all in our capability range
Post the period of the structuralist
Writers theory wiped away some mist
And assessed texts and narratives
from a variety of turns and twists
Literary theory began to say
Take perspective of the feminist
Within the tradition of literary criticism
Take it from a Marxist or Freudian way
Post-colonial movements also had their say
This new movement in layperson speak
Meant the third world
Joined with black and yellow people
Had their literary day
Finally the minorities, who are the
Really the majorities
got to be read.
They talked of hunger,
they talked of the dead
It is a much better situation thus
Than just reading dead white guys
Who wrote well,
of this there is no fuss
But now we hear how
the other two-thirds try
To get by
and fight oppression too
Abolish IMF, fight AIDS and take power
This has taken place in Venezuela,
Bolivia is also making a new world flower
Cos what is culture and language
About if not speaking truth
exposing lies an’ raising the banner
Of a new world! Exciting! Strewth!
It’s the best thing in the world to
Historicise, know what’s past,
Struggle to make it better real fast
Cos there are people dying here today
Needlessly - its not radical to say
Now not unheard,
with help of literature’s deed and word.
An evolution we have witnessed
here unperturbed
Marxism, Formalism,
Imagists and Romanticism,
All featured here in
our poetic exploration
Mimetic theory, American New Criticism
We delved hard into language
We ate a meaty theoretical sandwich
Followed by post-modernism and structuralism
Who tied us up into discursive prison
Finally the poor black people got their day
Within post-colonial theory they had more of a say
So we have ridden this history wheel
We know a bit more about verse, semiotics and
Literature questions no longer make us terse
I hope you choose to write
of the struggle and the fight
So that we now no longer run and hide
From the mammoth tasks that confront us here
The oppressed will find us oh so dear
I do hope it is all the more clear!
I will desist and go off to struggle,
I have enjoyed my time here
in a theoretical bubble
Anon! Farewell!
Be good and make some political trouble!
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