6/4/08

I wonder how doing this in blogger will work. It's a medium I have some associations with already, but it's limitless, accessible anywhere and I type faster than I write. Plus I can just dump into a Word file after I'm done.

One of the questions I've been asking is Does Bad Poetry exist before the advent of criticism. Bad poems certainly do--that's one of the things I'm turning up--but poeticizers always seem to want to categorize. Rude rustical rimesters, and so on. Perhaps this is because the category of Poet is still being formed by the work of the "laureate poets"--Helgerson-- so there's no easily accessible label for someone who writes poetry that isn't any good.

What about degrees of bad? Johnson has available the category of minor poet--he's willing to point out flaws in poets that he still considers "poets". Yes, one doesn't follow from the other, but together there's something there.

The "minor poet" idea must happen at some point during the 17th century or early 18th century, and it has to have something to do with the remembering of the Renaissance. Right? All the authors who disappeared by 1620--the spare sonnetists, the satirists, others--somehow didn't make a canon that was being constructed by whom the cavaliers imitated.

I'm speculating--perhaps one way to follow up on this is to trace a single genre from its origins to its end-point, paying attention to whom is counted as a practitioner of that genre. Who would Marvell have thought were the most important satirists? Who would he have thought were the most important poets?

I guess that's a matter of reading Dryden, to some extent. He'll probably tell me.

How does Joseph Hall fit into all this? He was around the whole time, and may be part of what helped create the whole thing. So was Donne, actually. The satirists kept writing for a long time. Except, perhaps, Marston, who I can't find much evidence of after SV. (And by "I can't find" I mean in my head--I'm not actually looking things up as a I free-write).

So: to pursue this, I'd need to read more Elizabethans--Hall, Weever, Guilpin--and start tracing the genre up, perhaps through the red book. I'd need to read Horace, Juvenal, and Persius as well, of course.

Maybe that's a good summer project--read all three sets of classical satires, so that I know what people are picking up on. I could even do one satire a day!

And dump it here, perhaps. Hmm. This sounds interesting.

This, by the way, is a key example of why I shouldn't "waste words" as Bolker calls it--I was thinking about totally different things in the shower and now those are gone.

As is my time.