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eBook details
- Title: Sequestered from the Winds of History: Poetry and Politics Beyond 2000
- Author : Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 119 KB
Description
At the end of his book, How to Read a Poem (2007), Terry Eagleton notes that of all the literary genres, "poetry would seem the one most stubbornly resistant to political criticism, most sequestered from the winds of history" (164). A critic of Marxist persuasion, Eagleton says this not as negative judgment, but as recognition that poetry works its own way, has its own "thickness and density, which are not to be summarily reduced to symptoms of something else"(164). In almost the next sentence he might seem to refute his own recognition when he asks, "What kind of society is it in which poetry feels it has to turn its back? What has happened to the content of social experience when the poem feels compelled to take its own forms as its content, rather than draw from a common fund of meaning?" (164). The questions, however, are rhetorical. Eagleton has provided his own context for recognising the uneasy relationship between poetry and politics. He paraphrases Roland Barthes' observation that a little form in poetry is a dangerous thing (ie, a superficial splitting of form and content; a neglect of what is said for how it is said) while a large amount of form could be salutary (ie, a more comprehensive grasp of form is like grasping the history of the political culture itself). To illustrate, Eagleton turns to Pope's heroic couplets: the balances, inversions and antitheses, disciplined within the paired pentameters as embodying the social ideology--order, harmony--of the 18th-century patrician class, or to Yeats's tone--his mournful resignation or defiant exaltation--as a register of the wider historical context: the decline of the Anglo-Irish governing class of which Yeats was a self-appointed representative (Eagleton 2007: 161-2). The politics of both Pope and Yeats are no doubt anathema to Eagleton's continuing Marxist commitment; yet he is able to appreciate the poetry. Notwithstanding the distance of these two poets from the current state of British society, it is simpler in contemporary Europe or North America than in the politically over-determined postcolonies of the world to appreciate the poetic medium even when its message is politically unpalatable. The relative value of form and content is an old story in South African literature, according to which we may chart the cultural wars of the 1970s and 80s: Lionel Abrahams's (1987) individual vulnerability versus Jeremy Cronin's (1987) worker nobility; Stephen Watson's (1990[1985])) denunciation of the politicisation of poetry; Michael Chapman's (1988) warning of constraints to the possibilities of imagination in a state of emergency, etc, etc. Closer to today, Kelwyn Sole (2005) grants 'content'-value not to most of the poets who are the subject of my essay (in the spirit of 'class suicide' not even to the formal range of his own poetry, perhaps?), but to what have been described as the "anti-mainstream", "counterpublic" voices of literature collectives, such as Botsotso Jesters, WEAVE, and the Timbila Poetry Project. (2) The question is: has 'post-liberation' in South Africa heralded a significant change in the uneasy relationship between poetry and politics? And, pertinent to the current enquiry, is there a content and a form to the descriptor, "beyond 2000"?