Poetry, Strangeness and Ideology

The living core of poetry is the intense strangeness of canonical experience (Bloom) in which a slit is made in the umbrella of civilization (Lawrence). It is this strangeness, this rending of the veil of ideology that makes poetry intrinsically political.

An ideology of canonical strangeness is a contradiction in terms. Individual poetic movements, poetic techniques, poetic forms can be ideological, but poetry as such is intrinsically opposed to ideology.

Communion with nature, experiential profundity, sublime intensity, romantic passion - these elements of romanticism become ideological at the point at which they cease to be strange. Likewise with extreme 'formal' innovation - which always also means, or ought to mean, innovation of experience - e.g. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, objectivism, etc.

The definition of ideology assumed here, like all definitions of ideology, is a partisan one.

Modernism: a Historical Schema

1. German Romanticism = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical anti-modernism

2. Rimbaud, Baudelaire = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical modernism.

3. Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens... = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical ???