Pontifex and Scapegoat: The Poet in Twentieth-century Western Culture

Abstract

The title looks formidable but my intention is a modest one: to offer a few comments on the near desperate predicament in which the poet finds himself today, while at the same time, in spite of, or paradoxically enough, because of this predicament, exaggerated claims are lodged on poetry’s behalf, and near-impossible demands made upon it. My references for the most part are to poetry itself, but they apply to all forms of literature and could with suitable modifications be extended to ‘poetry’ in the Coleridgean sense, as ‘the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts, as its species’. Wherever possible I have tried to illustrate my comments with the better known passages; some of them in fact are old chestnuts, but my choice of them is deliberate as I am interested simultaneously in their literary as well as their culturally representative qualities, and the way they appear to a partial outsider like myself. The degree of ‘outsiderhood’ is of course always partial, and always changing.