Richard:
Hello, Michael. Our mutual friend and poet, Sara Russell, the previous editor of
interviewed you in the March 2006 issue of that journal. In her interview, Sara focused on your background and present stature as a poet, and on your particular insights into the poetic achievements of fellow poets you have featured on your poetry portal,
In the same interview, Sara and you also discussed at some length recent trends in the evolution of modern poetry, and above all, of formal verse, in the early Third Millennium.
But let's take a different tack. In this interview, we'll turn our attention more towards the historical background to recent trends in contemporary poetry and to the relevance of certain theories of poetry, as exemplified for instance by Percy Bysshe Shelley's seminal treatise,
My first question then is, who are some of your favourite formal poets of past eras, the acknowledged arbiters of rhyme and metre, from the English Renaissance to the twentieth century? This is a loaded question, to be sure, but if you can just name a few of the more notable poets who really appeal to your tastes, that should serve our readers well.
Michael:
Talking about my favorite poets is always a joy. It's one way a poet can announce to the world: "This is where I stake my allegiance. These are the leaders and masters I choose to follow." My favorite poets are poets I might call "prophetic poets of passion." They include Blake, Yeats, Whitman, Cummings, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Ernest Dowson, Housman, Frost, Thomas Wyatt and Louise Bogan.
Richard:
In light of your previous reply, can you tell us what you believe the relationship is between recent developments in formal poetry of the early twenty-first century and representative historical eras in English poetry, such as the high Renaissance or the so-called Romantic Era?
Michael:
It seems to me that we have two divergent schools of poetry today. We have the various of schools of Modernism and Postmodernism, which include Imagism, Surrealism, Vorticism, Projectivism, and other -isms which tend to get increasingly weirder and weirder as time passes.
And then we have the various camps and outposts of more traditional poetry, which include New Formalism, the Expansive Poetry movement, New Romanticism, and various other -isms. It seems to me that most, if not all, of these schools and movements center around two major events: the beginning of the Romantic era (heralded by Milton and Blake, then ushered in by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Bryon), and the arrival of Modernism on the scene around the early 1900's (famously/infamously headed by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot). Who is writing classical or "high Renaissance" poetry today that isn't tremendously under the influence of both Romanticism and Modernism? No one that I can think to name. So it seems to me that all types of poetry prior to Romanticism and Modernism have been "folded into the tradition" and now we have two armed camps that aren't quite sure what to make of each other. Hopefully, there will be a grand fusion in which the best of the tradition, as focused through the lens of Romanticism (Milton, Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth), will collide and hopefully ecstatically rapture with the best of free verse and Modernism (Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Cummings). If that happens, then poetry may yet again prosper.
Richard:
In his Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley makes the startling claim that all poets since the dawn of written literature and right up to the present day have collectively contributed to the evolution of "that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world". Shelley's bold assertion would seem to imply that the poetry of no individual author or even of any particular nation constitutes the "universal poem", but it is the shared accumulated heritage of all nations and all humanity. What is your take on this claim?
Michael:
I would say that evolution has two aspects: that of the individual and that of the species. If you breed bulls and you want to breed the strongest, most virile bulls possible, you find "the pick of the litter" and focus on it. In the same way, the "great poem" comes to us via great individual poets: Wyatt, Milton, Blake, Whitman, Frost. The evolution of the species is always via "selection of the fittest." As Harold Bloom has said, poems are not written by anonymous splendors. Great poems are not written by committee. But as individual poets push the poetic envelope forward, the "great poem" which is the greater canon, moves ever forward.
