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| End Of The Line﹖ |
| 2004年02月27日11:17:46 网易教育 From Oxford University |
诗歌的伟大传统难道已终结﹖
英国诗歌传承着莎士比亚、拜伦、济慈以来的伟大传统。在一切文化传统面临挑战的今天，这种伟大传统是否已没落？牛津大学的一位学生在此陈述了他的见解。
Poetry is dead. Well at least dying. The modern obsession with celebrity has finally knocked it from its perch(高位)and one of the great areas of literature is no longer loved or appreciated.
Such assumptions are all too easy to makealongside the easily-adopted position that poetry was once a great and loved art. The idea that 'lots' of people enjoyed it seems to form on its own and yet when you have to think about that heyday which is strangely hard to pin down the image that comes to mind is of a person surprisingly upper-class not the popular masses. When you really look into it poetry is not really dying.
Poetry never really was that alive even in its most traditional form. Roll through a few of the great names - Donne Shakespeare Byron Keats...none of them were famous for their poetry in their own lifetime. Except possibly Shakespeare and even that's debatable. Byron for example was far more famous for committing incest with his cousin and then fleeing the country a couple of years later after he was warned he was to be tried for sodomy.
It could be bemoaned 悲叹 that the closest most people who don't now claim to enjoy poetry have ever come to it was being forced to read it in English lessons. In which the chance to appreciate it is shall we say strangled at birth in many cases. The fact that most people who can name a poet today name Sylvia Plathi and Benjamin Zephaniah the former famous for the current film about her and the latter for having turned down an OBE in the New Years Honours list could be seen as depressing. Except that compared to the past the fact that one of those two is still alive and kicking and writing good poetry is a marked improvement. Keats had to die in a foreign country before anyone thought he was any good.
Ask someone who actually enjoys poetry and when not moping around in that classically poetic manner they can reel off at least three well-known poets writing today and happily still ticking.
The three I can think of are Paul Muldoon Simon Armitage and Seamus Heaney. I concede that they're not exactly sprightly Simon Armitage being the youngest at 40. Incidentally he is also one of the young men of poetry. Then again if you don't die young in poetry the chances are pretty slim that your best stuff will be written at an early age.
The question of whether poetry is under-appreciated is an easy one to answer. The more important question though is has it ever really been appreciated﹖ Poetry can span the whole breadth of emotion from love to loathing. Yet possibly that's why it's treated with kid gloves on most occasions. Poetry has to make a harder push for acceptability because it's so damn difficult to understand half the time and because everyone fails to realise that actually not all poetry is good. In fact a fair proportion of it is awful and yet the ″it's a great literary art″ approach means that nobody dares to criticise it because they're not allowed to claim they understand it. Not that the great British institution of the literature class in most cases does much for poetry's health. It being regarded in the same vein as French I don't understand and I don't want to and I'm happy it's over. Except it needn't be…
Poetry is great and it deserves better recognition in its classical formbut it has never been a popular art.
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