At the Lifeline Bookfair I picked up a copy of The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (published 1985). It cost all of $3, a knock down price but some of the pages are falling out. As the title suggests, the poets are young and fresh in the promising stage of their poetic careers. There is a section for each poet and photographic portrait. I have got into the way of looking up the poets by doing an on-line search. It is interesting to see that so many took the literary studies path, moved into academia and are now hallowed figures in American college settings. Of course they no longer look like their photographs and it is sad to see how quickly the bloom of youth fades into the nondescript blur of middle age. Now they are seasoned college staff with slight to significant reputations and books of poetry to their credit. Some have branched out to short stories and novels. You can see they have become part of a literary establishment. One supposes the rage has gone out of them. Life must be sweet with a captive audience of students, speaking events, visiting positions and levers upon the grail of publishing. I tend to think that what is good for poetry is the precarious and simple life close to the common run of men and women. It is better to be a low-ranked colonial public servant like C. P. Cavafy or public revenue collector like the William Wordsworth, or, perhaps, just starving in a proverbial garret (but not mad was Chatterton). The artificiality of academe, the aura of respectability, the dreary round of campus life must be deadening to the muse.
Here is a quotation from my commonplace book:
'In the end one comes back to the most obstinate question of all. Isn't there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organised, fault-finding, competitive -- and above all, aware of other academic minds. Think of the atmosphere of suspicion implied by the habit of fitting out the most trivial quotation with a reference, as though it were applying for a job. Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things -- but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield it full intensity.'
John Cross
The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters
