Thursday, February 19, 2009
Ideology and Hypocrisy
I have been thinking a lot about ideology and its relationship to language and art (specifically, the art of poetry.) Jerome McGann's book focused on ideology as being often semi or unconscious. What about poets for whom ideology is a sine qua non of poetic practice? What about poets who are, for want of a better term, ideologues? Of course, McGann would say that all poets are ideologues to some extent, but I am talking about poets who foreground ideology in their work. It could be feminist, queer, working class, black, bourgeois, materialist, spiritualist, any number of things. When ideology is foregrounded, what effect does it have on the work? I have always felt that ideologues generally write lousy poetry. I used to call poetry ideologues "agenda poets." There would seem to be a price to pay either way. What is the cost for adopting and maintaining ideologies at the expense of the aesthetic, and vice versa? What are the wages of ideology and verse?
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A thoughtful and useful post here, Adam. The advocates of Modernism in the U.S., at least, wanted to eliminate politics and other concerns of the public from poetry (see Joseph Harrington's Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics), but these supporters were at the same time almost crazily ideological. Their ideology imagined the poem as "a value-neutral craft-object" [Allen Tate]. I think you're right that Ashbery is ideological, but more in the Modernist style of withdrawal rather than the Ginsberg/Shelley style of confrontation. Those who would dismiss Ginsberg and Shelley because they violate the supposed value-neutrality of poetry will surely have to dismiss Dante and Shakespeare as well. Or is that ideology becomes mere decoration if it's far enough back in time? Random thoughts.... Anyway, thanks for the excellent post.
Joseph, I don't think ideology is decoration, where Shakespeare and Dante are concerned. Dante was more directly political than Shakespeare; he named names, whereas we never learn, in WS, who the dark lady is, and her ideology seems to be one of erotic subversion. I also don't think its possible to get away from politics in poetry (or any other art form); withdrawal, as you put it, is as viable (and, in its passive-aggressive way, forceful) statement as any other. The New Critics were upholders of a bourgeois, privileged ideology. Their corruption and hypocrisy was that they didn't seem to realize who they were and what they stood for. Formalism, as they espoused it, puts a premium on deferral-of-overt signification, preferring irony and other privileged tropes that ideologues do not find expedient. Somewhere in the middle, between ideologues and anti-ideology ideologues, would seem to me to be the best thing to shoot for, and what Shakespeare and Dante (and Keats and Ashbery and Stein and Rich) have achieved. Glad you liked the post.
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