BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?

Subject: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sibelius
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:04 PM

According to Leonardo da Vinci, the poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of the visible and far below the musician in the representation of the invisible.

Was he right?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Peg
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:08 PM

Maybe you should ask Dylan Thomas, William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats or Emily Dickinson about that...

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:12 PM

No, he was not.

The often poet ranks well above the musician in the representation of the human and spiritual. daVinci was just being a smart ass. Why choose that particular dichotomy -- the visible and the invisible -- as the categorical watershed?

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: katlaughing
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:17 PM

I'd say music is the highest art because it transcends all language barriers and abilities. It can paint pictures in the mind, bring words to life. It is the Universal Language. Having said that, I love poetry.:-)

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Don Firth
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:22 PM

Had da Vinci been primarily a poet, I doubt (strangely enough) he would have said that. Methinks any attempt to put the Arts into some kind of hierarchy is not only futile, it is foolish.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: CapriUni
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:24 PM

If poetry were over-rated, I'd be much wealthier than I am now ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:27 PM

oh forget those fellows ask nathan tompkins instead... ;)

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: harvey andrews
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:40 PM

Or Philip Larkin

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Ed.
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:47 PM

To my mind visual 'modern' art is the most overated. To be able to pile up a few bricks or screw up a piece of paper and claim it as artistic...

And be up for a £20 000 prize

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: CapriUni
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 06:59 PM

What contest is this, Ed?

Can I join?

Or is it only open to Brits?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Ed.
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 07:16 PM

Sorry, CapriUni

I was referring to the 'Turner Prize'.

The official site is here, but you might also like to read this BBC article on the last awards, or John in Hull's mudcat thread: BS: Modern art?

I think that a joeclone removed the 'is shit' from John's thread title.

Get the idea?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sibelius
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 07:23 PM

CapriUni, I think Ed's referring to the Tate prize. The complaint about the pile of bricks has become an abusive cliche hurled at modern art in general, both by the informed and the ignorant. But just such an edifice as Ed describes did win the prize a decade or two back. Inexplicable to most of us.

I'm not sure whether the prize is available only to Brits, but I think the judges are a little more enlightened these days, and you'll have to come up with something far more exciting and original than the bricks.

Such as a light going on and off at 5-second intervals in an otherwise empty room.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Thomas the Rhymer
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 07:24 PM

Raise the bar, ask again
The registrar says art is sin
Higher, lower who can tell
Intentions line the way to hell

What's effective does us proud
Pointless makes us shameful loud
Higherarchies there are none
And noone ever knows who won

Poets never make much dough
Therein lies the rub down low
For truth and justice poets sing
While all the rest can money bring...

ttr

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sibelius
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 07:25 PM

Sorry Ed, you beat me to it - the Turner Prize, not the Tate. The bricks were displayed at the Tate Gallery though, weren't they?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Ed.
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 07:43 PM

I believe so, Sibelius.

A chance to quote my favourite poem anyway:

FUTILITY Wildred Owen

Move him into the sun
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 08:06 PM

Ed, I'd imagaine da Vinci would turn in his grave were he to view some of what now get's called art.

Words are the weakest form to me in that a great picture or piece of music can let my imagination paint my own "picture". With words, I'm stuck with what someone else has said and generally dislike flowery language - sort of a get to the point and stop waffling.

Jon

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Ed.
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 08:16 PM

Understand what you're saying Jon, but get to the point and stop waffling could be applied to many an instrumental session...

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: vindelis
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 08:16 PM

Where would our Hymns and fongs be withoout poetry?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Ed.
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 08:25 PM

Where would are Hymns be without Charles Wesley, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Bach, the Organ, the Printing press etc?

Sorry, but thaa's a stupid question.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 09:47 PM

Any poetry that makes you respond with that attitude, Jon, is iether piss-thin poetry or has been picked up by the wrong individual. Literal minded poeple often have trouble with poetry because it tends to run parallel concepts across a single set of syllables and the ambiguity is more than they can stand. This is not a reflection on the art, so much as on the ear.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Benjamin
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 10:03 PM

I'm not sure if this on the same subject exactly, but you might find this quote interesting. Rousseau said in an essay on the orgin of language "Poetry was devised before prose. This was bound to be, since feelings speak before reason."
During the 16th and 17th century (before Rousseau) almost all music came out of poetry. I learned in music history class that the poetry was the reason everyone would attend the Opera. The music was just something to enhance the performance. Things have changed since then.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 10:11 PM

Literal minded poeple often have trouble with poetry because it tends to run parallel concepts across a single set of syllables and the ambiguity is more than they can stand. This is not a reflection on the art, so much as on the ear.

I'm pretty sure that is the case with me.

Jon

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: CapriUni
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 10:14 PM

This reminds me... I have some things to post in the Mudcat Poetry Corner thread.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Feb 03 - 10:19 PM

CapriUni, looks like my bad HTML above (I opened italics with </I> to qoute from Amos and you missed a closing quote - probably locked the thread for some with that...)

No doubt a clone will fix but for now, your post should have ended...

Mudcat Poetry Corner

Jon

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sam L
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 07:39 AM

There is something stubbornly materialist about visual art and object-making, and it can be a good thing and a bad thing about it, sometimes in the same case.

Plato thought music was the highest art because it didn't represent anything other than itself, but I think he was wrong, and also wrong.

Joyce had a character think that literature was the most spiritual art, somewhere in Ulysses, I think. There's something about needing only a mind to make something.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 10:45 AM

There is a sheerness to the finest music that reaches deeper than poetry can. Music can go celestial, andit is much harder for lines of language to do that; not impossible.

That said, for the finest voice of the earth-bound human heart, I voe for poetry, and for the fine blend of poetry and music that bards acquire when they become singers of good song. There are some things poetry will do that neither music nor song can quite touch, but if I had to choose one, I'd come here where the singers of song congregate.
Chacun a son beaute, eh?

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: mousethief
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 10:56 AM

I pity people who can't enjoy poetry.

Alex

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: mack/misophist
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 11:29 AM

Part of the problem, IMHO, is the most talented young proto-poets are not trying to write poetry. Pop lyrics is where the money is. Given the forms used in pop, can any one be surprised?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST,Hippie Chick
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 12:38 PM

Katlaughing said it all. that's the alpha and the omega of music.

HC

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Deda
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 01:13 PM

(Snip, quote)
I'd say music is the highest art because it transcends all language barriers and abilities (snip)

It doesn't necessarily transcend deafness, any more than painting transcends blindness -- although I know that there are deaf dancers.

I just had a relevant experience, I was reading the poetry thread while listening to Hober radio. Kate McCleod came on Hober, singing "Piney Wood Hills", and I actually had to stop reading the poetry because I couldn't take them both in, and the song was playing right now and I couldn't put it on hold the way I could the poems. So I closed my eyes and listened until the song was over -- and I'm going to go back to the poem with Hober on mute.

That said, I think poetry may be the most UNDER-rated art form. It's older than Homer, and I don't think any human society has ever existed or ever will that doesn't need it -- but it doesn't get the kind of mainstream air time that songs or books get, it's not sexy and high-paying and top-ten. But I really don't believe that humanity as a whole can get by without it -- not for a day. It's where I turn when I am in need -- spiritually, emotionally, deeply, from the core. Music is also intensely comforting but poetry works a different set of spiritual muscles.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 01:33 PM

Ideas are often (usually?) borrowed, added onto, reworked, moved to new mediums. Sometimes it pays to look into the background of the more jarring artists, to find a fine classical education that is being reworked. Look at Picasso's modern work where shapes are distorted, but don't imagine that he couldn't draw them lifelike if he wanted. Music, poetry, literature, visual arts, they're all malleable. We get used to after a while to the modern interpretation, or they go away for lack of interest or lack of content. Poems to songs, songs to poems, and words of both to dramatic music, often evolving beyond the words.

Seems about time to include this bit of wit:

WHEN 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took — the same as me!

The market-girls an' fishermen,
The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
They 'eard old songs turn up again,
But kep' it quiet — same as you!

They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
An' 'e winked back — the same as us!

Rudyard Kipling

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Thomas the Rhymer
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 01:40 PM

Amen, Deda... Amen.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: fiddler
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 02:17 PM

Opens me up to my soap box!

I love poetry, and most songs - the ones you remember are naught but poetry set to music - the music in the best ones harmonises so well with the words and emotions, how can one be better than the other?

I hate competition, at this level!!$$££** I worked in Opera, with a set of notes (not even lyrics or libretto) to tell you what is going on a good opera can move you or an audience to tears, combined with the skull of the lighting and other technicians some bits still send shivers down my spine and I can still vizualise them 10+ years on!

The mona Lisa is (I think) rubbish but the cistine chapel is increddedible! And what about the Pyramids, they are art too in their own way. Like folk, rock, classical, Punk Rock there are different needs in society and all get well serviced most of the time.

The best ones live forever (fame!)

Well thats me all stirred up for a Saturday night.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sam L
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 05:55 PM

The mona Lisa is (I think) rubbish but the cistine chapel is increddedible!

But I'd still rather eat the mona lisa. It's a great portrait. If he had painted the whites of her eyes it wouldn't make any sense at all as a painting.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Don Firth
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 06:09 PM

"Words are the weakest form to me in that a great picture or piece of music can let my imagination paint my own 'picture.'"

Jon, when it comes to painting your own picture, a good metaphor can just about knock your socks off.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Feb 03 - 07:09 PM

Minneapolis had the honor of hosting the annual National Poetry Slam last August, and I was lucky enough to be part of it, and the local "Singers of Daybreak" spoken word conference that was held in conjunction with it.

As to poetry being over-rated, I don't think so.

Heard any of the stories about how the Bushes locked the poets out of the White House at the end of January?

The result has been "Poets Against the War":

http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

Our local chapter recently had their first night out:

http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/entertainment/books/5132607.htm

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sibelius
Date: 16 Feb 03 - 06:59 PM

I'm no literary historian, but I can't see how poetry can have come before prose (Benjamin, above, quoting Rousseau). Surely prose is simply the standard use of written language as a communication medium, which would have followed on from pictorial representations, while poetry requires innovations like rhythm, couplets, division into stanzas etc.

Rousseau may have been right that "feelings speak before reason". But since when has feeling required, exclusively, poetry for its expression? You stub your toe, you'll vent your feelings in the most expressive way, but it's hardly going to be poetry.

Mind you, Rousseau spouted a lot of nonsense anyway.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 16 Feb 03 - 07:14 PM

I would hazard that what Rousseau was talking abut was the kind of free-linked and somewhat raw kind of communicating at which poetry excels, coming before the more structured semantic architectures of uniform sentences and established syntax. In that sense pre-language might well have consisted of bursts of what would sound like poetry to a modern ear. Or hiphop :>)

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: M.Ted
Date: 16 Feb 03 - 11:51 PM

Roussseau was talking about literature, Sibelius--literary narratives in prose form didn't start to appear until in Western literature until the fifteenth century or so--and it wasn't til quite a while later that the novel was created. Even drama was written in verse until almost the beginning of the twentieth century--The quote from Da Vinci seems very odd, since Renaissance artists drew a lot of their subject matter from classical literature, which was all in verse--

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: CapriUni
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 12:14 AM

Surely prose is simply the standard use of written language as a communication medium, which would have followed on from pictorial representations, while poetry requires innovations like rhythm, couplets, division into stanzas etc.

Well, actually, for a long time, there was no "literature" (that is, the art of the written word), but Homer and Chaucer and the other nameless great artists who came before them all composed works for a primarilarily illiterate audience -- and they didn't read from the page when performing their work ... most, if not all of it, was recited from memory (The ancient Filid [sp?] of Ireland wrote down the first line of the epics in their repertoire, and nothing else]. And it is easier to memorize a long story or passage if it is in rhyme and meter than if it is in the language of ordinary speach.

Prose writing, as such, didn't really become the norm until after the printing press made literature more common.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 12:39 AM

I have some good material about the history of and comparison between poetry and prose, but it's late and I'll post it tomorrow. Meanwhile, you might enjoy this.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST,Jim Clark..London.England
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 02:12 AM

Poetry is the basis of all forms of songwriting...Most people these days think poetry is simply a written art form to be read to
oneself in silence,but this is only a phenomenon of the last few centuries with the advent of the printing press etc....prior to this poetry was purely a word of mouth form rarely written down and performed as commonly as its musical hybrid "song"...Its when one takes on board what poetry realy is...Not just dry words on paper for these are just the notation just as in music...poems need to be interpreted and brought to life in sound form just as much as a song or piece of music...

You can hear dozens of classic and original English poems set to music and acoustic music of all sorts at these unique sound websites..
acoustic musicians and poets sound archive

sound poetry

Regards.

Jim Clark..London..England..

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: CapriUni
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 10:52 AM

Some of my favorite lines of W.B Yeats, which have been coming to my mind as I read this thread:

(From "Meditations in a time of war: I. Ancestral Houses -- 1929)

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet^*...

The point being that a) whatever form of art we create springs fromwhere deep inside us, at our connection to the core of life itself -- our connection to "Life's own self-delight" so catagorizing one artform over another as more or less "true" is, in some ways, a betrayal of all art, and b) that today, we think of Homer mostly as a poet and not a musician, but Yeats did not make that distinction... As a matter of fact, he wrote an essay (which I only half remember) about how all poetry should be written as though it would be sung... I'll have to find it again for a reread...

^* That's "jet" as in fountain or geyser, not an airplane... the "fountain of life" was a recurring symbol for Yeats.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: JenEllen
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 11:34 AM

Not over-rated, more like over-abused. Most people can tell the difference in art forms-- between 'good' painting and 'bad' painting, 'good' dancing' and 'bad' dancing', etc... but the majority of people who can spell have at one time or another written 'poetry' and have, worst of all, subjected innocent people to it.

just because you take the time
to get some words and make them rhyme
line them up three or four to a line
does not make you a poet fine

I think it was Francis Bacon (?) who said: ..He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been carelessly and without study composed out of 26 letters. It's worth the thought.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sam L
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 11:46 AM

Well, one theory holds that literature was invented when a cave boy came crying Wolf! when there was no wolf.

More recently the critic Clemente Greenberg argued that painting had to abandon pictorial space because 3D space belonged to sculpture, quite as if illusion and real space were the same thing. In a related story, Greenberg's decorator had him put in mirrors to make a room "feel" bigger, and then he kept bonking his head on the glass.

Fiction is an interesting aspect of the arts. Dang it.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 11:59 AM

Jen:

That poem of yours up there is just awful!! LOL!!

Granted it is easier by far to abuse poetry, than it is any art which requires a mastery of instruments or lines. I have seen paintings on a par with the kind of shlock you protest, and I am sorry to see such things let loose in the world.

But then Frost, Yeats, cummings, Corso and others keep reminding me that all that is no reason not to keep the gates open.

From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction, ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

When you paint outside the lines, there is always a risk that you will make a mess. A risk worth taking, a risk worth giving others for the taking.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 17 Feb 03 - 01:03 PM

The excellent qwuote above is from Thomas Browne, not Bacon, and in context it supports the wide admission of variable qualities of effort:

It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so
many millions of faces, there should be none alike:
now, contrary, I wonder as much how there should be
any.  He that shall consider how many thousand
several words have been carelessly and without study
composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many
hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabrick of
one man; shall easily find that this variety is necessary:
and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to
make one portrait like another.  Let a painter carelessly
limn out a million of faces, and you shall find them all
different; yes, let him have his copy before him, yet,
after all his art, there will remain a sensible distinction:
for the pattern or example of everything is the perfectest
in that kind, whereof we still come short, though we
transcend or go beyond it; because herein it is wide,
and agrees not in all points unto its copy.  Nor doth
the similitude of creatures disparage the variety of
nature, nor any way confound the works of God. 

Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend
by Sir Thomas Browne

Regards,

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Cluin
Date: 18 Feb 03 - 12:24 AM

Think visual "modern art" corners the market on being overrated and inexplicable?

Ever seen a "sound poet" perform?

FFFFFFF FFeeffff Fuh Fuh Fuh FFFFFFF FOOOF Ffffff Fuhuf FFFF FEEFAHFOOFAH FFFFFFF FUFF FWAH FuFF FEEEF FUH FOO FAW FFFFF FUFF
FFFF FWAH FUFF FA FA FUM FA FWUFF!!! FFFFFFFFF FACKAFOCKAFUCKA FFFF FWEEEF FUFFA FFFFUFF! FAFAFAFA FUFF!...

and so on, for several minutes.

Checque, please?

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 18 Feb 03 - 11:21 AM

There will always be someone willing to push the envelope of possible communication in the name of art; the problem of course is those who push the envelope so hard it breaks and collapses! :>) In these boundary regions where new forms are being tried, there are no precedent standards of what works and what does not. If you take such an effort and try to force it into cognitive frames developed in earlier media, you lose the opportunity of exploration; it is something like trying to make an ee cummings poem meet the standards of Dr Seuss and rejecting it if it does not.

That said, I don't have a lot of time for experimenters who are so self-absorbed that they give no study to what communicates and what does not; to my mind the sole purpose of any form of art is to communicate. Otherwise it becomes dabbling and daubing as a way of dramatization of self, which is really not very interesting.

One of the abuses of poetry, as of any other form of art, is the use of it as a means of self-dramatization without any intent to communicate. Check!

A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sam L
Date: 18 Feb 03 - 03:34 PM

On the other hand, some modern visual art that many people think makes no sense, makes perfect sense despite that many people have no interest in it, take no time to consider it, expect to be able to watch baseball without knowing how it's played.

   Most people who expect art to cater to their pedestrian idea of what it should be don't care much about it even when it does cater to them. Why should any artists devote themselves to pleasing people who don't much care, anyway?

   19th century universities taught drawing as a basic skill of educated people, now it's somehow an artsy talent.

   I'm somewhere in the middle of these opposed views. It's nice if your work can reach a variety of people, it's great, or--let's say it is--but it's not a crime if it doesn't. You can't control how your stuff is received.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Cluin
Date: 18 Feb 03 - 10:06 PM

That's very true, Fred.

However, if the sound poet were to insert an electronic drum track and a few ripped off "sample" riffs behind his noises, he/she could have a new rap/hiphop/pop/dance hit on their hands. Betters their chances of a favourable reception amongst some anyway...

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sibelius
Date: 19 Feb 03 - 11:21 AM

I asked this in a separate thread some months ago and got nil response, but as there are evidently a few poets and lit. historians following this thread, perhaps I could try it out on you again?

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (5th Ed.) has the following verse from a poem called 'The Law Student' by Robert Lloyd, 1733 - 1764:

"Alone from Jargon born to rescue Law,
From precedent, grave hum, and formal saw!
To strip chicanery of its vain pretence,
And marry Common Law to Common Sense!"

I'd like to find the rest of it, but I've looked high and low. Anthologies of 18th Century poetry seem to have two or three of Lloyd's poems but never this one, and I've seen no sign of a "Robert Lloyd Complete Works" - presumably because he died too young to complete very much!

The poem, or this verse at any rate, is about the famous reforming Lord Chief Justice of the time, William Murray (Lord Mansfield). It seems to be an 18th Century plea for plain language in the law. 'Jargon' presumably has the same meaning we'd give it today; 'Hum' (humbug) is a cheap deceit; 'saw' is in the sense of a maxim; 'chicanery' is also deceit. Mansfield was known for his clear and straightforward style when summing up or making judgements, and he often went out of his way to explain judgements to law students observing court cases.

If this is thread creep I apologise, but at least we're still in the same branch of art!

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Sibelius
Date: 19 Feb 03 - 11:23 AM

... and I still failed to get to the point. Does anyone know the rest of the poem, or where I could find it?

Ta

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 19 Feb 03 - 12:33 PM

As far as I have been able to find it is a short poem, of which your quote lacks only two lines:

THE LAW STUDENT.

O for thy spirit, Mansfield! at thy name
What bosom glows not with an active flame?
Alone from Jargon born to rescue Law,
From precedent, grave hum, and formal saw!
To strip chican'ry of its vain pretence,
And marry Common Law to Common Sense!



Lloyd, Robert: The Poetical Works (1774):

Source: http://dlib.stanford.edu:6520/cgi-bin/hugo

Regards,


A

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Feb 03 - 12:05 PM

Amos, thank you very much. Bit of an anti-climax after all that! Odd that the ODQ saw fit to leave out two lines when it's such a short piece.

Well that's made my day anyway.

Subject: RE: BS: Is poetry the most over-rated art form?
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 03 - 06:29 PM

SIbelius:

Glad I could help!


A