How norms get changed

I now feel unhappy with one chapter of ‘BF’ and I would like to add something to clarify it. It is the chapter “Language is made of rules”.

If you look at the vanity press sector, you find that the poets have ignored reforms made during the 20th C and are writing poetry which is out of date and which the contemporary audience just doesn't want. These are many people- I estimate that 1 in 3 of the poetry titles published in 1960 were vanity titles. There are several reforms which are basic to the scene. Clearly, the vanity poets, like other outsiders, reject these reforms – reject the right of editors (or, whoever it was!) to legislate such changes- and claim their right to protest and repeal these changes. It emerges, from the fact that the rules can be changed, that there are rules. This is what the chapter is about.
Moving away from vanity presses, it looks as if many under-published poets also regard the decisions of editors as enslaved to rules, and believe that those rules can be protested and repealed. I am more interested how the rules are enacted and updated. This is quite hard to recover. The indicative fact is someone publishing, in the 1970s, a book which adhered to styles which had been in fashion prior to 1912. The poet had not accepted the validity of decisions made after that.
It is striking that you can date a poem. This implies that there are stylistic changes which are collective. The norms of poetry change in the same way that the norms of a language change. But, of course, that only applies to insiders – outsiders were certainly writing poems in the style of 1910 during the 1970s.

Another tile in the pattern involves someone called Herbert Palmer. After Michael Roberts did the Faber Book of Modern Verse, Palmer wrote a book called Post-Victorian Verse (1938). He rejected Roberts’ master pattern. He included 83 poets discarded by Roberts - a list which is a good way of defining what Roberts did to the collective map. (Of course, he also covers a dozen poets whom Roberts includes.) My point is that Palmer’s book is two years after Roberts’. So he could have erased Roberts’ intervention. But clearly Roberts won. In some way, he was more persuasive, more eligible, closer to the ideal for the role of artistic judge.

Who said yes to Roberts? I don't think I can prove that there was a democratic process by which people voluntarily gave assent. It just seems that that is the most plausible explanation. Roberts didn’t have any institutional standing, he didn’t have a job which gave him power over anybody’s career. He was legitimated by the audience, not by an institution.

I think Roberts won the day, but I think it happened slowly. Allott’s 1962 anthology completely accepted Roberts. I think he saves one of the 83 whom Palmer had championed. (That is Edward Thomas.) But that is the historical gaze, it doesn't mean they vanished quickly, in 1937 or 1938.

I just wanted to establish this idea of legislation changing the rules. I am not really getting into the question of outsiders who reject the rules because they didn’t take part in making them. My belief is that editors accept poets which they like, and that they can predict what their readers will like. Argument is unproductive – you need to write poems which editors enjoy. It’s all about pleasure. You are not going to win an argument.
I suspect that outsider poets think that editors don't have the right to dislike their poems.

There is this question about learning the big stylistic shifts of the 20th C, their spread over the landscape. For example, the abolition of rhetoric, the ascent of modernism, the rise of free verse, the enlistment in the Cold War, the rise of Pop hedonism, etc. There are significant blocs of people who rejected any one of these changes. Maybe all of them! But, if you were reading poetry all the time, as part of your stable life-style, you would assimilate these features directly. They would just flow into you. The act of reading poetry may be narcissistic, but it it is primarily dual – you experience what the poet experiences. This is assimilation. My impression is that my goal was to find out what these people thought and felt. I achieved that goal, but in doing so I became just like them. If we turn back to the stylistic legislation, it looks like a sediment which the insiders all share. (By sediment I mean something which is left behind by the flow of something which is flowing all the time. It is what poetry leaves behind in your brain.) We buy into the changes of taste. Secondly, the vanity community experience these rules as hostile and irrational. In fact, they may well think that they are superior, artistically, to the fêted and favoured poems. I don't want to get into the litigation process. Life’s too short. But a lot of would-be poets certainly reject the selection process, and the ‘legislation’ which underpins it. So, at some level, these aesthetic judgements are like court judgements – open to protest. I am more interested in how the rules are enacted and updated. This is quite hard to recover.

It may well be that successful poets have gone through a long process of looking at published poems, considering why editors liked them, and applying that learning to their own work. This may actually be why they are successful. When you ask “Is this line good?”, it is important to know the right answer. This presents poets as highly socialised, rather than being “rugged individualists”, but maybe art is a very social thing and the whole category of non-social people cannot write good poetry. The problem may be invisible to them. They may not know whether their work is out of date.

Just one quote! I picked up Yeats’ 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, as a check. He has a poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, starting:

He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction's reach. His fortune then
Holds nothing secret, and Eternity,
Which is a mystery to other men,
Has like a woman given him its joy.

Clearly this is ridiculous now. And, it wasn’t ridiculous in 1936. If you posted such a poem to an editor today, in 2024, you would be laughed at. But, it is certain that people were still writing poems like this in the 1970s. It’s just that they weren’t getting into print. Maybe there were people who took Yeats as definitive and felt that Roberts was wrong – although collective taste has scrapped 90% of the poets whom Yeats picked up (and accepted almost all of Roberts’ picks). I apologise for quoting only one poem, when we could look at 1000 poems and still be finding new patterns. Blunt's poem does not rhyme because it is an imitation of Greek tragedy, whose verse does not rhyme.

I accept that poetry can be out of date. But, once you accept that, you accept that some agency can re-set norms. I believe that agency is the community of poetry readers. And I think their decisions are legitimate. But, at any stage, there is a category of people who write poetry but don’t identify with that community.