The Great Forms Disappear

A. D. Hope in 1963 

In his 1965 book of essays, The Cave and the Spring, A. D. Hope compares the landscape of poetry with its diverse forms to a natural ecosystem, and laments the loss of so much. “One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy and display increasing eccentricity and lack of control. A general erosion of the mind proceeds with more and more acceleration. A desert ecology replaces the ecology of the rain forest. The forms are few, small, hardy, and reflect the impoverished soil in which they grow.”

Mary Kinzie, in her essay ‘The Rhapsodic Fallacy’ echoed and cited Hope’s essay, down to similarly laying blame at the feet of Edgar Allen Poe, and his The Poetic Principle, for the malaise of modern verse. 

Hope quotes Poe's statement “That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.” He then goes on to entertainingly remark: “Poe's opinion hardly deserves a serious answer. He might just as well have maintained that love consists only of brief passages of intense excitement in secual intercourse, and that, because a man cannot prolong these moments indefinitely, he is never in love except when he is in bed.”

Baedeker poetry?

Kris Hemensley in a recent post looking at an essay by Petra White zeroes in on her use of term 'Baedeker poetry' - specifically in the context of her question "Can we write about the effect a place has on us, avoiding Baedecker poetry?". The derogatory import here of the term 'baedeker poetry' would perhaps seek to invalidate one of the occasions for poetry; and it is tempting to see all poetry as occasional. Laurie Duggan in a diary entry from August 2003 wrote "I’d mentioned to Kris that I’ve started to see myself as a kind of ‘occasional’ poet – no less a seriousness about poetry, just an awareness of its contingency". Duggan's recent poem on Milan and those poems John Forbes wrote while in Rome seem Baedekerish, but they are good poems. To disparage poems written in response to travel seems 'occasionalist'. Although of course the occasion of travel, like the occasions of love or love-gone-wrong, might inspire a lot of third-rate work, but that's another matter. Petra White has described "a dreary parade of random otherness" and this might locate the problem - poems should simply not be dreary. But if this is the crux of the objection, why the term 'baedeker poetry'?

The term was used in a 1969 paper by Vladimir Markov which was a 'reappraisal' of Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont (1867 - 1942), poet & translator of Poe and Shelley and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Markov described Balmont's sequence Аккорды (Akkordy - Chords) as 'baedeker poetry': it contains short lyric pieces such as Пред картиной Греко В музее Прадо, в Мадриде (Before a picture of El Greco in the Prado Museum, Madrid), Английский пейзаж (English countryside), В Оксфорде (In Oxford), and Крымская картинка (Crimean picture). This is work in the same line as Wordsworth's "Memorials of a Tour in the Continent, 1820' and 'Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837'.

Taking a broader view we could even see the origins of pastoral being cityfolks' nostalgic descriptions of a distant country life: Theocritus scribbling his idylls amid the clamour and stench of Alexandria. And of course the nostalgia for a lost bucolic life is rendered also in the classical Laments for Adonis - elegy and pastoral meet. Here is Theocritus rendered by Barbara Hughes Fowler:

Bear violets now, O brambles, bear violets, thorns, and let
the lovely narcissus bloom on juniper trees. Let all
be opposite of all, and let the pine bear pears
since Daphnis is dying. Let the stag drag the hounds.
From mountain tops let owls sing to nightingales.

Which sets the tone of deploration for poetic grief for the next couple of thousand years:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death!

Anyhow, as a reader who has been known to enjoy books by Bruce Chatwin or Bill Bryson or H. V. Morton, I think there's definitely a place for the undreary baedeker poem and its parade of details.