9 - All Our Exploring: Poetry's Critical Turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
Summary
The idea of a creative- critical divide is nothing new to poetry. Already in 380 BCE, Plato describes ‘an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ in Book X of the Republic, before banishing the latter from his utopia. The origins of this ‘disconnection’, as Kim Lasky calls it, are less clear. Yet its persistence is manifest in the perceived division between theory and craft, market distinctions between poetry and nonfiction, and academic structures separating research from practice. As Lasky writes, ‘Somehow, conceptually, the creative and critical processes have become falsely separated.’ In this, she echoes T. S. Eliot nearly a century ago, lamenting a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the seventeenth century, which severed thought from feeling in the poetry of Milton, Dryden, and others. In Eliot's timeline, this ‘dissociation’ loosely coincides with the historical influence of René Descartes, whose mind- body dualism also persists in popular notions of divisions within the mind: between the rational and emotional or analytic and creative thinking, often envisioned in relation to a physical division between the brain's right and left hemispheres. These are often invoked to justify a practical separation of ‘creative’ writing from other modes of research, critique, or commentary. But they have also begun breaking down in recent years. In this chapter, I consider poetry's status within a growing overlap of creative and critical modes in contemporary literature. In terms of wider book culture, that means assessing poetry's relation to a more widely acknowledged ‘critical turn’ or ‘theoretical turn’ in fiction since the 1990s, before considering the surge of non- fiction sales in the past decade as a backdrop for the spread of non- fiction- like tropes in mainstream poetry discourse. I conclude by examining a parallel shift in disciplinary language around ‘creative- critical’ writing, and in research policy and funding guidelines especially, pointing to where these discursive layers both recognise and help define the twenty- first- century (re- )emergence of what Eliot elsewhere called ‘critical poetry’.
The Long Turn
My characterisation of literature's ‘critical turn’ – in reference to the increasing use of whatever we might understand as ‘critical’ practices by whatever we might understand as ‘creative’ modes of writing – risks oversimplification, admittedly.
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- The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry , pp. 153 - 166Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020