The poet of anti-pathos

In The Making of the Reader, David Trotter proposes a useful distinction between “pathos” and what he terms “anti-pathos”. In any poem the voice of the self and the voice of the text are subtly different. For a Romantic poet their clash results in pathos: the pathos of origins, sincerity and feeling. In modernist poetry, what we frequently get instead is “anti-pathos”, which rejects appeals to origins and insists on dissonance, not harmony, as the defining condition of art.

JH Prynne is the ultimate poet of anti-pathos. Everything about him spells distance and difficulty. He does not give poetry readings; he does not appear in anthologies and is never nominated for prizes; his books have Captain Beefheart-like titles such as Her Weasels Wild Returning and Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage~~~Artesian; he attracts acolytes and execrators, rather than run-of-the-mill readers, and, most important, no one knows what any of it means. Such are the familiar assumptions where this poet is concerned. Passions run deep: when The Oxford English Literary History had the temerity to suggest that Prynne was more deserving of notice than Larkin, the brouhaha ended up on the Today programme. (…)

If comparisons across artforms are any help, Prynne is to modern poetry roughly what Karlheinz Stockhausen is to modern music. Both are products of the 60s avant garde: both have messianic ambitions (some would say delusions), and give the impression of wandering into our zone of consciousness from some unearthly space, like a passing UFO. There is something impersonal, inhuman even, about Prynne, but the challenge for the reader is to move beyond the obligatory prefixing of the poet’s name with the word “rebarbative” and find a space for pleasure. / David Wheatley, Guardian 8.5.

acolytes: Komplizen, Gesinnungsgenossen
execrators: Hasser
temerity: Frechheit, Verwegenheit
brouhaha: Stimmengewirr, wilder Lärm
Today programme: BBC-Nachrichtensendung