ABSTRACT
THE MIGHTY DEAD Some things never change for a poet of serious intent. There is an empty space on the page, the screen, or in the ear and the poet wants to ll it with something new, not to repeat the past. This can be experienced as a nearly debilitating pressure as Coleridge, writing of himself in the third person in his Notebook shows: ‘he rose, drew his writing-desk suddenly before him – sate down and took the pen – & found that he knew not what to do’ (quoted in R. Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1989, p. 283). The painter Benjamin Haydon, writing to John Keats at the time he was reading Keats’ Endymion, thinks over his own day’s labours
Artists of all kinds know Haydon’s paradoxical experience: ‘the mighty dead’ (a phrase Keats had used in Endymion) intimidate because we feel we can never emulate their achievement, but at the same time their ‘awful encouragement’ offers a daunting yet tantalizing model of what we would like to reach in our way. At other times the artist might feel lled with hope and nd, like Keats that
This chapter will explore how practising poets in the present time seek to work through their good days and bad days. As Gertrude Stein suggests it is not always possible to gain a perspective to tell the writer if she or he is doing anything new, of her own time. The twentieth century, and now our own, have seen the development of new media and implements in sound and vision recording, typewriter and latterly word-processing and the internet. How do these affect poets who have grown up with them and write in this context?
