ABSTRACT
The poem's superiority to the cliche, according to Wiener's formulation, lies in its ability to transmit a meaning unadulterated by repetition. The great poem, on the other hand, retains its communicative power in its commitment to innovation over familiarity, its refusal to rely on preformulated language and, by extension, preformulated ways of seeing. Charles Torminson's 'The Chances of Rhyme', which appeared in his 1969 collection The Way of a World, in a comparable though not strictly speaking analogous spirit to Larkin's poem, takes on the creative possibilities of chance. Realism, narrative and history, for their part, cannot be adequate to a culture in which migrations, technological developments and the range of social and political oppressions acknowledged by poets of this period produce dislocated selves. The former makes poetry itself the object of ironic devaluation, and a sense of vocation rather ludicrous, as Fisher observes: In barbarous times all such callings come through as rank parodies, refracted by whatever murk hangs in the air.
