Landon's essay got me thinking about the value of looking to history as an appropriate model of comparison for "today." Yes, she falls into a space between the Romantics and Victorians, but is she, or anyone else, justified looking into the past for moral standards? Really, if civilization is about progress, especially for the Victorians, why be looking backwards?
I think if there is scientific, technological, and social advancement then poetry should be looking into the future and trying to prepare a moral/ethical footing for culture. Otherwise we get things like Internet, or biotechnology and people aren't prepared to deal with their individual problems that morph with the changing world; instead, people are left struggling with Medieval maxims in the modernized world of the 19th (or 21st) century.
I guess we could leave it up to corporations to dictate our morals in the future. They sure as hell plan out what their market will be in the future and how to develop it. So, why aren't poets, like Landon, doing the same?
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History. I'm revisiting some of the thoghts of Bertrand Russell. Born in 1872, he could be categorized as a Victorian,but like all of us, more or less, as an individual he can't be categorized. My book is entitled Bertrand Russell's Dictionary of Mind, Matter, and Morals. Here's the entry for History, Ordinary People In:
In all these views there are elements of truth: the Middle Ages were rude, they were knightly, they were pious. But if we wish to see a period truly, we must not see it contrasted with our own, whether to its advantage or disadvantage; we must try to see it as it was to those who lived in it. Above all, we must remember that, in every epoch, most people are ordinary people, concerned with their daily bread rather than the great themes of which historians treat. Sojourner
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