A cliché popular with literary schoolmasters when I was a boy held lyric poetry to be the province of youth, and prose fiction of maturity. Exceptions to the rule such as Yeats or Radiguet were said to prove it.

Like all clichés, the distinction, though crude, contains a germ of truth if applied in context, depending as it does on a Romantic notion of imagination as a living organism, itself subject to the process of aging. To adapt the image of that archetypal romantic poem, Kubla Khan, genius erupts in an untameable flood of song from the young (Shelley, Byron, Keats), subsiding into a sedate river of prose in middle-age (Austen, Scott). Nonsense, perhaps, but suggestive nonsense.

Literary Review

Sep 2008

Categories

Peter Washington

Critical Mass

He was Moral, but Was He Great?

But What Was It?

Critical Thinking

Austen’s Onion

War Made Him

Empires of the Mind

Sons of Scotland

A Child Of Nature

Less Is Moore

A Widower Writes

The Man and The Mask

Writer & Co

A Large Corpus

‘These Fragments I Have Shored Against my Ruins’

Remembrance of Paintings Past

Literary Lucubrations

It’s All Relative

Literary Legacies

The Outsider

The Birth of Sredni Vashtar

Out of the Fog

Classics Lite

Kierkegaard & Chocolate