The Consolations of Tradition
This chapter looks at how, since the millennium, certain trends in Anglophone poetry have echoed the ‘turn’ in Western art music away from what we might think of as mid-century ‘scholasticism’ towards such conventional musical rewards as readily detectable patterning, or euphony. Artistic credibility and a response by non-specialist audiences no longer appear inimical. It has once again become possible to develop serious original work using traditional verse forms such as the ballad, or musical tropes as familiar as the rising or falling scale on which Arvo Pärt's famous Fratres is built. This shift, from the complex and unfamiliar to material that is distilled and empirically accessible, makes us ask whether it is cultural conditioning, or some innate human capacity, that lets us experience certain tropes as more accessible than others.