Don Paterson (says Peter Howarth, 'Degrees of Famousness etc', LRB [21 March 2013], 33) is 'vigilant about not making poetry into a surrogate justification for fantasies of individual importance.' As he writes in a recent essay on 'The Lyric Principle': "An algorithm for poetry would be incredibly complex, but not infinitely so; and its detachment from such overvalued constructs as 'the individual voice' could be just the thing to propel us into a new era of classicism, should we desire or require such a thing."
How cool this is. How it would have infuriated Coleridge; who believed its exact opposite.
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