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/lit/ - Literature

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6186925 No.6186925 [Reply] [Original]

How do I get away with being pretentious?

Seriously. MacPherson would have been a popular poet before the Romantic obsession with authenticity came along. To express himself the way he wanted to, he needed to pass it off as being ancient poetry, since it would have been seen as pompous to write an epic in his time. He needed to put on a false face, and so do I.

Specifically, I need to pretend to be of a certain background to give "romantic cred" to my work. Like MacPherson, I have antiquated tastes that are rejected, so I need to create an organic reason for producing this work. Romantics hate self-consciousness, and want everything to fall into their lap. They want every fairy tale to be true, or at least an honest expression of picturesque mental illness.

So, I need to be seen to be a kind of atavism, a part of a kind of family of country squires, expressing a lazily pre-industrial view of life, kind of cavalier, a little bit ancien-regime, that sort of thing. I need to have my personality seen as something that evolved without introspection or scholarship to appease the fruity, self-indulgent demographic that I'm stuck with as a poet.

I've got the location down. But how do I insinuate that kind of background without saying anything falsifiable?

>> No.6186929

>>6186925
>How do I get away with being pretentious?
A hefty vocabulary.

Although if you just learned about everything you wanted to talk about, you wouldn't be pretentious

>> No.6186937

>>6186925
>a pen name with an invented personality behind it
Or do YOU need to be recognised for your amazing wit and talent?

>enthusiasm
You can get away with saying and acting in some seriously pretentious ways by pretending you're just super-excited and enthusiastic.

>> No.6186938

>>6186929
>A hefty vocabulary.
Yuck. I'm with Racine on this one. Less is more.

>Although if you just learned about everything you wanted to talk about, you wouldn't be pretentious
I need to nip this in the bud:
I am not pretending to have skills or knowledge I lack.
I am pretending to have a background I lack.

>> No.6186940

>>6186938
Identity theft

>> No.6186942

read these poems

http://alberto-caeiro..
blogspot.
co.
uk/

>> No.6186946

>>6186938
>I am pretending to have a background I lack.

Why not write under a pseudonym? You don't need to pretend to come from a background you haven't come from, as long as you have the ideas and emotions that are suited to that background you can dress it in the images of that background naturally.

Alexander Pope didn't have to pretend he was an ancient Greek to translate the Iliad.

>> No.6186956
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6186956

I'm of a similar bent to be honest; my aesthetic tastes are largely considered primitive and anomalous outside of historical reenactment societies.

So, I try not to care what other people think about what I write, draw, say or do.

Solipsistic, I know, as art is there as a communicative medium.

But when they have nobody to talk to then men are wont to talk to themselves.

>> No.6186959

>>6186946
cont.

>So, I need to be seen to be a kind of atavism, a part of a kind of family of country squires, expressing a lazily pre-industrial view of life, kind of cavalier, a little bit ancien-regime, that sort of thing.

why do you need to have an identity behind the thought/emotion? I don't see a pressing need to invent an identity of being a country lad in order to talk about clouds and sheep. If you love clouds and sheep you will naturally talk about them without having to write a signed contract that you were born in the country and are therefore justified in writing on countryside themes.

>> No.6187024

>>6186956
lets not strike our egos too much, its not because it is or is not appriciated by society that our taste is good.

>> No.6187029
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6187029

>>6186956
also this

>> No.6187063
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6187063

>>6187024
Not sure I put any stock in ideas about good or bad taste.

It's enough to enjoy my hobbies to the extent that I do; I don't need other people to affirm the things I love.

>> No.6187081

>>6186946
>Why not write under a pseudonym?
Very tempting. An extra shield between my poetry and dreary reality. I'm held back by the fact that I share a surname with a well-known historical figure.

>Alexander Pope didn't have to pretend he was an ancient Greek to translate the Iliad.
He wouldn't have gotten away with writing a new poem on Greek themes, though. There could be no Hero and Leander in his day. That's part of what Romanticism was railing against - they were restricted in their range of subject matter by the new scholarly rationalism, which was all voyeurism and no sex, and so limited to the subjective, they became a storm in a bucket. Then they applied their storm in a bucket values to the periods before rationalism and digging up "deeply personal" aspects of pre-romantic poetry.

So now we have the worst of both worlds - rationalism that rolls its eyes at myth, and romanticism that demands that myths be authentic hallucinations.
On recent autobiographical subject matter, the expectation from the rationalists is a moderately truthful roman à clef, and from the romanticists, some tearful free verse confession.

>>6186959
It's a more "Versailles" country than "Lake" Country, if you know what I mean. I'll keep the scale believable and fairly modest, but I prefer pagodas to bothies.

>> No.6187099

>>6186942
I like these. It would be fairly easy to pass myself off as a hermit, just by giving fewer details.
However, my tastes as luxurious, and I prefer the lyric mode, so I'm obliged to say "I" in a counterfactual context, a context which adds instead of subtracts, leaving me open to the accusation of being pretentious or a liar: for the sake of my reputation, I need to never leave myself open in the first place.