A Manifesto Against Manifestos

Manifestos are short-lived documents at critical junctures to rouse a self-described poetic group to action and to separate it from other self-described groups trying to do the same. This separation seems to clarify everyone’s minds as they enter into elective affinities, publishing and publicizing each other’s work, also nourishing the hope that they will knock their opponents out of contention, heralding their own arrival on the scene. They need opposition in order to prosper, and for that enemy’s existence, they should indeed be thankful. Classicists need modernists and poststructuralists need structuralists in the same way that darkness defines sunlight. In this analogy, which is shadow, and which is light? It depends where one is sitting.

In either case, the principles each group defines to be eternal turn out over time to be contingent, therefore subject to change as new movements come along and new manifestos are written. This is true even when a movement hearkens to the past and insists that its principles are eternal, having always been the truth. We create our own precursors to the extent that we need them and worship their ways. Or else we claim to be completely novel, without ancestors, disruptors simply breaking the mold. However, over time, grand, universal statements start to sound more and more like position papers and the latter, at a remove of some years, read as either quaint or tedious—as yesterday’s news.  

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I happen to agree with him, but what that claim means to me might not mean the same as it does to another. We might both believe it for different or even opposite reasons. That is why we are all arguing about such pregnant phrases, because everybody wants a crack at describing or even prescribing what everybody else ought to be doing when they sit down to write a poem, and also what they ought not to be doing. Manifestos, like Martin Luther’s famous theses, often require strict devotion, groupthink, and inner repentance from perceived aesthetic sins, otherwise a poet is cast into outer darkness. They are ultimately less foundational philosophy than they are dogma, always already in practice, meant to call out the wrongdoing of others—in this case, one’s poetic competitors.