What is ‘banality’? How may one escape from banality?
Or, ‘Every revolution in poetry is apt to be……a return to common speech’. Keeping this remark of T. S. Eliot in view, discuss how one may escape from ‘banality’.
Ans. : If we study the history of the poetic traditions and poetic innovations, we come across the banality in two dimensions-one is the use of traditional age-worn undis- tinguished poetic style and the other is adherence to the contemporary ordinary or common-place style in the language.
The English critic, T. S. Eliot, noticed the banality of the second dimension and rightly pointed out. “Every revolution in poetry is apt to be…………….. a return to common speech.” It is a fact that to revitalize the language of poetry and to reach a larger number of readers easily, the poets directly draw on resources of the contemporary language and style, vocabulary including slang and most unpoetical elements. Banality in both the dimensions is unhealthy and undesirable. Poets and critics are not of the same opinion.
Poets like Wordsworth were of the opinion that there should be no fundamental difference between the language of poetry and the language used by the ordinary people in their day-to- day talk. As a sharp reaction to this kind of banality of everyday uses of the poetic language, toward the first two decades of the twentieth century, a group of creative writers, known as “Formalists” started a revolution and regarded literature as basically a specialised use of language which is opposed to the ordinary or ‘practical’ language.
They (the formalists) opined that the function of the ordinary language is to communicate an information to the auditors; but the function of a literary language should be to offer the readers a special experience by drawing attention to its “formal” features or qualities.
They called these formal qualities “Literariness.” And this literari- ness’ can be achieved by what they called “foregrounding”- the set of devices including the devices of parallelism and deviation in particular-for the purpose of defamiliarisation of the poetic language through unexpected regularities and irregularities. And in this way the banality of the ordinary use and the banality of the age-worn traditional undistinguished style may be avoided.