Tahir Wood wrote:
"I was referring to Bakhtin's notion, which has influenced me enormously, that the poeticising tendency is always on the conservative, official side of language"
Robt: I guess you mean the conservative, official side of society?
^^^^ CB: That's the way I took it. This is a lemma of the theorem that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of its ruling classes. Most artists, including writers and poets, ( most predomiantly mental workers, intelligentsia) have depended upon rich patrons to live down through the ages. Surely, rulers controlled the mass production of written material since the invention of writing. They owned the pens and presses and commanded the censorship laws.
I like Shakespeare, but he wasn't poor, and there's only one place to get money.