A Draft Manifesto of the Suburban Romantics

From my friend Maolscheachlann.

A Draft Manifesto of the Suburban Romantics

1) The Suburban Romantics are on the side of life.

2) The Suburban Romantics favour all the poetic conventions that were the poet's stock-in-trade up to the day before yesterday, especially rhyme and metre.

3) The Suburban Romantics believe that traditional poetic forms (such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ode, the villanelle etc.) are just as valid in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

4) The Suburban Romantics do not agree with Thoreau that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”, or with Wilde that “most people exist, that is all”. We celebrate the routine, the ordinary, the workaday, the familiar.

5) The Suburban Romantics are not afraid of sentimentality or nostalgia, nor are we afraid of challenging or subverting sentimentality or nostalgia.

6) The Suburban Romantics do not genuflect before any transitory socio-political orthodoxies.

7) The Suburban Romantics want to evoke mystery, not practice mystification.

8) The Suburban Romantics are nourished at the wells of myth, legend, archetype, the sacred, the proverbial, the folkloric, the sacramental, and so on.

9) The Suburban Romantics do not disdain the topical, the ephemeral, the colloquial, the commercial, and so on.

10) The Suburban Romantics accept that the great majority of people (and perhaps an ever-increasing majority) are destined to live in suburbs, conurbations, commuter towns, housing estates, and so on. We insist that these can be the subject and setting of poetry; not just the poetry of satire and protest, but the poetry of affirmation and celebration as well. We seek the re-enchantment of the world, the transfiguration of the commonplace.

11) The Suburban Romantics have a special respect for Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, who demonstrated beyond all doubt that traditional forms can be used to explore contemporary life.

12) The Suburban Romantics are quite willing to use irony, but not to live in it as our natural element.

13) Suburban Romanticism is not a straitjacket. We do not preclude forays into free verse, rural themes, bleakness, misanthropy, obscurity, or any of the things against which this manifesto is a riposte. But they should be the exception, not the rule.