With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
-- G.K Chesterton
Just as the divine seems to choose the broken prophet, art often paradoxically anoints imperfection. That’s an academic way of saying the ugly turns beautiful. Often though, snooty aesthetic standards keep an entire generation from seeing it.
I became a scholar of the American tradition out of this love of failure. Jazz, once a “low” art form, has become perhaps our greatest cultural contribution. Even within this genre, we have maestros like Thelonius Monk who replicated his deliberate hitting of the wrong notes on the piano in his home by hanging framed pictures diagonally on the wall. Emily Dickinson, cocooning her idiosyncratic thoughts within stanzas of brilliant slant or “off” rhymes, erratic dashes, mixed metaphors (catachresis), etc., aptly called herself “the only kangaroo among the beauty.”
As brilliant as T.S. Eliot was, and despite his capturing so much modern decadence with “The Wasteland,” his superior erudition that rejected the raw hearted all-accommodating transcendentalists put poetry so deep into academia that to this day it almost ruins it.