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| | Jacket 15 - Keston Sutherland - The Trade in Bathos |
 | | Bathos is “the Bottom, the End, the Central Point, the non plus ultra of true Modern Poesie!”[note 1] Pope believed that the majority of poets, whose “Trade” and “Manufacture” of verses had reached a “flourishing state”, were responsible for vitiating the image of nature through absurd or nonsensical descriptions of it. |
 | | Bathos is the livid fact and outrage of that split, the infection of all idealistic content in language with its own excluded position, its own existence as an ecstatic compromise. |
 | | This is all bathos, the deliberate misuse of language in deliberate vitiation of our relation to truth, whether we think that truth is rotting away in the tree trunks of tropical South America, or that truth is unacceptable to the mind of man and can be swapped playfully for untruth. |
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