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Charles Ives was the first major American composer, and his status grows as performances and recordings of his work become more frequent and widespread. Next year marks the centenary of his birth. At one time his music was considered incompetent, or so wilfully complex and obscure as to be unperformable.

   His significance for younger, radical artists today - whether they be musicians or poets - lies in the fact that his work was not only well ahead of its time, but he was also an outspoken critic of what he called academic "Rollos" (meaning, at that time, a fop, poof, or effete person) and "lillyboys". He was never musically or socially respectable, and his revolutionary attitude to the techniques of composition met with bland incomprehension from most sophisticated academics, who would quietly fume through an Ives violin sonata, too angry about the notes to hear the music.

   The raw, real, honest life of his small hometown, Danbury, Connecticut, encouraged Ives's approach to technique as a kind of "synonym" for experience. He inherited this attitude from his independent-minded father, a local bandmaster who made technical experiments in quarter-tones, piano-drumming, ragtime, and elements of jazz. Ives often asked: "What is technique for? What is it doing in relation to one's actual experience in Danbury or New York or wherever, in 1910 or whenever?" He detested the incestuous, claustrophobic world of closed metropolitan culture and the spurious glamour that went with it. After scoring a composition called "The Fourth of July" in 1912, he wrote: "I had a feeling of freedom, as a boy has who wants to do anything he wants to do, and that's his one day to do it ... And I did what I wanted to do, quite sure the thing would never be played ... Though the uneven measures that look so complicated in the score are mostly caused by missing a beat, which is often done in parades." (Most maverick poets know this feeling of freedom, their "one day to do it", not caring whether the poem is published or not).

   Ives always returned to his basic truth that it was quality in living that made for quality in art: "If an old man bellows off-key at a camp meeting, we may hear the music of the ages." He demolished the sacred cow of "good workmanship" with this salty anecdote: " 'On the whole' - 'to sum up' - 'in the final analysis' - 'eleventhly' - 'to conclude' - 'in a brief summary' - these Rollos are like the chicken fancier who had seen nothing but chicken all his nice lifetime, and has never seen a lion. And so, on seeing a lion enter, he says: 'He's built all wrong - no feathers, wrong colour, too long, too many feet - he's not like a chicken.' Creator, that's poor workmanship. "

   It's been said that Ives's music was indeed "a lion, fluttering the genteel chicken runs", as might well be said of some contemporary American poetry such as Charles Bukowski's or Doug Blazek's in the "little" mags. The parallel, although 50 years apart, is clear. Ives cared nothing for formal academic criticism or the approval of the conservatoire professors; he regarded his wife, who had the marvellous name of Harmony Twichell, as his most valued critic because she asked the only relevant questions.

   He retired early from professional music, at 46, having had enough of the scene, though he still went on to compose some of his best work. He has a central place in American artistic history, because, by steps, his music and thought embraces the pioneer frontier hero, who becomes the go-getter, with ideals, transplanted to the metropolis, and then back to a Thoreau position as a nature-mystic in the woods (he much admired Thoreau, the recluse of Walden Pond, who wrote that 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"). If there is a rather formless, unfledged quality about much of his work (recalling again Bukowski and others), this too is part of the unique American experience - unfinished, unfulfilled - reflecting its own authenticity. To compare it with the European tradition as a severe limitation would be invidious and churlish - "more goddam Rollo-ing" as Ives might have said. It is a totally different kind of journey, perhaps beginning with Twain and ending with the open road of a rootless Kerouac. The cloistered "traditionalists" - too arid and desiccated for Ives's taste - may possess "workmanship" but have little real experience to graft it on. In other words, the exploration is everything, making in the process its own shape and style, discovering its own originality as art.

   Recently, Ives's autobiographical jottings and comments on composition, performance and criticism were published, called simply Memos (edited by John Kirkpatrick; Calder & Boyars, London). These were scribbled hastily in notebooks, with many doodles and confusing "balloons" in the margins, and intended to be private, or only for examination by friends who were concerned about Ives's reputation after his death. Apparently he himself, according to those who knew him, did not expect the acclaim he belatedly received, though he wouldn't have been surprised by it. All along he seemed quietly confident of his genius; his humility was not false modesty. In his notebooks, the hilarious and devastating tirades against the critical Rollos and lillyboys stem from this full awareness of his gift, intelligence and resilience. He could be a tough character, but was not without compassion even for the mandarins he disliked. His prose is voluble, sinewy and ironic, full of memorable phrases generating what he described as "a kind of furious calm." The mind that made the music might also have made some literature, as his studies of Emerson and Hawthorne prove.

   Charles Ives was a fine, true artist and a good, progressive man - and, as I said, he points valuable lessons for young experimental artists today - including the more serious, tenacious poets on the small press scene - who, like him, are trying to break old conventional barriers and to explore fresh ground. His example is worth thinking about, and his work is available in the record shops. We need more brave lions, or at least foxes, to flutter the genteel chicken-runs.