Poetry Matters

Jay Parini touches all the bases in this argument for why poetry matters. It doesn't matter that he does, though. Poetry still doesn't matter. Like much else, it was killed by the 20th century.

In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult." That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century — or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.

I'm inclined to take Hugh Kenner's observation that Pound and Eliot (the rest were following or reacting), after World War I, wrote poetry for an age in which poetry already was dead. Living in Europe, to them, Western civilization lay crushed (and how much of it did we ever get back?), the ancient libraries shelled and gutted, a generation of readers, critics, and writers gassed and rotting in the trenches. They wrote for the past, or directly for the anthologies, complete with numbered lines and footnotes, in hopes a future generation would arise and find the poems like time capsules.

Poets since have never gone back to that point and tried to recover the trail.

Meanwhile, for the few for whom it still matters, here Adam Kirsch reviews Stanley Plumly's new “Posthumous Keats”:

Yet the consolations of poetry, as “Posthumous Keats” reminds us, last only as long as the poem lasts. The sublimity of the odes did not stop Keats from suffering in body and mind, or from cursing the fate that allowed him to taste the pleasures of life and art so intensely, only to snatch them away. “Keats, of all poets, cannot be divided between the artist and the man,” Plumly writes. But in a sense it is precisely the violent sundering of the artist and the man that is Keats’s tragedy. The poet saw autumn as fulfillment, the season that “set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease.” The man died in winter, in a foreign country, certain that his work had not kept the promises his imagination made. “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?” he asked in one of his last letters home. “There must be,” he decided. “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

Note to Self

Man is a lumpe, where all beasts kneaded bee,
Wisdome makes him an Arke where all agree;
The foole, in whom these beasts do live at jarre,
Is sport to others, and a Theater;
Nor scapes hee so, but is himselfe their prey:
All which was man in him, is eate away,
And now his beasts on one another feed,
Yet couple'in anger, and new monsters breed.

-John Donne, "To Sir Edward Herbert, at Julyers"

Byron Wasn't the Only One

This is hardly news. But I do like the possible Brontë connection. Though I think Emily was strange enough to have got here on her own.

"When I read Dorothy’s accounts of her love for William in the Grasmere Journals I am moved in the same way as I am by Catherine Earnshaw’s description of her love for Heathcliff ... and it is through Wuthering Heights that the peculiarity of [their] relationship can best be understood. Powerful in both cases is the elusive, visionary nature of what each woman is straining to define, her hunger for twinship with the one she loves ... her confusion about where she ends and he begins. "

This comparison makes sense, and it connects with the idea of incest which F. W. Bateson so memorably introduced in 1954 when he suggested that William and Dorothy fell in love in the intimacy of their cold winter in Germany. Bateson, according to Wilson, only pointed out “what was obvious to all”, which is that something odd went on in Goslar. (Wordsworth’s comment that he wrote in Goslar “in self-defence” is intriguing.) The Heathcliff–Catherine relationship has an incestuous element, as they were brought up together as children, and their sexuality is obviously abnormal (though not very unusual in the context of Gothic fiction and Byronic poetry). Emily Brontë could not have read Dorothy’s journals but, Wilson argues, she is more than likely to have read De Quincey’s portraits of the Wordsworths in Tait’s in 1839, which describe her “gipsy tan”, outdoor spirit and impulsive nature. It is intriguing to think that descriptions of the high-minded homely life of Dove Cottage could have prompted the melodramatic tragedy of Wuthering Heights – a shadow story spun from what lay concealed and repressed.

For the Few Fools Who Still Care

... about poetry. I had the good fortune to once hear Meyer Abrams analyze a short poem by Wordsworth. The fluid assurance of his thought was as marvelous as the poetry itself. So I am pleased to read this tribute to his work and influence on the shrinking concern called "literature."

Why is it a sinking island? There's a clue in the difference between college now and this:

When he returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935, Abrams notes, it was "in the days when, to get a Ph.D., you had to study Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old French, and linguistics, on the notion that they served as a kind of hard-core scientific basis for literary study."

I was reading the Romantics before I got to college and had to buy the Norton "Anthologies," which they anchor. But even for my early exposure to Keats, Wordsworth and Byron, I may have to thank Abrams.

Foregrounding that era, from the late-18th to the mid-19th centuries, was part of a shift in literary study. When Abrams started out, the basis of literary studies was in earlier periods and major figures like Spenser and Milton, and T.S. Eliot had dismissed the Romantic poets as inferior. Abrams helped turn the field toward the more modern sensibility of poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, who were more secular and concerned with problems of language and epistemology.

I would almost say I could live without Shelley, except for Julian and Maddalo, which is beyond brilliant and far ahead of its time.

But if you want to raise a glass to Abrams, do it for this:

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Abrams's career is that he has kept up for more than 60 years. Through the 1970s and 80s, he sorted through and questioned new schools of literary theory like deconstruction and theorists like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida, whom he found compelling but disagreed with. He adds, "I've been skeptical from the beginning of attempts to show that for hundreds of years people have missed the real point," his chief quarrel with contemporary theory.

"Salutation"

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

-- Ezra Pound

From "Contemplation of the Sword"

Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.
I know what pain is, but pain can shine. I know what death is,
I have sometimes
Longed for it. But cruelty and slavery and degredation,
pestilence, filth, the pitifulness
Of men like hurt little birds and animals . . . if you were
only
Waves beating rock, the wind and the iron-cored earth,
With what a heart I could praise your beauty.
You will not repent, nor cancel life, nor free man from anguish
For many ages to come. You are the one that tortures himself to
discover himself: I am
One that watches you and discovers you, and praises you in little
parables, idyl or tragedy, beautiful
Intolerable God.
The sword: that is:
I have two sons whom I love. They are twins, they were born
in nineteen sixteen, which seemed to us a dark year
Of a great war, and they are now of the age
That war prefers. The first-born is like his mother, he is so
beautiful
That persons I hardly know have stopped me on the street to
speak of the grave beauty of the boy's face.
The second-born has strength for his beauty; when he strips
for swimming the hero shoulders and wrestler loins
Make him seem clothed. The sword: that is: loathsome disfigurements,
blindness, mutilation, locked lips of boys
Too proud to scream.
Reason will not decide at last: the sword will decide.

-Robinson Jeffers

I would send you to more of his, but the best of it is not online and the best of it can be very long, and what is printed online is at sites I do not entirely trust for either accuracy or security. Poetry is, in a final, feeble way, dangerous again!

The Excesses Of God

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

-Robinson Jeffers

Time of Disturbance

The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive
life, not to take sides.
Leave it for children, and the emotional rabble of the
streets, to back their horse or support a brawler.

But if you are forced into it: remember that good and
evil are as common as air, and like air shared
By the panting belligerents; the moral indignation that
hoarsens orators is mostly a fool.

Hold your nose and compromise; keep a cold mind. Fight,
if needs must; hate no one. Do as God does,
Or the tragic poets: they crush their man without hating
him, their Lear or Hitler, and often save without
love.

As for these quarrels, they are like the moon, recurrent
and fantastic. They have their beauty but night's
is better.
It is better to be silent than make a noise. It is better
to strike dead than strike often. It is better not
to strike.

-Robinson Jeffers

Unfortunately, I can't do his long lines properly in an online format like this one.

Peace

Peace is written on the doorstep
In lava.

Peace, black peace congealed.
My heart will know no peace
Till the hill bursts.

Brilliant, intolerable lava,
Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass,
Walking like a royal snake down the mountain
      towards the sea.

Forests, cities, bridges
Gone again in the bright trail of lava.
Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,
And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below
      the lava fire.

Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.
Within, white-hot lava, never at peace
Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth;
To set again into rock,
Grey-black rock.

Call it Peace?

[D.H. Lawrence]

Bad to Verse

Dennis the Peasant is trying to write bad poetry. He's not doing a great job of it, but it's hardly an insult to him to think so. Writing truly bad poetry is one of the most difficult attainments of a writer. You could spend years honing the craft, and it's possible no one can succeed at it without some natural talent along that line.

You have to start with idiotic ideas. Dennis has got that down -- after all, he's been reading political blogs for years. But when he sits down to write it, his skill gets in the way. His verse -- as verse -- is passable. What's required is a complete lack of humor, a complete lack of grammatical consistency, tone-deafness, the rhythmic sense of Donald Rumsfeld, and an artless innocence about all of it.

This may be unattainable without the proper genes. I have worked with a man who was a tuneless hummer. When he wasn't around, co-workers would try to imitate him. Try it; it's really impossible. Avoiding a tune is infinitely more difficult than carrying one.

Dennis already has dug up a blood ruby of a bad poem, on the Daily Kos site. It starts like this:

Trapped in a machine that only nourishes the rich
Like a glitch in the system that hard to catch
And bombs that drop on kids with legs detached
Women, Children, and Men for Oil!
Is this the "Freedom" you bring to the New World?
Amerikkka Now Hides Behind A New Freedom
The one that gives you death instead of Life
Why Don't you just get up and fight?
Stop Wasting your time in Protest and Strikes
The plight of the poor is at an increasing rate
Why don't you allow yourself to be suicidal and late our economy crash?

By the gods, I'm jealous of the talent that wrote that. If I could write anything half as good as that is bad, I could retire on the royalties.

However, Dennis is well on the way to self-education in this art, because he's been reading Pandagon dutifully. Just throw random line breaks at Amanda's prose, and you've got yourself some bad poeting.

But what I really recommend is a crash course in the all-time champion of bad poetry, the Chaucer of cheese, the Shakespeare of shabby, the Elizabeth Barrett Browning of godfuckingawful, Julia Moore, the "Sweet Singer of Michigan." Here is the opening of her 1876 tribute to a Civil War casualty:

Come all good people, far and near,
Oh, come and see what you can hear,
It's of a young man, true and brave,
Who is now sleeping in his grave.

Now, William Upson was his name --
If it's not that it's all the same --
He did enlist in the cruel strife,
And it caused him to lose his life.

If you can get through the first two lines without blurting out a laugh -- well, Mark Twain couldn't. He counted her as his favorite poet. [It's a tribute to the savvy of the 19th century that this woman published her verse thinking it was good, and that a great many reviewers managed to write about it so artfully that they seemed to be praising it until you saw the alternate meanings in their sentences. The gag was kept up -- almost -- long enough for a national reading tour.]

I'll close as the Sweet Singer closed her ballad of her youth (which describes all manner of hardships and suffering while insisting how happy it all was):

My childhood days have passed and gone,
And it fills my heart with pain
To think that youth will nevermore
Return to me again.
And now kind friends, what I have wrote,
I hope you will pass o'er,
And not criticise as some have done,
Hitherto herebefore

Words and All

[posted by Callimachus]

Terry Eagleton doesn't wonder why non-literary types often are repulsed by the personalities and politics of many of the geniuses of poetry. He wonders why the guardians of the canon are so defensive about it.

Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? Eliot's well-earned reputation is established beyond all doubt, and making him out to be as unflawed as the Archangel Gabriel does him no favours. It is true that the poet was a sourly elitist reactionary who fellow-travelled with some unsavoury political types in the 1930s, and as a Christian knew much of faith and hope but little of charity. Yet the politics of many distinguished modernist artists were just as squalid, and some—Pound and Junger, for example—were quite a lot worse. There is no need to pretend that all great writers have to be uxorious, liberal-minded, philosemitic heterosexuals. Why does Raine write as though discovering that Eliot was a paedophile would change our view of Four Quartets?

Neither is it just a question of "fine poetry, pity about the politics." The fact that apart from Joyce and Woolf, almost all of the major "English" modernists were radical reactionaries, askew to the orthodox liberal consensus of their age, is a condition of their achievement, not a regrettable corollary.

Right. When it comes to personality, it's hard to think of any of the great ones who wasn't a bastard or a bitch on some important level -- though Whitman probably is the exception. As for politics, poets are notoriously bad about that. Yeats probably got closest to the truth, upon being asked for a war poem in 1915:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

Note it's not "upon being asked for a pro-war poem." Needless to say, his STFU advice has been roundly ignored since then; poets just don't work that way.

An executioner might write a beautiful poem. But not even an angel could write a beautiful poem in praise of a concentration camp.

I, Too, Dislike It

[posted by Callimachus]

Throwing down the gauntlet

Poems are written only with other poets in mind, and therefore do not sell. (Two thousand copies is the industry standard.) [ John Barr, a former Wall Street executive and the president of the Poetry Foundation] argued that the effect of M.F.A. programs, increasingly prevalent since the nineteen-seventies, has been “to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety. The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor—and I stress this quality—entertaining.” In a section titled “Live Broadly, Write Boldly,” he urged poets to do as Hemingway did, and seek experience outside the academy—take a safari, go marlin fishing, run with the bulls. “The human mind is a marketplace, especially when it comes to selecting one’s entertainment,” he wrote. “If you look at drama in Shakespeare’s day, or the novel in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time.”

That this man now has power over "Poetry" magazine, which is the "Edinburgh Review" of modern American poetry -- WaPo, NYT, LA Times all rolled into one, for you journalism types, with "Newsweek" and "Time" thrown in for good measure. What's better (or worse), he's backed by a huge warchest put up by an eccentric poetry-writing dowager hieress ("[Her] poems are formal, sighing, adorned with exclamation points, and often poignant in their wish for simple things ....").

Needless to say, the American poets who enjoy the power of the M.F.A. program and who zealously guard the snobbish obscurity of their craft, are appalled:

Barr’s essay loosed a cascade of criticism from poets and teachers already wary of the foundation’s agenda: “horrifying,” “anti-intellectual,” “anti-education” were some of the responses I heard. ... A forthcoming piece, by Steve Evans, in The Baffler, a leftist Chicago magazine, asserts, “Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world.” In a footnote, Evans identifies Barr as a Republican Party contributor, an assertion that Barr, who sees his job at the foundation as having nothing to do with politics, told me he would rather not discuss.

So now they're fighting about the money. Whether it will "ruin" them or not. Which seems to me like the owners of a wagon wheel shop feuding over whether to accept a free computer. Is there really any place for poetry in such a nation as the United States? What would Lord Byron be doing here today, were he alive? Pope? Keats? Shakespeare?