About three weeks ago, an occasional Times op ed writer, Matthew Walter, published a provocative essay entitled “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month.” I knew immediately what this essay was going to say, that (with some slight reservations) I was going to agree with it, and that we could soon expect a small avalanche of dissent and denial from poets and poetry lovers writing to the editor. All three of my premonitions were spot on; but instead of feeling smart, I felt merely wistful and resigned. Many people protested that they write poetry all the time; others frequently read the daily poem posted on the website of the National Poetry Foundation. Poetry dead? Walter’s calendrical allusion was to T. S. Eliot’s publication of “The Wasteland” in late 1922, and he well knew that it did not really mark the “death of poetry”. But metaphorically, definitely. To maintain that poetry is a vital part of our national cultural life is wishful thinking. But that is not T. S. Eliot’s fault. Eliot’s brilliant modernist poem dazzled a small group of literary “experts,” but he could not claim the popular audience that had made poetry such an important part of English cultural life. Poetry became obscure, arcane, forbiddingly high-brow. To attempt to explain the causes of poetry’s serious cultural decline since the nineteenth century would require a book rather than a short essay, but the truth is that there may be as many people in America today who write poetry as there are those who regularly read it. In hundreds of colleges American poets, many highly talented, eke out a living leading poetry workshops for students who would give an eye tooth to publish something in an on-line magazine you never heard of.
The word poetry originally meant “something made,” verbal artifice. And in its classical origins it comes in two main forms, epic (a long story) and lyric (a song). For centuries Homer and Virgil, tellers of large and noble tales, epics, set the standard. In England the author of Beowulf, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton—they all told ambitious stories in carefully crafted language. A special form of poetic narrative was dramatic, as exemplified by Shakespeare. At least since the late eighteenth century, and certainly today, when most people think “poetry”, they think lyric. The last epic poem even to approach a popular audience in this country was Benet’s John Brown’s Body (1928). It is an excellent, and super-woke epic of the American Civil War, and I doubt that there are ten undergraduates in the country who have ever heard of it.
Articulate speech is a crucial definer of the human species, and I think we all have a natural instinct to use and enjoy language to the full. The more poetry you read, the more you will marvel at the gift that language is. We are not going to reinstate poetry to its former glory, but we can all cultivate an interest in some favorite poets and poems. There is God’s plenty to choose from. Try this: memorize a good short poem; make it a part of your mental furniture. Poetry has ceased to be a significant part of the cultural storehouse of literate people. You will find few major prose writers of the nineteenth century whose works are not laced with poetic quotations and allusions, mainly from memory. We value what we memorize. The first piece I was required to memorize had a strange name and forbidding content: “Thanatopsis” (1817) by William Cullen Bryant, probably the most famous poem written in the early American Republic. In unforgettable language Bryant puts into the framework of Nature’s operations the universality of death, reformulating in elegant romantic diction the inexorable decree of Ecclesiastes: “Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.” Nobody in my public school seemed to think it inappropriate or “triggering” that a twelve-year old boy should be required inwardly and equably to meditate upon his destiny
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon.
Perhaps they might have surmised that such lines could give comfort and resolve to that fellow should he ever become eighty-six and ill, though more immediately he needed to find out what a swain was, and figure out the swain’s share was a plow-blade, and that he was allowed, as he glanced around at his mates, to free-associate over the phrase sluggish clod; because that was how poetry worked.
Poetry “works” in many ways, of course, and most poetry lovers used to be consciously aware of several of them. You appreciate anything more if you know even a little bit about its inner workings. Poetry as “making”, verbal artifice, requires the agile and intelligent use of words in a special fashion, often by discovering things in them that usually go unnoticed. A fine poet can be “poetic” with the simplest of words. Virgil does it with the most banal of words, res “things”. As Æneas stands with his friend Achates before the terrible sculpted history of the Trojan War in Dido’s palace, he shudders before the artistic depiction of the slaughter: Sunt lachrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangent (Aeneid I, 462). “These are the tears in things, or there are tears of things—and they touch the hearts of other mortals.” Who would not weep to see Hector’s body dragged about the city walls?—in actual deadly “life” or in life’s imitation in crafted words or sculpted stone? The tears of things, indeed. Virgil does that with the word res. But great poets need not always be so solemn. In the “Miller’s Tale,” maybe the world’s funniest dirty story, one of several butts of humor is a fancy long-haired, sweet-smelling, skirt-chasing young dandy named Absalon, a clerk of the parish church and the major acolyte in charge of the incense. He pays special attention to any good-looking females in the congregation. Exploiting the phonological identity between a censer (meaning the thurifer or guy with the incense, or the hot pot with the incense itself) and a senser (a guy who revels in the sensory experience of checking out the attractive females) Chaucer has these shameless lines:
This Absalon that jolif was and gay
Goeth with a sencer on the haliday
Sensynge the wyves of the parishe faste…
This kind of poetic wit is still to be found in some of our great song-writers like Bob Dylan or the Beatles. My nomination for the greatest popular song line of the twentieth century has to go to Laurenz Hart (of Rodgers & Hart):
When love congeals
It soon reveals
The faint aroma of performing seals
The double-crossing of a pair of heels
I wish I were in love again.
What a line! What a genius! And he has dozens of others. Not far behind is my Princeton colleague, the poet Paul Muldoon:
She was a systems analyst
For a dot com company
She said, "You think because we've kissed
I'll be yours eternally
I'll sign another pre-nup
And we'll merge our P.L.C.s
That's why most girls go belly-up
In this economy.”
There are tears in things—but also laughs! But this delightful piece lacks the metrical regularity of perfect performable song. It gestures toward iambic tetrameter (four feet of duh-dum, …go-bel ly up…) though only two lines are actually in that form. But the art of lyric poetry invites attention to both meter (song rhythm) and of lexicon (verbal content). Here is a “perfect” lyric stanza of iambic tetrameter, the beginning of one of Tennyson’s early Arthurian fantasies, “The Lady of Shallot”:
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky.
And thro' the field the road runs by
To manytowered Camelot.
Does anyone read Tennyson today? If not,
why not? He was one hell of an
artificer. There is a great line in
Ovid, in which the poet characterizes the work of the sculptor Pygmalion, who
made an ivory maiden so skillfully that one would not believe she was not
living flesh and blood. “With his art,
he concealed his artifice”. Tennyson
doesn’t do all that much concealing. He
wants verbal and metrical perfection, and he is happy to “show his
work.” In the second line he is willing
to force a stress upon the humble conjunction and, which in the next two
lines reverts to its humdrum unstressed banality. Wold was already a very old word in
Tennyson’s time, mainly preserved in place names (such as the Cotswolds),
meaning uncultivated moorland. It’s
probably a little precious here, but the poet wants (and gets) the delicious
half rhyme clothe/wold and also the idea of long strip fields defining
the edge between nature untamed and
nature tamed by human industry in its variety: of barley and
of rye. And
isn’t it just his good luck that there is a disyllabic English cereal grain (barley),
itself a trochee, that can be so positioned as to help create two iambs!
Now no reader, let alone any poet, would ever actually scrape over these tender, slightly soupy lines with a heavy harrow of such an analysis as I have just given. Most students already think poetry is “hard”. To obfuscate if further with fancy technical literary terms adds the insult of pedantry to the injury of difficulty. But a poem is a thing manufactured, made by the creative “hand” of a poet. The reason that manufactured goods are more or less pleasing and efficient lies in their maker’s knowledge of its material parts and how they work in interconnection. In a poem those parts are linguistic. Pygmalion’s art conceals his art—but it is still there. A poem should not mean, but be*, says one of our fine poets, but without dropping even a clue about how one comes to be.
*Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”
