Poetry

# 49

Poetry

The means of poetry—sound and rhythm working together to compel the reader/auditor—give poetry a unique hold on the human psyche. Poetry is ancient stuff, whether as an accompaniment to a musical instrument or in its own spoken right. It’s also stuff that has communicated lore within a group of people, the stories that matter, the ways of doing things that matter, the origins of why things are the way they are, all the animating legends, tales, and myths. As an art of essences, poetry has been crucial to cutting through the hubbub of time’s distractions and distilling the moments, scenes, images that drill deeply into the human psyche. When people are married or buried, someone recites a poem.

Poetry chimes with meaning: someone is being wooed; someone is being celebrated for his or her feats; some cautionary story is being related; some god is speaking. The poem holds the action but the poem also is the action. Some formal dance is ever occurring in poetry. Urgency is forever making the acquaintance of reflection. This intensity makes the prospect of a median, some meeting place in the middle, inveigling but sketchy. It is as easy to err on the side of urgency—this happened and it matters—as on the side of form—the forms being both a blessing and bequest. Free verse, the chief poetic invention of modern times, can be seen as an attempt to referee this balancing act: the form is felt. Individual expression is allowed more latitude; the formal dimension is more improvisational.

It is tempting to see poetry as serenely existing on its own hilltop, a sempiternal presence in the human landscape, but poetry has been as much a part of the tug and pull of modern times as any endeavor. Poets have tried, and succeeded, in communicating the excitement of the era—the images of William Carlos Williams or the fervor of Mayakovsky—while acknowledging the pity—T. S. Eliot and Anna Akhmatova, among many others. In all cases, the poets have had to face up to the paradoxical situation of having to invent lore. What was taken for granted in traditional societies—a legend passed on from generation to generation—could not be taken for granted. Obsessed as people were in modern times with innovation and invention, they were squarely opposed to taking anything on time-honored faith. The paradoxical career of Eliot—a dazzling innovator who kept insisting on his orthodoxy—is a case in point.

How poets made themselves known in modern times to an often uncomprehending (to say nothing of indifferent) world was problematic. In market economies, poetry became one more facet of that publicity spewing energy, replete with its own prizes, awards, and events: “Poetry Incorporated.” Whether remarkable poets appeared each year with the regularity of car models was unclear.

Whether there were any means in the society to promote poems as something people might want to share and explore was also another story. Professors insisted that poetry was to be explicated. Modern poems were “difficult”; Sylvia Plath or Paul Celan was not Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This critical rigor may have been a better fix than some genteel pedant spouting mediocre chestnuts but, as the thickets of theory grew thicker, not by much. Particularly in the United States, academia became a half-way house for poetry. As more and more poets joined academia, an atmosphere of respectable bohemianism emerged. Though the poets protested that poetry could bare some substantial teeth, the poems often were tamely self-regarding or content to play coy word games. Poets became like many modern people: they went to meetings and served on committees. They even participated in conventions.

There has been plenty of confusion and resentment about modern poems. It can be argued that in the United States, the nation-at-large has yet to take its two great poets from the nineteenth century—Whitman and Dickinson—to heart, much less poets of the twentieth century. Poetry wants to be taken to heart, but in a heterogeneous, commercial society which is concerned with the present moment, the heart can be very fickle. There is always plenty of sentimentality, sensationalism, and melodrama to go around. Poetry that has had higher aspirations has had to explain itself when, in truth, there were no explanations. Poetry is lexical magic. Take it or leave it. Many, accordingly, left it. It gave them a classroom headache. It was not worth the meaningful bother.

That was too bad because the visionary world that poetry offered, and continues to offer, is, among other things, exhilarating. This vision resides in an exalted, exultant sensitivity—Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Rilke, Mandelstam, Milosz, and, yes, Dickinson and Whitman. Such passion doesn’t come along in its most potent form that often (why would it?) but when it does, it wants to be heeded: the human race is being given something to use as both solace and inspiration. Our days are suborned by our needs, fancies, confusions, purposes, etc. We barely notice. Poetry, as it deploys the senses in tandem with metaphor, notices. As poetry lingers, dwells, ravishes, and inheres, it teaches.

Societies with cheap visions do cheap things. People in modern times bought endless amounts of mass-manufactured goods most of which wound up in vast garbage heaps. The stubborn, individual crafting of poems and the sharing of poems were something else, something that spoke to care rather than carelessness, to faith in language rather than glibness. The caring has to do with generosity of spirit along with the sense that something of value wants to be passed on. If the society recoils from trying to assess value, if it retreats into relativism or disparagement of “subjectivity,” it is courting emptiness.

To their credit, many poets in modern times assessed that emptiness and offered much vitality in its stead. Whether modern or ancient, poetry’s allegiance to the imprint of being is immediate. In an era when freedom was often reduced to the tawdriness of consumerism or cynically mocked by ideological functionaries, poetry continued to stand for something that might connect with life in the deepest sense, as if the planet could speak through a single human voice. Occasionally the planet did, to quote the poet Hayden Carruth who wrote at the end of his poem “The Cows at Night”—“And then / very gently it began to rain.”