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The sentimental, as this 2018 March Madness Poetry tournament is finding out—as poems smash into each other in the particle accelerators of Scarriet’s aesthetic criticism—refers to any emotion at all, even anger.
Emotion, which the Modernists, sought to distance themselves from—because the Victorians and the Romantics, were too emotional in their poetry—is the beating heart of any poem; the poem cannot survive without emotion.
Are poems truth, as in scientific truth? Even those who hate emotion, would not make such a claim (it would be an emotional one).
So if poems are not scientific documents, what are they? They are sentimental documents—as much as feeling can be registered in a scientific (aesthetic, philosophical, psychological) manner.
The Modernists were fashionably reactive, but rather bankrupt philosophically and critically—the New Critics’ objected shrilly to the relevance of the reader’s emotional response to a poem (yes, poems may make us feel something, they conceded, but this was not as important as the objective description of the poem as a thing).
T.S. Eliot, the father of New Criticism, famously called poetry an “escape from emotion,” but he was confusing Poe’s formula that verse was 90% mathematical and 10% moral.
Poems can certainly be written, as Wordsworth said, in “tranquility,” even as powerful feelings flow between poet and reader.
The poem itself is not emotional.
The whole question of “escaping” emotion, or counting emotions bad in a poem, the way emotions are bad if one loses one’s temper in real life, is besides the point.
The mathematical is not emotional, and verse is largely mathematical—even prose poetry relies on rhythm, which is music, which is math.
But should the poet invent, and impart, emotion as part of the poem’s effect?
Yes, and this is a truism.
Aristotle says emotions can be “purged” by poetry. Aristotle was arguing with Plato, and looking for a way to praise emotions, but the “purging” idea is incomplete. Let’s say a poem elicits disgust—how does this “purge” anything? Does this mean we will never feel disgusted, again? Of course not. The poem has given us a feeling of disgust where there was none before, and whenever we remember the poem, we are disgusted.
The emotional content of a poem can include some “bad” emotions—fear or sorrow, for instance—disgust should probably be avoided altogether, but even disgust may be used, sparingly, perhaps—but the poem itself should do more than just produce an emotion, or a combination of emotions; the emotions of the poem must be accompanied with—what? And here’s the mystery; here’s what the poet must decide with each poem. All we know is that every poem should be highly sentimental, in the old, less pejorative, meaning of the term.
In the Fourth Bracket, the Sushmita Bracket, we feature some living poets, who don’t give a damn what contemporary critics think, and find joy and weeping in the poetic euphoria of grand, old, high sentiment.
Ben Mazer—one of the greatest living poets (tell us how he is not)—gives us a poem burning on emotional jet fuel.
As we have said, the “emotion” of a person and the “emotion” of a poem are two different things.
Personal emotion could indeed be something we would want to “escape” from, to tamp down, to control, etc.
A poem, however, understands no such social limits or niceties.
The more the poet understands this crucial distinction, the better the poet will be; those who do not understand this distinction produce poetry which is either purely dull, or purely offensive.
Number 5 (December Poems) –Ben Mazer
I was at the Nuremberg Rallies pleading with my wife,
I love you, I love you, more than anything in the world!
As she looked off to see the dramatic spectators,
she turned to me and said, you hate my guts.
I wept, I pleaded, no, it wasn’t true!
I only married you because I love you!
There is no force to plead with that can change her course,
now everything is quite its opposite,
and yet she said, “I wish that it were true,”
and would not answer “Do you love me?”
or contest “You do! You love me!”
What are we then? Man and wife
hopelessly lost and separated in strife
and worser grief than was known to despair
at using words like markers, no means yes,
when Jesus Mary Magdalene won’t you bless
the two true lovers, their heads to your thighs,
and let this nonsense out in bursts of tears and sighs.
The famous poem by Walt Whitman is Mazer’s opponent. We copy the first stanza.
O Captain! My captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red.
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Many know and admire this poem, and Walt Whitman was embraced by the moderns—Pound put out a hand to Whitman (while ignoring Poe, and other important figures of the 19th century.)
Those who admire Whitman’s poem, when pressed, would probably not remember “But O heart! heart! heart!/O the bleeding drops of red.”
What respectable poet writes anything like this today?
And yet, “O Captain! My Captain!” is a great poem, a powerful poem, a memorable poem, with a wonderful rhythm—if Whitman had checked himself and said, “I can’t write nonsense like O heart! heart! heart!” who doubts but that the poem would never have seen completion, would never have been written at all?
The only drawback to Whitman’s poem is that it exhausts its theme in the first stanza, and the next two stanzas merely recapitulate the first. It is a bold and lovely poem, however.
Ben Mazer, similarly, pours on the sentimentality in his poem—the poet is vulnerable in the extreme. The hysterical and desperate nature of the poem is announced at once, with, “I was at the Nuremberg Rallies pleading with my wife.” This alone, marks the poem as genius, and then Mazer presents the searing, simple words of an actual, intimate conversation, which adds to the drama, and then Mazer ends the poem with a direct, emotional plea at the highest possible pitch.
Mazer’s poem has four parts, with the poet’s position never wavering—the first part announces the setting and situation, the second part features a dialogue, the third part presents a key, yet hopeless turn in the dialogue, “I wish that it were true,” and in the last part, the poet seeks divine assistance, after beginning the poem with a reference to earthly power.
There’s no crying in poetry?
Yes there is.
Mazer wins.