The educated reader of today is certainly aware that love poetry appeals to the popular taste, and probably wonders occasionally if there is a critical, definitional connection between love and poetry.
But we have never seen the case made philosophically.
Love and poetry both belong, generally, to social, polite behavior, and love is an endless source of interest—all writing, laws, and human behavior revolve around love—and though we could expand on love’s definition, and include things like marriage, divorce, prostitution, and abortion, what we really mean by “love” here is courtship or Romanticism—what we usually mean when we refer to the love poem.
Forgetting the fact that “love” is a source of interest in itself, the question: are love and poetry good for each other? Aesthetically? Scientifically? Is the question I want to ask.
I don’t know if recent history can help us—20th century Modernist poetry was famous as a movement which chucked the “hearts and flowers” of 19th century poetry (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”)—but Modernists would be quick to point out that their revolution was not to consciously reject love poetry, but to simply expand poetry’s subject matter.
But hadn’t Byron, in his popular long poems, already done that? Byron wrote his share of love poetry, but he published two long poems, to much acclaim, which chattered on, in verse, about everything under the sun.
Perhaps it is best not to get embroiled in changes of fashion and taste; poets proclaim “revolution” mostly to get attention; I wish to ponder the twin existence of love and poetry in a purely scientific manner.
My entrance into solving the puzzle began when I seized upon a quote which I have thought about many times before—a pithy remark made by a non-poet philosopher from the 19th century. John Stuart Mill, in a rather brilliant, and today, mostly ignored, essay, defined “eloquence” as that which “supposes an audience” and is “heard,” while poetry, its “antithesis,” is “overheard.”
And thanks to John Stuart Mill (epitome of English, liberal, worldly genius) I think it is possible to explain, scientifically, why poetry and love are suited to each other to an extreme degree—despite the fact, that the educated, reasonable person will invariably insist, “A poem can be about anything! The poetry is what finally counts, produced by the poet as a whole person—there is no reason to defend any narrowly defined subject matter!”
Mill’s quote reveals a crucial distinction—we have “subject matter” (what the poem is “about”) on one hand, but there is something else just as important—the conveyance of the “subject matter”—is it “heard” by an “audience,” or is it “overheard?”
And upon this distinction, the great mystery is revealed.
If poetry is that which is “overheard,” and not “eloquence” which is “heard” by an “audience,” this fact, which does appear to be an important truth, a truth which exists apart from “subject matter,” is that which truly defines and narrows poetry.
For what is it, but the talk of passionate lovers, which is “overheard?”
By contrast, the usual discourse of numerous subjects, declaimed to an “audience,” is not poetry—how often do we read “poems” which are arguments made for “the world,” the “audience” who represent the “world,” assembled to hear the wisdom of the legislator or the sermonizer—and without being able to put our finger on it, the “argument” put on display by the poet, fails to move us, sounds pompous, too obvious, too calculated to convince, too direct and transparent in the manner it speaks to us? (Or poets, wisely fleeing from pomposity, nevertheless err by blindly seeking what they feel is the opposite—the trivial and the obscure, which also disappoints.)
The lover who is “overheard,” on the other hand, comes from a place of shame, of flawed desire, of subjective anguish and despondency, and is not meant to convince at all, but is like a “scene” or “drama” which we witness by accident, and for that reason, is more nuanced, more original, more driven by accident and the problematically unique, more embellished by subjective seeing—which turns out to be a more lively way of seeing!—more mysterious, more emotional, more cloudy, and yet more clear (because we are seeing what we weren’t supposed to see) and where the inability to explain is the very thing which explains.
All this—shame, subjectivity, cloudiness, confusion, negative capability, beauty for its own sake, urgency for its own sake—is it not felt and spoken most strongly by love? Or hate, which is the partner of love, since both belong to passionate, subjective intercourse, alive to what is most important to the slightly confused individual?
None of this would be tolerated by an audience assembled for instruction, or any sort of worldly rhetoric meant to clarify or solve an issue. Imagine a speaker on How To Recover From Alcohol Addiction speaking passionately about the pleasures of intoxication—and only that. It would either be taken as a joke, or seen as something foolish and dangerous.
Poetry will never solve alcohol addiction. Poetry is alcohol addiction.
Addiction is what we “overhear;” when we see a person, not wearing a public dress, not prepared for public disquisition, being an addict. The poem is for the shamed and covert “addict,” not for the convert seeking sobriety, not for the one seeking to expose the dangers of addiction.
Not for public consumption is the celebrity secretly glimpsed in their bathroom. And exactly so, is the poem an overheard document—which appeals to curiosity alone.
Curiosity alone! How much of human interaction belongs to this?
But the snare is not the same as the treat.
Poetry is “overheard” and this defines it absolutely.
The disgusting and the appalling, not proper for a general audience, is also “overheard.”
But love ensures the poem will be something else—not meant to be heard, and yet, the most beautiful thing (we never should have heard it) we have ever known.