A terrible error occurred in American culture in the early 20th century: a profound turning away from the sentimental in aesthetics and life. The great poets blend the unsentimental and the sentimental—this is the whole of the tension which creates the dramatic. Significant art and sublime dramatic tension is the mixture of sentimental weeping and cruel, unsentimental revenge; of warmth, love, coldness, mistakes—comedic or tragic.
The poetry is good or bad; but necessary sentimentality, itself, cannot be bad. It was the Modernist error to cast away all of sentimentality as bad. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, Dickinson, Yeats, Teasdale, Millay, and the best of Eliot, are sentimental as hell, even as they are true and sublime. It isn’t sentimentality that is ever the problem; the absence of it informs that bad educated poetry (smart but frozen) ubiquitous since the 1930s, academically or politically respected, which we are obligated to like—wet petals on a wheel barrow, poetry unable, like the best of Yeats, to hold back emotion, because it has no emotion at all. Emotion may be implied, but there is no structural emotion—it’s chatter, not art.
If so much amateur rubbish outside the Academy seems sentimental, it is only a trick that this is somehow the fault of sentimentality; the sentimental is the default which hangs on in much well-meaning verse that is simply, for reasons other than sentimentality, just plain simplistic and bad.
If you don’t believe me, check the progress of “sentimental” in the OED—in the early 20th century that which was necessary for all art and life of high feeling morphed into a negative. It is no wonder the 20th century fell into immense crimes of cruelty. All fanatics share this: they are touchy and defensive and overly serious and, in hidden ways, sentimental—to the point of not being so. Fanaticism is where the sentimental goes to hide and die. And imagine the dangers of fanaticism where all respectable, aesthetic, high brow society frowns on the sentimental.
All would agree we live in an angry, fanatical world now. The first step to fix things is extremely simple, because the great error which haunts us is simple, and therefore, great, and fiercely egregious, and blind. Bring the sentimental back into the fine arts.
This is not to say that all works should become overtly sentimental; it is only that sentimentality should never be isolated as bad, and destroyed. We feel happy, and this sentiment is all human life needs. The road to feeling happy is never sentimental all the time, but it would be silly to lose sight of the goal, or to take such long side routes that we completely lose sight of the goal, or reject whatever sentimental teaching joys we do meet on the road. John Lennon was both sentimentally loving in art and life—as well as cruel and sarcastic. The great artist is both. Lennon was more sentimental than Dylan—who was known for political protest and unsentimental lines like “it ain’t me, babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe!” Yet Lennon sarcastically mocked Dylan (never mind Paul) to great effect. The sentimental never precludes its opposite. The deeply sentimental combined with sarcastic unsentimentally in appropriate ways lies at the center of wisdom in art and life.
Here is the Beautiful Bracket’s First Round action:
The no. 1 seed is Mary Angela Douglas, and her “one candle grown lilac in a perpetual spring,” is beautiful and sublime.
Her opponent is “So I write this poem and feed it to the ravenous sea.”
Abhijit Khandkar brings to this contest the same powerful mingling of burning and nature; the “sea” is burning up the poem—the sacred (or secular?) offering—by “feeding” on it. In a transaction similar, but traveling in the opposite direction, the “one candle” burns (or grows) into “lilac in a perpetual spring.”
A lovely battle.
The Douglas is miraculous, optimistic, and moving; the Khandkar is pessimistic, naturalistic, and moving. Both lift with the same sort of religious awe. The “one candle” versus the “sea.” The “perpetual” versus the “ravenous.” Growing versus feeding.
Abhijit Khandkar is more in the poet’s skin, acting in a clear manner: “So I write this poem and feed it to…”
Mary Angela Douglas is the poet witnessing no action: “one candle grown lilac in a perpetual spring”
The sublime is the equivalency of great feeling with the great. What is “the great?” We are not sure until the sublime poem makes us feel, even as we are given to understand that the frozen alps, the horrible battle, the wide misty sea, the merciless winter, have no feelings for us at all. “So I write this poem and feed it to the ravenous sea.” We, who have feelings, worship what does not. The sublime accuses us in divine, sentimental torture—we know, but do not know. We cry out—to what will never cry.
At last, in fearful meditation, we will ourselves to become one with the beautiful.
“One candle grown lilac in a perpetual spring”
The torture past, we achieve peace in the modest and the beautiful.
Mary Angela Douglas wins.
****
The rest of the Beautiful Bracket to come:
Ann Leshy Wood — “where groves of oranges rot,/and somber groups of heron graze/by the bay.”
Medha Singh — “you’ve/remembered how the winter went/as it went on”
Yana Djin — “Morning dew will dress each stem.”
John Keats —“Awake for ever in a sweet unrest”
Sushmita Gupta — “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”
William Shakespeare —“Those were pearls that were his eyes”
A.E. Housman —“The rose-lipt girls are sleeping/In fields where roses fade.”
Raena Shirali — “we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
C.P. Surendran — “A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”
Dimitry Melnikoff —“Offer me a gulp of this light’s glow”
Jennifer Robertson — “ocean after ocean after ocean”
Sharanya Manivannan — “burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”
Philip Nikolayev — “within its vast domain confined”
Ravi Shankar — “What matters cannot remain.”