Why is no poetry which is popular—none of it—deemed critically and artistically worthy? Going on almost 100 years? Or more than 50 years, if we quibble over “critically worthy?”
Why is poetry no longer sublime?
Why has poetry lost its reading public? (Poets “reading” one another in the confines of writing program networks is not a “public.”)
No matter how aesthetically wounded a society becomes, as long as there’s written language, as long as there’s diary writing, interesting works of fiction will be published and read.
But why do we have a public willing to spend hours, days, reading critically esteemed novels, making these at least somewhat popular, but this same public will not spend a few minutes on critically esteemed lyric poems? So that no esteemed poems are popular? The current state of poetry would seem to be the aesthetic canary in the mine, the proof that, even though fiction sells, something is rotten in terms of the purely aesthetic accomplishment of writing as an art form.
Why does this century-long gulf of sublime distances exist, this profound disconnect between public and poetry in Letters?
It isn’t the fault of the public. It’s the fault of how poetry is conceived, written, marketed and sold.
Scarriet has argued that Modernism, which in the name of revolutionary change, turned its back on Romanticism. All that was popular in Romanticism (the accessibility of love poems, poetry as sublime and beautiful speech, etc) was lost, in the middle of the Modernist experiment, and the problem was compounded when the Moderns simultaneously secured a place in the academy (writing programs in the 1930s until the present) in which the loss of popularity was “fixed.”
The story of Modernism, revolutionary wacky on one hand, institutionally savvy and pragmatic on the other, is vital to understanding the problem—Marjorie Perloff, a Modernist (avant garde) advocate, spoke openly, not too many years ago, about how she was troubled by the fact that there are “too many poets.” When there is no true criticism to weed out bad poetry, and when millions of “students” immediately become “poets,” well, of course there will be too many “poets.” The Romantics (or other eras, if you wish) only had a few poets. Why are they so much better than the millions of modern poets? Well, it doesn’t take an Einstein (or a Coleridge) to figure out why.
But there’s a deeper problem, which just came to our attention, thanks to Jon Baskin’s “On the Hatred of Literature,” published online by The Point.
Jon Baskin spends the bulk of the piece discussing Ben Lerner, who has made something of a name for himself with his 2016 book, The Hatred of Poetry.
Lerner, like many in Letters, is aware poetry is dying—but he hasn’t quite figured out why. Lerner has made something of a splash, however, simply because he’s had the honesty to admit art and letters doesn’t move him. Perhaps I am not the problem, thinks Lerner, poetry itself—as commonly defined by tradition—is the problem. Fair enough. A truly open mind considers everything.
But Lerner is wrong. Lerner, and people like him, are the problem. Poetry is not the problem. Lerner begins by blaming Plato, who called poetry “divine,” which Lerner, the modern, thinks it just silly; poetry, Lerner thinks, is not “divine,” and it makes moderns work too hard to make their poetry “divine.” There is a certain amount of common sense here, but this doesn’t alter one bit the eternal truth of the whole issue: it is never poetry’s fault, or the public’s fault, when poetry fails. Blame always lies with the poets and critics of a particular age—and to assert poetry is divine is neither here, nor there; the only thing that matters is the poets and the critics and the editors who make it divine.
Baskin examines Lerner’s recent autobiographical novels, and finds that for Lerner, poetry which is more political, or “socially responsible,” is the answer. No wonder Lerner is getting some left-leaning, mainstream attention.
Here’s Baskin: “What is clear is that, by the end of The Topeka School, political commitment has emerged as the socially responsible solution—even if it remains elusive to Lerner’s narrator—to artistic disaffection.”
And speaking of the Modernists turning their backs on the Romantics, we sat up with attention when we read the following in Baskin’s piece:
It was during a period of increasing politicization, and amid a boom for the proselytizers of scientific skepticism in nineteenth-century England, that Samuel Coleridge formulated his idea of “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” The famous phrase—“willing suspension of disbelief”—is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean we should suspend our capacity to think when we engage with artworks, or that we are to imitate children (or our fantasy of children) and pretend not to know the difference between fact and fiction. …….. Keats, building on the concept, would later coin the phrase “negative capability” to explain the specifically artistic virtue of being able to exist “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Both poets saw art’s highest potential as being to provide experiences that undermined the prevailing hierarchy of values in modern societies, a hierarchy that privileged detachment, skepticism and the “heresy”—as Coleridge liked to call it—of practical and political expediency.
But here’s the deeper problem, and it has to do with Plato, and the greatest literary trope of them all, one even more influential and profound than “willing suspension of disbelief” or “negative capability,” and this is, of course, the famous directive by Plato that poets are not welcome in the Republic.
There is little to say on this topic, as important as it is. You get it, or you don’t. If you don’t get it, you will over-argue it, you will over-think it.
Here’s the first four paragraphs of Baskin’s wonderful essay:
When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical production. The point of literary scholarship was to “unmask” these conditions—to show, for instance, how Mark Twain had unwittingly reinscribed the racist assumptions of his time, even as he attempted to expose them. It went without saying, on this theory, that literature was a conduit neither of timeless truths nor of trustworthy passions. Indeed our professors made it clear that, the more powerful of an imaginative experience a work delivered, the more important it was to learn to view it with skepticism and detachment. At best, and with the correct theoretical tools, what had been valorized as the height of literary culture in the past might offer us an unintended insight into what really mattered: politics, history, the shadow life of power.
I can still remember when, at the end of one of the departmental survey classes—our teachers having delivered a lecture on New Historicism as the culminating achievement of twentieth-century literary criticism—a student stood up in the back of the room. Nearly giving way to what seemed to me at the time (but not now) an embarrassing overflow of emotion, she accused the professors of “hating” literature. We had become English majors in the first place, she went on, not because novels and poems told us interesting things about history or politics but because they made us feel less alone, captivated us with their beauty, helped us to better know ourselves and the world. The professors, as far as I can remember, responded politely: after all, the student was only a sophomore. She would learn.
It is no secret that in contemporary America there are many people who hardly read at all, and then another sizable group who, though they keep up with news, sports and the latest fads in self-care or technology, have little interest in serious fiction, poetry or literary commentary. It would be wrong to say such people hate literature, for one has to care about something to truly hate it. What my classmate in the survey course had precociously recognized was that we were being introduced to a phenomenon both subtler and more sinister than the neglect or ignorance of literature. Our professors had a great deal invested in novels and poems; and it was probably even the case that, at some point, they had loved them. But they had convinced themselves that to justify the “study” of literature it was necessary to immunize themselves against this love, and within the profession the highest status went to those for whom admiration and attachment had most fully morphed into their opposites. Their hatred of literature manifested itself in their embrace of theories and methods that downgraded and instrumentalized literary experience, in their moralistic condemnation of the literary works they judged ideologically unsound, and in their attempt to pass on to their students their suspicion of literature’s most powerful imaginative effects.
The lesson was not a new one. Going back to Plato—perhaps the first hater of literature on record—philosophers and religious authorities have attacked art for the same reasons our professors taught us to deconstruct and distrust it: because it is unpredictable, unreasonable and often inconsistent with their preferred politics or morality. It was also a lesson that was destined, in the years that followed, to seep off campus. Even as New Historicism fell out of fashion in literary studies—along with the broader postmodern notion of “critique” that had produced it—the students it had trained were taking up positions in the public intellectual magazines and book reviews, where they now preside over the gradual disappearance of a distinctively literary mode of criticism: a criticism, that is, that attends to matters of form, style and character, that takes aesthetic experience seriously, and that appreciates the emotions inspired by an artwork as fully as, and as constitutive of, its politics. To the extent that this disappearance has gone unremarked, it is because the hatred of literature, though it remains almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of our literary culture. As was the case in my college survey course, the highest honors go to the most eloquent haters.
I will repeat something here I quickly wrote on Facebook, when I shared Baskin’s article, overjoyed at finding a new sane voice in Letters. Here’s what the article essentially meant to me:
It’s okay to love poetry over politics. It really is. It means you understand politics.
And here’s what I added on Facebook, re: my thoughts on Baskin’s article, and re: Plato:
I always said that modernist theorists, who at heart, hate poetry, are unconscious followers of Plato. Plato said, with common sense, Homer should not be read for wisdom on chariot-building or military strategy; he’s a poet. Similarly, poetry should not be read for politics. Nothing wrong with hazy, divine poetry. But there are subjects which, by their very nature, are not properly understood as poetry, but will be treated poetically nonetheless by the untruthful and the mendacious. This is what Plato feared. Plato did not really dislike poetry. But modernist theorists do dislike what makes poetry poetry, even as they unconsciously act like Plato, in theorizing poetry away.
For hundreds of years, Letters has responded to a Fake Plato—one who hates poetry.
But this Plato does not actually exist.
It’s never about liking or disliking poetry. The question is: what is poetry, and where do you put it?
Having this Fake Plato in the back of one’s mind, entertaining even the faintest notion that somehow the aesthetic, the beautiful, the sublime, impedes the rational, the theoretical, and the socially responsible, is the greatest heresy of all.
Shelley called Plato a poet. And he was.
How is the truth of poetry conveyed by one—Plato—who does not trust poetry?
This is the greatest contradiction in Letters—and not understanding it will hinder poetry.
But now. Can we say this contradiction is solved at last?