There is something about poetry which eludes definition—and therefore attracts the thoughtful person satisfied to reside in an unfinished state (Keats called this Negative Capability).
The poet’s problem is that nothing gets done; paths are persistently followed to nowhere. But the type embodies a virtue—patience in crossing the desert of thought.
If one refuses to find an answer on purpose, however, the virtue of patience is replaced by pathology; a path to nowhere becomes the whole reality.
The poet can’t earn a living from poetry directly but still makes this either the goal (often by artificial means) or the source of so much resentment that self-pity confines poetry to its noteworthy problem: a trail leading nowhere.
To be wrong about poetry is not the same thing as being in a state of negative capability about it. If one has all sorts of unrealistic expectations about poetry (why can’t I earn a living from it? It’s as important as religion, isn’t it? If I’m a poet it means I’m really special, doesn’t it?) these very expectations will prevent us from seeing what the poem—just the poem—is.
When I recently put together an overview of 100 years of the American Pulitzer prize, I discovered a few poets from the 1920s who didn’t, or couldn’t, ride the Modernist train—roaring with great but obscure purpose into the future towards the “new” (the new and the future were the same, it turned out) and roaring along to some of those elaborate expectations mentioned above which tend to confuse the public (who do things for a purpose) and setting off an apologetic fury in Modernist critics (Randall Jarrell crying, “Shakespeare is confusing, too!”).
One of the poems from the 1920s I discovered was by George Dillon (Edna Millay’s boyfriend) and I found myself forced to defend it against those who had embraced the New—and all its significant expectations. I had no idea how I was going to defend this forgotten, old-fashioned lyric of George Dillon’s, since I merely liked its rhyme and I was sure a defense of it would never please a sophisticated Modernist far advanced into all that was complex, ironic and new.
Almost absent-mindedly I thought about George’s poem (a short, simple lyric) and then it dawned on me: this neglected bauble (covered in post-war dust) was a little more sophisticated than I had first thought.
Allow me to trace how I came to this conclusion.
William Logan (enamored of High Modernism, not old, girly lyricism) had told me quickly in passing he wished the poet “Jimmy Merrill” had more “grit” (I had ranked Merrill near the top) and this threw me into reflecting on what I thought were poetry’s ideal qualities and I quickly formulated a reply in my mind to William: In poetry I want beauty and maybe philosophy; grit is more a quality which can be found in other places.
I always thought it was wrong to think poetry contained everything—this was simply no way to define something. I refused to believe “grit” belonged in poetry.
Then I thought: (it is important to critique oneself) philosophy doesn’t really belong in poetry, either—poetry isn’t philosophy.
But I knew poetry had a thoughtful aspect. Poetry doesn’t need to be “gritty.” The most popular poems, (the good ones?) however, tend to be mildly reflective.
I settled on irony. Beauty and irony, I thought might define poetry. Then I smiled and thought “beauty” is difficult to define when it comes to words.
The irony (I thought ironically) is that beauty (perhaps) won’t define poetry, either. A rose is beautiful, but words? How are words beautiful?
Maybe irony is all poetry is.
Poetry (principled receptacle of anything) contains nothing, but is a continual deferment (ah Negative Capability again).
In terms of taste, I found a certain beauty (pleasantness?) in Dillon’s poem because of its nice (skillfull? tactile? sensual? real?) rhymes (largely unnecessary to the Moderns).
Irony, however, has an intellectual complexity—and in a flash I saw, far apart from its beauty or rhyme, Dillon’s poem was strongly and explicitly ironic—now I was off to the races.
“Beauty Intolerable” posits that beauty (what we like) is more intolerable to us than death (what we revile and fear).
The poem submits completely to a startling or contradictory idea—irony defines Georgie’s poem.
The work of the poet is this. How does he invoke the “beauty” which he likes? How does he give the poem a body, and make it more than just an ironic statement?
A body has certain dimensions; by creating a rhythm of a certain duration (following certain rules of rhetoric and the lyric) the poet creates that body for us. The flesh of poetry is its metrics.
Leaving the body aside for a moment, two things which Dillon does establishes him in my eyes (as I scrutinize the poem) as a student of those simple, yet profound rules of poetic composition elaborated in a bygone day, based, roughly, on the aesthetics of the time-honored, ancient Greeks.
The two principles followed both involve limits.
Beauty cannot be experienced in its purest form; the poet George Dillon understands we are limited by how beauty appears to us: pure, ideal “beauty” (accepted by the “Romantic” or rejected by the “Modernist”) will not do.
Combination (in this case, and alluded to briefly yet starkly, flame combined with snow) is the clear means by which the poet presents the beauty which moves him. We know excellence only through the combining faculty—we cannot know excellence mystically or ideally. The poet must take care to never present the essence without identifying the parts which, as parts, identify themselves as such per the whole poem.
The combining faculty—and the necessity of identifiable parts—is the first principle.
The second limiting principle, even more strongly manifest in this particular poem, is the Effect principle: the poem (a thing of words) is highly limited in its ability to describe extreme situations or visions.
Rather than childish attempts to describe directly the thing, the poet preferably describes his limited and human reaction to the thing.
The cause of whatever is existentially important is beyond us; only through the effect can the essential thing, the essential beauty, the essential urgency, be glimpsed.
Rather than attempt to describe the beauty (a hopeless task of non-sensual, non-gritty words) the poet presents his visible reaction (for all poetry is a reaction to the ineffable) which we have no trouble seeing and understanding, since the thing, by nature of its extreme importance (why we attempt the poem in the first place) is naturally far beyond us—all poetry traffics in extremes, ideals, hopeless situations, since the extreme of what the poem tries to do defines the poem, not anything in the poem itself.
George Dillon describes a series of bodily shocks which we can easily identify with as mortals (the necessary “realism” within the excessive world of beauty) and this effect remains the “visible” aspect which fills out the poem’s irony.
Unlike a story, the lyric does not end with some specific incident; the music of its lyricism ends it, together with the expression of the irony—subordinate, in this case, to the action of sensual love being like death. (The lyric poet can certainly add story-like elements if he so chooses, as long as he remembers to make them subordinate to the lyric effort as a whole.)
It is the limited nature of the lyric (fashioned by principles based on limitation) which gives the lyric “Beauty Intolerable” its focused, laser-like, quality.
The limiting principles were abandoned by the Modernists, but irony was not.
Note the irony of the “Red Wheel Barrow” (also from the 1920s) “So much depends…” on merely “mundane” objects; we see the expression of the irony, but the Modernists forgot the other limiting principles, as well as the one which requires a measured duration of metrics or rhythm for the poem to have real flesh.
The Modernists flew too close to the sun—they thought they could manifest the thing (the Image) by simply presenting the thing, which had an added effect of taking them away from the ineffable and the human, as they fell in love with thing-ism and all that is literal (political poems, non-ironic didactic poems, poems which think out loud, as well as poems of pure description and imagery).
“Beauty Intolerable” also features two other Romantic tropes surrendered by the Modernists—the Urgency principle (poems by nature deal with extremes of vision and feeling) and the Human principle (poems by nature are made of observable human thought and behavior).
Romance is the most popular trope in all of literature (followed closely by the supernatural topic of religion) because the Extreme and the Human combine to give us, so often, the romantic. This is for reasons based on principle, not squishyness or sentimentality.
The Modernists, highly thoughtful in their rejection of romance and sentimentality, nevertheless, in their embrace of “things” or hard “images”—and even while the best of them kept and fostered all-important irony—unfortunately neglected old, underlying principles, to their general estrangement and despair.
This, too, and now we quote the poem, (which we recommend speaking aloud) features despair, but of a much different kind:
Beauty Intolerable
Finding her body woven
As if of flame and snow,
I thought: however often
My pulses cease to go,
Whipped by whatever pain
Age or disease appoint,
I shall not be again
So jarred in every joint,
So mute, amazed and taut,
And winded of my breath,
Beauty being at my throat
More savagely than death.
We quote this lovely work, not because it is a great poem but for the many principles it contains.
If a reader does not believe what this poem is expressing, the poem will certainly fail for that reader, but this failure would still not be a rebuke of anything I have said.
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