We’ve listened too long to defenders of impure poetry.
Robert Penn Warren, co-author of the most influential poetry textbook of the 20th century, Understanding Poetry—which declared the early 20th century poet WC Williams a genius and the early 19th century poet Edgar Poe an over-rhythmical flop, explicitly wrote on the subject in “Pure and Impure Poetry” where he sneers at a lovely Romantic lyric by implying its author, Shelley, was sexually naive. No pure poetry for Mr. Warren!
It’s a great, old argument, pure v impure. I lean towards pure.
My first roommate in college was a poet and a wild, charismatic, humorous, Byronic lunatic, a transfer who was a couple of years older, and I being still unformed in all sorts of ways (I matured slowly) that rubbed off: it was Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake forever. The quotidian moderns were to be mocked always. Fortunately, looking back, I could have fallen under the spell of much crazier things. But nearly all poetic opinion is against me (and my old roommate) and I acknowledge it’s a worthy punishment. The Modernists couldn’t help but be influenced by what went before (God, it was everything) so I give them no points for that. Anthony Hecht parodying Matthew Arnold (“Dover Bitch”) is a conscious and honest reaction. Done well, it wins the day and I must give kudos. “The Raven” was parodied mercilessly from the day it was produced—which proved its worth. Shelley was a fool—but a fool I love.
There is great misunderstanding, which favors the impure—and it makes perfect sense that misinformation lives with the impure. It profits the impure side to muddy, as much as it can, all waters. This is the best way to be impure, after all.
This misunderstanding is this: I don’t favor pure poetry because I’m a prude or I’m afraid of complexity.
I’m complex enough to realize that poetry which becomes too impure is no longer poetry.
A lot of it is just emphasis.
Trauma, politics, sex, and other sensational subjects which don’t overwhelm, cripple and distract from “the poetry” can only be pulled off by the rare genius. Otherwise we have grotesque gossip parading as poetry. It’s bad enough when this kind of stuff pretends to be “journalism,” but when it pretends to be poetry, civilization is over. Dante’s Inferno certainly travels in trauma and so does Shakespeare. And poetry is better for it.
Shakespeare and Dante survived their blood.
How does that work? Keats rebuked Wordsworth: “Dover? How could you write on Dover?”
“House of Mourning,” a little sonnet by Keats, lays out the pure argument. Keats would not be the great poet he was, had he been impure.
Can we appreciate both?
Poe, of course, is pure all the way (but vast and rich if you read him as a whole, not just the poems, which is kind of the whole point—have many arrows in your quiver).
Wordsworth writing about the poor was a noble example of the impure—this example was provided to me by a learned friend, who was anxious to defend impurity (no surprise). But as Poe said: write an essay on prose subjects. Everyone will be better for it. Unless, of course you are Shakespeare or Dante. But don’t hold your breath for that. Criticism isn’t for the genius. It is for you and me.
“The poor” is a subject which can be one of two things: either sentimental or politically controversial, and neither one is good for poetry. The beloved Wordsworth poems are not his poems on the poor.
Paul Engle was a salesman, a Cold War warrior; he raised money for anti-Soviet poetry; I was at his home many times; Paul and Hualing (his second wife, a novelist) had the most beautiful home in Iowa City; Marilyn Chin was part of their orbit; Paul’s Yale Younger Prize judge was the godfather of the Fugitives, William Percy. Anthony Hecht belonged to Paul’s world—both were at Iowa and Hecht also had the JC Ransom link. (The poetry world is very small.)
The key to understanding the vital importance of the “impure” to Modernism, is RP Warren’s essay “Pure and Impure Poetry,” but a simpler explanation is a trope I’ve long called “Grandma’s Cancer.”
Poetry (great, old, Romantic Poetry with a capital P) is easily deconstructed by poetry—gruesome, trivial, topics of bad-taste (“impure”)—with a small p. I remember in the 70s all the college students (forgetting their Plato, their Horace, their Petrarch) were writing poems about their grandma’s cancer—and I knew instinctively this was wrong: God bless grandma, but grandma’s cancer canceled out the poetry. You cannot rhyme about grandma’s cancer.
Listening to Anthony Hecht read his two most anthologized pieces, “The Dover Bitch” (comic) and “More Light! More Light!” (tragic), Hecht a New Yorker with a mysterious British accent, it struck me, hearing them read, that these were masterful prose pieces, a more sophisticated version of “Grandma’s Cancer.”
Traumatic subjects, the “impure” poetry of the Cold War/Post-Modernist warriors, was a weapon against all that was worth rebelling against: “Purity,” whether it was 1) Soviet Realism, 2) Xenophobic, American, Conservatism, 3) old Romanticism, 4) old Dead White Male civilization.
Whatever is in “bad taste” also feeds the Impure Impulse. The disgusting, the horrific, the sexual, the political. These are all good. Whatever destroys the Romantic is good. The didactic is good, too. So many predilections. It’s a wonder the Pure (poetry which is elevating, accessible, beautiful, and not didactic) has any chance at all. Pure poetry is why Shakespeare is art, rather than melodrama. It’s a subtle difference lost to those who get lost in the impure.
Impurity might be called 20th century, consumerist, virtue-signaling, Neo-liberalism, which is so triumphant in a myriad of ways (it defines our Age), but a winner chiefly through mockery of the old, ushering in the “impurity” of the new. Paul Engle was certainly part of this, just as much as Hecht, Warren, Lowell, and Ginsberg were. The Beats (superficially Romantic) and the New Criticism (superficially Classical) were both Modern and Impure.
Poe, the pure, was isolated—Modernism’s poetry is a torch of impurity which still burns on every rampart.
I’m all for the Impure. This essay is merely a plea for seeing The Pure for what it is.
Here’s another way of looking at it. You probably don’t go on the David Letterman show (or late night talk shows in general) to read your poems. (The poem on grandma, or any of them.) Facing the grin, the jokes, the laughter, (that raucous Impure spirit,) your poems wouldn’t have chance, would they?
A poem by Allen Ginsberg about how the asshole is holy would not do well on Letterman, either.
This is the dilemma impurity always faces—there is always greater impurity (comedy) which will dissolve yours, even if your impurity (you feel) has a kind of religious purity. (The Holy Asshole).
This dilemma is actually the secret which smiling purists hold dear. It comforts them.
Poe: there are some things of which no jest can be made.
We might despair as we think, “impure” is so dominant in poetry today, what chance do any poems have?
However, taste (which Poe said was the key to poetry) does change. The Muse may yet uncloud her mind.