The Four Tops: Examined different meanings and the self-reflexive.
Oh, the heavy apparatus of learning poetry.
Lecturing for two hours on the difficult subject of poetry is easy—for the inspired professor.
“It’s the Same Old Song” was released (a hit song thrown together in a few minutes) by the Four Tops in 1965, when the avant-garde professor and Language poet Charles Bernstein was a pimply kid at Bronx High School of Science. In 1965, New Critics Ransom, Tate and Brooks were still hotshots. But the Four Tops were part of a popular rock music renaissance at its pure Romanticism height—it was as if Byron and Shelley were back, and the fusty New Critics were suddenly killed off.
Here’s a lyric sampling of The Four Tops’ ”It’s the Same Old Song:”
It’s the same old song
But with a different meaning since you’ve been gone
A New Critic could lecture for hours and never summarize as nicely both the self-reflexive and the mutable aspect of meaning in poetry—especially since New Criticism pushed the idea that unchangeable meaning resided within the authoritative text. But as the simple pop song attests, meaning does not reside in the mechanics of the text. A “different meaning” can reside in a text, depending on outside circumstances. Things outside the text are crucial, and may be so in a completely counter-intuitive manner. The anti-Romantic New Critics got it wrong.
It’s embarrassing to admit that it’s possible for those who do not read poetry to understand it with as much nuance and precision as those who study the genre. It leads us to wonder how much teaching of poetry is a waste and a vanity, since snapping one’s fingers for two minutes can produce the same result.
But pride will interfere. Students of the muse, invested in the apparatus of education and learning, those historians and theorists, those deans and provosts, those professors and financial aid officers, even those janitors that vacuum the carpets of the long, hushed halls, will manage to see to it that the walls between the ignorant and the enlightened are secure. The lectures and the classes and the workshops and the readings and the publications will go on. The real poet will keep vanity afloat.
It is with the gentlest remonstration that we dare to raise the topic of poetic vanity, for we realize the difficulty the professor of poetry faces: how to fill up that hour or two which the curriculum and the classroom and the credentialing policies demand? The assembled students, who dragged themselves from their ill-heated dorm rooms at seven in the morning, facing mounting debt and an uncertain future, require teaching, and
It’s the same old song
But with a different meaning since you’ve been gone
is the essence of it all, which they already implicitly understand. But you can’t just send them back to their dorms. Expectations must be met, especially if everyone is to get paid.
So what shall the students of poetry be taught?
As soon as poetry ceases to be mere verse, it changes into something else, and whether we think of modern poetry as philosophy or prose, it will never be called that by the poets. Going backwards—to verse—is impossible; it’s too late for that, and going forward, it cannot be called fiction or prose or philosophy; it needs to be called poetry, and this defensive posture is all that drives the poet into the uncertain future.
Was it an accident that the 20th century revolution in English-speaking poetry was accompanied by the rise of New Criticism? No, for the Modern Poets and the New Critics essentially belonged to the same clique: the New Critics were merely the American (and soon the American University) counterparts of Eliot and Pound. As Romanticism faded and was replaced by Modernism, a couple of things happened: the Poet went from being a Romantic hero, an interesting human being in his own right, to something vaguely tweedy and clownish (“Prufrock”), a quoter of poetry, rather than a poet. And then it was decided, for the sake of pride perhaps, that “close-reading” was the key to poetry, and that all outside elements, including the poet’s identity, were irrelevant.
The poets have struggled with this ever since—trapped inside the difficult text, they no longer can articulate who the poet is, who the reader of poetry is, or what virtues and advantages actually pertain to poetry. It is no accident that during this period, the poem which existed solely for the sake of love and beauty vanished, and Eliot, Pound, and the New Critics attacked the heirs of Shakespeare: Poe and the Romantic poets.
As Shakespeare put it in a way that needs no “close-reading:”
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
