`The Moods of Their Own Minds'

When I say Tom Disch’s poetry is amusing, I use the adjective in its conventional sense, meaning pleasantly diverting, while hinting at its near-homonym, Muse, in particular, Erato. And recall Dr. Johnson’s definition of “amuser”: “He that amuses, as with false promises. The French word is always taken in an ill sense.” Amusement once implied fraud or deception, the artist’s modus operandi. Reading Disch consistently, I see his love of lists and unexpected rhymes, and his frequent mention of food. Here’s a fine list poem, “Garage Sale,” which turns a catalog of castoffs into a moral epiphany, a memento mori:

“Once someone thought he’d want to read this book,
And here’s a chess set minus just one rook;
A Sunbeam toaster sans its cord; the Life
Of Who’s-It by his unforgiving wife.
Como singing “Dance, Ballerina, Dance”;
The buttons off a hundred shirts and pants;
A rug unfaded where a bed had been
With traffic patterns marked in olive green.
There are few takers, though the prices cry,
`Remember, stranger, someday you must die.’”

Disch is also a fine critic of poetry, letting his taste and good sense lead him where they will. The subtitle of his first collection of reviews offers clues to his Jarrell-like sensibility: The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995). In his introduction, Disch anatomizes the usual suspects – writing workshops, poetry prizes, the sense of victimization and entitlement, encroaching illiteracy, little knowledge of or interest in metrics – which he distills into three qualities: laziness, incompetence and smugness. Here’s Disch on smugness:

“Apprentice poets, once they’ve developed sufficient self-esteem, quickly graduate to self-reverence – a tendency that has its complement in the self-protective contempt that adolescents feel for the oppressive vistas of history and the intricate machineries of the world they never made.

“The most benign form of smugness is that which dotes upon family snapshots. If there’s nothing else happening in one’s life, there are always births to be celebrated, deaths to be mourned, spouses to cherish, and skeletons to be exhumed from closets.”

In a word, narcissism. And in several more words, poverty of imagination. This is not a new theme among critics of poetry. Between January and March 1818, at the Surrey Institution, William Hazlitt delivered his Lectures on the English Poets. In “On Shakespeare and Milton,” he writes of the former:

“He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it is possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.”

And this Dischian diagnosis:

“The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds. Milton and Shakespeare did not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both to nature and art. They did not do all they could to get rid of the one and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own Minds.”

If these thoughts sound familiar, remember that in the audience for seven of Hazlitt’s eight weekly lectures was a 23-year-old poet and medical student, John Keats. Just three weeks before the first lecture, on Dec. 21, 1817, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats wrote:

“At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…”

The lectures confirmed Keats in his new way of thinking about poetry and its composition. The following October signaled the start of Keats’ annus mirabilis. On Oct. 27, 1818, he wrote to Richard Woodhouse:

“As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures.”

Blasphemous words, surely, at least in a poetry workshop. Of course, none of the students and most of the instructors have never read them.