`Poetry and Not Something Else'

“Those who demand of poetry a day-dream, or a metamorphosis of their own feeble desires and lusts, or what they believe to be `intensity’ of passion, will not find much in [Samuel] Johnson. He is like Pope and Dryden, Crabbe and Landor, a poet for those who want poetry and not something else, some stay for their own vanity.”

This is Eliot on “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” and might serve as a litmus test to distinguish the classical impulse from the romantic. I almost said the grownup from the childish but that would be neither fair nor entirely accurate. I’ve thought about Eliot’s distinction often while rereading Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry and prose. A passage in Adam Zagajewski’s prose sent me back to him. Herbert’s is public poetry, but never merely public. He is preoccupied with history – Poland’s and the West’s – but his classicism, compounded of learning, tact, tonal reticence and abhorrence of vulgarity, buffers his poems from agitprop and primal scream. In “London” Johnson writes:

“Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.”

And in “Report from the Besieged City” Herbert writes:

“in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the city
along the frontier of our uncertain freedom
I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights
I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks
truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself
the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns”

The full title of Johnson’s poem is “London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.” He wrote it in 1738 when he was 29, and it’s a lesser poem than the later “Vanity” and correspondingly less “classical.” It’s funny (“female atheist”) and feels almost spontaneous, and doesn’t quite fit the image we have of the more mature Johnson.

Herbert’s poem was written in 1982, after the imposition of martial law in Poland, when the poet was almost 60 years old and an internationally respected figure. He might have howled, and people, his compatriots and others, would have listened. Instead, he spoke with dispassionate passion, not with “what they believe to be `intensity’ of passion.” “London” and “Report” are, in Eliot’s words, “poetry and not something else.” Neither can be reduced to potted opinion.
As an amusing diversion, let’s pay one of our periodic visits to Poets at War, a site dedicated to “the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.” Randolph Nesbitt, 47, of Aliso Viejo, Ca., contributes “I Take This War Personal [sic]”:

“I didn’t do that with the
Viet Nam war even though
I was carrying a number
that could be called
I was too busy following
wherever my testicles would lead
I never smelled napalm
only where my fingers
had been
never shot gooks
only anything living in
the ditch that day
and that sad deer
but this war is different
not because of 9/11 either
that debacle will
someday shock even patriots
no, this war has a
dark hand around my neck
I’m older
see the end of my life
and I see with so
much high-def clarity
what we are leaving
for our children to sort out
only some of it can’t be
sorted out
only dealt with
one body
one bullet
one scream
at a time
and when I go
I leave a son
who doesn’t carry
a number
only a curse
for which I helped
form the words”

This is not poetry but some version of Eliot’s “something else.” It has none of Johnson’s brio and elegance, none of Herbert’s moral authority. It’s petulant and vulgar, narcissism masking as principled outrage. Herbert wrote at the conclusion of “The Price of Art,” an essay from Still Life with a Bridle:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

I take this as the opposite of Nesbittian sputtering on one side and Ashbery-esque persiflage, a garrulous, ephemeral drone, on the other.