'Its Super-Ego Has Gone AWOL'

The American philosopher Brand Blanshard delivered the Riecker Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona in 1962. It was published that year as a twenty-three-page pamphlet titled “On Sanity in Thought and Art.” For much of the text Blanshard reviews various twentieth-century fashions in philosophy, including logical positivism and existentialism. The essay gets more interesting when he turns to the arts, especially poetry: 

“Now the trouble with contemporary poetry is that its super-ego has gone AWOL. This has left its practitioners without an ear, and therefore without much music in their souls. Many present-day poems, if printed continuously rather than in lines, would give the impression of being peculiarly cacophonous prose.”

 

A thoughtful reader nods his head in agreement. In 1962, confessional verse was thriving, as were such tribes as Beat, Deep Image, Black Mountain, et al. Free verse reigned and poetry was placed on life supports. Blanshard cites the work of the English poet John Betjeman, who has never successfully crossed the Atlantic. He is, Blanshard writes, “no great poet” but “he must have something that the public is hungry for,” at least in England. He continues:

 

“Robert Frost has written some things that sing; Masefield has written more; but these are survivors of an earlier day. The last poet I can think of whose work was uniformly the product of a fastidious ear was Housman himself, who died in 1936.”

 

The lament is familiar: recent decades have been a sad time for poetry and its readers. “Poetry, no more than art or theology,” Blanshard writes, “can surrender itself to meaninglessness without capitulating at the same time to charlatans.”

 

Naturally, I thought of Joseph Epstein’s much admired and hated essay, "Who Killed Poetry?", published in Commentary twenty-three years after Blanshard’s lecture. It concludes: “One gets a darting glint of it [Wallace Stevens’ ‘a pheasant disappearing in the brush’] every once in a while in the work of the better contemporary poets, but to pretend that that meaty and delectable bird freely walks the land isn’t going to get him out of hiding, not soon, and maybe not ever.” I thought of the usual suspects, including poetry workshops, diminished literacy and the erosion of tradition. Most poets are reflexively followers of the herd, and prosy free verse ranks among Orwell's “smelly little orthodoxies.”

 

Edward Short has published “Joseph Epstein, Yet Again,” a celebration of the essayist and critic in City Journal:

 

“Instead of joining his contemporaries in touting the fashionably vapid, Epstein has always remained true to the voices of the great writers whose books turned him into the discriminating reader we encounter so frequently in his literary criticism. It also enabled him to see the ruinous effect that the academy has had on the writing of poetry. In [‘Who Killed Poetry?’], he nailed what continues to make our contemporary poetry, with few exceptions, so unreadably bad.”