'Poetry Is an Art'

Most bores are not aware they are boring. It’s not always their fault and the impulse to tell them they are boring, though understandable, is almost always a waste of time. You can’t make people interesting who value their humorlessness, bad taste and stridency. 

I woke the other morning internally singing these words, perhaps left over from a dream: ‘’I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.” I still thrill at these lines, some fifty years after I first encountered them in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). They are the opening to Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (c. 1650). It’s the casualness of “the other night” coupled with Vaughan’s glimpse of eternity that rouses and delights me. Mystics often resort to inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language, so they yawp, the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be recounting this morning’s breakfast. His tone is calm, methodical, almost journalistic, the meter regular and yet conversational.

 

These are lessons lost on most contemporary poets. Their verse is prose and thus defies memorization, unlike Vaughan’s, whose poem I never set out to memorize but did. In a recent review of a volume by Jonathan Chaves, the poet Catharine Savage Brosman writes:

 

“To say that poetry in America now, though honored by public budgetary support and widely heralded, is largely superficial and ephemeral is not unfair. . . . Like other rhetorical performances, a poetic flash in the pan, a pleasing act of verbal prestidigitation, a strident accusation of injustice, a cry on the rooftops for change may attract admiration and assent; they are not in themselves good poetry. Poetry is an art.”

 

To intentionally write badly and impose it on others is the definition of artistic narcissism and, incidentally, tedium. Many have convinced themselves they are writing poetry. Trying to argue them out of their delusion is a waste of time. The effort would require them to rehabilitate their sensibilities, and that’s a lot of work. They want the leftover Romantic “prestige” associated with being a poet without the learning, discipline and dedication required. Brosman again:

 

“Nearly empty of sense, solipsistic, without appealing use of language, much contemporary writing called poetry is imitative, facile, accusatory. Of course, bad poetry has always been around. But new means of disseminating it, wealth to underwrite and popularize it, and the general degradation of culture have made a difference.”

 

In another recent essay, “Poetry and Western Civilization,” Brosman writes: “Poetry belongs to those enterprises which examine and preserve the past, while sifting and shaping facts to create understanding, so that human beings may know themselves and comprehend their destiny better.”