'Cynicism Is Such a Pall on the Arts'

While looking for nothing I found a genuine curiosity: an interview with Tom Wolfe focused on poetry. The interview was conducted in 2011, seven years before the novelist/journalist’s death at age eighty-eight. His favorite poem as a child, he tells Aaron Rench, was Honey Bear (1923) by Dixie Willson. He describes the poem as being written in “a rollicking kind of meter.” “I use a line from it in every book I write” he says. “There’s always a line from this poem.” If you’ve scanned Wolfe’s books and can verify this claim, please be in touch. 

More than many poets, Wolfe is alert to meter: “That rhythm, to me, just went right, as I was mentioning, right to the heart. There’s very little intervention by Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area of the left hemisphere. It just comes, streams, streams, because of the music.”

 

Wolfe goes on to describe other favorites, including Kipling, especially Barracks-Room Ballads (1890): “He was never forgiven for being for the Empire, instead of against it. He was never a poet laureate but he seemed to be because he found exoticism. He found beauty. He found adventure instead of, the only fashionable thing to do about the twenties was to condemn it, you know?”

 

Then Shelley, Byron, Keats (“I like those three better than Wordsworth. Wordsworth was okay in a pinch.”), Poe and Eliot. Wolfe was born more than twenty years before me but his tastes as a young reader overlap heavily with mine – especially Kipling and Eliot. Next comes a name I learned to appreciate only much later:

 

“P]oetry was invaded by, not only the forces of the deaf, but by cynicism. Cynicism is such a pall on the arts. I can remember taking a liking to Walter Savage Landor—a British poet—a little after the Romantic poets, a bit stately, you might say, but pretty good, pretty good stuff. I think I got interested in him in college.”

 

Landor is one of my heroes of prose and verse, a forgotten master: “What really stands out is that he wrote a poem about a clean, well-lighted, space which was a phrase that Hemingway picked up—a clean, well lighted place rather. It may be sheer coincidence.”

 

Wolfe moves on to Balzac and takes a surprisingly charitable view of The Grapes of Wrath. Talk of novels inspires these thoughts:

 

“I just think the salvation of modern poetry—God knows it needs saving—is narrative poetry, rhyming poetry, poetry with a strong meter. Internal rhymes, I think, work so well in poetry. As well as at the end of lines. It’s time for a form of epic poetry. Poetry today doesn’t dare celebrate anything, because that’s too uncynical. I mean you can’t have a ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ now. The charming aristocracy is just not going to put up with it.”

 

That’s Wole’s term for fashionable tastemakers: “the charming aristocracy.” He goes on to praise Vachel Lindsay and his barnburners and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Back to narrative:

 

“I honestly think that poets should think of reporting as part of their job. It’s not just that there’s something nice about verse, it’s that things happen in this world, particularly today, that the greatest poet in the world could never dream up. They are so bizarre. And they’re such rich material that it would improve any poet’s output. I mean even a subject like Paris Hilton.”

 

Aaron Poochigian, are you listening?