'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. 

I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and aesthetic defense of formal verse, Timothy Steele writes:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share in those qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

 

Steele is no stiff-necked reactionary. One page earlier he writes:

 

“The poetry of the past can elevate and console us. But it cannot do this as fully and richly as poetry of the present. Only the poetry of the present speaks of our life and time. And though the poetry of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson can connect us with the past, only the poetry of our time can connect us with the future and give us the indispensable hope that something that we say will matter to our descendants and will enable them to live more intelligently and happily than otherwise they might. Only the poetry of our time can offer the prospect that, after we and those we love have returned to dust, some reader somewhere will be moved by lines that bear witness to us and will commit our words to heart and mind that we may live again.”