December Song: The Ordeal of Poetry in a Secularizing Society

by Samuel Hux (April 2019)

Poetry, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1879

Can Poetry Matter? So asked Dana Gioia almost thirty years ago. I reviewed his book then, respectfully—a rave in fact. Today I would force myself to say yes, it can matter, but that right now it does not matter and will not as long as the mainstream literary world has its way. This is a unique cultural moment: it used to be expected that a cultured person who was not a lover of verse would have, nonetheless, at least some small familiarity with the dominant poetry of his time, and not to have it would indicate a radically compromised degree of cultivation—but, now, ours may be the first literate age in which a lack of familiarity with or concern for the poetry of the moment could instead be considered a mark of a person’s discernment, a radical good cultural sense. I need to disburden myself of some despairing thoughts. I also need a certain permission (indulgence?) from the reader that I may—as the Bard said—“by indirection find directions out.”

Readers of Saul Bellow know what he meant by “short views.” Those short-hand, cryptic, suggestive mini-essays on matters of consequence embedded in the frantically expansive fictions. The focused and precise insights penetrating the no-holds-barred flights of narrative energy characteristic of the rhythm of thought of his novels. But the champion of the short and chiseled must be the German playwright and poet August Stramm, killed in the 1915 bloodbath.

One of Stramm’s more curious of his very curious poems is “Schwermut”—Melancholy. The title seems inadequate for what the poem says, or rather, says now, after the experiences of the century to follow, which made 1914-1918 seem almost like practice.

Schreiten Streben

Leben sehnt

Schauern Stehen

Blicke suchen

Sterben wächst

Das Kommen

Schreit!

Tief

Stummen

Wir.

Verbs used as nouns. Nouns which look like verbs. An adjective (Stummen) which looks like a verb, or a noun. A sense of being and doing artfully confused. All of which I try to suggest with this translation. “Striding. Striving. / Life yearns. / Shuddering. Standing. / Looks seek. / Dying grows. / The Coming / Shrieks! / Deeply / Mute / We.”

Striding and Striving, Shuddering and Standing do not modify adverbially or adjectivally as they might appear to do in English—as I try to indicate with the periodic punctuation of the English that Stramm does not need in his German (since the capitalization designates those words as nouns and nothing else). Not the sense of “while striding and striving life yearns.” Rather, the words are isolate: states of being almost crippled. Human movement is almost motionless, furtive, pitiful: “Life yearns” and “Looks seek”. . . something. What really moves is catastrophe, death: “Sterben wächst,” and the vague Coming (of death, but of more) screams! In our deep recesses we are left frozen. Mute. Stummen.

Sterben is something we do. And it does grow in our time—wächst. It’s one of our biggest enterprises, as Bellow might have said. Odd to think of Bellow, with that exuberant, expansive style (he could never have composed a “Schwermut”), as our poet of death, but he was that, funny-sad or tragic. Tombstones are “postage stamps Death has licked” (Henderson the Rain King). Recall the funeral scene in Seize the Day, or Moses Herzog writing letters to the dead, or Artur Sammler (Mr. Sammler’s Planet) a Lazarus.

Bellow’s The Dean’s December when it was published (1982) was, to my mind, the least satisfying since the first, Dangling Man, which is to say it is a cut above the work of the ordinary good novelist. It has not fared well critically, and not just because that street-urchin-Great-Books style had been relatively muted and the book was as eventless as a plot can be. The book almost invited the proper-thinking to be offended—most specifically by one of its recurrent “short views.” The inner-city, crime-suffering, mostly non-white, unemployed population is “on the fast track for death,” is “meant to die,” is “a people consigned to destruction, a doomed people.” Chicago’s resident apocalyptic Toquevillean could expect a critical Genickschuss (imagine Lueger at nape of neck) as the mod Left assumed that Bellow was blaming the victim. He wasn’t, but . . . well it’s hard to say.

America is “not itself securely attached to life just now.” We are “whirling people,” a culture of “outsiders without insides.” What am I talking, the Dean wonders, “Metaphysics? Epistemology? What?” (I suspect in some sense Religion.) “We do not know how to approach this population. We haven’t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there’s nothing but death before it . . . Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don’t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves . . .” How to characterize this short view? Truth, or merely neurasthenic, apocalyptic, “artistic” indulgence? Or is it an extraordinarily brave enterprise of thinking the worst that we can think as a kind of prophylactic against the worst that we can think?

Rest assured that I don’t really imagine some silent to passive conspiracy / complicity toward a state lumpenrein (I’m only trying to assault the reader’s attention). But if it were even conceivable that we have turned some corner and are resignedly about to rely on our biggest enterprise, Death, as a social mechanism, this would be a large matter to consider. But one question is: would Bellow’s language help us consider or would it only deaden perceptions? I suspect that many who would say the latter beg the question that the social lingo we normally use does not deaden perceptions. Talk about the “culture of poverty” for instance. Not a “culture,” says the Dean, “only a wilderness, and damned monstrous too.” I think the Dean is right that the more respectable language, “underclass,” “anomie of the lumpenproletariat,” etc., blinds us. For bureaucratese (Amtsprache) like “economically redundant people” is too much like the language that Stramm’s countrymen learned to speak. Let’s face it, social-scientese is not a lovely tongue.

A friend once asked in a public venue a naïve-profound question—why doesn’t poetry change the world?—and the knowing crowd was speechless, embarrassed by the naïveté and deaf to the profundity. We have here a matter of different languages: “poetry” and—what shall we call it?—Amtsprache, bureaucratese, academese, programmatic talk? For reasons which may become clearer later I’m going to settle on secularese.

The Lost Voices of World War I, and translations by Alistair Noon can be found on-line, although I am surprised that the poem I have translated above is not among them. Once again: Schreiten Streben / Leben sehnt / Schauern Stehen / Blicke suchen / Sterben wächst / Das Kommen / Schreit! / Tief / Stummen / Wir.

unaccented “rhyme” in the second syllable. Schreiten, Streben, Leben, Stehen, Suchen, Sterben, Kommen, Stummen: the second syllables drive the poem. (Technically in prosody all rhymes must occur in accented syllables.) And the trochaic pattern is violated so to say by the monosyllabic sehnt, wächst, Schreit, Tief, and Wir—so that if one misses the solemn rhythmicality of “Schwermut” one should be ashamed to admit it. In any case, the poem rhymes—and yet doesn’t; the poem does not rhyme—and yet does. And given what the poem is “about,” any less solemn rhythm would seem a blasphemy.

Stramm’s little masterpiece puts me in mind (associations necessitated) of another poem, although what they share is not immediately obvious, Evelyn Hooven’s “Morning Song,” in New English Review, July 2016. (The poems published in NER, by the way, are generally far superior to those chosen for the excessively with-it Poetry sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, once the greatest poetry journal in the Anglosphere but now an aesthetic disgrace.)

Waking, crossing

This threshold

While you sleep there,

In plain November hunger,

Gloom or candid glare,

Something is missing.

Last week’s singing

Holds no longer.

Neither oblique gold

Nor garlands here.

Oh I have wished all year

For what’s astonishing.

hold/gold and hunger/longer falling in separate stanzas, there/glare separated by intervening line, here/year making a couplet. So the poem clearly rhymes, and in another sense doesn’t, if you’ll take my meaning.

Or take another Hooven poem, “Chant for a Lover”

I cradled him in moss one day,

A chill, a moment! He was gone,

A phantom took my love away,

A ghost has cast him into stone.

Fireflies dance their light away,

Dead bones stir in lands unknown,

A phantom bore my love away,

A ghost has wrought him into stone.

Absolute regularity of rhyme: ABAB, ABAB. Absolute metrical regularity in stanza one: iambic tetrameter. Near metrical regularity in stanza two, with spondees (DUM-DUM) introducing first and second lines: Fireflies and Dead bones. Altogether a more traditional, perhaps predictable, form than have “Morning Song” and “Schwermut.” Yet all three are citizen poems in the same republic of poetry as a musical genre nearing extinction.

The “incantatory” is really not bad at all, if we note that “incantation” means not only a magical chanting, a spell, but as Webster’s reminds us, “repetitious words used to heighten an effect.” The italics are mine, but I would add not only repetition of words, but of sounds and rhythms, as in Shelley’s “by the incantation of this verse” (“Ode to the West Wind”). So: Incantatory.

But I should not pretend that I am just now discovering this thought. Is it kosher to quote oneself? I don’t see why not. Should one toot only a borrowed horn? “Doubtless the secularizing of society is a positive thing,” I wrote several years ago. (I’m not sure I’d say that now.) “But the total secularization of the world? For ‘secular’ need not imply merely the disestablishment of the ecclesiastical: it can imply the absence of the mysterious, the magical, the wonder-demanding non-cashable suggestive in the most quotidian aspects of life.” And “The poet has traditionally been one who stood in the way of the secularizing of the world’s body, the mere engineering of it, so to speak. His chosen job was to know that the richness of the world does not respond to barked commands, that it reveals something of itself only after respectful entreaties, oblique strategies (as any quantum physicist knows!), charms, so to say. This required a certain formal indirection . . .”

Yes, charms: incantation, the formal indirection that such poetic values as rhymes and/or rhythm and alternating regularities and irregularities provide. So, all three poems I have reproduced are incantatory.

But it is clear that the virtues of these three poems, by these two relatively unknown poets—neither one a household name—are not now, in the poetry and critical sub-culture, broadly cherished, a sub-culture which to its own dishonor has little use for cónsequéntial cádencés. If this were not the case, how could the following disgraceful phenomenon occur?

The winning entry for the first annual (2010) Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize had none of these values, was graced by no poetic virtues. Not incantatory in the least, no way, not at all. The judges should have been ashamed to make Kunitz turn over in his grave. The first line is the title, or the title rather, separated in the text, serves as the first line.

Another Thing I’d Rather Not Know About Myself

Is what a good soldier I’d make. A man

and woman come into the coffee shop

and talk about the dinner party menu

like it’s the divorce settlement. I watch

them sit down, each ready to write

and argue, and he suggests jambalaya

and she says she’s okay with that

to which he says you don’t sound okay

with that and to answer she only asks

how it’s spelled so she can type the decision

into her laptop, finally . . .

Brendan Gill once reviewed a film by summarizing the first few minutes and concluding, “I hope the rest of the movie turned out all right.”

I defy anyone to tell me how “Another Thing I’d Rather Not Know About Myself” differs at all from simply barely competent prose, the quality of language you would use if you were explaining to someone, somewhat unintelligently, things about yourself you’d prefer not to know. It only looks like (does not sound like, sing like) a poem, lineated as it is. To make an effort in its direction I might note that each line has on average ten syllables (actually eight to thirteen) so that its formal requirement is traditional syllable-count as in some old odes. But, hell—give me a break—I could lineate the essay I’m writing into ten-syllable lines and call it a “critical ode” or some such! Another thing about “Another Thing”: it is entirely paraphraseable—because it reads quite simply like a paraphrase, a prose paraphrase.

If the Kunitz-winner’s entry seems to some a poem—as circumstances dictate that it must seem—it is because it strikes some as so normal: which says much about the judgments, preferences, standards, aesthetic definitions that currently corrupt the enterprise of “poetry.” It must be the case that the lie Karl Shapiro suggested years ago (in a book entitled—confessionally?—In Defense of Ignorance), still has currency, that there is no essential difference between poetry and prose.

It must say something about the poetry sub-culture (notice I do not write poetic sub-culture) that Williams was much more respected, admired, and rewarded in the literary world than the incalculably more talented Dana Gioia. It is not simply that Gioia is a serious Roman Catholic of the old stamp—although that doesn’t help in a sub-culture secular in its bones. Nor is it simply that Gioia’s political conservatism cannot be ignored in a sub-culture where illiberal liberalism is a secular faith—Gioia did after all serve as head of the National Endowment for the Arts under Bush II. Rather, the trouble is that something like the following—“So much of what we live goes on inside— / The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. What we conceal / Is always more than what we dare confide. / Think of the letters that we write our dead”—that something like Gioia’s “Unsaid,” if heard, will never be mistaken for prose. Or perhaps I am mistaken: I am not sure that most of our mainstream literati can hear.

Most American literati would be offended by an association of poetry with a religion, any religion, even when the association takes the form of an innocent analogy. (“Innocent,” hah!) That’s too bad—for I must offend much more seriously.

My view is consistent with Gioia’s, but differently weighted. I suspect—I would bet my soul on it—that it is no accident that the paucity of poets actively alive to the aesthetic traditions of churches graced with a sacramental and ritualistic life-blood (Roman Catholic not excluding Episcopal), or alive to any denomination for which creation is not mere calculable molecules but is a divine gift to be reverently celebrated. . . it is no accident that this sad state of affairs is co-existent with the prosaic linguistic banality that passes as poetry in our mainstream literary precincts. The liturgies of the church—whether we’re talking about the language of prayer and celebration or the physical ritualistic behavior of the communicants—were a kind of music, either musical language or a kind of musicality incarnate in simple or elaborate gesture, a kind of choreography as it were. Take this away . . . or throw this away (a more exact way to put it), and . . . need I finish this sentence? Taking another tack: Try to imagine literature in English unnourished by the rhythms and cadences, the simple elegance and the breath-taking elevations, the astonishing poetry of the King James Version of the Bible . . . and what would you have? The wasteland that constitutes the vast majority acreage of the contemporary American republic of poetry—that’s what.

The late Sherwin Nuland. M.D.—“Shep” to his friends (I never met him, but without him this essay would never have been thought of)—was no garden-variety med-school professor: author not only of texts such as Origins of Anesthesia and Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, but Maimonides and Leonardo de Vinci as well . . . and How We Die. Yes, how indeed. I heard Nuland speak in New Haven in 2004 as a member of a panel on “Beginnings and Endings: where do we come from, why are we here and where are we going?” One of his speculations was about the hope for an afterlife as an impetus for religious belief (yes we all know that), and along the way he quoted the poet John Hollander to the effect that all languages have two tongues, the everyday and the poetic. Yes, we all know that as well?

metaphysical function. Or to put it another way, real poetry has a metaphysical existence beyond what any specific poet might intend—for, as I have argued already, the genre precedes, outlives, and “out-exists” any single practitioner—and is by its own demands nothing less than a prayer. We don’t want the sounds to end . . . because we don’t want it to end.

Shelley as he chanted his ode was in all likelihood not conscious of the ode’s “intention,” even as he wrote “by the incantation of this verse, / . . . Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!”—that December, so to speak, does not mean the end of time: “O, Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Now, my question is: What happens to a culture when its “poetry” has no respect for the ear, is no longer incantatory, is no longer rhythmically and sonorously repetitive, is without the consequential cadences, and settles for being something a quite deal less than prayer? That’s a rhetorical question.

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

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