Good Poetry, Bad Poetry, and Good Poetry Read Badly

by G. Kim Blank (February 2015)

“One great poet is a masterpiece of Nature which another not only ought to study but must study.” 
—Percy Shelley, from the Preface to Prometheus Unbound

 

1. A Life Before Us

Without venturing too far into mired arguments about taste and aesthetics—or fully engaging critiques of canonization that descend from political correctness—is it difficult to recognize great poetry? Were there that many poets in the times of Donne, Herbert, Dryden, and Pope who wrote nearly so well? Robert Southey is obviously not in the same league as his arch-detractor, Byron. Hopkins trumps Patmore every time. How many poets possess Wordsworth’s deep eloquence? 

                                  And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens—their significance is palpable, and more so with every reading. Spender, a decent poet, does not stand up to Auden, an exceptional poet. Then there are a few magisterial figures like Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. Marianne Moore has rightly risen (and may still be rising), while John Frederick Nims (you’re right: who?) seems to have rightly sunk altogether. And in our own time, and still among us, are Derek Walcott and John Ashbery, who unquestionably lean toward posterity, with Geoffrey Hill standing at the gates, despite what seems to be some willful obscurity in his later work. Seamus Heaney, sadly, is no longer with us, but his place among the greats has been certain for some time now. 

To massage Eliot’s pronouncements on the metaphysical poets, great poetry often turns thought into forceful, profound experience, rather than offering mere rumination or sentiment, which is why—and Eliot is surely right—work that may be poetically sincere is not always poetically urgent, sweeping, or reflective in ways that cause sustained reflection and reaction. So too may great poets be motivated by occasion, but the best are never tied to it, and often overheard in their work are intricate, discerning, and sometimes playful conversations struck with other formidable voices and ideas beyond their time and place, anticipating significant conversations to come. And, once more borrowing from Eliot (who suggested that strong literary theft was preferable to weak borrowing), great poetry is often recognized in advance of understanding it.

Such poetry thus presses us to read in our own here-and-now, and not in or limited to the then-and-there of the poetry’s originating context.

To “recover” meaning seems to suggest that we return the poem to its own time in order to find what it was and can only be, as if to say, “This is what it meant,” rather than “This is what it means.” In the end, to focus on there-and-then poetry means caring less about whether and why the poetry is any good. Yes, perhaps some history lesson can be picked up along the way, but that is not why great poetry is crucial to who we are, to seeing the world—and to (hold your breath) an encounter with great beauty. As humans, we are the expressing creature, and poetry is, in a way, the apex of how we express ourselves . . . all those words, all those sounds, all those rhythms, all those meanings. We are homo loquens, but we are also homo poetica. 

Equally narrowing, though frequently ingenious, are top-down readings of poetry, which necessarily privilege the discursive thrust of the theory, ideology, or special interest over the possibly expansive power of the poetry. For example, reading Walcott as a postcolonial poet impounds his best work. Reading Heaney as a regional poet restrains his critical and pressing relationship to the work of others as diverse and resonant as Milosz and Hughes. Reading Emily Dickinson through a “gendered” lens narrows her stirring, sharp eccentricity: it does not strengthen her voice but limits it. Elizabeth Bishop, in her famous refusal to have her poetry published in women’s-only anthologies, makes the point: “to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art.”

Harold Bloom, at his best when in an inimical mood, has for some time now championed something like this attitude: he condemns “the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists” for diverting us from what strong poetry possesses: “complex imaginings” and “aesthetic and cognitive difficulty.” He concludes, “The only pragmatic aesthetic I know is that some poems intrinsically are better than others.”     

This slides toward the concomitant practice: where Bloom condemns these methods that amount to reading poetry badly, what becomes clear is that these other styles of reading allow for and even invite the reading of bad poetry. Helen Vendler, perhaps the poetry arbiter for our age, has clear views about poetic worth: in a relatively recent review of a major anthology of twentieth-century poetry that included a whopping 175 poets, she dryly suggests that much of this poetry will “seep back into the archives of sociology.” She adds, “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading.” She hasn’t changed her mind for at least a decade and a half, having previously noted, “I think there’s nothing to be said about mediocre poetry.” And Christopher Ricks—never shy in judging both poetry and criticism—has come to make much the same point: “You don’t get great literary criticism about a poet who isn’t much good.”

All of this begs the question: If you read bad poetry or read good poetry badly, can you say much that matters?

2.  A Dirty Little Question

I placed a jar in Tennessee,? 
And round it was, upon a hill.? 
It made the slovenly wilderness? 
Surround that hill.

3.  That Other Scaffolding

Perhaps there are a couple of ways to briefly think though a few aspects of this problem of finding meaning in and recognizing great poetry. Let the first be called The Vendler Test. In an interview in the Paris Review in 1996, and responding to a question about an imagined audience for her criticism, she said:

I think of my audience in part as being the poet. What I would hope would be that if Keats read what I had written about the ode “To Autumn,” he would say, “Yes, that is the way I wanted it to be thought of. And, Yes, you have unfolded what I had implied,” or something like that. It would not strike the poet, I hope, that there was a discrepancy between my description of the work and the poet’s own conception of the work. I wouldn’t be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, “What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.”

The second test brings us closer to the issue of why we read great poetry and how we might recognize great poetry: If a particularized history is removed from a poem, or if a privileging theory or special interest is not employed to solicit the poem’s meaning, do we still have an ever-urgent work, a poem always-already for a profitable reading out of its own originating contexts?

I met a traveller from an antique land?
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone?
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,?
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,?
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,?
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read?
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,?
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:?
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:?
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare?
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Back to the question: Do we still have a strong poem when we take away all that other scaffolding? Without question we do. “Ozymandias” joins other works that find striking, original ways to position human power and vanity against time and nature’s power, and it does so in a way so that (to echo Auden) meaning and form profitably, exceptionally meet. In doing so, the poem—a great poem—reminds us of something we shouldn’t forget, and now we won’t.

The matter of great poetry is the way it can so well express ways of seeing and feeling and thinking, new ways that will matter no matter when the work was written or when it will be read. That is why we should read, study, and teach great poetry: it often offers us something greater than ourselves while also offering so much about ourselves. 

 

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G. Kim Blank has published widely in both academic and in popular venues. He teaches at the University of Victoria.

 

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