What to do about poetry?

The lyric poets are probably the most difficult part of the Great Books

I’m mindful in extolling the Great Books of not falling into the trap of what John Pistelli called “philosophy supremacy”. Which is to say, I’ve got this great big list of books, but lately I’ve just been talking about Aristotle and Freud and Nietzsche. And that’s because it is, frankly, a lot easier to talk about non-fiction. I wrote an entire essay on this subject, in fact (I should probably apologize to my one remaining book club though, as our discussion of The Golden Ass was exemplary and wonderful).

Nonfiction has ideas in it, stuff you can hold in your mind. You can paraphrase the ideas and chew over them, follow them through to their natural implications. Imaginative literature doesn’t really have ideas. It has characters, actions, and details. The closest imaginative literature gets to ideas are: a) themes; and b) moral conflicts. The nature of a theme is kinda hard to describe, actually—a theme is an idea suggested by the book, one which recurs over and over. If the book treats its themes well, then it runs through a number of variations on the theme, developing it in natural ways. Middlemarch is a perfect example. The theme is what spouses owe to each other, and what contribution women make to men’s greatness, and it runs through this theme with three ‘(potential) marriages: Dorothea to Causubon, Rosamand to Tertius Lydgate, and Fred Percy to Mary Garth.

The themes of a fiction differ from the ideas of a nonfiction in that themes are all subject and no predicate, all question and no answer. In Middlemarch you see that a woman’s love can ennoble her spouse (Fred and Mary), but that some people simply can’t be loved in a certain way, or that certain expectations become very oppressive (i.e. Causubon is ultimately tormented by Dorothea’s admiration). There is no ultimate solution here to the problem of right fit—some people simply aren’t meant for each other, but it’s hard to truly know beforehand who is meant for whom.

Discussing theme is very fruitful, but it still feels a bit ancillary to the experience of reading the book. You could not read Nietzsche without catching the idea that a great man creates their own values; but you could easily read Middlemarch without consciously catching these marriage themes. The themes are inextricable from the greatness of the book, but a conscious explication of them isn’t particularly necessary. So if whenever you discuss imaginative literature you only discuss theme, it can seem like you’re doing the book a disservice.

These problems become even more insuperable when discussing poetry. What do we talk about when we talk about poetry and the Great Books?

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I know many contemporary academic poets (i.e. the kind with MFAs, who publish in literary journals), and they all seem a bit perplexed by the death of poetry. In the past, poetry was the most senior of the arts—not just the most important, but the most read and understood. Illiterate people enjoyed poetry! Shakespeare’s plays were in poetry! Prose was restricted to histories and philosophical texts—stuff for experts. Anything you wanted regular folx to read and enjoy, you put into poetry.

Now it’s the opposite. People are afraid of poetry. They’re afraid they “won’t get it”. That’s certainly how I felt about poetry rather recently.

I don’t think poetry is really as dead as people make it out to be. I mean, isn’t contemporary music basically poetry? Historically, a lot of poetry was set to music (e.g. Ancient Greek lyric verse was verse accompanied on the lyre). I guess the question here hinges on some arcane discussion of whether the music or the verse is preeminent in modern music. The answer is clearly…it depends? In much rap music the verse is senior, in most pop music the music is senior. Anyway, that’s not important, because I am not discussing the modern fate of poetry in whatever form, I am discussing whether modern people can read the poetry in the Great Books.

The thing is, what modern people dislike about poetry is that they can’t really understand or retain it. Like, in many cases, it’s difficult to understand what the poem is about on a literal level. Take Wallace Stevens, one of my more favorite poets. I’ve read Harmonium a bunch of times, and I doubt that I could quote a single line from you, and I also have no idea what most of the poems mean. Take one of my favorite poems “Snow Man”:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

When I googled this, I got the wikipedia article, which says something about epistemology? Like, that it’s very hard to not be sad in the winter, even though the winter is, by itself, meaningless and emotionless. I totally buy that, but I wouldn’t really have gotten that from reading the poem. And I also think that doesn’t really capture the power of the poem, which lies precisely in that evocation of the person who is untouched by winter—the person who is “cold a long time” and is able to behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”. It’s a haunting poem.

Nonetheless, despite loving it, I couldn’t have quoted a line to to you until I looked it up, not even the line “one must have a mind of winter”, which is a very famous line! And I don’t think I’m a poor reader of poetry. It’s just that reading a poem is a fleeting experience: there isn’t a lot to hold onto and convert into memory. The themes are too weak, the ideas are nonexistent, there are no characters and actions. You only have sounds and images. And that’s kind of okay? It’s just one of life’s many evanescent experiences.

BUT, the poetry in the Great Books usually isn’t even lyric poetry, much less the kind of modernist, very private poetry we see in Wallace Stevens. Most of the poetry in the Great Books is epic poetry or verse drama. It’s The Iliad or The Odyssey or Richard III or Paradise Lost. And all of those things do have themes, characters, actions, and all the accoutrements that keep us grounded in the novel. So it’s very easy to discuss those works the same way we’d discuss, say, Middlemarch. For instance, it’s simple to contrast the civilized Trojans and the barbaric Greeks—to think about how, for instance, at the last moment, when he sees that Achilles has been possessed by the Gods, Hector turns and runs, desperate to escape, and Achilles chases him down—a scene made more poignant because Priam has just lamented, saying “I behold thee slain / and stretch’d beneath the fury of that plain”.

Hector runs three times around the walls, while the Gods debate his fate, with Zeus asking that they spare him:

"Unworthy sight! the man beloved of heaven,
Behold, inglorious round yon city driven!
My heart partakes the generous Hector's pain;
Hector, whose zeal whole hecatombs has slain,
Whose grateful fumes the gods received with joy,
From Ida's summits, and the towers of Troy:
Now see him flying; to his fears resign'd,
And fate, and fierce Achilles, close behind.
Consult, ye powers! ('tis worthy your debate)
Whether to snatch him from impending fate,
Or let him bear, by stern Pelides slain,
(Good as he is) the lot imposed on man."

Ultimately Athena decides to do the dirty work of leading him on and takes the appearance of Deiphobus, one of Hector’s brothers, and pushes him to fight.

It’s a powerful scene (is scene the right word?), and it is thematically rich in precisely the way we most know how to discuss. Hector has been supreme amongst the Trojan warriors—he is the one hero who seems able to match Ajax and Agammemnon and the horde of warriors on the other side. Nonetheless, at the final moment, he flees, fearing for his life. And why not? What worth is bravery—he knows that if he dies, so does his city—so why not run, then, and try to survive? The Gods don’t necessarily hate him for it—they respect him as preeminent and some woulddo what they could do save him—Apollo even gives strength to his feet, allowing hector to outpace Achilles, until the God is persuaded to withdraw his aid.

My question here is, how can we relate to this scene as poetry? Is it worthwhile to make the attempt? Should we change how we discuss it versus how we discuss a prose fiction?

I’m still not sure of the answer, to be honest.

When I started reading the Great Books, I was utterly untutored in poetry, either contemporary or ancient, lyric or epic. I’ve learned about poetry by reading it. And when I’ve read poetry, I’ve always more or less sat down, book in hand, and read it through. Sometimes, as when I read Middle English poetry, I recite it out loud to myself, but that’s it. I find the poetry in the Great Books to be freeing, because it’s not clear that it was composed with a lot of care (besides first 18 lines of the General Prologue, are there any truly great lines in Chaucer). The poetic works in the Great Books are often so long that it’s clear you can only digest them in great gulps anyway—unlike with lyric poetry, it’s simply impossible to slow down and amble amongst the hawthornes.

But that merely buries the question, rather than obviating it, am I reading this poetry as poetry? Am I truly getting from it what I ought to?

The test comes when it’s time to read lyric poetry, which I, personally, find much more difficult to enjoy. I’ve been reading, lately, a volume of Cavafy given to me by a friend. I like it quite a bit, but when it’s not in front of me, I’d be hard-pressed to describe him as writer: he seems to write a lot about the Classical past, but in a much earthier, more lived-in way, with a focus more on regular folks (Cavafy was a Phanariot Greek, living in Alexandria during the time of the late Ottoman Empire). How do I take the treasure from his poetry? How do I turn it into something that I can keep, something worth discussing, something I’ve learned from?

I dunno!

I’ve found that self-educating myself in literature involves reading a lot of things I only barely understand or only barely enjoy. Lyric poetry still falls more into the category of “things I ought to like” rather than “things I actually enjoy”. As you know, I don’t recommend reading things one dislikes, but I do think it’s worthwhile to push oneself. And if that sounds like a very “eat your vegetables” approach to literature, well…that’s exactly what it is. If taste didn’t need to be educated, the concept of the Great Books wouldn’t exist.

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Addenda

The blog has been doing really well lately. I think I posted last week or the week before that we were approaching 300 subscribers. Well it’s blown through that lately. Kind of incredible, to be honest. No idea where you all have been coming from. It’s a lot of pressure. I’ve never worked on anything before where I felt like, wow, I need to capitalize on this! Usually I have a leisurely pace to my work—I figure when I’m done, it’ll fall limply onto the marketplace and go unnoticed.

But with this, it seems like the more effort I put in, the better it does. Having a regular writing schedule has been great (Tues/Thurs, with a paid post every other saturday). I’m pretty sure that I can keep writing on this subject forever, but who knows? I do make an effort not to write things that are trite or obvious, and I kill many more ideas than I actually write.

Back in the before-fore, I briefly did stand-up comedy, and my tight five about being a bisexual man, and the differences between dating men and dating women. The jokes killed. Actually, what kind of spoiled open mikes for me is that I was just doing so well—it wasn’t a challenge.

I never would’ve dreamed that this topic was remotely interesting to anyone, if I hadn’t mentioned to some of the women in my standup comedy class that I was bisexual. They were fascinated. It was so strange to them. But I built off their confusions and developed a pretty decent routine.

Sometimes I wonder in writing this blog am I doing the same thing? Do I even believe all this stuff I say about the existence of some knowable metaphysical truth? Or is that just what I need to say because it makes my project easier and more effective? Hard to say! I don’t think people are unitary. I think everyone we’ve been is still inside of us, waiting to emerge. And there’s definitely a part of me that is, and has been, a complete nihilist, rather dismissive of any claims to exterior truth. So I don’t think what I write in this blog is a lie, precisely, but it does have the potential to become schtick.¹ Something to watch out for!

1. I have a jewish friend who is so fascinated that I, and my characters, sometimes use Yiddish words (nebbishy, schmo, schmiel, mensch, etc). But how can you not? I mean…what else did Jerry Seinfeld live and die for if not to give us all our Yiddish vocabulary.