Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month

[TranquillityBase]

Title of column in NYTimes published on Dec. 29th:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opini...Position=1

Since you probably cannot read this brief essay without a subscription, I'm going to give some quotes (fair use! copyright-wise):


Modest as the festivities* have been, I am certain that in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration. This seems to me true for the simple reason that poetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it.....

*referring to the anniversary of the publication of The Wasteland


I’m hardly the first person to suggest that poetry is dead. But the autopsy reports have never been conclusive about the cause. From cultural conservatives we have heard that poetry died because, for political reasons, we stopped teaching the right kinds of poems, or teaching them the right way. (This was more or less the view of the critic Harold Bloom, who blamed what he called the “school of resentment” for the decline in aesthetic standards.)

Another argument is that the high modernist poets and their followers produced works of such formidable difficulty that the implicit compact between artist and audience was irrevocably broken....

.... modern life, disenchanted by science and mediated by technology, has made that* kind of relationship with the natural world impossible, even if we are keen botanists or hikers. Absent the ability to see nature this way — as the dwelling place of unseen forces, teeming with images to be summoned and transformed, as opposed to an undifferentiated mass of resources to be either exploited or preserved — it is unlikely that we will look for those images in the work of Homer or Virgil, and even less likely that we will create those images ourselves....

*his main point is that we are so cut off from the pre-modern connection to nature, that writing poetry has become impossible for us


With his almost cinematic montages, Eliot created a body of work that is unique in English poetry for its simultaneous ability to lay bare both the personal anxieties of its author and the sense of mechanized horror that had overtaken an entire civilization. In juxtaposing automobiles, typewriters, gramophones, popular lyrics and modern slang with allusions to Jacobean dramatists and half-parodic forays into more recognizably “poetic” language, Eliot created an idiom that captured the disappearance of the pre-modern worldview.

Eliot was successful — so successful that he remade all of English poetry, or what has passed for it since, in his image. The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot....


What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.....


For poetry to reappear, the muses would have to return from wherever they fled after we banished them. Among the conditions for their return would be, I suspect, the end of the internet and many other things that most of us value far more than we do poetry....

His argument is not very convincing, but if you can read the whole thing, you might find it interesting, if only because it is slightly provocative.

[CRNDLSM]

You should make a cut up of it, as an argument, then send it to them as tribute, maybe random poetry challenge #54

[RiverNotch]

I love Bloom. Currently reading/rereading Shakey's plays (Dicky III died right at the stroke of midnight for me. Happy New Year!) with Dr. Johnson and Mr.'s Hazlitt and Bloom for my tutors. I find Bloom's whole "school of resentment" angle a bit disingenuous, about as much as when some proponents of that same school seek to (for example) stop reading Shakey wholesale, but I get the impression Mr. Bloom would admit to being a curmudgeon or a provocateur in this regard, and both those kinds of people have their place (though preferably not in Malacañang). It's his "anxiety of influence" that I value, in relation to this article, and I constantly confess to feeling some of that angst with regards to Eliot.

Eliot was definitely one of my biggest influences, starting out. In seeking to find a voice that lives outside of outmoded meter or sub-English pop, it was Whitman, Eliot, and Louise Gluck that first greeted me as tutors, with Gluck and Whitman existing in relation to Eliot -- Whitman the teacher, Gluck the student. And as I've found out that the Anglicanism-turned-Anglo-Catholicism I once admired was actually predicated on prejudices I actually loathe, prejudices against which I have been induced to turn to Orthodoxy (though, in an ironic twist of fate, the local priest that confirmed me is properly pro-Marcos, while the missionary priest he's most working with peddles Putinite propaganda), my love for him has turned to ardent hate. A spurned lover's hate, not least because of how sexually liberated Whitman is, or how Gluck is both a woman and a Jew: their voices are just so much more welcoming, with Whitman by Bloom's estimation being the most canonical of this trinity. Between me and toxic Eliot was a toxic relationship that never materialized because of the welcome arms of others, one of whom is both his better and more open to the prospect, although of course I continue to acknowledge the anxiety born from losing him, just as I keep remembering my Southern Baptist school upbringing or my high school crush (who I learned too late had gone to the church the school was an arm of xD).

All this is to say, Eliot's overrated. Mightily, mightily overrated. Not least because I don't think poetry's dead, it's just found (or is presently searching for) a new medium or media. The dramatic poets of Ancient Greece had to incorporate choruses and depict the action only of a single day, their medium being necessarily a community ritual. Ancient Rome's metropolitan sophistication made "ritual" more "theatre" in the modern sense of the word, and it was the likes of Ben Jonson and, everyone's favourite, Christopher Marlowe that made contemporary dramatic poetry more of a written medium, at least by my understanding. Now it's moving on again to film -- see Andrei Tarkovsky's work, with his father being an acclaimed Russian poet. For lyric poetry, it's the phonograph that "killed" that, or rather tranformed bards and troubadours into rockstars, rappers, and folkies; for epic poetry, well, you have mass literacy making that an increasingly rare medium, and no honest lover of the written word would fault that. Just as no honest reader of poetry would wish away the likes of libgen or project gutenberg or wikimedia commons, giving access to poor sods like me books that aren't even shipped to my country.

---

Not to deny anyone's God-given right to cultural pessimism. Only those poets Bloom considered more canonical than Eliot -- Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoi, of course Shakespeare -- were perhaps so canonical because they weren't so pessimistic. Heck, even in the apocalyptic visions of Dante and Becket, I don't intimate apocalyptism with regards to Western culture. To persons and communities, perhaps, but the whole history of Western culture, and by extension poetry in general, is one of continuous self-revision. If Rome hadn't fallen, wherefore he who'd "small Latin and less Greek"? And yet we mourn the fall of Rome, not because of that mere scutcheon we'd lost, "culture", but because of the people who needlessly suffered in its fall's wake....at least, we who mourn that strive to be more just.

[busker]

“The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot....”

I don’t get that impression from reading Ted Kooser or Ruth Stone

[TranquillityBase]

All this is to say, Eliot's overrated. Mightily, mightily overrated. Not least because I don't think poetry's dead, it's just found (or is presently searching for) a new medium or media. The dramatic poets of Ancient Greece had to incorporate choruses and depict the action only of a single day, their medium being necessarily a community ritual. Ancient Rome's metropolitan sophistication made "ritual" more "theatre" in the modern sense of the word, and it was the likes of Ben Jonson and, everyone's favourite, Christopher Marlowe that made contemporary dramatic poetry more of a written medium, at least by my understanding. Now it's moving on again to film -- see Andrei Tarkovsky's work, with his father being an acclaimed Russian poet. For lyric poetry, it's the phonograph that "killed" that, or rather tranformed bards and troubadours into rockstars, rappers, and folkies; for epic poetry, well, you have mass literacy making that an increasingly rare medium, and no honest lover of the written word would fault that. Just as no honest reader of poetry would wish away the likes of libgen or project gutenberg or wikimedia commons, giving access to poor sods like me books that aren't even shipped to my country.

Hey Rivernotch,

Thanks for your whole essay....if you are not a writer of essays, you should be...anyway, of the many profound things you point out, I highlighted the one that made me sit up and listen.  

I sampled (a very small sample) of Instagram poetry.  Most was terrible but then I came across one that was really amazing.  So there must be many more out there, though I hope something better than Instagram is poetry's next haven.  Then again it may already be out there and in a form not yet discerned by my feeble vision.

TqB

---

“The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot....”

I don’t get that impression from reading Ted Kooser or Ruth Stone

Yes, and I think his defining a "default register" for poetry since 1920 is a generality too far, even limiting it to English, as he does somewhere else in the essay.

[busker]

I think the larger question is why the general public hasn't heard of Ocean Vuong or Ted Kooser, while Tennyson or Eliot were much better known in their times.
And here, I disagree with that assertion in the first place.
The average factory worker or farmhand, to say nothing of gardeners, wouldn't have heard of Tennyson. Or if he had, it'd have been when Tennyson had already become a public celebrity at 80. The average man in industrial age Britain would've worked his 12 hours and have spent his leisure time at the pub and the football.
Tennyson and Eliot loom large in the Anglosphere because they have been made to loom large through universal school education, and later, widespread university education in the 20th century. It all worked very well for the first few generations. The canon was small, and universally accepted. But in a finite number of schooling years, and in minutes within that that can be earmarked for literature, you can fit in Dylan Thomas only if you exclude someone else.

It's quite as simple as that. The poets after Eliot don't feature as much in the popular imagination because there was never any space for them in the syllabus.

[RiverNotch]

I think the larger question is why the general public hasn't heard of Ocean Vuong or Ted Kooser, while Tennyson or Eliot were much better known in their times.
And here, I disagree with that assertion in the first place.
The average factory worker or farmhand, to say nothing of gardeners, wouldn't have heard of Tennyson. Or if he had, it'd have been when Tennyson had already become a public celebrity at 80. The average man in industrial age Britain would've worked his 12 hours and have spent his leisure time at the pub and the football.
Tennyson and Eliot loom large in the Anglosphere because they have been made to loom large through universal school education, and later, widespread university education in the 20th century. It all worked very well for the first few generations. The canon was small, and universally accepted. But in a finite number of schooling years, and in minutes within that that can be earmarked for literature, you can fit in Dylan Thomas only if you exclude someone else.

It's quite as simple as that. The poets after Eliot don't  feature as much in the popular imagination because there was never any space for them in the syllabus.

I find this kinda beautifully said, too. I'm under the impression that, in America, they're working to include other minority voices to the canon, but the work seems rather scattershot, not because of any faults in the poets, but because there doesn't seem to be much concerted effort in who should these poets be. There could also be some sort of whitewashing going on, with the likes of Dumas being black perhaps not being well known enough, or maybe America just isn't there yet when it comes to culture: the way America's education, especially in the arts, is underfunded might be emblematic of how the country lost the plot when it comes to having erudite citizens being both cultured and specialized. But really I have no idea.

Here, I'm under the impression poets aren't that big, simply because most people are too poor -- too busy and ill-educated, what with corruption and even violence between higher ups being ubiquitous -- to seriously take in Shakespeare or even just Balagtas, much less someone like Conchitina Cruz. Though I'd imagine it was much the same in the past, and one reason why we have a small canon (or at least, why high schools and below have a small canon) was because there was not enough people reading to preserve certain works, however great they were. A better attitude than lamenting the "death" of this or that culture is probably to be grateful Langston Hughes or the Perle poet or Sappho even survived the ages.

[TranquillityBase]

 you can fit in Dylan Thomas only if you exclude someone else. 

I find this kinda beautifully said, too. I'm under the impression that, in America, they're working to include other minority voices to the canon, but the work seems rather scattershot, not because of any faults in the poets, but because there doesn't seem to be much concerted effort in who should these poets be. There could also be some sort of whitewashing going on, with the likes of Dumas being black perhaps not being well known enough, or maybe America just isn't there yet when it comes to culture: the way America's education, especially in the arts, is underfunded might be emblematic of how the country lost the plot when it comes to having erudite citizens being both cultured and specialized. But really I have no idea.

Beautifully said, but I wish Dylan Thomas, I hope Dylan Thomas will always be in the Canon.  I think Busker knew that   Out of curiosity, I did a fruitless google search on most commonly taught poets, but came up empty.  So how would you define the canon?  I was going to look in my son's enormous college poetry anthology, but I can't lay hands on it at the moment.

Black poetry had yet to be included when i was a college student who took a lot of poetry classes (early 70s).  When I went back to school in 89, I did get introduced to Amira Baraki.  But I sought it out on my own since then.

[RiverNotch]

 you can fit in Dylan Thomas only if you exclude someone else. 

I find this kinda beautifully said, too. I'm under the impression that, in America, they're working to include other minority voices to the canon, but the work seems rather scattershot, not because of any faults in the poets, but because there doesn't seem to be much concerted effort in who should these poets be. There could also be some sort of whitewashing going on, with the likes of Dumas being black perhaps not being well known enough, or maybe America just isn't there yet when it comes to culture: the way America's education, especially in the arts, is underfunded might be emblematic of how the country lost the plot when it comes to having erudite citizens being both cultured and specialized. But really I have no idea.

Beautifully said, but I wish Dylan Thomas, I hope Dylan Thomas will always be in the Canon.  I think Busker knew that   Out of curiosity, I did a fruitless google search on most commonly taught poets, but came up empty.  So how would you define the canon?  I was going to look in my son's enormous college poetry anthology, but I can't lay hands on it at the moment.

Black poetry had yet to be included when i was a college student who took a lot of poetry classes (early 70s).  When I went back to school in 89, I did get introduced to Amira Baraki.  But I sought it out on my own since then.

I'd go with Harold Bloom for that question xD