Sounds like my Mississippi redneck upbringing. One of our classmates tried to commit suicide with a pistol, but didn't succeed; tried later a second time-same result. Told my best friend about it. Full of compassion, he replied, "He needs to take some target practice."
I cannot resist a cautionary note. It is good to remember that all strong art and all strong literature has always been "difficult," and rarely ever "popular" in its own time, unless it has managed to appeal to the more accessible responses inspired by devotion (as with religious themes), sentiment, or social commentary. Indeed, important works of art, in my view, may cloak complexity in what appears to be limpid simplicity. The example of AE Housman in this article is brilliantly chosen. He was past master of a complex simplicity. I think most enthusiasts of A Shropshire Lad would be appalled at the obsessions with death and homoeroticism that close readings unpack. But this is all part and parcel of his exquisite craft as well as the emotional center from which his inspiration sprang. He is as "difficult," in his way, as Hopkins and Dickinson, as Crane and Valery, as cryptic, as indirect. And even perhaps as the Late Quartets of Beethoven, which were considered "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors" to the likes of a Louis Spohr.
So, much as I sympathize with the contempt for fatuous critical discourse and "theory" in this article (99% of which has been utterly useless to an understanding of poetry and art in every age), I am wary of the appeal to populism. Art has always in some fashion been addressed to an elite. Not an elite of understanding always, a cultural or academic elite, but an elite of appreciation, the precious few among us who are open to the new, open to surprise, willing to "suspend disbelief" in the presence of new ways of seeing, hearing and understanding the world that art and science bring us in equal measure, although by radically different means. And the irony is that most contemporary expression these days (including and especially the pap that's encouraged in the writing schools), prides itself on its accessibility, its lack of pretension.
So let's not too hastily enlist the vox populi as arbiter. The opprobrium to which new art has always been subjected (consider the insults originally intended by such labels as "gothic," "rococo," "romantic," "impressionist") always seem to appeal to the "common man." This common man has never given a flip for art. He/she just doesn't have the time or patience. Otherwise, our commentaries may begin to sound like derisive catalogs for the Berlin Exhibition of Degenerate Art held in Berlin in 1937. Strong art will always be in some measure degenerate, defy its origins, strike out into unexplored directions. So much of today's arts (verbal, pictorial, plastic, musical), as I suspect in every age, seem mediocre because they're boring, derivative, predictable. Not because they defy tradition, but because they are ignorant of it.
I think the reality is that it’s easy for people to over-correct on either side, whether in trying to craft a message of popular appeal and play to the gallery, or going full-hog Modernist Mandarin or contemporary self-referential oblivion.
Plato placed discernment as the chief virtue for good reason, knowing that without it, all the other virtues are too easily spoiled (and there are limitless different ways to do so). Ironically, the narrow path is ostensibly more difficult, but much more natural.
That being said, if we consider the greatest examples in art and poetry, we don’t find this gulf between popular and critical taste being an issue; it was only made an issue later on. Whether it’s Homer, Dante or Shakespeare, Schiller or Shelley, Boccaccio or CS Lewis, their works can be appreciated at many levels and for many reasons, such that they appeal as much to the popular taste as to the critical.
Lastly, the tension between revolutionary and traditional also disappears when guided by the light of discernment. Homer’s Iliads gave a new life to Ionian civilization, using an old story to impart new civilizational wisdom. Dante’s Commedia was also deeply revolutionary for its times. Not only was it an epic in the vernacular instead of the language of the grammarians, it was an epic told in the first person AND included many contemporary figures. One could go on. However, each work in its own way included some higher dimension of transcendent truth, memorable wisdom, such that even as time and place were altered, their verses would remained timeless.
Whether intuitively or consciously (or a bit or both), all poetic genius in some way resolves this paradox between time and timelessness, the One and the Many. The Modernists by and large failed at this because they didn’t believe it was possible to reconcile their own time with the timeless tradition as it had existed across the ages. But one has the further complication that a lot of this was ideologically pushed by the establishment of the day as well. It wasn’t completely organic, as some wish to believe. Western ideological subversion of academic institutions was already very active back then. To the degree people believe this is all just a matter of taste and intellectual discourse, they’re missing a big part of the plot, some of it quite dark and nefarious.
The best account to this day (that I’m aware of) is Frances Stonor Saunders’ “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.”
Your everyday Ice Cream Italian (of which I am proudly descended) certainly knew of Dante as a culture hero, but I'll bet could never quote you any but for the first two lines of the Commedia. His gorgeous syntax is far too tortured in most places for the layman to decipher, or understand at ANY level. Shakespeare same. The groundlings only descended on The Globe to carouse, pick fights, boo the direst villains, and throw spoiled fruit. While these became household names as culture-heroes, I'll bet things pretty much stopped at just that.
Some of Schiller (passages from Die Raeuber) may have gained purchase among the German-speaking middle class, but much in the way that Robert Burns, Kipling, and some Tennyson did, along with the odd citation (or misquote) from the likes of Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore or Oscar Wilde did. Over here we had our Longfellows and Robert Services, of course. It's not a question that such products of verbal expression (as with corresponding works of pictorial art and music) were, or seemed, "intelligible" at some level, but that they served in the popular imagination as a kind of decor, the polite furnishings of a life well-lived. I'll wager not even Chaucer or Bocaccio, those paragons of popular tales recast in the novel elegance of their respective vulgates, were ever truly "appreciated" among hoi polloi. Who has time for that?
I had to look up "modernism" in the context of literature and art, since I'm unused to seeing it used in that context. I'm certainly familiar with the term as applied to architecture and design. And I must say, the litany of names associated with that seemingly loosest of designations (including the likes of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Maryanne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky...) certainly doesn't sound to me like a movement that failed to "resolve the paradox between time and timelessness," whatever that's supposed to mean. Yes, each was of its time, each paid tribute to tradition, and certainly each contributed to what remains certainly among the greatest eruptions of creative expression in human history.
If this "modernism" failed at anything, I suppose, it may be that it failed to definitively silence the egoistic melodramas of Romanticism and ersatz "plain speaking," which have returned with a vengeance in the supposed accessibility, the untroubled intelligibility, of American art and poetry.
“His gorgeous syntax is far too tortured in most places for the layman to decipher, or understand at ANY level. Shakespeare same.”
I would simply ask: so, because someone isn’t adept at musical composition and wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate the complexities of Mozart’s melodic development, they can neither enjoy one of his symphonies or quartets nor find themselves elevated by them?
Without being master grammarians, I think anyone can enjoy a canto recited from any of the Comedy’s three canticles. It seems like a curious argument to suggest one can’t unless one has mastered the art of the grammarians…
One is mistaking the details for the overarching poetic or musical ideas communicated by great art. This is where many of the Modernists got confused as well. The details are infinite, but the Truth will always remain simple. All great art is a testament to that.
Being one of the best writers doesn’t mean being one of the most difficult to understand. Arguably, the better the writer, the more capable they are of making complex and profound ideas intelligible and communicable, through beauty. Often, this simply involves finding or creating the appropriate metaphor, or coming up with an appropriate parable or story.
Clearly, David, you run with a better crowd than I do. No, it’s not a question of intellectual acumen, of the capacity to decipher the syntax of as complex a wordsmith as Dante, but of the desire to do so. Shakespeare same. Never in my seven years in Italy did I hear anyone outside the academy quote from Dante. Never in my 40-some years in the US business and engineering world did I hear reference to the name Shakespeare to indicate anything other than overwrought, antiquated speech. Never in my academic life, some 40 years ago, did I ever hear anyone outside the literature business refer to Shakespeare or Dante, ever.
It’s not a matter of intellect or acumen. It’s a matter of interest. Your “common man,” alas, sees all we love as stuff and nonsense.
Aesop, Jesus and Socrates? Really? Those paragons of great writing?
There is nothing whatever “difficult” about American poetry today. With some wonderful exceptions, it is all perfectly direct, limpid, simple. Perfect for your common man. But is s/he even interested?
Some of these questions are simpler than we make them out to be, in my opinion.
The Bible, Homer, Plato and the fables of Aesop are some of the most influential, ubiquitous and best-selling works, including in our own age.
Are people often influenced by these works without even realizing it, much in the same way the English language of even common speakers has been shaped by Shakespeare? Of course!
People are often influenced by ideas and works without realizing that much of their worldviews are dependent on things they perhaps have never even really bothered to read or investigate themselves.
But is that even a controversial point?
Lastly, I would simply point out that in many ways academia, especially over the last 40-50 years, has tended to obscure many common and historical realities. New ideas rarely come from academia and academics are hardly indicative of what the actual trends and realities are. So, to the degree we have had our opinions shaped by academia, that can be a crutch.
But again, is this really a controversial point?
With that said, I will acknowledge that poetry and culture are now at a turning point, so one shouldn’t be surprised to see many seemingly iron-clad systems and assumptions vanish, with new and surprising things taking their place.
If there’s one presentation I like to share with people, it’s Dana Gioia’s “Poetry as Enchantment.” It talks about many of the illusive yet powerful ways in which poetry has acted on and shaped the imagination of man.
On that note, I would simply say that we should be wary of solely relying on trends, even very long term ones, to assess the cultural and intellectual turning points and realities/potentials of our age.
I write for myself. I don't really think of an audience. If it satisfies me then that's enough. And I know how very hard I am to please.
Of course this isn't totally true: individual poems will be addressed to particular individuals. In a sense I also write for those great poets of the past whom I most admire.
I also rather like playing games with my reader, gently teasing them rather than indulging in outright sadism. Though at times it can get pretty close to that.
In short I'm like myself. If I am to be anything to the reader it is as a quiet friend or companion, gently pointing things out to them on a walk, say.
But in fact on the whole it is my words that take me for a walk. I simply follow where they go. And they take me to some very surprising places indeed.
I am merely the servant of my muse. If you, the reader, have any problems with that then it is best to take them up with her.
A problem however is that too much poetry has become “self”-centric. In focussing on their self and trying to give it meaning or understanding, many lose themselves, forgetting the greater historical context, tradition—and simply the world—which necessarily informs any healthy sense of self.
Writing things that can communicate with fellow human beings, and taking joy in that, is simply a natural outcome of a healthy journey of self-discovery, rather than “self” worship. I’d argue that the overly obscure is very much a consequence of confusion about the same. Hence the need to gravitate towards various occult and other sketchy things to make sense of what otherwise seems befuddling. Here, I think friendly reminders are most important, which is really what poems are at the end of the day. They are reminders of those things men are prone to forgetting. After all, the mother of the muses is Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.
But today, people resort to theories of aliens and secret wisdom, hallucinogenic drugs and all sorts of other theories to make sense of things because they have forgotten certain simple truths, including about their own “self.”
The more people become aware that we are in an age of “self” worship, the greater the chance for people to break free and, ironically, discover their true self.
I will have to disagree. I started reading poetry as a boy, attracted by what I felt were rather magical passages in the best poems. I chose to become a poet because I wanted to see if I could create the same sort of magic. I think the modern idea that all "strong" literature is necessarily difficult (Howard Bloom) and must be works of an "elitist art" (ibid) is hogwash. I read great volumes of poetry at a young age, with no classical training, and I grokked most of what I was reading. And it turned out that the writers of some of the more "difficult" poems, such as T. S. Eliot and John Ashbery, admitted that they sometimes didn't understand their own poems. They were not so much "difficult" as hopelessly obscure. Art has not always been addressed "to an elite." Millions of people appreciate great works of art by the masters. I do not at all agree with "the precious few," remembering myself as a boy. The idea that "the common man" doesn't have the time or patience for art, or poetry, seems entirely wrong to me.
Hello, Michael! I agree with much of your disagreement! Forgive me if I observe that you were, as a youth, certainly among those precious few. No, I do agree that strong art is not "necessarily" difficult, but that it tends to be. It challenges its audience, forces us to think, presents us with ways of seeing outside the commonplace, don't you agree? As for Eliot and Ashbery, I couldn't agree more. What a couple of poseurs!
I think strong (please forgive the term) artists work the way John Martin says he does, without specific concern for the audience. Artists just do what they do, because they have no alternative. One possible definition of "bad art" just might be art that seems to aim at a specific audience. I'll have to think about that, but it feels right.
But I do stand by the proposition that the "common man" is entirely unmoved by important works of art, by that which is important at work in them. If he "appreciates" great works of art, I'll bet what he appreciates most are its referents, the things "represented," and can't manage to pay attention to anything non-representational. In painting that translated at one time as "flatness," the appeal that paintings made to look at them as acts of form and color and dream, not as simulacra of the commonly visible.
And please remember, I don't mean to equate this common man with "uneducated" or "uncultured" people, but with people who are altogether unmoved, unmovable, set in their ways of thinking and seeing, seeking in art a confirmation of their established convictions.
Outside of this, each one of us surely looks for something different in literature, as in movies or buildings. I may regard Rothko and Bacon, Kafka and Celan, as timeless, and you may not. I happen, personally, not to "like" TS Eliot and Henry James and William Faulkner, but that doesn't mean I don't regard them as important elements in "the canon," literature our children need to read. That's what makes life interesting. What's important, in my book, is that we find ways (despite our personal preferences) to celebrate human creativity in all its forms.
Nearly all human beings are capable of thinking. It's not like readers aren't capable of reading poems and thinking about them. I think you underestimate the common man. And really, you sound like the theorists Tom Wolfe criticized in "The Painted Word." If you haven't read it, it's a short, eye-opening book that I highly recommend. And it never hurts to consider alternate points of view. It turns out that the earth is not flat, tomatoes are not poisonous, and most art theory is screwy.
I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, Byron, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Keats, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman, Wordsworth, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone.
-------------------------
Rant: The Elite
by Michael R. Burch
-------------------------
When I heard Harold Bloom unsurprisingly say:
"Poetry is necessarily difficult. It is our elitist art ..."
I felt a small suspicious thrill. After all, sweetheart,
isn’t this who we are? Aren’t we obviously better,
and certainly fairer and taller, than they are?
Though once I found Ezra Pound
perhaps a smidgen too profound,
perhaps a bit over-fond of Benito
and the advantages of fascism
to be taken ad finem, like high tea
with a pure white spot of intellectualism
and an artificial sweetener, calorie-free.
I know! I know! Politics has nothing to do with art
And it tempts us so to be elite, to stand apart ...
but somehow the word just doesn’t ring true,
echoing effetely away—the distance from me to you.
Of course, politics has nothing to do with art,
but sometimes art has everything to do with becoming elite,
with climbing the cultural ladder, with being able to meet
someone more Exalted than you, who can demonstrate how to fart
so that everyone below claims one’s odor is sweet.
"You had to be there! We were falling apart
with gratitude! We saw him! We wept at his feet!"
Though someone will always be far, far above you, clouding your air,
gazing down at you with a look of wondering despair.
Thinkers who have something important to convey will give it to you straight as they can, will want to be fully understood by as many as possible. Their object is to share intelligence not to conceal it. Real thinkers don't play hide and seek if they can help it. Their object is to make perfect sense, to be as pellucid as possible in the circumstances in which they find themselves and with the lights they inherited.
At the same time, however, they're aware they can only get through to the likeminded on ultimate philosophic matters, and that their species is a rare one. Maybe that's why Voltaire spoke to Everyman, and in language plain as day--and why he made the target of his outrage an oppressor known and rightly feared by all alike. Maybe he decided it was best to be more than another cry in the wilderness.
He was so successful because he confined his attention to the practical domain. Instead of attacking a less widely apprehended tyranny, such as that of forced existence for example, he attacked the best known and most ferocious tyrant of his era.
At any rate, abandon authors that would keep you in the dark, who would entrap you in a maze of mystifying gobbledygook. Read Schopenhauer's "On Thinking For Yourself" and enjoy some good clear thinking instead.
This is a fine essay, and it really struck a chord with me because I regard all theories about poetry as dark veils that can cover your eyes and prevent you from seeing what is actually right there on the page in front of you.
Theories about poetry are, in my view, are a form of brainwashing, a form of programming, for human beings who are becoming more and more robotic - and therefore unable to see, hear, or feel what is truly real.
Well done, Mike, for writing this, for being a sane voice on the periphery of poetry's tower of Babel.
I can never escape the feeling that only artists who 'can't get it up' go in for theories. And in any case precept should always follow practice, and never the other way around. A Cézanne at the end of a lifetime of high achievement can be allowed to theorise, and expect to have his theories taken seriously. But at the beginning? Manifestos are for politicians. And artists are not politicians
Thanks Martin. I am suspicious of any "thou shalt nots" for poetry. And I do highly recommend "The Painted Word" for poets. Laughter is indeed the best medicine for irrational art theories.
The big craze - the big theory in Ireland at the moment - is, that there should be no passion or emotion of any sort in poetry. So poetry now is fast becoming the new domain of legislators and rule makers. One would laugh if it wasn't so totally detrimental to what Neruda calls: 'the old unremembered human heart.'
Thomas Rain Crowe, a Beat poet, wrote an article in which he observed that certain topics are verboten in the "name" journals. For instance, poems of praise.
What Eliot actually said was, 'It is a test that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.' And I think this is true. Note Eliot is not saying here that poetry should be incomprehensible. He is saying it should be effective. Or rather effective first and understood later.
I believe both Horace and Robert Frost said that poetry delights us into wisdom (my paraphrase). I take them to mean that poetry must delight before it can impart or instruct.
I agree. Best if both happen at the same time. To some of us wisdom is a delight anyway. But it's always wise to make anything and indeed everything pleasurable. And delight is the greatest pleasure of all. Since it implies a certain amount of surprise.
But I do not think that delight should be used as a way of sugar-coating or disguising the medicine. And I doubt that they meant that anyway.
You expressed "doubt" and I said there is no doubt. Two very different things. To even venture that Horace and Frost may have been "sugar-coating" seems wildly off-base to me.
This essay really resonated with me. So much so that I haven't yet finished it, since I simply couldn't contain my urge to comment on it immediately.
My parents were avant-garde artists, and so as a poet I felt duty-bound to be an avant-garde poet. For this reason I felt obliged to study under Pound and Olson and Duncan. And to write free verse. But I could never produce anything that satisfied me and that didn't seem pretentious. In the end I suffered a mental breakdown, physically attacked my father, and was hospitalised.
And so at long last I began my real life. Slowly I hammered out a viable aesthetics and poetics for myself.
With regard to painting I began to elect a canon of undoubtedly good artists, against whom I could begin to measure all others. Beginning with Monet, Cézanne and Van Gogh. Including Bonnard and Vuillard. And culminating in Klee, Matisse and Picasso. From these exemplars I saw that visual art must necessarily contain at least seven elements: drawing, colour, chiaroscuro, paint-handling story-telling, design and composition. (Where composition is the ability to combine the other six elements in a telling way.)
Traditionally there has been established a false dichotomy between literary art and plastic art. The best art is both. There has also been established a false dichotomy between abstract art and figurative art. Again the best art is both. You see, there has recently been developed a false analogy between art and science. In science specialisation is expected. Things are analysed and broken apart into bits. So artists began to specialise within art. Rothko concentrated purely on colour. Mondrian on design. Magritte on story-telling. Pollock on paint-handling. Etc. Etc. And yet the colour in the artists of my canon still remained vastly superior to Rothko's. Ditto with respect to the design in Mondrian. Ditto with respect to the story-telling in Magritte. Ditto with respect to the paint-handling in Pollock.
'Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' All these artists were following a false analogy. Art is exactly opposed to science. The one is synthetic, the other analytic. Art is about putting things back together. And though all the arts aspire to the condition of music again they cannot be analogised. Each has its own separate laws. The seven elements of art support and reinforce each other. Drawing and colour and chiaroscuro, etc., interact and enhance each other's impact.
Similarly, with respect to poetry, the scales began to fall from my eyes. I saw that the poetry I and other people actually valued wasn't this pretentious muck, but words that were both memorable and wise. (Yes, Michael, emotion must be there. But *understood* emotion. Emotion that encompasses and moves towards insight and wisdom. Towards some sort of realisation, and even self-realisation.) To this end, a certain amount of incomprehensibility, and even mysteriousness, can, and perhaps should, be there, but it should never be the whole story. Ashberry for instance is totally out. But Eliot and Yeats are not only permitted but actually achieve the acme of full poetic potentiality. Perhaps because of this.
As so often it's a matter of balance. Eliot merely said that a line can be effective without being understood. And I agree with him. Though usually the understanding dawns later. And indeed should. Or it will come across as merely arbitrary.
Duncan remains a poet I admire and am continually intrigued by. But he did occasionally use rhyme and rhythm. Interestingly enough his sequence 'The Structure Of Rhyme' contains neither structure nor rhyme. Is that title intended ironically?
Because poetry is a about wisdom it should be well-rooted since it is wise to be rooted. Therefore it should never represent too great a break with the past.
Poetry is distinguished from prose by the fact that it makes use of all of the resources of the language in a way that prose simply doesn't and cannot. This is why poetry that makes use of fewer linguistic resources than prose represents such a betrayal.
I am reminded that Charles Olson called Pound and Eliot "inferior predecessors" and yet who can quote a line by Olson today?
I think Eliot was a great poet in his best poems but went out too far on a limb in others. I particularly like "Prufrock," "Four Quartets" and the lovely poem about the girl with sunlight in her hair.
We definitely deserve the government we vote into office, but I'm not sure that's happening. The Dems are destroying the country and the Reps are a bunch of cowards who talk, talk, talk and DO nothing. It won't happen, but I think we should vote every incumbent out, start anew and maybe do it once or twice more. Ah well, there's always the foxhole.
This is the only article I can remember that made sense of the senseless.
Robert, you made me chuckle.
Laughter is about as essential air to survive this world.
Yes, and in many of my humorous poems I engage in "foxhole humor." One quick example:
Enough!
by Michael R. Burch
It’s not that I don’t want to die;
I shall be glad to go.
Enough of diabetes pie,
and eating sickly crow!
Enough of win and place and show.
Enough of endless woe!
Enough of suffering and vice!
I’ve said it once;
I’ll say it twice:
I shall be glad to go.
But why the hell should I be nice
when no one asked for my advice?
So grumpily I’ll go ...
although
(most probably) below.
Foxhole humor-never heard the term before. "Enough is funny/creepy, like nothing I've read. Kind of a likable dread.
Foxhole humor would be the jokes soldiers told each other while being gassed in WWI trenches, and such.
Sounds like my Mississippi redneck upbringing. One of our classmates tried to commit suicide with a pistol, but didn't succeed; tried later a second time-same result. Told my best friend about it. Full of compassion, he replied, "He needs to take some target practice."
I cannot resist a cautionary note. It is good to remember that all strong art and all strong literature has always been "difficult," and rarely ever "popular" in its own time, unless it has managed to appeal to the more accessible responses inspired by devotion (as with religious themes), sentiment, or social commentary. Indeed, important works of art, in my view, may cloak complexity in what appears to be limpid simplicity. The example of AE Housman in this article is brilliantly chosen. He was past master of a complex simplicity. I think most enthusiasts of A Shropshire Lad would be appalled at the obsessions with death and homoeroticism that close readings unpack. But this is all part and parcel of his exquisite craft as well as the emotional center from which his inspiration sprang. He is as "difficult," in his way, as Hopkins and Dickinson, as Crane and Valery, as cryptic, as indirect. And even perhaps as the Late Quartets of Beethoven, which were considered "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors" to the likes of a Louis Spohr.
So, much as I sympathize with the contempt for fatuous critical discourse and "theory" in this article (99% of which has been utterly useless to an understanding of poetry and art in every age), I am wary of the appeal to populism. Art has always in some fashion been addressed to an elite. Not an elite of understanding always, a cultural or academic elite, but an elite of appreciation, the precious few among us who are open to the new, open to surprise, willing to "suspend disbelief" in the presence of new ways of seeing, hearing and understanding the world that art and science bring us in equal measure, although by radically different means. And the irony is that most contemporary expression these days (including and especially the pap that's encouraged in the writing schools), prides itself on its accessibility, its lack of pretension.
So let's not too hastily enlist the vox populi as arbiter. The opprobrium to which new art has always been subjected (consider the insults originally intended by such labels as "gothic," "rococo," "romantic," "impressionist") always seem to appeal to the "common man." This common man has never given a flip for art. He/she just doesn't have the time or patience. Otherwise, our commentaries may begin to sound like derisive catalogs for the Berlin Exhibition of Degenerate Art held in Berlin in 1937. Strong art will always be in some measure degenerate, defy its origins, strike out into unexplored directions. So much of today's arts (verbal, pictorial, plastic, musical), as I suspect in every age, seem mediocre because they're boring, derivative, predictable. Not because they defy tradition, but because they are ignorant of it.
I think the reality is that it’s easy for people to over-correct on either side, whether in trying to craft a message of popular appeal and play to the gallery, or going full-hog Modernist Mandarin or contemporary self-referential oblivion.
Plato placed discernment as the chief virtue for good reason, knowing that without it, all the other virtues are too easily spoiled (and there are limitless different ways to do so). Ironically, the narrow path is ostensibly more difficult, but much more natural.
That being said, if we consider the greatest examples in art and poetry, we don’t find this gulf between popular and critical taste being an issue; it was only made an issue later on. Whether it’s Homer, Dante or Shakespeare, Schiller or Shelley, Boccaccio or CS Lewis, their works can be appreciated at many levels and for many reasons, such that they appeal as much to the popular taste as to the critical.
Lastly, the tension between revolutionary and traditional also disappears when guided by the light of discernment. Homer’s Iliads gave a new life to Ionian civilization, using an old story to impart new civilizational wisdom. Dante’s Commedia was also deeply revolutionary for its times. Not only was it an epic in the vernacular instead of the language of the grammarians, it was an epic told in the first person AND included many contemporary figures. One could go on. However, each work in its own way included some higher dimension of transcendent truth, memorable wisdom, such that even as time and place were altered, their verses would remained timeless.
Whether intuitively or consciously (or a bit or both), all poetic genius in some way resolves this paradox between time and timelessness, the One and the Many. The Modernists by and large failed at this because they didn’t believe it was possible to reconcile their own time with the timeless tradition as it had existed across the ages. But one has the further complication that a lot of this was ideologically pushed by the establishment of the day as well. It wasn’t completely organic, as some wish to believe. Western ideological subversion of academic institutions was already very active back then. To the degree people believe this is all just a matter of taste and intellectual discourse, they’re missing a big part of the plot, some of it quite dark and nefarious.
The best account to this day (that I’m aware of) is Frances Stonor Saunders’ “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.”
Your everyday Ice Cream Italian (of which I am proudly descended) certainly knew of Dante as a culture hero, but I'll bet could never quote you any but for the first two lines of the Commedia. His gorgeous syntax is far too tortured in most places for the layman to decipher, or understand at ANY level. Shakespeare same. The groundlings only descended on The Globe to carouse, pick fights, boo the direst villains, and throw spoiled fruit. While these became household names as culture-heroes, I'll bet things pretty much stopped at just that.
Some of Schiller (passages from Die Raeuber) may have gained purchase among the German-speaking middle class, but much in the way that Robert Burns, Kipling, and some Tennyson did, along with the odd citation (or misquote) from the likes of Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore or Oscar Wilde did. Over here we had our Longfellows and Robert Services, of course. It's not a question that such products of verbal expression (as with corresponding works of pictorial art and music) were, or seemed, "intelligible" at some level, but that they served in the popular imagination as a kind of decor, the polite furnishings of a life well-lived. I'll wager not even Chaucer or Bocaccio, those paragons of popular tales recast in the novel elegance of their respective vulgates, were ever truly "appreciated" among hoi polloi. Who has time for that?
I had to look up "modernism" in the context of literature and art, since I'm unused to seeing it used in that context. I'm certainly familiar with the term as applied to architecture and design. And I must say, the litany of names associated with that seemingly loosest of designations (including the likes of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Maryanne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky...) certainly doesn't sound to me like a movement that failed to "resolve the paradox between time and timelessness," whatever that's supposed to mean. Yes, each was of its time, each paid tribute to tradition, and certainly each contributed to what remains certainly among the greatest eruptions of creative expression in human history.
If this "modernism" failed at anything, I suppose, it may be that it failed to definitively silence the egoistic melodramas of Romanticism and ersatz "plain speaking," which have returned with a vengeance in the supposed accessibility, the untroubled intelligibility, of American art and poetry.
When you write:
“His gorgeous syntax is far too tortured in most places for the layman to decipher, or understand at ANY level. Shakespeare same.”
I would simply ask: so, because someone isn’t adept at musical composition and wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate the complexities of Mozart’s melodic development, they can neither enjoy one of his symphonies or quartets nor find themselves elevated by them?
Without being master grammarians, I think anyone can enjoy a canto recited from any of the Comedy’s three canticles. It seems like a curious argument to suggest one can’t unless one has mastered the art of the grammarians…
One is mistaking the details for the overarching poetic or musical ideas communicated by great art. This is where many of the Modernists got confused as well. The details are infinite, but the Truth will always remain simple. All great art is a testament to that.
Being one of the best writers doesn’t mean being one of the most difficult to understand. Arguably, the better the writer, the more capable they are of making complex and profound ideas intelligible and communicable, through beauty. Often, this simply involves finding or creating the appropriate metaphor, or coming up with an appropriate parable or story.
Aesop, Jesus and Socrates come to mind here.
Clearly, David, you run with a better crowd than I do. No, it’s not a question of intellectual acumen, of the capacity to decipher the syntax of as complex a wordsmith as Dante, but of the desire to do so. Shakespeare same. Never in my seven years in Italy did I hear anyone outside the academy quote from Dante. Never in my 40-some years in the US business and engineering world did I hear reference to the name Shakespeare to indicate anything other than overwrought, antiquated speech. Never in my academic life, some 40 years ago, did I ever hear anyone outside the literature business refer to Shakespeare or Dante, ever.
It’s not a matter of intellect or acumen. It’s a matter of interest. Your “common man,” alas, sees all we love as stuff and nonsense.
Aesop, Jesus and Socrates? Really? Those paragons of great writing?
There is nothing whatever “difficult” about American poetry today. With some wonderful exceptions, it is all perfectly direct, limpid, simple. Perfect for your common man. But is s/he even interested?
Some of these questions are simpler than we make them out to be, in my opinion.
The Bible, Homer, Plato and the fables of Aesop are some of the most influential, ubiquitous and best-selling works, including in our own age.
Are people often influenced by these works without even realizing it, much in the same way the English language of even common speakers has been shaped by Shakespeare? Of course!
People are often influenced by ideas and works without realizing that much of their worldviews are dependent on things they perhaps have never even really bothered to read or investigate themselves.
But is that even a controversial point?
Lastly, I would simply point out that in many ways academia, especially over the last 40-50 years, has tended to obscure many common and historical realities. New ideas rarely come from academia and academics are hardly indicative of what the actual trends and realities are. So, to the degree we have had our opinions shaped by academia, that can be a crutch.
But again, is this really a controversial point?
With that said, I will acknowledge that poetry and culture are now at a turning point, so one shouldn’t be surprised to see many seemingly iron-clad systems and assumptions vanish, with new and surprising things taking their place.
If there’s one presentation I like to share with people, it’s Dana Gioia’s “Poetry as Enchantment.” It talks about many of the illusive yet powerful ways in which poetry has acted on and shaped the imagination of man.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHVHSe-_AM&t=0s&pp=ygUVUG9ldHJ5IGFzIGVuY2hhbnRtZW50
On that note, I would simply say that we should be wary of solely relying on trends, even very long term ones, to assess the cultural and intellectual turning points and realities/potentials of our age.
I write for myself. I don't really think of an audience. If it satisfies me then that's enough. And I know how very hard I am to please.
Of course this isn't totally true: individual poems will be addressed to particular individuals. In a sense I also write for those great poets of the past whom I most admire.
I also rather like playing games with my reader, gently teasing them rather than indulging in outright sadism. Though at times it can get pretty close to that.
In short I'm like myself. If I am to be anything to the reader it is as a quiet friend or companion, gently pointing things out to them on a walk, say.
But in fact on the whole it is my words that take me for a walk. I simply follow where they go. And they take me to some very surprising places indeed.
I am merely the servant of my muse. If you, the reader, have any problems with that then it is best to take them up with her.
A problem however is that too much poetry has become “self”-centric. In focussing on their self and trying to give it meaning or understanding, many lose themselves, forgetting the greater historical context, tradition—and simply the world—which necessarily informs any healthy sense of self.
Writing things that can communicate with fellow human beings, and taking joy in that, is simply a natural outcome of a healthy journey of self-discovery, rather than “self” worship. I’d argue that the overly obscure is very much a consequence of confusion about the same. Hence the need to gravitate towards various occult and other sketchy things to make sense of what otherwise seems befuddling. Here, I think friendly reminders are most important, which is really what poems are at the end of the day. They are reminders of those things men are prone to forgetting. After all, the mother of the muses is Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.
But today, people resort to theories of aliens and secret wisdom, hallucinogenic drugs and all sorts of other theories to make sense of things because they have forgotten certain simple truths, including about their own “self.”
The more people become aware that we are in an age of “self” worship, the greater the chance for people to break free and, ironically, discover their true self.
Here poetry does have a genuine role to play.
I will have to disagree. I started reading poetry as a boy, attracted by what I felt were rather magical passages in the best poems. I chose to become a poet because I wanted to see if I could create the same sort of magic. I think the modern idea that all "strong" literature is necessarily difficult (Howard Bloom) and must be works of an "elitist art" (ibid) is hogwash. I read great volumes of poetry at a young age, with no classical training, and I grokked most of what I was reading. And it turned out that the writers of some of the more "difficult" poems, such as T. S. Eliot and John Ashbery, admitted that they sometimes didn't understand their own poems. They were not so much "difficult" as hopelessly obscure. Art has not always been addressed "to an elite." Millions of people appreciate great works of art by the masters. I do not at all agree with "the precious few," remembering myself as a boy. The idea that "the common man" doesn't have the time or patience for art, or poetry, seems entirely wrong to me.
Hello, Michael! I agree with much of your disagreement! Forgive me if I observe that you were, as a youth, certainly among those precious few. No, I do agree that strong art is not "necessarily" difficult, but that it tends to be. It challenges its audience, forces us to think, presents us with ways of seeing outside the commonplace, don't you agree? As for Eliot and Ashbery, I couldn't agree more. What a couple of poseurs!
I think strong (please forgive the term) artists work the way John Martin says he does, without specific concern for the audience. Artists just do what they do, because they have no alternative. One possible definition of "bad art" just might be art that seems to aim at a specific audience. I'll have to think about that, but it feels right.
But I do stand by the proposition that the "common man" is entirely unmoved by important works of art, by that which is important at work in them. If he "appreciates" great works of art, I'll bet what he appreciates most are its referents, the things "represented," and can't manage to pay attention to anything non-representational. In painting that translated at one time as "flatness," the appeal that paintings made to look at them as acts of form and color and dream, not as simulacra of the commonly visible.
And please remember, I don't mean to equate this common man with "uneducated" or "uncultured" people, but with people who are altogether unmoved, unmovable, set in their ways of thinking and seeing, seeking in art a confirmation of their established convictions.
Outside of this, each one of us surely looks for something different in literature, as in movies or buildings. I may regard Rothko and Bacon, Kafka and Celan, as timeless, and you may not. I happen, personally, not to "like" TS Eliot and Henry James and William Faulkner, but that doesn't mean I don't regard them as important elements in "the canon," literature our children need to read. That's what makes life interesting. What's important, in my book, is that we find ways (despite our personal preferences) to celebrate human creativity in all its forms.
Nearly all human beings are capable of thinking. It's not like readers aren't capable of reading poems and thinking about them. I think you underestimate the common man. And really, you sound like the theorists Tom Wolfe criticized in "The Painted Word." If you haven't read it, it's a short, eye-opening book that I highly recommend. And it never hurts to consider alternate points of view. It turns out that the earth is not flat, tomatoes are not poisonous, and most art theory is screwy.
I wrote two poems in response to Harold Bloom's claim that poetry is "necessarily difficult" and an "elitist art."
Come Down
by Michael R. Burch
--------------------------------------------------
for Harold Bloom and the Ivory Towerists
---------------------------------------------------
Come down, O, come down
from your high mountain tower.
How coldly the wind blows,
how late this chill hour ...
and I cannot wait
for a meteor shower
to show you the time
must be now, or not ever.
Come down, O, come down
from the high mountain heather
blown far to the lees
as fierce northern gales sever.
Come down, or your hearts
will grow cold as the weather
when winter devours
and spring returns never.
-------------------------------
I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, Byron, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Keats, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman, Wordsworth, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone.
-------------------------
Rant: The Elite
by Michael R. Burch
-------------------------
When I heard Harold Bloom unsurprisingly say:
"Poetry is necessarily difficult. It is our elitist art ..."
I felt a small suspicious thrill. After all, sweetheart,
isn’t this who we are? Aren’t we obviously better,
and certainly fairer and taller, than they are?
Though once I found Ezra Pound
perhaps a smidgen too profound,
perhaps a bit over-fond of Benito
and the advantages of fascism
to be taken ad finem, like high tea
with a pure white spot of intellectualism
and an artificial sweetener, calorie-free.
I know! I know! Politics has nothing to do with art
And it tempts us so to be elite, to stand apart ...
but somehow the word just doesn’t ring true,
echoing effetely away—the distance from me to you.
Of course, politics has nothing to do with art,
but sometimes art has everything to do with becoming elite,
with climbing the cultural ladder, with being able to meet
someone more Exalted than you, who can demonstrate how to fart
so that everyone below claims one’s odor is sweet.
"You had to be there! We were falling apart
with gratitude! We saw him! We wept at his feet!"
Though someone will always be far, far above you, clouding your air,
gazing down at you with a look of wondering despair.
Modern "art" is a store of value for the wealthy. no one wishes to look at it. great for money laundering too.
Thinkers who have something important to convey will give it to you straight as they can, will want to be fully understood by as many as possible. Their object is to share intelligence not to conceal it. Real thinkers don't play hide and seek if they can help it. Their object is to make perfect sense, to be as pellucid as possible in the circumstances in which they find themselves and with the lights they inherited.
At the same time, however, they're aware they can only get through to the likeminded on ultimate philosophic matters, and that their species is a rare one. Maybe that's why Voltaire spoke to Everyman, and in language plain as day--and why he made the target of his outrage an oppressor known and rightly feared by all alike. Maybe he decided it was best to be more than another cry in the wilderness.
He was so successful because he confined his attention to the practical domain. Instead of attacking a less widely apprehended tyranny, such as that of forced existence for example, he attacked the best known and most ferocious tyrant of his era.
At any rate, abandon authors that would keep you in the dark, who would entrap you in a maze of mystifying gobbledygook. Read Schopenhauer's "On Thinking For Yourself" and enjoy some good clear thinking instead.
This is a fine essay, and it really struck a chord with me because I regard all theories about poetry as dark veils that can cover your eyes and prevent you from seeing what is actually right there on the page in front of you.
Theories about poetry are, in my view, are a form of brainwashing, a form of programming, for human beings who are becoming more and more robotic - and therefore unable to see, hear, or feel what is truly real.
Well done, Mike, for writing this, for being a sane voice on the periphery of poetry's tower of Babel.
Plato thought so.
I can never escape the feeling that only artists who 'can't get it up' go in for theories. And in any case precept should always follow practice, and never the other way around. A Cézanne at the end of a lifetime of high achievement can be allowed to theorise, and expect to have his theories taken seriously. But at the beginning? Manifestos are for politicians. And artists are not politicians
Yes, many poets these days do sound like politicos. And evangelists.
Thank God!
Thanks Martin. I am suspicious of any "thou shalt nots" for poetry. And I do highly recommend "The Painted Word" for poets. Laughter is indeed the best medicine for irrational art theories.
The big craze - the big theory in Ireland at the moment - is, that there should be no passion or emotion of any sort in poetry. So poetry now is fast becoming the new domain of legislators and rule makers. One would laugh if it wasn't so totally detrimental to what Neruda calls: 'the old unremembered human heart.'
Thomas Rain Crowe, a Beat poet, wrote an article in which he observed that certain topics are verboten in the "name" journals. For instance, poems of praise.
Yes, poems of praise, erotic poetry, poetry that is well crafted - and basically anything that is meaningful and destined to endure in the long run.
I doubt that William Blake could get published today, or Keats.
They'd have no chance whatsoever. This (so far) is the golden age of prosy mediocrity.
What Eliot actually said was, 'It is a test that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.' And I think this is true. Note Eliot is not saying here that poetry should be incomprehensible. He is saying it should be effective. Or rather effective first and understood later.
I believe both Horace and Robert Frost said that poetry delights us into wisdom (my paraphrase). I take them to mean that poetry must delight before it can impart or instruct.
I agree. Best if both happen at the same time. To some of us wisdom is a delight anyway. But it's always wise to make anything and indeed everything pleasurable. And delight is the greatest pleasure of all. Since it implies a certain amount of surprise.
But I do not think that delight should be used as a way of sugar-coating or disguising the medicine. And I doubt that they meant that anyway.
I don't think anyone ever accused Robert Frost of sugar-coating anything!
I don't think I was doing that. Read my final sentence.
You expressed "doubt" and I said there is no doubt. Two very different things. To even venture that Horace and Frost may have been "sugar-coating" seems wildly off-base to me.
While you 'Americans' tend to go in for over-statement we English tend to do the exact opposite. In fact we're famous for doing so.
This essay really resonated with me. So much so that I haven't yet finished it, since I simply couldn't contain my urge to comment on it immediately.
My parents were avant-garde artists, and so as a poet I felt duty-bound to be an avant-garde poet. For this reason I felt obliged to study under Pound and Olson and Duncan. And to write free verse. But I could never produce anything that satisfied me and that didn't seem pretentious. In the end I suffered a mental breakdown, physically attacked my father, and was hospitalised.
And so at long last I began my real life. Slowly I hammered out a viable aesthetics and poetics for myself.
With regard to painting I began to elect a canon of undoubtedly good artists, against whom I could begin to measure all others. Beginning with Monet, Cézanne and Van Gogh. Including Bonnard and Vuillard. And culminating in Klee, Matisse and Picasso. From these exemplars I saw that visual art must necessarily contain at least seven elements: drawing, colour, chiaroscuro, paint-handling story-telling, design and composition. (Where composition is the ability to combine the other six elements in a telling way.)
Traditionally there has been established a false dichotomy between literary art and plastic art. The best art is both. There has also been established a false dichotomy between abstract art and figurative art. Again the best art is both. You see, there has recently been developed a false analogy between art and science. In science specialisation is expected. Things are analysed and broken apart into bits. So artists began to specialise within art. Rothko concentrated purely on colour. Mondrian on design. Magritte on story-telling. Pollock on paint-handling. Etc. Etc. And yet the colour in the artists of my canon still remained vastly superior to Rothko's. Ditto with respect to the design in Mondrian. Ditto with respect to the story-telling in Magritte. Ditto with respect to the paint-handling in Pollock.
'Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' All these artists were following a false analogy. Art is exactly opposed to science. The one is synthetic, the other analytic. Art is about putting things back together. And though all the arts aspire to the condition of music again they cannot be analogised. Each has its own separate laws. The seven elements of art support and reinforce each other. Drawing and colour and chiaroscuro, etc., interact and enhance each other's impact.
Similarly, with respect to poetry, the scales began to fall from my eyes. I saw that the poetry I and other people actually valued wasn't this pretentious muck, but words that were both memorable and wise. (Yes, Michael, emotion must be there. But *understood* emotion. Emotion that encompasses and moves towards insight and wisdom. Towards some sort of realisation, and even self-realisation.) To this end, a certain amount of incomprehensibility, and even mysteriousness, can, and perhaps should, be there, but it should never be the whole story. Ashberry for instance is totally out. But Eliot and Yeats are not only permitted but actually achieve the acme of full poetic potentiality. Perhaps because of this.
As so often it's a matter of balance. Eliot merely said that a line can be effective without being understood. And I agree with him. Though usually the understanding dawns later. And indeed should. Or it will come across as merely arbitrary.
Duncan remains a poet I admire and am continually intrigued by. But he did occasionally use rhyme and rhythm. Interestingly enough his sequence 'The Structure Of Rhyme' contains neither structure nor rhyme. Is that title intended ironically?
Because poetry is a about wisdom it should be well-rooted since it is wise to be rooted. Therefore it should never represent too great a break with the past.
Poetry is distinguished from prose by the fact that it makes use of all of the resources of the language in a way that prose simply doesn't and cannot. This is why poetry that makes use of fewer linguistic resources than prose represents such a betrayal.
Now to get back to the essay again...
I am reminded that Charles Olson called Pound and Eliot "inferior predecessors" and yet who can quote a line by Olson today?
I think Eliot was a great poet in his best poems but went out too far on a limb in others. I particularly like "Prufrock," "Four Quartets" and the lovely poem about the girl with sunlight in her hair.
I found nothing in the rest of essay to cause me to want to withdraw anything in the comment above. And much to reinforce it.
We seem to finally agree about something, at last! ;-)
Comments are always welcome.
We definitely deserve the government we vote into office, but I'm not sure that's happening. The Dems are destroying the country and the Reps are a bunch of cowards who talk, talk, talk and DO nothing. It won't happen, but I think we should vote every incumbent out, start anew and maybe do it once or twice more. Ah well, there's always the foxhole.
Foxhole humor-never heard the term before. "Enough" is funny/creepy. Something about it is different from anything I've read. Kind of a likable dread.