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American
poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the
mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become
the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated
group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches
outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without
cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they
still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual
artists they are almost invisible.
What
makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising
is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for
the art. There have never before been so many new books of
poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines.
Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There
are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative
writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels.
Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate,
as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network
of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state,
and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form
of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats.
There has also never before been so much published criticism
about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters
and scholarly journals.
The
proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding
by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections
of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad
of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No
one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but
surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And
there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs
in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate
ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate
section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited
professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics
an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden
age of American poetry.
But
the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon.
Decades of public and private funding have created a large
professional class for the production and reception of new
poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students,
editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities,
these groups have gradually become the primary audience for
contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry,
which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused
inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within
the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition
of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals,
a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets.
But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively
meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant
as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.
The
situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology.
Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist
audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has
declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's
institutional success—the explosion of academic writing
programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses,
the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the
migration of American literary culture to the university—have
unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.
Its
Own World
To
the average reader, the proposition that poetry's audience
has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the
art's current isolation that within the subculture such notions
are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives
from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations
of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships.
Given the bullish statistics on poetry's material expansion,
how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual
influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but
to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of
ideas and letters seems inescapable.
Daily
newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little
coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984
until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as
a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually
no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections
of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the
Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It
seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists
for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar
with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John
Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks,
Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.
One
can see a microcosm of poetry's current position by studying
its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never
reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently
discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always
in group reviews where three books are briefly considered
together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on
or around its publication date, a new collection by an important
poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a
year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry
Taylor's The Flying Change was reviewed only after
it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones's Transparent
Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National
Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning
Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times
at all.
Poetry
reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is
much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion
that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none
of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to
anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and
magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended
less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors
run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana
rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the
endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.
How
Poetry Diminished
Arguments
about the decline of poetry's cultural importance are not
new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth
century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun
in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of
his controversial essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Surveying
literary history, Wilson noted that verse's role had grown
increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular,
Romanticism's emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so "fleeting
and quintessential" that eventually it dwindled into a mainly
lyric medium. As verse—which had previously been a popular
medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific
speculation—retreated into lyric, prose usurped much
of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually
had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature,
Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.
Wilson
was a capable analyst of literary trends. His skeptical assessment
of poetry's place in modern letters has been frequently attacked
and qualified over the past half century, but it has never
been convincingly dismissed. His argument set the ground rules
for all subsequent defenders of contemporary poetry. It also
provided the starting point for later iconoclasts, from Delmore
Schwartz to Christopher Clausen. The most recent and celebrated
of these revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988
critique "Who Killed Poetry?" first appeared in Commentary
and was reprinted in an extravagantly acrimonious symposium
in AWP Chronicle (the journal of the Associated Writing Programs).
Not coincidentally, Epstein's title pays a double homage to
Wilson's essay—first by mimicking the interrogative form
of the original title, second by employing its metaphor of
death.
Epstein
essentially updated Wilson's argument, but with important
differences. Whereas Wilson looked on the decline of poetry's
cultural position as a gradual process spanning three centuries,
Epstein focused on the past few decades. He contrasted the
major achievements of the modernists—the generation of
Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism
into the twentieth century—with what he felt were the
minor accomplishments of the present practitioners. The modernists,
Epstein maintained, were artists who worked from a broad cultural
vision. Contemporary writers were "poetry professionals,"
who operated within the closed world of the university. Wilson
blamed poetry's plight on historical forces; Epstein indicted
the poets themselves and the institutions they had helped
create, especially creative-writing programs. A brilliant
polemicist, Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and
it did ignite an explosion of criticism. No recent essay on
American poetry has generated so many immediate responses
in literary journals. And certainly none has drawn so much
violently negative criticism from poets themselves. To date
at least thirty writers have responded in print. The poet
Henry Taylor published two rebuttals.
Poets
are justifiably sensitive to arguments that poetry has declined
in cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers
have used such arguments simplistically to declare all contemporary
verse irrelevant. Usually the less a critic knows about verse
the more readily he or she dismisses it. It is no coincidence,
I think, that the two most persuasive essays on poetry's presumed
demise were written by outstanding critics of fiction, neither
of whom has written extensively about contemporary poetry.
It is too soon to judge the accuracy of Epstein's essay, but
a literary historian would find Wilson's timing ironic. As
Wilson finished his famous essay, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens,
T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson
Jeffers, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Robert Graves, W. H. Auden,
Archibald MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing
some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics,
economics, religion, and philosophy, are among the most culturally
inclusive in the history of the language. At the same time,
a new generation, which would include Robert Lowell, Elizabeth
Bishop, Philip Larkin, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, A. D.
Hope, and others, was just breaking into print. Wilson himself
later admitted that the emergence of a versatile and ambitious
poet like Auden contradicted several points of his argument.
But if Wilson's prophecies were sometimes inaccurate, his
sense of poetry's overall situation was depressingly astute.
Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated
from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal
coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to
and for the general culture.
Inside
the Subculture
One
sees evidence of poetry's diminished stature even within the
thriving subculture. The established rituals of the poetry
world—the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences—exhibit
a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for
example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater?
At most readings the program consists of verse only—and
usually only verse by that night's author. Forty years ago,
when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting
other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless
humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations
less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience
for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be
poets, and friends of the author.
Several
dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't
publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly
minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed
so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage.
One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster
ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines
with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally
not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to
poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite
kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.
Until
about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that
addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects.
Poetry vied for the reader's interest along with politics,
humor, fiction, and reviews—a competition that proved
healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn't command the
reader's attention wasn't considered much of a poem. Editors
chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular
audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety
of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published
Robert Lowell's poems next to critical essays and literary
reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between
cartoons and short stories.
A
few general-interest magazines, such as The New Republic
and The New Yorker, still publish poetry in every issue,
but, significantly, none except The Nation still reviews it
regularly. Some poetry appears in the handful of small magazines
and quarterlies that consistently discuss a broad cultural
agenda with nonspecialist readers, such as The Threepenny
Review, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review.
But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular
audience of literary professionals, mainly teachers of creative
writing and their students. A few of these, such as American
Poetry Review and AWP Chronicle, have moderately
large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships.
But size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency
or resignation about existing only in and for a subculture.
What
are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication?
First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature
(supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have
already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything
other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if
it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly
positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly
reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose
exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books
but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal
connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss.
If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be
openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine
has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to
be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all,
mainly our friends and colleagues.
By
abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture
demeans its own art. Since there are too many new poetry collections
appearing each year for anyone to evaluate, the reader must
rely on the candor and discernment of reviewers to recommend
the best books. But the general press has largely abandoned
this task, and the specialized press has grown so overprotective
of poetry that it is reluctant to make harsh judgments. In
his new book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity,
Robert Bly has accurately described the corrosive effect of
this critical boosterism:
We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being
published now than ever before in American history, most
of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack
what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but
the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused
by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and
who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.
A
clubby feeling also typifies most recent anthologies of contemporary
poetry. Although these collections represent themselves as
trustworthy guides to the best new poetry, they are not compiled
for readers outside the academy. More than one editor has
discovered that the best way to get an anthology assigned
is to include work by the poets who teach the courses. Compiled
in the spirit of congenial opportunism, many of these anthologies
give the impression that literary quality is a concept that
neither an editor nor a reader should take too seriously.
The
1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, for
example, is not so much a selective literary collection as
a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers (it
even offers a photo of each author). Running nearly 800 pages,
the volume presents no fewer than 104 important young poets,
virtually all of whom teach creative writing. The editorial
principle governing selection seems to have been the fear
of leaving out some influential colleague. The book does contain
a few strong and original poems, but they are surrounded by
so many undistinguished exercises that one wonders if the
good work got there by design or simply by random sampling.
In the drearier patches one suspects that perhaps the book
was never truly meant to be read, only assigned.
And
that is the real issue. The poetry subculture no longer assumes
that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues
in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish,
for purposes of both job security and career advancement.
The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do
not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are
in grave jeopardy.
In
art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity
matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable
poem—Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose," for example,
or Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe," which was made
famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers—an
unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their
very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible
as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists
for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly
objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,
A
poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth
or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration;
but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications
are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be
listed on a resume.
Poets
serious about making careers in institutions understand that
the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They
must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The
slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness
to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first
book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards
would be unemployable.
The
proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past
thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite
for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of
writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized
farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has
been created to serve the interests of the producers and not
the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art
has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit
this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional
poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy.
Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake.
Luckily, no one outside the subculture cares enough to press
the point very far. No Woodward and Bernstein will ever investigate
a cover-up by members of the Associated Writing Programs.
The
new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but
by providing specialized educational services. Most likely
he or she either works for or aspires to work for a large
institution—usually a state-run enterprise, such as a
school district, a college, or a university (or lately even
a hospital or prison)—teaching others how to write poetry
or, on the highest levels, how to teach others how to write
poetry.
To
look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary
poets have been alienated from their original cultural function.
As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes
in a class's economic function eventually transform its values
and behavior. In poetry's case, the socioeconomic changes
have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance
of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside
it. One might even say that outside the classroom—where
society demands that the two groups interact—poets and
the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.
The
divorce of poetry from the educated reader has had another,
more pernicious result. Seeing so much mediocre verse not
only published but praised, slogging through so many dull
anthologies and small magazines, most readers—even sophisticated
ones like Joseph Epstein—now assume that no significant
new poetry is being written. This public skepticism represents
the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary
society.
The
irony is that this skepticism comes in a period of genuine
achievement. Gresham's Law, that bad coinage drives out good,
only half applies to current poetry. The sheer mass of mediocrity
may have frightened away most readers, but it has not yet
driven talented writers from the field. Anyone patient enough
to weed through the tangle of contemporary work finds an impressive
and diverse range of new poetry. Adrienne Rich, for example,
despite her often overbearing polemics, is a major poet by
any standard. The best work of Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht,
Donald Hall, James Merrill, Louis Simpson, William Stafford,
and Richard Wilbur—to mention only writers of the older
generation—can hold its own against anything in the national
literature. One might also add Sylvia Plath and James Wright,
two strong poets of the same generation who died early. America
is also a country rich in émigré poetry, as
major writers like Czeslaw Milosz, Nina Cassian, Derek Walcott,
Joseph Brodsky, and Thom Gunn demonstrate.
Without
a role in the broader culture, however, talented poets lack
the confidence to create public speech. Occasionally a writer
links up rewardingly to a social or political movement. Rich,
for example, has used feminism to expand the vision of her
work. Robert Bly wrote his finest poetry to protest the Vietnam
War. His sense of addressing a large and diverse audience
added humor, breadth, and humanity to his previously minimal
verse. But it is a difficult task to marry the Muse happily
to politics. Consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing
that they are virtually invisible in the larger culture, focus
on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse.
(And a few loners, like X. J. Kennedy and John Updike, turn
their genius to the critically disreputable demimonde of light
verse and children's poetry.) Therefore, although current
American poetry has not often excelled in public forms like
political or satiric verse, it has nonetheless produced personal
poems of unsurpassed beauty and power. Despite its manifest
excellence, this new work has not found a public beyond the
poetry subculture, because the traditional machinery of transmission—the
reliable reviewing, honest criticism, and selective anthologies—has
broken down. The audience that once made Frost and Eliot,
Cummings and Millay, part of its cultural vision remains out
of reach. Today Walt Whitman's challenge "To have great poets,
there must be great audiences, too" reads like an indictment.
From
Bohemia to Bureaucracy
To
maintain their activities, subcultures usually require institutions,
since the general society does not share their interests.
Nudists flock to "nature camps" to express their unfettered
lifestyle. Monks remain in monasteries to protect their austere
ideals. As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists
and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias,
where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions.
Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned
the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North
Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.
At
first they existed on the fringes of English departments,
which was probably healthy. Without advanced degrees or formal
career paths, poets were recognized as special creatures.
They were allowed—like aboriginal chieftains visiting
an anthropologist's campsite—to behave according to their
own laws. But as the demand for creative writing grew, the
poet's job expanded from merely literary to administrative
duties. At the university's urging, these self-trained writers
designed history's first institutional curricula for young
poets. Creative writing evolved from occasional courses taught
within the English department into its own undergraduate major
or graduate-degree program. Writers fashioned their academic
specialty in the image of other university studies. As the
new writing departments multiplied, the new professionals
patterned their infrastructure—job titles, journals,
annual conventions, organizations—according to the standards
not of urban bohemia but of educational institutions. Out
of the professional networks this educational expansion created,
the subculture of poetry was born.
Initially,
the multiplication of creative-writing programs must have
been a dizzyingly happy affair. Poets who had scraped by in
bohemia or had spent their early adulthood fighting the Second
World War suddenly secured stable, well-paying jobs. Writers
who had never earned much public attention found themselves
surrounded by eager students. Poets who had been too poor
to travel flew from campus to campus and from conference to
conference, to speak before audiences of their peers. As Wilfrid
Sheed once described a moment in John Berryman's career, "Through
the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible
to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation
turned out to consist entirely of English Departments." The
bright postwar world promised a renaissance for American poetry.
In
material terms that promise has been fulfilled beyond the
dreams of anyone in Berryman's Depression-scarred generation.
Poets now occupy niches at every level of academia, from a
few sumptuously endowed chairs with six-figure salaries to
the more numerous part-time stints that pay roughly the same
as Burger King. But even at minimum wage, teaching poetry
earns more than writing it ever did. Before the creative-writing
boom, being a poet usually meant living in genteel poverty
or worse. While the sacrifices poetry demanded caused much
individual suffering, the rigors of serving Milton's "thankless
Muse" also delivered the collective cultural benefit of frightening
away all but committed artists.
Today
poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession—not
as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several
big steps above the squalor of bohemia. Only a philistine
would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty
of yesteryear. But a clear-eyed observer must also recognize
that by opening the poet's trade to all applicants and by
employing writers to do something other than write, institutions
have changed the social and economic identity of the poet
from artist to educator. In social terms the identification
of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one
poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you
teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is
not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place
for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination
and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry
suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with
institutional ones.
Even
within the university contemporary poetry now exists as a
subculture. The teaching poet finds that he or she has little
in common with academic colleagues. The academic study of
literature over the past twenty-five years has veered off
in a theoretical direction with which most imaginative writers
have little sympathy or familiarity. Thirty years ago detractors
of creative-writing programs predicted that poets in universities
would become enmeshed in literary criticism and scholarship.
This prophecy has proved spectacularly wrong. Poets have created
enclaves in the academy almost entirely separate from their
critical colleagues. They write less criticism than they did
before entering the academy. Pressed to keep up with the plethora
of new poetry, small magazines, professional journals, and
anthologies, they are frequently also less well read in the
literature of the past. Their peers in the English department
generally read less contemporary poetry and more literary
theory. In many departments writers and literary theorists
are openly at war. Bringing the two groups under one roof
has paradoxically made each more territorial. Isolated even
within the university, the poet, whose true subject is the
whole of human existence, has reluctantly become an educational
specialist.
When
People Paid Attention
To
understand how radically the situation of the American poet
has changed, one need only compare today with fifty years
ago. In 1940, with the notable exception of Robert Frost,
few poets were working in colleges unless, like Mark Van Doren
and Yvor Winters, they taught traditional academic subjects.
The only creative-writing program was an experiment begun
a few years earlier at the University of Iowa. The modernists
exemplified the options that poets had for making a living.
They could enter middle-class professions, as had T. S. Eliot
(a banker turned publisher), Wallace Stevens (a corporate
insurance lawyer) and William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician).
Or they could live in bohemia supporting themselves as artists,
as, in different ways, did Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and
Marianne Moore. If the city proved unattractive, they could,
like Robinson Jeffers, scrape by in a rural arts colony like
Carmel, California. Or they might become farmers, like the
young Robert Frost.
Most
often poets supported themselves as editors or reviewers,
actively taking part in the artistic and intellectual life
of their time. Archibald MacLeish was an editor and writer
at Fortune. James Agee reviewed movies for Time and The Nation,
and eventually wrote screenplays for Hollywood. Randall Jarrell
reviewed books. Weldon Kees wrote about jazz and modern art.
Delmore Schwartz reviewed everything. Even poets who eventually
took up academic careers spent intellectually broadening apprenticeships
in literary journalism. The young Robert Hayden covered music
and theater for Michigan's black press. R. P. Blackmur, who
never completed high school, reviewed books for Hound & Horn
before teaching at Princeton. Occasionally a poet might supplement
his or her income by giving a reading or lecture, but these
occasions were rare. Robinson Jeffers, for example, was fifty-four
when he gave his first public reading. For most poets, the
sustaining medium was not the classroom or the podium but
the written word.
If
poets supported themselves by writing, it was mainly by writing
prose. Paying outlets for poetry were limited. Beyond a few
national magazines, which generally preferred light verse
or political satire, there were at any one time only a few
dozen journals that published a significant amount of poetry.
The emergence of a serious new quarterly like Partisan
Review or Furioso was an event of real importance,
and a small but dedicated audience eagerly looked forward
to each issue. If people could not afford to buy copies, they
borrowed them or visited public libraries. As for books of
poetry if one excludes vanity-press editions, fewer than a
hundred new titles were published each year. But the books
that did appear were reviewed in daily newspapers as well
as magazines and quarterlies. A focused monthly like Poetry
could cover virtually the entire field.
Reviewers
fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily
tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their
most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall
Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist
Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written
on a typewriter by a typewriter." That remark kept Jarrell
out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate
to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald
MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it "might
have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally
deficient." Or read Weldon Kees's one-sentence review of Muriel
Rukeyser's Wake Island—"There's one thing you
can say about Muriel: she's not lazy." But these same reviewers
could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell
did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens.
Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come
lightly.
The
reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty
must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with
the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with
scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them
literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new
poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers.
Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a
public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided
specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They
also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists
often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social,
political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry
with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their
intellectual discourse.
Ill-paid,
overworked, and underappreciated, this argumentative group
of "practical" critics, all of them poets, accomplished remarkable
things. They defined the canon of modernist poetry, established
methods to analyze verse of extraordinary difficulty, and
identified the new mid-century generation of American poets
(Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman, and others) that still
dominates our literary consciousness. Whatever one thinks
of their literary canon or critical principles, one must admire
the intellectual energy and sheer determination of these critics,
who developed as writers without grants or permanent faculty
positions, often while working precariously on free-lance
assignments. They represent a high point in American intellectual
life. Even fifty years later their names still command more
authority than those of all but a few contemporary critics.
A short roll call would include John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur,
Louise Bogan, John Ciardi, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes,
Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwartz,
Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters. Although contemporary
poetry has its boosters and publicists, it has no group of
comparable dedication and talent able to address the general
literary community.
Like
all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They
believed that if modern poets did not have an audience, they
could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass
audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a
direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section
of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen,
educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers. This group constituted
a literary intelligentsia, made up mainly of nonspecialists,
who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama. Recently
Donald Hall and other critics have questioned the size of
this audience by citing the low average sales of a volume
of new verse by an established poet during the period (usually
under a thousand copies). But these skeptics do not understand
how poetry was read then.
America
was a smaller, less affluent country in 1940, with about half
its current population and one sixth its current real GNP.
In those pre-paperback days of the late Depression neither
readers nor libraries could afford to buy as many books as
they do today. Nor was there a large captive audience of creative-writing
students who bought books of contemporary poetry for classroom
use. Readers usually bought poetry in two forms—in an
occasional Collected Poems by a leading author, or
in anthologies. The comprehensive collections of writers like
Frost, Eliot, Auden, Jeffers, Wylie, and Millay sold very
well, were frequently reprinted, and stayed perpetually in
print. (Today most Collected Poems disappear after
one printing.) Occasionally a book of new poems would capture
the public's fancy. Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tristram
(1927) became a Literary Guild selection. Frost's A Further
Range sold 50,000 copies as a 1936 Book-of-the-Month Club
selection. But people knew poetry mainly from anthologies,
which they not only bought but also read, with curiosity and
attention.
Louis
Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry, first published
in 1919, was frequently revised to keep it up to date and
was a perennial best seller. My 1942 edition, for example,
had been reprinted five times by 1945. My edition of Oscar
Williams's A Pocket Book of Modern Poetry had been
reprinted nineteen times in fourteen years. Untermeyer and
Williams prided themselves on keeping their anthologies broad-based
and timely. They tried to represent the best of what was being
published. Each edition added new poems and poets and dropped
older ones. The public appreciated their efforts. Poetry anthologies
were an indispensable part of any serious reader's library.
Random House's popular Modern Library series, for example,
included not one but two anthologies—Selden Rodman's
A New Anthology of Modern Poetry and Conrad Aiken's
Twentieth Century American Poetry. All these collections
were read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were
memorized. Difficult authors like Eliot and Thomas were actively
discussed and debated. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.
Today
these general readers constitute the audience that poetry
has lost. Limited by intelligence and curiosity this heterogeneous
group cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation.
Representing our cultural intelligentsia, they are the people
who support the arts—who buy classical and jazz records;
who attend foreign films and serious theater, opera, symphony,
and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen
to public radio and subscribe to the best journals. (They
are also often the parents who read poetry to their children
and remember, once upon a time in college or high school or
kindergarten, liking it themselves.) No one knows the size
of this community, but even if one accepts the conservative
estimate that it accounts for only two percent of the U.S.
population, it still represents a potential audience of almost
five million readers. However healthy poetry may appear within
its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience,
who represent poetry's bridge to the general culture.
The
Need for Poetry
But
why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American
poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form
have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would
need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own
existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, "The purpose
of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness." Children know
this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite
nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no
justification, because a life without such pleasure is one
not worth living.
But
the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry.
To the general reader, discussions about the state of poetry
sound like the debating of foreign politics by émigrés
in a seedy cafe. Or, as Cyril Connolly more bitterly described
it, "Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over
a dried-up well." Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry's audience—critic,
teacher, librarian, poet, or lonely literary amateur—faces
a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical
readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that
poetry still matters?
A
passage in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny
Flower" provides a possible starting point. Written toward
the end of the author's life, after he had been partly paralyzed
by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons about poetry
and audience that Williams had learned over years of dedication
to both poetry and medicine. He wrote,
My
heart rouses
. . .. .. . .thinking to bring
you news
. . . . . . . . . . . .. of
something
that
concerns you
. . . . . . and concerns many
men. Look at
. . . . . . . . . . . . .what
passes for the new.
You
will not find it there but in
. . . . . . despised poems.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .It
is difficult
to
get the news from poems
. . . . . . . .yet men die
miserably every day
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
for
lack of what is found there.
Williams
understood poetry's human value but had no illusions about
the difficulties his contemporaries faced in trying to engage
the audience that needed the art most desperately. To regain
poetry's readership one must begin by meeting Williams's challenge
to find what "concerns many men," not simply what concerns
poets.
There
are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters
to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the
role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using
words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual
leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand
the power of language will become the slaves of those who
retain it—be they politicians, preachers, copywriters,
or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been
pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist
Stephane Mallarme praised the poet's central mission to "purify
the words of the tribe." And Ezra Pound warned that
Good
writers are those who keep the language efficient. That
is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn't matter
whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the
bad writer wants to do harm. . . .
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies
and decays.
Or,
as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, "One ought
to recognize that the present political chaos is connected
with the decay of language. . . ." Poetry is not the entire
solution to keeping the nation's language clear and honest,
but one is hard pressed to imagine a country's citizens improving
the health of its language while abandoning poetry.
The
second reason why the situation of poetry matters to all intellectuals
is that poetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal
position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture
of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary
art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation
of American high culture during the past half century has
left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from
the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely
exists as a living art outside university departments and
conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular
audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados
and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot
find places to perform in many metropolitan centers—and
for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling
liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins
of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring
actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual
arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class
support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.
How
Poets Can Be Heard
The
most serious question for the future of American culture is
whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline
into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility
of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of
the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces
more towering obstacles than poetry. Given the decline of
literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in
humanities education, the collapse of critical standards,
and the sheer weight of past failures, how can poets possibly
succeed in being heard? Wouldn't it take a miracle?
Toward
the end of her life Marianne Moore wrote a short poem called
"O To Be a Dragon." This poem recalled the biblical dream
in which the Lord appeared to King Solomon and said, "Ask
what I shall give thee." Solomon wished for a wise and understanding
heart. Moore's wish is harder to summarize. Her poem reads,
If
I, like Solomon, . . .
could have my wish–
my wish . . . O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!
Moore
got her wish. She became, as all genuine poets do, "a symbol
of the power of Heaven." She succeeded in what Robert Frost
called "the utmost of ambition"—namely "to lodge a few
poems where they will be hard to get rid of." She is permanently
part of the "felicitous phenomenon" of American literature.
So
wishes can come true—even extravagant ones. If I, like
Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could
have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish
that poetry could again become a part of American public culture.
I don't think this is impossible. All it would require is
that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for
bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest
proposals for how this dream might come true.
1.
When poets give public readings, they should spend part
of every program reciting other people's work—preferably
poems they admire by writers they do not know personally.
Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not
merely of the featured author's work.
2.
When arts administrators plan public readings, they should
avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix
poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings
honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures
with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract
an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising
quality.
3.
Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more
candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the
attention of the broader intellectual community by writing
for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon
of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom.
Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly
admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they
like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.
4.
Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should
be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely
admire. Anthologies are poetry's gateway to the general
culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing
trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces,
not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight,
and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers
who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse's
property for professional favors.
5.
Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate
levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance.
Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems
should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy
of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance
is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement
of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance
was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for
centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.
6.
Finally poets and arts administrators should use radio
to expand the art's audience. Poetry is an aural medium,
and thus ideally suited to radio. A little imaginative programming
at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations
could bring poetry to millions of listeners. Some programming
exists, but it is stuck mostly in the standard subculture
format of living poets' reading their own work. Mixing poetry
with music on classical and jazz stations or creating innovative
talk-radio formats could re-establish a direct relationship
between poetry and the general audience. The history of art
tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop,
they establish conventions that guide creation, performance,
instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions
grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience.
Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American
poetry establishment is locked into a series of exhausted
conventions—outmoded ways of presenting, discussing,
editing, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have
codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that
enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense,
but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto.
It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but
stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry
and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There
is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry
is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated
conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered,
unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.
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