Actually, I don't know. But they ought to, because it seems that perhaps we have finally hit the nadir of poetic composition in the West and are beginning to wander our way back toward the rather important tradition, as it turns out, of form. Part of Dana Gioia's success as chairman of the NEH (how did that ever happen?) has been both to symbolize and to invigorate the rise of this new formalism.

The place to encounter this reactionary-radical school of poetry online is at Contemporary Poetry Review particularly in the writing of James Matthew Wilson, a young poet-critic currently at East Carolina University. The article linked to above will offer sufficient evidence of that judgment. Here's a morsel that reveals Wilson's sensitive and judicious handling of the New Critics:

quote:

Now, I should emphasize that the usual dismissal of the New Critics on account of their “religious” obsession with metaphor and paradox, or because their apparent formalism closed off literature to the deeper exigencies that explain why we read it and why some of us write it is naive. As their Arnoldian pedigree suggests, few authors have ever so persistently insisted on the importance of poetry as a mode of discovery and critique in religious, political, and other cultural discourses as did Ransom, Tate, Brooks, and especially Yvor Winters. Far from erring on the side of isolating or eviscerating the aesthetic, these practical critics only failed in articulating the profound and convincing relations between the aesthetic, cultural, political, and religious spheres of thought and activity with a nuance and sophistication that could remain permanently enlightening. It is hard not to blush at some of John Crowe Ransom’s efforts to take on John Dewey, name-dropping Kant and Hegel in his defense of art as something more than a chemical or natural “reaction.” All men of good will root for him, as they would root for Winters’s attempt at Thomistic criticism if they ever read it, but they must acknowledge such arguments are neither as cogent nor informed as they ought to be. On the other hand, Francesca Aran Murphy’s study, Christ the Form of Beauty (1995), draws Tate, Ransom, and Caroline Gordon into dialogue with the theological aesthetics of Jacques Maritain, William Lynch, and Hans Urs von Balthasar; in doing so, she demonstrates how important the New Critics become when we move beyond the contemporary English department and look at modern theology.

Jeremy,

You frame the issue well - as does the article you refer to. You bring to mind a line from David Hicks' Norms and Nobility: "Literature is only as important as the culture it sustains."

The immediate benefit of literature, particularly poetry, seems to be pleasure. But it does so much more than that. No wonder those who hate the west are paranoid about the poetry.

Keep it in front of us.

Well, if poetic composition has really and truly hit its nadir and is swinging back in a more meaningful direction, that's a wonderful thing. I have serious doubts about that, however, though I have to admit I'm no expert in contemporary poetry. If literature is really only as important as the culture it sustains, what does that say about our culture for the last 20+ years?

I hope that the tide is turning, but still, after studying literature in grad school and teaching English on the college level, the last place I would recommend a young (or old) person go to study literature would be a university. If the tide of contemporary literature is changing, the academics will strive mightily to ignore that fact.

Dear Mr. Beer:

I care about poetry. I am also an occasional reader of The Contemporary Poetry Review, although I cede ignorance of Wilson's work. But, I don't understand why you say poetry is only "beginning" to return to forms.

Consider:

In 2000, eight years ago, that Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, was first released. It was then promptly reprinted in paperback the following year. My copy's copyright page indicates it has been reprinted eight times. You can find it in any Border's Books.

It is a wonderful collection. And it's perfect for anyone wondering where formalist verse "has gone." Strand and Boland collected therein a litany of marvelous examples of traditional forms spanning from every decade of 20th century verse. The forms haven't "gone" anywhere. They've always been there.

Furthermore, to say poetic composition has hit anything like a nadir is, well, a little pretentious. In what way has it hit a nadir?

There certainly is a lot of bad poetry out there. More and more every day. And perhaps the greatest culprit in it's production is the great proliferation of MFA programs. But with what age shall we compare ourselves? The age of Eliot and Williams, Ransom and Winters, Shakespeare and Marvell?

None of those comparison will do unless you consider the huge increase in the total amount of poetry being published, and the increase of poetry's popularity. I quote Donald Hall from a 1991 interview with The Paris Review:

quote:

Newspaper people and essayists always whine about how we don't read poetry the way we used to, in the twenties for example. Bull***t! Just compare the number of books of poems sold then and now. ... In 1923 Harmonium didn't sell out--Steven's was remaindered, for heaven's sake! A book of poetry today, by a poet who's been around, will be published in an edition of five to seven thousand copies and often reprinted.

Poetry is much more popular in America than it used to be, and as a result more and more people want to write it. Now then, most of what people write is garbage, to be sure. It gets printed in the little magazines and it's lucky if it ends up in a public library. But all that is just bottom scum, cheap imitation. And imitations can't exist without their prototypes, the good poems, which have continued to exist in every decade. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But I suspect I'm now getting into theoretical territory: what makes a "good" poem? Traditional form? The image? The meter? The content? The artistry? The writer? The reader?

Well, those debates can be fun too. What I'm saying here is, however you define it, good poetry has always been there and still is.

If anything, I suspect this new formalism--which you announce has having just begun--probably only amounts to the slow, general improvement of all that rubbish. In other words, the imitators are getting more proficient.

Sincerely yours,
Phillip Harvey


P.S. Dana Gioia is Chairman of the NEA, not the NEH.

Dear Mr. Harvey,

I appreciate that people continue to look at Jeremy Beer's post so long after it first appeared, and yours is a thorough response indeed. As the occasion of Beer's post, and so the indirect occasion of yours, I should like to take a moment to offer my own thoughts on these matters.

First off, the sale of books of poetry can hardly serve as an indication of the vitality of poetry now or at any time. Most published books of poetry are bought by academic libraries, where they sit in the stacks unread. The exception would be anthologies and guides to poetic form, prosody. These are frequently reprinted because they can be used in the high school and college classroom. It is a frequent American practice to equate the appearance of economic viability with the health of this or that cultural form, but this is a dubious equation indeed. If fewer books of poetry sold, but were sold to persons who actually read them, I would be more optimistic about poetry's future.

Secondly, to address the meat of your complaint, we should turn to the history of poetic practice. The modernists of the early twentieth century turned to poetic experimentation because they were uncertain what "function" poetry might play in culture and society, and because they were uncertain what constituted poetry properly conceived. Their sometimes radical flings with fragmentation and unprecendented forms was bound up with an attempt to explore the possibilities and limits of what one might do with language and still have it constitute a poem.

This appearance of radical experimentation concealed a persistent adherence to an established romantic convention: that poetry must be the expression of difficult, intense emotion. In the middle decades of the last century, this convention persisted, but the effort was made to "conceal" it all the more through the exagerated use of fragmentation, irony, and above all the adaptation of incongruous imagery from the surrealists (needless to say, with none of the surrealists' intellectual rigor or political radicalism).

Poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to adhere to fairly narrow conventions that can be traced back to Wordsworth and Tennyson. Redundant though much of that poetry certainly was, the conventions were considerably more loose and varied than those that emerged in the twentieth century. By the end of the last century, most published poetry adhered either to the sincere, prosaic statement of autobiographical (confessional) free verse, or it diddled with ever more extreme fragmentation and incongruous imagery (thus rendering the poem logically incoherent, but linguistically "surprising").

Dana Gioia and other poets associated with the "new formalism" struggled in the early nineteen eighties and afterward to create venues where poetry that was both coherent and formal (as opposed to free verse) could be published. This was a hard road that has been amply described in books and essays on the movement. Along with recovering the lost formal traditions of English poetry, they also extended, or rather, re-extended the kinds of genres that could be deemed poetic. Thus was seen a rise in the number of verse novels and narrative poems during the last thirty years. Longer poetic forms in earlier decades tended to read like over-long fragmented lyrics (Pound's Cantos, for instance).

Poets like Donald Hall routinely attempt to repress this history of poetic decline and recovery by relying on extrinsic figures like the sale of books. What we should do is recognize that the great bulk of even the canonized poetry of the last century was not very good; a ballad of wee Thomas Moore is at least as pleasurable to read as much of Stevens and all of Williams. Hall's and your comments perpetuate what literary historians have come to call the "lyricization" of poetry. That is, the reduction of poetry to the lyric form, and therefore the loss of narrative and dramatic genres in favor of the representation of intense, subjective experience. So long as the convention of the lyric continues to "dominate" what people think about when they think about poetry, only a few "sensitive" souls will find much in it, and only a few redundant kinds of poems will continue to be written.

For further dilation on these matters, see the first two sections of my serialized essay "Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade."

Finally, yes indeed, Gioia is chair of the NEA. A point for you.

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