On the Death of Poetry
Also: The self in the fiction of J.M. Coetzee, Harriet Martineau’s forgotten Deerbrook, the novels of Josephine Tey, against the psychometric establishment, and more.
Last year, Matthew Walther wrote a couple of pieces on the state of poetry. His argument, in a nutshell, is that it is “dead”:
When I say that poetry is dead, I mean that no living poet, or indeed any poet who has written in English since the death of Philip Larkin, has produced anything likely to be of lasting value. How can I make this claim with such unbridled confidence? For me there is a simple test: unconscious staying power in memory. I challenge anyone who wishes to defend the honor of contemporary verse to rattle off, unaided, any ten lines of the stuff. (I have been asking people to do this for more than a decade, and I have never once found anyone who could recite so much as a line of—but no, we won’t go into names, lest the boys at Big Poetry put out a contract on my head.)
James Matthew Wilson responds in The European Conservative:
Walther’s first and only developed explanation is, to put it plainly, a bit of warmed-over romanticism. He quotes a passage of blank verse from the romantic poet—and English laureate—Robert Southey, where we hear an affectionate description of “woodbine wreathing” and creeping “holly-hock.” The verse is fine, Walther contends, and yet who would write like this today? Moreover, who could read it without boredom? Nobody, he answers, because “the very conditions of modern life … have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.” In his second piece, he returns to the claim and, I note with a groan, cites Martin Heidegger’s theory that modern man no longer perceives the being of much of the world—from the natural to the artificial—but rather takes it all for granted as a “standing reserve” of utility. We no longer see and love nature the way Southey did, and so poetry can no longer be written or appreciated. That is his argument.
This claim is, to say the least, naïve. If we are alienated from the natural world, the romantics were similarly alienated two centuries before us. While the romantics did not suffer the indignity of having their lives mediated by smartphones and medicated by a pharmaceutical-industrial complex (although opium was a societal problem), they did know their Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, not to mention the great successes of the modern experimental sciences for which those philosophers provided an intellectual foundation and apologia. Whatever their many differences, these figures I have just named agreed on one thing: the reduction of being in general, and nature in particular, to matter and motion, all of which could be understood by a theory of mechanics. Nature had already been proven—or so they thought—to be a mere machine . . . Walther correctly credits Eliot with creating “an idiom that captured the disappearance” of this romantic worldview, but he does not correctly perceive why Eliot did so. Walther calls the romantic vision “pre-modern,” but . . .it was indeed consummately modern. What did not seem modern was the sentimental and imaginative response of the romantics to the mechanistic reduction.
More:
In his second piece, Walther moves the goalposts of his argument considerably. All talk of our relationship to nature has been rendered secondary in favor of a claim that is in a sense non-falsifiable. Poetry is dead, says Walther, because none of it has “unconscious staying power in memory.” Nobody, he suggests, can “rattle off … any ten lines” of poetry since the death of Larkin. Well, this is not a contention to be settled on the page. If Walther has never met anyone who has memorized some lines by a contemporary poet, the only way to answer him would be to introduce him to someone who has. This I would be happy to do.
I always read both Matthew and James with interest, both of whom I know personally, but I am with JMW on this one.
Since we’re on the topic of broad statements about literary genres, let me point you James Elkins’s short manifesto for the novel in the latest issue of Athenaeum Review. He defends four statements on the novel: “Novels aren’t about real life,” “A novel should not be ‘careful, cautious and professional,’” “A novel need not provide good companionship,” and “A novel is complex.” Here’s a snippet: “As much as I’m interested in learning about the world by reading novels, I’m more intrigued by what novels can do other than reporting. Murnane’s an extreme case, but he is fundamentally correct: novels do many irreplaceable things, but the most important, the capacity that isn’t shared by any other medium, is the ability to weave imagination with logic, memory with reasoning, producing a sort of complexity.”
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