Is Poetry ‘a Little Word Machine’?

Cropped view of "Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry," 1798, by Charles Meynier. Public Domain

A famous definition of poetry as “a little word machine” has been quite extensively and approvingly quoted in the last few decades. There are various versions of the expression. William Carlos Williams spoke of “a small (or large) machine made of words.” Typing the phrase into Google gave me 530,000,000 hits. A short-lived poetry magazine in Birmingham (U.K.) even used the phrase as its title.

The definition is plausible, isn’t it? After all, isn’t that exactly what a poem is? In one sense, yes, it is. It is a “little word machine,” and it might be argued that in the case of long poems, like epics, they are “large word machines.”

Yet one thing is sure, as the reference to William Carlos Williams and other purveyors of the idea makes clear: Defining a poem as “a little word machine” is very much a modernist and postmodernist construct. It’s not something that the ancients or the classical traditionalist would have entertained, except with derision.

Is Poetry a Word Machine?

"Homer Crowned as Poet Laureate,"1767, by Antonio Zucchi. Oil on canvas. National Trust, England. Public Domain

Poetry thrives on metaphors. As Aristotle observed: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”

Hence, we find the genius of poets and poetry; and, of course, of some scientists too. Was it not Einstein who first noticed the similarity—or equivalence—of matter and energy? And so, when we say that poetry is “a little word machine,” we are using a metaphor to describe what it is. However, all metaphors break down at some point; what something is like is not what it actually is.

To see how this metaphor doesn’t work, we only have to consider a trivial alternative: The crossword puzzle is also “a little word machine”; indeed, a dictionary too is “a little word machine” (or perhaps a huge one). But there’s the rub. Crossword puzzles and dictionaries are largely works of logic and intelligence, not works of the imagination.

Thus, when we start over-familiarly (in my opinion) referring to poems as “little word machines,” we are reducing their status, their scope, and their impact. We are putting them into the domain of things we know all about and can control. In short, then, having established that the definition has some degree of truth about it, we realize that it is only a half-truth—less than a half-truth, since in essence this particular metaphor denigrates poetry.

How the Ancients Saw Poetry

Odysseus weeps as the blind Demodocus plays the harp and sings about Odysseus and Achilles at Troy. "Ulysses at the Court of Alcinous,"1814–1815, by Francesco Hayez. Oil on canvas. National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy. Public Domain

The ancients saw poetry differently. In Homer, the poet Demodocus is introduced in the following way (Odyssey 8. 62–64):

The house boy brought the poet, whom the Muse adored. She gave him two gifts, good and bad: she took his sight away, but gave sweet song. (Emily Wilson translation)

Who was Demodocus? The poet whom the “Muse adored.” Other translations have this as “Muse had favored” and even “whom the Muse loved above all others.” Does this sound mechanical and little? Was Demodocus constructing a little word machine?

And a bit later in the “Odyssey,” we see the effects of the poet on a member of the audience (Odyssey 8. 84–87):

So sang the famous bard. Odysseus With his strong hands picked up his heavy cloak of purple, and he covered up his face. He was ashamed to let them see him cry.

This is describing the warrior Odysseus—note his strong hands—and yet the poetry reduces him to an emotional wreck as he confronts his past at Troy in a way that nothing else could remotely do or had yet done. It also leads him to reveal his true self to King Alcinous, which hitherto he had been concealing.

No wonder, then, that when Orpheus sang—Orpheus, the ultimate Greek poet and singer—all of the underworld suspended its activities, and even death permitted release of one of its captives (Eurydice).

"The Lament of Orpheus," 19th century, by Franz Caucig. Oil on canvas. Public Domain

So far, the examples of what poetry is capable of (emotional catharsis) and where it is sourced (the Muse, a divine goddess) do not tell us what it is in the same simplistic way that “a little word machine” purports to tell us all that we need to know about poetry. But at least we now sense the grandeur, the importance, and the sublimity of poetry. In his “Life of Milton,” Samuel Johnson did attempt a definition of poetry, but his finest comment on it is found in James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson”:

Boswell: Sir, what is poetry? Johnson: Why Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Rather than getting overwhelmed by trying to define something that we can otherwise automatically recognize by its effects on us, we have to ask why the modernists and postmodernists like their trivial definition so well and trot it out at every available opportunity?

The Misplaced Quest for Equality

The Muse, or divine inspiration, is dismissed when poetry is reduced to "a little word machine." "Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry," 1798, by Charles Meynier. Oil on canvas. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Public Domain

The quest of modernists and postmodernists, sadly, is part of that general conspiracy, which ever grows in intensity and ferocity: to reduce the meaning of life to meaninglessness, to ensure that the cosmos itself can only ever be considered a machine. And why would they wish to do this? Because a machine is lifeless. And lifeless machine parts are replaceable with other like—that is, equal parts. They desperately seek the “equality” that comes from having no gods or goddesses, no transcendent reality to whose authority we need to be subordinate.

Indeed, as bizarre as it sounds, the impulse to reduce poetry to a little word machine is like the ancient desire to build Babel. Babylonians did not need gods to reach heaven, for they could do it themselves, and through their own works. In Christian terms, this is Pelagianism as poetry. Pelagius was the great fourth-century heretic who was condemned by St. Augustine. Essentially, Pelagius believed what the Enlightenment movement believed. Namely, that it is not by faith (in a transcendent reality) that humans are saved, but that they can do it all for themselves, through their own free will, education, and progress.

Today, there is a kind of modern egalitarianism in all this. If poetry is a little word machine, then, surely anyone can write it. Just scribble a few words down and voilà: You have a poem! Who needs the Muse? Who needs to be the favorite of the Muse, adored and loved by the Muse? No one. We don’t need all that celestial hocus-pocus.

And this explains why so much contemporary poetry, and even prize-winning and academic poetry, is so awful; well, not awful, actually—just not poetry. But certainly, these poems are examples of little word machines.

The lesson from this is clear: Avoid these pernicious definitions of poetry and also the poets who subscribe to them. We need to find the true poets who reveal our true selves to us. That’s where the lasting greatness is.