Real Poetry: An Antidote to Today’s Poetry

“The Moon Shines Bright,” 1859, by John Edmund Buckley is a scene from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” Act 5, Scene 1. Like true poetry, Shakespeare described how music softens the human spirit and disables evil. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. Folger Imaging Department

My father (1915–1996) left school at 14, barely literate or numerate and was more or less a manual laborer his whole life; he was never interested in education and never became educated. But I always remember this about him: When I was a teenager newly interested in poetry, I asked him, “Dad, why aren’t you interested in poetry?” It was a naïve question, but I wanted to know. The response I got shocked me then and still does today. While my father—God bless him!—was a massive exaggerator on any topic, he said, “I am interested in poetry.” Then he quoted both stanzas of James Stephens’s “The Snare” from memory. I was bowled over.

At the time, I didn’t know the poem and had never heard of the Irish poet James Stephens (1880–1950). But I certainly looked it up afterward. The first stanza goes like this:

I hear a sudden cry of pain! There is a rabbit in a snare: Now I hear the cry again, But I cannot tell from where.

In questioning my father, it turned out that he’d memorized this poem at school and won his class’s second prize for reading it aloud. “Who won first prize?” I asked. He couldn’t remember the student’s name, but the poem was Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

This was the full extent of his poetical knowledge—the complete extent—there was nothing else. But what an impact that had made on him! Fifty years later he could still recite it.

Political Language

A statue of George Orwell in front of BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London. Claudio Divizia/Shutterstock

In his brilliant article, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell noted, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” What’s argued here and elsewhere is that much of political discourse tries to justify actions that are morally questionable or outright wrong. It uses convoluted or deceptive language to mask the truth.

I would add that it’s not just convoluted language that obscures the truth; sometimes the mere repetition of simplistic and empty slogans can do this. The prototype for these reminds me of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” fable: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” It was a repeated until it worked up the crowd into an emotional frazzle about two-legged people.

Today, the two-legged people are the climate-change deniers, deniers of transgender women being real women, deniers of systemic racism, and so the list—the litany—goes on. These complex issues are reduced to variant slogans that people parrot.

The question is: What is the antidote to this corruption and perversion of language? Clearly, if this is a perversion of language, then it’s also of thought. As Orwell wrote in “1984”: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

While there’s no one simple answer, I do think the education systems in the United States and the UK need to embrace the teaching of poetry—real poetry.

Venantius Fortunatus reading his poems to Radegonda VI and the abbess in the monastery of Poitier, 19th century, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas. A venerated poet since the Middle Ages, Venantius Fortunatus wrote 11 surviving books of poetry in a diverse group of genres. Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands. Public Domain

What Real Poetry Is Not

Today, “real poetry” has been subverted by “false poetry” or what might be better called “ersatz poetry,” or poor substitute for real poetry. We can usually identify ersatz poetry by its omissions. Most significantly, ersatz poetry tends to omit meter, rhyme, and alliteration, while often embracing cliched diction and common place ideas. It tends to avoid syntactical complexity, while at the same time eschewing powerful repetitions built on metrical and rhyming patterns. Finally, ersatz poetry tends to avoid an overarching stanzaic structure. It even avoids the well-known (and usually loved) forms, such as ballads or sonnets.

There are exceptions to all this. In the works of some academic, postmodern ersatz poets, the diction tends to be arcane rather than cliched. The poem’s meaning is often impenetrable for the average reader. In sum, it tends to be extremely and uniquely solipsistic.

A great example of academic solipsism is from a father of moderniism, Ezra Pound. This short extract from his “Canto LXXXI” gives a flavor (with indentations removed):

Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom Taishan is attended of loves under Cythera, before sunrise and he said: “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo—(sounded catolithismo  y muy poco reliHion.” and he said: “Yo creo que los reyes desparecen” (Kings will, I think, disappear) was Padre José Elizondo in 1906 and in 1917 or about 1917 and Dolores said: “Come pan, niño,”  eat bread, me lad Sargent had painted her before he descended (i.e. if he descended but in those days he did thumb sketches, impressions of the Velázquez in the Museo del Prado and books cost a peseta, brass candlesticks in proportion, hot wind came from the marshes and death-chill from the mountains.

Notice that this is one sentence! But as Spock might have said to Capt. Kirk, “It’s a sentence Jim, but not as we know it,” and then added, “It’s poetry, Jim, but not as we know it.”

Real Poetry’s Impact

"The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry," 1782, by Angelica Kauffmann. Oil on canvas. Kenwood House, London. Public Domain

What real poetry can do and do supremely—better than any prose—is convey complex ideas and profound emotional states. It can express what is otherwise inexpressible. Almost as a contradiction, too, it can do this when using simple language.

The simplest poetry can set up inexhaustible resonances that readers return to again and again for their souls’ refreshment. Think of my father: Yes, the poem didn’t become life-changing for him as it did for me and so many others who read real poetry. But all his life, a small capsule of beauty held sway in his heart and mind so that he never forgot it.

“The Moon Shines Bright,” 1859, by John Edmund Buckley is a scene from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” Act 5, Scene 1. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. Folger Imaging Department

Poetry—and its cousin, music—has a profound impact on human nature and life. Take, for example, Act 5 of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” when Lorenzo says:

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.

What Shakespeare described is how music softens the human spirit and disables evil. This is true for poetry as well as music. It’s through Shakespeare’s poetry that he expresses this, and through the beauty of his language that we feel it too. Yet this is no mere poetic fancy, for we find, as  English writer Samuel Johnson said, Shakespeare holds up a mirror to life. In other words, poetry and music reveal and have effects in the real world.

A famous example of this is in Maxim Gorky’s “Memoirs of Lenin.” Lenin said: “I know nothing greater than [Beethoven’s] “Appassionata”; I’d like to listen to it every day. It is marvellous, superhuman music. I always think with pride—it may be naïve of me—what marvellous things human beings can do! But I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, makes me want to say sweet nothings and stroke the heads of people who, living in such a hell, can create such beauty. Nowadays you have to thrash them on the heads, without mercy, to make them go to the revolution.”

A portrait of Beethoven, 1920, by Leonid Pasternac. British Museum, London. PD-Art

In short, in order to be a mass murderer, Lenin had to forego—to suppress—the beauty of music, the music inside himself for it made him compassionate, but his political machinations required ruthless efficiency and cruelty. He had to suppress the poetry that is everywhere; for the universe means “uni” (one) and “verse” (song or poem).

On the other end of the spectrum, Abraham Lincoln found solace and emotional release in poetry, particularly during difficult times. One of his favorite poets was William Knox, whose melancholic poem “Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?” struck a deep chord in him. Lincoln frequently recited it to friends and family. In it, he found a poignant reflection on mortality and the fleeting nature of life. Those themes resonated especially in light of the Civil War and personal tragedies he endured. In short, poetry strengthened him.

With this in mind, we'll look at one real poem to see how its specific qualities are an antidote to today’s corruption of language and thought. In Part 2 we’ll visit poet Robert Frost’s masterpiece “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

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