POETRY WAS NEVER KILLED

In August 1988, Joseph Epstein wrote a stupid essay in Commentary magazine entitled, ‘Who Killed Poetry?’, where he conducted a kind of post-mortem and requiem for poetry, decrying creative writing programs, asserting that poetry has now become so insular and self-referential it has lost its lyricism and appeal, that poets [the good ones] have all fled into the arms of academia, where they perpetuate that insularity, and that there are no longer any great poets like Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W.H. Auden, that the new generation is either lost in the halls of academia (Seamus Heaney) and has no appeal beyond them, or it is lost in obscurity like John Ashbery, and that the younger stars like Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman are all flawed, damaged, broken, ending either in suicide or as alcoholics. His basic thesis is there is no audience for poetry anymore, that publishers (the big ones) are reluctant to publish poetry, that there is no living B-S-K triumvirate to carry the torch, that is, Byron-Shelley-Keats, and that the universities have more or less killed the craft. 

As I said, it is a stupid essay. I would add, it is an ignorant one too. I had the same feeling reading it as I often had when watching the ‘World Series’, and realizing the game is between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, and not between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Melbourne Wallabies, say. World doesn’t mean the real or whole world, except perhaps in an imperialist, conceited way, yet this fact doesn’t prevent the baseball commission, or whichever body is responsible, from calling their national final the ‘world series’. Similarly, Epstein doesn’t look beyond the borders of the US to etch his epitaph onto the headstone of poetry. He never mentions Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Sean O’Riodain, Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison, Blake Morrison, Andrew Motion, Peter Redgrove, R.S. Thomas, Linda Pastan, W.D. Snodgrass, Amy Clampitt, not to mention Yves Bonnefoy, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, Octavio Paz, Czeslaw Milosz, Wole Soynika, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Osysseus Elytis, Michael Ondaatje, Nizar Qabbani, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Evgeni Yevtushenko, Jorge Guillen, Nicanor Parra, Georgi Gospodinov, Fernando Pessoa, to name but a few non-Americans. 

Epstein doesn’t mention Jay Wright or Harold Bloom either, or William Logan, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartmann, or Louise Gluck. He doesn’t mention Melissa Green or her sublime book, The Squanicook Eclogues, which was published in 1987. I mean, if it is lyricism steeped in the richness of the English language he is after, then he could scarcely find a more fitting model than Green’s book, which as a first book of poems carried blurbs from three Nobel laureates, Brodsky, Walcott, and Heaney. Maybe there is merit to some of what he says about creative writing programs, but why begrudge poets a livelihood, and who cares that they make that livelihood in universities?* Time has a way of sorting the good from the bad, and if the US is awash in doggerel because of MFA programs, then why generalize that to the rest of the world, or even to all of poetry? At least read other poets from other countries before you make your own hubristic insularity the measure of a global standard. 

Which brings me to my last point: throughout the history of the poetic tradition there have been watershed moments when the craft has been sent off in an entirely new direction, when there have been tectonic or seismic shifts as it were, and the paradigm has changed irrevocably forever. The publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads, or ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915, or The Tower in 1928 were such moments. The old ways of writing poetry and thinking about poetry changed irredeemably, and the tradition was freed from all the conventions and constraints that defined it up until that moment. These landmark departures launched a new poetics by reinventing the form and breathing new life into it. This ought to happen whenever poetic language becomes mundane, mediocre, jaded, cliché, predictable, sterile, or too familiar, when it comes to resemble only itself, or when a few originals propagate an endless retinue of cheap copies, as happened in Ireland with the Celtic Revival until Kavanagh came along. 

Such a seismic shift happened in poetry after the war with the publication of Der Sand Aus Den Urnen and then the subsequent nine volumes that Paul Celan published before his death in 1970 and posthumously in 1976 with Zeitgehoft. Celan changed poetry forever and his poetic revolution is the most significant event in poetry since Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Rilke, Valery, Stevens, Crane, Plath, Rulfo, and Adonis wrote. Epstein does not mention Celan, but why would he? For him poetry does not exist outside his silly thesis and frame of reference: but would that this self-appointed eulogist had expanded his horizons and range of reading before passing his empty death sentence, and would that he had resisted equating the whole world with whatever happens inside but a small part of it.

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* I have just reread Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, where she makes a similar argument quoting Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:

“What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne - we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were university men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do … a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.”

Woolf goes on to write that ‘intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom’. Her argument concludes that material wealth buys one the intellectual freedom and space, buys one a room of one’s own, which are the prerequisites of great writing, since “the theory that poetic genius bloweth where it listeth holds little truth”.