A NEW V-V FEATURE!
No. 2 - July 2016
No Ideas? No Problem!
Now that I’ve retired from teaching college English, I guess it’s safe to make my confession. Don’t tell anyone, but I really don’t much care what your poem says. Is that too strong? Then put it this way: among the great trio of key poetic qualities (sound, sense, and detail), I care far more for gorgeous music and vivid detail than I do for ideas per se. Chances are, so do you. For instance, if you love Lewis Carroll’s beautiful nonsense in “Jabberwocky” (“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”), we’re on the same page. For that matter, if you’ve ever sung along with a song whose lyrics you know are lame, you agree with me. Really, if one judges a poem primarily based on the profundity or truth of its theme, well, a whole lotta fine poems fly out the window.
Speaking of fine, you’ve heard of Shakespeare, right? Consider his classic love sonnet “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” which is still being read at weddings four centuries later. Its vision of profound, courageous, unstoppable love clearly speaks to a deep yearning many of us feel. But honestly, isn’t he setting the bar, well, a tad high, when he defines love as follows?
. . . love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Say what? Love never alters or wavers? Love is never shaken? In truth, isn’t he pretty much full of it in this impossibly stringent definition? Not only does he ignore fallible human nature (check out the divorce statistics), but more problematically, he declares true love to be changeless, period. Do we even want that? Speaking as someone who’s been happily married now for 41 years, I can say that our love has changed a lot, developed and grown and adapted to all sorts of things. If it had been “an ever-fixéd mark” that was “never shaken,” well, we might have been in real trouble decades ago. (We’d also be pretty boring, if not insufferable.)
Yet this remains a very great poem, however dubious its central assertion, and its strength lies mostly in its gorgeous sounds and its powerful metaphors conveying its idealism both precisely and movingly.
Don’t get me wrong: having spent decades in classrooms, I love analyzing poems, and that definitely includes teasing out complexities of theme. I’m not saying ideas are worthless. Far from it. But I can’t help noticing how many poems I love are, well, fairly obvious or even wrong; many others are simply predictable. Others are lovely but too simple to need analysis. Great ideas aren’t worthless, certainly, but neither are they necessary for great poetry. And our tendency to talk about poems —in class or elsewhere—chiefly in terms of the strength of their ideas is, I think, an unfortunate limitation.
Teachers bear some of the blame for this state of affairs, I’m sorry to say. For instance, I was in college before I encountered a truly great poetry teacher. (I’m looking at you, Sydney Lea.) Since I was already a poetry lover, this late start did me no lasting harm. But what about all those poor kids who don’t love poetry, who suffer through high school classes that treat poems as puzzles to be solved, riddles with single answers, or worse, pleasureless exercises in moral uplift or arcane knowledge? Even a wonderful college professor often has trouble undoing the damage. Yes, I know there are many excellent teachers in public schools—but also more than a few who ignore poetry or handle it poorly. For thirty seven years I met college freshmen who arrived hating poetry quite deeply. It gave them no pleasure whatsoever.
My small effort to present poems in a more balanced way included a course I taught for years called Poetry Aloud. I usually began by quoting Duke Ellington’s immortal title, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” I’d tell my students that most literature classes put meaning in the foreground; but while we would not ignore meaning, we would keep that old swing in the foreground whenever possible. So we read poems aloud for the fun of it. We looked deeply at sound, rhythm, tone, and so on. We considered different performance styles. We listened to poems that were set to music. We looked at the history of poetic styles in relation to sound and presentation. And if at times we found ourselves loving a poem without being able to explain what it meant, well, that ‘twas brillig too.
A contemporary master of poetry rich in image and sound was Philip Larkin, whose ideas I often don't like much at all. He was in some ways an unlikeable fellow, cynical and bigoted, all too proudly provincial--and these things sometimes infected the poetry. But he won me over with passages like this one from "The Whitsun Weddings,” describing a trip by train across the English countryside. As Cezanne remarked about Monet, he’s “only an eye, but what an eye!”:
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept for miles inland
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept,
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
I can’t explain why a phrase like "floatings of industrial froth," describing something unpleasant, strikes me as beautiful and satisfies me deeply, but it does, and that clearly has little to do with profundity of theme.
I’d like to say more about both sound and vividness, and look at some further examples of poems I love apart from or even despite their themes—but you’ll have to tune in next month for that. Thanks for reading
Speaking of fine, you’ve heard of Shakespeare, right? Consider his classic love sonnet “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” which is still being read at weddings four centuries later. Its vision of profound, courageous, unstoppable love clearly speaks to a deep yearning many of us feel. But honestly, isn’t he setting the bar, well, a tad high, when he defines love as follows?
. . . love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Say what? Love never alters or wavers? Love is never shaken? In truth, isn’t he pretty much full of it in this impossibly stringent definition? Not only does he ignore fallible human nature (check out the divorce statistics), but more problematically, he declares true love to be changeless, period. Do we even want that? Speaking as someone who’s been happily married now for 41 years, I can say that our love has changed a lot, developed and grown and adapted to all sorts of things. If it had been “an ever-fixéd mark” that was “never shaken,” well, we might have been in real trouble decades ago. (We’d also be pretty boring, if not insufferable.)
Yet this remains a very great poem, however dubious its central assertion, and its strength lies mostly in its gorgeous sounds and its powerful metaphors conveying its idealism both precisely and movingly.
Don’t get me wrong: having spent decades in classrooms, I love analyzing poems, and that definitely includes teasing out complexities of theme. I’m not saying ideas are worthless. Far from it. But I can’t help noticing how many poems I love are, well, fairly obvious or even wrong; many others are simply predictable. Others are lovely but too simple to need analysis. Great ideas aren’t worthless, certainly, but neither are they necessary for great poetry. And our tendency to talk about poems —in class or elsewhere—chiefly in terms of the strength of their ideas is, I think, an unfortunate limitation.
Teachers bear some of the blame for this state of affairs, I’m sorry to say. For instance, I was in college before I encountered a truly great poetry teacher. (I’m looking at you, Sydney Lea.) Since I was already a poetry lover, this late start did me no lasting harm. But what about all those poor kids who don’t love poetry, who suffer through high school classes that treat poems as puzzles to be solved, riddles with single answers, or worse, pleasureless exercises in moral uplift or arcane knowledge? Even a wonderful college professor often has trouble undoing the damage. Yes, I know there are many excellent teachers in public schools—but also more than a few who ignore poetry or handle it poorly. For thirty seven years I met college freshmen who arrived hating poetry quite deeply. It gave them no pleasure whatsoever.
My small effort to present poems in a more balanced way included a course I taught for years called Poetry Aloud. I usually began by quoting Duke Ellington’s immortal title, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” I’d tell my students that most literature classes put meaning in the foreground; but while we would not ignore meaning, we would keep that old swing in the foreground whenever possible. So we read poems aloud for the fun of it. We looked deeply at sound, rhythm, tone, and so on. We considered different performance styles. We listened to poems that were set to music. We looked at the history of poetic styles in relation to sound and presentation. And if at times we found ourselves loving a poem without being able to explain what it meant, well, that ‘twas brillig too.
A contemporary master of poetry rich in image and sound was Philip Larkin, whose ideas I often don't like much at all. He was in some ways an unlikeable fellow, cynical and bigoted, all too proudly provincial--and these things sometimes infected the poetry. But he won me over with passages like this one from "The Whitsun Weddings,” describing a trip by train across the English countryside. As Cezanne remarked about Monet, he’s “only an eye, but what an eye!”:
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept for miles inland
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept,
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
I can’t explain why a phrase like "floatings of industrial froth," describing something unpleasant, strikes me as beautiful and satisfies me deeply, but it does, and that clearly has little to do with profundity of theme.
I’d like to say more about both sound and vividness, and look at some further examples of poems I love apart from or even despite their themes—but you’ll have to tune in next month for that. Thanks for reading
©2016 David Graham