A Critique of Modern Poetry

Poetry has been an interest of mine since high school, and while I have never lost interest, in recent years I have been occupied with other things. Lately, however, I found myself going back and re-reading poets who have kept my interest over the years. In the process, I have been reading some critical books in an attempt to increase my understanding of the poet and the poem.

I am beginning to look at poems in what is for me a new way. The most important thing is that I see that I have only understood poetry in the most superficial way. I have read poems for the beauty of the line, the vividness and economy of its images and its sound. Unless the meaning was obvious, I paid little attention to what the poem was "about". Archibald MacLeish once said "A poem should not mean but be", a thought which was not too far from my somewhat naive initial understanding. I now think that this approach is itself naive, in that it makes the assumption that a writer must make a choice between the "being" of a poem (its sound and images) and the "meaning" of a poem. Clearly a poem can and should have both elements.

However, this debate/argument has been going on for many years. In the early 20th century, the "Imagiste" movement focused only on the image in the poem. Poems in this category have their beauty but have not really achieved the first rank. Pound, for instance, wrote the following poem, tiled "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Why this poem has not been "successful" is probably obvious. It's a simple image, clear and precise, with no meaning other than itself as an image. But there is no depth of meaning, no content to help us relate to it in a personal way, no poignancy. It fails (for me) to stir some more intense experience or emotion. Reading it is like looking at a photograph taken by someone else of a street scene on a rainy day. It might be mildly melancholy, but nothing more than that. It fails some quality of universality and communication beyond the image which should stir an idea or an emotion in me. (The article in Wikipedia on Imagism is excellent and need not be repeated here.)

Some poetry by T. S. Eliot fails me for the opposite reason. He has complex and multi-layered ideas which he attempts to express through his poetry. Some seems successful; some does not. He is also at times a master of the melodic and sonorous line. When the two come together, the poem is marvelous. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an example of the good. "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" is an example of the failure of the union of meaning and image. The "meaning" of a poem should not be a puzzle to solve, nor should it depend on complex intellectual associations that are so unique to the author that no-one outside his head can connect the dots. Poems are not essays on religion or philosophy.

Pound's Cantos are another example of the latter failure. In spite of that failure, however, there are lines and images that are beautiful and powerful. In his earlier Translations Pound was able to translate meaning AND image from another culture and language into English. Perhaps because he could not depend on intensely and uniquely personal associations and recollections, he was forced to make the language simpler, and ultimately incredibly successful.

What are we trying to do when we write poetry? Recently I briefly took part in an on-line web site devoted to unpublished poets showing their work. Most amateur and unskilled poetry is written in the form of blank or free verse. One may presume that this is so that nothing can get in the way of the expression of feeling. But that's mostly what the poems were. They were adolescent outbursts of emotion with no discipline and little skill, though no one could doubt the intensity of the emotion. Each poem was written as if the author had never seen another poem and did not understand that their feelings were non-unique to the point of being trite. The occasional image or beautiful phrase might make itself noticed, but the meaning of all the poems I read was the same: "I and I alone have this FEELING! And it's important because I am the one who has it!" There is no suggestion among them that it is the universality of their feelings that can make it resonate with the reader. They did not want critical comment; they wanted praise and approval for their hothouse plant. They do not understand that the writing of poetry is a highly skilled task, demanding the utmost mastery of the language.

I too still find myself reading poetry in a simple and naive way, for the beautiful phrase and memorable image. The emotions being expressed are merely the context in which the language is placed. However, such a style of reading misses much of the content and simplifies or ignores the meaning. Still, I would rather read in that manner than read a scientific text or a sermon. So while image and sound are necessary for poetry, they are not sufficient for a poem to rise to the highest level.

What kind of “meaning” is appropriate for poetry? Considering that poems are not aimed primarily at the intellect, can we say they are aimed at eliciting emotions only? When Eliot describes the “objective correlative”, he refers to the attempt to elicit in the reader’s mind the same thoughts and emotions that were present in the mind of the author. But which is more important, thought or emotion? While there seems to be no limit as to the kinds of emotions expressed, some kinds of thoughts are clearly inappropriate, in the sense they can’t be easily expressed in such a format because they are non-verbal or abstract or even mathematical. Eliot attempts to express religious concerns and conflicts, and in that he owes much to the metaphysical poets of the 17th and 18th century. Pound tries to focus our thoughts on economics and politics throughout the centuries. In my mind, neither are successful attempts. I would rather find other ways to learn ideas.

Reading such attempts as the amateur in the local Poetry Society as well as the unsuccessful attempts by the famous helps clarify for me what it is that poems should do. An example of a successful attempt to universalize a loss and make it poignant and beautiful at the same time is found in the "Lucy" poems by Wordsworth. It can be done. We should know it when we see it. Wordsworth is not howling at the moon like a love-lorn teen. He is attempting (successfully, in my opinion) to speak to all who have lost someone of the universality of that loss and what it means to us. "A slumber did my spirit seal" is a successful blend of the emotion of loss with economy of line and with images that speak to us as well. I can find many poems who meet this criterion and am interested in those the reader of this essay can bring to my attention.