What is it that poets do? If poetry is to regain its bearings, this question has to be answered specifically and straightforwardly.
Vagueness and uncertainty are the enemies not only of clear thinking, but also of vigorous action. As I constantly tell my students, wallow in nuance and nebulosity and you will become a moral paralytic. So let me cut to the core of the matter.
Many years ago, Joseph Wood Krutch in his book The Modern Temper made the point that art furnishes a means by which life may be contemplated, but not a means by which it may be lived. It was a brilliant insight. You can’t model your behavior on what you read in a poem or a novel — to do so would lead either to prison or the lunatic asylum. Literature serves for entertainment and contemplation, or what the medievals would have called a speculum mundi — a mirror of the world.
Krutch was following Bernard Shaw’s argument in Man and Superman that aesthetic excellence has no necessary link to actual day-to-day existence. Art creates beautiful things, but they exist in a realm of their own. The biggest and most dangerous error a writer can make, as Pirandello pointed out, is to confuse art with reality.
For some reason, many people in the poetry business fight tooth and nail against this truth. They can’t bear the idea that their literary creations are verbal abstractions from life rather than pulsating realities. They’re offended by the notion that a poem might just be a poem, and not a moral compass or a testimony of feeling.
This is why such a godawful fuss is made in so many poetry workshops and classes about “sincerity” and “authenticity” and “genuineness” and “honesty” and all those other bogus scarecrows designed to frighten people away from real art. Many poets and readers refuse to accept the fact that poems are fictive artifacts, produced out of errant fantasy in the same way that a doodle is produced on a notepad. No, it can’t be! they shout. It must be more important than that!
No, it isn’t. There really is nothing more to it than that. As a poet, you don’t have some priestly vocation to save the world or to teach the truth. You just have to write good poems that will provide entertainment and contemplation for yourself, and maybe for some other people as well.
It’s especially hard for American poets to accept this limitation, because they come out of a dreary puritanical tradition, as old as The Mayflower, which insists on seeing the world in moralistic and utilitarian terms. If poetry doesn’t “do something,” they feel, poetry is trivial and non-serious. It can’t just be a verbal jeu d’esprit. It has to have some positive impact on the world.
People of this sort want poems to be beacons of intellectual light, illuminating the path for others. They want poets to have “a sense of responsibility” — a hideous phrase that is lethal to all art. To put it bluntly, they are poltroons and conformists who cannot conceive of the joyous freedom that art affords its creators and appreciators. And I’m not making a partisan political judgment here — morons like the stodgy conservative William Bennett are just as culpable in this regard as left-wing liberals who want all art to be politically correct. In both cases, poltroons see art as a means rather than as an end in itself.
And yet, for the sake of argument, let’s grant that poetry as a human activity must have some purpose or goal. Well, what’s wrong with having the purpose of providing entertainment and contemplation? Are these somehow less valuable than teaching and moral edification? If you think so, then perhaps you ought to examine your puritan prejudices.
There’s nothing more boring than a poem with an agenda. But it’s wrong to imagine that agendas in poetry are limited to crude attempts to push readers into some intellectual position. There are emotional agendas as well, designed to manipulate readers into feeling something, or as the current jargon has it, “to raise their consciousness.” These intellectual and emotional agendas make a great deal of current poetry unreadable.
You can’t use art as a guidebook to life. Art is sublimely free precisely because all the major issues of human existence are decided elsewhere, on non-aesthetic grounds. Once you accept that, you might be able to stop worrying about saving the planet, and write a few good poems.
Some persons say that this attitude trivializes poetry. Well, let them say what they like. I say that it gives poetry and poets carte blanche to do whatever they wish in the realm of literary creation. It opens up possibilities that people with intellectual and emotional agendas can’t begin to dream of. And it frees us once again to provide material for entertainment and contemplation. That’s what we do.
Why do we do it? Because we happen to be good at it, and because it gives us pleasure to exercise our talent. If you need two better reasons than that, then something is wrong with you and you should seek professional help.
