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The Case for Popular Poetry
 Stanley
Kunitz, one of the most respected
American poets of our time, has died at the age of 100. Until I read his
obituary I didn’t know
that  his
father had committed suicide six weeks before his birth. Touching detail.
Poor man!
Poor boy! What a thing to live with. And it surely had something to do with
the boy’s becoming a poet, though it might be hard to explain exactly
why.
I accept
the consensus of poetry lovers that Kunitz was an excellent poet. But
isn’t that an odd thing to say? As if poetry lovers were a
small class of specialists sharing an eccentric taste. Poetry today is
notoriously the least popular, least remunerative form of writing. You can
still eke out a living writing prose. But verse? Forget it.
I’ve
tried to read Kunitz and other recent poets of repute — Seamus
Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Louis Zukofsky, and many more — but I have
to confess I just can’t get into them. I’m obviously not the only
one. This is in no way a diatribe against them, but let me put it this way: Why
doesn’t their work stick to the ribs?
Not since
Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, both of whom died about forty years ago, has
there been an English-language poet of both high literary prestige and great
popular appeal, whose verses and phrases could be recognized by ordinarily
literate readers — as, in earlier centuries, it seemed that Pope,
Wordsworth, Byron, Longfellow, and Tennyson were common possessions.
Everyone quoted them. But how many people today can name even one living
poet?
And yet we
are all poetry lovers by nature, aren’t we? The surest proof of this is
that popular poetry survives in popular song; we can all quote Bob Dylan and
Paul McCartney, and, if we are older than the rock era, Cole Porter and
Lorenz Hart. This takes no effort of memorization; on the contrary, when
poetry keeps its roots in music, such devices as rhyme, meter, and melody
can make it nearly impossible to forget.
![[Breaker quote for The Case for Popular Poetry: Bring back the sonnet!]](2006breakers/060516.gif) I
can still recite hours of
Shakespeare, less because I am studious than because, in my youth, I
listened to recordings of his plays until I knew them by heart. Others may
have thought this was a great feat of memory on my part, but actually, of
course, the great feat was the author’s: writing words that, heard a
few times, became a permanent part of the listener.
It’s
as if several of the modern arts have repudiated, as “vulgar” or
“bourgeois,” the very conventions that once made those arts
coherent and readily intelligible. So we have had novels without narrative,
music without melody or harmony, and painting without representation, as
well as verse that seems impenetrable.
In some
cases these experiments were brilliantly successful on their own terms, like
Joyce’s Ulysses; and we needn’t disparage
them. But when Joyce took his experimental fiction further in
Finnegans Wake, he set a precedent that was bound to find
few imitators.
In fact,
progress of this kind in the arts entailed loss as well as gain, but the cult of
modernism has sometimes refused to admit this obvious fact. When art fails
to communicate, as C.S. Lewis observed, it is now widely assumed that the
fault lies wholly on the side of the audience: “In this shop, the
customer is always wrong.”
The heyday
of audience-defying modernism is over now; it survives wearisomely in
attempted provocations — such as obscene or blasphemous pictures
and sculptures, mostly tax-funded, that cause banal disputes on editorial
pages. These silly rows really have nothing to do with either artistic freedom
or artistic merit. They signify the exhaustion, and greed, of what now passes
for the avant-garde.
But some
artists will always experiment, as they should. I merely say that excellent art
may also be, and usually has been, conventional and popular. It should hardly
be necessary to point this out. Tom Wolfe has argued that the novel has its
roots in the lowly craft of journalism; and he has proved his thesis in a series
of brilliant and essentially old-fashioned novels full of colorful characters,
dramatic plots, and social observation — nineteenth-century novels for
the twenty-first century. And they sell like crazy.
If the novel
can still do this, why not the symphony? Or even the sonnet?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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