To celebrate National Poetry Month, Slate publishes its annual How to Hate Poetry article. The job of writing this year's edition falls to Robert Pinsky, who gamely tries to explain why reading poetry is harder than, say, reading Dan Brown. He starts off noting that posterity forgets hacks like Edgar Guest within five minutes of their death. Yes, Pinsky admits, good poetry can be a bit of a bother to read, but look on the bright side: even if you don't understand the poem, it's fun to complain about how irritatingly difficult it was to read. Pinsky then tentatively suggests that difficulty may be an end in itself. He cites Yeats's off-kilter complaint about the difficulty of poetry:
The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.
As difficult as poetry is, Yeats's real wrath is reserved for all the bureaucratic overhead involved in setting up theater productions "That have to be set up in fifty ways,/On the day's war with every knave and dolt." Composing and reading poetry, by contrast, is a pleasurable sort of toil, and certainly more meaningful.
Yeats was the poetic son of Rimbaud and the grandson of Baudelaire, the two poets most responsible for making poetry difficult in the modern way. Until the Romantics poetry was a public art. Its reception in the form of plays, rituals, and heroic narratives was a shared experience. Poetry was a popular art not just because it was written in plain speech--quite the opposite, in fact. Rather, it was a shared experience because its audience shared a common set of cultural values and assumptions.
The unity of Western culture began to break up during the nineteenth century. The Romantics replaced the notion of a unifying culture with an expansive self. Consequently, poetry for the Romantics was a private act, and the dominant verse form was the lyric, with its exquisitely concentrated and subjective forms. T.S. Eliot described the post-Romantic lyric as a poet talking to himself, or to no one at all. Baudelaire was the first poet--the first recognizably modernist poet--to place the furtive, isolated modern self at the center of verse. Rimbaud adapted poetic form to the new modernist sensibility, giving new forms to forms of experience previously unknown in poetry. One of his best known poems is "Les chercheurs de poux" ("The Lice Pickers"), which begins, "When the child's forehead, full of red torments,/Implores the white swarm of indistinct dreams." The poem captures an experience none of us would prefer to have, but that's precisely the point. The leap from lice to dreams is the kind of paralogical thinking that has been banned by science and commerce with their implacable logic. From there, Yeats would expand poetry back into the wider--but now fragmented and discontinuous--world of symbol and experience, a project that continues to this day.
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