“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
William Butler Yeats
First, it is necessary to
acknowledge that Louis Menand was on assignment when he wrote “The Defense of
Poetry: Can a poem change your life?” It
is a responsible review of three books about poetry, that is, about poetry and
other things, but still, under this title, I expected more, a lot more.
Menand says he “doesn’t completely
agree” with Michael Robbins who writes, “No
one has ever changed his life because of a poem or song . . . (we need
poetry and music) . . . because they provide the illusion that we are changing,
or have changed, or will change, or even want
to change our lives.”
Menand critiques Robbins’ view of
the fading impact of once beloved poetry and music. He acknowledges that none
of us can be the fifteen-year-old first reading Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” or the “shining from shook foil”
that Hopkins shared. But we can, according to Menand, “remember with respect
and longing that time of life . . .when, as Georg Lukacs once put it, “the fire
that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.” That fire never grows old!
The necessity to review pop music
criticism along with poetry was unfortunate.
Perhaps we are a generation (we boomers) who grew up with both, but we
are a particular slice and not everyone in our generation experienced one with
the same intensity as the other.
About a quarter of the way through
the review, Menand takes up the title of Robbins’ book, “Equipment for Life.”
Robbins makes contradictory statements about the efficacy of poetry for life.
Menand quotes the “can” and the “can’t,” referring (as though every reader is equally
familiar) to Auden’s line “poetry makes nothing happen.” In February, 1939,
Auden had the courage to say that poetry “survives, a way of happening, a
mouth.” Robbins instead takes
capitalism, not Hitler, as a target, according to Menand, but holds that “when
capitalism is dead . . . we might not need poetry anymore.” Menand gently steps
away in disdain, and then details how poetry was alive and well around the wars
of the 20th century and is alive and well even now: “Every crisis is
an opportunity for poetry.”
On his way out of Robbins’ world
and on the way to Matthew Zapruder’s question, “Why Poetry?” Menand stops
briefly at Ben Lerner’s publication, “The Hatred of Poetry.” With
this pivot point I’m beginning to think the title of this review should be
something like, “Why Poets Hate Poetry.” And I’m beginning to see that Menand
took on a quite impossible task in reviewing these books, or this topic! He
sums up Lerner’s argument as “Poetry is a paradigm example of human
inadequacy.” Rather than take on what he
seems to believe are fundamental errors in reasoning, Menand mostly just moves
on. How might he have given a compelling
argument to Lerner at this point?
Perhaps, at the very least, turn to the adequacy of Archibald MacLeish:
“A poem should be wordless as the flight of birds . . . a poem should not mean,
but be”? I was looking for Menand to
give a good joust, and found thus far, a slightly sardonic reportage.
Menand lastly turns to Zapruder
with at least a third of the review to come.
He also shifts tone at this juncture, and begins to respond in a more feisty
spirit to all three of the authors under review. Their fundamental position
according to Menand, is based on the distinction between nonfiction and
fiction, and which of these is more meaningful, practical, and effective. All
three find poetry lacking. Menand does take a firm glove to the three, and
directly, too, with examples from Basho to Brodsky to Trump and September 11th.
On first reading this long,
involved review essay, I was disappointed that Menand didn’t do more to not
just list evidence, but to be the
evidence to the contrary. On this more careful and analytic reading, I see that
he marshalls history, titles, names, and arguments in addition to sarcasm and
overall contrariness. Possibly, the
authors might even say that he does NOT even fairly represent their books.
Menand concludes his essay with
some very personal remarks (that might even have been placed first). He, and
the three authors (and I as well) found poetry in youth, “and it changed their
lives.” My experience was mediated by
animated teachers and by the guidance of Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. My expectations of Menand are shaped by
Perrine, too. “Poetry . . . is a kind of
. . . multi-dimensional language . . . a gear for stepping up the intensity and
increasing the range of our experience, and as a glass for clarifying it.”
Robert Pinsky is another
interlocutor whose voice on poetry might have added to Menand’s range and decisiveness. Nowhere in this essay do we feel the force of
poetry as “a vocal, which is to say, a bodily art.” For Pinsky, poetry contains
“intricate patterns of sound, in great measure intuitively heard and
intuitively perceived . . . its unique expressive structure. . .”
In my world, poetry starts young
and sinks deep. It operates at the level
of cellular motion, mitochondria, synapses, amygdala. Learning poetry by heart is a deep pleasure and also an efficacious defense against
pain. Just try it at the dentist’s office: words written hundreds or dozens of
years ago are anodyne better than novocaine.
Poetry IS “shining from shook foil” in exactly the way that Hopkins meant,
and “trepidation of the spheres” as Donne reveals. It is the “frigate” (ED) and the eagle that
“clasps the crag” (ALT) and it makes visceral “the old lie” (WO). And if “life is more true than reason will
deceive . . . beauty is more each than living’s all.” (EEC) (Full poem by ee cummings below)
life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose: higher than have
–but beauty is more each than living’s all
multiplied with infinity sans if
the mightiest meditations of mankind
canceled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)
or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete: pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing’s more than everything)
death, as men call him, ends what they call men
-but beauty is more now than dying’s when
