Commentary Who Killed Poetry? Joseph Epstein There are certain things in which mediocrity the best of their work was already behind them. is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public The audience for poetry was then less than vast; eloquence. it had diminished greatly since the age of -LA BRUYRE Browning and Tennyson. In part this was owing to the increased difficulty of poetry, of which AM NOT about to say of poetry, as T. S. Eliot, in 1921, had remarked: "It appears Marianne Moore once did, that "I, too, likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists, dislike it," for not only has reading poetry brought at present, must be difficult." Eliot's justification me instruction and delight but I was taught to for this difficulty-and it has never seemed quite exalt it. Or, more precisely, I was taught that persuasive-is that poetry must be as complex as poetry was itself an exalted thing. No literary the civilization it describes, with the modem poet genre was closer to the divine than poetry; in no becoming "more comprehensive, more allusive, other craft could a writer soar as he could in a more indirect." All this served to make the modern poem. When a novelist or a dramatist wrote with poet more exclusive as well, which, for those of the flame of the highest inspiration, his work was us who adored (a word chosen with care) modern said to be "touched by poetry"-as in the phrase poetry, was quite all right. Modern poetry, with "touched by God." "The right reader of a good the advance of modernism, had become an art for poem," said Robert Frost, "can tell the moment the happy few, and the happy few, it must be said, it strikes him that he has taken an immortal are rarely happier than when they are even fewer. wound-that he will never get over it." Such But such snobbish considerations aside, the quasi-religious language to describe poetry was generations of poets between W. B. Yeats (1865- not unusual; not so long ago, it was fairly com- 1939) and W. H. Auden (1907-1973) produced an mon. "The function of poetry," wrote Robert impressive body of poetry-of the kind that, in Graves, "is religious invocation of the Muse; its Frost's phrase, really does make "an immortal use is the experience of mixed exaltation and wound"; once read, it never is quite forgotten. Nor horror that her presence excites." were all of these poets imposingly difficult: Yeats Both these quotations and several others in the isn't, nor is Robert Frost. The most difficult same spirit are to be found at the back of Oscar poems of all, the Cantos of Ezra Pound, seem over Williams's A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry the years to have slipped outside the canon of great (revised edition), a small stout volume that has modem poetry and to be thought instead the something of the look and heft of a missal or other interesting fragments of a great cultural impre- religious tome. Even Delmore Schwartz, not a man sario-the Diaghilev of modernist poetry-who noted for heightened rhetoric or empty ecstasy, finally flipped, betraying both his country and referred to the poet as "a kind of priest." To those himself. These poets did not, except occasionally, for whom literature, and culture generally, came teach. Occupationally, they ranged from physi- increasingly to stand in as a substitute for religion, cian (William Carlos Williams) to editor (Mari- poetry-and modern poetry specifically-was anne Moore) to insurance executive (Wallace Stev- High Church. ens); in personal style, from traditionally formal The copyright date on my edition of Oscar (T. S. Eliot) to bohemian (E. E. Cummings) to Williams's anthology is 1950, and it was during suicidally desperate (Hart Crane). But for all their the 1950's that poetry last had this religious aura. variety, no one would ever think to describe them Many of the high priests of the cult-T. S. Eliot as academic. and Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and William They were, however, the first living poets to be Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and W. H. given the full academic treatment. Their works Auden-were still alive and still writing, even if were dissected in classrooms, the intellectual quar- terlies ran solemn essays about them even while JOSEPH EPSTEIN is the author of PlausiblePrejudices and Once More Around the Block, among other books. A new collection continuing to run their poems, book-length crit- of his essays, Partial Payments, will be published by Norton itical studies about them began to be written and early next year. continue to be written even now. Their fame was 13 14/COMMENTARY AUGUST 1988 neither of the general nor of the wealth-producing would one day know it, too. But the poets who kind that Ernest Hemingway and William came after them were less sure; they knew some- Faulkner knew-though T. S. Eliot was an thing had gone wrong. And they were right. It international celebrity-but within the circumam- had. bience of the university they were revered. No body of critical writing produced during this period was EFORE I attempt to get at what I be- more efficacious than that of T. S. Eliot, whose lieve has happened, perhaps I ought essays could affect the reputation-"the place in to describe what I think is the situation of con- the canon," as academics now put it-of writers temporary poetry. Pressed to formulate this situ- born three hundred years earlier. In the view of ation in a single sentence, I should write: con- F. R. Leavis, Eliot, along with Samuel Johnson, temporary poetry in the United States flourishes Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, is one of the four in a vacuum. Today there are more than 250 great English literary critics, yet without the au- universities with creative-writing programs, and thority lent his criticism by his poetry, it is plain all of these have a poetry component, which that Eliot's critical power would have been no- means that they not only train aspiring poets but where near so great. hire men and women who have published poetry But the clearest evidence of the reverence in to teach them. Many of these men and women which these poets were held is found in the way go from being students in one writing program they were worshipped by the generation of poets, to being teachers in another-without, you might or at least those in America, who followed them. say, their feet, metrical or anatomical, having Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, touched the floor. Many colleges and universities Delmore Schwartz not only wrote some of the most that do not have formal writing programs none- brilliant essays on their immediate poetic fore- theless hire poets to teach a creative-writing course bears, but in their lives they tended to be obsessed or two; and the course in writing poetry has also with them. The young Robert Lowell set up a become a staple of the community-college and tent on the lawn of the home of Allen Tate, to adult-education menu. None of this puts poets up learn at the feet of one of his masters. Delmore there with the Helmsleys and the Trumps, but it Schwartz viewed T. S. Eliot as a culture hero, pure has made it possible for a large number of poets- though not so simple, and his letters and conver- and more than 6,300 poets and other writers are sation were filled with references to Eliot. Randall listed in the most recent edition of the Directory Jarrell, after writing about Wallace Stevens's lat- of American Poets and Fiction Writers-to earn ter-day weaknesses, capped his criticism with the their living in work closely connected with their thought that Stevens was "one of the true poets craft. Such work, thirty or so years ago, was of our century, someone whom the world will available only to a small handful of poets, and keep on reading just as it keeps on listening to these of the highest stature. Vivaldi or Scarlatti, looking at Tiepolo or Pous- Robert Frost, when in his eighties and a great sin." draw on the poetry-reading circuit, thought it a Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman, Schwartz, as anyone good thing that poets had become teachers "in who has read much about them cannot mistake, a thousand, two thousand colleges," and added were all immensely ambitious men. Had their that colleges and universities gave poets "the best ambitions been applied to business or politics or audiences poetry ever had in this world." Writing perhaps anything other than careers in poetry- in 1985, in an essay entitled "The Poetry Reading: and all four were the most careful caretakers of Public Performance/Private Act," the poet Donald their careers-they might not have ended as sadly Hall noted: "In the past thirty years, the poetry as they did: in repeated mental breakdown, alco- reading, which used to be rare, has become the holism, early death, and suicide. I believe poetry chief form of publication for American poets. was implicated in their disastrous lives in that they Annually, hundreds of thousands of listeners hear had set out to forge brilliant careers like those of tens of thousands of readings." The great majority their predecessors and knew that, for a complex of these take place on college campuses, but many of reasons, they could not make it. Jarrell wrote others are given at such cultural centers as the an essay entitled "The Obscurity of the Poet," 92nd Street Y in New York, the Poetry Center at which he claimed had to be surmounted if civ- the Art Institute in Chicago, the International ilization were to carry on, and another entitled Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, not to mention var- "The Taste of the Age," which he found trashy.