Re-reading Poets: The Life of the Author

Chapter 4. Preaching to the Birds

114 I did not expect to turn to John Stuart Mill, of all people, as a helpmate in concluding my thinking about the value of poetry. I first encountered his work in the college English class I wrote about earlier: Both Mill’s “Autobiography” (a short excerpt) and “What Is Poetry?” (the first half of his “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties”) were included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I don’t keep many books, but for some reason I still have that one. I remember that I felt a mild sort of interest in Mill. But I specifically did not like his conception of the role of poetry in the economy of life. The image that stuck in my mind—I’m not sure if I concocted it from reading Mill or borrowed it from a commentator on Mill—was of a bedraggled businessman coming home tired and mildly depressed at the end of a productive day of money-making and retreating to his attic to read some poems as a solace for his soul, a kind of pleasing distraction to erase the harsher memory of the day just played out and to prepare a firm enough frame to support him through the one to come. Poetry as a dry martini. It reminded me of the companion nineteenth-century Four 3 Preaching to the Birds kameen pages3.indd 114 9/1/10 3:32 PM Preaching to the Birds / 115 cliché of the light-deprived, garret-ridden poet parsing out poems in utter isolation. When I first read Mill, I was deep into the dramatic, highpressure politics of the day. I was not writing political poetry. But I read and admired the poets who did, like Amiri Baraka and Daniel Berrigan, for example. Mill’s paradigm seemed utterly afflicted by, as it remained entirely unconscious of, the British class dynamic: the poor starving artist providing beautiful artifacts for the solace of world-weary wealth-mongers. A few years ago, I was preparing materials for an Introduction to Critical Reading class I was teaching. We were discussing Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the preface of which is almost as explosive as the poems that follow it. In that preface, Whitman proffers a sweeping and exuberant statement on behalf of the poet of democracy, investing the poet with extraordinary powers as a political, social, and cultural force to be reckoned with. I wanted to be sure that the class knew this was an apotheosized conception of the poet, that it took its place at the time among a pretty wide array of similarly grandiose conceptions of the poet. So I put together a little handout of passages I took from other sources: Wordsworth’s description of the poetic process from the preface to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s definition of imagination from Biographia Literaria, the soaring closing lines of Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry.” I decided, out of the blue, to look again at Mill, to extract what I expected would be much more conservative definition . I was surprised by what I found: [T]he word “poetry” imports something quite peculiar in its nature; something which may exist in what is called prose as well as in verse; something which does not even require the instrument of words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of sculpture, painting, and architecture . . . (63) One may write genuine poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. (79) These two passages struck me most because they offer a Janus-like face for framing out what is, for most poets, an almost inevitable practical problem concerning the manner in which the role of “poet” is assimilated as a function of personal identity. One way of putting it might be this: Does one need to be writing, or at least trying to write, poems, actual poems, things that would be recognized in some potentially public way as poems, in order kameen pages3.indd 115 9/1/10 3:32 PM 116 / Preaching to the Birds to be a poet? In the most obvious sense, the answer is no. No poet can write poems, or be working toward writing poems, all the time. It’s just not possible . There are always interims, down times. But what if one...