Poetry and Public Speech

MOST people would concede that what is truly important is what we cannot forget even if we try. These could be events, persons, places, or words spoken or written. Unlike words most events, persons, and places tend to live on in our memories like aging photographs. We see them within the parentheses of their years, months, and days; to our regret they often have dated lives. But memorable words have an undying legacy, and they survive the times and places of their origin without difficulty. How? Perhaps it is because they retain their original energy and express something that is permanently true. It is inherent in how Sophocles has Haimon answer his father Creon in Antigone after Haimon had been reprimanded for having the temerity to correct his elders. Haimon says, “But if I am young and right, what difference does it make if I am young?” Or it could be in St. Paul’s “Yea, though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” Why have these words kept their original life? What makes them unforgettable?

In a letter to the philosopher Sidney Hook, Robert Frost stresses that an essential difference exists between a grammatically correct sentence and a living sentence. He does not define the difference, but he suggests that a living sentence can be identified by its undismissable effect. I would suggest that these lines from Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” would qualify as a living sentence: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” And the same sense of life is present in the four sentences that constitute an early poem of Frost’s entitled “November,” which concludes:

We heard “’Tis over” roaring . . . Oh, we make a boast of storing, . . . But only by ignoring The waste of moments sleeping, The waste of pleasure weeping, By denying and ignoring The waste of nations warring.

These lines live because they succeed in expressing felt thought in its fullness and let us share the feeling as we absorb the thought. We listen with our whole selves, not merely from the eyebrows up. All the words contribute to a unified poetic effect and persuade us that the expression is as perfect as possible for its purpose. It meets Henry David Thoreau’s standard: “That which is done well once is done forever. It creates the power of the imperishable example.” The words endure as written or said because the inimitable has no substitutes. It lets itself be known by heart, which is the best form of knowledge because it confirms it as a continuing presence. And continuing presences have no past tense.

The difference between the transitory and the permanent is obvious if we compare living or poetic lines with these journalistic examples: “The idea of canning a huge, flavorful beer was anathema in the bottle-fetish craft-brewing world where cans were associated with mass-produced plonk,” or “Clint Eastwood takes an intimate look at the public face of war.” Both sentences are grammatically correct, but all that they convey, as intended, is information. They exist, but they do not live. They do not have the quality that is identified in Spanish as sentipensante—feeling/thinking. Anyone, even a committee, could have written them. In either case they lack the staying power of Frost’s lines because the lines of his poem are not mere statements but utterances; the spiritual impetus and energy of their author is behind them and in them.

I do not make this comparison to denigrate the language of statement, which does serve a necessary purpose. Regardless it is not language at its fullest. Once it has served its purpose, it evaporates. Such language dominates our public life. It is expository prose in varying degrees of directness and style—almost all of it forgettable. Social scientists have estimated that each of us is bombarded daily by thousands of similar forms of expression—seen or heard. Of the thousands that we heard as recently as yesterday, are there any...