The Failed Embrace

Not long ago Randall Jarrell foresaw that modern poetry had become a commodity to be marketed like Cheer, All, and Joy. The insight came amid an explosion of interest in poetry accompanying the successes of poetry readings at the ymha in Manhattan and nationwide at universities and was enhanced by the sales of recordings by poets like Dylan Thomas and the availability of poems in inexpensive quality paperbacks. Poets even began appearing as guests on radio's and tv's late-night talk shows, and writing programs began to spring up at universities who found it advantageous also to inaugurate literary journals to promote these programs. In an effort to capitalize on and expand this interest in high schools, poems were rephrased into a simpler language. Two competing anthologies appeared to convey the vitality of a postwar generation of poets—New Poets of England and America and The New American Poetry—beginning what would be a decades-long life-nourishing squabble between academic and beat poets. Nonetheless indications that the explosion might be short-lived appeared in an alienation suggested by poetry book titles like Land of Unlikeness, The Dispossessed, Losses, and The Lost Son, and subsequently there have been abundant essays announcing the "death" of modern poetry and proposing strategies for its remarketing.

Generally these strategies follow established models: change the product so that it is more appealing to the consumer; change the sales campaign to widen the appeal; and change the salesman (poet/critic). These strategies are not new in the history of verse.

With its combination of words and rhythm, poetry was originally a mnemonic device for passing on tales and mores of the tribe at a time when reading was not widely existent. It fell into three categories: narrative, dramatic, and lyric—the last of which is what is meant when the health of modern poetry is talked about. A split in the form occurred in the Renaissance when new musical notation made instrumental music possible and words became allied with oratory and Ramist logic. The split was aided by the invention of the printing press, which made books more readily available, and a Protestant emphasis on the ability to read the Bible as instrumental in man's personal relation to Christ. This emphasis was further delineated in educational reforms in the nineteenth century and a division of discourse into the languages of science and feeling. It is this division that Samuel Hazo and David Orr seize upon in The Stroke of a Pen and Beautiful & Pointless, though, as Hugh Kenner has argued in the instance of the typewriter, technology has also had an impact. No doubt, the computer and cloud computing will bring comparable changes.

Hazo proposes that the appeal of modern poetry might improve indirectly through a change in the sales campaign consistent with John Henry Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University. Hazo finds "the voice that is great within us . . . missing in almost all of our public discourse," its having succumbed to a language of an economy that "leaves out many of those elements that sustain us as human beings." In science one may temporarily gain power, but it is a capacity to bend reality to one's will and not "the power [of poetry] to awaken the self that exists deeply within each of us." Economies in today's educational system affecting the arts may, in responding to vocational programs, have unintentionally impeded the imagination, which Hazo calls a "primal source" akin to "the hunger for music and for knowledge and for God." Allowed to flourish, the arts put us "in touch with...