The Offense of Poetry (review)

After banishing poetry from the well-governed city in Book X of Plato's Republic, Socrates challenges poetry to return only after it has successfully defended itself. But there is an odd qualification. The defenders of poetry "aren't poets themselves but lovers of poetry" who must "speak in prose on its behalf." This challenge, whether serving as an origin or a paradigm, has grounded the dynamic between attacks on poetry and its defenses up to the present day. The need for poetry to be continually on the defensive—or to justify its importance in the face of ignorance and neglect—testifies to the inevitable failure of this picture. If poetry must defend itself discursively, it must accept the same presuppositions about language and rational discourse that it is inherently capable of calling into question. This fact alone reveals what is truly at stake: more fundamental than all the attacks mounted against poetry and the defenses brought in favor of it is the truth that poetry offends, through its very nature, against our established theories and accepted modes of reasoning.

In The Offense of Poetry, Hazard Adams brings this situation keenly to the fore, creating a rich landscape out of the problems, historical and theoretical, that make it possible and perpetuate it. The book "is not concerned with offensiveness of subject matter but rather with poetry's fundamental nature as one of the principal forms of human expression" (ix). As such, it is concerned with offense at two levels. At the level of culture, poetry offends because it challenges protected and privileged views about language—mainly encapsulated in the belief that the function of language is reducible to its communicative utility and that all figurative uses of language are deviant or parasitic upon that function. But poetry also offends at the level of the individual reader. Here the offense is in requiring the reader to pay attention, to be willing to witness and undergo a confrontation with one's own culture and habits of thought, hence with oneself. As Adams suggests in his Introduction, this personal offense may be more fundamental than its global counterpart: "The demand for attention, which may, in fact, seem to the reader a repulsion, may be poetry's ultimate offense" (20). One is reminded here of William Carlos Williams' line from the fifth book of Paterson: "I have told you, this is a fiction, pay attention."

Poetry unites these offenses in taking an "antithetical" stance toward deeprooted binary oppositions that we uphold both individually (cf. Bacon's idols of the cave) and socially (cf. Bacon's idols of the marketplace and of the theater). "Antitheticality," a notion which Adams develops out of William Blake (though the term is borrowed from W. B. Yeats), is a stance contrary to, but not negating, a rigid system of conceptual opposites—"cloven fictions," as Blake calls them—as, for example, soul-body, good-evil, subject-object. If it were to negate such oppositions, the poem taking an antithetical stance would merely be repeating the dialectic in which one given side of an opposition dominates at the expense of the other. In standing contrary to a binary opposition, by contrast, a poem recognizes the latter as a fiction "and stand[s] in intellectual warfare, which is intellectual conversation, with it, thereby opposing the domination of either side, even its own" (14–15).

This idea of antitheticality grounds the argument of the entire book. In its first part, Adams traces the traditions of attack and defense, showing how both sides have perennially ignored the way poetry opposes the terms (truth and lies, rationality and feeling, content and form, etc.) that imprison the whole debate. While the exposition in this part is historical, what we gain from it is a synopsis of the major argumentative paradigms that have developed and which stand in array for anyone contemplating the role and legitimacy of poetry in human discourse here and now. These paradigms include, on the side of the attack, the Socratic claim that poetry is fundamentally deceptive...