Lerner and His Firefly

On The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

There must have been a moment when an editor at FSG said to Ben Lerner, in an email or maybe in the old face-to-face modality, “How about if we publish your essay ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ as a small book!” (Let’s assume, for Lerner’s sake, that the idea did not come from Lerner himself—that would be too grotesque.) There must have been a moment when Lerner could pause and say, “No, that’s a bad idea, it would be way too pretentious.” But presumably the editor said something like, “With a catchy title like The Hatred of Poetry we might actually sell a lot of copies.” And Lerner acquiesced.

My revulsion against this tiny book is so over-determined! Let me count the ways. There’s the cynicism in marketing as a twelve-dollar book an essay that’s barely more than 20,000 words. There’s the sensationalism of insisting on the flagrant word “hatred” when really what Lerner has in mind is addressed more fairly by such words as frustration, disappointment, radical skepticism, or Marianne Moore’s “dislike.” There’s the embarrassing puffed confidence of the author—at one point he actually refers to his thin chatty essay as a “monograph.” There’s the weird narrowness and repetitiousness of the essay—even in just 20,000 words a writer truly engaged with the subject could present many more examples and counterexamples for discussion. There’s the attempt to ride piggyback on the theorizing of Allen Grossman, whose ideas about poetry’s value are vastly more nuanced than Lerner acknowledges. There’s the comfy ordinariness of Lerner’s pages on Whitman, written as if for college freshmen. Above all, there’s the profound wrongness of Lerner’s thesis.

His thesis consists of two claims: (1) poetry has a special power to induce in readers a hunger for an ideal poem, a poem that will marvelously and totally uplift us, inspire us, enlighten us, comfort us; (2) actual poems always disappoint us by inevitably falling short of such an ideal, and our disappointment darkens into “hatred.” Lerner implies, without ever thinking it through, that poetry has this double effect on us while other arts don’t. Why could there not be a parallel essay on “The Hatred of Dance” or “The Hatred of Jazz” or “The Hatred of Abstract Painting” or “The Hatred of Theater”? For that matter, why could there not be a parallel essay on “The Hatred of Golf ” or “The Hatred of Progressive Politics”? People attach extreme unrealistic hopes to all these interests, and others. But to compare such obsessions would be difficult, and Lerner is not trying something difficult.

Most art of any kind is disappointing. More so, usually, than most experience of life, though that too is often disappointing. We all get used to this, if we are mentally healthy. Do you hate your life because it is so frequently frustrating and keeps failing to reach the great fulfillments you’ve imagined? Occasionally, in exhaustion or distress, you say you hate your life, but actually you cherish it and will fight to keep it, and next morning you’re looking for something beautiful or sweet or wonderfully funny.

Similarly, if you have truly loved some poems, and if this love has led you to be interested in poetry, you can “hate” hundreds of particular poems (in The New Yorker for instance) and you can see thousands of other particular poems as irritatingly flawed, but this doesn’t mean you hate poetry. When you’ve just experienced an onslaught of obscure and/or pretentious poems by students or by famous prizewinners, yes, you might shout “I hate poetry!”—but it’s not true, and the passion of your outcry is actually a symptom of your amazingly persistent love for poetry, that is, for the innumerable ways in which poems can enrich your life and nourish your soul.

If the topic is how do “we” feel about poetry, who are we? Ben Lerner sometimes implies that “we” are all the literate readers in the...