Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner (review)

The title of Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry suggests an ambitiously large topic, but, as it turns out, it’s just being modest, because its actual subject is Poetry with a capital P. In clear terms Lerner names the various haters—critics, poets and non-poets, the leftist avant-garde and the rightist avant-garde, dentists—and their particular beefs. Starting with the claim that the whole medium inspires widespread dislike, even among those most dedicated to it, Lerner proceeds to do no less than analyze the whole point of poetry and to stage an exciting defense in its favor.

“I, too, dislike it,” Lerner generously admits on the first page, quoting a Marianne Moore line. Even those who are primarily occupied with poetry—poets—have a contentious relationship with it. Something about its very essence inspires hatred. A clue lies in what all poems succeed and fail to do in varying degrees, and all poems, Lerner tells us, even those generally agreed to be the best—the Keatses, Dickinsons, Whitmans—fail. They fall short because they attempt the impossible, to bring forth a message from another realm, one unburdened by logic and preconceptions. Words fall into those categories, however, so we necessarily only get a vestige of the thing itself. By hinting at more in garbled form, poetry invariably disappoints.

The experience of reading poetry, in Lerner’s portrayal, is like taking psilocybin: “Do you remember the sense (or have it now) of being a tentative node in a limitless network of goods and flows?” It’s also frustrating, like coming down from a psychedelic trip during which you saw profound things, the underlying patterns of the universe, and remembering none of the specifics. You’re left with a dim sense of loss and negative space.

Keats famously referred to being comfortable with that insecurity as negative capability. “That is,” he wrote, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats left behind a small prose description of this quality, a couple of lines in a letter, a tease. Hatred of Poetry goes further and satisfies, using hatred, that negative quality, to discuss how negative capability is fundamental to poetry.

The “irritable reaching” and subsequent disappointment underlie much of the hatred. There are variations, though, on this discontent. Critics, for example, often find poems to be too personal; they fail to speak to “the universal.” But how possible is that, Lerner posits, if even Whitman, the poet of American inclusiveness and democracy, doesn’t quite achieve it? Idealists hope that poetry will induce revolutions, real change in the world. They are let down, too. Others want poetry to continually embody the new and avant-garde, but, like anything else, it stops being that once published and consumed.

Then there is the revulsion of laypeople, the most interesting one to examine. Lerner’s dentist, making conversation, seems embarrassed upon learning of his patient’s profession. Lerner believes this is because the dentist views him as playing make-believe, fooling around with something that is not quite tangible, that doesn’t produce any real capital. Isn’t it past time to put away childish things? The dentist has. But that uselessness in trade is a virtue of poetry, Lerner argues; it creates a hallowed space for itself apart from the mainstream economic exchange.

The depiction of economic unease at the mention of poetry feels accurate, but the rest of Lerner’s look at the attitude of people who don’t read or write poetry is the least convincing part of the essay. He recognizes that it makes little difference in most lives today, but he underestimates just how little. Strangers at parties and on airplanes are resentful and embarrassed to hear that he is a poet, he claims, because they have a nagging feeling that poetry is supposed to be universal. Everyone should have an innate connection with it, yet they don’t quite get it and haven’t actually read a poem in years...