The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Poetry / Not Poetry

138 Poetry/Not Poetry Where do we draw the line between what is poetry and what isn’t poetry? Or, to put the question another way, what makes a poem a poem? Ask a poet like Howard Nemerov, and you’ll get a beautiful answer, in the form of a poem called “Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry”: Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned into pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell. (125) I imagine many poets will like the answer: it’s elegant, and it pays a compliment to poetry, making it fly, while prose merely falls. But in the end Nemerov’s answer about the nature of poetry is evasive, offering little more than the “I’ll know it when I see it” argument that people used to invoke in debates about pornography. I don’t really have a better way to answer the question, except to say that the only real way to answer anything is to quit looking for trans-historical, absolute truths and start rooting around in contexts, in the history of how a question has been answered, and the reasons those old answers made sense at the time. 139 Poetry in a Difficult World Turning the question in this direction, I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question “how is poetry different from prose” right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. The new answer arrived with Romanticism, and we’re far from done with it. Roland Barthes, in his great, early study Writing Degree Zero, makes a statement about poetry before Romanticism. He tells us that for poets of the pre-Romantic period, there was a fundamental similarity between good poetry and good prose. “Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Barthes, but in the neo-classical eighteenth century “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma” (41). In other words, the neoclassical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same as prose, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Consider Alexander Pope’s poem Essay on Man: it is more or less what it sounds like it is—a discursive, explanatory essay. It just happens to add versification. In the neoclassical paradigm, prose and poetry are involved in the same sort of things: explaining, talking, arguing, narrating. And why did people write poems? Many reasons, of course: but they tended to be the same sorts of reasons one writes prose, utilitarian reasons such as personal advancement, money, getting the girl, social improvement, or didacticism. Prose and poetry were close cousins formally—one just had extra verse elements—and close cousins in terms of their telos or purpose. Then things became strange. They became strange right around the time the Romantics hit the stage—not that this is a bad thing: indeed, it’s the beginning of everything I most love in poetry. Suddenly, poetry wasn’t more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects: there was a new discontinuity of language. Poetry was reborn as something very different from prose, and different from verse, too. Consider Coleridge’s famous definition of poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Here, we learn that poetry, unlike prose, generates its own rules. 140 The Poet Resigns We learn that the poem, unlike prose, looks inward upon itself, seeking an inner co-ordination of all parts to the whole. And we learn that the statement or use-value or telos of the poem is secondary to its formal composition. Poetry, says Coleridge, is a kind of communication “opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species...it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification...