Essays posing as obituaries for modern poetry have become so numerous and have appeared over so many decades that they practically constitute a special department of literary criticism. A year ago, the opinion writer and editor of the Catholic magazine The Lamp, Matthew Walther, treated the readers of The New York Times to the latest entry in the form, before following up some months later in the pages of his own magazine. The first of his pieces was timed to commemorate the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s best-known poem, The Waste Land, which Walther both praised as “effortlessly” memorable and memorialized as the arsenic that killed poetry.
I can hardly blame Walther for offering not one but two essays attempting to justify pronouncing poetry’s death. I myself published a book of more than three hundred pages on the subject, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. There, I sought to dissect and excoriate every imposter to be found in contemporary poetry, while also explaining what poetry is, why it matters, and how it might once more resume the role it has historically played in our civilization. Walther and I agree that something catastrophic happened to the art of poetry in the last century and, so far as I can tell, we also agree as to both the nature of Eliot’s virtues as a poet and, in a general way, on the fatefulness of Eliot’s influence.
However, I think we do disagree on the nature and consequences of that influence, and I suspect that we disagree on other points as well. But it is hard to say for certain because parts of Walther’s argument are historically naïve and other parts are merely incoherent or disingenuous—as if Walther’s response to critiques of his arguments was merely to inch them into the secure realm of the non-falsifiable, while pretending merely to hold his ground.
Walther is certainly correct in contending both that contemporary poetry is not flourishing in the ways that it should and that it is flourishing in ways that it probably should not. It is as true today as it was in the 1990s—when the poet Dana Gioia first made the observation in “Can Poetry Matter?”—that there are more books of poetry being published than at any previous time in our civilization. There are more literary magazines publishing poems, whether in print or online, than anyone could possibly read. That poets are prolific in our age is not in question; what is in question is whether any of that work is any good and whether there is an audience for any of it sufficient for us to speak of poetry as a living art.
Walther answers both questions in the negative. He does so as a reader of poetry, and so his answer should be taken seriously. I respond not merely as a fellow critic of poetry but as one of its practitioners. Moreover, I founded and currently direct a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in writing, and at least twice Walther suggests that such programs are part of the lumbering corpse of poetry after The Waste Land. This may lead the reader to believe that I am merely defending professional turf—and, indeed, that appearance is something I had initially hoped to avoid by remaining silent. But because my own program was founded to stand athwart virtually all the others; because it is the only such program in the world whose curriculum is wholly formed by the Catholic intellectual and literary tradition; and, because it is also the only program to offer a rigorous apprenticeship in prosody—the craft of writing verse with meter and rhyme—I hope it may be said that even my professional commitments in poetry agree, in some sense, with Walther’s complaints. Poetry is in rough shape—but why?
Walther’s first and only developed explanation is, to put it plainly, a bit of warmed-over romanticism. He quotes a passage of blank verse from the romantic poet—and English laureate—Robert Southey, where we hear an affectionate description of “woodbine wreathing” and creeping “holly-hock.” The verse is fine, Walther contends, and yet who would write like this today? Moreover, who could read it without boredom? Nobody, he answers, because “the very conditions of modern life … have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.” In his second piece, he returns to the claim and, I note with a groan, cites Martin Heidegger’s theory that modern man no longer perceives the being of much of the world—from the natural to the artificial—but rather takes it all for granted as a “standing reserve” of utility. We no longer see and love nature the way Southey did, and so poetry can no longer be written or appreciated. That is his argument.
This claim is, to say the least, naïve. If we are alienated from the natural world, the romantics were similarly alienated two centuries before us. While the romantics did not suffer the indignity of having their lives mediated by smartphones and medicated by a pharmaceutical-industrial complex (although opium was a societal problem), they did know their Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, not to mention the great successes of the modern experimental sciences for which those philosophers provided an intellectual foundation and apologia. Whatever their many differences, these figures I have just named agreed on one thing: the reduction of being in general, and nature in particular, to matter and motion, all of which could be understood by a theory of mechanics. Nature had already been proven—or so they thought—to be a mere machine.
What is it like to see nature as ‘demystified’? Just look to the romantic age, where trembling voices wondered whether it would be possible to write a poem about the beauty of a rainbow now that Newton’s theory of optics had robbed the rainbow of its mystery and shown it to be nothing but refracted light. The romantic poets, whom Walther holds up as writing serenely about nature, were in fact responding to this reduction of nature to mere mechanics. They did not deny the testimony of the physical sciences as true, but merely disapproved of it as neither good nor beautiful.
The romantic movement in literature, among other things, was an attempt to take what could no longer be believed as the literal truth about the world and preserve it as a beautiful ideal for the moral imagination. The romantic celebrated nature not for what it was, but for what it made him feel; thus, nature took on pantheistic qualities that the romantics struggled to credit by an ingenious but pained sort of special pleading. William Wordsworth offers an instance of this, in that greatest of English romantic poems known to us as “Tintern Abbey,” where he writes as follows:
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
In one sense, Wordsworth is not alienated from nature, but a lover of nature indeed. He finds the meadows, woods, and mountains beautiful; moreover, they are the “anchor” of his “purest thoughts,” a nurse, guide, and guardian of his “moral being.” Nature is at once a delightful beauty and a symbol of moral goodness that re-forms the soul of the poet who contemplates it. The crucial verse in the passage, however, appears right in the middle, where he speaks of his own eye and ear experiencing nature’s beauty, and says parenthetically, “what they half create, / And what perceive.” What is perceived by the eye and the ear—that is, by the poet’s subjectivity—is nothing but the raw material of nature. Our subjective faculties, however, have the power to create on that material canvas the spiritual significance that it holds for Wordsworth. He sees the material stuff of nature but projects beauty and goodness onto it—he “half-creates” it.
At one point in the poem, Wordsworth allows himself to speculate most fearfully that this sense of nature as source of beauty and goodness might “Be but a vain belief.” He can hardly finish the thought, however, because his heart rushes in to tell him that it must not be so—as in, we cannot allow it to be so—because, in his sorrow, he has turned to nature and felt deep consolation. Following the example of the German idealist, Immanuel Kant, Wordsworth and other romantic poets came to hold that while nature might be a mere machine in fact, it was nonetheless permissible for the subjective mind to assign to nature (that is, to project onto it) the quality of beauty and the further quality of being a sensible symbol of moral and spiritual realities.
Poetry before the romantics rarely if ever took nature as a spiritual source of meaning. If such earlier poets did not try to make a sentimental god of nature, they nonetheless saw it as having a meaning proper to itself. Even Virgil, who certainly wrote extensively about the natural world in the Georgics, has none of the sentimentalizing, projective idealism we find beginning to appear in poetry only in the romantics of the late 18th century. Nature’s intelligible order is there to be discovered; it does not have to be worked up with help from Kant’s philosophy. The romantics are the aberration in a literary history dating back to Homer. The beauty of nature and the art of poetry have nothing essential to do with each other. Walther mistakes a passing fashion for an entire literary form.
Walther correctly credits Eliot with creating “an idiom that captured the disappearance” of this romantic worldview, but he does not correctly perceive why Eliot did so. Walther calls the romantic vision “pre-modern,” but as I have argued, it was indeed consummately modern. What did not seem modern was the sentimental and imaginative response of the romantics to the mechanistic reduction. For Wordsworth, it was good taste and moral refinement to make believe in nature as an immanent divine nursemaid, but to Eliot and his contemporaries it looked like forced naïveté or, as it were, a “noble lie.” And so Eliot’s poetry sought to disenchant poetry just as nature had been disenchanted two centuries earlier. He did so in hopes that poetry might be made once more an honest intellectual means of knowing the world and human experience. He wanted to restore truth to poetry, but because he had been reared on the romantics, he could only do so—at first—by eschewing poetry as a vision of goodness and beauty.
But that is not where Eliot ended. In his last great poem, Four Quartets, Eliot realizes that one does not need to choose between truth and beauty. If nature had long since been disenchanted by a modern scientific vision, it was also clear that the modern scientific vision was inadequate to reality. Mechanistic materialism was an aberration in the history of natural philosophy just as the Romantics were an aberration in the literary tradition. Four Quartets gives us a true realism, where nature is not beautiful because subjective wishing makes it so, but because it has been created as intelligible being by God, who is Being Itself. Its beauty is the splendor of truth, not a pleasant fiction. Rather than retreat into sentiment, Eliot drew himself out of mere subjectivity in order to recover the classical Christian-Platonist understanding of the world that he had first encountered in his study of Dante, Aquinas, and Aristotle. If, as Walther contends, a kind of poetry died with The Waste Land, a better, more intellectually perceptive kind of poetry was reborn not even two decades later in the work of the same poet.
Eliot’s influence begat the greatest generation of poets in England and America since the romantics. In the work of W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin, in England; and, in the work of Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, among many others, in America, we see a whole age of poets not repeating the disillusion of The Waste Land. Rather, they show the influence of the intellectually chastened, metaphysically rich, technically brilliant, lyrically memorable, and, finally, visionary poetry of Four Quartets.
There were too many great poets in the generation following Eliot to say that they all followed him in his Christian turn. Many did not. What they all had in common was a sense that poetry could at once be beautiful and true. It must be well-crafted, they said; and, indeed, almost all of them wrote a far more regular, traditional verse than had Eliot. It must be honest, they said; by which they did not mean disenchanted and reductive, but expressive of a vision that recognized it cannot “half-create” truth but only discover it. The shortest possible expression of this we find in Richard Wilbur’s poem, “On Having Misidentified a Wildflower”:
A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
Wilbur’s relationship to nature here is more intimate and sane than was Wordsworth’s. His is not a sentimentally enchanted vision, but a sacramental and realistic one.
In his second piece, Walther moves the goalposts of his argument considerably. All talk of our relationship to nature has been rendered secondary in favor of a claim that is in a sense non-falsifiable. Poetry is dead, says Walther, because none of it has “unconscious staying power in memory.” Nobody, he suggests, can “rattle off … any ten lines” of poetry since the death of Larkin. Well, this is not a contention to be settled on the page. If Walther has never met anyone who has memorized some lines by a contemporary poet, the only way to answer him would be to introduce him to someone who has. This I would be happy to do.
If poetry is not dead, the reader may ask, then why do the obituaries keep appearing? The reasons for poetry’s decline are multiple and some of them intractable. We should note, first, that by the turn of the 20th century, poetry had lost its place as the best-loved of the art forms to the novel. All the arts are, at root, narrative, and the form of the novel could tell stories in ways often, but not always, better than could a narrative poem. Most poems written over the last two centuries have been not narrative but lyric, but some poets have continued to write good short stories and novels in verse. In any case, if the giving-up of narrative was the death of poetry, then poetry has been dead since 1813, the year Sir Walter Scott abandoned epic poetry because he was jealous of Lord Byron’s talents, and so settled for making a fortune as a novelist. If poetry is to be a living art again, more poets must learn again how to be good storytellers.
As I noted above, the greatest generation of poets since the romantics was born around the year Eliot published The Waste Land (1922) and its last members died over the course of the last two decades (Anthony Hecht in 2004; Richard Wilbur in 2017; Robert Pack—a minor figure, admittedly—in the summer of 2023). Many of those poets wrote rigorous and intelligent verse over the course of that century. But the majority suffered, at mid-career, a failure of nerve; they abandoned what they had learned from Eliot and wrote, ever after, a humdrum, colloquial free verse.
What happened? In the 1950s the Beat poets emerged as a cultural phenomenon. Their work was not any good, but they had sensational personalities, and their verse was familiar in speech and easy to understand. When Robert Lowell received the National Book Award, for his collection Life Studies, in 1960, he spoke of contemporary poetry as divided among the “raw and the cooked.” The poets in Eliot’s tradition were “cooked,” and Lowell’s work had almost all the juices baked out of it. The Beats were “raw.” In his award-winning volume, Lowell sought to season the raw immediacy of the Beat voices with some of the more sophisticated techniques of his cooked pedigree. From that moment, until about 1980, it was difficult for a poet writing actual verse even to find a publisher. If we should take the abandonment of verse-craft as the death of poetry, then poetry died not in 1922 or 1977 but in 1960.
Neither Walther nor anyone else has an obligation to attend to contemporary poetry, and those who do may find the sheer awful glut overwhelming. This militates against any claim on my part for poetry as a living art. And yet, I can say this much: there are poets writing today who demonstrate a mastery of craft that has wholly recovered from the formlessness of the Beats—poets who write lyric poems but narrative poems as well, and who have helped poetry recover its capacity to represent and reflect on the depths and drama of human experience in ways that Eliot’s early modernist fragments had seemed to render obsolete if not impossible. Those same poets have recovered the art of verse as a pure medium for the truth about reality, including in its religious dimension, without recourse to that sometime consolation prize, the romantic subjective idealization of nature. Among the contemporary volumes being published are not a few poems of such intelligence, craft, and capaciousness that a child someday will read one and remember it effortlessly. In the mind and on the lips of that child, poetry will remain a living art.
This essay appears in the Winter 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 29:68-71.
