Who Killed Tennyson?

Here is Lev Grossman's account of the alleged demise of poetry:

If poetry is dead, who killed it? In the 19th century it was a vital part of Western culture. Writers like Byron and Tennyson were practically rock stars. "Every newspaper in the U.S. printed poems," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "At the end of Longfellow's life, his birthday was like a national holiday."

But the 20th century saw the rise of Modernism and brilliant but difficult and allusive writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. (Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine.) Poems became less like high-end pop songs and more like math problems to be solved. They turned into the property of snobs and professors. They started to feel like homework. "It's thought of as a subject to be taught instead of simply an art to be enjoyed," says Christian Wiman, Poetry's editor.

This historical narrative is frequently enough recited that I have to assume some people actually believe it. Poetry was a "vital" art, read by one and all, back in the good old 19th century (when poets still knew how to rhyme, dammit!) but has been destroyed by putatively "brilliant" but in fact dastardly Modernists intent on making poetry too "difficult" for the average reader, a private possession of the "snobs and professors." (If it were only true that professors still admired poetry, difficult or otherwise, homework or not. Unfortunately, academic literary study has mostly turned poetry into the same simplistic source of sociological critique and political agitation it's turned fiction into--although this does, admittedly, drain all the enjoyment out of it, if not in the way Wiman thinks.)

What this story leaves out is the evolution of mass taste--and the emergence of other forms of "entertainment" to satisfy it--that occurred between Longfellow and John Ashbery. While it is true that some poets in the 19th century (but not all: think Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins) were popular in a way we cannot easily imagine for poets in our time, poetry was an early beneficiary of the spread of literacy both in the United States and Europe and was regarded as entertainment because it was accessible to many people at a time when few other "entertainment options" were available. Gradually poetry lost this audience to fiction, but both poetry and fiction ultimately lost it to the popular arts as we now know them: film, television, etc. Poets were no longer "rock stars" because that role was taken over by, well, rock stars.

It could be said that the "difficult" writers of the 20th century began to experiment with the conventions of poetry and fiction for the same reason that painters in the 20th century began to turn away from the conventions of representation to produce various forms of irreal and abstract art. Painters no longer saw the point in reproducing reality in the era of photography; poets and novelists no longer saw the point in clinging to traditional narrative and familiar forms, in straining to entertain "the people" in the era of vaudeville and movies. Instead, both painters and writers began to examine their media for other possibilities to be explored, to find other ways to engage their viewers and readers, even if that meant potentially alienating some of those in the mass audience who just wanted painters to paint pictures and novelists to tell stories. Or poets to rhyme and express nice sentiments.

Gioia and Wiman would like to reverse this history, to take poetry back to a more innocent time when pretty words made young girls swoon. This isn't going to happen. Poetry is now written and read by people who actually like to write and read poetry. (To "enjoy" an art doesn't preclude enjoying informed criticism of that art, either.) I honestly don't understand why it's necessary to change that. Poetry is as vital as its ever been, judging by the number of journals, small presses, and blogs devoted to it. "Western culture" should have to take care of itself.

Comments

[Ted]

The whole 'poetry was widely read and now it's not' is a romantic myth, I agree. Widely read by whom? Weren't most people illiterate? Printed poetry will always be more obscure than printed prose - always. We use words daily to express ourselves in a direct, descriptive and economic way so when words are suddenly coopted for other uses it's harder to get it. That was true of Byron the "rock star" and it's true of Ashberry the prince. Printed poetry is elitist in that most forms yield enjoyment or understanding only when you're familiar with the rules. It takes more work. However, spoken verse and song have been around for millennia - they preserved our cultures' histories, honored our cultures gods and goddesses, celebrated our rites, entertained the masses, moralized in churches and theaters, created hilarities on the back of trucks and in the streets. People continue to slam it from mikes on friday nights, speak it in the theater (Ntozake Shange and Glynn Maxwell are good examples of contemporary verse playwrights), chant it in churces, and rap it on the radio and on the street. Some poets are rock stars and some rock stars poets - who cares? I don't think popularity can be legislated. It's an idiotic notion. Is Gioia disappointed because he's not a rock star? The richness of poetry is in the variety of the way people use the everyday word (and the rare one too) and whether they want to do so to be famous or obscure is their problem. Ashberry may flirt with the reader by obfuscating and being puzzling but it hasn't seemed to hurt his readership. And he sits on my shelf along with the celebratory and clear as crystal Mary Oliver. That newspapers won't print poetry is not a problem with poets, it's a problem with newspapers - news is a product now. They are worried about what will sell.

[Richard]

I don't think there is anything wrong with the term "hobbyist." I do think most of my poet friends are hobbyists in the sense that while poetry may be at the core of what they do, it is not how they "make a living" (pretty much impossible to do that with poetry). I consider myself a hobbyist as a short story writer despite getting books published and reviewed and occasionally even bought.

To me, some of the beauty in contemporary poetry stems from its utter lack of commercial possiblities. That "uselessness" in commercial terms has led to some talking-to-themselves dead ends but also in some breathtakingly innovative (and traditional) work.

[zbs]

Lately it feels like one sees more claims for or against contemporary poetry than the names of contemporary poets. Who should I be comparing the classes of the 50s and the 20s to ?

[danup]

" And it's belittling to poets (there are probably more poets writing and publishing today than there ever have been -- not that that's necessarily a good thing) to set up an analogy that likens them to hobbyists."

That wasn't my intention at all; in fact, the goal of the analogy was to address what you talk about earlier in your comment. Poetry was much more vital at its height than radio was, therefore where radio is down to hobbyists poetry is down to little-read but (I assume) worthwhile journals, anthologies, etc.

[Jonathan Mayhew]

Byron was a celebrity. Perhaps the first "celebrity" of the modern age. So was Allen Ginsberg. Lorca was famous in in his own lifetime. It's kind of an arbitrary phenomenon when a poet gains a measure of fame, in the sense that the vitality of the art form cannot really be measured by the presence or absence of celebrity poets. It's too unusual a phenomenon to treat it as the norm from which we've somehow fallen off. Remember when some celebrity Soviet poet used to fil the stadium? ... Neither do I.

[Joseph]

Radio drama may be a distinct art, but it doesn't hold as central a place in our culture as poetry does. It doesn't have as much history and tradition behind it. 100 years of radio plays compared to thousands and thousands of years of poetry? Maybe one day we'll get Time magazine articles bemoaning the loss in popularity of the vital art of radio plays, but I doubt it. And it's belittling to poets (there are probably more poets writing and publishing today than there ever have been -- not that that's necessarily a good thing) to set up an analogy that likens them to hobbyists.

[mary]

While I agree with much that you say, I would point out that the so-called "familiar forms" are now utterly unfamiliar to many young poets. Maybe those shapes are just about old enough to be new. Maybe there's still life in those vessels, and in the everything that once made poetry poetry: maybe it just needs to be made new, and maybe it can be made new.

[danup]

I agree with most of what you say, but to say poetry is as vital as it's ever been seems a little much for me. It's like saying that radio drama--as distinct an art form as poetry--is half as ital as it's ever been because there are hobbyists who do it sometimes.