Aardvark
2011-02-20 21:33:00 UTC
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/top-10-composers-been-there-done-that-what-about-poets/?hp
... There are really no "good" or "bad" poets
in the sense that you can predict any given work
from any given individual will be "good" or "bad."
Shakespeare wrote a lot of massively boring leagues
& leagues of words; and some of the "worst" poets
of all are those blessed souls who are celebrated for
their singularly unparalleled one poem wonders (W E
Henley's ubiquitous "Invictus").
Without going into the usually lengthy lecture on
what constitutes "Great" or even "good" poetry, here
are a few judgments traveling backwards through time
(hint: study what has survived across the ages)...
Intelligence is what creates good poetry because
poetry is at its core a setting down of our thoughts;
and if our thoughts are dumb, then that's what must
follow as our poetry. Thus the best poets have been
very intelligent persons (Shakespeare, whether "he"
really was Shakespeare or "he" was de Vere ... and
Emily Dickinson, who was not merely a most repressed
neurotic but manifestly a keen and insightful observer/
discoverer of the cosmic in the minutiae around her).
It is very likely that almost everything (though never
all, certainly) by those two poets will prove very good
or even very great poetry.
There are a handful of poets in every age who manage
to write a dozen or more truly distinguished poems
(and some, such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, e e
cummings, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Keats & Shelley,
Browning & Whitman, Tennyson & Wordsworth, Poe
and Byron, Burns & Blake, Edna Millay & Marianne
Moore, Ezra Pound & Wallace Stevens, A E Housman,
Hart Crane, Milton, Pope ... have all unquestionably
contributed more than just one dozen each).
And so those are the poets on whose work you should
probably concentrate first in order to discern the essence
of "good" poetry (even though I have already given you
the true essence of good and competent poetry: a good
and competent mind). There's a handful of others to be
included, if you're so inclined: Mathew Arnorld, Longfellow,
Stephen Spender, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Coleridge, Andrew Marvell, John Donne & Ben Jonson,
Marlowe & Herrick, George Baker, Elizabeth B Browning,
W H Auden, W C Williams ... poets who perhaps have
written fewer "great" poems, but who have nevertheless
unquestionably written more "great" poems than most
persons who've tried their hand at it. You should keep
those poets in mind as well when you make up your mind
to inquire into which qualities are more likely to foster
the creation (by you?) of a great/good poem (if the thing's
in you).
And forget about trying to imagine that "modern" poetry
is "better" than "traditional" poetry; or that the opposite
is true: Poetry is what our language says we are thinking.
The "thinking" trumps "the slang."
There are probably many more great poems which have
expressed great thoughts about the most mundane of
matters than there are great poems about "great" subjects:
A great mind will conceive of something great to say;
and a small mind speaking through a megaphone will
still holler out a lot of pointless nonsense.
This, no doubt, will leads us to ask the ages-old question
of what ever happen to Leigh Hunt (who in his time was
popularly considered a "greater" poet than Keats or Shelley
and most of their contemporaries)... and all such "wonders?"
Well, the answer is simple: They did NOT write great poems.
However popular the works of many a song lyricist may be
("the answer, my friend, is blow'n in the wind")... once you
remove the melody, as it were, they are revealed/exposed
as the pointless mouthings they are. (If the poem is not the
answer--does not contain the answer, if the point of the
poem is to point out that you just don't know... then it's a
pretty pointless poem, absent one hell of a great redeeming
melody). This is just as true of every other "extraneous
artifact" which artificially raises the popularity of a given
"poem" or "poet" (such as the efforts of mutual-admiration
societies in whatever forms they take, from mere access to
"a" publication, or membership in academic/"civic clubs"
whose "dues" are paid in currencies other than just poems).
Ben Jonson's marvelous lyric, "Drink to me only with thine
eyes..." is chockful of striking metaphors even 400 years
later (and in spite of the unforgettable melody married to it).
This is certainly NOT the case with Berlin's "White Christmas."
For the sake of "the slang," here are a few 20th Century
poets who, in my sole judgment, have written great lines
(which may yet make of them candidates to be considered
to have been among the great poets)... in no particular order
of importance, although you may note some "popular"
omissions, certainly. These are "modern" masters who
actually managed to create extremely intelligent/competent,
purposeful poetry in & of itself (from whatever why they wrote)
..
Basil Bunting, Grey Burr, Ted Hughes, W S Merwin, Richard
Wilbur, Allen Tate, Theodore Weiss, Archibald MacLeish,
Vassar Miller, Vachel Lindsay, W D Snodgrass, Ralph
Pomeroy, J V Cunningham, X J Kennedy, James Wright,
Howard Nemerov, Robert Lowell, Edgar Bowers, Conrad
Aiken, Edith Sitwell, Elinor Wylie, James Dickey, Kenneth
Rexroth, Louis MacNeice, Robert Horan, G S Fraser, Sylvia
Plath, Selden Rodman, Robert Penn Warren, Laurie Lee,
Marya Zaturenska, Oscar Williams... & some random notes:
[I never found a poem by Robert Graves I thought was great.]
[I remember writing on the edge of a Robert Creeley poem:
"This guy's a jerk." ("Kore" ?) But I liked his, "The Signboard" ,
"I Know A Man" , "After Lorca" & "lots others" of his poems.]
[I consider Stephen Crane nuts, and anybody who likes him
perverse.] [I have no idea why the great W H Auden has fallen
out of favor with some persons, even though perhaps he wrote
more than he should have.] [Although I enjoy W C Williams'
"The Yachts" ... I don't think much of the bulk of his work. Sorry.
I enjoy/admire a lot of Whitman's lines, but, frankly, I find his
endless enumerations annoying.] [Wordsworth is maligned now
for what he did, rather than worshipped for what he wrote...
as he instead ought to be.] [I have never been able to find the
poetry in George Herbert, hard as I've tried to.] [Ferlinghetti's
"Underwear" is funny, albeit screw the sob's politics.] That's it.
There are a few other "extremely" well regarded "modern"
poets about whom I can't say anything especially positive.
Poems/phrases which can be reduced to, "I hurt," or "I feel
bad," "I like this" or "I really, really hate that," or adjectives
for their own sake (usually "dirty words" or quite outrageous
insults)... this is what children do all the time and will never
be real poetry. (In fact, I don't know of anybody who is so
"gentle a soul" as to even be outraged by these antics any
more.) Do not confuse a novel/interesting way of looking at
something ... with just merely telling people how you feel
about the thing--who cares about that outside of your mother?!
Edwin Markham's "The Man With The Hoe" , Edwin Arlington
Robinson's "Richard Cory" , Richard Eberhart's "The Groundhog" ,
Edwin Muir's "The Road" , John Davidson's "Thirty Bob a Week" ,
Emily Bronte's "Remembrance" , Frank O'Hara's "To The
Harbormaster" , Adrienne Rich's "33" , Robert Lowell's "Caligula" ,
Paris Leary's "September 1, 1965" , X J Kennedy's "Heartside
Story" , John Masefield's "Sea-Fever" , W H Davies's "Leisure" ,
Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" , Edmund Waller's
"Go, Lovely Rose" , William Oldys's "The Fly" , Thomas Carew's
"A Song" , Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Thomas Gray's
"Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard" are some masterpieces
you can mine for the essence of what constitutes great poetry ...
by poets who although they only produced a few great works,
yet managed to touch the greatest heights of this great art with
their handful of undisputed masterpieces.
Study on! *
S D Rodrian
http://sdrodrian.com
* I dare not prompt anyone to actually write: Poetry?
There is no more time-wasting a person in this world
than one who goes out of his way to encourage people
to write "poetry" (or to "talk," for that matter).
.
... There are really no "good" or "bad" poets
in the sense that you can predict any given work
from any given individual will be "good" or "bad."
Shakespeare wrote a lot of massively boring leagues
& leagues of words; and some of the "worst" poets
of all are those blessed souls who are celebrated for
their singularly unparalleled one poem wonders (W E
Henley's ubiquitous "Invictus").
Without going into the usually lengthy lecture on
what constitutes "Great" or even "good" poetry, here
are a few judgments traveling backwards through time
(hint: study what has survived across the ages)...
Intelligence is what creates good poetry because
poetry is at its core a setting down of our thoughts;
and if our thoughts are dumb, then that's what must
follow as our poetry. Thus the best poets have been
very intelligent persons (Shakespeare, whether "he"
really was Shakespeare or "he" was de Vere ... and
Emily Dickinson, who was not merely a most repressed
neurotic but manifestly a keen and insightful observer/
discoverer of the cosmic in the minutiae around her).
It is very likely that almost everything (though never
all, certainly) by those two poets will prove very good
or even very great poetry.
There are a handful of poets in every age who manage
to write a dozen or more truly distinguished poems
(and some, such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, e e
cummings, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Keats & Shelley,
Browning & Whitman, Tennyson & Wordsworth, Poe
and Byron, Burns & Blake, Edna Millay & Marianne
Moore, Ezra Pound & Wallace Stevens, A E Housman,
Hart Crane, Milton, Pope ... have all unquestionably
contributed more than just one dozen each).
And so those are the poets on whose work you should
probably concentrate first in order to discern the essence
of "good" poetry (even though I have already given you
the true essence of good and competent poetry: a good
and competent mind). There's a handful of others to be
included, if you're so inclined: Mathew Arnorld, Longfellow,
Stephen Spender, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Coleridge, Andrew Marvell, John Donne & Ben Jonson,
Marlowe & Herrick, George Baker, Elizabeth B Browning,
W H Auden, W C Williams ... poets who perhaps have
written fewer "great" poems, but who have nevertheless
unquestionably written more "great" poems than most
persons who've tried their hand at it. You should keep
those poets in mind as well when you make up your mind
to inquire into which qualities are more likely to foster
the creation (by you?) of a great/good poem (if the thing's
in you).
And forget about trying to imagine that "modern" poetry
is "better" than "traditional" poetry; or that the opposite
is true: Poetry is what our language says we are thinking.
The "thinking" trumps "the slang."
There are probably many more great poems which have
expressed great thoughts about the most mundane of
matters than there are great poems about "great" subjects:
A great mind will conceive of something great to say;
and a small mind speaking through a megaphone will
still holler out a lot of pointless nonsense.
This, no doubt, will leads us to ask the ages-old question
of what ever happen to Leigh Hunt (who in his time was
popularly considered a "greater" poet than Keats or Shelley
and most of their contemporaries)... and all such "wonders?"
Well, the answer is simple: They did NOT write great poems.
However popular the works of many a song lyricist may be
("the answer, my friend, is blow'n in the wind")... once you
remove the melody, as it were, they are revealed/exposed
as the pointless mouthings they are. (If the poem is not the
answer--does not contain the answer, if the point of the
poem is to point out that you just don't know... then it's a
pretty pointless poem, absent one hell of a great redeeming
melody). This is just as true of every other "extraneous
artifact" which artificially raises the popularity of a given
"poem" or "poet" (such as the efforts of mutual-admiration
societies in whatever forms they take, from mere access to
"a" publication, or membership in academic/"civic clubs"
whose "dues" are paid in currencies other than just poems).
Ben Jonson's marvelous lyric, "Drink to me only with thine
eyes..." is chockful of striking metaphors even 400 years
later (and in spite of the unforgettable melody married to it).
This is certainly NOT the case with Berlin's "White Christmas."
For the sake of "the slang," here are a few 20th Century
poets who, in my sole judgment, have written great lines
(which may yet make of them candidates to be considered
to have been among the great poets)... in no particular order
of importance, although you may note some "popular"
omissions, certainly. These are "modern" masters who
actually managed to create extremely intelligent/competent,
purposeful poetry in & of itself (from whatever why they wrote)
..
Basil Bunting, Grey Burr, Ted Hughes, W S Merwin, Richard
Wilbur, Allen Tate, Theodore Weiss, Archibald MacLeish,
Vassar Miller, Vachel Lindsay, W D Snodgrass, Ralph
Pomeroy, J V Cunningham, X J Kennedy, James Wright,
Howard Nemerov, Robert Lowell, Edgar Bowers, Conrad
Aiken, Edith Sitwell, Elinor Wylie, James Dickey, Kenneth
Rexroth, Louis MacNeice, Robert Horan, G S Fraser, Sylvia
Plath, Selden Rodman, Robert Penn Warren, Laurie Lee,
Marya Zaturenska, Oscar Williams... & some random notes:
[I never found a poem by Robert Graves I thought was great.]
[I remember writing on the edge of a Robert Creeley poem:
"This guy's a jerk." ("Kore" ?) But I liked his, "The Signboard" ,
"I Know A Man" , "After Lorca" & "lots others" of his poems.]
[I consider Stephen Crane nuts, and anybody who likes him
perverse.] [I have no idea why the great W H Auden has fallen
out of favor with some persons, even though perhaps he wrote
more than he should have.] [Although I enjoy W C Williams'
"The Yachts" ... I don't think much of the bulk of his work. Sorry.
I enjoy/admire a lot of Whitman's lines, but, frankly, I find his
endless enumerations annoying.] [Wordsworth is maligned now
for what he did, rather than worshipped for what he wrote...
as he instead ought to be.] [I have never been able to find the
poetry in George Herbert, hard as I've tried to.] [Ferlinghetti's
"Underwear" is funny, albeit screw the sob's politics.] That's it.
There are a few other "extremely" well regarded "modern"
poets about whom I can't say anything especially positive.
Poems/phrases which can be reduced to, "I hurt," or "I feel
bad," "I like this" or "I really, really hate that," or adjectives
for their own sake (usually "dirty words" or quite outrageous
insults)... this is what children do all the time and will never
be real poetry. (In fact, I don't know of anybody who is so
"gentle a soul" as to even be outraged by these antics any
more.) Do not confuse a novel/interesting way of looking at
something ... with just merely telling people how you feel
about the thing--who cares about that outside of your mother?!
Edwin Markham's "The Man With The Hoe" , Edwin Arlington
Robinson's "Richard Cory" , Richard Eberhart's "The Groundhog" ,
Edwin Muir's "The Road" , John Davidson's "Thirty Bob a Week" ,
Emily Bronte's "Remembrance" , Frank O'Hara's "To The
Harbormaster" , Adrienne Rich's "33" , Robert Lowell's "Caligula" ,
Paris Leary's "September 1, 1965" , X J Kennedy's "Heartside
Story" , John Masefield's "Sea-Fever" , W H Davies's "Leisure" ,
Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" , Edmund Waller's
"Go, Lovely Rose" , William Oldys's "The Fly" , Thomas Carew's
"A Song" , Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Thomas Gray's
"Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard" are some masterpieces
you can mine for the essence of what constitutes great poetry ...
by poets who although they only produced a few great works,
yet managed to touch the greatest heights of this great art with
their handful of undisputed masterpieces.
Study on! *
S D Rodrian
http://sdrodrian.com
* I dare not prompt anyone to actually write: Poetry?
There is no more time-wasting a person in this world
than one who goes out of his way to encourage people
to write "poetry" (or to "talk," for that matter).
.