When I was a student in Krakow in the late sixties Milosz’s writings—the works of an emigré poet whom the encyclopedias laconically termed “an enemy of People’s Poland”—were forbidden. However, by employing various ruses, you could gain access to the shelves of books marked with the euphemistic abbreviation “Res,” for “Reserved.” And what struck me in his work was something that defies labeling (even the structuralists, so influential back then, couldn’t come up with anything): its intellectual expanse, its vast atmosphere. Since Milosz, like Cavafy or Auden, belongs to that breed of poets whose work exudes the scent not of roses but of reason.
But Milosz understands reason, intellect in a medieval sense, even a “Thomistic” sense (metaphorically speaking, of course). That is to say, he understands it in a way that precedes the great schism which placed the intellect of the rationalists on one side of the divide, while the other was occupied by the imagination and intelligence of the artists, who not infrequently take refuge in irrationality. Healing this divide—is it possible?—was and is one of Milosz’s great utopian projects, the ambition of a writer who has himself done battle with so many other utopias. He’s rarely come across as a classic conservative, though, bewailing the decline of culture in our times, lamenting the divorce of the two forms of intelligence. He’s been too busy, by and large, struggling to arrange their renewed betrothal. In the minitreatise entitled “What I Learned from Jeanne Hersch,” from his newest volume This, we find the following commandment: “That reason is a gift of God and that we should believe in its ability to comprehend the world.” Obviously this reason shares little with the cautious notion employed by today’s philosophers.
In the same poem Milosz also says: “That the proper attitude toward being is respect and that we must, therefore, avoid the company of people who debase being with their sarcasm, and praise nothingness.” No one should shun the companionship of Czeslaw Milosz’s books.
2001
7 Against Poetry
1
People who write poetry sometimes find themselves busy conducting a “defense of poetry” on the sidelines of their primary occupation.
With all due respect for this genre (I’ve practiced it myself), I’d like to pose the following question: Do these subtle, at times inspiring, treatises inadvertently damage poetry instead of strengthening it? Even great poets—Shelley for example—have tried their hand at such defensive writing. Weren’t they simply wasting precious time on futile exercises in pious rhetoric? Since what could you expect from a poet but a defense of poetry? Can we really take a defense of one’s own craft seriously? A craftsman defending his own territory—what could be more obvious? Wasn’t Witold Gombrowicz—a prose writer, not a poet—doing something more original in his essay “Against Poets,” which at least prompted a provocative exchange of opinions when Czeslaw Milosz himself joined in the argument? But Gombrowicz’s chief complaint against poetry was its excessive “sweetness,” the disproportionate amount of sugar in poetry; he stopped short of tossing it out entirely.
What are the primary charges against poetry? We’ll begin with the simplest examples, with absolutely naive poetry, the poetry written by provincial amateurs, retired postal clerks, and genteel ladies who’ve grown bored in their attractively decorated bungalows. It goes without saying that this will be poetry praising sunrises, the first snow, the charms of May, daisies, squirrels, and birch trees. Gottfried Benn couldn’t stand them and mocked the poems about spring that turned up in cultured periodicals every March or April. What’s wrong with them?
Nothing—but often their boundless naïveté can trigger a primal and not entirely unfounded aversion. The ability to acknowledge what’s negative and ominous in life is indispensable. Those poems about daisies rarely consider the world’s negativity—and that’s what makes them naive. This might seem a petty objection. Some poet in Idaho wants to write about flowers—what’s the problem? Let’s admit that there’s something appealing about this naive, rather amateurish stratum of poetry. Certainly it’s harmless enough, even if it doesn’t help us to understand the world. (Newton supposedly called poetry “disingenuous nonsense.”)
Even our kindly retired postal clerk, busily writing his glib verses, doesn’t live in a state of permanent rapture, after all. He may be a basically cheerful person, but he too endures moments of fear, anxiety, or despair. Can he express them in his work? More than this: it may even happen that this retired clerk is not at all the kindly person that his poems’ readers took him for. When we speak of literature’s titans, we have a ready-made answer: the work redeems the author’s character flaws (“he wrote well”). But does the same thing apply to our little poet? And another question that may not arise in considering a great artist: Why doesn’t this gentleman include his weak points, his less attractive traits in his poetry? Is it simply because he’s adapting to the laws of collective life that insist that we display only our good sides, or what passes for our good sides, and keep our defects and misfortunes under lock and key? If so, that’s not such a problem. Things look worse, though, if the fault lies in the very nature of poetry, which welcomes rapture while rejecting anything negative, which is not free, in other words, of hypocrisy.
2
If this is the case, then poetry is to blame for expressing only a fraction of our spiritual energies; poetry, as we recall, is brought into being by a certain exceptional and legendary state of mind known as inspiration. Humanity does not require inspiration, the companion not just of poets and novelists but also of musicians, painters, not to mention some scholars and clergymen and even those who write (wrote) wonderful long letters, because it’s accompanied by euphoria, bliss (although it is). We need it above all because it raises us above the petty network of empirical circumstances that makes up our everyday lot and confinement. It lifts us above the quotidian so that we can scrutinize the world attentively and ardently. It doesn’t liberate us from these empirical limitations completely; poets don’t levitate, they are granted neither diplomatic immunity nor immunity to diseases. As we know, nothing saved Mandelstam, one of the twentieth century’s great inspirationists, from deportation or death in a prison camp. For all this, in an aesthetic and even philosophical sense inspiration does seem to offer its recipients the possibility of a certain leap, a certain purely inward and invisible form of levitation. Sometimes—most frequently—this levitation takes the shape of a creative work, endows it with a more perfect form and greater intellectual power. Sometimes it also seems to communicate itself to the reader, in which case it is like a flaming torch that passes from hand to hand. Such a torch would be older than the Olympic flame, wandering as it does among human spirits since Homer’s time.
Poets themselves disagree about the existence and necessity of inspiration. There are various schools of thought. We know, for example, that Paul Valéry opposed the very notion of inspiration and praised only the rational components of a well-ordered mind. Other poets have defended inspiration without scanting the need for extensive preparatory labors, craft, and reflection. This isn’t the issue, though. The question, perhaps slightly perverse, is merely whether that splendid disease known as inspiration determines in some way the temperament and even substance of poetry. Inspiration is after all almost purely positive, it is very nearly the embodiment of joy. (We’re better off not looking too closely at those it touches—suffice it to say that they in no way resemble those melancholy catatonics who remain in the same position for hours on end.)
But we can’t know if our enthusiasm actually corresponds to anything in reality, in the world’s structure, even though in moments of exaltation we’re absolutely convinced this is so, and even the next day we’re still sure we’re right. In a week or two, though, doubts may begin to appear.
3
Someone will say at this point (quite rightly): What planet do you live on? After all, the vast, overwhelming majority of poems being written today—and in the nineteenth century as well—are filled not with enth
usiasm, ecstatic joy, but with melancholy, irony, doubt, and despair! These days a kind of irony parched with sorrow is probably the most frequently used material in poetry. So it’s no easy matter to turn poets into the heralds of ecstasy.
The author of this essay should at this point lock up his modest workshop, cede defeat, and return to his primary occupation, namely the writing of poetry. But the matter may not be quite so simple.
Of course there’s no dearth of melancholy and irony in poetry, be it Romantic or contemporary. Not to mention the poetry of antiquity: the exiled Ovid didn’t write joyful poetry. The Romantics wept copiously. Contemporary poets no longer cry, they simply endure in a chilly, elegant despair, interrupted from time to time by an outburst of morose laughter. Isn’t it true, though, that joy and melancholy form a couple of sorts? These moods are elevated in lyric poetry to something like a worldview, but they also retain something of their characteristic temperament in the epic. Melancholy and joy are poetry’s modest, binary legacy. Affirmation and repudiation taken together form a rather psychotic gesture, the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” casually borrowed from the Roman caesars (both caesars and poets rely on the thumb). And isn’t poetic melancholy at times only rapture in disguise, as if the poet wished to enjoy inspiration just a bit longer and so hides it in a heat-resistant container? At times these affirmations and negations may be slightly ahistorical, pronounced without reference to new facts and conclusions. The court assembles, experiences inspiration, and, ignoring the witnesses, ignoring both the prosecutor and the defense, passes its apodictic, beautifully composed sentence. Is Baudelaire’s complaint really so different from Ovid’s?
What’s the harm in this? Poetry’s opponent answers sternly: It’s not even the inescapable, cheap irony that bothers me. Rather, it is poetry’s refusal to participate in the age’s intellectual labors, the way poetry ignores everything that is most interesting, and perhaps most significant, in the humanist intellectual endeavor, that is to say, the constant, careful, and rigorous observation of the human world’s intricate landscape, in which something always changes and something remains the same. Along with his other traditional labors, the writer’s pressing task must be the weighing of these two components, the discovery of new forms of evil, new varieties of good, new forms of behavior and ageless ways of life. The writer evaluates the world, always a little old and a little new, both archaically the same and changing under the invasion of the “modernity” that now sheathes the world like a layer of shining nylon, even though not so long ago it had been traumatized by the convulsions of the thirties and forties, partly under the influence of the same modernity. The age’s great intellectual labor, in which so many have taken part, is still chiefly the comprehension of the twentieth century’s vast tragedies. Is there a place for poetry in this labor?
4
Why do so many intelligent, enlightened, educated people turn from poetry these days? In some countries, the answer is easy enough; in France, for example, where for several decades the lyric has understood its function as being a methodological monologue, an endless meditation on the question of whether poems are possible at all. It’s as though some introspective tailor had stopped making clothes, ceaselessly pondering instead the marvelous Arabian proverb “The needle that clothes so many people stays naked itself.” Thoughtful people seeking answers to the most fundamental questions inevitably turn their backs on such dry, narcissistic, hermetic poetry. But elsewhere, in those regions where poetry has not entirely renounced its dialogue with the world, the lyric doesn’t always manage to attract those who might potentially prove its best readers.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
We read this stanza from Auden’s beautiful poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” with admiration and we agree, by and large, with its sense. If, however, we stop a moment to consider its conclusion, we can’t help asking whether the mere fact that someone writes well, even exceptionally well, really excuses ignoring what he says. Even if we skip over the names Auden singles out in his Marxist phase (do Claudel and Yeats really require our forgiveness?), the tendency we see here is not confined to the author of “The Shield of Achilles.” This is the tendency to go easy not just on poets but on novelists too, to treat them like children. You may have said something stupid, but you’re so adorable (what a cunning little face). But if we are to take literature seriously, sometimes a work has to be discarded even if it is “very well written”—a large chunk of Mayakovsky’s work would have to be jettisoned, for example, though his vast talent is not in question.
5
Is there perhaps some ontological element of reality before which poetry is helpless? Is this the element of evil? Could it be that poetry is helpless before evil? But we have Dante, after all, we have Goethe’s Faust, we have Othello and Macbeth. (The “statistical” argument that we have more ecstatic lyrics—for example, Keats, Whitman, and Claudel—than poems confronting evil doesn’t hold much water.)
But those who want to understand the modern dictatorships, Nazi or Stalinist, will reach rather for historians and philosophers, for Raul Hilberg or Hannah Arendt, the works of Eric Voegelin or Aron, even Speer’s diaries, for Hermann Rausching, Solzhenitsyn’s early books, the memoirs of the Holocaust’s victims and executioners. They’ll turn to Chiaromonte, to the historians of twentieth-century Russia, the works of François Furet, Martin Malia, Leszek Kolakowski, and so many other penetrating analyses. (Whether they’ll find the definitive answer they seek is another question—if a definitive answer does indeed exist.) And if they’re concerned with more recent, contemporary ailments of society and the spirit, they likewise won’t lack for appropriate prose readings.
“Slow down a minute,” one of my poet friends will burst in here. “Is poetry really only supposed to be some kind of intellectual emergency service whose sky blue ambulances rush screeching through the dark streets of the sleeping city?” Of course not. It would be ridiculously reductive to confine poetry to such functions alone. On the other hand, poets shouldn’t ignore what might be called their age’s intellectual debate; they can’t avoid it completely. Whether this debate truly exists and where it’s to be found is another matter. I think it does exist, though, however imperfect and intermittent it may be.
If poets do shun this discussion, convinced that their minor treasures of lyric inspiration or melancholy are worth more than meditations on the twentieth century’s radical evil or on the great sorrow, and boredom, of our times, then they’re contributing to poetry’s decline, they’re helping to erode the high place among human works given it by the gods and the Greeks. Poetry then becomes an amusing hobby for students and senior citizens—not a matter for grown-ups, who must focus on essentials.
It’s not the actual debate that’s at stake here—it’s truth. The one persuasive charge against poetry would be that it doesn’t seek the truth about human beings and the world, but confines itself instead to gathering pretty baubles on the world’s beaches, pebbles and shells.
Yes, of course. But we have the Duino Elegies, Eliot’s Waste Land, Milosz’s Treatise on Morals and Treatise on Poetry, Mandelstam’s Petersburg poems, Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles,” Akhmatova’s Requiem, the poems of Zbigniew Herbert and Celan—what do they tackle? Evil, modernity, life in our age, the way our age resists us.
6
Let’s take a look once more at the relationship between the world and poetry. Of course there are the rare and extraordinary poems in which a few great poets cast judgment upon our age’s ignominies. Isn’t it true, by and large, though, that poetry doesn’t possess cognitive apparatus attuned to banality, baseness, boredom (I’m not thinking of the artist’s elegant ennui, of Baudelaire’s spleen, but of our cities’ sleepy boredom on an ordinary Sunday afternoon), as well as to Eichmann, the raging skinhead, the soulless bureaucrat.
&
nbsp; There is, of course, a certain variety of evil that eludes poetry, that only the novelist—perhaps only Dostoevsky—can handle. We’ll call this “Dostoevsky’s evil,” the evil of Stavrogin and Smerdyakov, and of the young Verkhovensky, an evil that is simultaneously both psychological and theological. As concerns the potent evil of Hitler and Stalin, poetry confines itself chiefly, and sometimes wonderfully, to the victims’ laments, as in the poetry of Celan, for example, of Milosz, Herbert, and Akhmatova. However, it approaches the sources of this evil only with extreme difficulty. (It should be said immediately, though, that the greatest philosophical minds haven’t offered much more.)
It’s not simply a matter of the perception of evil. I’m also concerned with the modern definition of poetry, not the theoretical definition, since there isn’t one, but the practical definition applied by even the greatest masters, one that accurately reflects the changes that have taken place in the modern mind. Rainer Maria Rilke, the most universally admired twentieth-century poet, has little to say on a topic that enthralled the ancients and should involve us, too: how to live among other humans, in what kind of human community? He speaks beautifully, though, about how to live in the privacy of existence, in solitude, in solitary love, and also about how to die.
7
Perhaps it’s that lyric poetry has two wings, two chief concerns. The first of these is the venerable task that is perhaps the lyric’s absolute center in every generation: this is the need for continuity, the need to sustain spiritual life, or rather, to provide forms for our inner life. Since in poetry, as in meteorology, two atmospheric fronts are always colliding: the warm air of our introspection meets up with the cold front of form, the chill breeze of reflection. The “minor treasures of lyric inspiration” I’ve mentioned rather dismissively (for pedagogical purposes!) are genuine treasures, and their registration has tremendous significance regardless of the philosophical sense they’re assigned.
A Defense of Ardor Page 12