Had this essay been written a few years later, it might have observed not only the turn to theory (what, in other fields, like history and anthropology, became known as “the linguistic turn”) but also a kind of inevitable response (I hesitate to call it a backlash) in the turn—or return—to history. History, rather than theology or psychology, became, for many readers and teachers, the anterior “meaning” of literary texts.22
When historicism emerged as a central defining practice in English departments in the later twentieth century, one of its core practices was to do powerful close readings of historical texts in the context of the readings of works of literature. The elements of surprise, consternation, and arrest were introduced into the reading of what had previously been described as secondary texts for literary study: a treatise on witchcraft, say, or an instruction manual on swordsmanship or mathematics, or a conduct book for young ladies or young gentlemen. Work of this kind was invaluable in returning to prominence questions of historical reference in literary texts that had sometimes been ignored, or consigned to footnotes, by formalist practices of close reading.
The importance of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 as a reference for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the changes in domestic fiction brought about by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, or the observations of the early modern astronomer, ethnographer, and translator Thomas Harriot when he traveled to the Americas with Walter Raleigh in 1585–86—all of these became focal points for important scholarship in English and American literature and culture. But every practice is prone to its own excesses, and over time it has occasionally been the case that the historical fact took preeminence over the literary work. When history is regarded as the “real” of which the poem, play, or novel is (merely or largely) a reflection, something crucial is lost, and that something is literature.
The Poetry Cure
Some early examples of English poetry exhibit a striking kind of fictive usefulness, embedded in the artifice of poem-making. In these cases, the poem—or the rhyme, or the perfect word—comes to the poet as inspiration, whether from God or from the muse of poetry, supplying words where they were lacking, and changing or healing the speaker. These stories are legendary and exemplary. Here are three examples, one from the earliest-known English poem, another from a religious lyric, and a third from a love sonnet.
The story of “Caedmon’s Hymn” is told, movingly, by the monk and scholar known as the Venerable Bede. Caedmon was a lay brother who worked as a herdsman at the monastery. Once, when the monks were feasting and singing, he retreated to sleep with the animals because—says Bede—he knew no songs. He dreamed that “someone” came to him and told him to sing a song of the beginning of creation. At first he demurred but then began to sing the short—and beautiful—poem known as “Caedmon’s Hymn.” The next day he reported these events to the monastery, was asked to write another poem, and, having complied, was invited to take monastic vows. He became—again according to Bede—a prolific poet of religious verse, all composed, like the hymn, in the vernacular—that is to say, in Old English, not in Latin. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which reports this, is, however, written in Latin.
Like all foundation myths, this one can, if we choose, be regarded as an invention, a fiction, an allegory, an embellishment of fact, or any other species of instructive story. But the hymn exists in a number of dialect versions, and what it records is a story of literary inspiration. “Sing,” the command given to Caedmon, remains throughout much of the history of English—and earlier—literature the figure inviting or initiating poetic performance (Virgil’s Aeneid famously begins “Arms and the man I sing”). The moment of inspiration (after a period of mute or stumbling incapacity) is not infrequently restaged in later poems as a birth, or rebirth, of song and creative fluency.
Consider, for example, George Herbert’s poem “Denial,” which begins
When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears,
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder.
and ends
O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favors granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhyme.
The mended rhyme comes with the word “rhyme,” which accords with “chime” and “time,” and repairs the loss of rhyme in the previous stanza, which ends in “disorder.” Herbert expertly deploys the final lines and stanzas of his poems to perform this kind of mind-mending, in poems like “The Collar,” “Love (III),” and the “Jordan” poems, among others. As with Caedmon, the literary fiction—whatever the spiritual reality—is that of divine assistance, inspiration, collaboration.
A more secular version of this trope—for it is a trope, a figure of speech—is on display in the first of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sonnets, where the lover, seeking words to describe his passion, turns dramatically from rhetoric to spontaneous feeling:
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she dear she might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
(1–14)
This great sonnet is deeply—and deliberately—disingenuous in its ingenuity. Disclaiming artifice, study, and literary device, it deploys them with consummate artistry. The poem is a primer in literary figures, from anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word from a previous clause or phrase at the beginning of the next, to the vivified pun on “feet” (anatomical and poetical), and finally to the professions of incapacity “helpless in my throes”; “truant pen”) and the triumphant breakthrough when the Muse dictates the manner of plain speech (“look in thy heart and write”). Significantly, it is the Muse’s speech, not the poet’s, that comes to end (and mend) the sonnet—although the Muse herself is, like Invention and stepdame Study, one of the invented personae of the poet’s text.
The naive voice in such a poem is achieved through learning, not despite it. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets were skilled in the use of rhetorical devices, having learned them in school and through the examples found in numerous rhetorical textbooks, like Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick (1577), Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all suche as are studious of Eloquence, sette forth in English (1553), and George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589). Modern students may be familiar with metaphor, simile, personification, and a handful of other figures of speech, but the poetic toolbox of earlier poets contained dozens, indeed hundreds, of tropes. Recognizing them, and the twists and turns that made them new, was one of the manifold pleasures of reading. For a modern reader, the reverse is the case: the identification of tropes and figures often comes after the first and second readings of the poem, if at all, and is often associated with the classroom rather than with the immediacy of aesthetic or intellectual response.
These rhetorical treatises directly address the question of use. The poet, equipped with skills in language and style, is enabled to move in courtly circles and to affect both language and politics.23 The idea of material advancement through po
etry was not an exaggeration. It was possible to overcome the disadvantages of low birth through education. Archbishop Cranmer (himself not born to the aristocracy) contended that “poor men’s children are many times endued with more singular gifts of nature … eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, and such like, and also commonly more apt to apply their study, than is the gentleman’s son delicately educated.”24
Puttenham’s title, The Art of English Poesy, should be inflected with a stress on the word English: he took for granted the effectiveness, importance, and art (in the largest sense, encompassing rhetorical skill, craft, politics, and eloquence) of earlier poets, both historical and divine. What he set out to do, by tracing the role of the poet through Western cultural history and “Englishing” the names of some classical literary tropes, was to define the potential use of poetry, poetics, and poets for the emerging English nation. The explanatory subtitle of Chapter 2 is “That there may be an art of our English poesy, as well as there is of the Latin and Greek”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 3 is “How poets were the first priests, the first prophets, the first legislators and politicians in the world”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 4 is “How the poets were the first philosophers, the first astronomers, and historiographers, and orators, and musicians of the world,” and so on. Taken together with the address to the queen, this framing constitutes a political as well as a social and aesthetic argument. Poets are good for nation-building, and a national literature is good for the nation.
Moreover, the idea of poets as legislators and politicians—a concept that, by the time of Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, had become rhetorical in the abased sense of that term—was, for the Elizabethans, a practical reality. Shelley would claim that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but in ancient Greece and throughout the Renaissance, poets were, in fact, fully acknowledged as political players. “Poet” was not a full-time occupation to the exclusion of other pursuits. Philip Sidney was a diplomat, Walter Raleigh a courtier and explorer, George Herbert a priest.*
John Donne was trained as a diplomat and anticipated a career in government until his marriage produced a breach between Donne and his political patrons. Edmund Spenser pursued a political career in Ireland (his prose pamphlet A View of the Present State of Ireland recommended aggressive conquest of the Irish native population and the instigation of English language and customs); his prose epic The Faerie Queene, one of the masterworks of the English literary canon, was written in hopes of obtaining a place at court—hopes that did not come to fruition for political reasons. As one of Spenser’s early-twentieth-century editors wrote, “Poetry was a noble pastime, even a vocation, but for a gentleman it was not a profession. All it could do for him would be to bring his talents to the notice of those who were in the position to better his fortunes.”25
The argument of The Faerie Queene, setting forth its poetic program, was addressed to Spenser’s friend Walter Raleigh. Spenser explained that “the generall end” of the book was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” So this, too, was a use of poetry. The choice of a fictional narrative for what Spenser called his “continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” was connected—or so he alleged—to the idea of fashioning the moral character of his gentle or noble readers:
To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather hauve good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus cloudily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises. But such, me seeme, should be satisfied with the vse of these dayes, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense.26
Excuse or not—since allegory’s “dark conceit” was also, equally usefully, a way of disguising controversial views under the device of fiction—this explanation for why one of the most brilliantly imagined poems in the English language takes the form of poetry and fiction rather than precepts and sermons is a good example of the use of use. In Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, “the vse of these dayes” is customary practice, what people are used to, what they like or prefer—in this case, “showes.” A few years later, Ben Jonson would excoriate mere “showes” as the stage design and props provided by his collaborator, Inigo Jones, as contrasted with the greater complexity of poetry: “O showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! / The Eloquence of Masques! / What need of prose/Or Verse, or Sense, t’express Immortal you?”27 But “showes” for Spenser still seemed to include literary exhibitions or fictions.
So the uses of rhetoric, eloquence, “poetical ornament,” figures of speech, and fictional examples were, for the poets, scholars, and politicians of the English Renaissance, a way of (1) fashioning gentlemen, (2) inculcating moral virtues as painlessly and pleasurably as possible, (3) concealing or disguising unpopular opinions under the guise of fiction or allegory, and (4) seeking—and sometimes obtaining—political, social, and financial advancement. Literature had uses: it did things, it gained things for the poet, even though—and perhaps because—his profession was not “poet” but something else.
Can Poetry Make “Nothing” Happen?
The combination of poetry and advocacy, we might note, is as vital and necessary today as it was centuries ago. When the poet Robert Bly accepted the National Book Award for poetry in 1969, he invoked the moral authority of the radical intellectuals of the sixties:
We have some things to be proud of. No one needs to be ashamed of the acts of civil disobedience committed in the tradition of Thoreau. What Dr. Coffin did was magnificent; the fact that Yale University did not do it is what is sad. What Mr. Berrigan did was noble; the fact that the Catholic church did not do it is what is sad. What Mitchell Goodman did here last year was needed and in good taste … In an age of gross and savage crimes by legal governments, the institutions will have to learn responsibility, learn to take their part in preserving the nation, and take their risk by committing acts of disobedience. The book companies can find ways to act like Thoreau, whom they publish. Where were the publishing houses when Dr. Spock and Mr. Goodman and Mr. Raskin—all three writers—were indicted? …
You have given me an award for a book that has many poems in it against the war. I thank you for the award. As for the thousand-dollar check, I am turning it over to the draft-resistance movement, specifically to the organization called the Resistance …28
The only dated part of the speech is the amount of the check. Today’s National Book Award winners each get ten thousand dollars and a trophy.
But there is something moving about the spectacle of a poet trying to change the world with “many poems against the war” and a thousand-dollar check. Especially when we contrast it to the cancellation of a proposed White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” convened by First Lady Laura Bush for Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 2003. When the poet and editor Sam Hamill responded to the invitation by sending out an e-mail urging invitees to send him poems and statements opposing the invasion of Iraq, he received over 5,300 submissions, from poets as well known as Adrienne Rich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Levine, and Diane di Prima. The symposium was postponed indefinitely, and the White House put out the following statement: “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.”
Slam Dunk
Outside of the classroom poetry is often a specialized interest, what consumer guides call a niche product. But in recent years audiences have been drawn to two kinds of in-person cultural performances: the poetry reading and the poetry slam. The former typically takes place in a bookstore, café, or college auditorium. The speaker is a well-known poet or several—often, but not always, appearing in connection with the publication of a new book. The slam features individuals or teams who speak within a strict time limit (three minutes) and are awarded points by a judge for their performance. Participants in poetry slams are usually young, often influ
enced by hip-hop or dub poetry, and sometimes connected to youth poetry organizations. Although in both formats—the reading and the slam—poets occasionally recite works by others, the characteristic mode is personal performance of one’s own work.
Responses to slam culture have, predictably, been varied. The New York Times reported that Harold Bloom called poetry slams “the death of art.”29 Still, it’s undeniable that poetry has attracted new enthusiasts, younger participants, and high energy in recent years, in part through this medium of performance.*
The Renaissance lyric gained popularity through the performances of troubadours and the global phenomenon of Petrarchism, so it’s not so unlikely that a new generation, for whom downloading songs on iPods and other MP3 players is second nature, should make the connection between song and poem. The word lyric dates back etymologically to a time when a poem was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and has, since the end of the nineteenth century, also meant the words of a popular song—surely the most common use of the term today.
Despite the occasional gloomy prognosis, poems and poetry are alive and well today—in the classroom, the poetry magazine, the writing workshop, the lecture hall, the bookstore, on the Internet, and in the streets. The death of art is always being predicted somewhere, and is perhaps a necessary pronouncement to ensure the tangible edginess, the sense of delighted transgression, that comes with practicing a living and changing art or craft.
* He was an orator at Cambridge before he became an Anglican priest.
* and through rappers like Eminem and Jay-Z.
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