Do You Have A Poem Book . . . ?

The poet—“one who writes in measure,” as Johnson laconically defines him—and poetess (“a she poet”) have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people @ la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish. But the very worst has happened to him, and in the last couple of decades. It has been forgotten in high places what he is, and every schoolchild is taught the most godawful rot as to why he writes as he does in measure. The things of the world are always at one’s doorstep; the miseries of the American poet were nicely defined while I was on my errands this morning deep in Kentucky. At the grocer’s, as I was throwing Time into my cart, a lady broke into a motherly smile, “Thar you go,” she said, “buyin’ th’ magerzine book of your choice for the month: ain’t it grand to read?” It was at the local paperback emporium that a teen-ager, obviously a time-server in summer school, asked for “a poem book on E. E. Cummings.” The lady admirer of literacy is a guitarist and sings “Great Speckled Bird” and “The Murder of James A. Garfield” on the radio. She is, in her way, a poet; and one of the things utterly forgotten about poets is that they come in hierarchies and orders. Edgar A. Poe and Edgar A. Guest spoke, to be very sure, from different sensibilities, but their greatest difference is that they spoke for different sensibilities. The young man with his poem book on E. E. Cummings will have been taught by the time this gets into print that Mr. Cummings’ poems are the expression of Mr. Cummings’ inward reflections and ideas. Mr. Cummings had Personality and was capable of Self Expression. He was a book author. Lord help us, he even Used Symbols. If Mr. Cummings speaks with another man’s voice, as he does poem after poem, the teen-ager’s teacher will explain that the poet is Undercutting with Irony.

THAT THE POET speaks for people who cannot speak, that he makes sentences for people to say, is as outmoded a concept in pedagogy as whacking the behind for laziness and insolence. The poet, poor fellow, has become a Personality, and the only authority for his raving is that he stands in his shoes. That pair of shoes over there: in them stands a man who for lack of Personality might be as famous as the poet. One can think of statements that seem to explain so wry a misunderstanding of the poet as an issuer of personal pronunciamentos. Behavioral psychology, squirted into the ears of students from Head Start through the Ph.D., can account for no action not grounded in self-advancement; it follows that the poet as a voice for other people is suspect. He must be expressing himself, don’t you see?

GD

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Guy Davenport

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The poet—“one who writes in measure,” as Johnson laconically defines him—and poetess (“a she poet”) have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people @ la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish. But the very worst has happened to him, and in the last couple of decades. It has been forgotten in high places what he is, and every schoolchild is taught the most godawful rot as to why he writes as he does in measure. The things of the world are always at one’s doorstep; the miseries of the American poet were nicely defined while I was on my errands this morning deep in Kentucky. At the grocer’s, as I was throwing Time into my cart, a lady broke into a motherly smile, “Thar you go,” she said, “buyin’ th’ magerzine book of your choice for the month: ain’t it grand to read?” It was at the local paperback emporium that a teen-ager, obviously a time-server in summer school, asked for “a poem book on E. E. Cummings.” The lady admirer of literacy is a guitarist and sings “Great Speckled Bird” and “The Murder of James A. Garfield” on the radio. She is, in her way, a poet; and one of the things utterly forgotten about poets is that they come in hierarchies and orders. Edgar A. Poe and Edgar A. Guest spoke, to be very sure, from different sensibilities, but their greatest difference is that they spoke for different sensibilities. The young man with his poem book on E. E. Cummings will have been taught by the time this gets into print that Mr. Cummings’ poems are the expression of Mr. Cummings’ inward reflections and ideas. Mr. Cummings had Personality and was capable of Self Expression. He was a book author. Lord help us, he even Used Symbols. If Mr. Cummings speaks with another man’s voice, as he does poem after poem, the teen-ager’s teacher will explain that the poet is Undercutting with Irony.

THAT THE POET speaks for people who cannot speak, that he makes sentences for people to say, is as outmoded a concept in pedagogy as whacking the behind for laziness and insolence. The poet, poor fellow, has become a Personality, and the only authority for his raving is that he stands in his shoes. That pair of shoes over there: in them stands a man who for lack of Personality might be as famous as the poet. One can think of statements that seem to explain so wry a misunderstanding of the poet as an issuer of personal pronunciamentos. Behavioral psychology, squirted into the ears of students from Head Start through the Ph.D., can account for no action not grounded in self-advancement; it follows that the poet as a voice for other people is suspect. He must be expressing himself, don’t you see?