Poets of Modern Life

To judge from outward appearances, one might imagine that poetry occupies a place of unprecedented importance, at least in America. There are now more poets writing here than there have ever been — perhaps more than in any era, in any nation. A bewildering profusion of journals, chapbooks, and full-length volumes appears every year; long, heated arguments over the relative value of this or that poem or poet are carried out in magazines of academic criticism and in the blogosphere. Any number of awards, from the Pulitzer down to a whole delta of minor regional prizes, are given out annually, along with what must amount to hundreds of thousands in prize money. Fellowships are awarded, residencies filled, readings held. In short, poetry appears to be thriving as it has never done before.Why, then, does it seem to matter so little to the general reading public, a public once deeply concerned with poetry? Why is such scant attention paid to it by serious, non-academic practitioners of literary criticism? How can a field so crowded remain of interest to so few — only to other poets, by and large? There are any number of explanations for this strange disconnect between the frenzied activity in the field of poetry and the relative inconsequence of poetry as a form in contemporary America, each of which could well serve as the subject of a book in itself. But one of the most easily diagnosable is that few serious critics devote themselves to poetry with the energy and discrimination displayed by American observers of literature in the long century from Poe to Wilson.There are, happily, exceptions. And Adam Kirsch ranks prominently among them. Mr. Kirsch is a book critic of this newspaper, and a regular contributor to the New Republic, the New Yorker, and other publications. “The Modern Element” (Norton, 250 pages, $25.95), a collection of his essays on modern poets ranging from Philip Larkin to Czeslaw Milosz, with American masters like John Ashbery and James Merrill amply represented, comes as a welcome interruption of the busy, self-involved desuetude into which poetry has fallen in America. Mr. Kirsch’s method as a critic differs sharply from the one prevalent among writers on poetry, many of whom feel the need to take a side in the argument between believers in the expressive, communicative, imitative power of poetry, and those who believe it is a medium whose meaning is internal, closed in its own horizon, constructed and conditioned solely by the inner tensions of any particular poem. (It’s odd that these views are seen as opposed.)But Mr. Kirsch takes poets on in their own terms, reading them by their own lights even as he locates them in the poetic tradition — in particular their relation to the Romantics, a relationship he sees as key to understanding contemporary poetry. This is not merely to say Mr. Kirsch is gentle or ecumenical, but rather that he understands the difficulty of writing about poems, even the longest and most perfectly composed of which are fleet, fragmented, and elusive in a way particularly inhospitable to the kind of scrutiny that novels and essays bear up so well under. When Mr. Kirsch praises, he does not praise first and foremost in the service of any critical ideology. Here, he addresses Philip Larkin’s poem “Faith Healing”:Lines like these remind us of what it really means for a poet to sacrifice himself for his art. It has nothing to do with ambition, vanity, or even material deprivation, although many poets’ lives include all of these. It means hollowing out one’s self, in order to allow all the bitterness and joy of life to take up residence there and find expression. In this sense, even a misanthropic poet is bewilderingly generous; as Larkin said, “The most negative poem in the world is a very positive thing to have done.”When he condemns, as he does the work of Louise Glück, he condemns with full awareness of the scope and depth of the work under consideration:But, as these lines show, the chastening of the body has not diminished Glück’s pride in her mind, which has always been the real seat of her ambitions. Her encounter with death, like her encounters with love and sex and divorce and God, have only confirmed her consciousness of superior insight, deeper sensitivity, darker knowledge.He is even capable of finding a place in his survey, albeit a negative one, for so bathetic a figure as Billy Collins. Mr. Kirsch, of course, like any serious reader of literature, has his predilections — as “The Modern Element in Criticism,” the book’s concluding essay, reveals, he belongs with certainty to those who see poetry as a medium directed outward, capable of the most powerful expression and the most serious interrogation of our moral imaginations:If criticism can make any contribution to this goal, it is to help us break free from the post-Romantic dialectic that obsessed American poetry in the twentieth century . . . . We will be able to see how the twentieth century gave us poets of humane insight — Hardy, Frost, Moore, Larkin, Lowell — as well as poets of otherworldly magniloquence and hectic experimentalism. Andifwearefortunate, our poetry will come to understand the full implications — ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic — of Horace’s seemingly simple formula: Of writing well, be sure, the secret lies In wisdom, therefore study to be wise.But the gravity and care he displays in writing about individuals and artists makes “The Modern Element in Criticism” a cri de coeur, rather than a programmatic statement; indeed, one might say that the book’s final essay illustrates the difference between ideology and philosophy in criticism. This points us to what must have served as one of Mr. Kirsch’s models in confronting contemporary poetry: Edmund Wilson’s seminal 1931 study “Axel’s Castle,” an appraisal of literary modernism in English by way of its roots in late 19th-century European symbolism. As a collection of essays “The Modern Element” lacks a comprehensive, encompassing structure, but “The Modern Element in Criticism,” his final essay, shows that Mr. Kirsch shares Wilson’s preoccupation with the larger philosophical problems of literary culture — and that Mr. Kirsch has another such book in him, one that will share the novelistic architecture of Wilson’s major works.Poetry has been, for the majority of recorded history, the central medium of literature, nearly synonymous with literary effort, producing foundational religious texts, farmer’s almanacs, laments for the dead, near-pornographic picaresques, hymns of ecstatic nationalist praise, calendars of religious observance, recommendations for tax reform, shattering and still unmatched love songs. It seems, to be frank, unlikely that poetry will ever occupy such a preeminent position again: The novel and its relative, the essay, have usurped the narrative task of poetry, to which a huge part of its past glory belongs. But in reading “The Modern Element,” in seeing the intense interest poetry can still excite in a first-rate critical talent like Mr. Kirsch, a small hope rises that some of its former strength may return.Mr. Munson is online editor of Commentary.

Poets of Modern Life

Poets of Modern Life

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