11
An Historical Overview
So far this term we have been mainly discussing the most basic, formal elements of poetry: line, meter, stanza, form. We’ve also discussed a number of poems on a variety of subjects. But we haven’t delved into any subject—except of course the subject of poetic—in detail.
Some people find the mathematics of poetry endlessly fascinating—that the beauty of poetry can be discussed in the sterile language of numbers makes them say “wow!” These are the same sorts of people who like to talk about grammar and math. Others find this sort of thing endlessly boring. Fascinating or boring, at some point in your poetic education, it is necessary to deal with poems in that laboratory fashion. But it would be a shame if that were all we did in our study of poetry. So today we turn the corner and begin to look at poetry in a more focused way in terms of what it says and what it does. Poetry we’ll see is not just an idle entertainment. It is an actor in history. The things it does are sometimes progressive and liberal and sometimes conservative and sometimes reactionary. (We’ll see that all these possibilities exist in this week’s poems.)
To review much of what we’ve said already at least once: most English-language poetry is written in standard English sentences. The grammar may sometimes be complex, but it is the same grammar we all have learned in school, or tried to learn. Being written this way, most poetry includes what is known as “paraphrasable content.” (We’ve seen this over and over again as we’ve tried to read the poems on our syllabus.) In other words, it’s possible to look at what the sentences and the poem are actually saying and put that “content” into other words.
If this were all we did in reading poetry, if we thought that once we could report what a poem was saying we were through with the poem, we would do a great injustice to poetry. Moreover any number of poems defy, deliberately or not, our ability to paraphrase them. At the same time, it is nearly impossible to feel comfortable with any poem if you don’t have any idea of what it says or what it does. (As Marianne Moore says in her poem “Poetry” “we do not admire what we cannot understand.”) In the rare cases when a poem cannot be paraphrased, knowing that that is so and why that is so will be of a great help in learning to feel comfortable with the poem. If a poem can be paraphrased, doing so will, again, help greatly in reading the poem.
Poems have something to say. Poems also have work to do.
We have already begun to look at the ongoing conversations among poets and poems. Poets are always talking to each other and to the history of poetry. They are also talking to and responding to the society or culture in which they are written. Like newspaper editorials, movies, novels and political speeches, they attempt to affect the course of their contemporary world and therefore also the course of history. Poetry is an actor in history. (The Romantic poet Percy Shelley