5
In Chapter Three, we noted that poetry is part of a continual tradition which is conscious of the fact that it is a tradition—in other words, that poets of every era have carefully read the poets not only of their own time but also of the past. As we said then, certain features of poetry make it possible to think of poems as always and everywhere the same thing. We learned then that ignoring the history of poetry affords us certain insights into the craft. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. It forces us to see certain things that we might otherwise be distracted from. But it’s also true that paying attention to history will allow us to see things that we miss when we ignore it. So in this chapter we want to bring some history into our discussion.
Poets are always reacting in various ways to their predecessors and their contemporaries as though they were all contemporary. One prominent literary critic named Harold Bloom has argued that the primary driving force in the best poets of any age is the drive to overthrow the best poets that came before them. So a nineteenth-century poet like William Wordsworth, according to Bloom, feels as though he is in competition with a premier eighteenth-century poet like Alexander Pope even though Pope was already dead before Wordsworth began writing. The history of poetry, according to Bloom, is a struggle for supremacy with each “strong” poet of every time trying to place himself at the center of the whole history of poetry.
A lot of readers disagree with Bloom’s way of describing the history of poetry. But whether Bloom is right or not about the struggle for supremacy, he is certainly right to perceive that poets respond to other poets in their poems. For our purposes, it will be more useful to describe this relationship as a conversation than as a struggle because it allows us to think about other kinds of responses than the search for dominance. But we should keep in mind that part of conversation is struggle, and that no poet responds to an earlier poet merely to agree with him or her.
Any poet of any skill must see themselves in the context of the history of poetry. This on-going conversation among poets is not the essence of poetry any more than the things we’ve mentioned in previous chapters are. Nonetheless, conversation is so pervasive an aspect of the poetic tradition that we will have a hauntingly incomplete understanding of what poetry is if we do not notice it and think about it. In fact, failing to recognize the status of a particular poem in relation to the poetic tradition is another reason why poetry often frustrates students. Reading poems is often like coming in on a conversation in the middle. If someone doesn’t help you get caught up, you may well miss the point.
Let us look at an example. First, read this poem by William Wordsworth:
My Heart Leaps Up
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall gr