In July 1912 [Frost] started making plans for a radical change of scene. When he suggested England to Elinor as “the place to be poor and to write poems, ‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘let’s go over and live under thatch.‘”
— WIlliam H. Pritchard / The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English as reproduced here [x]
There is much to admire about and learn from the duality of man, especially of great men. Fundamentally, there are two struggles in life, the work of exposing one’s soul to the world and the work of being a soul exposed to the world. It may come as no surprise then that the same poet who made the statement above later wrote to former student and friend, John Bartlett:
There is a kind of success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my own legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside the circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands.
— Robert Frost / as reprinted in A Divided Poet: Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the Drama of Disappearance. David Sanders
On one hand we have a gleeful casting off of material things, of one’s own home even, in order to pursue a calling for poetry, for art. On the other, a sobering reminder that poetry is one of the few remaining arts which does not sustain life, even in the hands of its greatest masters.
This message is as relevant today as it ever has been. In an era where massively popular instapoets — with their aesthetically pleasing images and spare, not-always-precise language — dominate the general readership, every poet is pausing to consider the taste of parsnips.
The question is simple: Is it poetry? The answer is yes, but… Is that what we want poetry to be? Is a mere witticism the ultimate message humanity is comfortable sending? If you say no, then where does the blame lie; with the readers, teachers or poets? Personally, I say fuck it.
After years of vehement and passionate study of the ideograms of the Tao Te Ching, I think I have summarized it all into a couple of words: Fuck it. And if you can’t fuck it, ignore it. It’ll go away.
— Robert Anton Wilson
For what it’s worth though, I believe the fault lies solely with the poets, but time heals everything. The whole conversation is rooted in an appeal to general understanding, which leads to popularity which, if one is clever enough, leads to monetization of popularity. The comfortable and palatable poetry the masses are gobbling up these days is merely a reflection of the language they were taught. For most of us alive today, that language is capitalist epigram much in the style of E. E. Cummings.
Where Frost was derided by the modernists for his fondness for form — both the comfort it represented to the public and the challenge form presents to a great poet — Cummings was seen as gimmicky. Make no mistake though, he was always challenging the use of language. Poet Laureate Randall Jarrell later said of Cummings that no one “has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.”
That’s where the instapoets and so many other contemporary writers and poets fall short. Their fault lies in being complacent, in asking to be heard rather than pushing the limits of language as we know it. Most of them have absolutely nothing vital to say, but some have an important message. Some are artists at heart, and how it doesn’t kill them to paint the same picture a thousand times escapes me.
Poets throughout history have always been at risk or accused of appealing to the lowest common denominator. As far back as Chaucer, as I am aware. This reaching for a common thread belies a need to exist as a soul in the world. Where artists in other forms can make a living solely through their craft, it is the rarest state in the world of poetry. All of the most brilliant poets I’ve met have a day job or two (or three???) and often plenty of side hustles. The path to self-sufficient poet is usually lined with lecturing and teaching or with patrons of the arts, of which there are too few.
That is to say, the path to being a poet is to abandon the idea of celebrity. The fact that Frost couldn’t keep a farm alive and wound up teaching and lecturing (honestly a cushy gig akin to being patronized) is hilarious to me. I’m sorry, I am just a sucker for irony. He succeeded at connecting with as wide an audience as possible and still failed to make ends meet. There are no you-can-quit-your-job-now contracts in the poetry world. As a matter of fact, most of the honorariums poets are bestowed go towards financing the next few months of submissions to journals and contests.
It is a blunt truth that all aspiring poets eventually face: You will write poems and be poor.
Frost was a genius who may well have crippled his voice (and was later lauded for the effort) for the sake of popularity and money. Sometimes I wonder what languages that man died holding on to. Sometimes I wonder what languages you or I may die holding on to.
Cummings was undoubtedly inspired by some ancient Greek poets who loved conflating short form with deep meaning. That’s the sign of a great poet, elegance. It astonishes me that Japanese short forms aren’t all the rage on constricted media platforms like Instagram and Twitter for exactly that reason.
In the end all that matters is what we say, not how we say it; time itself takes care of the how.
Perhaps that’s a bit too fatalistic. The truth is that the passing of time means nothing without voices slowly chipping away at the status quo. The best poets are a generation ahead of their readers in age, and at least four generations ahead in language. What is taught to the father is passed on to the son, is the language the child seeks comfort in all their life. It’s no wonder I feel most at home in classical English poetry. My father was raised on it, being born in the early ‘40s.
I’m still finding my place in a language as dated as the modernists as a result of the spirit and stories I was raised on. I am never complacent with poetry though. Poetry, the only thing in my life I refuse to seek comfort in, to be marked and grounded by. I’ll keep running until I’m a generation ahead, until my voice becomes the carrot instead of the stick, even if it takes a lifetime. That’s the difference between histrionics, with their typewriters and aesthetics, and poets.
Refuse to seek comfort in poetry. Be poor and write poems.
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This is in response to a @purplemonkeysexgod69 piece here