poetry isn't dead. it's just a weird thing to love.

why do any creative thing if not to grow in attentiveness to the world?

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece in which the author argued that T.S. Eliot killed poetry when he wrote “The Waste Land.” (To be fair, they also published a lovely meditation by Tish Harrison Warren about how much we need poetry right now, a piece I highly recommend.)

This NYT opinionist bases his argument on the fact that we are more alienated from nature than we have perhaps ever been in the past. His argument might be summarized in this extended quotation from the article:

Modest as the festivities have been [for the centenary of “The Waste Land”], I am certain that in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration. This seems to me true for the simple reason that poetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it. . . .

. . . We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so. The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.

. . . Absent the ability to see nature this way — as the dwelling place of unseen forces, teeming with images to be summoned and transformed, as opposed to an undifferentiated mass of resources to be either exploited or preserved — it is unlikely that we will look for those images in the work of Homer or Virgil and even less likely that we will create those images ourselves.

I guess I see where this person is coming from. But I also kind of hate the article, or at least the premises behind it. What, for example, does he mean by “good poetry”? What’s the standard here? I’ve read a lot of poetry written in the last hundred years that I find startling in its beauty and depth, that I would — to use a reductive word — call “good” poetry, even life-changing poetry. When there isn’t a lot of nature to look at, it often seeks out the beauty and mystery of people instead.

Also, how could poetry possibly be so weak as to be able to be killed by science — which is simply another creative, important mode of knowledge and exploration? For the places where science does “demystify” creation, I find poetry is an important way to re-mystify it. Is necessary, even, for practicing mystery in contemporary life.

I am a poet who lives in a highly urbanized area. I’m still writing pretty solid poems, I think. And nature makes herself known here, too. I just have to pay closer attention to her — one of the gifts, I would argue, of poetry, which challenges me to contemplate the nature that is here with more humility and presence than I could muster without the discipline of a creative practice. Poetry teaches me to regard nature as beautiful and dignified in itself rather than for its potential usefulness, and thus helps redeem my relationship with nature in this industrialist age.

I think part of what’s at stake here, and why I’m reacting so strongly to the article, is a question involving how we value writing and other forms of creativity on a fundamental level. Is the life of an artistic practice constituted in its technical impressiveness, its obvious fame and success, its ability to deconstruct the genre itself? Or is it in the way it connects people with the beauty and tragedy of the human condition; builds relationships around shared creative acts; and enables individuals to discover and be kind to themselves and others in new ways (even if the poem that does this is simple or unpolished)?

Perhaps you’ll permit me another extended quotation from the opinion piece:

With his almost cinematic montages, Eliot created a body of work that is unique in English poetry for its simultaneous ability to lay bare both the personal anxieties of its author and the sense of mechanized horror that had overtaken an entire civilization. . . . Eliot created an idiom that captured the disappearance of the pre-modern worldview.

Eliot was successful — so successful that he remade all of English poetry, or what has passed for it since, in his image. The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot.

The problem is not that Eliot put poetry on the wrong track. It’s that he went as far down that track as anyone could, exhausting its possibilities and leaving little or no work for those who came after him. It is precisely this mystique of belatedness that is the source of Eliot’s considerable power. What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.

I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.

Melodrama aside, this opinionist seems to me to have an unnecessarily absolute view of Eliot’s genius. Eliot was brilliant, yes, and he did something no one else has done since. But what he did is also just, well . . . weird. His poetry is beautiful, rich, even hopeful, but it is also esoteric and strange and hard to grasp. In my experience, it takes a lot of re-reads before it starts to make sense.

I don’t want to compete with that. It doesn’t sound fun to me. In my life, poetry is a source of delight. It’s a method of exploration, a practice in seeing and relating to the world from a posture of openness, creativity, and grace. Even if only a few people ever read it or care about it, I want the poetry I write to be present and bright and open. I want people to be able to enjoy and delight in it, to take it into their lives and befriend it. And I want it to be poetry that is ready to be befriended.

I was educated at a private Evangelical university, and I’m Anglican now, and I hang out with a lot of folks who are Anglican and love poetry. Which all amounts to me having read quite a bit of Eliot. In my own poetic practice I have had to — in both explicit and subtle ways — wrestle with Eliot’s legacy and influence. It is tempting to try to write like him, but any time I’ve tried, I’ve found it simply can’t be done.

Eliot’s voice is so particular, so unique, so almost not-poetry (as observed by Li-Young Lee in this interview) that I’ve found it’s better to eschew his syntactical influence altogether and instead search for my own music in the language I pen. “Smashing” language apart and remaking it in the image of my own “genius” and intuition has required something like ignoring Eliot when I write. I have to leave his language behind and enter the simplicity, beauty, and wonder of my own life, of my loves, of my present moment, and let them shape and change my language — as Eliot’s moment shaped and changed his.

The poets I admire and aspire to emulate value poetry as a way of being, a way of seeing, a method of submitting the self to the present. The opinionist whose article I am responding to here seems to value poetry for its capacity to innovate and impress. Perhaps I’m being reductive. But if I’m right, these are two value systems that are not mutually exclusive, but are here opposed. Mr. Opinionist terms poetic success in language of triumph. I want such success to be defined by humility and renewal and mystery a generous, open, vibrant imagination.

I have loved poetry since fourth grade, when I stumbled across a Poetry for Young People collection of Emily Dickinson’s work. Her poems changed how I see the world. They caused me to pay closer attention to roses and lizards and sunshine and little purple flowers and lush, overgrown grass in people’s front lawns. Her poetry imbued these childhood fascinations with mystery and grace. It gave me language and images for loves I already had, but didn’t know how to express yet. They set my imagination on fire. I’ve never been the same.

Poetry is by no means absolute. But it is a beautiful, compelling way to pay attention to the world. It changed me when I was ten, and continues to change me today. Practicing it makes me more humble and patient with the necessities of faithful creativity (for example, a poem I recently, finally managed to get published took me three years to write, is something I’m still not totally sure is done, and got rejected something like six times before it was published). It opens me to hope and grief and love and mystery.

As much as I love Eliot’s work, the places in which his obvious world-weariness and inclination toward despair take over his poetry are the places I might actually critique the most. It’s the moments in his poems that transcend this weariness, that rediscover hope and wonder (usually through prayer), that I find most powerful.

There are a lot of mysteries in the world. Poems are one of the few things that can invite people into mystery without trying to pull back the veil. For that reason alone, I never want to stop practicing it. But it’s true that it’s a weird, maddening thing to love. It constantly confronts the poet with her smallness, her glory, her failures, with the limits of her own relationship with language.

Perhaps a healthy, living relationship with the craft necessitates a humble and consistent playfulness. As Richard Hugo says in the introduction to The Triggering Town, “Above all, I hope you’ll not take the book more seriously than it is intended. Some of it, though obviously not all, is written in a sense of play. But it is play directed toward helping you with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems. I don’t know why we do it. We must be crazy. Welcome, fellow poet.”

Blessings on your practice, fellow maker. May we all be humble enough to enjoy our play, and see differently on the other side.

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A few contemporary books that have or are deepening my love for and dedication to art-making (and which convince me poetry remains very much alive):

• Art and Faith, Makoto Fujimura

• Incarnadine, Mary Szybist

• Experimenting with an Amen, R.S. Thomas

• Dream Work and Thirst, Mary Oliver

• F and Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Franz Wright

• Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle

• Joy, Christian Wiman

• Glass, Irony, and God, Anne Carson

• The City in Which I Love You, Li-Young Lee