A Rose by Any Other Name Smells as Acrid

The Case for Popular Poetry

Joe Sobran delves into the world of poety with the article above. Well, not so much poetry as the warping that this divine art form has been subject to in the modern schools of 'higher education'.

I accept the consensus of poetry lovers that Kunitz was an excellent poet. But isn’t that an odd thing to say? As if poetry lovers were a small class of specialists sharing an eccentric taste. Poetry today is notoriously the least popular, least remunerative form of writing. You can still eke out a living writing prose. But verse? Forget it. I’ve tried to read Kunitz and other recent poets of repute — Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Louis Zukofsky, and many more — but I have to confess I just can’t get into them. I’m obviously not the only one. This is in no way a diatribe against them, but let me put it this way: Why doesn’t their work stick to the ribs? Not since Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, both of whom died about forty years ago, has there been an English-language poet of both high literary prestige and great popular appeal, whose verses and phrases could be recognized by ordinarily literate readers — as, in earlier centuries, it seemed that Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Longfellow, and Tennyson were common possessions. Everyone quoted them. But how many people today can name even one living poet? And yet we are all poetry lovers by nature, aren’t we? The surest proof of this is that popular poetry survives in popular song; we can all quote Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, and, if we are older than the rock era, Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart. This takes no effort of memorization; on the contrary, when poetry keeps its roots in music, such devices as rhyme, meter, and melody can make it nearly impossible to forget.

Like all things at the modern university, poetry and all prose have been subjected to the cult of multicults and the legion of their mindless dittoheads who dutifully parrot whatever their enlightened professors feed them. I myself had the pleasure of seeing English ripped apart and reformed into a Frankenstien's monster that does not resemble what it is or was. This first time I was confronted was during my Critical theory class and a reading of "Frankestien". I just didn't know how far down hill the ball had rolled but soon came to find out when my class delved into Mary Shelley's masterpiece. You may be unaware, but the way people are taught to read books (the people who will eventually teach your child English) has drastically changed. I thought the text and the author's intent held a place of esteem when disecting literature; the reader's feelings are now paramount and the lens through which he reads literature holds greater meaning and importance than finding out why the author makes his choices. Thus I was introdued to Gay/Lesbian, Feminist, Post Colonial, and a whole host of other political theories issues foisted upon writers who probably never thought a second about those issues when they put pen to paper. Who knew that the way things have been taught since they were created could be so wrong? Those professors wouldn't say wrong of course, but shortsighted. I never knew how 'political' literature was. But really, it is not political. Political would mean there are different meaning to be gleamed from literature. University modern Romans followed the beat of one drum. Caesar was the other and all literature could be analyzed and molded to fit the preconceived notions. There are truly no new ideas under the sun, but there are new clouds in the sky that alter the lens of the mind's reasoning eye. The study of literature is dead. The rewriting of classics continues daily.

It’s as if several of the modern arts have repudiated, as “vulgar” or “bourgeois,” the very conventions that once made those arts coherent and readily intelligible. So we have had novels without narrative, music without melody or harmony, and painting without representation, as well as verse that seems impenetrable. In some cases these experiments were brilliantly successful on their own terms, like Joyce’s Ulysses; and we needn’t disparage them. But when Joyce took his experimental fiction further in Finnegans Wake, he set a precedent that was bound to find few imitators. In fact, progress of this kind in the arts entailed loss as well as gain, but the cult of modernism has sometimes refused to admit this obvious fact. When art fails to communicate, as C.S. Lewis observed, it is now widely assumed that the fault lies wholly on the side of the audience: “In this shop, the customer is always wrong.” The heyday of audience-defying modernism is over now; it survives wearisomely in attempted provocations — such as obscene or blasphemous pictures and sculptures, mostly tax-funded, that cause banal disputes on editorial pages. These silly rows really have nothing to do with either artistic freedom or artistic merit. They signify the exhaustion, and greed, of what now passes for the avant-garde. But some artists will always experiment, as they should. I merely say that excellent art may also be, and usually has been, conventional and popular. It should hardly be necessary to point this out. Tom Wolfe has argued that the novel has its roots in the lowly craft of journalism; and he has proved his thesis in a series of brilliant and essentially old-fashioned novels full of colorful characters, dramatic plots, and social observation — nineteenth-century novels for the twenty-first century. And they sell like crazy. If the novel can still do this, why not the symphony? Or even the sonnet?

I just want to remind the reader that Shakespeare wasn't written for lifetime, university, public supported, egoists to muse over. Shakespeare was written for the common man paying a penny to get in to see the show, hoping there was a dog with a good trick on stage. There may not have been a fine mutt act, but everyong in the audience understood what was happening and what it meant. Hell, they didn't even read for the most part and could still readily grasp what the professors today couldn't imagine. They listened to what was being said; it mattered not what they wanted the players to say.

If you want to destroy something just have the government fund it, thus the decline of art and literature.