What Poetry Is Not

 

Poetry is not instructive.

     Poetry does not teach people wisdom; it offers no pointers toward enlightenment, no aid to being more moral or guidance on how to vote.  Artists have no privileged access to truth.  The apparent insights the reader may gain from a story or poem are generated by recognition of another take on reality, another vision, not necessarily sager but different from one’s own and thus broadening.  A poet need not be wise; his professional skill is limited to the manipulation of words and symbols made of words.  The historic claim that art teaches truths arose from its central role since archaic times in conveying received ideas like those implied by myth, ritual, and religion, and affirming people’s beliefs about politics and behavior in general.  In its inverted modern version, art’s critical role comes to the fore, exposing contradictions and opening the way for change.  Art’s reputation for teaching its audience one way or another has been heightened by a moralistic suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure in the contemplation of beauty for its own sake.

 

Poetry is not sincere.

     Poetry is always in the voice of a persona, always an artifice.  The pose of speaking directly from the heart is rhetorical as are other fictions.  Every lyric is not the author’s cri de coeur but rather a hypothetical statement of what some speaker might one day have said.  This does not contradict the fact that, coincidentally, the statement on the page may correspond closely to the conscious sentiment of its writer, but this is accidental and unrelated to the value of what is said.  In fact, creativity is more foregrounded in the depiction of attitudes that are not the author’s own, just as one is obliged as a reader to exercise greater imagination in identifying with fictional characters with views unlike one’s own.  Sincerity, while doubtless valuable in personal relationships, has no place in art.

 

Poetry is not therapeutic.

     The aim of a poem qua poem is not to work through personal experiences, neither to overcome grief nor, for that matter, to celebrate a joyful event.  The author’s state of mind, whether it be disturbed or serene has no relation to the success of the work of art.  Likewise, the reader’s feeling better or worse after reading has no aesthetic value.  When someone says a poem is inspired by a bout with disease or by a newly adopted child, the reader must be wary, though such an origin has, in fact, neither positive nor negative implications for the value of the work.  Any therapeutic (or other utilitarian) use for either a producer or consumer of art is entirely incidental.  Art is the playful manipulation of symbols; it is not designed to solve the problems of either creators or consumers. 

 

Poetry is not (in general) obscure.

     The qualification in this statement arises from the fact that, whereas in other discourses lucidity is the highest value, poetry is often more complex.  Some verse has always depended on subcultural knowledge, whether academic and courtly or based in folkways, rural or urban.  The pleasure of some literary work, too, derives, like that of riddles and puzzles, from the need for energetic decoding.  Still, most poetry is intelligible for any attentive reader.  With poetry’s exile from the center of the majority of  people’s artistic experience after the turn of the twentieth century, certain poets, such as Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, indeed reacted by reveling in the density of their texts, but in earlier times no one complained that poetry was difficult to understand.  Nonetheless, since a significant amount of human experience is mysterious, contradictory, ambiguous, or irrational, these characteristics are replicated in many poems.  If a sentiment is reducible to a simple paraphrase, after all, there is no excuse for casting it in artistic form.  In art “meaning” is overappreciated in any event; in only a minority of cases does “meaning” provide the primary value of a work.

 

Poetry is not a specialized taste. 

     Every culture on earth, including those which have no written language, has poetry, often in genres similar of those of technologically advanced societies.  Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare were consumed by everyone.  Popular genres such as folksong and broadsheet verses among the uneducated and parlor poetry for the middle classes flourished until very recently.  All young children relish nursery rhymes and virtually all adults are moved by popular songs.    Poetry appears today still in advertising jingles and the word-play of graffiti, sound bites, jokes, and bumper stickers.  Dexterity in the manipulation of symbolic materials is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species.  It is only natural that we should all enjoy practicing this skill.