this is just to say

Hey, massive post ahead!

I took a class in grad school called 20th-Century African-American Literary Criticism--hereafter Af-Am Lit Crit, because try saying the full title twenty times fast. This post will not be about the actual class (maybe sometime I'll write about it, though, because it was fascinating), but partially about something my professor said. We were reading poetry at the time, and he said, "You can throw anything at English students and they'll take it, but if you give them poetry, they'll run away screaming."

Yeah, that's totally me. Maybe it's because poetry is sometimes so damn difficult. You got rhyme, you got meter, you got form, and those things matter when you're looking at a poem (yes, they do, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society). 

And maybe it's because poetry's hard to define. Samuel Johnson, in answer to Boswell's question, "What is poetry?" said, "Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is."

I'm also of the opinion--and perhaps this is an unjustified opinion--that very, very few people are good poets. I am not one of them. The best poem I ever wrote was a parody of part of "East Coker" ("Oh dark dark dark, they all go into the dark" got turned into "Oh slush slush slush, they all go into the slush." I was rather sick of winter at the time). For the most part, though, let me stick to prose. I can do prose (I think. I hope). 

Good poetry? It takes my breath away, leaves me speechless, renders me almost unable to think.

All right, that's established. Bring out yer poetry! Or, rather, poems you like (though, if you're a poet, feel free to share).

 My favorite poem--or more accurately, series of poems--is T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. I wrote my undergrad senior thesis on it (it was titled "Intersections with Eternity"), and I still love it. Most people are familiar with Eliot through "Prufrock" and The Waste Land. I like to quote their opening lines, usually rather flippantly: "Let us go then, you and I" when I'm going out, and "April is the cruellest month" during, well, April.

The Quartets come after these, after Eliot's conversion to Anglicanism, so there are often mixed responses to the poems. What fascinates me is not only Eliot's response to Christianity here, but also his response to the looming war. Actually, the response to World War II is one of the things that fascinates me most about the Modernists in general: most of them experienced the Great War and thought, like so many others, that it was the war to end all wars. And then...World War II.

In any case, one of the major themes that runs throughout the Quartets is this idea of language being inadequate--perhaps because language, art, poetry didn't stop the war. In Burnt Norton, we get

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. 

And in East Coker, the feeling of wasted time ("twenty years largely wasted") is paired with the feeling that one is always saying that is not what I meant at all:

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. 

The resolution comes in Little Gidding, with words being "[t]he complete consort dancing together." 

There's so much to say about the Quartets, but in lieu of writing another thesis on them, I'm just going to quote the last few lines of Little Gidding:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I quoted Seamus Heaney's "Doubletake" in my post on 9/11, but I think it's worth talking about again. It's part of an adaptation of Sophocles' Philoctetes. I've never read either, though Troy is on my to-be-read list. Published in '91, the play also subtly references Northern Irish politics as well as Greek history. The most quoted lines of "Doubletake" come from the chorus:
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
I try to remember this, as well as the next lines: "So hope for a great sea-change/on the far side of revenge." Also, if you're going to check out Heaney, his translation of Beowulf makes me swoon. And "Digging" is a great poem. 

My favorite love poem: Pablo Neruda's "Every Day You Play." The last line? "I want/to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." 'Nuff said there.
Along with Neruda, I love e.e. cummings's "somewhere i have never travelled," which ends like this:
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and open; only something in me understands 
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
How could anyone resist poems like cummings' and Neruda's? They read like whispers, like longing. They're entrancing.
(Also, with the elections looming, perhaps we all should read next to of course god america i)

I have a soft spot for Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," just because it's so catchy (iambic whatevermeter, people, for the times that you want to get something stuck in everyone's head):
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
where Alph, the sacred river, ran
through caverns measureless to man
down to a sunless sea.
It's a bit of an acid trip--which, wait, is completely appropriate, as Coleridge was probably writing this in an opium-induced trance or something. 

Also in the "catchy" category is Yeats' "The Stolen Child."
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
And, you know, "The Second Coming" cannot be read enough: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." And something rather relevant to today:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And how about some Gerard Manley Hopkins with that sprung rhythm? I love me some "Pied Beauty."
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
     Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                          Praise Him.

And to end, William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say."

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I realize that I've been quite heavy on 20th-century poets here. I apologize for that. But bring me your Shakespeare and Jonson, Dickinson and Whitman. And Dryden and Pope, and Wordsworth and Shelley, and Donne and Herbert. And all those neglected poets that I've, well, neglected, as there is only so much room and so much time to write.