THE IMPORTANCE OF POETRY AND IRRELEVANCE OF CRITICISM

Jerry Harkins

My mother, an elementary schoolteacher born in 1908, her mother, a nurse born in 1882, and her sister, another school teacher born in 1905, all grew up memorizing and reciting poetry in school and at home.  I spent a lot of time alone with them especially with my mother when she was on sabbatical before and after giving birth to my sisters.  I would be with her when she was in the cellar doing the wash, in the kitchen preparing dinner and in the bedrooms when she was changing the linens.  She knew an amazing amount of poetry by heart and she loved to recite it whenever the task at hand didn’t demand her full attention.  She could recite all 1,399 lines of Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline.”  Her repertoire included the complete texts of “The Merchant of Venice" and “Julius Caesar” and every soliloquy Shakespeare ever wrote.  She knew both of Walt Whitman’s Lincoln elegies, “O Captain! My Captain!” and the much longer and more difficult “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.”  She knew hundreds of poems for children as well as dozens of works by Shelley and Keats, William Blake, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Ernest Henley and Walter Savage Landor.

I inherited some of this skill.  I can recite more poetry than anyone else I know but nowhere near as much as mother knew.  I grew up at the tail end of the era in which memorization was thought to be important.  I think I know the lyrics to some two thousand songs and at one time I could recite several hundred lines of the Odyssey in Greek, maybe a hundred lines of Cicero’s first oration against Cataline in Latin and a dozen or so lines of Caesar’s Gallic War also in Latin.  But the closest I ever came to my mother was when I was required by Father Lemkhul to memorize the 626 lines of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”  Overnight.  For something I had done that displeased the Prefect of Discipline. (Full disclosure:  all those heroic couplets make it easier than it sounds.)

I enjoy memorizing.  The truth is I enjoy everything about the faculty of memory such as  remembering something out of the blue that happened a long time ago that I haven’t thought of in decades.  Even when I know the memory isn’t perfect.  Or when I remember something I may have dreamed or something that I wish had happened or something that had not happened at all.  I love the games I play when I’m trying to dredge up some elusive memory.  Let me see.  It begins with an m.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.  Why did I come here?  What is the capital of Nevada?  Obviously not Las Vegas.  Not Reno.

In the age of Google, memory is not as essential as it used to be.  I no longer need to remember what the Docetist heresy was about.  Google knows and will give me 101,000 answers in less than half a second.  It will also criticize my spelling and my use of the uppercase D.  They want me to ask for docetism and not to label it a heresy.  I can however refer to it as “heterodox” which means different from orthodox but is less judgmental.  Which brings me to the point of this essay.  I’m a pretty heterodox person myself, especially when it comes to the poetry I like.  At one brief point in my checkered academic career, I had a fantasy of becoming a critic and took a course entitled “The Literature of Literary Criticism.”[1]  We covered the period of two millennia between Aristotle and Edmund Wilson, all of it boring and irrelevant to what interested me.  And that was in the era before deconstructionism with its central premise that every text contradicts itself.  In any event, I wrote a term paper entitled “The Three Worst Poems Ever Written in English.”  The idea came to me from reading an article about the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest conducted by the scholars of Columbia University.

Of course I’ve always liked the work of Joyce Kilmer, including “Trees” which is scorned by the supercilious scholars of his Alma Mater.  “Roar, Lion, Roar / For Alma Mater on the Hudson Shore!”  So my paper was a satire relying heavily on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” and Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective.  The latter offers persuasive evidence that music critics are almost always wrong by the simple expedient of quoting them at length.  My nominees for the “worst” poems were the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” as translated by Edward Fitzgerald, "Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer and “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clark Moore.  All of them once beloved by millions of the unwashed.  The latter two won their places on the list over “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service because it amused me that, like Kilmer, both poets were graduates of Columbia.[2]  Also, my mother apparently did not know about Sam McGee from Tennessee while she was on familiar terms with Casey, Omar and Santa.  And, of course, with Joyce Kilmer.

“Trees” is a remarkable piece of work:  a simple but appealing theme, an almost perfect metric pattern (iambic tetrameter) and, of course, the very strong rhyme scheme that makes it one of the most memorable poems in English.  It utilizes a variety of poetic techniques including anaphora, alliteration, enjambment, personification and repetition.  It was set to music in 1922 by Oscar Rasbach and became one of the biggest hits in the Great American Songbook, covered by the likes of Paul Robeson, Patti Page, Mario Lanza, Nelson Eddy, David Whitfield and Robert Merrill.

Now no one would mistake Joyce Kilmer for Shakespeare or any other member of the approved canon but that fact has almost nothing to do with the quality of his work.  Rather, it is entirely a matter of the personal preferences and enthusiasms of the canonists of the moment.  There is nothing wrong with this; it is just not the only way to read and enjoy a poem.  Consider, for example, one scholar’s insight on the first line of John Keats’ masterpiece, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

The urn as unravished bride proleptically contains its ravishment as a natural outcome in the ritual of weddings that parallels the consummation of questions asked. And even if stated in a kind of elegiac or tragic negative, other elements are structured around narratives of completion: lover meeting and kissing, trees leafing, ritual sacrifice being performed, citizens leaving and then returning to their town.[3]

This was written nearly twenty years ago.  Had it been written during the #MeToo era, one would expect a very different analysis of Keats’ “yet unravished bride of quietness” and one might note the omission of the words “yet” and “quietness” in the earlier explication.  As interesting as this might be to an academic, it has little relevance to my enjoyment of the poem.  More importantly, it does not make “Trees” any less (or more) of a poem.

I suppose it would be churlish of me to think that any work of art that appealed to a broad public would be, ipso facto, anathema to those who earn their daily bread by telling the rest of us what to think.  And it would not be entirely accurate.  There were one or two contemporary critics who recognized Beethoven’s genius and many who overcame the immense popularity of Joyce Kilmer and celebrated his work.  Even during the two hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare’s death when his work was totally denigrated, he had a handful aficionados acclaiming him in the wilderness.  Criticism in general, however, has always been part of the fashion industry.

Why are critics so often wrong?  The dark answer is that they know criticism is a useless exercise but it lets them imagine otherwise.  A more generous answer is that criticism, like art itself, is a reflection of its time even when it is deploring its time.  O tempora, o mores!

It is at least arguable that poetry originated in the need of pre-literate societies to record and pass on their history, mythology and culture.  In Europe and probably everywhere, bards were taught from an early age to memorize and elaborate on the stories that carried those values.  Their task was made more manageable through the use of rhythm and rhyme.  Of the two, rhyme is more powerful but it developed much later and is still much rarer.  There are forty different kinds of rhyme available in English, each with complex rules.[4]  Kilmer was a master of several.  It is likely that the immortal lines:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree

are the most memorable lines ever written in English and certainly lines that the Columbia scholars would never be able to write in a million years.

Another master of rhyme was the British-Canadian poet Robert W. Service whose best known work is “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”  After the famous scene-setting opening, he introduces Sam thusly:

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he'd often say in his homely way that “he'd sooner live in hell.”

Whenever in the future readers encounter Sam, they will learn viscerally what the Klondike was like during the gold rush of the late 1890’s.  This epic experience of North American history is thereby preserved in the collective memory of the generations.  The Greeks understood the importance of this in binding a community’s sense of itself. Mnemosyne, their personification of memory, was one of the twelve Titans, a primordial deity, a daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth).  In her youth, she knew almost nothing but as she matured she accumulated memories.  It is sometimes said that this made her wise but it was not wisdom so much as common sense.  Memory is not history and not unadorned truth.  It is experience shaded by imagination, intuition and sometimes wishful thinking, closer perhaps to mythology than science.  It influences and is influenced by the emotional intelligence.  It is both a principal tool and a product of poetry.  It is good if it is successful in eliciting pleasure, comfort, understanding;  it is not good only if it fails to do so for those who encounter it.

Whenever my mother reached the end of “Evangeline,” both of us would experience a flash of sympathy or fellow-feeling :

All was ended now, the hope, and the fear, and the sorrow,
All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience!
And, as she pressed once more the lifeless head to her bosom,
Meekly she bowed her own, and murmured, "Father, I thank thee!"

And then the epilogue and, somehow, the catharsis:

Still stands the forest primeval

… 

Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun,
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story,
While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

---

Notes

[1] The text for this course was Criticism:  The Major Texts, Harcourt, Brace, 1952 edited by the distinguished critic and Harvard Professor Walter Jackson Bate who won the Pulitzer Prize twice for biographies of Samuel Johnson and John Keats.  I found the texts disappointing but Bate’s introductions to them are brilliant.

[2] Columbia University is not on the Hudson River Shore.  Its Baker Field, where the Columbia Lions roar only rarely, is on the Harlem River.  Still it has turned out a surprising number of popular artists including Richard Rodgers and the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein.  The scholars’ opinions about these worthies are not known.

[3] Jeffrey C. Robinson, "Deforming Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in James O’Rourke (Ed.), “Ode On a Grecian Urn:  Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy,” Romantic Circles, October, 2003( romantic-circles.org/praxis/grecianurn/index.html).

[4] See An Introduction to Rhyme by Peter Dale (Agenda/Bellew, 1998).