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Serious & unserious poets
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In the current (November) issue of Poetry--CK: "a skimpy literary
review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to
me in Chicago" (C.71)--appears an essay by D.H. Tracy entitled
"Bad Ideas." In it, he crafts a way of thinking about and
judging poems that may shed light on our recent discussion.
Tracy identifies two kinds of poets: those whose poems are an
expression of their own very personal and deeply held beliefs,
and those whose poems do not reflect those beliefs, either
because the poet does not have strong beliefs or because he
or she chooses not to express those beliefs via poetry. The
first kind of poet Tracy defines as "serious," while the other
kind is "unserious." What follows is Tracy's basic summation
of this dichotomy:
"'Serious,' in this sense, does not mean 'somber,' 'grave,' or
'humorless.' It does not mean 'conscientious in craft.' It does
indicate an awareness of premises, a belief in the validity of
those premises to the exclusion of competing ones, and the will
to execute them [in a poem]. Gertrude Stein, even at her silliest,
is serious. Dylan Thomas, even at his most sonorous, is not. Milton
is serious, justifying the ways of God to man; Donne and Marvell,
playing with ideas like brokers playing with pork bellies, are not.
For now I do not attach any value to the term. . . . You might
call serious poets bees and unserious poets butterflies. A poet's
relationship to ideas is charged by his or her seriousness, and
hedged by the lack of it. . . . When a poet's ideas fail, our
judgement, when it exists, is likely to be severe in proportion
to the poet's seriousness about them." (137-38)
That last point, regarding how we may judge serious poets by a
different standard than unserious ones, helps me to understand
some of the difficulty in judging the poem "Pale Fire," for it is
a work with two authors. Using Tracy's standard, I would say that
John Shade's relationship to the ideas in "PF" is serious. As
reader's, then, we may judge the poem in part on whether or not
the poem accurately and movingly reflects that seriousness--an
especially difficult task, given the unreliability of Kinbote.
Nabokov, however, strikes me as unserious by Tracy's definition.
His relationship to "PF" is not charged by an intense allegiance
to his own beliefs. It's more of a game to him, a chess problem
to work out. Thus, we are not bound to consider the author's
relationship to his poem as a factor in considering its merits.
We can judge the poem by its purely internal merits. As Cleanth
Brooks would have had it, "not by [its] truth or falsity as such
... but rather by its character as drama--by its coherence,
sensitivity, depth, richness, and tough-mindedness."
I suppose this is another way of getting at the question of
"authenticity." Can the emotional situation of the poem be real
for us if we sense that it is not real for the poet? This came
up in my Intro to Poetry class today, as we discussed Sylvia
Plath's "Daddy." Many of the students defended the poem on the
grounds that it was an authentic portrait of the author's feeling.
I then asked whether they would like the poem so much if I, instead
of Sylvia Plath, had written it. Most of them replied that they
would appreciate the poem less. In this case, then, they were
judging the poem largely on their notion of its relationship to
the poet and her seriousness. If I had written it, they might
be less forgiving, I suspect, of the speaker's excesses.
Matthew Roth
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review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to
me in Chicago" (C.71)--appears an essay by D.H. Tracy entitled
"Bad Ideas." In it, he crafts a way of thinking about and
judging poems that may shed light on our recent discussion.
Tracy identifies two kinds of poets: those whose poems are an
expression of their own very personal and deeply held beliefs,
and those whose poems do not reflect those beliefs, either
because the poet does not have strong beliefs or because he
or she chooses not to express those beliefs via poetry. The
first kind of poet Tracy defines as "serious," while the other
kind is "unserious." What follows is Tracy's basic summation
of this dichotomy:
"'Serious,' in this sense, does not mean 'somber,' 'grave,' or
'humorless.' It does not mean 'conscientious in craft.' It does
indicate an awareness of premises, a belief in the validity of
those premises to the exclusion of competing ones, and the will
to execute them [in a poem]. Gertrude Stein, even at her silliest,
is serious. Dylan Thomas, even at his most sonorous, is not. Milton
is serious, justifying the ways of God to man; Donne and Marvell,
playing with ideas like brokers playing with pork bellies, are not.
For now I do not attach any value to the term. . . . You might
call serious poets bees and unserious poets butterflies. A poet's
relationship to ideas is charged by his or her seriousness, and
hedged by the lack of it. . . . When a poet's ideas fail, our
judgement, when it exists, is likely to be severe in proportion
to the poet's seriousness about them." (137-38)
That last point, regarding how we may judge serious poets by a
different standard than unserious ones, helps me to understand
some of the difficulty in judging the poem "Pale Fire," for it is
a work with two authors. Using Tracy's standard, I would say that
John Shade's relationship to the ideas in "PF" is serious. As
reader's, then, we may judge the poem in part on whether or not
the poem accurately and movingly reflects that seriousness--an
especially difficult task, given the unreliability of Kinbote.
Nabokov, however, strikes me as unserious by Tracy's definition.
His relationship to "PF" is not charged by an intense allegiance
to his own beliefs. It's more of a game to him, a chess problem
to work out. Thus, we are not bound to consider the author's
relationship to his poem as a factor in considering its merits.
We can judge the poem by its purely internal merits. As Cleanth
Brooks would have had it, "not by [its] truth or falsity as such
... but rather by its character as drama--by its coherence,
sensitivity, depth, richness, and tough-mindedness."
I suppose this is another way of getting at the question of
"authenticity." Can the emotional situation of the poem be real
for us if we sense that it is not real for the poet? This came
up in my Intro to Poetry class today, as we discussed Sylvia
Plath's "Daddy." Many of the students defended the poem on the
grounds that it was an authentic portrait of the author's feeling.
I then asked whether they would like the poem so much if I, instead
of Sylvia Plath, had written it. Most of them replied that they
would appreciate the poem less. In this case, then, they were
judging the poem largely on their notion of its relationship to
the poet and her seriousness. If I had written it, they might
be less forgiving, I suspect, of the speaker's excesses.
Matthew Roth
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm