The main character of the musical The Light in the Piazza is named Clara. She’s blonde. The show is set in the fifties, and she wears gorgeous fit-and-flare dresses. The waists are belted tight and the wide skirts swirl. She’s beautiful. Her tastes are simple—she likes sunlight, hugs, the thought of having a baby one day. Her story goes like this: she and her mother are visiting Italy from North Carolina when they meet a handsome young man named Fabrizio. He and Clara fall in love at first sight. The initial obstacle to their romance is that they don’t speak the same language; the later, and more serious, is that in Clara’s mother’s eyes, Clara is not ready to enter any relationship, as Clara was kicked in the head by a horse at her twelfth birthday party and has remained childlike ever since. But neither of those things matters in the end. Clara’s beauty reflects her essence—her face reveals, at a glance, her pure heart and innocent spirit. What unites the American girl and Italian boy isn’t a shared culture or IQ, but the quality they sing out in their love duet: “You are good, you are good, you are good …”

I watched them sing to each other in a Manhattan theater when I was seventeen years old. I’d taken the bus in from New Jersey to see the show. Four rows from the stage, I sat alone, dressed in black, my head shaved, and cried. Clara and Fabrizio wrapped their arms around each other. It was so romantic—it felt unattainable. My seat wasn’t farther than twenty feet from Clara’s T-strap shoes, yet we seemed to exist in different worlds.

There, I thought, is the woman I will never be.

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Benjamin Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn, 1842, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

T. S. Eliot announced portentously in 1921 that “poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult,” because modern life was confusing and difficult, too. The idea that new poems should be harder to read than prose, that serious poems pose a challenge to most readers, may seem like it began in the twentieth century, with the writers called high modernists (Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein), who distanced themselves from prose sense in new ways. And yet some poems have seemed hard to read for a while. Eliot made his announcement in the course of his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” about John Donne and the contemporaries of Donne. Lord Byron complained in 1819 that William Wordsworth had grown incomprehensible:

Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion”
…….(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
Has given a sample from the vasty version
…….Of his new system to perplex the sages;
’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,
…….And may appear so when the dog-star rages—
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

Most readers who try The Excursion do find it hard going; almost all think it’s too long. The earlier, more influential Wordsworth—the one who liked daffodils—can be a challenge, too. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) consisted mostly of poems about peasants and rural scenes; its plain language seemed groundbreaking—or disturbing—for its apparent simplicity, like a Chuck Berry single on a playlist full of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. It might have seemed, even, literally revolutionary: Wordsworth’s new ways of writing about peasants and other low-status people came out of his sympathies with the French Revolution, which he and his friends first supported, then came to oppose. Read More