{"id":136679,"date":"2019-05-28T11:50:13","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T15:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136679"},"modified":"2019-05-28T12:46:35","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T16:46:35","slug":"what-makes-a-poet-difficult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/28\/what-makes-a-poet-difficult\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Poet Difficult?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Benjamin Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn<\/em>, 1842, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

T.\u2009S. Eliot announced portentously in 1921 that \u201cpoets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult,\u201d 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 \u201cThe Metaphysical Poets,\u201d about John Donne and the contemporaries of Donne. Lord Byron complained in 1819 that William Wordsworth had grown incomprehensible:<\/p>\n

Wordsworth, in a rather long \u201cExcursion\u201d
\n…….<\/span>(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
\nHas given a sample from the vasty version
\n…….<\/span>Of his new system to perplex the sages;
\n\u2019Tis poetry\u2014at least by his assertion,
\n…….<\/span>And may appear so when the dog-star rages\u2014
\nAnd he who understands it would be able
\nTo add a story to the Tower of Babel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most readers who try The Excursion <\/em>do find it hard going; almost all think it\u2019s too long. The earlier, more influential Wordsworth\u2014the one who liked daffodils\u2014can be a challenge, too. Wordsworth and Coleridge\u2019s Lyrical Ballads <\/em>(1798) consisted mostly of poems about peasants and rural scenes; its plain language seemed groundbreaking\u2014or disturbing\u2014for 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And yet when William Wordsworth wrote about his own inward nature, his own thoughts, he could get complicated indeed. He and his sister took a long walking tour in 1798 along the River Wye, which separates England from Wales. William and Dorothy stopped for the view a few miles north of the ruins of a monastery called Tintern Abbey. William therefore called his poem \u201cLines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798.\u201d The poem begins clearly enough: \u201cFive years have past; five summers, with the length\u2009\/\u2009Of five long winters! and again I hear\u2009\/\u2009These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then it gets weird. Five years ago (the poem continues), Wordsworth had hiked the same riverbank in a mood of severe apprehension, \u201cmore like a man\u2009\/\u2009Flying from something that he dreads, than one\u2009\/\u2009Who sought the thing he loved\u201d (he had just come back from postrevolutionary France). In 1798, though, things were different. He had<\/p>\n

……………….<\/span>learned
\nTo look on nature, not as in the hour
\nOf thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
\nThe still sad music of humanity,
\nNor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
\nTo chasten and subdue.\u2014And I have felt
\nA presence that disturbs me with the joy
\nOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
\nOf something far more deeply interfused,
\nWhose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
\nAnd the round ocean and the living air,
\nAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
\nA motion and a spirit, that impels
\nAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,
\nAnd rolls through all things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cNature,\u201d it seems, will take care of him; but how? The great and snarky critic William Empson complained that the lines did not make grammatical sense. \u201cIt is not certain what is far more deeply interfused than what,\u201d he mused. \u201cIt is not certain whether the music of humanity is the same as the presence \u2026 The something may possibly dwell only in the natural objects mentioned, ending at sky; the motion and the spirit are then not thought of at all as interfused into nature, like the something; they are things active in the mind of man. At the same time they are similar to the something; thus Wordsworth either feels them or feels a sense of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other critics treat the poet more respectfully, but they still disagree on what exactly he meant. Some of those critics focus on the long-suppressed\u2014now amply verified\u2014story of Wordsworth\u2019s French lover, Annette Vallon, and their child, both of whom stayed in France when he moved away. My favorite Wordsworth expert, the Yale scholar Geoffrey Hartman, thought that nature taught Wordsworth how to calm down. But that\u2019s not why those lines are in this essay. Nor are they here because \u201cTintern Abbey\u201d remains so influential.<\/p>\n

Instead, they\u2019re here because it\u2019s so hard to decide what they mean, and because so many people who can\u2019t quite decide nonetheless find them inspiring or exciting or consoling. The tough parsing does not point to one right answer (as, say, crossword puzzles do); the range of potential answers, their overlap and their penumbras, are what you discover by reading the poem. Dorothy Wordsworth remembered \u201cTintern Abbey\u201d that way, too. Decades later, quite ill, she wrote a short poem called \u201cThoughts on My Sick-Bed\u201d about her memory of their walk; she \u201cfelt a power unfelt before\u201d as she remembered \u201cthe green Banks of the Wye,\u2009\/\u2009Recalling thy prophetic words.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that feeling might be one of the things that we mean when we call a writer or an attitude Romantic. You can trace those attitudes\u2014and their attendant difficulty, weirdness, even vagueness\u2014from both Wordsworths up to Hart Crane, who during the twenties tried to write poetry that was just as challenging as Eliot\u2019s, but much more optimistic and way more gay. More than once during Crane\u2019s short life, an editor agreed to publish his poems if and only if Crane could explain them in a letter. One of those poems was \u201cAt Melville\u2019s Tomb,\u201d which begins:<\/p>\n

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
\nThe dice of drowned men\u2019s bones he saw bequeath
\nAn embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
\nBeat on the dusty shore and were obscured.<\/p>\n

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
\nThe calyx of death\u2019s bounty giving back
\nA scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
\nThe portent wound in corridors of shells.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here nature itself works like a difficult poem, its complex symbols yield shifting, spiritually empowering, hard-to-process meanings. Had Crane sought similar verbal effects decades later, he might have labeled them psychedelic. Men taken by the sea\u2019s destructive randomness are both a legacy (\u201cbequeathed\u201d) and an embassy to the nonhuman world undersea; when they die and the sea exposes their skeletons, their bones are white like dice (the first-ever dice were carved from bones). A calyx (the part of a flower underneath the petals, the seat of its fertility) may take the same helical shape as a dangerous whirlpool; that whirlpool may kill sailors (who die without funereal bells) or give us back their corpses.<\/p>\n

Crane composed poems while listening, over and over, to orchestra music on 78-rpm records; other poets imitate music directly, trying to bypass semantic expression, not to need it, as instrumentals do not need words. Fred Moten\u2019s poems can sometimes be heard in that way: this very learned writer\u2019s work offers roomfuls of references, but it can also seem to keep a healthy distance from description, narration, exposition, and explanation, moving toward a challenge in pure sound, almost as jazz innovators like Ornette Coleman and Alice Coltrane moved their own performances toward a musical abstraction and away from conventional melody. Moten\u2019s poetry can also feel as if it is trying to describe itself, to give us the words for the ways in which its sounds move:<\/p>\n

let it go till it comes back again. it should be something
\non the wall, something on the floor should call itself when
\nthey break it down to put it back up again. when it comes
\nback again it should be gone till it\u2019s all gone again and
\nready to return.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, from the same 2014 collection, The Feel Trio<\/em>:<\/p>\n

we study partial folds in them alpine jukes, bent, bow-
\ntongued stick and move and mahangonnic rupture in
\nseptember, in alabama, throat sung to the kabaret\u2019s gener-
\nal steppe and fade. out here you breathe they breath, this
\nbridge is just, this bridge is just a pile of bones this load be
\nbreathing, this alpine rasp in this dry bridge just be weaving.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can find allusions and references here, if you want them (for example, to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill\u2019s \u201cAlabama Song\u201d). But they are not the point: the \u201cpartial folds\u201d are the point, along with the way that the sounds make a kind of counterpoint to the meanings, the way that Moten finds a style that is at once immediate and evasive. You may not be sure what he wants, where the \u201cpartial folds\u201d end, but you know he can take you there. And this kind of difficulty\u2014there are others\u2014might be called modern; but it can seem Romantic, too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, coeditor of poetry at <\/em>The Nation, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. Her work appears regularly in the <\/em>New York Times Book Review, <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>London Review of Books, and other journals. She lives in Massachusetts.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Don\u2019t Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems<\/a>, by Stephanie Burt. Copyright \u00a9 2019 by Stephanie Burt. Available from Basic Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephanie Burt on William Wordsworth, Hart Crane, and Fred Moten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Makes a Poet Difficult? by Stephanie Burt<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Stephanie Burt on William Wordsworth, Hart Crane, and Fred Moten.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/28\/what-makes-a-poet-difficult\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Makes a Poet Difficult? 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