Hi, friends. I've been thinking lately about the well known critic Adam Kirsch's The Modern Element, which clarified for me my position as a poet out of synch with my time. He defines "courteous" and "discourteous" poetry.

The courteous poet meets his ideal reader on conditions of equality. He will strive for clarity. There's an assumption of a shared literary tradition. They gravitate to meter and rhyme. The discourteous poet values novelty and complexity for their own sake. The reader is assumed or ignored. Form is theoretical, not musical. I definitely identify with the "courteous" side. Kirsch discusses extensively the work of Richard Wilbur, who is consciously untimely. He started writing poetry to heal himself during World War II. Kirsch observes, "There is something quietly but unmistakably polemical about Wilbur's proud adoption-by-translation, in Ceremony, of La Fontaine's 'Ode to Pleasure':
"For games I love, and love, and every art,
Country and town, and all" there's naught my mood
May not convert to sovereign good,
Even the gloom of melancholy heart..."
He adds, "Such praise of mundane joys defies the whole trend of English and American poetry since Eliot, if not since Wordsworth. Against the potent myth of the Romantic poete maudit...Wilbur sets the unfamiliar ideal of the poete benit."

Somehow Kirsch includes Shelley and Keats among the "cursed" ones, but I respectfully disagree. Keats's Odes are paeans to transcendence in which all the goodness is wrung out of a jug or a bird song, so the poet becomes alive to the second power, and gives that to the reader, no matter how lousy he personally feels. I am not a great fan of Shelley, but he too seems to celebrate art, nature, manly strivings. Later on, Kirsch says that Hecht "adopted a sort of Flemish-painting spirituality, in which the detailed observation of nature is itself a kind of prayer, a way of 'praising God' for the sheer fact of existence." Beautifully written - but not describing anything new, surely.

Kirsch points out that T.S. Eliot thought a poet should need to innovate style because he is attentive to "new subjects, new feelings, new complexions of consciousness." Kirsch goes on to distinguish between a merely fashionable nihilism and despair pertaining to the 1920s, and Eliot's "spiritual and musical discoveries." Kirsch describes how Trilling, Winters and Tate disliked Ginsberg's Howl because it smacked of where Hart Crane was going when he committed suicide, and the whole nihilistic thrust of modern literature. Winters recoiled from the rebellion against form and continuity, and the "itch for novelty." Isolated by his battle with the "idols of the age", Winters became hostile and extreme.

Kirsch ends with Horace's statement:

"Of writing well, be sure, the secret lies
In wisdom: therefore study to be wise."

I couldn't agree more. And certainly I have seen as I get older how large-minded tolerance, reason and moderation serve me so I can live long, have my mind in good order, and write well. It also helps if I honor my "father and mother", in other words, whatever of tradition looks like family to me. I do not consciously think of all this when I write, but it certainly informs my writing. I hope I impart a larger truth, a life-affirming elan, and along the way, perhaps, some universal insight which never goes out of style.

Love, Barbara