Graves at Süleymaniye Camii
From David Perkins::A History of Modern Poetry:
Through poetry, the argument goes, the total response of persons in their time, place, and circumstances is vividly represented to the imagination. This access of historical understanding comes in the reading of all poetry, but when poetry is deliberately used for this purpose, it must be used with caution. What poets express depends not only on personal experience and feeling but also on literary tradition and convention; the personally experienced that cannot be articulated within the current poetic mode may not be articulated at all. Again, it is not a question of what a poet articulates only. Experience–what happens within or without the person–may not be experienced, may not be noticed or take on meaning unless it can be assimilated to prior habits of response built up by cultural tradition (Perkins 268).
When I read the above passage the other day I not only drew a line next to it (one way I highlight a passage) but I also adorned that line with a little question mark (?). It is a rather large claim that Perkins makes here, yet one that he does not dwell on for very long or substantially go about blatantly making a case for; rather preferring to take the claim as obvious fact. So what in fact is Perkins saying here? As a possibly important sidenote, this passage comes as an introduction to the chapter on the poets of World War I, who he claims struggled properly discussing the war in poetry due to their preconceived Georgian poetic notions.
I can’t decide how much I buy into Perkins’ claim here. I think part of me does and part of me doesn’t, with the dividing line being based on the specific poet’s makeup. A poet focused on form and tradition, I think, would be more likely to be tied within these preexisting constraints. Other poets, though, have made form secondary to experience–take Whitman as an example of this type of poet.
What I think becomes most interesting about Perkins’ statements on experience here is what they seem to be saying about poetics. While I don’t think that Perkins is taking a stand against poetic schools, the above can be read as a damning of them in some way; that no matter the best intentions of a poetic tradition or way of expression, there will be a bevy of potential experiences that get lost along the way simply because we don’t even know to notice them, or are so caught up trying to fit what we do notice into, say, a Romantic way of thinking. I wonder if Perkins would argue that this problem is more acute in a poet, who at least at times wanders around trying to determine how to fit what surrounds them into their next poem.
In an earlier chapter, Perkins discusses Robert Frost and more particularly brings up something critic Genevieve Taggard said of Frost (Perkins does not offset the following with quotations, so it does not seem to be a direct quote from Taggard, though I am unsure):
…a poet may merely spread his metaphors, letting them take responsibility for whatever meanings are caught (Perkins 248).
This was a criticism of Frost and his inability, or refusal, to take a specific stand on issues, to be ironic rather than purposeful. But reading the statement again, in light of the Perkins statement on experience and cultural tradition, I think it can be re-read (or mis-read) in an entirely new light. What Perkins is discussing in the statement on experience is the poet who is determined to fit what he sees into his conception of poetry. This can be just fine, when that reality likewise fits into the existing tropes of the time. But, as Perkins argues occurs during WWI, if reality no longer matches up with those tropes, a disconnect can theoretically at least appear. That disconnect I wouldn’t think is necessarily damning–it just so happened that those Georgian poets were largely attempting to create a rather neat form of poetry that did not really use disconnects, and thus one that seems off when an unintended disconnect appears.
If we slightly misread that criticism of Frost, though, we can have a totally different conception of dealing with reality and poetry. Instead of seeing reality and then forcing it into a specific metrical pattern, into a specific argument of ‘what the world is’, another option is simply to spread one’s impressions of the moment, letting them take responsibility for whatever meanings and realities are caught. Because the one thing that I am certain about is that the moment in and of itself is overwhelming; so overwhelming that we only can process a few disconnected aspects of it at any given time. If I feel that I am missing virtually everything that is going on around me, how can I as a poet do significantly more than attempt to catalog a few of these fleeting instances, and then let the reality that is thus cataloged take responsibility for any meanings that happen to be caught.
That personal experience that Perkins claims is missed is not truly missed, though. It is just deferred, in a sense. Those new experiences, though perhaps either ignored or clumsily incorporated into poetry at first, become part of a new poetics:
For at least two years the war had no important effect on poetry. Poets described the sights and incidents of war, but with methods and sensibilities carried over from peacetime. Only toward the end of the war do ideas of the nature and function of poetry begin to change–at least to expand–under the pressure of war emotions. Yet poets in the war were undergoing experiences that were prototypical for the next fifty years of literature. What they actually lived through was to become literary convention in the next two generations…The War’s deeper impact on literature came in the Modernist writing of the postwar years (Perkins 268-9).
So, were those experiences the WWI poets ‘missed’ truly missed, or were they an impetus that drove poetry towards the development of what has become known as the Modernist movement? Where is the dividing line? It seems that the initial perspective the critic takes will create in and of itself predispose the answer–chicken and the egg, as it were. But this is perhaps an inherent issue with creating a literary history–one must almost necessarily attempt to explain developments, and thus find oneself making somewhat generalized and ridiculous claims about those developments. Perkins largely attempts to simply document what was going on, but at times he falls into traps such as the one being highlighted here.
Do I think this has any relation with contemporary poetry? Well, perhaps. I wouldn’t say that contemporary poetry is ‘better’ at being malleable with reality. But I would perhaps put forth the possibility that the plethora of acceptable forms of expression is in part a triumph of experience over form, where the form becomes subservient to expressing whatever experience the poet feels is worth sharing in a poem. Free verse, concrete poetry, prose poetry, visual poetry, &c. all have turned the form of the poem, at least potentially, from the purpose of the poem into a tool of expression. Though, saying that, I acknowledge that oftentimes the various forms are used as the starting point for a poem, rather than the result of communicating a moment.
Filed under: Poetry, Theory , David Perkins, Experience, Form, Genevieve Taggard, Georgian Poetry, Grave, Modernism, Poetry, Robert Frost, Süleymaniye Camii, World War I Poetry
