The Pain of the Neglect of Poetry

 I'm ill as I'm typing these words, so perhaps that will add to the melancholy and even bitterness of this post. Please bear that in mind.

Recently, as I was making a cup of tea, a line from Tennyson's long episodic poem "Idylls of the King" came into my mind:

But when he spake and cheered his Table Round
With large, divine, and comfortable words,
Beyond my tongue to tell thee—I beheld
From eye to eye through all their Order flash
A momentary likeness of the King.

As so often with poetry, I felt a stab of intense pleasure followed by a stab of even more intense pain.

(The likeness is momentary because none of the knights can fully live up to the ideals of Camelot, except Sir Galahad, who is taken up to heaven by angels.)

I know my blog readers probably get sick of me moaning about the neglect of poetry. A few months ago (I know I've told this story) I was speaking to one of my fellow library staff, at a coffee morning (we have tons of those), about the decline of poetry. She said she needed more coffee, walked away, and never came back.

At another coffee morning (we have lots of them), I found myself standing next to her and teased her a bit about it. She said: "I'm more interested in the revival of poetry than the decline of poetry."

Well, so am I, but they are closely related.

Here are some principles that I subscribe to when it comes to the decline of poetry:

1) Poetry is difficult to read. It requires mental exertion in a way most reading (or arts) don't. The pleasure very rarely comes on an initial reading. It comes later, if it comes at all. (Of course, there are exceptions.)

2) The problem with poetry today is not a problem of supply. It's a problem with demand. When I complain about poetry, people often tell me that they write poetry or they know someone who writes poetry. OK. There's no shortage of poetry in the world and all the schemes for making poetry available to the masses won't achieve anything. It's the reading of poetry that has to be stimulated. I think the best thing the education system could do for poetry would be to bring back learning it by rote. It's hated at the time but appreciated years and decades later.

The best thing the media could do is have programmes of poetry appreciation and poetry criticism, not more poetry being recited.

3) Anthology pieces are far from the whole of poetry. If you look through the Collected Works of nearly any great poet you will notice that short poems are in the minority. Most of the great poets took their long poems far more seriously than their lyrics. They would probably be horrified to know that people only know their lyrics today.

"Idylls of the King" by Tennyson, for instance. Please understand I'm criticizing myself as well as other people. I have read "Idylls of the King" in its entirety once in my life, despite the poem "Morte d'Arthur" (written long before the rest of the Idylls, and rewritten to be their finale) having been one of my favourite poems since my teens. I mean, how can you not love lines like these, spoken by King Arthur to the last surviving one of his knights after the final battle, before he is taken away on a supernatural barge to the island of Avalon (like Tolkien's Grey Havens):

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

Can you read that without tears?

So why have I only read "Idylls of the King" all the way through once in my life, a few years ago? Laziness, madam, pure laziness. It took me decades to actually finish it. What a bum!

But maybe not just laziness. One of the pleasures of any literary or cultural pursuit is sharing it with other people. It's terribly lonely when there's nobody to share it with. I've known about three people who've taken a serious interest in poetry in my life, who were willing to discuss it on the "granular" level of particular lines and words, themes, etc. One was my father and he died in 2019. (He never had much interest in Tennyson, strangely.)

Imagine you had only known about three people all your life who took a serious interest in films, and everybody else thought it was OK to have watched maybe twenty films in school, and OK to watch another one maybe once every five years. And never to rewatch them. And absolutely never to talk about them except whether you liked them or didn't like them. No analysing scenes or reciting dialogue or anything like that. It takes one of the great pleasures of an art away from you and leads to a lot of frustration. (The first thing I do after watching a film is see what other people thought about it.)

Honestly, I don't see any huge difference between reading only prose and spending all day on TikTok. There was a time when reading novels was considered dissipation and I don't think it was entirely a wrong idea. 

(I was reading a sermon by our most recent Doctor of the Church, just yesterday, on the dangers of novels. He preached it as an Anglican; he seemed to have changed his mind as a Catholic. But I think his Anglican scruples have something to be said for them. Novels appeal mostly to the arousal and gratification of suspense, which isn't a particularly elevated appetite.)

Of course, a lot of the decline of poetry is down to free verse, which is rubbish (for the most part). People encounter it and think they don't "get" poetry when really there's nothing to "get", most of the time. (I think some free verse is good, like some of the free verse of D.H. Lawrence; "Snake", for instance. But only a tiny proportion of it.)

It's very discouraging. 

I have no uplift with which to end this blog post. I can't see any of this changing, especially since conservatives don't care about the decline of poetry, and especially since even supposedly conservative magazines like First Things (one of the vanishingly few magazines who actually publish poetry), mostly publish free verse.

I fully expect I'm going to be like an Ent seeking the Entwives for the rest of my days.

(If you read and love poetry, please don't be insulted by this post. Join me in trying to shame our contemporaries, especially "conservatives", to do the same.  It won't work, but like Camelot it's worth striving for anyway.)