In Defense of Poetry

April is the cruelest month," wrote T.S. Eliot 75 years ago, bemoaning the fragmentation of modern society. He also wrote a lot more on that subject, but that's beside the point. The point is that April is also National Poetry Month, during which, one supposes, we are all supposed to declaim verse in public and succumb to consumption. After all, that's what poetry's all about, isn't it?

I blame the damn Romantics. They're the ones that started all this nonsense. Granted, they did the necessary job of destroying the neo-classical ideals of the previous century (although I am quite fond of Pope, the one-man SPY Magazine of the 18th century), thereby keeping the world safe for blank verse. But then they went a bit too far asserting their own presence in the world of literature. They're who your man on the street thinks of when asked about poetry. It's all Wordsworth and Blake and Shelley and blah blah blah. Mucking about the wilds of England, catching ill and dying young or growing old and mad. You know the type. And we're still living with it; poets are considered flighty types, overly dramatic and slightly fey. Hey, I should know, I live with one.

Here's my personal opinion on Coleridge, which also applies to most of the Romantics: He's about halfway into his weekly opium stash and working on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." He's getting a little paranoid and thinking spooky thoughts. "I fear thy skinny hand!" he writes. He freaks himself out big time. This is the true image of death and damnation; shows it to his other poppy-head friends, who all agree that yeah, man, that's really spooky. English students read this a century later and think, "thy skinny hand?" How creepy is that image, really, to a sober person?

But here's the thing about the Romantics, and every other major poetry era up until the Modernists: they were big. Everyone knew them, read them, gossiped about them. They were full-blown celebrities. So what happened?

Something went very, very wrong. People stopped reading. Everyone stopped noticing that new poetry was being written. They stopped reading new poetry. Then they stopped reading old poetry. (Everyone, that is, except high school girls, who will keep Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath in print forever.) And now yelling, "Poetry!" in a crowded theater will get you looked at very strangely.

A friend of mine had Canterbury Tales beaten (her word) into her early on in high school. Not just the pleasant selections in the Norton Anthology that you read in English 370A, the whole damn thing. Even "The Parson's Tale," which even my Chaucer professor didn't make us read. Now the only poet she'll go near is Shel Silverstein. I don't think this turn of events would have pleased Milton.

Since humans learned to write up until our benighted century, poetry was how you said the important stuff. If it was major, it was verse. You may not like the rhymed couplets of old dead guys, but they make you sit up and pay attention. Poetry is fiction with all the extra stuff trimmed away; it is the essence of experience in an easy-to-carry package.

The same holds true today, too. Contemporary poets are not the big-draw names they once were, but they're doing important work. In the past year, the UA Poetry Center has presented readings by Marilyn Chin (big issues: race, families, American culture) and Marie Howe (AIDS, childhood, loss), among many others. They have things that need to be said, and they need to say them in poetry. Some things just don't fit into fiction or essays or screenplays. When did we forget this?

Poetry is showing up again in popular culture through spoken word shows and poetry slams. This guerrilla-type versification may be an antidote to those who don't like traditional poetry. It's not always art; hell, it's not always good. But it's always interesting, though sometimes interesting like a car crash or a big scab.

So my point is (and I did have one when I started this): Read something. We shouldn't have to have a National Poetry Month any more than we should have a National Breathing Month. Every single experience you've ever had has probably been written about by someone, somewhere, sometime. Go find it. Even if it is one of the Romantics.

M. Stephanie Murray is a junior majoring in English Literature who, if pressed, will admit to liking Keats. Her column, 'What Fresh Hell?' appears every other Wednesday.

By M. Stephanie Murray (letter)
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 2, 1997