Poetry and the Permanent Things

In recent years the art of poetry has received nearly as many eulogies and obituaries as the most recent mid-tier TV celebrity to cross the bar. Autopsies have been done and have tended to focus on poetry’s dwindling audience as a result of the modernist—and then postmodernist—tendency to obfuscation. Others have blamed the didactic politicization of the arts by the cultural left. Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” is the best example of the former assessment, and Micah Mattix’s “The Integrity of Poetry” ably represents the latter opinion. I believe both are essentially correct. Nevertheless, I would like to add for your consideration one more cause for the decline of poetry, a cause related to both Gioia’s and Mattix’s theses. This cause is, to put it very bluntly, the conservative abandonment of the arts. The great voices of conservatism’s foundations, from Burke to Coleridge to Russell Kirk, were quite often literary men. More than mere writers, they were “men of letters,” learned and cultured. We lost one of the last of their kind with the passing of Roger Scruton in 2020. One would be hard-pressed to find very many literary voices for the right in our current public conversation, though a few still occupy the territory, Gioia and Mattix being two prominent examples. Another rare literary man on the right, James Matthew Wilson, points out in his excellent book, A Vision of the Soul, that sometime around the Reagan years American conservatives largely abandoned cultured concerns in order to focus almost exclusively on economics and personal liberty. The result has been a cultural, and especially artistic, milieu almost entirely devoid of conservative values, especially of the conservative veneration of the past and tradition. The conservative exodus from the arts has left us with a poetry devoid of what Kirk, following T.S. Eliot, called “The Permanent Things.”

The marriage of art and leftist politics is not as natural and inevitable as those on the left, and indeed often on the right, seem to think. Fewer than one hundred years ago, the single most important literary person in the anglosphere was T.S. Eliot, a consummate conservative. The Vanderbilt Southern Agrarians—including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren—were voices for tradition speaking from within the English department. In fact, there is a natural fit between the true work of the English department and the conservative disposition: both strive to pass on to the next generation what is good and true and beautiful, or at least that is what they should do.

If we define conservatism as the desire to preserve what has been best in the human life of the past, then it is not hard to see that poetry entirely devoid of the conservative impulse becomes superficial and meaningless. This is not to say that for American poetry to be healthy the chairs of our creative writing departments and the pages of our literary magazines must become the exclusive territory of people on the right. That is not a realistic goal, nor is it a desirable one, as it would no doubt result only in imbalances of a different kind. But there must be some significant amount of conservatism in the literary world in order to season the writing of our time with timelessness, to save it from total infatuation with the mere whimsies of the moment.

When considering the relationship between poetry and the conservative mind, it is difficult to discern who abandoned whom first. As poetry divorces itself from the permanent things, conservatives abandon it as inconsequential and incomprehensible, and thus it becomes, in the absence of the conservative disposition, even more divorced from the permanent things. Like Gioia in “Can Poetry Matter,” I would lay much of the blame on modernism, but not merely for their tendency to be difficult. Previous literary developments, or movements, had often happened as reactions against immediate predecessors, but modernism was the first artistic movement to define itself by its separation from all artistic precedents, immediate or distant. Modernism deliberately attempted to cut off the past as a source of artistic values. That the collapse of poetry into pure mediocrity and irrelevance was not immediate is due in no small part to the way that Eliot, and to a lesser extent Pound, insisted on keeping direct reference to the past at the forefront of the art even as poets were abandoning traditional methods, forms, and content. Pound’s Cantos begin with direct reference to the Homeric epics, and Eliot’s Wasteland is made up almost entirely of quotations and allusions from the broad stream of tradition in both the Western and Eastern worlds. Yet, as modernist generation succeeded modernist generation, the bond between poetry and tradition held through force of personality by Eliot became weaker and weaker, dwindling to an ironic reference to a Greek god here and there. Poetry was able to survive, if not thrive, for a little while on the sort of destructive energy unleashed by Whitman’s wanton smashing of the iambic pentameter line, but the energy of destruction can only go so far. As Charlie Newman puts it in his book The Postmodern Aura, “Joyce . . .worked in a time when the destruction of every literary convention was still exciting, and not the working hypothesis of every freshman English class.” When the innovations of modernism, free verse, for instance, become conventions themselves, it becomes harder for them to meaningfully define themselves as opposition to convention. The free verse line can now only continually rebel against itself, breaking down into smaller and smaller, ever more “elliptical” fragments. No longer willing to carry the substance of a tradition, poetry becomes all air, weightless and without consequence. The “experimental” antics of “language poets” like Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein, who shun the idea of poetry as an expression of meaning, are a case in point. Bernstein’s jokey “This Poem Intentionally Left Blank,” a poem I have just quoted in its entirety, may just be the ultimate statement of contemporary poetics.

Though modernism can’t be reduced to the rejection of meter, the rise of “Free Verse” is a useful metonymic for modernism as a whole, since it is a succinct and clear rejection of the past. Although this is in itself a great oversimplification of the complex modernist phenomena, it is the oversimplified narrative that informs much contemporary poetry, the nuance largely lost in the transmission. Under the spell of a triumphant narrative of the modernization of verse, it is easy to forget that some of the greatest poets of modernity—Frost and Yeats, for example—wrote in traditional forms, or that the first generation of modernists were followed by a brilliant generation of formalists, including Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur. It is easy to forget these exceptions because, by the 60’s and 70’s, free verse seems to have established its dominance through its close kinship with the zeitgeist of conformity to a prescribed ethic of liberation and anarchy. In his 1960 acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Robert Lowell famously proposed that there was an ongoing struggle between the “cooked” poetry of tradition and form and the “raw” poetry that we would associate with the confessional poets, the beat poets, and other postmodern camps. Over the twenty years following Lowell’s speech, the raw won, leaving us with a national poetry that is even less attractive to those of a conservative disposition than was high modernism. A person who values the lasting truths of life is rarely interested in juvenile self-absorption masquerading as art.

Not that there haven’t been rear-guard actions against the disposability of modern verse, for instance, the “New Formalism” which emerged in the 80’s and 90’s. The originators of the new formalism, those featured in Mark Jarman’s Rebel Angels anthology, for instance, were not all conservatives—some were and some weren’t—but the movement itself had an essentially conservative aim: the preservation of the larger, longer poetic tradition. In a later interview with the poetry website Eratosphere, prominent new formalist, and former First Things poetry editor, Paul Lake summed up this conservative disposition:

I also now see that writing in meter and rhyme is an innately conservative act, whatever the politics of the poet or the poem. The American left in its desire to remain forever in a state of sinless, Adamic innocence must attack and abolish every vestige of the tainted past, including our history, language, and poetic traditions. Writing in meter and rhyme really is politically incorrect. It shows a conservative allegiance to our traditions, our language, even our bodily pleasures. Good Puritanical leftists, on the other hand, know that we are marching forward to a multicultural utopia and can’t afford to be seduced by such subversive pleasures as rhyming poems that may cause us to stumble on our way.

Formalist defenders like Lake managed to carve out some space in the contemporary poetry world for a following generation of traditionalists, poets like A.E. Stallings and Ryan Wilson, but, as Professor Mattix noted, such writers rarely occupy the most coveted real estate in contemporary publishing. Even as valiant efforts are made by journals like the now defunct Formalist and the now online-only Measure, contemporary poetry continues to be dominated by the self-cannibalizing tradition of anti-tradition.

So, it is not surprising to find few conservatives at poetry readings. Conservatives having found the arts inhospitable, have abandoned the arts and thus have left them even more inhospitable. Perhaps that is not entirely the fault of conservatives, but in this abandonment, we have further impoverished both poetry and conservatism. While a few periodicals like Modern Age, The New Criterion, and First Things push against the leftist dominance of the arts, most American conservatives have been content for the last fifty years or so to limit themselves to economic and policy concerns. We have discouraged our children from majoring in English, and we have directed our giving primarily to purely political causes. Having left the arts to leftist rot, we occasionally peek in and wonder how the arts got so rotten. We should have known that the only way to win a culture war is to have a culture worth preserving. For not only do the arts become more superficial without the conservative insistence on valuing the permanent things, but also conservatism becomes more superficial without the sense of transcendence and non-utilitarian values brought by properly ordered arts. Conservatism and the arts are the couple that each deteriorate after the divorce: the arts get wackier and the conservatism gets more superficial.

Poetry deprived of tradition is left to sustain itself meagerly on mere convention or fad. Whatever is popular in the moment becomes the only possible material out of which to build a poem, and poetry without timeless standards is left to award its prizes and prestige for approved sentiment and fashionable technique rather than for artistic accomplishment. When conservatives exit the arts, they take with them the philosophical and metaphysical foundations for standards. The loss of standards is accelerated especially as the left shifts increasingly from classical liberalism to a new, postmodern progressivism. It is now considered “mean” to suggest that some poems, and some ways of making poems, are inherently better than others. After all, it is not enough just to tolerate all poems; we have to be affirming of them as well.

What I am building toward is this: if conservatives want arts worth investing in, we will need to begin investing in the arts. If the approaches and attitudes of first modern and then postmodern poetry make poetry a hostile environment for conservatives, then, rather than abandoning the art, conservatives should simply reject those conditions and reclaim the literary tradition. In the spirit of Gioia’s essay here are a few “modest proposals” for reconnecting poetry with the permanent things:

Conservatives need to support conservative efforts in the arts financially. The traditionalist should be aware of the great social potential of something like the pre-modern patronage system. Those who wish the arts to be sane and healthy must financially support artistic institutions that shun progressive nonsense. If one can’t find any such institutions, then one should help fund their foundation.

 Secondly, conservatives should let our children major in English. In fact, we should encourage them to do so. We should also encourage them to major in classics, or theater, or philosophy, as the sorry state of poetry is part of a larger decline in classical learning. Give them a solid foundation of conservative values at home, send them to a college that will introduce them to the great works of the past, and then send them into the world of the arts and thought to restore sanity.

If you are afraid there are few sane English departments to entrust with your children, then help fund the sane ones that do exist and help found new ones. You probably already have a sense of the liberal arts schools worth supporting. Support them. Fund professorships for teaching in core curricula devoted to the Western tradition. Fund scholarships for students who want to read great books. Help conservative students go into the arts without crippling student debt. This is not encouraging freeloading; rather it is taking civic responsibility for the moral imagination of our culture.

Conservatives should also make every effort to buy good books. We should buy and read books like Micah Mattix’s The Soul is a Stranger in this World and William Baer’s anthology of contemporary conservative poets, published by The University of Evansville Press in 2006. We must lend our support to what is good and not allow nonsense and garbage to dominate either the marketplace of ideas or the literal marketplace.

We also need to be there when the art of poetry, as well as other arts, is happening. Conservatives need not only to support sanity and traditionalism in the arts but also to make themselves enough of a presence in the arts, through both audience and patronage, to exert counter-influence to the left in the artistic sphere. Given the leftist domination of poetry and other art forms today, this seems like a herculean task. The overall audience for the arts, however, is tragically small even on the left, and, if just a small number of conservatives becomes highly involved, it could significantly shift the weight of the contemporary poetry scene toward the right. If five conservatives came with me to the next poetry reading I attend, we would have a good start on shifting the balance.

Above all, conservatives must recover the ability to value beauty as much as other major contributing factors to human flourishing. This aesthetic element is built into the conservative DNA. From Burke to Kirk, the foundational visions for the conservative movement have valued beauty and aesthetic experience. To avoid contributing to our national barbarism, and indeed to avoid becoming barbarians ourselves, we need to resurrect the conservative awareness of the centrality of aesthetic experience in the good life. Such a recovery entails nothing less than a major reordering of our lives and priorities.

Contemporary poetry suffers from a dearth of the permanent things, a situation that is both the result of and the further cause of a separation between poetry and the conservative disposition. If we can heal this rift, the result will be not only a higher standard for contemporary poetry but also a deeper, richer conservatism.

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