Poetry and Trust
My friend Mary recently told me that her trust of poetry solidified as she gradually understood the meanings behind poems that she instinctually liked. This process is the reverse of a typical twentieth and twenty-first century classroom pedagogy for literature: teachers imply that a poem has meaning, and from there students are expected to value the poem. Sometimes, an almost ridiculous fear that they are missing the point obliterates the reality that it is actually there.
There is an intrinsic rejection of anything that doesn’t make sense, that cannot be fit into a class period and be awarded the statement, “You understood!” Whether reading comprehension questions are the stars of the homework, or tentative pokings into symbolism, metaphor, and synecdoche, the poem boils down to a string of words that can take its place, rather like the reduction of an algebraic equation. The understanding takes the place of the poem itself, and guilt at not seeing what seems to be an obvious simplification can result. Reading devolves into a self-policed punishment-and-reward system; naturally, if the poem does not reduce no matter what, either it or the reader is practically deemed hopeless. At its worst, the mind gives up memory of the poem in order to make room for other lessons. At its best, the mind substitutes a soundbite of summary for the actual, tactile experience of a poem spread across the page, across time.
We are at a bizarre crossroads of literary theory and literary history. On the one hand, Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralists, starting in the early 20th century, tried to prove that not only linguistics but language and literature themselves were “scientific,” or subject to the same methods and categorizations in the scientific method. This point of view, which can become scientism when taken to an extreme, assumed that literature, a field often stereotyped as based on subjective aesthetics, could gain authority if it could be proved to act the same way every time. Since then, a host of theories – from structuralism to reader-response criticism to eco-criticism – have claimed places in the “scientific” toolbox of literature analysis.
On the other hand, the works of more abstruse poets – modernists, for example, the artists at the beginning of the twentieth century who are known for frequently referencing obscure myths and authors – cannot necessarily reveal their meanings with ease. All literary theorists believe that we can better unlock the patterns of the human experience in fiction if we master methods, but a cut-and-dry confidence in specialization can make the average reader afraid of any literature viewed as “hard.” The footnoted, ethereally complicated poetry of the modernist T.S. Eliot, for example, could get dismissed by students or teachers who find him impossible to teach or learn.
As a society, we have time to learn that we should analyze according to specific methods, but we do not have the time to examine what has been historically difficult. This is a recipe for skimming, blaming, and Cliffnotes. So, how do we trust poetry again? How do we believe that it has meaning, that it is worth time and space, including when it is difficult? How do we not throw down all reason and declare it a hedonic or relativistic free-for-all – read what you like and good for you?
My friend Mary’s happenchance approach – read and wait – is an almost interpersonal dynamic between the reader and the poem, taking in place in and over time and space. If a reader experiences enough times that a poem makes sense or that its meaning can change depending on the circumstances in which it is read, a familiarity with the genre grooves itself into the mind. Can a poem without a decipherable meaning – no matter how hard you try – have meaning? Only if you are willing to return to it – and its likability increases the odds.
After many years of return to her friend-poems, Mary can say that they are more understandable in themselves and more relatable to her everyday life. They have been companions as her mind has grown, not as the goal of knowledge, but rather the beginning, the strength and nourishment along the way. They can continue with her throughout her life, as she experiences them anew and as they become associated with events sad, happy, and transcendent.
Taking something personal and making it universal is the goal of all literature, but especially poetry’s, because of its condensed form. Universal feelings that a poem elicits often connect to wisdom, an aspect of learning through experience that pertains to acting well rather than to summarizing themes or abstract philosophizing.
When the nineteen-year-old John Stuart Mill mentally broke down due to the pressure of learning too much, especially in what he considered the ugly and hopeless teleology of the Benthamite philosophy of an arbitrary universe, he found that Wordsworth’s poetry relaxed his troubles and opened him to the beauty of the moment. In this way, poetry can be precisely where we can find respite from textbook-learning and connect with authors’ emotions and ideas, wrapped around wisdom that shifts like light through tree branches, depending on the angle. The light can shed clarity on a set of a reader’s experiences, join him in them. This is a living, moving text, ready to be read on a weekday night for a minute’s respite, or to be presented in a classroom as an opportunity to experience, rather than as a dissection to extract an essence in the “right” way, or even a dismissal of caging interpretations.
In an age where pencils and paper are accessible, a poem can turn into a summary; in an age of Kindles, a poem takes up no space; in an age without oral history and storytelling, a poem becomes silent.
Contemporary media and pedagogy have sometimes denied poetry the right to take up space, time, and sound, to sprawl across a page and make no efficient sense. Along with poetry in physical abeyance, the individual reader seldom traces by hand the path of the printed words in a tangible copy of a poem, seldom says it aloud, seldom asks how far it can reach rather than how small it can get. With that reductionism and scientism regarding poetry, the scope of the human person also gets underestimated and attenuated. If you can’t trust poetry to contain wisdom and beauty even when you don’t understand it, you aren’t trusting yourself to be a life-long learner in that regard.
The religious, spiritual, and psychological parallel here is faith, given to be something that you find unreachable and still reach for, something that you don’t entirely understand but towards which you still feel compelled, perhaps even inexplicably. If an explanation is attempted, it covers the feeling that one’s individual experiences connect to a universal experience: something is out there, unattainable now through logic, but perhaps glimpsable in the future through perseverance or revelation.
The aesthetics of poetry can be saved from relativism – or its opposites, graded examination and automatic reaching for reference books and Internet notes – by letting students and general readers interact with poems through their senses. Have them capture the cadences out loud, have them copy the words, run their fingers under each word as they read, and most importantly for the tentative and perfectionistic readers let them know that working to understand a poem is only one aspect of learning a poem. The rest of it is up to whatever individuality makes a person a person, just like the individuality that makes a poem a poem. Trust in the person – the indescribable and mysterious substance of soul – is in getting to know it. Analyzation is useful, but only one part of the whole.
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