Is the Land Waste?

Did T. S. Eliot kill poetry? Really?

Perceval arrives at the Grail Castle to be greeted by the Fisher King in an illustration for a 1330 manuscript of Perceval, the Story of the Grail.

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I rounded out the year with a series of mostly disappointing film experiences, which I intended to write about—and still will, I suspect. Something stopped me from digging in though, and I think it is simply that I didn’t want to end the year on a crabby note—even though this really was a lousy year for movies, an art form I dearly love.

Then, two things happened. First, I had one of the best theatrical experiences of the whole year seeing Bruce Norris’s latest play, Downstate, at Playwrights Horizons. I am definitely going to write about that experience and that play, but I’m not sure I’ll get to it before the show closes on January 7th, so for now I’ll just say: run, don’t walk, to see it. It is an actual tragedy, inspiring pity at suffering and terror at its true inescapability, and as such is as good example as I have seen lately of what theater foundationally is for.

Then, my old colleague from The Week, Matthew Walther, wrote a piece for The New York Times on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of “The Waste Land” blaming T. S. Eliot for destroying English poetry. The argument is more sophisticated than that summary, but nonetheless: it has roused me to opposition in defense of poetry as a possibility, and against the inescapability of decline and death—in art if not in life.

Walther had the experience, as a young man, of encountering Eliot and being possessed by his poetry. It’s an experience one hopes to have when one is young. I can certainly remember it happening to me with books, films, plays, etc. Openness to that sort of experience is part of what youth is for. Eliot’s power was obvious to him, and he assumed, not entirely wrongly, that it was obvious to everyone; so now, at the centenary of “The Waste Land,” he assumed there would be an extravagant celebration of the occasion. This didn’t happen, and, Walther suspects, never will again, because poetry is dead and Eliot helped to kill it.

The rest of the essay explains how Eliot managed such a feat. If you attend carefully to that argument, it’s clear that Walther isn’t really arguing that Eliot killed poetry through the sheer power of his writing. (Dante didn’t kill poetry; Milton didn’t kill poetry.) Rather, Eliot was simply the last poet to inherit the capacity to write great poetry, and he used that ability to anatomize and exemplify the very forces that had destroyed the civilization that much such poetry possible. That conjunction meant that no future poet could outdo Eliot at what he had done, and also no future poet could outdo Eliot doing anything else. Hence: poetry is dead.

The reason that great poetry of any kind is no longer possible, in Walther’s view, is that we are alienated from the natural world, the true wellspring of creativity. We live in a mechanized world and we have mechanized our lives and minds to the point where we simply cannot do what generations of poets before Eliot had routinely done. That’s the condition that Eliot’s poetry foretold, and by doing what he did so well, he fulfilled his own prophecy.

Well.

The first thing I might say by way of response is that Robert Frost was T. S. Eliot’s rough contemporary, dying only two years before Eliot did, and I daresay that Frost’s poetry is better known today by more people than Eliot’s is. Frost was every bit the elegiac that Eliot was, but not at all alienated from the natural world, and yet his poetry resonates widely with people whose familiarity with nature is limited. Frost wrote in a plain style that can be appreciated by people without academic training, but there are vast depths under that limpid surface, ironies layered upon ironies. It’s no accident that Vladimir Nabokov—a consummate lover of complexity in language if ever there was one—chose Frost as the poet to emulate when he composed his puzzle box novel, Pale Fire. I can’t see any reason why a poet after Frost couldn’t follow his example rather than Eliot’s—and, indeed, plenty have, whether or not they have exceeded Frost’s own achievements.

There are also plenty of poets who came after Eliot who both popular and elite lovers of poetry would acclaim as deserving laurels. Elizabeth Bishop is one obvious example. Eliot’s fellow Missourian, Langston Hughes, is another. If the test is “does the poem sink into your memory refusing to be dislodged” I think it would be hard to best Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” For my money, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is five lines of absolute perfection; it’s all about that mechanized world that supposedly made poetry impossible, and its subject is the horror of that world, but its style and tone are nothing like Eliot’s.

On Twitter, Walther threw down the following gauntlet: “I challenge anyone who wishes to defend the honor of contemporary verse, formalist or otherwise, to rattle off, unaided, any ten lines of the stuff.” I replied as follows:

Noah Millman @BloggerGideon

@matthewwalther Elvis was a hero to most But he never meant s- to me you see Straight up racist that sucker was Simple and plain Mother f- him and John Wayne 'Cause I'm Black and I'm proud I'm ready and hyped plus I'm amped Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps

That’s only eight lines, true, and I can’t prove that I could recite them from memory—but I can’t recite the “Tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth (the shortest of the play) perfectly from memory, and I’ve both read the play and seen it multiple times; I know it well enough to have confidently critiqued Joel Coen’s film version. I’m just not very good at reciting from memory. Trust me though that I, and plenty of White guys my age, could recite Chuck D.’s lines without a hitch. I’m sure plenty of people twenty years my junior can do the same for Eminem. That’s a living culture or poetry, whether you like that culture or you don’t. In fact, I would venture to guess that verse is more “alive” today than it has been in many years—but as spoken word rather than in the MFA programs.

Ah, but is any of that poetry truly great? Probably not. But greatness is a tricky thing to understand; if we knew where it came from, we’d surely have more of it. I am not the best person to talk about poetry, but I do know something about theater. Name a truly great playwright in English between William Shakespeare on the one hand and the two Irishmen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, on the other. I am on the board of a theater company that focuses on the Jacobeans, so I’m familiar with Webster and Ford and their even obscurer contemporaries, and I quite like the best of them, but there’s a reason these plays are so infrequently produced that we need a special company to do them. After them, Sheridan wrote a couple of excellent plays, and somewhere a bit below him on the ladder are Congreve, Behn, Farquhar—I can throw out all sorts of names, but be serious; there isn’t anyone who ranks up there with Wilde or Shaw, or with any number of English-language playwrights who came after them. And yet, Wilde and Shaw were possible, and they were not the end of the line either. I saw a production of Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman, this past summer that absolutely knocked my socks off; it fully held its own alongside the best Shakespeare productions that the largest classical repertory in North America could mount. Greatness was still possible then, and is still possible now.

The theater wasn’t dead, mind you, during all that slack time; the land wasn’t waste. Except during the Interregnum when the theaters were closed, plays were being written and seen and loved and argued about. They just weren’t achieving everything the art form was capable of—and this despite the fact that the novel in English was going gangbusters all that time, as was poetry. Meanwhile, when English-language theater did revive, it was at the very moment that a new art form—cinema—was being born that one might have imagined would threaten to make it obsolete. Instead, just when film was reaching its own peak of influence in America, we had a glorious theatrical efflorescence, with Miller and O’Neill and Williams and the rest of the mid-century gang, plays that we now think of (and argue about) as classics. Why did it work out that way? And what might cause it to happen again, for the poetic fire to burst forth amid the thicket of video games and virtual reality? These are interesting questions—but I don’t know the answer and neither does Walther.

I’m not going to deny that poetry doesn’t have the influence today that it did in Wordsworth’s era. I’m not even going to try to argue that there are poets working today who are Wordsworth’s equal, though if anyone out there is approaching his greatness, I do wonder if we would know it on account of the fragmentation of our culture, which has diminished not only poetry but cinema, of all things. But I am going to push back, hard, against the notion that great poetry is impossible. We haven’t got the foggiest idea what is possible. More to the point, the counsel of despair is no way to raise a surprising new generation of poets.

Now, if Walther wanted to argue that MFA programs are killing poetry, or at least stunting it, I’d entertain the argument. If so, then the next generation of great poets will undoubtedly write explicitly against those programs’ dictates, much as the Impressionists and post-Impressionists painted against the Academy. But Eliot? If he had any baleful influence, it must have been in convincing certain young readers who fell under his spell that his own gloomy assessment was correct, to the point that they saw little point in trying to create and became critics instead.

If the land requires a bloody lance to be revived, though, perhaps they should have run Eliot through the heart with their own pens instead.

Happy New Year.