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Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Already two thoughtful responses to last night's post! I don't have much to say about Chris Lott's at Ruminate because he seems to have been able to read my mind better than Jeff Ward at This Public Address. That's not a deficiency on Jeff's part—it makes me think maybe Chris can write Petrarchan sonnets in Klingon.

Jeff picks up the two key phrases, "So I don't expect poems, even great poems, to surprise me intellectually" and "Poets don't, as a rule, have the training or think rigorously enough to do anything original [in phlosophy, linguistics, science, etc], and when they try, it's usually embarrassing" and points, as well he should, at the English Romantics. Now, I did get up late last night—well, very early this morning—and add "Oh yeah, Coleridge, mumble mumble." But Jeff had probably already written his response, and, anyway, it's not enough.

I did write that, like other artists, poets are good at " paying attention to the feeling of being human," and the Romantics were as good at that as anyone since Shakespeare, and not just in their poetry. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, influenced by David Hartley, would have been a far more productive foundation for psychology than Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. They were also deeply involved in the revolutionary politics of the time, connected with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (Coleridge's friends and Mary Shelley's parents). Their poetry, particularly Wordsworth's and Shelley's, is full of ideas and full of the liveliness of thought—but, except in the case of Coleridge, it's not original thought. Even the Shelley of Mont Blanc, which Jeff movingly and rightly praises, doesn't really break any ground. Still, the poem was my first serious introduction to thinking about responsibility and God and failure and the work of becoming human, and I am forever indebted to Shelley for that.

Poets may not be "economists or philosophers or scientists or theologians or linguists" (and I'll stand by my claim that they're often merely embarrassing when they try to be: look at Yeats' mystic gyres, Pound's economic and political philosophy, and langpo linguistics and epistemology, for a start), but I should have said they must be damned good folk psychologists instead of only weakly hinting at it in that bit about the feeling of being human. The best poets are also interested in, and explore in at least some of their poems, the exciting ideas and arguments of their time, and the best poetry often thinks hard and shows the shape of thought better than almost anything else. My favorite form, the sonnet, is a little exercise in dialectics. Of course there is intellectual excitement and intellectual surprise in poetry and I was careless to say otherwise. I just don't require or expect poets to be the ones who come up with the ideas.


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