I could not possibly care less about poetics or literary theory. I am fascinated by the technical aspects of how poets make poems, but half a sentence about the structure or politics of literary discourse sends me either to sleep or, better, out the door. Such talk does nothing to get poems made and less to help us understand any poem worth reading in the first place; even when, like Freudian psychology, it's interesting for its own sake, it's just wrong. I can make marginal exceptions for Darwinian literary theory because there is at least a chance that it will tell us something about why we make and like the kinds of stories we make and like, and for neuroscience-based theory because, along with Darwinian theory, it's shown that narrative and metaphor, far from being an obstruction to our understanding of each other and each other's stories, are central to our kind of mind — but I don't think either will ever tell us why particular poems or novels or plays or TV shows are treasures and others are trash.
I started thinking about this (this time) a few days ago because of a post by Amy King in which she proposed there were three types of theorizers on listservs. She calls them simplifications; here are my simplifications of hers:
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those trying to prove their intellectual dominance,
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those trying to be helpful, and
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those trying to learn by thinking out loud.
I used to have some sympathy for the last two, but now only the last seems to me an honest position. Even the helpful have stopped thinking about poems as opposed to about poetry, and poetry just isn't very interesting except as embodied in particular poems.
I decided to write here about it (instead of about a poem!) because of Theodore Dalrymple's "Truth vs. Theory
" in the current City Journal (link via Arts & Letters Daily). Dalrymple notes that at least one group fascinated by Shakespeare's useful knowledge of their own field doesn't think he needed an aristocratic education to acquire that knowledge: medical doctors. In fact, a university education like that of Shakespeare's son-in-law Dr. John Hall would have been a positive hindrance: "A contemporary medical man can learn something from Shakespeare; he can learn nothing from Hall." The accompanying quotes from both men amply prove the point.
Dalrymple concludes by quoting and commenting on a passage from T.S. Eliot:
Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't want to do harm—but the harm does not interest them … or they do not see it … because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
Eliot might have added: the endless struggle to look well in the eyes of their fellow intellectuals and the fear of losing caste. But as a result of their efforts, as Orwell also famously said, "We have sunk to a depth in which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."
That's numbers one and two, no? And the obvious is that three things help a poet to make poems:
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acute, even obsessive, observation of how people (including the poet) live with each other in the world,
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a love for the particularities of particular poems,
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and a willingness to do real work on poem after poem.
8:25:24 PM 
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