Is Poetry Kaput? [by Michelle Rochefoucauld]

It used to be God whose decomposing corpse made the big stink. Nietzsche announced the death. Freud put forth the exposition in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In its cover story of April 8, 1966, Time made it official in a cover story wisely phrased as a rhetorical question: “Is God Dead?” 

If religion had been the opium of the masses, and masses on Sunday mornings were a casualty of deicide, people could turn to the usual alternatives – politics and art – but the youth culture was in full swing in 1966, and the nearest thing to transcendence was an acid trip at a rock festival or blowing yourself up making a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Meanwhile, the subject has receded to the terrorism and fundamentalism pages of the newspaper, and the obituary focus has long since shifted to literature.

The death of the novel had worried all-star panelists for years. Now, with Updike and Roth dead, a new consensus started to form around the notion that the TV serial as exemplified by The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Fauda, House of Cards, and Homeland has displaced and supplanted the novel as a mass entertainment form -- one that can aspire to be both wildly popular and notably artistic, as the novel was at its best. The past tense in that last clause makes me sad, though I have the seen the future and it is even more enthralling than Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga as done BBC-style with Damian Lewis as Soames.

The death-of debate of the moment centers on poetry and takes the form of essays, sometimes jeremiads, in wide circulation monthlies. Last month the NY Times declared that poetry is dead because T. S. Eliot murdered it, which was a novel though not poetic way to note the 100 anniversary of ”The Waste Land.”  If you wonder at magazine editors who run variants of the same article, rehashing the same tired arguments, don’t. Think of the ingenuity that goes into the packaging. This time: poetry as the corpse in a detective story whose culprit was the least-likely suspect.

 “People who are not poets make fools of themselves talking about poetry,” La Rochefoucauld said. “It is the one thing they have in common with poets."

-- DL

Comments

[Timothy O'Connor]

'God may have lost his function as the subject or object of a predicate, but may not be so much dead as entombed in a dead language."

Northrop Frye, "The Great Code"

[Sylva Portoian]

A New God…!

My brain is searching
For a new God
Can anyone think
Where I might find
Thee?

Before I reached
Somewhere low
After reaching
Somewhere high

I want to see
My new God
I want to know
If He can vanquish
All genocides

If Not
Thus,
Can I still call him God?
Yes, I’m sure
We will call him
Once again
Our God!

Our throats
Repeat daily the word,
God
Million and Billion times
With no response
Then for what…?!

Sylva Portoian, MD
Winner of the Carnegie Poetry Prize,spring 2009
Has 10 medical articles, including in "the lancet".

***

‘We should not forget our ancient gods,
We created them with our creative hand
After then we started carving Khach-kars
(Armenian cross-Stones)’

[David Lehman]

Thank you for these comments. The problem of evil remains unsolved. Northrop Frye's essays are terrific ("The Modern Century," "The Educated Imagination").
The post does illustrate the danger in starting an analogy from the greater to the lesser in comparative importance. God makes poetry look very small.

[Timothy O'Connor]

My Lurianic instincts tell me that God depends on poetry!

As for the "problem of evil," these days I'm toying with C.S. Lewis's conceit that "evil is a parasite [on goodness], not an original thing." Strangely, I find that uplifting!

[Kate Farrell]

Thanks so much, David, for the great response to the awful piece in the Times about Eliot murdering poetry. In today's Times, there are several good Letters to the Editor on the subject.