The Language of the "Unaccountable"
I believe that human life is not ultimately unaccountable to the human senses and this unaccountable problem is the origin of all human need for poetic communication. Science attempts to solve this unsolvable problem by placing the metaphysical problem of humans aside, and simply create an artificially "roped-off" mental construct called the Physical Universe - devoid of gods, magic, spirits and souls. Science interpreted human life exclusively with the five senses - and called it a day. When the scientific world view is the dominant thought model (ca.1945 - 1995), then it only follows that poetry no longer has the prestige it had under a more shamanistic (spiritual) society. And thus it feels that it must express itself in prose for relevance in a prosaic "nuclear democracy". This was not always the case in the West.
The first published writers of English lyric in the 16th century (Gascoigne, Daniel, Greville and Sidney) recognized that principles of poetics are generated from within each language, according to its own acoustic properties. It was well known that Latin was a quantitative language - English is not. That there should be in our best poetry a striking juxtaposition of pleasure and truth seems to be a reasonable statement - but seldom found in modern works. We want to discover power and authority in modern speech, not a sentiment, a political ideology, or a melodramatic moment (victim). We have just survived an age where power was thought to lay in prose ideologies, Mao's Red Book, or in Marx' Das Kapital, both enslaving men more than any book from the Age of Faith. Ideas are dangerous if believed.
I find sanity in Gascoigne's mantra from the early age of the English lyric: "Let your poem be such as may both delight and draw attentive reading". I can agree with this. I believe that a poem can say more about a civilization than an entire library of prose works. Capturing human monumentality is poetry's proper gift. Gascoigne's colleague, Daniel, felt poetry was the chosen venue for expressions of memorable or authoritative speech:
"Those numbers where with heaven and earth are moved
Show weakness speakes in prose, but power in verse".
(ca.1570)
All correct communication must be based either on practical reality or human wisdoms. Greville, at the dawn of the English Lyric Age, insisted that true eloquence is the reflex of living wisdoms. Poetry, he says, should raise her creations on "lines of truth and teach us order under pleasure's name". This may seem tame stuff, but I want to begin where the lyric began in English and see if it still fits our concept of what constitutes poetry in the 21st century. I rest content that there is some merit in truth, and speech based on truth as humans sift and tease it through their lives. I admit to a few assumptions about the human condition that I may not have already proven in my argument: if great poetry exists in a culture, humans will recognize and respond to its truth - though not always in the poet's lifetime.
Poets do not present new ideas, they memorialize, that is, they create the perfect expressions of what humans are. I don't think Ezra Pound, for example, ever really had anything new to say - I think he wanted to return to Delphic oracle speech of the Greeks and despoil Victorian sentimentality - but he had some wonderfully measured lines and an American voice with that "unknown quantity" each poet should rightfully seek. As Dickinson was still undiscovered, I think he was the first to re-introduce poetic language as incantation in English - he simply could not sustain it and keep it relevant to modern life. Sometimes a new voice is all we can ask of a great poet. Sometimes they give us more. So long as the human condition remains ultimately unknown, our poetry must always seek the unknown quantity of incantation.
Modern poetry does not always have to achieve perfection on each line, but at the minimum it must aim for such perfection and contain definable and recognized perfection in its parts: the uniqueness of the voice, the authority of the line, a superior expression that matures and deepens the idiom of the people. Finally, it must have the architecture and presentation of stasis to support its proper nature as song with numbers. Poetry is not a prose report that merely teases an idea to exhaustion. Yet this is what university students are forced to learn. It's all wrong and nobody is going to rush to the local bookstore to get their latest copies. Who does not address this issue in our own time, need not write or concern themselves with the future of poetry in English.
In so far as poetry does not meet the standard of incantation, I do not believe that poetry should be attempted. But what is poetry? Something that takes the form of verse, like a greeting card? A prose sentence broken up into separate lines that have a light, intellectual twist - or is that an epigram? Can an affluent society that does not honor poetry with a living wage make a ready distinction between lyric poetry and numerous other poetic forms? And what purpose does incantation serve? How can one get paid well for incantation? Who will accept a contract from us of a specific and deliverable incantation?
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