Quote:
Originally posted by Rhina P. Espaillat:
Well, but EVERY poem faces "an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome."
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Dear Rhina,
I'm not sure how I got trapped into defending the proposition that poems based on other arts are to be deplored, since I don't believe it. My point was merely that it's not necessarily stupid or a sign that those who think so must not have "big spots in their hearts," as Nyctom would have it. He sees the idea as a kind of moral failing of narrowheartedness, you see it as a kind of poetical failing, and I see it as, well, something intelligent poets and critics might reasonably hold, though I happen not to, probably because I'm not intelligent enough, or poet enough, or critic enough.
Of course every poem faces an initial suspicion from the reader, but the question here, Rhina, is whether poems based on other arts ought properly to face a harsher suspicion--whether they have to clear a higher bar. Some poetry does confront such higher bars, I think. Object poems do not seem in themselves impossible to me, but they face a much higher initial burden in my reading. And if I can say that about one kind of poetry, why not about another--about poems based on works of visual art, for instance?
As it happens, such poems don't face that higher bar, for me. But a defense of why they needn't isn't as simple as it looks. Let me give one example, Rhina. When you write, "the X that triggers the poem is a hook on which the poet hangs it," you're making a philosophical assertion, both ontological and aesthetic, about the nature of those Xs, whether you intend that assertion or not. You're suggesting that a painting, a natural object, and a human action are all roughly the same sort of thing. They're all equivalent hooks.
Maybe so, but it's a pretty complex philosophical claim about the nature of reality. And one could reasonably join Plato in insisting that an apple isn't the same kind of thing as a painting of an apple, and when you write a poem about a painting of an apple, you've left the actual apple pretty far behind--too far behind, for those who want to reject poetry about painting.
Plato, of course, is going to ban the poets from the Republic, in part in response to the way they mediate reality. But there's a long line of platonistic poets writing prose essays of platonic defense of poetry--from Philip Sidney to Percy Shelley, just in English--and the platonic and neoplatonic poet is probably not going to agree with the view of reality implied by your description of how a poet works.
I've always thought Platonism was the wrong way to do aesthetics, but I'm loath to call its practitioners necessarily stupid or narrowhearted. If a smart guy and good poet like Housman wants to hold that poems about paintings face a higher initial suspicion than other poems, I'm all for letting him do it.
Jody
[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 14, 2003).]