Either/Orr
David Orr’s recent New York Times Book Review essay on greatness in poetry is a bland bit of punting. I’ve read it twice and I still don’t understand what he’s trying to say. The main thesis, that defining greatness in poetry is very difficult to do, is obvious enough, but he never makes the attempt himself.
Taking John Ashbery as his last great poet — apparently just because the Library of America has chosen to release his collected works — sets the essay off on the wrong course from the beginning. Richard Wilbur, anyone?
He also seems to believe that quantity of work should be a necessary element in defining greatness. Though, it seems to me, Shakespeare would be great if he’d written only the sonnets; Eliot if he’d written only the Four Quartets and/or the Waste Land; Stevens if only Sunday Morning, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Anecdote of the Jar and a handful of other poems; Keats if only the odes; Rilke if only the Duino Elegies.
Greatness in poetry has become difficult to define because we live in a time when the very notion of Quality itself is being challenged, which is a point Orr fails to stress. How, if we don’t exert judgment and taste, can we ever hope to make distinctions such as good versus great, or even good versus bad?
Of course, it isn’t what is said, but how it is said, that’s most important in poetry. For example, this, one of Richard Wilbur’s greatest poems:
Praise in Summer
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
I’ve never found anything in Ashbery to match it, to even come close. So, others might say, that’s your opinion. To which I answer, show me a poem of the last 50 years any better. Having that discussion just might be the only way to define greatness in our time.
Latest posts by Christopher Guerin (Posts)
- A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Seurat) - August 3, 2013
- Hyde Mill (Sandy Ellarson) - July 27, 2013
- Hands and Feet (Alice Bea Guerin) - July 20, 2013
- Cafe Terrace at Night (Van Gogh) - July 13, 2013
- Winter Landscape (Sesshu) - July 6, 2013
Print This Post
Christopher:
Thanks for posting this link. I found it extremely interesting, if flawed, and find it difficult not to simply be delight that the New York Times is devoting a little column space to poetry. It happens so infrequently these days, that one must delight in its appearance–even if the discussion were to center on the life work of Shel Silverstein.
While Orr’s essay is remarkably desultory, I do think he raises some good points about the nature of “greatness” and rightly points to the growth of creative writing programs (such as the one that many of the contributors here attended). But, to me, he failed to mention how very good much of the poetry published these days is because of that democratization.
To my mind, the general quality of verse may be substantially higher these days simply because of the number of talented people…perhaps making that distinction between simply good and great (which is no more than a matter of degree) impossible.
Yet Orr does fail, in my opinion, to elucidate how difficult the process of canon-making actually is–even if when we account for the quagmire of just who decides. Consider the June, 1915 edition of Poetry Magazine .
Does anyone think that T.S. Eliot’s first published poem was instantly recognizable as immensely superior to Georgia Wood Pangborn’s sonnets? Or Skipwith Cannell’s “Songs of Hunger”?
To my mind, greatness in a poem is essentially nothing more than the ability to endure. Poor Skipwith didn’t make write those songs well enough for them to reach us. Or maybe his skill was just blanketed by the newness of modernism and the forceful personalities of poets like Eliot, Pound, and Crane.
So…check back in 50 years to find out whether or not some living writer is greater. For me, and yes it is subjective, I’ll read and re-read “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” again and again with the certainty that it is a great poem and perhaps the finest poem written in the last 50 years. Why?
It teaches.
Hi Christopher,
Your post is one of the best I’ve come across. I agree with you as concerns Wilbur. It is amazing to me how he *seems* to be completely ignored by the current crop of critics, editors, poets, etc… all completely under the spell of that inherited form called free verse.