The unfortunate decline of poetic form

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
February 28, 2007

Thanks to my American Lit class, I’m currently developing complex and puzzling feelings for one Walt Whitman, a poet reviled at the start of his career except by one mover and shaker: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “greet[ed] [him] at the beginning of a great career” in a note sent right after the 1855 original publication of Leaves of Grass. My looming creepy admission of love for the long-dead poet aside, it is the poetry’s ability to reach deep into my soul and assert something reminiscent of one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes from his book Timequake: “Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

I write this as a reader and lover of poetry, not a future literary critic (which, as an English major with painfully-close-to-realization plans for graduate school, I am). Right now, I’m refraining from overtly applying any one literary theory to my expounding the relative virtues of poetry. This valentine, as it were, to poetry stems from my recognition of its ability to make me feel that there is a vast and rich tradition of poets reminding me that, like the Vonnegut quote says, there are people who think and feel as I do, that in my thoughts, the theater of my mind, I am not alone.

And for this, I fall in love with Whitman. (There’s the creepy admission, at long last!) I read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” reading through the death of a soul as we suffer through the pains of war and dehumanization as a society. The beauty of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience reaches through 300 years and across the Atlantic Ocean to remind me that conventionally conservative approaches to love, politics and religion are by no means the definitive and only ones.With four lines of poetry, a poet can challenge the order of the world and come out standing on top, a king of images and allusions, a writer of society and a link to it for the future.

And I cry, my friends, because we’ve lost our poetry. We sit slack-jawed and bored as we discuss the myriad types of imagery of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the Arthurian references of “The Waste Land,” the antireligious and hypersexual imagery of Blake’s “The Garden of Love” and “The Sick Rose,” respectively. I’m comfortable with the rise of the novel as the primary literary form, don’t misunderstand—but just because we’ve lost our poets doesn’t mean we have to lose our appreciation of poetry. Read Harry Potter, please—I love those books—but don’t cast aside Paradise Lost or “An Essay on Man” to do so.

“A poem should not mean / but be,” writes Archibald MacLeish in 1925 (“Ars Poetica”). And so it is—do not go gentle into that illiteracy, my friends. Let us reclaim our poetry, iamb by iamb, meter by meter, connection by connection.

costellom4@lasalle.edu