I'm just finishing reading Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Wiman's description of his drive to become a poet is fascinating, and I'm sure it's something that many poets can connect with, especially his description of trying to live up to the classics. That is something I can remember well since I spent time as an undergraduate pouring over the works of writers like Homer, Dante, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Whitman. In fact, reading Wiman's work reminds me of my undergraduate university, a school that stressed the classics and the work of the New Critics. Wiman's prose even has some of the intelligence and beauty of critic/poets like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and William Empson**, but his stress on form has some of the limitations found also in these writers. Wiman dismisses too easily the language poets and poets of fragmentary work. Perhaps he doesn't want to spend time explaining theories that he does not believe in or perhaps he is as dismissive of fragmentary/open writing forms as "experimental" poets can be of formal/neo-formal work.
While I disagreed with many things in the book, I enjoyed reading it. The prose is well-crafted, and Wiman has a classic intelligence. My main negative reaction to the book regards Wiman's comments about the sorry state of contemporary poetry (the "we are in poetic decline" argument). I usually dislike this type of argument. Formalists or more narrative writers often put it forward as a reason to spark a revival in those types of writing. To me, the argument is fallacious. More books of poetry are being printed and sold now globally than any time in history. One could make the argument that more is not necessarily better, but I do think it points us to some type of audience. Even if you argue that the audience is mostly literary-oriented folks, it's still an audience; plus, trying to convince someone who is not necessarily interested in poetry to get interested in it by giving them more narrative work or more formal work is just simple-minded. Should we, for example, take our new person-centered poems to go fight the dragon of Hollywood/Bollywood? I doubt we'll find a new St. George in that venture. Besides, when has poetry had a massive audience ever. The Middle Ages? Have you taken a look at the literacy rates? Oral? Doubtful for most people. When?
Anyway, I think poetry is actually fairly healthy in the contemporary world. Poetry is extremely diverse globally in terms of poets and forms. We should celebrate that instead of turn to the factually inaccurate clinging to "poetry in decline" argument.
(**William Empson, in my opinion, is a wonderful poet and woefully underated.)
While I disagreed with many things in the book, I enjoyed reading it. The prose is well-crafted, and Wiman has a classic intelligence. My main negative reaction to the book regards Wiman's comments about the sorry state of contemporary poetry (the "we are in poetic decline" argument). I usually dislike this type of argument. Formalists or more narrative writers often put it forward as a reason to spark a revival in those types of writing. To me, the argument is fallacious. More books of poetry are being printed and sold now globally than any time in history. One could make the argument that more is not necessarily better, but I do think it points us to some type of audience. Even if you argue that the audience is mostly literary-oriented folks, it's still an audience; plus, trying to convince someone who is not necessarily interested in poetry to get interested in it by giving them more narrative work or more formal work is just simple-minded. Should we, for example, take our new person-centered poems to go fight the dragon of Hollywood/Bollywood? I doubt we'll find a new St. George in that venture. Besides, when has poetry had a massive audience ever. The Middle Ages? Have you taken a look at the literacy rates? Oral? Doubtful for most people. When?
Anyway, I think poetry is actually fairly healthy in the contemporary world. Poetry is extremely diverse globally in terms of poets and forms. We should celebrate that instead of turn to the factually inaccurate clinging to "poetry in decline" argument.
(**William Empson, in my opinion, is a wonderful poet and woefully underated.)
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