"Bad" Poetry Author(s): Hermann Hesse and Roy Temple House Reviewed work(s): Source: Poetry, Vol.

70, No. 4 (Jul., 1947), pp. 202-205 Published by: Poetry Foundation Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20590131 . Accessed: 12/02/2012 03:08
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POETRY:

A Magazine

of Verse

"BAD" POETRY'
ONE day when a poem whose bacher's Little Son. I was about ten years old, we read in school title, if I remember rightly, was Speck

It told about a heroic little boy who fought through a battle, in a hail of bullets, who brought ammunition to the soldiers and was a famous hero. The whole class was filled with enthusiasm, and when the teacher asked us ironically: "Do you think that is a good poem?" we all cried excitedly: "Yes!" But the teacher shook his head with a smile and said: "No, that is a bad poem." He was right, in a way. According to the rules and the taste of the time the poem was not good. It lacked genuineness and delicacy, it lacked spontaneity, it was a crude piece of work. But ithad given us boys a fine thrillof enthusiasm. Ten years later,when I was in the neighborhood of twenty, I would have undertaken to read any poem in the world once through and decide whether it was a good poem or a bad one. It was the simplest thing in theworld. All one needed to do was to glance at the page, say a few lines over half-aloud, and the

thingwas done. A third decade has passed, I have read poems by the hundred, and I am once more in a situation in which I am uncertain whether any particular bit of verse is good or bad. A great many poems are brought tome nowadays, most of them by young peo ple who want me to inform themwhether they are good or bad and help sell them to publishers. And the young poets are

invariably astonished and disappointed when they discoverthat

this older poet Hesse, who is supposed to have learned by experi ence, has learned nothing at all from his experience, but leafs 'An abbreviatedversion of Schlechte -Gedichte.

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"Bad" Poetry

helplessly through their manuscripts without mustering thecour

age to decide whether their poems are good or valueless. What at the age of twenty I could do with perfect confidence in two minutes, has grown hard forme now. hard, 'but impossible. puzzling matter. When (This we Perhaps I should not say call "experience" is a take it for granted from experi thing we

are young we

that it comes automatically. But it isn't as simple as that. There are people who have a talent for gaining wisdom ence; they are experienced when they are schoolboys, they seem

tobe bornexperienced-and there areother people, among whom

I must listmyself, who can live fortyor sixty or a hundred years and be finally gathered to their fathers without ever having

learned or understood just what thisthing "experience" is.)

My confidence in the evaluation of poems when I was twenty years old reposed on the fact that I had come to love a certain number of poems and poets so ardently and exclusively that I other poem with them. If a poem was like those inmy group of favorites, itwas good. Otherwise I could see no merit in it. There are still a number of poets whom I love with particular fervor, and some of them are poets whom I already loved at twenty. But today I am inclined to be especially suspicious of the poems which sound like theworks of my favorite old poets. I don't propose at this moment to discuss poets and poetry in general, but only to write a few words about "bad" poetry; that is, about the poems which practically anybody except the poet himself would instantly classify with mediocre writing, inferiorwriting, writing which might as well not have been. It often happens to me nowadays that a poem which every agree is bad gives me real pleasure, that I am in

instantly and instinctively compared every other book and every

body would

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P O E T R Y:

A Magazine

of Verse

clined to approve me.

it, even to praise it,while the good poems, even the best poems, often fail to strike a responsive chord in I get a feeling that one of these "bad" poems is not bad and at all, that there is perfume in it, that its very weaknesses

obvious faults are touching, original, dear and charming; and I realize that a beautiful work of art that once charmed has grown pale and conventional. I can see thatmany of our youngest poets are having the same experience. As a matter of principle When they have eschewed the still re writing of "good" poems. one of them who

for instance-forgets himself memibers theold times-Werfel,

now and then and begins to pour his phrases out splendidly in the old classical manner, it makes his reader strangely uneasy. The youngest poets, who are never tempted to such lapses, have come to the conclusion that there are beautiful poems enough in theworld, that theywere not born and set down on this planet tomanufacture a few more pretty lines, to go on with the game of patience which their grandfathers started. They are abso lutely right, and their poems often have the same appeal, the

same thrill, that I sometimes find in the "bad" verses of which

I spoke.
And the reason is not far to seek. In its beginnings a poem It is a release, a is something very simple and spontaneous. realize a wave of impulse.

call, a cry, a sigh, a motion, by which a soul seeks toward off or In this first,original, fundamentally important function, nobody has the right to criticize any poem. The inspiration speaks to nobody but the poet himself; it is his cry, his revery,his instinctive gesture, his smile. Now and then it happens that a poem does more than afford its author emo tional release. Some poems please and inspire other persons

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Poetry "Badd"
beside the author. Some poems, that is, are beautiful. Pre

sumably this happens when

the poem expresses something that

is common to all humanity, something that mighthave occurred

to others; but I am not sure of this. It is at this point thatwe are caught in an unfortunate vicious circle. Because "'beautiful" poems make the author popular, a great number of poems are composed which have no other ambi

tion thanto be "beautiful," whose authors have no conception of theoriginal, primeval, sacredly innocent function of the poem.
These poems are no longer dreams or cries of a soul, outbursts of pain or of happiness, stammered wish-images or magic formulae, gestures of a sage or grimaces of a madman-they are only sweet meats for public consumption. They were made to get gain by providing amusement, instruction, or something else which purchasers desire. And such poems are often greeted with applause. But on the days when the correct world seems to pall on me, when I am impelled to break windows and set fire to temples, I discover that all the "beautiful" poems, even the sacrosanct classics, have a feel as if they had been censored, castrated, as if they had grown yes-yessy, tame, old-maidish. On those days I prefer the bad poems. And theworse they are, the better they please me. But it isn't long till even the bad poems grow monotonous. The reading of bad poems is only a fleeting pleasure. And after all, what is the good of reading them? Why bad poems? Do not make your own that, reader, and you will discover that the of composing bad poems is a much keener delight than the reading of themost beautiful poems ever written. Hermann Hesse Translated byRoy Temple House

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