Junior Poet Final Notes 2007.12.

17 Christopher Brown

• Poetry is not a tool, nor utilitarian. But it holds a place as a subtle way to improve society.
• True, poetry no longer holds any real survival / propagation purpose with the introduction of the
written word and simultaneous end of oral tradition. Poetry began as song, a mnemonic useful for
remembering things.
o “Memorable Speech (or Language)”
o What place does poetry have, then, after its application to hunting-gathering / reading-the-stars-
to-navigate has left?
o From a utilitarian standpoint, poetry may seem false
 Spartans didn’t write/read poetry
• It has become a leisure time activity. Has it become, also, a thing only enjoyed by poets. Or mere
aesthetic?
• Poetry, indeed, does not affect history.
o “If not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history
of man would be materially unchanged” (The Public v. the Late William Butler Yeats)
o Auden: “For poetry makes nothing happen” instead, it is “A way of happening, a mouth.”
 It “inflects” instead of “making happen” (Dr. Osborn: Lecture)
o Contemporary poet Paul Muldoon is even harsher, in “7, Middagh Street”
 As for [Yeats's] crass, rhetorical
posturing, 'Did that play of mine
send out certain men (certain men?)
the English shot ...?'
the answer is 'Certainly not'.
If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead
would certain men have stayed in bed?
For history's a twisted root
with art its small, translucent fruit
and never the other way round.
• Subjugation, as poetry, to the aesthetic – that is, not an end in itself, or a direct cause to effect a
change. It is a cause of a cause – it changes man, who changes the world. Although poets such as
Wallaces Stevens and Philip Sidney want to show how poetry is an act of the citizen in society, as
Seamus Heaney writes in the Redress of Poetry, insisting that their words “are intended to be more
than merely sonorous,” poetry is not. As Jorge Luis Borges writes “the taste of the apple (states
Berkeley) lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way (I
would say) poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader”.
• Transition: if poetry does not do anything, what is it for? It’s art.
o Allan Grossman’s 2 points: 1. Discourse. 2. Value individuals.
• Split into two categories, via “Psychology and Art To-Day.” “There must always be two kinds of art,
escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs good and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which
shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love”
o One is to delight, the other to teach
o Escape-art
 This is, first, a fantasy world that entails intemporality.
 Is comprised of extremes. “The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning”
 Poems that strive to make permanent:
• Hopkins, “The Leaden Echo,” “[I]s there any … latch or catch or key to keep / Back
beauty … from vanishing away?” … “O no there’s none” … “Be beginning to despair”
Yet “There is one … Where whatever’s prized … Never fleets more … Seal them, send
them, motion them with breath”
• Shakespeare, “Sonnet 65” – “who [time’s] spoil of beauty can forbid? / O, none, unless

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this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”
 Poems living in the ecstasy of the present:
• Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
• Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter” – poetry makes the material into ethereal, frees it
from physicality’s bondage: “Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music … To the
free skies unpent and glad and strong”
• Hardy, “Darkling Thrush” – “So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was
written on terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around, / That I could think there trembled
through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was
unaware.”
• Sonnet 73 (p. 264)
• “Ballad of Barnaby”
 Poems exhorting “carpe diem”
• To the Virgins to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick 
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
• Auden, “Lullaby,” love of fate: “Amore Fate”, Despite that “Certainty, fidelity / On the
stroke of midnight pass,” and “Time and fevers burn away / Individual beauty”, the
speaker wishes to enjoy the present, while he can, “till break of day”
• Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
• “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Frost
• “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now,” Housman (1173)
• “Go, Lovely Rose” (p. 393) Worth conceived in praise.
 Poems exalting the fantasy possible in memory and imagination
• Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
• Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”
• Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
…
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”
 Conclude:

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• Thus, praising the present immortalizes it. This is unreal. But pleasant.
 Insufficient.
• The Public v. The Late WB Yeats, “In 1900 he believed in Fairies; that was bad enough”
(391)
 Thus we get:
o Parable-art
 Metaphor approaches truth more closely than scientific inspection can do.
• Frost: “the more accurately you know where a thing is, the less accurately you are able to
state how fast it is moving” – that is, standing back lets you get a better look at both.
Also, the individual particular is free, but the general mass follows necessity – this is how
metaphor is useful in knowing more than we could by close inspection (Education by
Poetry: A Meditative Monologue)
• Shelley: Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty. Poetry is the foundational source of
all things. It is where unapprehended things are discovered. Metaphor is what allows us
to see beyond the veil. And not only to see, but to cut down as well.
 Teaches the reader to appreciate, to praise.
• Yeats, “The Gyres,” naming self as the “voice”: “Out of cavern comes a voice / And all it
knows is that one word 'Rejoice!'”
• “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise”
• “[Poetry] enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought.” – Shelley
• Poetry lifts the veil from hidden beauty. “All high poetry is infinite” – Shelley
• Blake – Miniscule Details.
 Also, in some cases, incites man to aspire to be heroic, like Achilles in the case of Homer
(Shelley). This is not the majority.
o Conclude:
 Parable-art is completely lost without the help of the reader, and his reaction.
• Final goal exemplified in exhortation to merge reader and poetry.
o In Memory of W. B. Yeats
o Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” – “The reader became the
book” – he is incorporated into the poetry, which is nothing without him.
o Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” – our words make our reality. Mimesis. Poesis.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
o Shelley wrote “The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold: by one it creates new materials
of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to
reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which my be called the
beautiful and the good.”
 He also wrote: “All things exist as they are perceived”
 And “Poets are the unacknowledged of the world”

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o Here, yes, poetry is rhetoric. Plato would hate it still, and it would crumble his perfect city. But
just because Plato doesn’t like it doesn’t mean it ought not be. Plato was not mistaken in his
reason of hating it, and he would still hate it today. Plato was, instead, mistaken in his ideal city,
which was impossible. I’d hate to live in Plato’s Ideal City.
 Plato’s ideal is a skewed, over-focused, subjective whim. His ideal is not perfect. When he
says poetry is false, he means it will not help his city run smoothly. His city sucks, though.
“To the Unknown Citizen”
 Poets are insurrectionists. Which is what we need in society.
 If poet incites someone to lose their religion, or flames of romantic desire, who says that is
bad? The prose writers. Ugggh.
• Why is poetry singularly good at these things?
o It is memorable. It is speech.
o Melopoeia (charm), Phanopoeia (riddle), Logopoeia (diction-imagery)
• Role of the poet.
o Poems are some persons’ vocations. It’s hard work, and it’s their effort to the world.
 Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”:
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
 Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”
A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, ( 5 )
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together ( 10 )
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.
 Ben Jonson, On my First Son
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
o The poet is not some sort of God figure, or a prophet, but an artist. He
oughtn’t be a king, not exalted. His poetry immortalizes him, but only as his
speakers, which are his poetry.
 Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
 Quote from In Memory of W. B. Yeats, Part I
o The poet is just a man who writes parables. It’s his poetry that ought to be
praised to the heavens.
o For, it’s his poetry that changes the world.

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Other poems to bring in “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by Donne, WS Sonnet 73

Sidney in his Defense of Poesie lists a few occupations, noting how they are constrained and merely
derivative. Then he states how poetry is like nature and creates like nature:
“Only the Poet disdeining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention,
doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite
a new, formes such as never were in nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and
such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts,
but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit”

Sidney: “Nature send the poet a brazen world, and he creates a golden”

Shelley presents reason & imagination, and says that poetry is “expression of the imagination”

— Plato said poetry is far removed from the truth / the ideal. And that poets are insurrectionists.
— Poetry is false imagery and “incites carnality”, irreligious.
— What is the value of poetry within the human world?
— What is its distinctive “truth”?
— What function does it serve in the ordering of human life?
— How does it add to the human record?
— Should the poet have a place of honor in the city? (Does the poet hold an important cultural
function?)

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