In Defense of Poetry
UNTERECKER, JOHN
In Defense of Poetry By John Unterecker Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University This is a propaganda piece. My project is to trap politicians, businessmen, labor leaders and...
...Men like these who make our language live perform a service quite as real for our children's children as those who preserve our boundaries or who shape our law...
...All we need is the will to open our eyes and read...
...They give us primary pattern of accurate eloquence...
...and New Directions has put out a paperback edition of Selected Poems of Ezra Pound ($1.15...
...We may, as William Meredith puts it, construct "A Major Work": "Poems are hard to read Pictures are hard to see Music is hard to hear And people are hard to love "But whether from brute need Or divine energy At last mind eye and ear And the great sloth heart will move...
...Going to the very heart of lyric statement, he constructs strongly-felt poems which, though thoughtful, seem more satisfying than bare thought...
...the University of California Press has just published a translation of The Poems of Jules La-forgue ($1.50) and a lovely translation of Sappho ($1.25...
...These days, hardly anyone reads poetry but poets and a captive audience of undergraduates...
...Viking's five-volume Poets of the English Language is available in paperback portables at $1.45 a volume...
...Wagoner, who sounds like no one but himself, writes poetry of enormous energy which crushes into strict stanza form a violence that explodes before the reader's eves His fierce poems, celebrating man's angry defiance of mortality ("O God in Thy blur,/ Who is it stuffs this murdering dust in my breath...
...Words are the magnificent machinery man has devised to free him from the limitations of grunt and growl the repository of information which gives each new generation the potential of knowing more than the preceding one...
...Or consider Cecil Hemley's kind of eloquence (In the Midnight Wood, Noonday, $3.00...
...And that's a shame...
...Understanding poetry, we come close to understanding words man's greatest achievement...
...We need it not only for the traditional reason (poetry, like myth and dream, gives us keys to unlock the guarded, secret doors behind which lurk our fears of life, love and death), but also because, since poetry uses metaphor as its primary tool it is nearest to the living center of language itself...
...Though never as violent in his emotion as Wagoner, Meredith writes lean, thoughtful verse...
...Consider, for example, the work of David Wagoner, a young poet and novelist whose second book of poetry, A Place to Stand (Indiana, 82.75), has just been published...
...Fitting what sounds like casual speech to such intricate poetic forms as the sestina, he manages most of the time to make flat statements take on abrupt richness...
...Our poets, refreshing and renewing that language which makes us not mere man but homo sapiens man the wise, help us--in the most basic way--learn to talk...
...Meaning," Hemley points out in another fine poem, "is possible though dissension rends/The magnificent bers of dark and light...
...Anchor has The Complete Poems of Hart Crane at $.95...
...have the organic unity of a shout and, though meticulously constructed, race from beginning to end...
...That poets as fine as these should be published at all should give us hope...
...Defenders of the word, they are the culture we defend...
...My project is to trap politicians, businessmen, labor leaders and housewives into reading poetry...
...The rest of us need it...
...Starlight," for instance, which examines the possibilities of constellations projects familiar faces on the dark to create "an enlightenment of night,/ The way the pronoun you will turn dark verses bright...
...The Open Sea (Knopf, $3.50), William Meredith's third book of poems, is eloquent in a very different way...
...Like the "two nights" which twine "beneath the mind" in his title poem, his poems explore the literal and the metaphoric levels of reality to locate in their intersection images which make patterns of order on the chaos of our world...
...By using them, by educating ourselves in the rich possibilities of our language—even if it be at the expense of television's soporific delights—we may become a nation symbolized by something more shining than the junk heaps of an industrial civilization...
...That the best of the poets of the past are at last being reprinted and so assured an even wider audience should give us encouragement...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 41
