What Poetry Is

...Thus he speaks of the men and women who perform endlessly repetitive tasks on automobile assembly lines...

...A well-known poet in England, Levi has also made a reputation as a critic and a translator of Boris Pasternak...

...James Fenton's poetic indictments of the Indochinese wars...

...Throughout, Levi wraps his opinions in lively metaphors...

...By the mid-19th century, the Chair had become a symbol of the Romantic regard for poetry as a manifestation of human creativity...

...For work...

...an idealistic youth works the graveyard shift at Cadillac and spends his days studying German in hopes of singing Wagner...

...Writers & Writing WHAT POETRY IS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Oxpord University's venerable Chair of Poetry is one of those peculiarly British institutions that confers a vague aura of prestige and an even mistier sense of duties on the writer elected to its five-year term...

...His diverse subjects range from "Lamentation for the Dead" in ritual elegies, to the influence that Alfred Lord Tennyson and Edward Lear had upon each other's verse...

...You know what work is—if you're old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it...

...These toilers have nothing in common with the Marxist abstractions of proletarian romanticism...

...In actuality, he finds words for people whose emotions and thoughts are reduced to the inarticulate clichés of country music...

...and who hammer together crates to hold soap while stinking drums of fat "sulk in the battered yard behind the plant" until ready to be poured out...

...Auden and Robert Graves served terms...

...Yet that Latin metre set Shakespeare free, dramatic verse is our best poetry...

...Until Matthew Arnold's tenure, the one lecture given each semester (the holder's sole specified responsibility) had to be delivered in Latin...

...Levi adds humbly that had Oxford exercised foresight, the American poet "might once have held the Chair I now shamefacedly hold," and been, perhaps, its most illustrious occupant since Matthew Arnold...

...He shines brightest, however, when he introduces us to some of his offbeat enthusiasms: an 18th-century Irish lament by Eileen O'Leary for her slain husband...

...On the evidence of the 15 talks included here, he is a particularly informed, thoughtful and entertaining speaker...

...The concluding piece, "Goodbyeto the Art of Poetry," consistsof rhymed, historical meditation...

...Actually, as a poetry reviewer can testify, anonymous works like Mother Goose Rhymes, genuine (as opposed to "literary") folk songs, and ballads tend to sound fresher and more distinctive than many of the "voices" currently overflowing the market...

...I have to repeat the prayer that we will all go back to earth one day soon to become earth, that our tears will run to the sea a last time and open it, and our fires light the way back home for someone...

...This is peculiar, because in the past y ou were recognized as a poet only when you could write just the same as everyone else, and with no lapses from the common standard...

...He mourns these stunted lives as he celebrates their heroism, the dogged persistence that preserves human feelings among denaturing machinery...

...Levine's voice frequently blurs the line between poetic utterance and prayer...

...Both W.H...

...His intriguing insights are contained in the Introduction to TheArtofPoetry:TheOxfordLectures(Yaie, 331 pp., $35.00...

...But who can tell how many masterpieces the three poets have developed out of their minor efforts...

...He tells us that the prodigiously gifted Auden "disported himself in poetry like a whale in a bathtub"—an apposite image for that gargantuan, playful, yet partly frittered talent...

...When first established in 1700, it seems to have been intended to provide future clergymen with a knowledge of Hebrew liturgical verse, as well as Greek and Latin epic and lyric...

...The body of Levine's accomplishment, so far, can be judged from What Work Is, together with the newly updated Selected Poems (Knopf, 292 pp., $24.00...

...The University long ago dropped its required discussion of ancient prosody, but our lecturer chooses to take up the challenge anyway...

...Feelings never run tepid in this volume either...

...The critic argues that Dante did not intend readers to take his depiction of Hell literally, but rather as "grotesque entertainment...

...It was like being a contemporary of Tennyson or of Donne: It was not only delightful, but he interpreted the world, he spoke about real things and one could understand him...

...The "work" referred to is not the familiar struggle of the artist to "make it new...

...As for the financial side, Peter Levi—who held the position from 1985 through 1989—observes: "Although [the] salary is generous as a price per lecture, it is not a living wage...

...Recapping history, he maintains that the poem in its first natural state is Homeric, tragic, illiterate, the shortest and the longest of verses cluster together where the firelight is, and what they have in common is one thing, a long line suitable for chanting: a line we lost with Beowulf and Gawain, a horn-blast we shall never hear again...

...Levi insists that in any period, poetry remains a firmly traditional medium...

...He is a poet when he can write as no one else can write...

...Workers are, in his compassionate eyes, the Achilleses, Beowulfs, Deirdres and Beatrices of an industrial age prone to overlooking noble endeavor...

...Our ears are trained to the Latin iambic, where we once waved a wand, we beat a stick...

...In fact, many scholarly recipients possessed no real artistic qualifications...

...As Levi asserts, we can always recognize that art better than we can define it, since it never sates, never cloys, is primitive because it is a noise, an intricate string of minute noises expressing what man thinks and feels and is and civilized society represses...

...Robert Lowell is so revered that "reading his poems as they appeared was a fascinating privilege...

...Nor does he let us forget those who stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park...

...Levine grew up in an immigrant neighborhood of Detroit and held several of the jobs he now describes in verse...

...This not only limited the appeal of the honor to classicists, it practically required that the "poet" be an academic...

...Each man and woman is individual, from Michelangelo, "the furious lopper of tree limbs," to the nameless female at a polishing wheel...

...Written in the neoclassical manner, it sparkles with Popean wit and shrewd critical judgments...

...Nowadays, according to Levi, "we suppose that every poet, in order to be recognized...

...Such learning was considered indispensable at the time for students who hoped to understand the foundations of Western Civilization...

...Levine's detractors have mistakenly accused him of relying on autobiographical inspiration instead of imagination...

...Today the Chair continues to favor people with connections to Oxford, but they must qualify as distinguished writers of verse, too...

...He understands how they mold lives, how children only in the fourth grade can seem afflicted by a future that promises a bleak existence: "You can see/already how their backs have thickened,/ how their small hands, soiled by pig iron, /leap and stutter even in dreams...

...Levi's comments on such familiar subjects as Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's development from an undergraduate Latinist to the second greatest English writer, Auden's decline, or Philip Larkin's bleak truthfulness carry a judicious weight...

...Seldom have I encountered tributes so lovingly devoted to the art of true poetry...

...In his poems everyday laborers become fully realized speakers of simple and profound eloquence...

...Though the models change from time to time, a connection with some part of the past is preserved...

...Levine means something that civilized literary society too often represses as a subject: manual labor...

...has to have an individual style and tone and personality in verse...

...His lyrical compassion, anger and hopefulness make Philip Levine one of the most authentically moving poets of our age...

...Philip Levine has entitled his 15th collection of poems What Work Is (Knopf, 77 pp., $19.00...

...it is more like an enormous tip...

...Contrary to American universities, where poets-in-residence offa classes and workshops for undergraduates, Oxford now expects that the Chair's tenant will distance himself from academia, which, Levi explains, "feels awkward about poets unless they are safely dead...

...He gives us an analysis of Horace, whose "crispness" produced "perfectly persuasive music," of "dark, narrow, morbid, mysterious, and artistic Virgil,' and of Aeschylus, who is more "contorted than Marlowe or most of Shakespeare...

...Levine is also said to write excessively, a failing one could level at Wordsworth or Whitman...

...who climb down into the "pickling tanks" to mix chemicals that plate plumbing fixtures...

...There are liberating acts of defiance: A little girl makes "the Lamb of God" out of dust mops to frighten a crotchety librarian...

...What Work Is, in particular, gives a hymn-like quality to its eulogies and elegies: / have to climb the slag hills again, but this time not as a child, and look out over the river of iron, and hold it all in my eyes, the river, the iron mountains, the factories where our brothers burned...

...the works of East German poet Peter Huchel...