If poetry is dead, is this a post-mortem? It is only that—and I beg pardon for my disbelief—I am a bit suspicious that this might be another instance of the boy crying wolf. We have heard the first strains of the elegiac lyre call out too many times, before they are quickly silenced again. Someone thinks they see death creep astride Poetry’s wings—and yet she is always alive, well, and fresh-faced like the morning. A lithe Aurora, flushed efflorescent, already bedecked in petalled raiment, slipping out from her bed and fluttering into the day, washed anew from eiderdown and sky-spun linen. So Poetry lives and breathes, revived cyclically, new and excitable, skin beaded with youngest dew. A temporary questioning of immortality, redressed and answered each time.
Our latest whistle-blower is Matthew Walther. By his calculation, ‘Poetry died one hundred years ago this month’ in December 2022. Had you heard? According to Walther, the inquest need not go very far; we have our murderer known to us already. It is T. S. Eliot whom Walther blames. ‘[P]oetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it.’ A few paragraphs later, he adds: ‘We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so. The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.’
The malady of modernity. That creeping miasma— the skulking sufferance of the modern condition. A Prufrockian yellow smoke curling around our hands, plucking poetry from our finger-tips. To blame modernity, as Walther does, appears to be an antique quibble—an inherited anxiety. He notes the long-established association of poetry with nature (‘…the relationship between nature and poetry is basic and elemental.’) and contends that we no longer live in such a world—no longer possess those correct, receptive imaginations—brightly alive and sympathetic to nature and thus to poetry. This poetry which descends to us from a nebulous golden age of before, poetry that articulates ‘…a natural world alive with intimations of the transcendent that could be evoked, personified and filtered through one’s subjective experience.’
Do we now know too much? Have we discovered too much? Is our array of knowledge too near-sighted, lacking in awe? Where once pastoral poetry was full of heartfelt reverence, perhaps we have now lost our joy in it, for its value to our contemporary society appears diminished. In a discouraging gloss of a piece by Southey, containing a pretty, natural description, Walther comments: ‘How many Americans even know what woodbine is?’ This seems to be a non-argument. There are plenty of flowers and plants that we do not know the names of; this does not preclude them from existing (obviously), nor does it preclude them from our poetry.
Before, in the eighteenth century, natural poetry spoke of the way man relied on the natural world beneath his feet, and revered it too. Such poetry is now our readmission into a world that Walther feels modernity has estranged us from; the branchlets of a young and baying birch whispering forth its inductive sermon. Whether we choose to pay attention to the underworld of plants and flowers that wreath and embroider the friezes (every year more marginal, it seems) of our streets and cities or not, we cannot discredit the symbiosis we maintain (often begrudgingly) with the natural world. It is our great bank of oxygen, the ruddy health of our heaving lungs; even if Southey, to use Walther’s example, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, had a more precise lexicon of the floral hemisphere. Encyclopaedic poetry, with foxgloves on the lips, apple-blossom tufting at the nose, geraniums holing in clavicle shadows, and tall and straight-backed tulips budding at the fingertips.
In Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, wherein he posits his poetic theory, Eliot describes how even something as seemingly insubstantial as a name does poetic work for us. ‘The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.’ The sweet taste on the tongue of a name, a little lingering flight of nomenclature alone, contributes to a sense of beauty and feeling. Sound, in its rawest articulations, must be valued as a poetic device: the things you learn, subconsciously, about ‘woodbine’ merely from its name. We must be open to unknowing with poetry, even down to its botanies. (Also, if you wanted to know—I just Googled it, most prosaically—woodbine is merely honeysuckle by another name.)
‘Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images,’ Eliot writes, again in The Waste Land. Poetry is a bit scuppered if we have been forbidden from speaking, because we know only (and know only how to use and write with) ‘a heap of broken images’—Poetry has not all that much more to her substantively than images. But we do use them, and we do fit them to our poetry. Perhaps, like the unmistakable truth of the daguerreotype photograph when it was first introduced to the world in the 1850s, as a change from the wistful, belying flattery of the oil-painting, Eliot’s did not slay Poetry, but performed a corneal transplant. He gave her new eyes—partially, anyway. Or at least, maybe he did. Was Eliot the cause of modern poetry, or the coincidental symptom—appearing gracefully as the times changed, but not as the thing that knocked them into change?
I sense disgruntlement, at any rate, from the other modern poets. I do not think Pound would take kindly to this at all. I think you could try and wrestle a book of Plath from a young woman’s hands under the pretext that poetry is dead, telling her that everything written after Eliot’s death is false, and so must be recalled, and she would rail against you. You only need to look for Poetry’s footprints, as she picks her way around the world to find that she attracts her circle of devotees as much as ever.
A few comments underneath an Instagram post of the poet Megan Fernandes’s recent, brilliant poem Orlando, testify as such: ‘this will live in a little corner of my heart a long, long time’, ‘so grateful to have read this’, ‘Absolutely undone. Stunning’, ‘This is so damn good!!! Love the poem. Love the poet.’, ‘I am electrified.’ and, in an ironic reversal of affairs, ‘This kills me’. Poetry has visited, just passing through, alive and twitching with movement.
Walther’s sallow disenchantment ought not cower us, for it is nothing new. Three centuries of industrialisation bring with them change, not only to do with poetry, but to do with humankind’s relationship with nature at large. In the span of these three centuries, anxieties were born, they tripped carelessly through childhood, turned into wastrel prodigals in youth, married and matured at length, melted and mellowed in age, died, and primogenitively passed on their estate many times over. It is understandable: to love Poetry is to dote on her, but these anxieties lack currency, for Poetry persists.
How has she persisted? Probably because humans are exceptionally good at talking about themselves, and good also at projecting themselves onto their concerns in any given age. And if other people bore of our prattling or our plaints, a notebook will be much more patient, and listen.
Walther does, actually, account for the fact that the practice of poetry has continued—and in great quantity. ‘Of course, poetry isn’t literally dead. There have probably never been more practising poets than there are today…’ he writes diplomatically. But ‘English poetry, or what has passed for it since’ fights against a poetical climate that Eliot ‘exhaust[ed of] its possibilities’ thus ‘leaving little or no work for those who came after him.’ Are our reserves of poetic energy non-renewable? Did we blaze through them too greedily before? Did we despoil the arable plains, once wealthy farmsteads, simply to plant bay leaves for laureation?
We spent centuries employing the same poetic tropes: calling on Jove and Minerva, invoking Poetry as a wingéd muse, complaining of lovers’ plights. As aforementioned, Eliot proposed his theories on Poetry in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. In it, though I risk dilution of his points for expedience, he stresses that the contemporary poet must pay heed to those who went before. ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’ Eliot writes also, and perhaps fearsomely, for some of the poets whose writing is bound ineluctably to their own experience, that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’
I would argue that this is true to an extent, but perhaps not exclusively so. There is room for many theories and approaches to poetry. Poetry doesn’t really owe us anything. Where the artist has not chosen to sacrifice themselves to accommodate some universal meaning with a robust temporal stamina, there remains some kind of affective or empathetic importance to reading their poetry. Eliot adds that ‘impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.’ Yet how many of us relate to anything the World War One poets wrote? How full their poems were of their own experience. And still, how emptied our collective consciousness of remembrance and history would be without them.
From there, we were left to our own devices, but always with the grand library of past poets—including Eliot—to refer to, just as Eliot had and did. Striving, modern poets work not to memorialise themselves exactly, not towards an Ozymandian ideal, or, as Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel writes, to build a ‘lasting monument’, but to, in the poet Savannah Brown’s words, write something that might prove ‘a notable pip in this quivering glitch of a life’, from her poem The Universe May Stop Expanding in Five Billion Years (2020). We have learnt to be meeker than our poetic forefathers, perhaps because we are constantly told that poetry is dead and gone. So, whatever it is that we are writing—and we are still moved to write—if not Poetry, what is it?
Yet with each generation, it appears that there is something fretting and fluttering to be said, begging only softly, as a sundered hope. And our impulses to write poetry change each generation; a Skeltonic might not pass for much; a languorous sonnet cycle, tens of pages long, would likely not be accepted by a journal; and a lyrical ballad might find no patient audience. We put our poetry, mostly, in different places these days. We stow our poetry in song lyrics, or we atomise it enough to put it online, to catch at a frenetic attention span and try to make it stay—we write it handwritten, still, sometimes, in notebooks, margins, scrap printer paper, post-it notes, backs of hands, without it proving too total an anachronism, and we stow it away for private viewing in that most gravely secret of chambers—Notes App Poetry.
Today, it feels almost remarkable that we still have poets who dare to wade out from the 5app, without fear—or without being incapacitated by fear—of critics like Walther. Poets who choose to lead their poems into the glowering public light, and plate them before critical appetite. Perhaps, in our new genealogy of poets, if you listen, you can hear Eliot. But you could hear all of Chaucer’s sundry sources in his poetry—some of it was translation from said sources, translation under poetic licence—and you can hear Chaucer in Spenser’s language, and you can hear both Chaucer and Spenser in Keats.
Moreover, it is not as if each poetic generation is insensible of its lineage. Granted, Eliot resurfaced and whittled a great deal of poetic taste over the past century. He was undaunted by the proposition that classical allusions could not sit next to symbols and icons dredged from modernity, the consumer goods and by-products of industrialisation. In The Waste Land, Eliot’s pallid muse, uprooted and stolen from ‘the Hyacinth garden’ with that classically bedraggled, Ophelia-esque ‘hair wet’, and Eliot’s narrator’s own wan response (owing much to Keats’ hapless knight in La Belle Dame Sans Merci) lives peacefully amongst more modern thoughts.
These images feel quite at home in the same poem that cuts across the page with the pub landlord’s cry ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’; the same poem with a mortally material preoccupation, leafing through the detritus of ‘summer nights’: ‘empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends’. Characteristically, Eliot immediately follows this numb polysyndeton with the short, rueful line ‘The nymphs are departed.’ Absconded; hurtling back towards the empyrean, they leave behind only ‘the loitering heirs of City directors’, and we, bereft of nymphs, are brought forward by the hand, nymph fingers in mannish grip, to poetic and situational modernity.
It was a pleasant surprise when, in Taylor Swift’s song ‘The Lakes’, from her 2020 album Folklore, she references William Wordsworth (even the title is a soft deferral to Wordsworth’s Prelude). I like to hope and believe that when listeners, especially young people, encounter those gauzy references, they will happily, curiously, and not bewilderedly come into contact with this lineage of poetic tradition. They will write, unafraid, even if the things they have to say sound or shape themselves differently to the way Wordsworth and his contemporaries wrote.
‘Tell me what were my words worth?’ Swift writes. I hope these young writers accept the worth of their words as a given. Savannah Brown comments on the poetic imperfections and blemishes that extreme youth, or naivety, can inspire, and finds them not wanting poetic refinement, but instead, as they are, containing the trace metals of a gritty importance to them. ‘Naturally you’ll get better at writing as you get older – age grants you new tools and experience helps you get better at using them – but there is so much value in youth itself and the irreplicable perspective that it grants you. You’re able to make incredibly sharp observations because you’re young, not despite it.’
Modernity has lived at least a hundred years from Eliot’s time, but when held against the tapestry of passed time, she is still very young. And it does seem to be that Walther is attacking modernity, rather than Eliot. But of course, it helps to have a hero—or indeed a criminal, whether Eliot slayed Poetry as a valiant knight, or killed her in iciest cold blood. Many more people, I think, would click on an article implicating beloved Eliot as Poetry’s murderer, over an article musing on its author’s very personal malaise with modernity, and modern poetry.
Really, what Eliot did with Poetry is not so different to what his forefathers did. He stayed with her long enough in the sun to watch tiny lines form around her wide eyes, just as Shakespeare gave her her first grey hair, and as Homer knew her in childhood, whispering stories into her ear at night, when both of them ought to have been sleeping. She is friend to all. She has time for all.
We have never been able to book-end poetical influence, because someone has just read their first Keats poem, and they had never read anything that felt like it did before. We cannot police or decide which poets must influence us—they are not temporally bound, and will overcome printers and publishers; manuscript-burning-fires; the regiments of those select literati circles who decide what poetry is good and what is not.
Keats was famously self-effacing about his poetry. I quote here that plaintive apostrophe to Boccaccio found in his poem Isabella (Boccaccio wrote the source material of the Decameron which inspired Keats). ‘O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!’ Keats calls out with fanfare, soliciting the four-hundred-years-dead Italian poet’s ‘forgiving boon’ for Keats’s ‘venturing syllables.’
John Keats then, even in that early dawn of the nineteenth century (when so much brilliant poetry was yet to come) describes how Boccaccio really had ought to grant him ‘a pardon’, since ‘There is no other crime, no mad assail / To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet: / But it is done—succeed the verse or fail—’. Keats is doubtful about his ‘English tongue’ and, especially of its flushed modernity, insecure beside Boccaccio’s writing, the smooth ‘ghittern’ of ‘amorous roses.’ And yet Keats is now praised as one of our greatest poets, for all his anxieties.
But Poetry has neither need nor use for me as her clumsy votary. She has withstood and outwitted many greater smarts before. At her most gorgeous and simpering, Poetry has had gallant knights lie down at her feet and praise her. At her strongest, she has brandished blade and shield herself, flinging herself against the bombardment of critics who railed against her existence. Poetry is so easy to discredit: to be written off as doltish versification, childish nonsense. Culturally, transnationally, across matrices of time and place, she has thundered her way into each and every society, and demanded to be heard. What poetry does Walther read, or not read? What poetic circles were the subject of his analysis? What was his sample-size?
Eliot may well have encouraged new ways to write poetry, but the proposition of a method is not the end to the method itself. The impact of the founder may live: evolved, changed, adapted beautifully by its inheritors. In Raymond Antrobus’s stunning poem Echo (2017), I think, if you wanted to, you could find little testaments to Eliot’s legacy. But that does not compromise the singular voice of Antrobus himself, in the same way that Spenser is Spenserian, though he so loved Chaucer, and was so inspired by him.
Echo opens with cacophony, almost a parallel to the great swirling vortex of poetic voices and predecessors that we have available to us, likely infringing our own poetic creations both consciously and without us realising. ‘My ear amps whistle like they are singing / to Echo, goddess of noise, / the raveled knot of tongues, / of blaring birds, consonant crumbs / of dull doorbells, sounds swamped / in my misty hearing aid tubes.’ There is the Eliot-like placement of the old poetic trope against the modern object; classical deity beside ‘hearing aid’. And yet Antrobus is inimitably the voice of himself. I wonder whether Eliot would approve.
Is there any ‘self-sacrifice’ to be found in this kind of poetry? Why does Eliot urge ‘self-sacrifice’? Who does it serve? In making more room for the reader, do we prevent poets from feeling able to say as much as they might like in incisive, raw ways? Should poetry avoid blood and human mess as much as possible? Eliot adulated his inheritance of poetic images—are we permitted to add any new ones to the repertoire, alongside them? Folding our way back to Eliot, he writes: ‘…what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.’
Perhaps we have become more demanding that our own voices lead in Poetry’s dulcet choir (though I still believe that the sonneteers for hundreds of years have been adamantly certain of their individual importance). But a historical sensitivity to poetry does not mean we cannot yield and bend to accommodate the kinds of poetry which twenty-first century writers might like to write, and might like to read.
Antrobus describes himself in Echo as having been ‘…living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer.’ It is worth mentioning that Antrobus is deaf. Despite the ‘noiseless palace’, the ‘pulsating light’ (perhaps analogous to reading poetry, overhearing it) still reaches him. Though touched by poetic tradition, Antrobus is not beholden to it. Every writer must reconcile themselves to those who have gone before. Harold Bloom called it the ‘anxiety of influence’, the idea that, basically, everything worth saying has already been said. Whilst we cannot – nor should we! – disentangle ourselves from our poetic ancestry, not every interaction with the past writers needs to be on a battlefield. We are not trying to best them so much as sympathise with them, and write alongside them. There are certain distinctive elements of previous writers which we can embrace, certain elements we can try to counterpose, ways of coexisting with what has already been written, and playing with it. Why try to ignore the great corpus of poetry we already have? It does not threaten us!
Antrobus does things that Eliot would not have done. Like Eliot, he forces the collision of juxtaposing images (classical brought into close and breathy contact with modern). Unlike Eliot, he fortifies these modern images with the searing song of personal identity, which, in turn, bespeaks a greater cause: Antrobus’s writing of deafness and Blackness is not only pertinent because it is anecdotal, but because it is anecdotal, transhistorical, and universally relevant. So much would we forfeit if we barred the personal from poetry! In Echo, the very same poem that opens with an address to ‘the goddess of noise’, he goes on to talk about how ‘The day I clear out my dead father’s flat, / I throw away boxes of moulding LPs, Garvey, / Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl.’ The poetics of identity can coexist with whatever poetic tradition they choose to. It is not a point of contention. The poem’s most obvious theme of deafness lives assertively alongside any touch and tincture of past poetic tropes, and the spectres of past poets too.
Walther may continue mourning Poetry as long as he pleases. She is not gone, but she has never stayed still, and it is easy to mistake the changeling mischiefs of her comings and goings as absence; this I understand. But he must wait at his window, and leave, perhaps, a twine-bound offering of woodbine, and I think she will come as fast as her feet, overstepping her winding woodland paths, can carry her.