This week I am revisiting my previous blog post on the hubris of humanity and the struggle to control our own inventions. For centuries, humanity has embraced innovation from the creation of the modern library by the Assyrians to the onslaught of the nuclear age, yet against the backdrop of enormous “progress” humanity has struggled to hold some deeper truth. Each generation of humanity has tried to rededicate itself to humanity and philosophy under the shadow of a greater menace. What makes each age distinct is not this struggle or even the virtues sought, but the unique menace that threatens such virtues. The threat becomes as much a part of the culture as the art and literature itself. The conflict is defined by some greater unspoken battle, but the battle, the fist-fight for sanity, becomes a shared cultural experience which defines art and poetry for generations.
Poets are never defined by their stylistic influences or literary predecessors as much as they are defined by their times. Catullus’ poems are vulgar musings on rebellion and the life of an aesthete in the midst of the largest military bureaucracy the world had ever known. A.E. Housman’s work is riddled with mournful poems of traumatized soldiers stuck in the middle of military machinations far greater than themselves. The poetry of an age is defined not by the people of the day, but by the artistic threat of the times, by the rejection of conformity. As I have written in past blog posts, each civilization became successful by embracing something of the inhuman, the anti-emotional. Poetry, as the purest form of human emotion, is the natural offspring of that which seeks to stifle emotion, the natural Hegelian “anti-thesis” to the suffocating “thesis” of empire.
Novelists too have been defined by the struggles of their times in a similar way. Mark Twain tried to capture some innately American spirit of enterprise, freedom, and basic fair play while his nation and the radical cultural ideals of its founding were threatened by regionalism, war, and the horror of slavery. Saul Bellow, my favorite novelist, writes of the twentieth century as the age of materialism, the greatest threat to true art Coca-Cola bottles, television, and the seduction of the scholar by capitalist enterprise. His novels, however, are no cynical Dosteyevskyian examination of the evil of humanity. They are beautiful, complex, life-affirming odes to the artistry and poetry of the struggle against materialism. Each of his characters are scholars with their heads in Aristotle and Goethe who are forced to come to terms with some greater truth, forced to compromise with the inhuman.
One of the most common misconceptions is that art and poetry are the words and images of the past, the stone carvings or yellow pages rotting in stuffy museums. Poetry and art are dynamic and deeply relevant. Culture is much more than beauty, far more than haughty Appolonian pleasures. At their core, poetry and art attempt to make the inhuman human, to find humanity in the inhumanity. In Dangling Man, Bellow’s deeply restless protagonist writes of the “lack of the human in the too-human.” “We find it,” he writes, “as others before us have found it in the last two hundred years, and we bolt for ‘Nature.’” At its essence, the role of art is to fill in this gap, to carve humanity from the concrete and showcase truth. Culture cannot hope to carry this Herculean burden from thousands of years away. Culture, poetry, has to be ultra-present and ultra-relevant. Aristotle cannot be made to explain modern anti-intellectualism, just as we wouldn’t trust Jefferson to understand modern party politics.
The role of classics in all this is complicated. The ancients are universally relevant, but also universally archaic. What modern culture demands is a redefinition of the classics, a reimagining of classical ideals, not to recreate Athenian democracy or condemn the tyrranies of Caesar all over again, but to better understand our own times. Culture must spar with modernity. Whether Ovid’s depiction of hubristic Daedalus or Ferlinghetti’s trigger-happy militarists are relevant today is up to us, but their struggle is the same as ours: the struggle to make the inhuman human. The power of poetry comes not from rejecting those modern clashes for cynicism, but by embracing them, and trying to create humanity from their chaos.
Is poetry more honest than prose? Could you imagine being Shakespeare and creating words? Did he know what he was doing?
I was just thinking. Do you even need words for poetry? Listen to Ashokan Farewell, it’s beautiful. What about classical music before WWII? Yes. Muslim prayer and chanting? Lee Greenwood’s voice? Blood Upon the Risers. Do we need any sound? How about yoga? I understand the need for language to move society and find the meaning for existence, but what about art? Nature? We can create or change definitions. Poetry conveys meaning. I don’t know how it rhymes the brain. Too scary for me to know.
When I think of logic, I think of Aristotle. He invented logic, and used that brain for logical thinking in a dozen topics. Biology, ethics, politics, astronomy, metaphysics, etc. I guess Descartes and Kant come next. I don’t understand Kant. Poetry humanizes, but logic advances. I don’t know what or how logic contributes to the meaning of existence, I’m not even sure what we’re defining as poetry. The conversation with the bartender or hair stylist? Novels? Tom Cotton on Fox News? Donald Trump’s Tweets? Civil War music. Irish folk music. Formal settings like magazines or slam poetry. Your stuff. Or, could it be every human’s voice because 99% of us can read in a safe, secure society. I know nothing…
It depends what you mean. Poetry is certainly more effective at humanizing our world and struggling with the deeper questions of existence. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Poetry is more effective than logic and reason, eh?