One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have disliked the poetry immediately preceding theirs. The classic critical explanation: The poet, or generation of poets, must push back against preceding tendencies to achieve creative self-assertion. It’s a kind of Oedipal hostility toward the father—not so much “anxiety of influence” as filial hostility. And this is probably true, from a creative standpoint, or as an example of artistic psychology. Of equal interest, though, is the remarkably consistent way in which this has been spun by the poets involved.
Chaucer satirizes the “rim, ram, ruf” of the alliterative Anglo-Saxon poets who precede him. Chaucer’s superior versecraft is actually all of French derivation; so, as it happens, are England’s rulers at the time. The idea of Chaucer (Troilus and Criseyde is entirely in rime royal, a direct French import) as a native poet catering to an essentially foreign aesthetic puts The Canterbury Tales’ satire of Regular English Folk in a slightly different light. He was warmhearted about it, of course, in his very Chaucerian way, but he was writing mostly about peasants and commoners for Frenchified aristocrats at a Frenchified court. To think about it analogously, he resembles a satirist or critic of traditional non-Western society or religion writing in a literary form (or language, or ideally both) for Western elites in New York and London. There is great fame to be garnered by catering to the tastes of the educated elites; the same factors that pushed Chaucer to the top back then have, over the past 40 years, benefited V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. “Rim, ram, ruf”: Chaucer represents the introduction of rhymed, sophisticated, Continental poetic technique to supercede the rough alliterative—and very “native-island”—coarseness of Beowulf. It’s a totally false dichotomy, of course: Books have been written about how Beowulf weaves in lines from the Aeneid and was probably written by a highly erudite, Latin-speaking priest, and not some Hoary Bard in the mead-hall.
For Chaucer, that stuff is old and crude, removed from the way his contemporaries spoke and lived, and as a consequence, silly without being funny; this poetry, Chaucer’s, is more “real”…even when he’s writing about Troilus and Cressida in ancient Troy, and even though Anglo-Saxon verse contains its share of intensely personal, vividly human poems (like “The Seafarer” or Pearl). Still, we tend to agree with Chaucer, creator of the Miller and the Wife of Bath, and we accept his claim almost universally.
And this is the crucial story, the pattern that will recur: The poet supercedes the preceding style by a superior presentation of “reality.” Chaucer is the first time the claim is made. It will be made repeatedly after this, and with astonishing consistency:
Shakespeare presents the bombastic players in Hamlet overdoing the pathos of the fall of Troy. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” Hamlet instructs his players to speak the speech “as I pronounced it to you, trippingly off the tongue,” and not to scream and shout or make elaborate stylized arm gestures. (Elsewhere Shakespeare makes a dig at “same-metre ballad-mongers.”) The blank verse drama, which was the hot new form back then, is “reality.” The play-within-a-play about Priam that Shakespeare satirizes is backward-looking and overly stylized—identical to how Chaucer presents “rim, ram, ruf” alliterative verse.
Wordsworth and Coleridge declare against the poetic diction (sun = “Phoebus”, etc.) of the 18th century poets. This is why that preface to Lyrical Ballads is such a classroom text: It is the clearest and bluntest articulation of this tendency. You poet write backward-looking, artificial work; we write in real language about real people. Of course, the most famous poem in Lyrical Ballads ends up being Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which is a fake ballad (retro form) in willfully archaic language (retro diction) about a subject last made famous by an Anglo-Saxon poet (cf. “The Seafarer”), but don’t think that any Wordsworth-lover, Coleridge included, has ever picked up on the weird, in-your-face irony of that.
And then a hundred or so years later, you have Eliot and Pound making the same claim, the standard Modernist claim, about the Victorian and Edwardian rhymed-quatrain poetry that preceded theirs: We write in real language about the real world (faces on the Metro, worlds revolving like old women gathering fuel in parking lots, etc.), while Victorians write in stilted, “artificial poetic diction” about unreal fantasy-worlds of knights-errant. Of course, the irony here is that the Victorians actually wrote a drastically greater amount about their contemporary world, and in language that cats and dogs could understand—Kipling used to churn out newspaper-poems about, well, newspaper-stories, and Tennyson used to throw down public occasional poems in his capacity as poet laureate. Meanwhile the here-now Modernists were reaching back to Provencal and Chinese and the Upanishads, and in the cases of Pound and Eliot, printing untranslated foreign phrases in their work. It was the first time the claim of a truer representation of “reality” was coupled with an unabashedly aristocratic complexity of expression. The Modernists didn’t write the bestselling, most popular work of their time; the bestselling, most popular poet in Britain during Modernism’s heyday was probably Robert Bridges; the Modernists wrote, like Chaucer, for the aristocracy, only the aristocracy was one of education this time, not of wealth. And their claim, too, was that they represented the contemporary world and contemporary speech more accurately.
Which was always what was going on in America: Whitman and William Carlos Williams made the identical claims for themselves, a simpler language to express the America around them better, Whitman with long lines and Williams with skinny lines. Leaves of Grass didn’t stir the masses on publication the way Whitman wanted it to…although when a member of the New England elite (Emerson) wrote to praise it, his note was promptly turned into a blurb by this supposedly populist poet. Williams’s epic, Paterson, similarly went unread by the Regular Americans he wrote it for, and about. About fifty years later, Robert Lowell makes his claim about Life Studies as the breakthrough work of real life and real language against the excessive formalism of…Robert Lowell. But let’s not forget how, ten or so years before that, the Beats were making an identical claim against the poetry of their day, and turning off genteel readers in droves. This will be the standard Populist Paradox of American poetry, and of English language poetry in general. The poets who attract and delight a large readership (talents like Billy Collins and Nikki Giovanni, in our day, and Robert Bridges back in the early 20th century) go unregarded by aristocratic circles; the touch of popular adoration taints them somehow; they can be poets laureate (Bridges, Collins), but they can’t be the toast of the academies (Collins has won none of the three major prizes for American poetry). Simultaneously, the educated elites search for better, newer ways of writing the Contemporary Moment in Contemporary Language, and thereby produce material (Ashbery; Armantrout; name your avant-gardist) that is incomprehensible to the people to whose moment and language they strive to give literary form.
As a side note, the overall tendency—out with the old, in with the new—sometimes results from the impetus of powerful poets who look backward and write “artificially”—and do so all too well. Wordsworth and Coleridge are struggling not so much against “poetic diction” as against Alexander Pope and John Dryden, who undertook massive translations of classical epics and Horace, and who perfected the style that Romanticism rose against: a verse style that was, however perversely to our tastes, purged of natural observation, irrational or ambiguous metaphor, intense passion, demotic or coarse language, poignant portraits of common folk, the detritus of contemporary life (find me the coach-and-four in the Essay on Man), and all autobiographical confessions or anecdotes. Pope and Dryden did tight satire best—not passionate outcries or dreamy visions.
Lord Byron mastered the new style in his youth (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) and swung hard to the old style in his later career (Don Juan), losing readers along the way—the Londoners who swooned to his Byronic heroes were offended or incomprehending when faced with his satirical masterpiece.
Similarly, Eliot and Pound come after the immensely popular poets Lord Alfred Tennyson, who wrote about Guinevere and Arthur in Idylls of the King, and Rudyard Kipling (whose “Barrack-Room Ballads,” incidentally, did more with demotic spoken English than The Wasteland.) The Beats and the Confessional school both, in some way, revolt against the critical ascendancy of Eliot himself, who had established the ideal of an impersonal, allusive poetry.
This, by the way, is the Eliot Pattern: The poet in his youth reviled for being too close to the unwashed populace (“O O O that Shakespeherian rag”) was resented, in his old age, for not being unwashed or populist enough. T. S. Eliot, in 1963, was stuck in a retro fantasy world of myth and Catholicism and verse drama; Ginsberg, or wait, no, Lowell, no, Plath was really talking about real life in real language. We could just as easily name this pattern after many another poet-revolutionary: Wordsworth eventually went conservative in his politics, and in his old age turned out politically minded sonnets; Byron stayed arch-Romantic in his politics, but the published cantos of his last unfinished epic, Don Juan, had already sent up Romanticism quite brilliantly. Anne Sexton, in her own late work, turned to a fantasy world, literally—one of her last books consisted almost entirely of retellings of fairy-tales. Who knows, if Plath had lived to this day, whether she might not have held court at a university symposium, telling admiring students not to read her early work, like those Ariel poems, as mere diaristic confessions? to recognize instead the artistry and scope of the historical and literary references, and the way the narrator, who is not necessarily the poet, presents her father, her children, her husband, herself?
Of course, there’s one idea about poetic revolution that involves the art of prose. If we think of poetry and the novel as ways of sequencing words without a division between them, if we think of verse as patterned rhythm (or at least as interrupted rhythm, rhythm interrupted by linebreaks) and prose as continuous rhythm, the real poetic revolution may have occurred outside of verse entirely. The prose novel in the 19th and 20th centuries has attained, from Charles Dickens to Toni Morrisson and Cormac McCarthy, a level of verbal distinction by no means inferior to the poetry contemporaneous with it. And it has done the work of connecting with large numbers of readers, and the work of portraying real life in real language. Some might claim that such work is being done by prose nonfiction and prose teleplays in our own time, as the novel cedes much of its cultural centrality. As we enter the 21st century, in a last bittersweet paradox, prose is doing everything poetic revolutionaries have dreamed of doing for the past century. The final stage of successive revolutions in poetry, the endpoint of all the unrest, may well have been the downfall of the quarreling revolutionaries themselves. Something similar happened in France: La Revolution devoured the ancien regime–but picked her teeth with Robespierre.