Poetic Injustice

Poetic Injustice and Performative Outrage

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Once poets spoke for the age and strutted the cultural stage as stars. What would European romanticism have been without Byron or Schiller?

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French symbolism without Rimbaud or Baudelaire? Anglo-American modernism without Eliot or Pound? It is easy now to forget just how ubiquitous poetry once was, and how central to the cultivated life. Schoolchildren were compelled to memorise long stanzas, until the rhythms of Tennyson or Longfellow were inscribed indelibly upon young minds. New poetry was reviewed as widely as novels, biographies and cookbooks are today. Now-forgotten poets such as America's John Greenleaf Whittier could become as famous, sometimes on the strength of a single poem, as actors, tycoons or politicians.

Verse was humorous, populist, narrative, satirical or polemical; it was lyrical, personal or learnedly esoteric. Great occasions were marked by poems whose phrases sometimes entered the language, at least for a while. All that, however, was a long time ago. Today, contemporary poetry seems more akin to collecting butterflies, painting-by-numbers or gazing at stars: a nice pursuit for enthusiasts, but of little significance to anyone else. For many, the only poems that matter are advertising jingles, pop-music lyrics or rap music.

Yet, to most people, song lyrics and rap remain one thing, poetry another. Whatever odd forms it may take, poetry is still usually assumed to consist of words to be spoken or read on their own, relished for their sound and meaning, not merely as an accompaniment to music, dancing or the latest pop video. Old-fashioned, just-the-words poetry continues to matter in places where artistic expression is repressed. This year, Index on Censorship, which chronicles the worldwide persecution of writers, devoted its 25th anniversary issue to poets.

They can still end up in jail in Turkey, Iran, China and many African countries: the jackboot still fears the quill pen. But when repression has ended, interest in poetry often evaporates. Russia is the home of such poet-heroes as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak and Brodsky; officially tolerated poets there once filled football stadiums and people once risked their freedom, and sometimes their lives, to read something new by a forbidden hand.

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Today Russia seems to have turned its back on contemporary poetry, now that made-for-television movies, hamburger joints and other temptations are available. In America and Britain, two countries with great poetic traditions and equally great poetic freedom, poetry has become more than culturally marginalised: it has fallen off the map. It is rarely reviewed in the pages of newspapers or popular magazines. Most big publishers, under pressure from their corporate bean-counters, dropped their poetry lists long ago.

The money-man, however, is no more dangerous to verse than is the modernist, with his avant-garde ethos and public-be-damned attitude. Contemporary poetry is often obscure or self-referential, neither scans nor rhymes nor tells a story, is impossible to memorise, is often about the act of writing poetry itself, is humourless, and can be more like a puzzle than a poem. Small wonder that so many general readers, even those who lap up novels or buy theatre tickets or visit art galleries, have given up on contemporary poetry.

When was the last time you bought a book of contemporary poetry?

Can you remember even one poem by a living poet? Here arises a puzzle. Ironically, as poetry has become less significant as a cultural form, more of it has been produced. Most of them want to see their work in print, even if few people actually read it. Hundreds of small magazines and presses exist to oblige them, usually publishing their work in minute quantities. Len Fulton of Dustbooks, which publishes the Small Press Review , receives books from new small presses and another new magazines each month. Many little publishers do not survive long. This flood of versifying flows year in, year out: and it is almost completely unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Some of the verse is good. But for a general reader wanting to sample it, the sheer volume is intimidating. To find something rewarding, the curious outsider has to plough through piles of dross, with little to guide him. Ask for advice, and an expert happily rattles off a list of names. Unfortunately, a second poetic expert will come up with an entirely different list. Third expert, third list. There are some fine poets writing today, but most people, with so many other claims on their time, can be forgiven for not finding them.

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So is poetry doomed forever to be like knitting, only less fun? Maybe not. Surprisingly, in the past few years it has begun to make something of a comeback. And the comeback has been led, not by more publications, but by more public readings. In the s, poetry readings have become hip. Many are no longer the soporific, reverential affairs of the past, but lively, even boisterous, events. Some readings attract hundreds of people. In the final round, the two poets have to improvise a poem from a word pulled out of a hat. The victor, cheered or jeered by the crowd, is awarded a trophy and heavyweight belt.

For some people, such razzmatazz is a long way from what poetry is, or should be, about. Mr Troupe, however, disagrees.

He is a two-time winner of the American Book Award and a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California in San Diego, and he sees no inherent contradiction between showmanship and seriousness. But I think you can have mastery, you can have thought-provoking, difficult poems, and still be able to lift the poem off the page for an audience. And if you're going to read in front of people, you've got to give them a real performance.

Is the vogue for public reading merely a fad, the final debasement of poetry as a pretentious sort of cabaret? Or is it the beginning of a genuine revival? The answer depends on what you think went wrong in the first place. It depends, that is, on whether poets are responsible for their own isolation, or whether poetry was doomed anyway to be shoved aside by television and films and popular music and web-surfing.

The past is swept away to render the present and the future less heavy; penitence need not be given expression. Her amazement at seeing the courtiers can well be quoted as an instance of utter naivety cf. How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Actually, it is her attitude which provides the most explicit hope for a happy future.

Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would never be quiet, For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder, Nothing but thunder! In The Tempest , at any rate, poetic justice could only amount to an orgy of whipping or thundering. The epilogue rather bluntly couches a conventional appeal for applause in Christian terminology, thus reaching out from the world of the theatre to that of the audience 12 :. It is up to us, to the individual spectator, if he or she will follow this appeal. Summing up we should note that the Christian concepts of grace and forgiveness are embedded in a series of explanations by which the concept of justice is transcended:.

First of all, forgiveness and reconciliation are expedient to Prospero, because without a reconciliation he could not leave the island. Justice is bypassed in favour of utility and expediency. Thirdly, justice is relegated to the concept of vengeance, which is introduced as the opposite of virtue.

It is human virtue or perfection which makes Prospero forgo the justice implied in being avenged on his enemies. Like the conclusions of many other plays, the ending of The Tempest appears indicative of the natural and divine order of things, but, while in a play like Cymbeline pagan deities make sure that justice is done, 13 The Tempest transcends justice by foregrounding the Christian concepts of mercy and forgiveness. In both King Lear and The Tempest central issues are left unresolved.

Both senility and innocence may—or may not—be the containers of some spiritual truth. Spectators are invited to continue speculating on the issue of justice on the basis of extra-theatrical, Christian discourse. If the tenets of Christianity are true, maybe there is a chance for Cordelia to be alive and partake of the felicity of the Christian heaven, and maybe Christian mercy can extend to Italian courtly villains even before they openly announce their repentance. These interpretations go beyond the kind of justice a human judge, a poet or a pagan god can dispense.

Shakespeare follows theatrical conventions in avoiding preaching, but he does not fit his plays into any closed or conventional system of dispensing poetic justice.

He rather establishes links to other fields of discursive experience which may or may not be followed by the individual spectator or reader. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: OUP, Charney, Maurice. Cox, John D. Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith. London: Faber and Faber, Graff, Gerald, and James Phelan.

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