You’re under no obligation to like all the remarks or attitudes you come across in art. Past artists reflect the prejudices and beliefs of their time, just as our twenty-first-century writers will reveal, to later readers, the (frequently unconscious) presumptions and beliefs of our era. It is notoriously hard to believe that morally we are much superior to our ancestors. Social attitudes may progress in one or another area (we in America no longer recommend public hangings or beheadings), but we are sure to seem as backward and ignorant to our descendants as even our recent ancestors seem to us.
Nor are artists necessarily morally better than others in their private or public actions. Genius does not guarantee moral probity in the ordinary activities of life. What, then, are the moral obligations of artists insofar as they are artists? (As people, they exist under the same moral imperatives as anyone else, and are conditioned by their cultures in their interpretation of those imperatives.) How — to put our question another way — can artists betray their artistic principles?
They can betray themselves as artists, and their art itself, by saying what society wants to hear, rather than what seems true; by papering over the actual with the agreeable or the socially enjoined; by falling into the comfortable habits of the past instead of reinventing their medium. If, however, the artist has the talent to work the medium accurately — to reveal in stylized language the structure of reality as it is delivered by perception, emotion, and thought — without being cowed by convention or audience response, there is a chance that the artwork will succeed.
This does not mean that a work has to be composed entirely freely, with no external conditions laid upon it. On the contrary. Many commissioned artworks have been spectacularly successful — Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s cantatas for Sunday. In fact, nothing is more stimulating to some artists than a patron’s saying, “I’d like you to make a painting in a semicircular shape to fit that space over the door; and I’d like it to represent Apollo; and you may have exactly four ounces of gold leaf to decorate it with.” Poetry is less often commissioned than music, sculpture, or painting, yet William Blake represents his Songs of Innocence as “commissioned” by a child-Muse:
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me,
“Pipe a song about a Lamb”;
So I piped with merry cheer.
“Piper, pipe that song again” —
So I piped, he wept to hear.
And Shakespeare’s sonnets seem to have begun as a commissioned sequence urging an aristocratic young man to marry and beget an heir.
A poem sometimes seeks out its own commissions, so to speak, by casting itself as a letter replying to a request or a question. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges asks Hopkins, in a letter, why he has sent him no poems lately. In response, Hopkins sends a verse-letter in the form of a sonnet (“To R.B.”) explaining that inspiration has forsaken him:
Sweet fire, the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
Oh then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss,
Now yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.
We may suppose that this poem might never have been written without the pressure of Bridges’s “commissioning” question. It is always useful, in considering the attitudes of a poem, to ask what has occasioned it. Has an anterior question, reproach, or command brought it into being? If we do not ask this question, we are likely to mistake the poem’s attitudes, values, and tone.
Consider the following example:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,°well-known garment
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love, still telling what is told.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76 has usually been read as a self-interrogation in which Shakespeare laments the barrenness and sameness of his poems. Improbably enough, according to this reading, Shakespeare thought ill of his own work, accusing himself of a boring similarity in all his poems:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
If this were all we had of the poem, we might indeed think Shakespeare is reproaching himself. But the next part of the sonnet shows that this is an “answer-poem,” replying to an implied question previously asked by Shakespeare’s young patron: “Why do you bring me nothing but sonnets, old-fashioned poems?” Shakespeare replies, “O know, sweet love, I always write of you”:
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love, still telling what is told.
Armed with this knowledge of implied question and answer, we can now better imagine the “antecedent scenario” of the poem. The fashionable young man, who has by now received many sonnets from Shakespeare, is surprised that his poet keeps writing in this old-fashioned form, already in existence for over two hundred years. Other poets have gone on to new things. Why can’t his poet write a satire, or a picturesque narrative, or a debate-poem? “Why,” asks the up-to-date young man of the poet, “are you always writing the same old sonnets, all the same sort, so that everyone who sees them says, ‘Oh, of course, another piece by Shakespeare’?” And he continues, “How about doing something new next time?” Shakespeare, only too conscious of the young man’s ignorant and trendy dismissal of his incomparable poems, gives the soft answer that turns away wrath, repeating and quoting the young man’s reproach, but finding nonetheless a way to defend himself. We can now reconstruct the poem as it should be read: not as Shakespeare’s reproach to himself but as his reproof of the young man:
Why [you ask] is my verse so barren of “new pride”?
So far from “variation” or “quick change”?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To “new-found methods” and to “compounds strange”?
Why write I still “all one,” “ever the same,”
And keep invention in a “noted weed,”
That every word doth almost “tell my name,”
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love, still telling what is told.
This deft but gentle rebuke reminds the young man, at the close, that nobody looks up at the sky at dawn and says, “The sun again! How boring and repetitive!” There are things so precious — the sun and love being among them — that we never have enough of them. And poetry, after all, never has new words — all the words are already present in the language. The only thing any poet can do is “dress [that is, arrange] old words new,” re-spending the words that poetic predecessors have already spent.
Our view of the attitudes expressed by the speaker in this sonnet depends very much on whether we see it as self-reproach or as a rebuke to the young man. This reminds us that before we can evaluate the attitudes and values expressed in a poem, we must try to be as accurate as possible in describing them. These are delicate questions; and the sophistication of poems (and of the people who write them) warns us against too hasty a judgment. One has to understand a poem well before judging it. (And really understanding the implications of a poem usually depends on having read many other poems by that poet.)
Evaluation depends on where you stand with respect to the things described in a poem. Until fairly recently, the poems that Langston Hughes wrote about Harlem — representing such realities as sexual intercourse before marriage, marital infidelity, children born out of wedlock, prostitution and pimping, and the strife between Jewish landlords and black tenants — were simply not represented in general anthologies of American poetry or anthologies of poetry by blacks. Much of Hughes’s subject matter seemed indecent to whites and blacks alike; and black anthologists wanted to print poems that were “a credit to the race.” Hughes’s veracity — his refusal to betray the structure of reality as he saw it for something more acceptable — is today much admired, but was in his lifetime often criticized. Judges were judging not his art — represented in his striking sequences on Harlem and his adaptation of jazz rhythms — but what they saw as his failure to condemn immorality, on the one hand, and his washing dirty social linen in public, on the other.
It is not desirable to let a difference in values blind us to the imaginative mastery of language and form in such poets as the atheist Robinson Jeffers (whose nihilism was much criticized) or the social realists Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg. The nineteenth-century anthologists who censored Charles Baudelaire’s depiction of lesbianism are comparable to those who censor Ginsberg’s depiction of homosexuality. The accurate representation of reality is, for the artist, the highest morality. It is immoral to conceal the way human beings live, or what human beings think. The tension between allowing an artist free expression and, for instance, shielding the sensibilities of the young is a real one; and most societies have worked out a gradual scale according to which the young can be exposed to art of increasing moral complexity.
However, in countries with active political or religious censorship, where free expression is not permitted at all, artists perform marvelous end-runs around forbidden topics. During the Cold War years, ingenious Eastern European poets in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and other Iron Curtain countries constructed allegorical poems that were seemingly “harmless” but which everyone could read as a coded critique of the regime. Even under censorship, art will find a way to be free — though sometimes the artist may suffer imprisonment and death.
It is impossible not to notice the attitudes and values expressed in a poem. In fact, they are often the first thing we do notice. Yet a criticism of attitudes and values alone does not come to grips with what a poet really has to offer, which is a personal sense of the world, an idiosyncratic temperament, a unique imagination, and a new linguistic lens through which readers may see the world afresh.
How, then, are we to evaluate the success of a poem if we cannot base our judgment on its attitudes and values? Robert Lowell, in the poem “Epilogue,” printed last in his final book, Day by Day, suggests one way. Despairing of his unrhymed modern “snapshots” of reality, he asks why he can’t make something as beautiful as the radiant interiors painted by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. He is thinking particularly of one painting, which shows a girl reading a letter; Lowell imagines her “yearning” for its absent writer. She stands by a casement window from which light steals across the wall behind her, illuminating the map on the wall (which is, in Vermeer and elsewhere, a figure for the abstraction of art). Here is the poem:
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme —
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
At its middle, the poem collapses in despair: “All’s misalliance.” But then the poet gets a second wind: What is wrong with describing his life truthfully as he sees it? “Yet why not say what happened?” He resolves his poem by realizing that though his “snapshot[s]” may not look superficially like Vermeer’s paintings, he and Vermeer have in common the artist’s truest motive — accuracy of representation. The artist can vow accuracy, but he or she must pray for the other ingredient in successful art — grace. “Pray for the grace of accuracy,” the poet tells himself. One part of his function as a poet is a duty to set down contemporary facts of life before they disappear; but he can only hope and pray that by the grace of aesthetic power he can give to the people of his century (who will otherwise be anonymous numbers in a census, “poor passing facts”) their “living name.” That living name is conferred only by the grace of art — its aesthetic power that often seems bestowed from the outside, like religious “grace.” By the end of the poem, the poet can stop referring to his work by the ugly and clipped word “snapshot,” and can speak of it as “writing with light” — a “photo-graph.” He, like Vermeer, will also become a writer with light if he can attain “the grace of accuracy.”
This poem suggests that we must judge any poem we read as a representation of its author’s perception of reality; but we must also judge it as an experiment in its medium, according to its portion of “grace” — what Hopkins called “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.”
If, in one direction, we judge poetry, it is also true that in another direction the poem judges us. It looks at us with a steady gaze and dares us to judge ourselves by its revelations. “The poet judges, not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing,” said Walt Whitman. To observe and convey reality is itself a judgment on reality, even if the poem makes no explicit judgment on the reality conveyed.
Rita Dove, a contemporary African-American poet, writes about the “poetic justice” of art in a poem about a painting she saw in Germany by a modern painter, Christian Schad. He had painted, in the twenties, in Berlin, a portrait of two circus “freaks”: one of them was a man with a bone disease that caused his shoulder bones to protrude like wings. He was billed as “Agosta the Winged Man.” The other “freak” was a perfectly normal black woman who, billed as “Rasha, the Black Dove,” was displayed as an exotic jungle creature, dancing entwined with a boa constrictor. The black Rita Dove, seeing “the Black Dove” — who, but for an accident of time, could have been herself — depicts Schad, the painter, planning the double portrait he is about to begin, attempting to decide where its power will lie. Is it in the mercilessness of his unsparing view of his subjects? No,
The canvas,
not his eye, was merciless. . . .
Schad would place him° Agosta
on a throne, a white sheet tucked
over his loins, the black suit jacket
thrown off like a cloak.
Agosta had told him
of the medical students
at the Charité,° a hospital
that chill arena
where he perched on
a cot, his torso
exposed, its crests and fins
a colony of birds, trying
to get out . . .
and the students,
lumps caught
in their throats, taking notes.
Ah, Rasha’s
foot on the stair.
She moved slowly, as if she carried
the snake around her body
always. . . .
Agosta in
classical drapery, then,
and Rasha at his feet.
Without passion. Not
the canvas
but their gaze,
so calm,
was merciless.
Is it the painter’s eye, seeing the social marginalization of his subjects (one black, one deformed) that is merciless in its accuracy? Or is it the canvas, demanding how paint shall be used, and how the picture will be composed, that is merciless? Schad decides that neither of these is true. It is neither his eye nor the canvas that is merciless, but the gaze of his two subjects, saying, “Here we are. This is how we were seen, in Berlin, in 1929.” The gaze is merciless because it is, like the portrait which depicts it, “without passion.” The painting is not propaganda; it is not “social protest art”; it is simply an accurate transcription (with the “grace” of its compositional arrangements with which Schad has taken such care) of “Reality, Berlin, 1929.” Nothing more than this is necessary; but how hard it is to ensure that the eye and the canvas and the gaze maintain this accuracy of perception — without exaggeration, without deletion. There have been other suggestions by poets on how to make and judge art, each understandable within its culture and its century. The religious poet George Herbert thought that if one wrote for God alone, one would write well: “If I please him, I write fine and wittie.” Poems that last for a long time tend to satisfy many criteria of success, and to interest many generations of future writers. It is, in the last analysis, chiefly by the admiration of other writers that writers become “canonized.” In one strand of the canonical male line (male because until recently it was chiefly males who were educated in complex uses of language) Spenser admires Chaucer, Milton admires Spenser, Wordsworth admires Milton, Keats admires Wordsworth, Tennyson admires Keats, Eliot admires Tennyson, Auden admires Eliot, Merrill admires Auden, and so it has gone. It is no accident that almost every contemporary woman poet in America, from Adrienne Rich through Jorie Graham to Lucie Brock-Broido, has written a poem to or about Emily Dickinson, or that Dickinson herself wrote a poem about her favorite woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or that Elizabeth Bishop wrote a poem to Marianne Moore, creating a comparable ongoing line of female “canonization.” It is also true that canonization crosses gender lines: T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and A. R. Ammons admired the poetry of Marianne Moore; Hopkins admired Christina Rossetti; Dickinson admired Emerson; and Moore admired La Fontaine. It is the admiration of poets for each other’s accomplishments in the medium of language that keeps poetry alive; and poets keep poetry honest in their fine-tuned admiration of any writing that is not only “accurate with respect to the structures of reality” but also full of “the grace of accuracy,” giving the “poor passing facts” of every era their “living name.”