Part XII

Content:

Mention poetic content and cannons roar across battle lines more a tradition than any specific in prosody.  As the armies of the night in this conflict blast away at each other, the obvious may be missed:  the strength and importance of content is dependent on scale.  And, even in an epic, content is usually composed from widely available material.   The latter was as true in a 16th century monarchy as it was in a 20th century democracy.  It seems a thing obvious.

But wait!  What is "content?"  As with many phrases and words in the poetry "police action" (no war having been declared), "content," while progandistically attractive at the beginning (as a PhD candidate might say), fails to convey much beyond its six letters shortly thereafter.   Therefore, for the purposes of discussion, content is defined as the subject matter of the poem, including its plot or incident, its characters, any action and consequence it describes, any idea it attempts to communicate, and its setting.   Yes, most poems have some sort of "content."   But one suspects more is needed in the definition to satisfy the bemoaners of "contentless" poems.  What do they mean?   One guesses the following, that a poem accused of being empty of content has little in its subject matter that is emotionally or intellectually engaging to a contemporary reader.  In other words, if a poem is solely an illumination of a form, whether one taken from the tradition or one contrived by the author, then it has little value beyond its clever organization of words.   How graciously Platonic!  Imagine if such standards were applied to painting, music, the movies, novels, or any other work of art.

This is not intended as hostility toward plot, idea, character, action and consequence, and setting.  But consider the following:

Start with lyric poetry.  A lyric has no space to elaborate on intricacies of character, plot, act, or consequence.  A perfect poem to illustrate this is Shelley's Ozymandias.   While to a young reader, the revelation that a great king and all his works will blow away in the sands of time might seem profound, it's a commonplace.  If you're a five-year-old in Rome or Mexico City, you've already learned this.  The sole value of Shelley's poem lies in beautiful illumination of this commonplace.

                             Ozymandias
                                 by Percy Bysshe Shelley

         I met a traveller from an antique land
         Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
         Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
         Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
         And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
         Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
         Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
         The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
         And on the pedestal these words appear:
         'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
         Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
         Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
         Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
         The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Lovely.  At the time it was written, however, drawings of such scenes by wanderers in Egypt and Greece were regularly engraved for printing in books, as photographs of Baalbeck, the Acropolis and the Pyramids so often appear today.   Whether you experience them that way or firsthand, the reminder of mortality is vivid, but it's as old as that "shattered visage".   Everybody knows.  Shelley's gift to us is a work of art.  That's what engages us nearly two hundred years after it was written; the idea wasn't new then or ten thousand years before that. What about a different kind of poem, say, a portrait?
 

Witch-Wife
    by Edna St. Vincent Millay

She is neither pink nor pale,
  And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
  And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
  In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
 Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
  And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
  And she never will be all mine.

Not a perfect poem (the last line might read better as "And she never will be mine");  its meter wanders.  Nonetheless it illuminates the point.  Millay may have had a particular person in mind, but the poem explores an archetype, and in the voice of a husband also an archetype.  Archetypes are familiar -- those first definitions we are born with, according to Jungians, or learn in early childhood, according to Freudians.  They are almost never "true" of any individual, but will skew our perceptions until we learn to grasp and define them as entities that, unacknowledged, crowd our view.  None of that is in the poem, which is Millay's artistic abstraction of an archetype familiar to anyone.  Its value lies in vivid language, careful selection of details, and concentration on a through line --  "she never will be all mine."  As content goes, however, it's a conversation in a bar.  The poem is still read because Millay illuminated a commonplace. It's a work of art.

What about a lyric that attempts to show something about science?   There are a lot of these.  One of the best is A.D. Hope's "X-Ray Photograph," briefly excerpted:

        Mapped by its panoply of shade,
        There is the skull I shall never see,
        Dark, hollow in its galaxy,
        From which the blazing eye must fade....

In sum, the content of the poem is Hope's perception of his future in an X-ray.  While the doctor may have been looking for a tumor, Hope saw "the face my future wears."   Beautiful -- but again, an illumination of a commonplace, a poet's well-dressed observation that many millions had already seen in 1944, when the poem was first published.

Some lyric poems attempt to illuminate complex ideas from science.  An area of frequent interest, one the author has engaged, is quantum theory.  But, one remembers Richard Feynman, the leader of the second generation of quantum physicists, who said to a reporter who asked for a summation of his Nobel Prize-winning work:  "if I could sum it up in a five minute interview, I wouldn't have won the Nobel."   Now, a facetious critic might suggest that only a scientist untrained in composition would say that, that a real writer wouldn't have such problems.   But Feynman, while no Loren Eiseley, was a fine writer who illuminated quantum physics in several books to the larger public.  But even there he couldn't include a fifty-page mathematical proof employing advanced calculus whose full explication might have filled  volumes.  Who but a mathematician cum physicist could read that?   The best Feynman could do was to explain general ideas and explore some consequences.  Hope, in his poem "X-ray Photograph," followed the same light; he took the complex underpinnings of X-ray photography as a given and explored the consequences of viewing an X-ray of himself.  As a result, both the background and the content of the poem border on the trivial.  We get no illumination of science and nothing surprising about Hope himself except one, vital thing: the poem, realized through elegant prosody and metaphorical illumination of an ordinary observation.  The poem is a work of art. But what about larger works?

Hamlet is referred to often in this Freeware Prosody, and for good reason.  It's familiar to many, and its author used any means playable to make the play work, from the odd lyrics of Hamlet in his correspondence to Ophelia to the stiff couplets of the play-within-the-play to the stunning essays-in-blank-verse of the soliloquies to the recitatif of blank verse and prose of the major and minor characters throughout the piece.  Like Goethe's Faust, it is barely unified, but forms a great playground for Shakespeare to exercise the arts of language.   The content is rich, especially the psychological complexities of the players, together and alone.  Its underlying theme of the conflict between conscious act and unconscious reaction is an important one in human life, but hardly unique to this play.  But look closer and you'll find a startling revelation.   Virtually every speech is arbitrarily composed to fit the character speaking.  Figures of speech and tropes used by Polonius are not employed by Hamlet nor by Gertrude.  Do real people do that?   Horatio's inverted word order is not repeated by anyone else; it is a sign of his characater.  Indeed, the delineation between characters is artificial.  The same is true of the essays, which are often brief summations of Montaigne.  The speeches are not heightened from memory but composed from a palette of materials as distant from the "real" as a tube of oil paint is from the delicate brow of a Contessa.  And yet, well-played, even today, and the characters sound "natural," a dazzling example of Diderot's conclusion nearly two hundred years later that an artificial language is required onstage for it to sound real to the audience. What did you expect?  It's a play, not a story on "60 Minutes" -- a work of art.  And even "60 Minutes" stories are carefully edited to fit the lede.

Regarding the plot, revenge tragedies were as common to Elizabethan stages as "Friday the 13th" movies are to contemporary American screens.  As the plot devolved into violent slaughter,  the audience expected it.  It was a convention of the art of theater.  By many accounts, audiences at the Globe loved the smell of blood, and actors ruptured bladders of pig's blood in fight scenes, which not only looked but smelled the same as blood spilled in real fights.   Some critics have argued that Shakespeare's intents were damaged by following such convention.  The point is a non sequitur.  Shakespeare was a playwright; as such, his first intention on any speech, scene, or plotline had to be "will this work?"  A playwright's intentions are playable dramas and comedies; he achieved them.  We don't need to go inside his mind to know this; hundreds of productions of his plays are running every day.  And yet, while his mixing of elements was original and unusually complex, Shakespeare was not a journalist, a teacher, or a crusader for justice.  And while he is taught every day in cultures as alien to Elizabethan England as our own or Japan's, he taught little; theater is not a schoolroom.  The sum of the contents of his plays -- Life, whether in a monarchy or in the last days of the Roman Republic,  is rich, complex, dangerous, sometimes funny, often playful and always fatal.  Anyone with eyes and ears knows that.   It's a commonplace. Separated from the poetry, the plots are soap operas.  With the poetry, they are works of art.

Further,  in the artifice of overall dramatic structure, plot, act, scene, speech and line, the author took materials available to anyone of experience, and of a will to knowledge.  These he edited, distorted and refabricated to produce art.   You want sociology about Elizabethan England; there's no shortage of that outside the plays.  In G.B. Harrison's edition of Shakespeare, the introductory chapter of forty or so pages has more about daily and court life in 16th and early 17th century England than you can assemble from all of the plays.   Why should this be surprising?  In addition to the obvious, that all playwrights want to put work onstage that a diverse, complicated audience will be engaged by, many in his audience knew the raw materials better than Shakespeare did, whether his Greek and Latin sources or matters at court.  Some note that Elizabethan theaters were always under the Court Chamberlain's censorship, and that this deflected Shakespeare's true intent.  True, theaters, patrons, playwrights and actors were constantly under attack, particularly from Puritans and other witless "progressives,"  just as "violent" films are today by such witless desk-smashers as Senator McCain.  It was also true that  the Queen was known to ignore favorites who trampled on these edicts (Shakespeare the most notorious).  Even so, what "daring" explorations there were of Elizabethan "reality," whether in a few lines that refer to the Gunpowder Plot, the tricky connection with Elizabeth coming to the throne and the central place of primogeniture in King Lear, or in the windy declamations on the state of the theater in Hamlet, seem as tame as such are today in "radicals" like Robert Bly, whose observations on the cost of war might have been paraphrased from Tacitus.

For all the romantic and political assumptions to the contrary, much of the above is as true of a Marxist novelist in today's Latin America as it was for Sophocles two thousand years before Shakespeare.  One may add to Aristotle's wisdom on imitation (mimesis to the Grecophile) as follows:

In an epic, a play, or even a lyric, what is described as the content, whether ideas, historical observation, or political persuasion, can only, by the limitations and scope of art, be the imitation of real subject matter.  It is not the business of a playwright, a filmmaker or a poet to conduct sociological studies, perform scientific experiments, or preach to the great unwashed about their sins of omission.  A poem can no more be a vehicle for teaching about or documenting "reality" than Fra Angelica's  image of a saint at miracle can be described as a precursor of documentary film.

But moral lessons in art have a way of coming back to haunt the patron, or the patron's descendants.  Take for example a frieze at the base of the U.S. Capitol Dome, a narrow ring of white marble high above the recently-installed statue of Dr. King.  Rather like an extended stations of the cross, its panels depict the arrival of the Pilgrims, their first meetings with the Indians (as they were then erroneously known), the introduction of agriculture and industry, and the Indian wars, followed by images of peace and prosperity.   The title, which has become rather hard to find in the Capitol Building, is "The Triumph of the White Race," an artifact that would have been held in high esteem by President Botha of apartheid South Africa.   It must have seemed so right when it was put there, summing up ultimate lessons about progress through technology, brought to a primitive, unknowing America by enlightened Europeans.  "How American!" we might still say, with one eye shut.  What do we believe now as we try to impose technological systems in countries where the Jefferson plow was introduced only fifty years ago? The frieze was commissioned by officials of the Lincoln Administration, historically considered the most progressive administration in the 19th century.  But, I don't think Sitting Bull would have been fooled by all the progressive folderol.  It was art in service of an unabashed and unforgiving racism.  And I rather doubt that the idea for it came from any but a politically-minded artist dodging for a commission.  Someone who actually enjoyed the art of sculpture would have laughed at such a request.  Think of it.  When a Pope moaned about the explicit poses of classical nudes in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo told him, probably in good, diplomatic Latin, to go to hell.  The Pope considered this request and left the nudes undressed.  It was a good choice to stick with the artist over the moral objections.  The frieze in the U.S. Capitol however reflects a deeply tragic and embarrassing point of view.  Do modern politically artistic supplicants, wishing to uphold all that is correct, suppose that their work will find itself in any different light in the year 2100?  We do stupidly err to presume that our assumptions of what is correct are qualitatively different from what they might have been a century ago.  Art built on the deliberate imposition of moral content is invariably locked into the time in which it was made.  This is why Shakespeare's plays are still done and Calderon's religious masques are only studied in graduate school. (One supposes, however, that contemporary poets, urgent to communicate only the most correct ideas, aren't greatly concerned that their work will be invisible beyond the graduate writing program at Yale.)

The Puritans-among-us argument is an old one in America.  The Beats used it to great advantage in reintroducing sex to American poetry.  But there is another.  It has to do with the limits of rhetorical and metaphorical abstraction, limits which, while less exact, are no less demanding than those in the calculus.  At a certain level of abstraction, the contingency of a poem, its earthiness, it's poetic reality, vanishes.  It goes through a limit, perhaps of expectation or of perception.  This maddening in early Millay, and defeated a young Robert Browning as a playwright.   The work becomes so wrapped up in being a work of art, so intricately contrived, that it becomes a pretty object, like a Greek amphora, or a gorgeously worked, silver salt and pepper shaker by Paul Revere.  A tension between what is being imitated and the art itself is dissolved in favor of abstraction alone.  While attractive, even beautiful, and art of some kind, it may put off a sophisticated reader who, despite a love of verbal art, would have liked the smell of real blood at the Globe.  Some human quality is missing; some "vital imperfection," as the Japanese describe it, is gone.  Someone without a critical sense might say "it isn't real."  Some sharp naif might say "it looks like something made by machine."  On their own terms, they'd both be right.   What's really happened is that the subject of mimesis is lost to the reader.  Such arid perfection was typical of late Victorians (with the large exception of Thomas Hardy).  Nonetheless, many still like the poetry of Austin Dobson.  One, his handling of prosody was better than any contemporary New Formalist.  Two, many find much charm in poems of mostly imaginative content.   And for some, though not for Dobson's for me, their impact is astonishing.  Look at Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (it's on the archives page).  This lengthy, intricately executed fantasy has no superficial reason whatsoever to make a claim on any but a glance at a well-executed Empire chair.  Rossetti would have said so herself.  And she utterly denied any interpretation.  But if you miss the poem's real contingency, a wet, sweet and fruity eroticism that drips across line after line, you should probably consult with Fred Feirstein in his role as a psychotherapist.  So, perfect execution in art doesn't mean that it won't reach us.  But if that's all there is, it probably won't.  The writer finds Dobson's poems precious, but then the writer's a cranky "Roman," with a fondness for spikes-in-the-face baseball and a distaste for fairy tales (particularly if they don't have sex in them.)

But it's not so simple as those two explanations for the periodic outrage against "contentless" art.   Far more pernicious and pervasive is the bizarre conflation of  political and economic agendas that seek to impose content, whether the above-referenced McKinnon's desire to subjugate speech to her perceptions of what femaleness is, or the terror of a movie company's legal department that uninhibited expression might lose them ticket sales.  Since politics and market are much alike, it is fair to fold them together.  The subjects of McKinnon's efforts at salvation are not much different in kind or in name from those that movie studios wish to retain.  The only difference is the pitch and who benefits.   Such limitations, motivated by fear, greed, and rationalized rage and prejudice, rarely notable for contributions to culture, force creative talent into a corner where, to get access to media outlets, they have to imitate a fabricated idea of the world.  In an economic agenda, this false world is one in which it is attractive to display and sell products; the customer should not be so move, distressed, or amused by what she sees so as to forget that.  In a political agenda, the false world is one in which a radical extreme is assumed to be real and impossible dream to be a reasonable objective.   With that as the basis for mimesis, a writer is forced into an imitation of a presumption...not a work of art, but verse (or film or music) in service of political and economic propaganda.

Before the 1970's, such forced representations were common in what Hemingway and Pound described scornfully (and unfairly, considering the enormous cultural wealth produced by literary women) as "ladies literature," but they were rare in acknowledged literary culture.   Only in "the Communist bloc" was high culture expected to fulfill the same mission as a self-improvement pamphlet at a Ladies Extension in Wyoming.  This is not say that self-improvement pamphlets in Wyoming were not useful; they were and authority for that comes from a grandmother who read and distributed many of them.  However, she never thought them literature; literature to her was comprised of things her daughter was not to read until older and of poems and Biblical verses Grandmother had memorized.   On the culture-as-teaching-tool side,  we know that Lenin expected a Plato's Republic of Letters in the USSR, with every phrase, sentence, paragraph and chapter devoted to illumination of The New Soviet Man or the Moral Superiority of The Workers Victory in The Class Struggle or The Transcendant Artistic Ideal of the Revolution, etc.  However, the heroic woman driving a tractor, the tale of the Marxist-Leninist whose belief in the Revolution brought him through the Battle of Stalingrad, such things were buried by the Black Marketer With Copies Of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and other bourgeois artifacts of literature. This is not surprising.  Even Cubans patient enough to listen to a four-hour speech by Fidel Castro (or an answering stemwinder by Bill Clinton) like to wrap themselves around the lush terrors of Allende or the beautiful wheel of Paz.

Now, as the relics of Lenin's world are sold as amusements through Sovietski.com; and Russians, though still reading Akhmatova and Pushkin, plunge into the fictions not only of the West but of Russian authors long considered incorrect, the "Free world" is awash in politically and economically motivated censorship, indistinguishable in an era when publishers and producers consult polls and pending lawsuits against content of books and films, and anyone with a torts attorney can sue anyone else for transgressions solely composed of words.  This bizarre fusion of political economy and political economics  has led to portraits of the world not contingent on anything that viewers or readers know, to poems where ideological content has assured artistic emptiness.  For one, it is not possible to illuminate a commonplace in environment where commonplace experiences are themselves held suspect.  Publishers today pay less attention to a public than to a governance that presumes memorization of a few rules of conduct regarding race and gender entitles it to silence anyone with an opposing view, whether with political embarrassment or with economic extortion.  If this only applied to racist, exist and homophobic expression, it might not be a bad price to pay for social peace.  But it applies to everything said, published, or performed.  And, as the recent Cybercrime act in Brussels clearly demonstrated (aided by the United States Justice Department), freedom of expression on the Internet, the one thing that keeps it from being nothing more than a hyperactive Yellow Pages, will soon be threatened by this as well.

What makes this doubly troublesome is that the few outlets for free "content" are aggressive and shrill, the artists working in them the only ones bold enough to speak off the party line.   This is notably so of rap music and in some areas of television and film. There's a large audience for anyone so bold, partly for the boldness, and partly for the feeling that what hearers and readers get has some connection with the world they know through the detested commonplaces of experience.  That some of it is rapacious, violent and vulgar does not seem to bother young Italian men in Carroll Gardens as they listen to an African-American rapper, anymore than suburban Protestants are disturbed as they watch Tony Soprano's gleeful savagery on HBO.  The audiences are large enough to guarantee an audience and a pile of money.  So, in an amusing conflation of political and economic motivation, precisely the opposite of political correctness is supported by the people who most desire to uphold it.  This is one of the joys of living in America, in fact.  An audience can still overthrow a censor just by buying tickets or by changing channels.

However, it is arguable that if the same freedom were felt by the creators of more "civilized" expression, such as novels, poetry and plays, we would live in a different culture.   Occasionally we get a hint of this.   Homicide, a totally fabricated, however well-researched, view of life in a homicide detective unit, worked so closely within Aristotelian notions of drama that one looked (in vain) for a classicist in the production company.   Yet, for all of its artifice, lovers of the program discussed its "reality," its powerful commentary on modern society.  Close examination suggested a different view, that the commentary and observed "reality" were commonplaces among anyone who spent time in Baltimore, that the beauty of this serial drama came from how its writers, actors and directors invoked Muses as old as any in the theater and long preceding film, and how instead of inventing a delusion, they focused the attention of audiences on what they already knew by creating works of dramatic art.

Other hints of what might be are found in the eruption of narrative poetry in America, as rich a vein as we've ever had, though few know about it.  However, as long as the "civilized" in governing, academic, corporate and legal office suites insist on art's content being directed at teaching, proselytizing and reporting "reality" (rather than imitating it), we won't find many pleasures like that.  For them, dangerous "passion" is restricted to the rap music concert or the movie theater, at least until they can silence it there as well.   Considering how contrived such passions must be for artistic expression to be successful, this stance is not against "reality," which, try as we might, we can't escape, but against art itself.   By conducting themselves this way, politicians, lawyers, and corporate executives do more to undercut the dream of cultural development than any movie, video game, or rapper.  The censorious mind, ever Puritan, ever fearul, ever demanding the useful and the real, always after saving the children it does so much to silence before they become troublesome adults, will tell you that it's for our own good.   It isn't.  Whether it's an ultra-feminist or John McCain, it's for their own good -- for their power, for their dominance, for their hands over your mouth and your ears.

The urge to create artificial, beautiful things, whether they're funny, tragic or off-the-wall, is innate to human beings.  The urge to make them useful, to control creative passions as if they were an unruly segment of a production line, was wonderfully parodied by Stanislaw Lem in Solaris.  Similar parodies have hunted down similar urges in commercially successful art.  But parody is scorned by the oppressors, held unsaleable by the marketers, and may sometimes be seen wrapped in brown paper.  One should ignore that as a poet.  You're always on the winning side, particularly if you let "content" take care of itself, and focus on the magic in art.  Because, the more they bear down, the more they try to anatomize, analyze, and terrorize that desire in order to destroy the strange power of those intricate objects created by artists, the more likely they are to be faced with someone holding a magic lantern to fill a darkness that, unlit, begins to feel like a hive.
 
 
 
 

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