Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns

Much has been made this weekend on writers’ individual blogs or email literary lists about the content and tenor of David Orr’s valuable and thought-provoking article in the New York Times, “The Great(ness) Game.” Some of the online commentary has focused upon questioning ambiguous definitions of “greatness” or the accuracy in Orr’s portrait of contemporary poetry, particularly his perceptions of college writing programs and a tendency toward careerism evident among those in the current community of authors. As with Orr’s essay, all of the opinions I have seen online so far have been interesting and insightful, have engendered discussion or debate, and have initiated some serious reflection.

At the same time, I have been thinking about my course on twentieth-century poetry that I again will be teaching in the fall. For the past few years I haven’t taught the class, since the university recently had instituted a new creative writing major and I was asked to concentrate on creative writing workshops during the first years of the major. Considering a return to teaching Twentieth-Century Poetry, I reexamined the course syllabus this week, wondering what additions or subtractions I might make, and pleasantly discovered once more an impressive depth of talent demonstrated by the chronicle of twentieth-century American poetry.

Moreover, after reading Orr’s article, especially his apparent suggestion that today’s poets are limited by producing works in the shadow of a generation of greatness—exemplified in Orr’s piece by John Ashbery, my own former teacher—and effectively diminishing their own output, I decided to isolate that chronological section of twentieth-century American poets to which Ashbery belongs. If one designs an admittedly artificial guideline for a generation as those born within a period of twenty years, and if everyone agrees for sake of the argument that modernism reached a pinnacle about 1923—upon publication of Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and the composition of early Cantos by Ezra Pound in 1922, as well as release of Spring and All by William Carlos Williams, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, and a first edition of Selected Poems by Robert Frost in 1923—while sowing the seeds for the beginning of post-modernism may have coincided with the World War II years, then an arbitrary but convenient two-decade stretch of time to study might be 1923-1943.

When I review my course syllabus for this segment of the past century, I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

If my math skill has not eluded me, this compilation of poets comes to fifty individuals. Readers could disagree about the greatness of any single poet listed above. Even talk about Orr’s example of Ashbery would create contentious conversation among some. However, looking back upon their record of accomplishments from the present position, the collective greatness of this generation’s poetry most likely would be indisputable in the minds of today’s readers.

Obviously, many would legitimately offer that the greatest generation of American poetry to arrive since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson earlier fostered the art in the nineteenth century occurred during a wave of poets born in the 1870s and 1880s who swept into prominence in a period at the start of the twentieth century—the Ezra Pound (born in 1885) era that also included T.S. Eliot (1888), Robert Frost (1874), Wallace Stevens (1879), and William Carlos Williams (1883). Nevertheless, it would be difficult to argue against the 1923-1943 combined group above as a pool of poets that represents a great generation of poetry.

Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others. Indeed, as David Orr indicates, the strong influence of these poets still lingers into this premier decade of the twenty-first century.

David Orr also contends contemporary poets continually swayed by the writing styles of these previous figures have not yet developed their own sense of greatness. Therefore, Orr wonders whether, “for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness.” A portion of Orr’s intriguing explanation makes a certain amount of sense, especially coming just one week after the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, perhaps resembling a typical business convention more and more each year, again drew thousands of poets to its venue in the Chicago Hilton:

Greatness isn’t simply a matter of potentially confusing concepts; it’s also a practical question about who gets to decide what about whom. Our assumptions about poetic greatness are therefore linked to the reputation-making structures of the poetry world—and changes in those structures can have peculiar effects on our thinking. For most of the 20th century, the poetry world resembled a country club. One had to know the right people; one had to study with the right mentors. The system began to change after the G.I. Bill was introduced (making a university-level poetic education possible for more people), and that change accelerated in the 1970s, as creative writing programs began to flourish. In 1975, there were 80 such programs; by 1992, there were more than 500, and the accumulated weight of all these credentialed poets began to put increasing pressure on poetry’s old system of personal relationships and behind-the-scenes logrolling. It would be a mistake to call today’s poetry world a transparent democracy (that whirring you hear is the sound of logs still busily being rolled), but it’s more democratic than it used to be—and far more middle class. It’s more of a guild now than a country club. This change has brought with it certain virtues, like greater professionalism and courtesy. One could argue that it also made the poetry world more receptive to writers like Bishop, whose style is less hoity-toity than, say, Eliot’s. But the poetry world has also acquired new vices, most notably a tedious careerism that encourages poets to publish early and often (the Donald Hall essay I mentioned earlier is largely a criticism of this very tendency). Consequently, it’s not hard to feel nostalgic for the way things used to be; or at least, the way we imagine they used to be. And this nostalgia often manifests as a preference for a particular kind of “greatness.”

Based upon Orr’s description and his observation about a perceived lack of greatness or unique ambition in particular younger poets, some might suggest a pessimistic outlook for American poetry. However, just as I believe the profile of American poetry may have shifted in the last century from a focus on the greatness of individual figures to an additional and equally important glimpse at the greatness of a collective generation of contributors, I view the new model of American poetry in the future as one that will prove even more inclusive and democratic, concentrated not only in the powerful works of a few individuals, but also in the strength of the whole production of poetry by the nation’s poets. As a larger number of folks write accomplished or well-crafted poetry, whether due to studies in university programs or the increased access to online writing communities and publications, maybe a new paradigm of greatness will present itself, though the word “greatness” suddenly may seem somewhat inappropriate.

As Daisy Fried states in a forum discussion, “Ambition and Greatness,” that appeared in the March 2005 issue of Poetry and is cited by David Orr in his article: “One of the delights of contemporary poetry is that there are as many ways of being great as there are of being ambitious. I’m not arguing against making distinctions. I like saying what I like and loathe. I’ll say why I think any poet is good or bad. I’m not particularly interested in persuading anyone to agree with me; it’s hard enough getting people to like my own poems. When I read I don’t ask myself, ‘Is this great?’ I look to see if something interesting is going on, hopefully something I don’t quite understand, something I need to figure out. Is that looking for ambition?”

In the same discussion, Jeredith Merrin adds: “This isn’t merely a matter of vocabulary: dramatic changes in our understanding of physical reality mean shifts in our ethical and emotional relationships to the world. Ambitious new work need not be ‘about’ physics, of course; and the juice of poetry remains in the homely details—Williams’s woman munching her plums. But writers stuck in Romantic or even twentieth-century assumptions can’t do the present job. Poetry (to allude to Frost) stays vital, necessary, ‘great,’ by giving accurate accounts of the altering weather—both ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’”

Perhaps Adam Kirsch rightly hinted at one problem with considering greatness in contemporary poetry: “If we look at poets of our day who seem likely to earn and sustain the name of great—I would think right away of Derek Walcott and the late Czeslaw Milosz—it is obvious that even the great poets are no longer interested in greatness, at least not in the sense that Milton or Keats were. After the world wars, communism, and fascism, there is a drastic mistrust in all intellectual fields of naive, triumphal humanism, of universal claims that disguise personal interests and assumptions. For a poet like Milosz, greatness consists not in self-assertion but in self-abnegation, not in mastery but in witnessing. This is a more modest and self-suspicious ideal, which may recoil from the very name of greatness, even as it retains the old ambition that defines the word—in Milton's formula, to create something that time will not willingly let die.”

One can blend the three comments by Fried, Merrin, and Kirsch to create a more complete understanding about the concerns contemporary poets and critics sometimes have with the use of certain terms, the uneasy relationship a number of them recognize between concepts of greatness or ambition and the current distrust by some for such labels, at least as they have been seen employed in the past. As the image above of an ancient muse reading words on a scroll might remind us, today’s readers also ought to consider it a bit risky to regard greatness in any specific contemporary poet since, as we all know, such a judgment is tenuous at best until tested by the passage of time and critically attested by forthcoming generations of readers as worthy of acclaim. Already, I look forward to “making distinctions,” as Daisy Fried phrased it, and exploring further all these issues about greatness with the students in my Twentieth-Century Poetry course next semester, fall 2009, when we will be able at least to claim we have distanced ourselves a decade from the end of the previous century.