War of words

The Hatred of Poetry. By Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 86 pages; $12. Fitzcarraldo; £9.99.

POETRY has always occupied an ambivalent space in society. In the ancient world Plato banned poets from his ideal republic; today they have to navigate the “embarrassment or suspicion or anger” that follows when they admit to their profession in public. Ben Lerner understands this hatred: as a poet he has been on the receiving end of it, but also, more interestingly, he has felt it himself.

Long before he published his two acclaimed novels, “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04”, Mr Lerner was known as a poet. Yet the biographical details that are woven into this short and spirited discussion suggest an uneasy relationship with the form. As a boy, charged with learning a poem, Mr Lerner tried to game the system by asking his librarian which was the shortest; later in life he confesses that he has never heard what Sir Philip Sidney described as “the planet-like music of poetry”, nor experienced the “trance-like state” widely said by critics to be induced by John Keats (“I’ve never seen any critic in a trance-like state,” he adds, not unfairly.)

Yet Mr Lerner does not see all this as a problem; indeed, he believes it to be central to the art form. Poets and non-poets alike hate poetry, he argues, because poetry will always fail to deliver on the transcendental demands people have invested in it. As a result they enjoy pronouncing upon the abstract powers and possibilities of poetry more than they actually like to sit down and read it. As Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter.” Mr Lerner takes his cue from Keats, but is a little more frank when he describes “the fatal problem with poetry: poems”.

This inevitable sense of falling short is expressed in some of the best poetry ever written, he says, and he elaborates his point with energised discussions of Keats, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. But it is also inadvertently present in some of the worst poetry ever written. “Alas! I am very sorry to say/That 90 lives have been taken away”, wrote William Topaz McGonagall, a Scottish poet, in a notoriously underwhelming response to the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. “When called upon to memorialise a faulty bridge, McGonagall constructs another,” writes Mr Lerner, as he dissects McGonagall’s swirling metrical confusion with poetically informed glee across a number of pages.

But McGonagall’s literary ineptitude is well known, and Mr Lerner’s essay becomes most interesting when he ventures into more contemporary territory, attacking with polemic zeal what he sees as confused critical assaults on modern poetry: the belief in a “vague past the nostalgists can never quite pinpoint” when poetry could still unite everyone, or in a “capacity to transcend history” that often seems to rely on its poetic purveyors being “white men of a certain class”. The hatred of poetry, Mr Lerner shows, can suddenly and revealingly become a vehicle for bitter politics. Yet he also sees communal redemption in the strange bond people have with this ancient art form: if we constantly think poetry is an embarrassing failure, then that means that we still, somewhere, have faith that it can succeed.