Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

Robert Pinsky

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400825158
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.
There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.
As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.

IX

Conclusion

I will quote one of my own favorite poems—one I have written about before, in an account of my home town on the Jersey Shore. Written near the beginning of the twentieth century by Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos” epitomizes for me the tidal forces within lyric poetry that draw it toward social reality. The poem’s peculiar, rather spectacular form embodies those forces and their “War,” as Bishop calls it, with something private and interior. In its title and other echoes of Greek tragedy, in its focus on one heroic figure in her choral, provincial setting, “Eros Turannos” recalls the individual’s cultural anxieties of suffocation on one side and an isolating dearth on the other.

The protagonist is a woman who must choose between a love affair that she well knows will be a calamity, or no love affair at all. The extraordinary account of her psychology turns out, partway through the poem, to be voiced by a town, in the first person plural:

Eros

Turannos

She fears him , and will always ask

What fated her to choose him;

She meets in his engaging mask

All reasons to refuse him;

But what she meets and what she fears

Are less than are the downward years

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity

That once had power to sound him,

And Love, that will not let him be

The Judas that she found him,

Her pride assuages her almost,

As if it were alone the cost.

He sees that he will not be lost,

And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees

Envelops and allures him;

Tradition, touching all he sees,

Beguiles and reassures him;

And all her doubts of what he says

Are dimmed with what she knows of days—

Till even prejudice delays,

And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates

The reign of her confusion;

The pounding wave reverberates

The dirge of her illusion;

And home, where passion lived and died,

Becomes a place where she can hide,

While all the town and harbor side

Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

The story as it should be,

As if the story of a house

Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,

As if we guessed what hers have been,

Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they

That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea

Where down the blind are driven.

The astoundingly deployed rhymes make “Eros Turannos” a kind of hyper-ballad: a ballad to the ballad power, as though the woman’s isolation and shame call up some longing for a folk-tradition that her surroundings cannot provide. On this level, Thompson’s idea that the cadences of verse imitate the shape of sentences has a kind of palpable application. More explicitly, the firstperson plural as “we” tap our brows and tell the story impersonates the communal, but also heightens the central character’s loneliness and lack.

That lack is made more poignant for me by what I know of Robinson’s career. For the long first part of it, he was indigent, lonely, spurned by magazine editors, embittered with his provincial town in Maine and with the New York where he also found the going hard.

But on the other hand, the town does notice the woman’s fate, and registers it and recounts it with awe. On this subject, let me quote the letter about this poem quoted in Americans’ Favorite Poems—the only letter in the anthology that we editors print anonymously:

I discovered the poem many years ago as a newly married girl living in a small town, which in fact possesses a harborside. My husband had an intractable (it seemed then) drug and alcohol problem and was away a lot for his job. I didn’t have a job at the time, knew no one, and spent many days in solitude riding my bike, reading, and reflecting on what my life had become since my decision to marry. I did not then comprehend what the line “for they that with a god have striven” meant. I just recognized completely the state of wishing to be united with a man because of what I knew or thought I knew about the onward years. I lived then and now in an ancient house left me by my father, whose father left it to him, whose father left it to him.It is one mile from the ocean, surrounded by old trees. These facts made up no small part of my husband’s decision to marry me. I copied that poem into the journal I kept then and it sits before me on the table as I write. I have always felt the woman was as I was. The knowledge that I’ve gained about “the god” has lent a retrospective dignity to events experienced as utter failure. The discovery of the poem, with its eerily large number of coincidences with my own situation, was like a gift, or maybe a clue in a giant game of charades, from “the god” himself, who saw he had perhaps misjudged his opponent.

This personal account of the poem is as remarkable as the coincidences it notes. Its viewpoint is perhaps more psychological and social than literary. The writer, for all her power and eloquence, does not choose to consider the ways that the poem’s story may be Robinson’s story, a transformed account of his own frustration, loneliness, dignity and rage. But this insightful, anonymous letter also suggests something like the classical relation of tragic hero and community, or touches on that idea with the words “a retrospective dignity.” In the poem, the community gains a certain stature from its awareness that in it is one who has wrestled with a god; the individual gains dignity from the witnessing of that struggle. The man, who “waits and looks around him,” is in a significant way less important than the god or the town. The poem is less about two people than it is about one person, who deals with love as a ruling force, and with a social setting.

The form of poetry in “Eros Turannos,” the chiming and symmetrically swirling rhymes, give rich voice to a great solitude, a desolation that communicates itself to the very landscape. “A sense of ocean and old trees” is vague partly as a mocking evocation of the man who looks around him, lightly comic in a way like the “iron clothing” of Robinson’s nostalgist Miniver Cheevy. But the phrase also has a specificity that relates it to Robinson’s concluding image, the “stairway to the sea / Where down the blind are driven.” The nightmare ritual or flight suggested by that image calls up a social world more ancient or more fantastically barbarian than can be known. The voice of the poem, in our heads and in our breath, brings that archaic world and the solitude of the protagonist together, with terror and majesty.

“Eros Turannos” was published in the same issue of Poetry magazine as Carl Sandburg’s group of Chicago Poems, including “Chicago”—the well-known anthology piece (it appears in the Favorite Poem anthology), the prolonged apostrophe that begins “Hog Butcher for the World” and ends “Freight Handler to the Nation.” “Chicago” is not a bad piece of writing, despite the limitations I have indicated with the phrase “anthology piece.” In no way does it begin to equal “Eros Turannos” in emotion, in formal penetration or invention.

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