Poetry and its Criticism

I was headed towards the Joyce Kilmer Forest yesterday in part because I was reflecting on a discussion with family of his most famous poem, "Trees." I assume you are all familiar with it, likely well enough that you can repeat at least the first line without looking. 

A photo of Kilmer's memorial plaque at his forest, which I took on an earlier visit.

Kilmer died heroically at age 31, killed by a German sniper while scouting enemy lines in World War I. He was a devout Catholic, and died young enough that he still felt his faith in the firm certainty of youth. The moment seems to have been central to both his own fame and popularity in his lifetime, and the disdain directed at his work by critics in more recent years. 

The critic John Derbyshire included "Trees" in an audiobook he recorded of great American poems (it doesn't still seem to be available). In his commentary, I recall that he remarked that Kilmer had written the poem as a joke, to mock the overly sincere mode that was popular in much poetry in the age, and found that it became his own most popular work. I don't know what Derbyshire's source is for that claim; the poem seems to me to be quite representative of Kilmer's work. 

Indeed, what people tend to criticize about Kilmer is just those very qualities. His own society, the Philolexian, holds an annual "Bad Poetry" event in his name. The head of that ceremony wrote in 2013 about his mixed feelings on the subject.

Central to both Kilmer’s work and the prevailing disdain of it is his deep Catholicism, to which he converted after his daughter Rose contracted infantile paralysis. Most of his efforts fairly drip with piety... Every year it falls to me as “Avatar” of Philolexian to kick off the Kilmer event by presenting a biographical sketch of the man. By now, I have my routine down pat. After outlining Kilmer’s life and enumerating his poetic sins, I ask, “But was he really bad?” Invariably the audience shouts, “Yes!” And I roar back, “You’re wrong!”

Kilmer, I inform the snarky undergrads, is what George Orwell in his essay on Kipling called a “good bad poet.” After dismissing most of Kipling’s verse as “horribly vulgar,” Orwell concedes it nonetheless is “capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means.” Admit it, Orwell says. Unless you’re “merely a snob and a liar,” you get at least some enjoyment out of something like “Mandalay.” That’s because it’s a good bad poem, which Orwell defines as “a graceful monument to the obvious....

That’s a fair take on much of Kilmer. Yes, he was proof of Oscar Wilde’s pronouncement that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” But he could still touch certain chords with crude, shameless offerings like “The House With Nobody in It”:

I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;

That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.

I know this house isn’t haunted, and I wish it were, I do;

For it wouldn’t be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.

If you insist on rejecting this admittedly hokey notion utterly, never musing that “only God can make a tree” upon beholding a particularly soaring oak . . . well, take your pick. Are you an Orwellian snob or an Orwellian liar?

I am reminded of our longtime companion Eric Blair (how strange to need to mention him so close to the invocation of Orwell) and his position on the First World War. Namely, he holds that war killed Western Civilization -- that it was a mortal wound to its soul, to which it is still slowly succumbing. 

His position is plausible. You can see in the poetry of the era before the war a great civilizational confidence. All sides rode to war on horseback, with at least some of their more famous units dressed gaily in ancestral armor or bright uniforms that recalled the Napoleonic era. Four years later, the aristocracy of all their nations was broken and destroyed; we recall Tolkien, who fought at the Somme, noting that all of the friends of his youth were dead.

Another position on Kilmer is possible: that his poetry is simply good precisely because it manages to bring all things under the eye of the sacred and divine. If a young woman were writing poetry today under the influence of some Guru, it would be thought a mark of her talents if she could find the sacred in ordinary things -- so long as she did so in the light of an Eastern religion, perhaps after her daily yoga flow session. Given that limited change of context, I can imagine such a poet enjoying real popularity among LitCrit circles, perhaps appearing on Oprah or being invited to Goop. 

It may be that Kilmer seems naive to those born after the great wound of World War I. Yet he was writing after suffering his own great wound, the paralysis and slow death of his beloved daughter. It was that context that brought him to devotion and daily prayer, to the determination to see all things -- yes, even New Jersey transit -- through eyes that reflected on their sacred nature. 

We have discussed here in other contexts the argument from Augustine and Avicenna and Aquinas that, indeed, all things that exist must be at least somewhat good because their existence is sustained by a God who is perfectly so. They were greater thinkers than most, drawing on arguments from ancient thinkers at least as great as themselves, Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus. The position isn't obviously wrong: far from it. It is defended by rank upon rank of reason and argument marshalled by the finest minds in human history.

The disdain and mockery strike me, at last, as a septic corruption likely arising from the great psychic wound. They consider themselves to be sophisticated and not naive, because they can entertain the bitter fruits of despair. It may be the greater art to retain instead the awe, to remain capable of seeing the sacred, the true, and the beautiful.