On Learning Poetry

A journey to the bosom of Mnemosyne

I.

At the start of this year I set out to learn the best of English poetry. Harold Bloom’s list was my light and my guide. I read most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, committing my favorites to memory, and did similarly for poems of Blake, Shelley, Dickinson, Tennyson, and others. I also finished Milton’s Paradise Lost a few weeks ago. Most of what I’ll say in this piece will be limited to what I’ve read, which excludes most modern and contemporary poetry (which I certainly mean to read soon!).

In case it seems like I’m listing achievements, consider that the sense of accomplishment from reading these poets is weaker after reading them than what you imagine it’s like beforehand. The height of a mountain is most exaggerated when looking up from the base; before it’s summited, a mountain is a bridge to the sky—afterward, it’s an abnormal protrusion of earth¹. Like so with these greatest of poets. They certainly take you to lofty heights, but they’re also recognizably human. Through a deep reading of their work, one learns to see where they come from (well, maybe except for Shakespeare).

It was only after I was past the initial hump of adjusting to the linguistic norms of ye olde English that I began to find classic poetry immensely rewarding. Once I got used to the language, to borrow a term from optimal foraging theory, my capture rate for poetry—(value-effort)/time—grew rapidly. The more I read, the less effort I expended, and the less time it took to digest an entire work. All of this meant that I could glean more from what I read.

I put poetry in terms of OFT because I notice the hesitation to read poetry, especially the older stuff, is largely explained by what poetry competes against. So it may be worth explaining why we consume fewer instances of poetry instead of the other kinds of information we tend to value more.

When we look out onto the landscape of information available to us, there are patches that seem to shine in terms of their value, even if we can’t readily parse them. Despite not understanding much of quantum mechanics, I certainly perceive it as valuable; but before I “understood” poetry, for some reason the “poetry patch” presented itself as inherently dull.

Poetry, especially the older kind, certainly isn’t low-hanging fruit, and we don’t like paying effort costs for items we perceive not to be worth it. Until I found a poem (Shakespeare’s 15th sonnet) that spoke to me, I couldn’t fathom why anyone would bother with poetry either. This beginner’s difficulty in breaking into “the classics” prevents people from understanding what value they could get from them. We can recognize that poetry seems valuable to English teachers and people who go to poetry slams, but poetry’s value is almost never cast in general terms. Why should someone not in these groups care about poetry?

(I’ll count myself successful in this piece, even if someone doesn’t end up reading poetry themselves, if they can understand why other people do—to make the poetry patches in their information landscape “light up”, so to speak, even if they never choose to harvest.)

First of all, what do I mean by value? In classic foraging theory, value is measured in calories or fitness points harvested by some exploring forager. Clearly, the term needs to be refitted for the context of the information landscape we scroll through these days. So here I’ll operate with a definition of value roughly equal to how successfully a work can either alter or renew one’s perspective. And I suggest this definition of value is independent of one’s ability to decode the information, whether it’s hard-core quantum theory or older English poetry.

I think poetry can change our perspective in at least one respect: by renewing the beliefs we already possess. We all have mental models about how the world works, and these schemas mediate how we see the world. Sometimes these models could benefit from being revitalized. And in this mental renewal, as in the biological, although the overall configuration is maintained and the whole maintains a kind of identity, the parts themselves change—made fresher, more resilient.

I think this definition of value in terms of affecting our perspectives, besides being intuitive, approximately works for the sciences as well as for poetry. Art is generally harder to determine quality for, but one could make the case that intersubjective judgments of art help decide quality in a not dissimilar way as for science—and so the number of people whose perspectives are changed by some piece of work might be considered a proxy for its quality.

This value measure isn’t purely qualitative either: the initial discovery of a type of scientific/artful content tends to first induce large changes in perspective, then smaller and smaller shifts as more of the content gets consumed. To a professional neuroscientist, for example, who’s read thousands of journal papers, a single new paper typically only results in a small shift in their worldview, more often affirming existing hypotheses than changing them. Seeing how after 4 months of almost daily poetry reading the perspectival tremors have started slowing down for me, I’d imagine the same goes for professional poets.

Large changes in perspective are the most likely to change our behavior, whether we’re designing new experiments or deciding on new life paths. But even if we don’t change our behavior, we often think changing our perspective is more justified if it’s backed up by Reason instead of Beauty, as if beauty is flimsy support for one’s worldview. But beauty isn’t meant to be support—it’s meant to be the fire that charges our beliefs!

There’s this assumption that poetry has only an incidental relation to truth. I don’t think poets have done much to discourage this. The time poetry tried uniting with philosophy to make some earnest formulation of truth—I only know of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things from the top of my head—it’s met with middling success as a work of poetry in its own right. The common retort here is that the sciences, and maybe even philosophy, deal with fundamental causes, while poetry deals with word associations; the first group has truth as its aim and the latter is too enamored with beauty.

And while we’re on the topic, it may strike you as odd that I’m writing a piece justifying a newfound interest in poetry, something I wouldn’t feel the need to do if I was instead taken by, say, number theory or astronomy, two subjects also distant from direct “real-world” application. That my intellectual life has so far been spent mainly in the science camp might even give some people cause to think that because of poetry my thinking is somehow less rigorous than it used to be.

I thought so too, early on, but as the passion of my first steps into poetry gave way to a more sober view of it, I became less concerned with such a belief in poetry’s “corruptive” influence. I find myself repeating Auden on the function of poetry, that it’s “the clear expression of mixed feelings”. In this respect, poetry has more in common with music than with philosophy or science.

II.

My project may seem less extreme when it’s remembered that we already learn poetry in the form of song lyrics. But for many songs nowadays, lyrics don’t mean very much. Don’t we often think rhythm and melody are more important than the words themselves? There are plenty of songs where lyrics take a backseat to instrumentals, where the human voice is simply another instrument but with a different timbre. So what do words add that music doesn’t already say?

At some point in our distant past, we began to infuse the rules of melody with those of grammar and diction, and something emerged beyond the simple primal resonance we felt by banging bones on hide. This union of words and beats may have marked the entrance of story into song. A wistful melody became the tune of a character feeling melancholy, frantic percussion exemplifying the terror of some sympathetic hero. When the feelings we have in response to music were projected onto a character, listeners were able to find themselves in that projection.

Seeing as we’re visual creatures foremost, I’ll suggest (though I’m unsure how originally) that words offer shape and color to a story whereas music only offers color.

Narrative/character shape is something we can talk about and refer to outside the song, while color is something you simply have to see (or hear, in this case) to “get it”. Words offer quieter colors than music, syllabically sharing in auditory space, but they also give us an outline of meaning, a sort of definitiveness that music lacks alone, because words also inhabit conceptual-space. Poetry channels the naturally emotional impact of music into a shape less nebulous than music alone, because music alone doesn’t give us a story—it can only color it.

In the minimal rhythm of poetry, we learn to hear language more closely, to be more attentive to both sounds and concepts. Language is at its most flexible in poetry because when grammar is subordinate to meter, constraint coaxes words into arrangements not found in regular speech or prose. Because of this constraint, words wriggle within their grammatical bounds, and sound and sense are made to snap together like heels in a march. To both our peril and pleasure, the apparent order in a poem sometimes masks the violence latent in the lines.

Some poets emphasize the music in their poetry, making a subtle instrument from the human voice, and some emphasize semantic meaning, seeking to convey a point or story. But the mark of the best was the ability to do both.² To have multiple scales of order operating at the same time, a story proceeding with all the parts in rhythmic lockstep. (Or maybe this is just Paradise Lost, I’ll have to read more epics to find out!)

Sure, fine, all the above might justify reading poetry, that it might very well be a pleasurable and emotionally rewarding experience. But why the hell did I start memorizing it? Bloom, along with many a teacher of English, insist that to know something by heart was to truly own it. I decided to listen, and the advice happened to be correct. Memory is what makes perspectival change last.

As you study a poem in the short term, it changes your mood, but in the long run, it changes your nature, and how you see the world. Memory offers immediate access to ideas in a way we’re unaccustomed to, or forgotten, as denizens of the internet. Biological memory is a form of retrieval that subliminally changes the memory-haver. With physical storage, objects remain distinct when you don’t look at them. Not so with memory.

We forget that Memory is the mother of all the Muses. When we memorize poetry it meshes with all the other stuff we know, helping us find superficial, linguistic connections between words, but sometimes even surprisingly deep links between concepts. Because of this I feel as though my writing and my thinking have become more interesting, more colorful since I started learning poetry. I never thought English was so expressive, that so many things could even be said, much less said so beautifully. Since I once only read philosophy, I used to believe so strongly in the poverty of language. Now that my ceiling of expression has been raised, I no longer think this.

III.

In all this talk of why reading and learning poetry is essential today, I’d be remiss not to mention a more historical context for its use. Why did people read it before it dropped from its former cultural importance? Dana Gioia has a wonderful essay called “Can Poetry Matter?” where he discusses this reason and more. Here’s a particularly good passage:

How does one persuade justly skeptical readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that poetry still matters?

A passage in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" provides a possible starting point. Written toward the end of the author's life, after he had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons about poetry and audience that Williams had learned over years of dedication to both poetry and medicine. He wrote,

My heart rouses
     thinking to bring you news
         of something
that concerns you
     and concerns many men. Look at
         what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
     despised poems.
         It is difficult
to get the news from poems
     yet men die miserably every day
         for lack
of what is found there.

Williams understood poetry's human value but had no illusions about the difficulties his contemporaries faced in trying to engage the audience that needed the art most desperately. To regain poetry's readership one must begin by meeting Williams's challenge to find what "concerns many men," not simply what concerns poets.

This is how we cast poetry’s value in general terms! Gioia corroborates the feeling I had in my private recitations—that there was some hidden internal audience, a sense of being part of a long tradition of oral storytellers, men and women who transmitted lore on behalf of their people, helping them make sense of the world and assuaging their fears. In doing what they do for personal reasons, poets also help create general value.

Poets have always held outsized influence in society—today they’re just running ad campaigns instead of creating myths. What would our world look like if poets returned to their once-epic aims? If they captured the momentous changes happening now with fitting heroic verse, explaining technical society with scintillating verbs, allowing truth and beauty to reign instead of inattention and noise?

1. This implies that when you tell people you read such-and-such, and they haven’t read it, you hijack their exaggerated sense of the worth of the work. For those who’ve read it, having read War and Peace suggests a possible new friendship more than it signals a need for admiration.

2. Stories, especially beautiful ones, bear odd relationships with truth, a thread I intend to go into in some future essay…sorry, not sorry, for teasing it in this one…