Don't Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt

Author:Stephanie Burt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

T. S. Eliot announced portentously in 1921 that “poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult,” because modern life was confusing and difficult too. The idea that new poems should be harder to read than prose, that serious poems pose a challenge to most readers, may seem like it began in the twentieth century, with the writers called high modernists (Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein) who really did distance themselves from prose sense in new ways. And yet some poems have seemed hard to read for a while. Eliot made his announcement in the course of his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” about Donne and the contemporaries of Donne. Lord Byron, among the most popular poets of the early nineteenth century, complained in 1819 that William Wordsworth had grown incomprehensible:

Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion”

(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),

Has given a sample from the vasty version

Of his new system to perplex the sages;

’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,

And may appear so when the dog-star rages—

And he who understands it would be able

To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

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