Beautiful & Pointless by David Orr

Author:David Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Still, however blurry “ambition” may be, it’s clear that segments of the poetry world have been fretting over its potential loss since at least 1983. That’s the year in which an essay by Donald Hall, the U.S. poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, appeared in the Kenyon Review bearing the title “Poetry and Ambition.” Hall got right to the point: “[I]t seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition—a modesty, alas, genuine . . . if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense.” What poets should be trying to do, according to Hall, was “to make words that live forever . . . to be as good as Dante.” They probably would fail, of course, but even so, “the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.” Pretty strong stuff—and one wonders how many plays Shakespeare would have managed to write had he subjected every line to the merciless scrutiny Hall recommends.

And yet many of Hall’s points are still being wrangled over more than twenty years later. In 2005, Poetry magazine published a roundtable discussion entitled (naturally) “Ambition and Greatness,” in which participants were alternately put off by the entire idea of “capital-G Greatness” (as the poet Daisy Fried put it) or concerned that, as the scholar Jeredith Merrin suggested, the contemporary poetry world might be trying “to rewrite ‘great’ as small.” In general, the panelists were understandably confused over what it means to be “ambitious,” and by extension, what it might mean to be “Great.” For instance, here’s how the first participant, the very sharp poet and critic Adam Kirsch, opens the discussion:

A famous anecdote has it that when W. H. Auden was a student at Oxford, his tutor asked him what career he planned to pursue. He explained that he wanted to be a poet, and was met with the kind of patronizing smile all poets know so well. “You don’t understand,” Auden retorted, “I mean to be a great poet.” One way of approaching our discussion of greatness and ambition in poetry is to ask whether any young poet today, similarly patronized, would risk Auden’s reply.

This seems like a reasonable question at first, but it becomes increasingly curious the more you look at it. Because Kirsch isn’t asking, “What young poet today would be as ambitious as Auden in the writing of his poems?” No, he’s asking, “What young poet would say, outside of his poems, that he wanted to be ‘Great’?” Talking about ambition is being conflated with ambition itself. Think of it this way: If Auden had never said anything about wanting to be “a great poet,” but had gone on to produce exactly the same books, would we have found the accomplishment any less impressive? Presumably not, yet this is the implication of the anecdote.

So what explains this odd maneuver? The answer, I think, has to do with the fact that readers are often less interested in a poem’s destination than in the clarity of its road signs.

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