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I came of age intellectually during the 1960s, among heirs of the New Criticism, and before the other "isms" had insinuated themselves into the teaching of literature. "The poem is all there is," I remember one of my undergraduate professors saying. "Nothing else is important except the words you see on the page." A poem was self-contained and self-sufficient, we were told. It would explain itself. All we had to do was read the poem, work it like a field, and we would find the key to meaning in its sounds and image patterns. Everything in the poem would point to the truth of the poem, the truth of the poet, the truth of human existence. It was that simple. Truth was available for those who were willing to work to find it.
Which, of course, was not simple at all. Poems, we learned, were like machines that could be taken apart, analyzed, diagrammed, and reassembled—except that we rarely got around to reassembling them. The intricacies of interpretation were mastered by those who practiced the acrobatics of analysis, an art so coolly rational that it could discard context. Historical, theological, psychological, political, biographical, cultural contexts were beside the point.
This rigid system of interpretation has now given way to its exact opposite, perhaps an inevitable response to the stringencies of New Critical pedagogy. On the one hand, we should hardly regret the demise of an approach that arrogantly dismissed contextual criticism. Every poem, after all, is written at a particular time in a particular place by an author with particular biases. On the other hand, now we often hear that the poem is important only insofar as it reveals its own, its author's, or its culture's deficiencies and prejudices in the inevitable struggle for power—which means that an individual poem is important only insofar as it reveals problems, not the least of which is its assumed inability to speak clearly. Most would agree that these days the interpretation of interpretation provides more challenging fodder for scholars than the interpretation of the poem it self, whose meaning is considered particularly slippery. To read poetry for the delight of poetry, to study literature be cause one loves it: these have been for many years signs of a certain cultural naivete, if not outright bad faith.
But the current crisis not only involves teachers and readers of poetry; it necessarily involves the writers of poetry as well. Every age has its bad poets, but the last quarter of the twentieth century seems to have spawned more of them than any other—except maybe the Romantic era, a period which created both great poetry and stunningly terrible verse, enshrined now in humorous collections of bad poetry.
I know whereof I speak, having served as poetry editor for three religious publications and as an editorial board member for a secular literary journal. Most of the poetry that comes across my desk is pretty bad. Not only are the majority of these poems technically deficient, they are also usually boring. I am always looking for inspired poems, those that will break through my mundane world and shake me up a bit, but more often I find predictable arrangements of words and lines, stale descriptions, and a predilection for anything other than the concrete image, which is the foundation of good poetry.
The sorry fact is that while the secular publication on whose board I serve receives its share of mediocre submissions, when it comes to the truly awful stuff, the religious publications win hands down. And when religious poetry is bad, it is spectacularly so—filled with cliches, abstractions, relentless rhythms, and predictable rhymes. To be a poet, religious or other wise, one must first of all be a reader of poetry. Who knows where these would-be poets have found their models. In the pages of other religious publications, perhaps.
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