Poetry as a Can of Coke: A Journey through Poetry from Marlowe to Ginsberg and Beyond

Elizabethan times were a nebula of great revolution in the mercantile, scientific, technological, religious, and political spheres. Poetic performance in theatre was an entertainment medium reaching broader audiences, even commoners. Verse was penned with an aristocratic reader/viewership, including the monarchs and policy-makers of England. The recent advent and promulgation of the printing press had, of course, lent another dimension to poetry besides public recitation and performance: private, solitary consumption, with folios and manuscripts circulated among intellectual circles. Aesthetic merit was at a zenith:

But far above the loveliest Hero shined

And stole away th’ enchanted gazer’s mind,

For like sea nymphs’ enveigling Harmony,

So was her beauty to the standers by.

Nor that night-wandering, pale, and wat’ry star

(When yawning dragons draw her thirling car

From Latmus’ mount up to the gloomy sky

Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,

She proudly sits) more overrules the flood

Than she the hearts of those that near her stood.[1]

Here we have the “other guy,” Christopher Marlowe, who pushed the limits of blank verse and blazed a trail for Shakespeare. He wasn’t exactly a vocational poet, just like Chaucer and Sidney weren’t. These were men entrenched in the apparatus of power and government. In fact, Marlowe, who if I may compare poetry to candy wrote in “Hero and Leander” the sweetest, glossiest verse I’ve ever encountered, was a spy, a bad boy, and a religious dissenter, reportedly stabbed dead in a bar fight.

            The great charm of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was soon to face extinguishment, and the last sparks of this era’s creativity and genius, less the bardic nature of the great playwrights, can be seen in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”:

                    …from the bough
She gave him of that fair enticing fruit
With liberal hand: he scrupled not to eat
Against his better knowledge, not deceived,
But fondly overcome with female charm.
Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and nature gave a second groan,
Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original; while Adam took no thought,
Eating his fill, nor Eve to iterate
Her former trespass feared, the more to soothe

Him with her loved society, that now
As with new wine intoxicated both
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the earth.[2]

Milton was almost the most self-serious poet to ever walk the earth, who, blind and politically crushed, did not pen “Paradise Lost” but rather dictated it to his daughter(s). We sniff out a sort of closet bard whose priggish Puritanism obstructed his really jumping into the lewd, decadent, inventive, human terrain of Marlowe and restricted him to a reverent, school-boyish display of classical learning.

            Like Shakespeare,[3] Marlowe, Spenser, and Sidney, he was in the proximity of power, serving as Cromwell’s Secretary of Foreign Tongues during the provisional government.[4] And if Milton’s verse can be called stuffy and blocky (F. R. Leavis diagnosed the “Miltonic thump”), and if “Paradise Lost,” despite its portals into sublimity, psychologically endearing rendering of Satan,[5] intoxicating riffs about the “ambrosial rose” or “frutage fair to sight,” and potency of books 4, 7, and 9, was in a cynical but quite correct sense a deeply flawed and regurgitative slog through Church history, then it still represents the high-water mark of pure craftmanship and erudition perhaps in all of English literature, and signals a shift from dramatic poetry[6] to more strained, solitary efforts. Although ebbing and flowing with the poet’s changing reputation, his shadow hung broodingly over English poetry for centuries.

            The void during Milton’s aftermath was filled with the over-intellectualized, highly skilled, highly boring Alexander Pope, and also Dryden. But at last, Milton’s influence, with its high idealism, poet-versus-the-world orientation, and colourful aesthetic power, paid dividends and inspired the Romantics:

Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations![7]

Although Shelley and Byron might be the archetypal Romantic figures, Wordsworth’s probably the archetypal Romantic poet, having their characteristic lyricism and manic outpouring of emotion, in addition to his own prodigious imagination. His poetry was intended for a broad readership, and though in his advanced age he’d accept the position of poet laureate, he was “radical” in his early politics and always an island unto himself. This new debasement from power and politics and delving inwardly into the irrational unconscious is a marker of the poetic mind up to the present. 

Another of the post-Miltonic age’s signatures is shorter poems with less narrative, and indeed “The Recluse,” the very long poem of which “The Prelude” is a prologue, never surfaced. I would argue that, notwithstanding, say, the “Cantos” of Ezra Pound, the shortened poetic length and divergence from narrative continued into modernism, as did the lonely, scholarly bent. These were poems written by inward-looking, educated males (mostly). There was a fragmentation, disjointedness, and obscurantism permeating this important wave of verse, exemplified in Eliot or Auden – whether due to the Great War, contagion from stream-of-consciousness novels, or the confusion of a modern, technological society. Accessibility took an intentional hit, just as it did in prose.[8]

I think that in the generations since the great modernist poets like Auden, Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, poetry has splintered off from popular (and even canonical) literature, just as literature has dwindled in its overall influence over intellectual and public discourse. This isn’t a complaint against contemporary practitioners – merely an observation that poetry has faced marginalization into almost hobby status, with less prestige and money involved, and an ever-thinner readership. Could the reading public name their favourite poets as easily as they could name Roth, Updike, Morrison, or even DeLillo? Or could a poet’s mug grace the cover of Time magazine, as Franzen’s did?

It goes without saying that technology has obliterated attention spans, with new media like the Internet, film, digital music, and video games stealing millions who would’ve been reading a century ago. And with increasing commoditization and a push for utility and efficiency, a novel, with its didactic yarn, is favoured by the reading public over a poem, which is seen as comparatively strange and emotionally charged and which, rather than a novel’s streamlined package of history, insight, and entertainment, seems often intended to simply give the reader a jolt, like a can of coke.

I’ve tried to chronicle how poetry became shorter and more obscure, but this isn’t a satisfactory explanation of its current position – its poise and sentiment are also instructive, and to exemplify these I’d point to Allen Ginsberg, whose achievements represent one of the last gossiped-over canonical scenes in poetry. I’d class his poetry as wrathful and visceral, memorable and drug-riddled, disaffected and left-wing, unmetered and free, more loud than ceremonious, and more about amalgamation than narrative. I don’t mean to denigrate his very significant contribution or suggest he’s not a vital poet, but I pose a question: Has he become, to poetry’s detriment, the new prototype?[9] If we consider the full gamut of modern poets this loses plausibility, but when we invoke poetry slams, which account for a disproportionate amount of modern-day poetic expression and publicity, well, Ginsberg seems like the messiah of the poetry slam. And while I wouldn’t cosign Harold Bloom’s declaration that poetry slams are the “death of art,” I would admit that from my North American perspective,^[10] slams are a sort of trendy, coffeehouse hugfest with half the performances dwelling on the speaker’s bulimia, or uncanny phobias, or subjection to racism, or sexual experimentation. This may sound insensitive or bigoted but I lay it down here to illustrate poetry’s drift away from lyricism, verse, and metaphor and towards a refuge for the disaffected.

Another modern poetic phenomenon, I would argue, is hip hop music from the early nineties, which I’d rather listen to than slam poetry. Though strange to admit now, with the music industry plainly manufacturing gangster myths for financial gain, there was once upon a time a great whirlwind of creativity emerging from the Five Boroughs of New York City, with hungry, disillusioned African-Americans reciting rhymes in the park and eventually recording them in studios. While not strictly poetry, the lyrics are recited instead of sung and bear a plethora of traditional poetry’s signatures: seriousness, rhyme, (loosely regulated) metre, wit, and wordplay.[11] However, the golden years of Big L or early Wu-Tang Clan are strictly over, ruined by an inevitable materialism and a market orientation, and I suspect hip hop’s time is over.

It’s not my contention that strong contemporary poetry is non-existent, but that poetry’s primacy in Western culture has waned dramatically, and that its modern popular manifestations – poetry slams, rap music – have tried to quench the public’s thirst for rhyme and wordplay. Obviously there are living masters like Heaney, or international notables like Tranströmer or Adonis, and a great Scottish flowering. I acknowledge that my views are filtered through the bias of inexperience; I’ll confess my lack of immersion and expertise in poetry[12] and appeal to my youthful ignorance, Canadian origins, and vocational love of literature (including poetry) in hopes that my perspective is at least provocative – that poetry in the public eye has taken a bruising. Allow me to excerpt Obama’s inaugural poem:

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.[13]

While misguided to peg poetry’s current health to whatever age’s U.S. presidential poem – inaugural poems are only a recent phenomenon, after all – still, what a sacrilege compared to Robert Frost! “Praise Song for the Day” is banal, flat, and unskilled.[14] And I think it all but invites the public to relegate something of the greatest importance to the sidelines – to demote the poet to a speaker of platitudes, a cheerleader waving dull images.

            I’ve argued that Elizabethan poetry was both performance-oriented but also available for solitary reading; that through John Milton the performative, bardic element fell by the wayside as poetry became a sage, lonesome, gentlemanly pursuit; and that in the twentieth century it took a left-leaning turn and lost some of its scholastic self-seriousness and now lives mostly, as far as the public observes, in poetry slams and yellow, dog-eared anthologies.

            But how can poetry be rejuvenated? Novels steal its thunder partly because of the modern demand for prepackaged lessons Saran-wrapped in entertaining narratives. The public wants something more straightforward and they want more than a rush or a buzz, they want a journey. My answer? Take it back to Shakespeare. How about a history play about the JFK assassination, replete with Dallas police officers, lawyers with Yiddish-Bronx accents, and the Kennedy family, in an unpretentious but poetic Robert Fagles-type verse? A novel would never confer the same ceremony or solemnity on such a tragedy. And maybe some history buff who’d have otherwise seen an action flick that night might just pick up a poetry book. Maybe the public’s imagination might get captured again, and maybe the poetic imagination, the love of words, would stir once more and enter the public conversation. To hell with poetry slams and rap music. The public wants interactive poetry? Let’s give them the theatre.  

[1] “Hero and Leander,” www.classic-literature.co.uk/british-authors/16th-century/christopher-marlowe/hero-and-leander.

[2] “Paradise Lost,” www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1.

[3] Who I can’t help but think was a commoner, maybe very talented, whose material was at least partially supplied by Francis Bacon and possibly others.

[4] A pairing whose militant Christianity makes Bush-Cheney’s look dovish.

[5] Might this, along with the sleep-inducing Son of God, be instructive of Milton’s conscious or subconscious morals?

[6] Cromwell even banned performances on the stage.

[7] “Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey,” www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html.

[8] Disclaimer: From here on in, my historical argument grows more tenuous and, well, debatable.

[9] That is to say, left-wing and activistic, bearded and weathered, a hippy of the people.

[10] I have indeed witnessed at the Glor Sessions that poetry in Ireland is (predictably) at a more advanced stage than Canada’s.

[11] Actually, I wouldn’t dismiss the prospect of hip hop music having exerted some influence over poetry slams.

[12] I am very eager for recommendations.

[13] “Praise Song for the Day,” www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20545.

[14] It made me cringe and curse when I heard it live.

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