Lecture 5

The Necessity of Poetry
Lecture on Education by Metaphor
Dante’s Inferno, Canto 5
(Outside reading for lecture)
Inferno, Canto V, Dante
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     In a recent study done in America by the National Council of Teachers of English about people’s avoidance of poetry, it was discovered that most people felt poetry took too much time, too much effort to get out of the poem what they thought they ought to. This study corroborates my own less formal findings. When I was working as program scholar for an adult reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and sent around to local libraries to discuss a book of poems, I asked the participants why they did not generally read poetry when they reach for a book to read. The answer I usually got was that it took too much trouble to read. When I asked what kind of trouble, they responded with the difficulty they had in “figuring out” the poem. If I understood the answer correctly, they thought that when they read a poem, they could not see why the poet tried to “hide” his meaning, leading the few brave readers to “find” the hidden answer. Poetry thus considered was little more than a verbal puzzle to be solved, a treasure hunt for meaning.
     What shocked me about the response is that very few people thought that their early experiences with poetry relevant, invalidating the simple joy they felt when their mothers, grandmothers, or siblings read to them. When pushed on this point it became apparent that the real problem was with the poets couching some simple message in terms that were ornamental, florid, baroque. What a distance from Wordsworth’s sense that poetry comes from the overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility or from Ezra Pound’s who said that poetry was language charged with meaning to the highest degree. What turns out to be the central problem in reading poetry for most people is the sense that the poet is saying one thing in terms of another. And he is every time he uses metaphor. And metaphor is the very heart of lyrical poetry. But can this be avoided?

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     The implication behind most people’s reluctance to read poetry is that in normal discourse disclosing emotive experiences, we are expected to speak directly. We say, “I feel awe;” “I feel gratitude;” “I feel speechless;” but these expressions rarely satisfy those to whom we are speaking. After all, what is awe or gratitude or speechlessness to me, may not be the same to you. Let me offer an example. You have taken an excursion to the country, and there far from the noise and distraction of the city you find yourself climbing a hill that overlooks a river valley. Standing alone at midday on the top of the vista, you look out and notice far above the water and earth a lone hawk gliding in circles. You find the scene compelling in some way and cannot take your eyes from the sight while the breeze blows against your face. Later you want to tell your friend about that experience. But that last term, “experience” is precisely the problem. What was that experience in its totality? You could avoid all communication problems ands simply say it directly: “I climbed to the top of a hill next to the river, and while I was resting there I saw a hawk flying in circles.” But you somehow feel that those twenty-five words do not come close to capturing the very personal experience you had. You could say those words, but when John Hall Wheelock witnessed this scene he said it was like this:

At noon I watched in the large hollow
of eternal heaven a hawk
soaring toward the sun
through gyres of adoration without end.
His flight was a great prayer.

     As long as your friend understood your terms, he would undoubtedly understand much more what it was you felt at the time. The bird’s solitude, the vastness of the open spaces, the sense of dignity that solitary flight often invokes: all these sensations are captured with terms that compare the sky to a concave surface and the silent flight towards the sun as a prayer. It is a metaphor not a puzzle; more a mystery than a problem.
     Take another example from a contemporary poem. You have noticed that certain events in your life or in the lives of your family or friends alter how they behave. They do not have the same ideas, they do not relate to their old friends in the same way. This change may feel strange to you who witness it. But it may also seem mysterious to the person undergoing the change. You could say, “That experience changed me in the way that I talk to my parents,” and no one would feel the sense of mystery that the change recalls. Robert Bly tries to capture the essence of the mysterious in that shift of character in the following way:

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house
Thoughts that go so far…
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books
The son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and bakes no more bread,
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party
and loves him no more.
The one inside steps back, the hands touch nothing and are safe.

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The poem continues to invoke images of apparently unexpected changes that seem as mysterious as the snow that blows in great sweeps up close to a wall, and then stops, leaving a snow drift that is high, and an empty place without snow right next to the house. There is something in us that we have trouble accounting for, as a child might in understanding the idea of air currents in a snow storm.
     But these illustrations of poetry’s use of metaphor do not go far enough. If we understand metaphor as saying one thing in terms of another, then we have to go much further and say that all thought is metaphorical. When we are learning a new vocabulary in another language we seek to find equivalencies in the dictionary, so that one term is compared to another. And when we seek to discover the meanings of the terms we may not understand in the definitions of the original term, we have to find still more terms. This is true not only in language but also in science and mathematics. There is no such thing as absolute knowledge without reference to something else leading Aristotle to his famous notion that the ultimate particular is unintelligible. It turns out upon closer inspection that all knowledge is understood in this metaphorical way, one thing compared to another.
     To be unfamiliar with metaphorical thought is to fail to understand the very nature of knowledge. It is to fail to see the limitations as well as the extent of what can be known. And poetry is the use of metaphor par excellence. The need for reading and understanding poetry is thus at the very heart of a solid education, for besides being beautiful, it turns out to be an education in thinking.
     But it is more than this, much more. If we understand what it is poetry is doing to us, enlarging our imaginations, inspiring us to feel certain things, then we must go a step further and say that poetry has a critical role to play in our moral development. Note the reading from Dante, especially where Dante meets Paulo and Francesca in Hell. The two lovers are suffering in the circle of the lust for the sins they committed in life. But what inspired their misdeed? What were they reading when they committed their sin? How did the poems they were reading effect their actions? These are very serious questions that Dante demands his readers attend to. The fact is that this couple was seduced by a book, by a poem. And we are, ironically enough, reading about that literary seduction in a book that will attempt, by means of poetry, to move our souls to the good. . “The Necklace,” Maupassant
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