[Paleopsych] John Derbyshire: (Paglia) Poetry's Plum Gone to Hell

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Poetry's Plum Gone to Hell 
http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Reviews/BreakBlowBurn.htm
Book Review by John Derbyshire
The Washington Examiner
March 27th, 2005
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    Break, Blow, Burn
    By Camille Paglia
    Pantheon Books, $20

    What is the use of writing about books?" asked America's greatest
    poet, "excepting so far as to give information to those who cannot get
    the books themselves?"  I had better confess up front that I am of the
    same mind as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and that what goes for books
    in general goes twice over for poetry.  I love to read it, but I don't
    much want to read about it.  Break, Blow, Burn therefore fell on stony
    ground here.

    I don't say this with any pleasure, as persons I trust have for years
    been telling me that the celebrated professor Camille Paglia is, on
    balance, a Good Thing.  But I'm sorry to report that her book bored me
    rigid.

    Break, Blow, Burn is a collection of 43 poems by 28 poets, with
    commentary following each poem.  It is intended, the author tells us,
    for "a general audience."  The poems are short and the commentaries
    mostly less than four pages.

    Only English-language poets are included.  I applaud her choice:
    poetry in, or from, other people's languages has no place in an
    enterprise of this sort.  In fact, of the 20 post-Samuel Coleridge
    poets she has chosen, 18 are American, the exceptions being Ireland's
    W.B. Yeats and Canada's Joni Mitchell.

    The strongest impression I came away with from this book was of the
    sheer beggared awfulness of modern American poetry.  It is simply no
    good.  That is why nobody quotes it, and nobody outside the academy
    reads it.  I do a fair amount of socializing with decently
    well-educated Americans, and can clearly recall the last three
    instances in which someone quoted verse at me unprompted, at couplet
    length or longer.  The poets quoted were Kipling, Kipling and Poe.

    It is, for example, hard to see why anyone would bother to memorize,
    or even just remember, the opening lines of "This Is Just to Say" by
    William Carlos Williams:  "I have eaten/ the plums/ that were in/ the
    icebox."  Perhaps I am missing something.  Perhaps Williams' poem has
    hidden depths.  What does Paglia say?  "At one level the succulent,
    fleshy fruit is a makeshift proxy for the opulent female form," she
    writes.  "The first stanza takes us backward into the dark recesses of
    the icebox, where the plums nest like eggs...  the 'delicious'
    fruitiness of the final images has the tactile lushness of a kiss."

    Uh-huh.  All of Paglia's commentaries are like this: fantastic
    extrapolations and plonking symbolism, usually of a succulent, fleshy
    nature, utterly humorless and reeking of estrogen.

    Theodore Roethke's "The Visitant" ends, she tells us, "with an aching
    sense of men's incompletion, their anguished separation from the
    maternal body, to which they vainly try to reconnect through the
    deceptive medium of sex."  In Gary Snyder's "Old Pond":  "the bird is
    the unembellished voice of nature itself Snyder's modest, flute-like
    substitute for the authoritarian boom of the Judeo-Christian God."
    And here we are on "Kubla Khan":  "If Coleridge is thinking of the
    cleft or gorge as vulval, then his 'mighty fountain' forced up by the
    earth with 'fast thick pants' is blatantly ejaculatory."

    Reading this book was like flipping through one of those pretentious,
    absurd catalogs you get when visiting an exhibition of the sillier
    kind of fashionable art.  I even had a fleeting suspicion that the
    whole thing might be a spoof a send-up of ponderous academic
    over-interpretation.  No, the author is in earnest.  Paglia has opened
    a window into the precious, self-referential little world of literary
    theorizing.

    For this poetry lover, it was a glimpse of Hell.  And what is burning
    in that hell is our poetry, for a thousand years the greatest glory of
    the English-speaking people, but now dead, smothered under the horrid
    rotten mass of literary academicism.  We must have done something very
    terrible to have our birthright taken from us, to see it suffocated in
    dust like this.