Randall Jarrell
THE OBSCURITY OF THE POET*
When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern
Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life.
But then I realized that I was bcing asked to talk not about the fact
that people don't read poetry, but about the fact that most of them
wouldn't understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect,
of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry,
that is today obscure.
Paradise Lost
is what it was; but the ordinary
reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it- instead he
glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes
shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along
with
Moby Dick, War and Peace, Faust
and Boswell's
Life of Johnson.
But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice: it was not the Public,
nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the
universities have trained, who a few weeks ago, to the Public's sympa–
thetic delight, put together this list of the world's dullest books.
Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is
obscure-i.e.,
that he is
diffi cult, i.e.,
that he is
neglected- they
naturally
make a causal connection bctween the two meanings of the word, and
decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is
true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult
because
he is not read,
because
the reader is not accustomed to reading his or
any other poetry. But most of the time neither is a cause--both are no
more than efTects of that long-continued, world-overturning cultural
and social revolution (seen at its most advanced stage here in the United
States) which has made the poet difficult and the public unused to any
poetry exactly as it has made poet and public divorce their wives, stay
away from church, dislike bear-baiting, free the slaves, get insulin shots
for diabetes, and do a hundred thousand other things, some bad, some
good, and some indiffercnt. It is superficial to extract two parts from this
world-high whole, and to say of them: "This one, here, is the cause of
that one, there; and that's all there is to it."
*
A lecture delivered at Harvard University, August, 1950.
