THE OBSCURITY OF THE POET
73
Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra,
to Eliot's
Four Quartets,
and to
all the rest of those ageless products of an age.
In this age, certainly, poetry persists under many disadvantages.
Just as it has been cut off from most of the people who in another age
would have read it, so it has been cut off from most of the people who
in another age would have written it. Today poems, good poems, are
written almost exclusively by "born poets." We have lost for good the
poems that would have been written by the modern equivalents of
Elizabeth or Bishop King or Samuel Johnson; born novelists, born
theologians, born princes; minds with less of an innate interest in words
and more of one in the world which produces words. We are accustomed
to think of the poet, when we think of him at all, as someone Apart;
yet was there-as so many poets and readers of poetry seem to think–
was
there in the Garden of Eden, along with Adam and Eve and the
animals, a Poet, the ultimate ancestor of Robert P. Tristram Coffin?
... When I last read poems in New York City, a lady who, except for
bangs, a magenta jersey blouse, and the expression of Palamede de
Charlus, was indistinguishable from any other New Yorker, exclaimed
to me about a poet now, alas, middle-aged: "He read like a young
god." I felt that the next poet was going to be told that I read
like the young Joaquin Miller; for this lady was less interested in
those wonderful things, poems, than in those other things, poets–
never realizing that it is their subordination to the poems they write
that makes them admirable. She seemed to me someone who, be–
cause he has inherited a pearl necklace, can never again look at an
oyster without a shudder of awe. And this reminds one that, today, many
of the readers a poet would value most have hardly learned to read an}
poetry; and many of those who regularly read his poems have values
so different from his that he is troubled by their praise, and vexed but
reassured by their blame.
Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find
himself famous-for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it
will not be for having written a poem. That is still logically, but no longer
socially, possible. Let me illustrate with a story. I once met on a boat,
traveling to Europe with his wife and daughter, a man with whom I
used to play ping-pong. Having learned from a friend that I write
poetry, he asked one day with uninterested politeness, "Who are the
American poets you like best?" I said, "Oh, T. S. Eliot ... Robert Frost."
Then this man-this father who every night danced with his daughter
with the well-taught, dated, decorous attractiveness of the hero of an
old
Saturday Evening Post
serial by
E.
Phillips Oppenheim; who had
