The Decline of Poetry

There are many reasons for the decline of poetry, a somewhat paradoxical statement. There may be more poetry written today and it’s easier to get published than ever before ( see the Poet’s Market). However, the natural soil of poetry has been greatly eroded. Schools don’t teach English, or if you like a very degraded form of it. Most high school graduates can’t connect center with central. The classic book, The lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers, points out that schools no longer teach Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic. This shows up in recent translations of St. Augustine’s Confessions. The Modern Library translation by Pusey reflects the fact that Augustine was a master of Rhetoric, recent translations show that the translators never heard of the subject: “Great art Thou, oh Lord, and greatly to be praised, great is Thy power and Thy wisdom , infinite, and Thee would man praise, he but a particle of Thy creation, man who bears about him the witness of his sin, the witness that, Thou, Oh Lord, resisteth the proud, yet would man praise Thee, he but a particle of Thy creation. Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise for Thou madest us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” Read these opening lines, they are beautiful and poetic, powerful, passionate and transporting, rare qualities. n a man who was a philosopher!

The King James Version has been watered down because of people who don’t know English, “thou” is personal,” you” impersonal. In the 23rd Psalm, it starts with the declarative sentence about God: “The lord is my shepherd…” It moves on to shift gears to: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for Thou art with me…” The shift from the impersonal to the personal subtly alludes to the the fact that in great personal tragedy and danger, David drew close to God as never before.But of course, psalms aren’t poetry because they don’t rhyme, right?

In the past, educators believed that “The formation of moral character.” was the chief end of education. Indeed, without a moral compass people are blind to much of what Christians understand to be reality. “A disciplined mind and and a cultivated heart are elements of power.” Horace Mann, the founder of Secularist education who also believed in basic morality in public education. A popular book in public schools was One Hundred and One Famous Poems. My grade school teachers read it to us. Much of this poetry was didactic, full of moral teaching. Consequently poets like Longfellow “Life is real, life is earnest and the grave is not its goal.” are considered passe. Moral teaching is an intrusion into the proper methods of teaching which actually amount to “brainwashing”. Contemporary teachers want their students “to Get” what they are dishing out without any logical analysis.

The insane obsession with originality has caused fanatical teachers to put down familiar old sayings as cliches which must be given the axe. Contra this, read Proverbs and Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings. I also hope you would read some of my poetry and articles on poetry on Associated Content.

The wellsprings of poetry in the past have been a knowledge of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic. Besides the obvious point of saying something according to correct rules, grammar teaches us to make plays on words and paradoxical statements. More important is rhetoric which teaches us such things as hyperbole, metaphor, simile and other devices of expression which go beyond bare, factual statements. Logic can be used to reveal absurdity. Lewis Caroll, a logician, is laughing at us for our sloppy, offhand statements as when one his strange characters tells Alice something absurd to put on a skinned knee. She responds by saying something else would be better. “I didn’t say there was nothing better. I said there is nothing like it!” There you are! Get it right! Make accurate statements.

An elementary knowledge of semantics is also helpful, especially to the extent of seeing the difference between connotation and denotation, between telling a woman she has “a beautiful complexion ” or “a lovely hide”. Connotation can be very suggestive and evocative.

What is really important is that young people no longer grow up in a world saturated with serious poetry, history, good adventure fiction like Doyle’s The White Company, folklore and fairy tales. There are no One Hundred and One Famous Poems, McGuffy Readers, folk poets like James Whitcomb Riley which everyone had been exposed to and for the most part had a good, underlying moral compass. This was even found in much of pulp fiction, comic books and radio drama. In the scientific field today, a la Richard Dawkins, their concept of education is “The Man With The Hoe” with technical training. “What to him are Plato and the swing of Pleiades, the long reaches of the peeks of song, the rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?” He doesn’t know the most elementary facts of English history. When evolutionists argue they tell you that eyes developed over millions of years. Eagles existed for 145 million years before they developed them. Prior to that, their nascent eyes had “other functions”. Most interesting! When poetry is taught, it is more in the form of cutesy word plays, not anything that actually says anything significant. “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said,This is my own my native land!” Yes indeed! There Are! They are teaching our children in grade school, high school and universities. People like Jane Fonda are the product. Teaching young people they are nothing but apes does not inspire great literature and the Liberal culture of death hasn’t produced any.

Last of all, the reading of the Bible, which is the greatest literary influence in English and American literature and this, the greatest inspiration of all, is denigrated in public education. Huge sections of the Bible are poetry and what is not is often very poetic, the prodigal son and his waiting father, the good Samaritan, the serpent lifted up in the wilderness, the exodus from Egypt, etc.

I conclude with a beautiful, powerful black choir echoing in my ears: “When Israel was in Egypt land,. Let my people go! Oppressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go. Go down, Moses, Way down to Egypt land, Tell ole Pharoah, Let my people go!” And behind this choir, I hear the longing of oppressed people down through the ages, the Russian peasants bought and sold with the land, the people of Jesus day comforted that their God thought that they were worth more than a pair of shoes, the slaves in Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Greece and Rome, America, The British Empire, so many with the mark of the whip on their backs, crying out of the depths, longing to breathe free! And I hear the voice of Christ proclaiming “If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.” Jn. 8: 36. Such is the evocative power of a few lines of poetry!

Books to read:

One Hundred and One Famous Poems, Roy J. Cook, ed. (see all 15 five star reviews on Amazon)

101 Patriotic Poems, songs and speeches

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Favorite Poems, Dover Thrift Editions

The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy L. Sayers

The comments of this English teacher in a review on Amazon corroborate what I have been saying in this article. Please read the complete review.

Review of Poetic Medicine– an English teacher’s view, April 10, 2001

By Peggy Messerschmidt, College English Instructor

As a literature student, I stayed as far away from poetry as I could. It wasn’t just that I preferred fiction Poetry made me feel “less than”. I didn’t get it, and all the terms were confusing.

Now, as an English teacher in a community college, I get a similar response from my own students, most of whom haven’t read much poetry, find it difficult or overwhelming, and don’t really see the point.

Another afterthought by the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset:

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem – as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being.
When he writes, I believe today’s poet simply wishes to be a poet.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature

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